My 1000th Post

This is my 1000th post. A milestone. And I wanted it to say something about hope--something about what connects us, reveals our humanness. The poem, below, by Naomi Shihab Nye does just that. I hope it is one that will resonate with you.

When I began this blog I had no sense, at all, that I would have anything to say--nor did I imagine any actual readers. I wrote my first post in December 2009 while at Bard College. It was an assignment, an obligation. I kept the blog and I did not write again for nearly a year. 

In late August of 2010, I began to post regularly. This renewed effort at blogging coincided with hearing Will Richardson speak about his blogging.  I can still recall seeing the map that was on his blog at that time that displayed the number of people who had visited his blog. I was amazed at the number. His interest and passion in connecting with others was inviting. I thought that perhaps this might be something I could do too.

So I went home and faced the blank screen and began to write to you. What I could not imagine was that readers from more countries than I knew comprised the planet would interact with the blog. Through Goggle+, Twitter, and Facebook the page views are now nearing 2 million. Scale via the Internet is surprising to say the least. 


A blog, I've learned is not singularly authored. We feed off of each other.  Your important works (in)form mine.  I learn from you in unexpected ways. This blog remains a collective.  And that realization fills me with hope. Do know, it has been such a privilege to connect and to learn with you. 

Blogs are largely about connecting and composing collectively. Ideas bloom between. So please think of these posts as my mamool cookies--offered freely, dusted sweet. Thank you, imagined and real reader. You help me to stay rooted, to find hope in our common expressions.

Mary Ann

Gate A-4

Naomi Shihab Nye


Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal,
after learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,

With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

Reclaiming Public Learning Spaces: The Long Tail Meets the Rhizome

from Occupy Wall Street (Reilly, 2011)

I.

I reread with much interest an older post by Will Richardson from 2011, "How the Hell Could They Let this Happen?".  In the post, Will quotes a section from an Alfie Kohn post.  Kohn writes:

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries. There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?”

Dem-o-cra-tic public education.
Say it slowly.
A mouthful of words.


II.

I think about this often--how public education is so much more than the content taught to children.  It's what helps us to become (other)wise--to try on unfamiliar perspectives. Amidst the standards and accountability movements, we have lost sight of aims of education. 

We have settled for far less. 

So how do we reclaim what does seem to be slipping from our collective hands? How might we do this reclaiming without colonizing one another?  Without forcing our will?

A way to reclaim public education as a public institution is by leveraging the long tail, the rhizome. The traditional view of education situates schooling as a function of transference from teacher to student of expert-determined content--such as the content specified in state and national standards. As such, U.S. public schools tend to rely on hierarchy as the method used to organize and distribute content and pedagogical practices, most often in the form of sanctioned programs. 

Think assembly line.

In contrast, a rhizomatic learning community is a fluid collective where participants dwell in the middle of things and where learning is a blend of explicit and tacit knowledge. As Dave Cormier has written: the community is the curriculum. Cormier writes:

Rhizomatic Learning posits, among other things, that the community is the curriculum. That being able to participate with and among those people who are resident in a particular field is a primary goal of learning. 

Think an endless sea of middles.
Think affinity groups.
Think choice.

III.

There's no single model of learning that represents wholly all that we are becoming. We are so much more and less. As such, the choices for what constitutes becoming in 2014 are fuller than the the single model we rely mostly upon: the school house. In a connected world, the opportunities to learn need not be limited to what we have done before. 

For example, in this brief video that chronicles the work of Charles Raben, a ninth grader, we can see that the locus of learning is not limited to the place we call school. Raben was able to make use of a passion of his, photography, and apply this passion to framing an urban problem. What strikes me most when I listen to Raben is the agency he asserts.  He is not the receiver of content, he is the maker. 

Charles Raben, 9th Grade Student at Quest to Learn from Institute of Play on Vimeo.

