I’m always impressed with Will Richardson’s posts (a lot of people are, he deserves the credit), and his latest, “Personalizing Education for Teachers, Too” has me nodding my head once again. I don’t equate personalized education with dignified education; however there is a large measure of commonality in the two.
Keep reading →
I fixed a problem that I’ve been working on for three and a half weeks today. That was elapsed time but I probably spent 5 person days on it. Too bad all I’ll get is flack for not moving ahead on other projects quickly enough. It’s not a problem that I can even explain to my users; they lose interest and eyes glaze over before I am finished with the first sentence of three paragraphs.
Poor me…lonely IT Director…nobody understands me. Why is there such a gap between those of us that create and maintain technology and those that we serve? I enjoy working with, thinking and talking about technology…not just the toys aspect but the social and educational impact. My non-tech friends, and I’m not in a place that is blessed with local tech friends (never have been), have no interest. They can’t connect their email and browsing with the societal changes that are on the way.
However there is hope, hope in our students. They are curious, unafraid and eager to explore. This doesn’t come with a bunch of knowledge and experience. It’s necessary to scale down their ideas (this one took a couple of years to realize) and do a lot of background training, but it’s worth it.
I have a set of IT Interns each semester. We’re an IB School, so this counts as part of their CAS Service hours. Part of their duties are to ensure that the dorm labs are working, have paper and report student feedback on the wireless system, etc. The other part is to assist the IT Department in projects that are about building and adding to our capabilities.
For several years, I tried many different tactics to get some finished product. It always seemed like the interns were just not up to what I wanted them to do, no matter how much instruction I provided. We tried inventorying and sorting software installation disks, fixing hardware, researching and evaluating CMS systems, rewriting the Intranet. Nothing worked, except the brilliant student who repaired a dinged up interactive white board.
Finally, this year, we hit on a formula that seems to be working better. Firstly, I turned over the facilitation of the Internship to my Help Desk Technician. He’s taken a serious interest in it and provided me relief to attend the myriad of meetings that always seem to arise during the CAS time period without cancelling that week’s internship.
Secondly, we hit on a project that is doable. We’re rebuilding obsolete systems for redistribution in the community. With a four year workstation replacement policy, I have a number of old but still working systems to deal with each year. I’ve tried this in years past, but with a linux rebuild and it never worked, because the learning curve was too steep. However, my Network Administrator suggested that we use the OEM Windows software that came licensed with the systems and install a Windows version of Open Office. This flattened the learning curve and in the two weeks, they actually built the first prototypes. They are now working out the package of other FOSSware that we’ll put on the systems and will be ready to Ghost the whole inital lot of 35 systems within the next two sessions.
So my tech life is not quite so lonely as I might think. Yea students!
I’m reading All Rise; Sombodies, Nobodies and the Politics of Dignity by Robert Fuller. Rankism, as he describes the abuse of personal power, pervades our society, including our educational institutions. Others, including Claude Steiner and Thomas Harris, have described this in terms of social relationships as one-up, one-down, Parent-Adult-Child crossed communications, etc. However, Robert Fuller really nails this as a major societal problem.
This directly impacts our educational institutions, and causes powerlessness and apathy. It’s built into our institutions with hierarchies of rank and privilege. Staff ranks over students, teachers rank over students and staff, administrators rank over everybody. Having these ranks is not the problem in itself. However, the fact that they exist ensures a power differential in relationships.
Sometimes people use their rank to get their way, just because they have the power to do so. Putting our own interests first, without considering its impact on someone who may not be able to or feel free to contradict us, treats him or her with indiginity.
How often do we treat our students as less than human, because we are the experts and they are there to learn? How often do we treat our faculty and staff as mere employees, because we’re the ones with the budget to balance? These acts whether proactive, reactive or in-active, whether considered or unconsidered, have a tremendous impact on the victims.
Of course, as Fuller says, we move between roles all the time. At work we may be real somebodies and in very powerful positions, but come home to a situation where we are nobodies and have no real power in the family. So we all proably understand the victim side of the equation. It makes us feel misunderstood and powerless.
How can we give our schools dignity? I would propose the following:
[Note: this is a rewrite of a blog that I started over a year ago. My goal is now to post once a week.]
Despite my tenuous relationship with academia as a student, I have somehow acquired the propensity to learn every day. Perhaps having been involved with microcomputers since their development has something to do with it. However, my desire to learn has far exceeded learning for my career’s sake.
I find that there is not nearly enough time in my life to pursue all of the things that I’m interested in finding out more about. When I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Coming Singularity, I got excited about the possibilities for increasing my learning capacity.
What motivates ‘life-long learners’? One thing that I’ve noticed about educators that I have admired is that they are all very curious people. They are always asking questions, kind of like living in permanent state of learning. Last year, we got a new puppy at our house, the very first for my son. ‘Strider’ is intensely curious. When he found a beetle crawling across the floor, the ensuing learning session was hilarious. He tried relating to it in every possible fashion and used all of his senses in the process.
I agree with Abraham Maslow’s placement of learning above the base of physiological, safety, belonging/love, and esteem in his ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. If you’re struggling to meet your daily necessities in order to stay alive, this probably consumes most of your attention (although you may be learning how to meet these needs more efficiently).
As I alluded to earlier, motivation is a key itself. In my job, I’m motivated everyday to learn something in order to solve problems that arise. In my personal life, it’s gone beyond problems needing solutions (although I still address them) to interests, explorations, etc. I think that when constantly exposed to learning, one simply gets into the habit.
I’m thinking about life-long learning because I sense that we’re coming into an age where learning will increasingly be the key between our survival and our extinction…but that’s material for another time.
