Maybe we should begin thinking of learning as more than just a psychological event. An article on the SharpBrains blog, Can Intelligence Be Trained? provides evidence that fluid intelligence, the ability to deal with new problems, may be influenced by exercising working memory.

A memory training experiment conducted by Martin Buschkuehl and Susanne Jaeggi is described in which participants in the experimental group far outperformed members of the control on a test of fluid intelligence that wasn’t directly trained. The question of whether any kind of memory training would have produced the same result was answered by pointing to other studies in which memory training did not transfer positively to fluid intelligence.

The authors of this study believe their memory training program was effective because it was challenging, complex, and it was designed so that participants could not develop task specific strategies that allowed them to “beat the game.” Working memory capacity, they claim, was truly extended through this training.

The best part of this whole article is that the memory training program is available online. Try it yourself. It’s tough, and it’ll take some practice. The more they trained, the more they gained, say the researchers. Who doesn’t want to try it?

A download version of Braintwister may soon be available.

The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

…which isn’t to say that we should turn a blind eye to our problems. From the executive summary of Democracy at Risk:

• Nearly one-fourth of U.S. children live in families below the poverty line, more than in any other industrialized nation;
• The U.S. ranked 21st of 30 OECD countries in science and 25th of 30 in mathematics — a drop from a few years earlier;
• High school graduation rates have been stagnant for a quarter century and have recently begun to decline;
• About 30 percent of an age cohort in the U.S. gains a college degree, as compared to nearly 50 percent in OECD countries;
• Growth in state spending on prisons far outstrips growth in education spending;
• Studies reveal declines in voter knowledge and participation.

Although A Nation at Risk did say, “…public education should be the top priority for additional Federal funds” and that, “A high level of shared education is essential to a free, democratic society,” those statements regarding the need for, and proper role of federal support have been largely lost in the discourse of choice, achievement, and accountability. Democracy at Risk is an attempt to highlight the lack of progress toward the goals that were laid out 25 years ago, and outline some recommendations for federal involvement in education, to include

• Rectifying inequalities in access to quality education, investing in out-of-school learning supports;
• Investing in the recruitment and training of new teachers and school leaders;
• Supporting education research and innovation by disseminating information about promising practices, including assessment and data reporting mechanisms that will inform instruction;
• Engaging local communities by placing schools at the center of community education.

The authors of the report note John Glenn’s observation that “our public education system is ‘the personnel office for democracy.’ And when our schools are unsupported, that democratic future is at risk.”

Interestingly, A Nation at Risk was written the year I began teaching. I can’t recall ever discussing it with anyone. Teachers typically don’t concern themselves too much with the politics of policy. The proverbial Chinese expression, “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” might be a guideline for practice in a complex decentralized system where decisions are made in response to ever-changing conditions.

One of the core issues in current policy discussions is from what level curriculum control should emerge. Top down program administration too easily misses the fine print and messy details that come with the teacher’s territory. The only people who are surprised by a billion dollar per year program bust are the clueless pundits and policy pushers who believe that “scientifically based reading research” is about science and reading, and not about ideology and profiteering. I knew when I started this job that I’d become a cynic. It only hurts when I care, which is most of the time.

The top-down/bottom-up disagreement was explored recently in a fascinating story, Liberating the Schoolhouse. A researcher from UCLA, Wellford Wilms, documented the tenure of a new principal who took control of a troubled school in S. California, and managed by several measures to pull the school out of its tailspin, only to be replaced by a more traditional administrator. Her unusual approach to leadership was to require the school’s dispirited staff to run their own meetings and begin making significant decisions that would affect real change.

By the end of 2004, Infante’s vision began to show results as the school—administrators, teachers and students—began to emerge as a single community. The campus was cleaner as students started picking up after themselves; tardies and cuts dropped in frequency; and the school’s test score index shot up an amazing 95 points in less than two years, a gain that placed Baldwin Park High School among the schools with the greatest increase in scores. Infante recalled of her staff, “at first they thought it was a mistake. They didn’t believe in themselves.”

Another teacher leaned over the table and whispered, “It was like an invisible takeover, a secret government that never actually took power.”