Raben's moment of learning that is actualized via his petition offers us a glimpse at the long tail.  And at the heart of the long tail of learning is the understanding that learning can and does happen anywhere, everywhere, all the time.  

We are never not learning. We are always (un)learning. 

This is a shift in thinking that leaders most need to consider--a shift that asks us to disconnect learning from causality.  I don't need to cause you to learn as you are doing so without me.  A teacher may assist you.  A teacher may help you to shape your thoughts. But frankly, you are learning without the teacher too. You may find that you are learning through chats, social media. You are learning via learning walks. You are learning through play. You are learning through dialogue. You are learning via observations. You are learning through trial and error. You are learning through YouTube videos. You are learning through books. You are learning in connection with others. You are learning by doing and making and reflecting on what you have composed and failed to compose. You are joining and breaking with others and learning during these transitions, these disruptions. You are learning via the courses and workshops you take and give. You are learning though work. You are learning at your dining room table, from the front seat of the car, or bus, or subway.  

It feels rather endless, yes? 
It is.

Learning is not limited to the domain of schools and leaders must embrace this reality and open the doors literally and figuratively.  In fact, some of what gets done at schools in the name of content, standards, and high stakes testing may well limit and suppress thought.

Leaders need to be bold.  Let's open our eyes and catalog the many ways learning is happening and then let's leverage social media to share, reinvent, revise those ways. 

Cue the Rhizome: A Post-Better World

Pershing Square (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

So I was reading Will Richardson's latest post, Redefine Better in which he quotes from Umair Haque's recent HBR column, Declare Your Radicalness:

But to do it, we can't merely call for a set of broken institutions to work slightly better, to restore the present to the state of the past. We've got to redefine better; to redesign the future.

I read the column next and both Will's post and Umair's column got me thinking about what some of the conditions of a redefined better might be.  A quick thought that emerged is that perhaps a central tenet of a post-better world is that institutions can no longer be positioned as being containable--as being able to be represented as a single set. The idea that there is a set called school needs to be rethought. If we are continuously trying to make that set better, we will never find ourselves very far from the boundaries that have limited our vision.  Operating within the narrow little box we have called school, will at best get us surface changes as the borders will remained fixed and with them the opportunities to rethink, re-imagine, and express our radicalness.

This is a chief difference between understanding power as epic hierarchy and conceptualizing power as possibility that is rhizomatic. The old order that Umair writes about can be nothing more than an epic construct.  Think Race to the Top.  Is it nothing more than a new NCLB?  The old order is by definition and function: untouchable, self contained, closed.  It derives and maintains power by adhering to these very attributes.  So when Will writes about the need to think of different, not better schools--I begin to see this challenge visually, as closed sets no longer work.  

Declaring our radicalness begins with understanding that the way we have progressed--the very place where you can still almost see your breath--does not offer a viable method of continuing and must be boldly abandoned.  The set we call school is broken.   Reassembling those pieces into fixed re-presentations is a losing method.  Looking beyond that set is a worthy task that many are doing.


Cue the rhizome.

Break
         the set.
Boldly step
                  into new definitions of learning

(that are not sanctioned by governments, municipalities, fortune 500 types).


It is not a big engine we need to make such movement.  Rather it is the anti-big engine powered by you, me, the guy over there, the child with an idea, the artist with a brush, the woman with a storefront, the connected group that meets, the happenstance we cannot predict.

It is about expression that pulls others to it,  not out of coercion like NCLB and RTtT, but out of desire.

Instead of a single place called school that is reiterated, imagine multi-expressions of learning that cannot be contained: we are a river that overflows, recedes, breaks, moves on and over.

Imagine a bit.

And then let's see how we might connect and break along the way.

Thinking About Power, Schools, Teaching, Technologies, and God

 I. Channeling God

A few weeks ago, Pam Moran (@pammoran) sent me the transcripts of extended talks that Drs. Ackoff and Deming had back in the early 1990s.  It was most fascinating. This one extended comment by Ackoff really caught my ear.

"And when we started to talk about an enterprise, we looked at it exactly the way that Newton looked at the world. The enterprise was a machine created by its god, the owner, to do his work, and the worker was a replaceable machine part. Okay? The owner was a visible power that had virtually no constraints imposed on him by government or anybody else. He could hire who he wanted to, when he wanted to, pay them what he wanted to, and so on. That concept went through a transformation after World War I for a very important reason.

The American economy grew so rapidly that even if all the profit the corporations were making were reinvested in them, they would not be able to grow as rapidly as was possible. Therefore, the fundamental problem that confronted American management in the 1920's was: Do we constrain growth and retain control, or do we encourage growth and sacrifice control in order to get the financing necessary to get the growth. In other words, do we stay private or go public? And the 1920's was the major period in which corporations converted from private ownership to public ownership.

What happened? God disappeared --a very fundamental change. God was no longer present and powerful. He became an abstract spirit - two hundred and fifty thousand shareholders out there. Now, there's a difficulty in communication between the ordinary worker and that abstract spirit. Peter Drucker recognized that was a problem we had confronted almost 2,000 years ago when God disappeared in the Western World, and he said industry did exactly what the Western World did. It created an institution whose function it was to communicate between man and God, and he called that institution management. And management knew the will of god, the owners, the shareholders, exactly the way that the clergy knows the will of God, by revelation, because they sure don't know it any other way. 
 - Dr. Ackoff (Transcript: Conversations between Ackoff and Deming, 1992)

Wondering what you make of this...what, if any, parallels you see with the shift from private to public in the 1920s and the  increasing interest to make public schools private now. What should we make of that? Are the motivations connected?

II. Thinking About Learning

Today I watched this excellent screencast (Embracing Uncertainty) by Dave Cormier (@davecormier) who boldly states that we need to embrace uncertainty and that cannot measure learning.

Take a look:


Now take a look at this quote by Deming.



Is the push for making public schools private, a response in part to the indeterminacy one might feel when God has been replaced by an abstraction?  Take a look at Will Richardson's (@willrich45) recent column in District Administrator, "Coming to Terms with Five New Realities." Specifically, I connect Will's first assertion with the idea of an uncertain future. Will writes:

It’s becoming clearer by the minute that, as Web technologies open more and more doors for learners, they also pose more and more challenges to traditional thinking about schools. At the center is figuring how best to prepare students for the vast learning opportunities they have outside of the traditional education system.

How do we respond to such challenges? How do institutions respond?

I see these ideas as being connected.  How do we respond to uncertainty? How do we leverage uncertainty and how might it connect to economic methods?

Some things I am thinking about and wonder what you think:

1. Do private institutions create a public need for certainty by establishing its role as interpreter of God--thus reasserting God, not as an abstraction, but as the Deity? (Great Chain of Being, revisited?) Is this related to the increased pressure to move from public schooling to private forms of schooling?
2. What do we do when faced with uncertainty?  Is embracing uncertainty a learned behavior?
3. What does it mean that we need to learn to live in a world of mistakes? How do we do that and how do we avoid that?
4. What role(s) might web technologies play in leveraging/attending to/obfuscating/intensifying these tensions? Is the current backlash against and imposed restrictions of web technologies connected to how well we attend and/or fail to attend to uncertainty?

Bold Schools Part II: Teacher as Time Traveler

Time Traveler (M.A. Reilly, January 2012)

Will Richardson's search for bold schools nudged my thinking too.  In a former post, I wrote about the learner as knowmad, borrowing heavily from Pekka Ihanainen and John Moravec's concepts about knowmads.  In this post I explore teacher as time traveler. In the the third post I will explore community as rhizome. All three are conditions present in my conception of bold schools.


1. Clocks

And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.  - William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury.

About two years ago I stopped wearing a watch.  This wasn't done for any philosophical, literary, or even political reason, but rather wearing one seemed a bit archaic--unnecessary even.  As time is relative, what exactly is being represented by the movement of hands on a watch?  I sometimes think the early Egyptians had a finer sense of time via their sundials as they recognized that an 'hour' was not a constant. Variations in time clicked on until the medieval period, when the pendulum clock was invented and along with it, time and commerce co-mingled.  Purchasing time moved from concept to guiding reality--one that remains with us (just consider interest on loans) and (in)forms our understanding of school.

Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) rightly observed, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age."  The clock regulates.

It regulates you.

Me.

Schools.

In bold schools, there is the recognition that in addition to 3-dimesnions of width, height, and length--there is a fourth dimension, time-space.  In traditional schools, acknowledgement of relative time is obscured by regulation and standardization of the day, the term, the school year.  

Let's take a closer look.


2. School Time

The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the big Puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards. It was a dark, old spirit that didn't so much mark time as bequeath it. Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

There's always a clock, isn't there?  Prominently displayed, the schoolroom clock is a staple, representing the regimentation that manages the coming and going of all.  And yet, the classroom clock in many ways is a testament to the fact that time does not flow at a constant rate, regardless of the ways we choose to represent it.  Just recall a time of tedium that informed a classroom stay and surely the concept of relativity becomes more embodied, less esoteric.  The orderliness of the clock as a single representation of time misrepresents the complexity of how we experience time just as the standardization of schools misrepresents learning.

Within any school environment multiple representations of time are present, yet not privileged in the way learning is organized.  In this manner,  schools are work like factories with all adhering to set starting and ending times, lunch breaks, passing time, and allocated 'minutes' by subject. Like factory lines, children are given x number of minutes to complete task y or task z.  Failure to adhere to the established scheduled is considered failure of the task. Time is an odd  constant. The tasks are predetermined and issued.  In many states, high school diplomas are granted based on seat time: literally the number of minutes one's seat has sat in a schoolroom chair. Yet, learning, like time, is conditioned and responsive to context.  Both are relative.

At a bold school, the environment is not set and a learner's time is local. The teacher travels across learners' notions of time, as establishing and managing time is understood as critical learning.  The teacher is a time traveler insomuch as s/he works in a fluid and changeable environment populated with learners whose time experiences are varied.

3. Local Time at the Bold School

The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. - Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Boundaries are interesting. Specifying behavior at the edge of a boundary is a most frequent task teachers enact with students in traditional schools for in a regimented world, boundaries are prolific and one might even argue, necessary, in order to maintain power.

This is the way you line up to leave the classroom.
This is the way you ask for a pass to use the bathroom.
This is the way you exit a burning building.
This is the way you sit during an assembly.
This is the way you write a heading and format our compositions.
This is the divider you place on your desks when taking a test.
These are the hallways in which you do not run.
These are the guards who come to the classroom door to bring you to be disciplined.
This is the way you signal when you want to speak.
This is the way you keep a notebook.
This is the specific notebook you must have in order to write notes.
These are the notes you must copy and do so exactly as indicated.
This is the time you may use a computer to complete a task.
This is the task you must complete in x minutes.
This is the reading quiz you take when you finish reading a book.
This is how you walk to a special.
This is how you enter the school.
If you are a minute late to school, this is the line you stand in for 15 to 20 minutes in order to indicate you were late.
This is how you line up to get lunch.
These are tools you need to learn with and this is how you ask permission to use them.
This is the way you huddle in the corner of the classroom in case an intruder with a gun shows up at our door.
This is how you sit to learn.
This is fear. This is the way to wear it daily.

Boundaries abound and stripped of institutional context, the absurdity seems more apparent, doesn't it?


In a bold school, time is overtly relative by design and learners are knowmads who "work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere" (Moravec, 2008).  As such, regulating behavior is less needed and teachers' roles shift from maintaining order and adhering to institutional and self-imposed sets of behaviors to understanding learners' intentions.   In such an environment,  teachers are situated as time travelers--those who negotiate their students' multiple and varying time frames, and in doing so are reflexive in order to support, teach, and guide these knowmads on their journeys.  In such a world, the term, teacher, is a placeholder for multiple types of people who guide, instruct, apprentice, and co-learn both within and beyond the physical classroom.  Some of these teacher-guides travel alongside a group of learners for years, while others fade when no longer needed.  Teachers visit, but do not live in the varied temporal realities of their students.  Susan Sontag notes:

To be a traveler...is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

Teachers, in bold learning spaces, hold such simultaneity in hand and that knowledge allows them and their students to craft important learning. This role requires new language, similar to the verb tense conundrum that Robert Heinlein discusses in his novel,  The Door Into Summer:

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Time-traveling teachers recognize that listening well in order to better understand their students' locations is a critical teaching skill one that compliments a shift in what counts as important knowledge. These teachers work in an environment where what constitutes important knowledge has shifted from learning prescribed and explicit content to composing knowledge collectively.  Dave Cormier (2008) in Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum captures this idea well when he writes: “The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum." Learning in these times is less about absorption and more about participation.

4. Embodied Location

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” - James Joyce, Dubliners.

In lieu of the solitary schoolroom, a bold school recognizes a field of potential spaces to learn, beginning with an embodied self.  As such a learner's 'school' is the self in a community: his/her home, libraries, coffee shops, book shops, parks, state forests, museums, various storefronts, recreation centers, art and music spaces, dance studios, government buildings, beaches, the ocean, research centers, shelters, labs, a corner diner, bakery, architect's studio, dentist and doctor's offices, the hospital, the town hall, the police station, garden, farm, morgue, petrol station, amusement park, machine shop, theater, and so on.  One only has to look at the learning spaces Monika Hardy via the Innovation Lab is creating in Loveland, CO community to see how this might work.

Oddly, a bold school is inherently local, especially for the time traveling teacher.  Against the uncertainty of time, one revels in an anchor of sorts. I think here of Michael Doyle's blog post where he dreams of teaching his students clamming. Michael writes:

I dream of teaching my students how to clam. It's a local activity that will never be part of the national standards because it's a local activity. That may sound innocuous enough, but it gets to the heart of the sickness in education today, our love of the abstract.

Bold schools recognize that learners, including teachers, arrive in bodies, and do not ask them to check those bodies at the proverbial door. In bold places, teachers offer what they know and are learning, not the long list of things they have been told to mimic that most often comes from those who have rarely set foot in a school as an adult.  Much is learned through the close study of the local.  This may well mean walking about--perhaps along a beach with a teacher who knows the tides and clams and ways to read such landscapes.  It is in these situations that teachers remember who they have been and perhaps even why they sought this work.  (Shh. Look, you've known in your bones you have much to give. The failure of the traditional school has been in requiring you to stop being the impossibly human person you are and requiring you to become a talking head.) 

In addition to the local geography a learner might map, there is also a virtual community s/he belongs to that is far more resistant to mapping.  Participation in these virtual spaces may well lead to a redesign of the physical geography as learners come to know and name other places in the world. This naming though is informed by what learners come to know through local matters. Some of these places may become new centers that the learner visits and dwells in. The development of these physical and virtual learning spaces occurs horizontally: translocally. Helping students to determine, enter into, manage, complicate, compose, and grow such spaces of learning is complex and represents a critical teacher role.

Teachers and students co-learn with each other in self-, peer-, family- community-, and teacher-sponsored learning.  These networks are inherently nomadic as learners make, merge, mash, remix, and break connections in multiple ways.  Part of the work a teacher does is to guide learners in the development and articulation of learning plans that remain in many ways emergent. Learners participate in temponormative, pointillist, cyclical, continuous, and overlapping learning engagements. During temponormative learning, a teacher offers and/or arranges explicit instruction in which learning outcomes are less surprising, more predictable and explicit knowledge is made.  In contrast, during the remaining types of learning (pointillist, cyclical, continuous, and overlapping), a teacher engages learners in dialogic discourse that occasions them to pierce beneath the skin of the ordinary, the obvious--to uncover and compose with greater depth.  This type of 'teaching' is associative, not causal and requires a teacher to create conditions where learners have an opportunity to determine pathways to learning, to name explicit knowing, to codify tacit knowledge, and to fold/unfold/refold conceptual space. 

There are many truths. One truth in bold schools is that learners will exit with holes in what they know and they will know deeply that which they have named as critical. 


5. PLNs

Central to a teacher's role is the responsibility to cognitively apprentice learners so that they compose intellectual and social independence. Independence is learned through the development of and participation in personal learning networks (PLN) which are both local and virtual.  Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli (2011) in Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education write about PLNs and explain:

With a PLN, we can learn anytime, anywhere, with potentially anyone around the world who shares our passion or interest. We can literally build global, online classrooms of our own making on the web that include networks and communities of learners with whom we interact on a regular basis. We can learn around a particular topic at a particular time, or simply tap into an ongoing stream of knowledge from which we can sip anytime we like. And we can build things together, things that can have a global impact in ways that were impossible only a few years ago (p.2).

They describe how learners within the next ten years will all have personal Internet-enabled devices. I agree with them that this time frame is conservative and imagine that such access will occur sooner. These devices allow learners to connect with others--to form PLNs,  guilds, or collectives across geographic spaces.  How they connect and what they do via these connections of course matters. Will and Rob say: "What really counts is the power to plug into networks for learning under the guidance of a teacher who knows how to do that" (p. 139). What I want to urge here though is that much of the important learning will have local roots.  The many walks taken along that beach with a teacher will likely prepare learners to compose and navigate the unmapped space of a PLN. The teacher here, knows both times as well as the need for learners to get lost in these emerging landscapes.

Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change  list three principles upon which this culture is based: 

(1) The old ways of learning are unable to keep up with our rapidly changing world. 
(2) New media forms are making peer-to-peer learning easier and more natural. 
(3) Peer-to-peer learning is amplified by emerging technologies that shape the collective nature of participation with those new media. (Kindle Locations 578-583).

Peer-to-peer learning matters at bold schools.  It is privileged and central, not a thing one gets to after the 'real' work has been done.

6. Affinity-Based Spaces as Sites for Learning

Within networks are passionate affinity-based spaces that are learner-determined.  Important literacies are learned through play in such spaces. For example in massively multiplayer online games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, learners have the ongoing opportunity to participate in complex systems, which in itself is a critical skill.  I have previously written about my son, his play in Minecraft and the learning he is composing with his guild and have come to see how powerful and socially complex the learning among these players can be. (I discuss this here, here, here and here).  James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) in Language and Learning in the Digital Age tell us:

...affinity spaces are about sharing a common endeavor were people learn things, produce things or knowledge, and can, if they wish, become experts...Even these experts believe there is always something new to learn, more to discover, and higher standards to achieve (p. 71).

What drives this powerful learning is commitment and passion.  For example, in Rob Cohen's 8th grade class, students are composing literary worlds in Minecraft. It was interesting to note one day that a student who had been absent from school was nonetheless present for class via the class's Minecraft site.  He was motivated to participate from home.  In this class, students can be found using the chat feature in their Minecraft site to guide homework they have from other classes. The site is a home of sorts. Thomas and  Brown (2011) explain that "[s]tudents learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment" (Location 1050).  In Rob's class, student interest in Minecraft signals a passion and the means by which they compose through the software represents a bounded environment--one not always easy to negotiate.

In bold schools, learners' passions and knowledge guide curricular decisions, not state standards.  I think here of Rob's latest tweet in which he asks:

Simply put: it is illogical to think a single list regardless of how clever one might be can encapsulate what is important to know.  Thomas and Brown (2011) aptly remind us: "Making knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game" (Kindle Locations 522-523).

7. Unknowing

What is knowable?  What is curriculum?

As knowledge is not stable, then how does one determine what represents important community knowledge? In the concluding post about bold schools I discuss learning content by situating content as knowledge a community of learners compose. As community is understood as rhizomatic,  the representation of knowing is varied and complex.  Hope you will take a look.

Why I Tweet (Unlearning and Unfixing Beliefs)

It seems somewhat surreal that I (one with little faith about Twitter) should be authoring a post about tweeting. I  mean a mere month ago I was highly skeptical about Twitter and posed the question in a blog: Where would Emerson find his (wo)man thinker on Twitter? For the last month I have followed and 'unfollowed,' and in doing so have begun to make sense of how tweeting helps to (in)form my practice as an educator by nudging me to unlearn and unfix tenets of learning I have privileged. I had the pleasure to listen to and interact with Will Richardson this last week when he helped the school district I work for open its year.  He talked about his children and through them his hopes for education and educators, inviting us to embrace a goal of guiding students to become global citizens. It was a thoughtful, unhyped, commentary. Poetic.

He then met with administrators for 90 minutes to discuss what we are privileging with regard to learning. He was largely quiet, occasionally interjecting to refocus the conversation. I admitted that day that I initially found Twitter to be a rather foreign landscape with lots of irrelevant commentary and I heard Will say, Ouch.  I've been hearing that ouch over and over again and wanted to expand.

Twitter is helping me to understand that a different concept of learning (and teaching) is required in 2010. Whereas, I have read numerous accounts that students from the class of 20xx would need to be continuous learners, would need to be able to make x number of career changes, and so on, there was a comfortable distance between these fictitious students and me.  In some ways these predictions helped to distance me from a far more intimate discovery: I, at the half-century mark, would also need to adopt new ways of learning and given the economic uncertainty of these times, might also need to change careers. 

I don't think I'm alone in this discovery: The very comfortable ways I have been learning no longer represent the totality of methods I need to use in order to continue to learn and teach.  The landscape is moving at such a rate that it is difficult to discern foreground from background.

Now to be clear, I deeply believe that the theorizing I was privileged to do en route to a doctorate is extremely valuable.  My professors (especially Ruth Vinz) and fellow students at Columbia helped me to turn a sharp eye at flashy educational trends, understand and apply Dewey, Bakhtin, and Deleuze to educational matters, and in doing so conceptualize progressive schooling.  My 25+ years as a public educator has helped me to actualize these theories into local practice.

I still believe it would be better for students if we read more Bakhtin and less Ed Leadership, but here's the rub: it is not a question of get on board with Twitter and its equivalents or tread water.   There is no water to tread as that metaphor has dried up.  The real dynamic is:  breathe or become irrelevant. 

Tweeting is random breathing, an embodiment of self and other represented in the "tweets" that sound.  A few minutes ago on my "TweetDeck" a tweet about Yoshitomo Nara's White Ghost sounded, sandwiched between a link about an abducted journalist tweeting from the captor's phone and a link that took me to an article about Mozilla's plug to play games via its browser that ended with these questions: Are native apps really where it's at? What do you see in the browser's future, and do you think Web games are a good way to get there?

13 years ago I composed a theory about learning and randomness in the guise of a dissertation, and titled it Courting (In)Stability.  Tweeting is all about instability, stability and the movable spaces between where learning happens and I want to suggest here, where teaching needs to be situated.  I am reminded here that at the end of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the narrator says that happiness is the longing for repetition.  I have thought about that phrase for a long time and composed a piece (see below) where I attempted to (re)present that idea:

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition. Image by M.A. Reilly (2009).  

Kundera is clever. He knows happiness is not repetition, but rather the longing for repetition.  I had forgotten how it feels to be unsettled and how necessary such imbalance is, as is the longing for repetition.  Tweeting has reminded me that everything is really in flux and that there is something oddly soothing about the repetition of tweets twittering.