But something happened to take the shine off the apple. Infante was reassigned and removed from her principal position by a school administration that wanted to maintain a more conventional hierarchy of control. They didn’t understand the steps this principal had taken to empower her teaching staff. According to Wilms, the board and superintendent were “blinded by their own ambitions.” Stephen Smoliar sees this as a cautionary tale, and comments that reformers can’t afford to wear blinders to the larger context within which their innovations might be executed.

That’s right, if your goal is to work and survive within the system. But who wants to do that these days?

But school lets out for the summer soon. So mid-May holds some promise.

My long range plan has been to get my students out in the field with the biology grad student who’s been working with us all year. But the weather has been…frustrating…I mentioned that, didn’t I? Next week we’re headed out on 2 all-day outdoor education missions. Today we toured the university power plant, saw examples of thermokarst in the “drunken forest” behind campus, and visited the migratory bird refuge, which was some sloppy wet walking. A good time was had by most.

I was taking pictures with my Canon S2 IS, and I noticed a little bit of vibration as the zoom lens retracted/extended. That lasted for about 2 on-off cycles before the whole works jammed (open) and the camera refused to work. A little message in the viewfinder said E18. That’s all it said.

Nothing happened to this camera that might have damaged it.

In a futile bid for a quick fix to this weird problem, I replaced the batteries. No such luck. I carried my broken camera around all day alternately seeing good photo subjects, and cursing Canon for its fussy equipment that costs as much to repair as to replace.

After school let out I took it to the camera shop to see what they had to say. The guy behind the counter took about 15 minutes with me, and he managed to get the lens to retract - once. I took a picture and it jammed again. He told me that we should think of this stuff as “disposable.” And he tried to interest me in another Canon product.

When I got home this evening, I searched “Canon” E18, and I found plenty. I left a comment on this complaint collection site, after I saw how common the problem was. There’s even a class action lawsuit, apparently. Interestingly, a site search at Cannon turns up zero results for EI8. Yet there’s even a web domain called e18error.com with a slew of error reports and some useless suggestions for fixing the problem. Even more reports of this mess at the Jungle Zone.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if Canon would stand behind its product. But this amazing customer service fiasco puts that pipe dream to rest. I won’t be getting another Canon. It stinks that this stuff is built to break.

Most of what’s been dogging me lately is bound to improve. I need some suggestions for a new camera with good zoom and macro capability. And, yeah, it should be tough enough.

For all the web-bound discussions about 21st century skills, about writing for a global audience and developing virtual voices, I can’t remember reading much about teaching kids to actually talk in front of an audience. Most of my students turned around with their backs to the class to look at their slides, and mumbled at the screen. Even the attention sponges and clowns - they shriveled. A few brave hearts courageously stood their ground and tried to say something off the cuff. But it was clearly a “thing” we need to work on.

When I taught the lower grades we had show and tell. A discussion with my daughter turned up a surprisingly easy, fun, and useful activity for older students. She told me about something her sixth-grade teacher did, which I’ve now started doing, too. I asked the kids to each write a common noun on one index card. Then I took the front page of the newspaper, and wrote down most of the nouns I found on it, one to a card. To play the game, we draw a student’s name, and a card, at random. The student stands in front of the group and talks extemporaneously for one minute about the chosen word. I told them it was like a freewrite, only out loud. Even though they’re still shy about it, they like doing it. A few at a time, it’s a great thing to do at the beginning or end of a class period with a few moments to spare.

I feel kind of bad that it took me almost the whole year to come up with this idea. I think I’ve focused on writing and reading a little too much. I forgot about presenting. Even though it isn’t tested, we’re going to work on it.

The irony of publishing an article about online “socially situated identities” in a print journal that doesn’t provide a reference for the author’s online identity was too incongruous for me to focus seriously on the content of the report, and I drifted in and out of a weirdly schizophrenic consciousness where I wasn’t sure how to read the article. I imagined being the “ivory tower academic” reading about blogs, a cutting edge communication tool that could revolutionize literature study. And then I’d flip into “blogging teacher” mode, wanting to follow a link back to the students’ or teacher’s blogs, hoping I’d learn something from their example. But the JAAL article didn’t provide source citations for the students’ blogs. So the article became its own example of the disconnect between the theoretical world of academia and the messy particulars of the classroom.

Will Richardson and Konrad Glogowski might be interested to know they were casually cited along with Gee, Fairclough, and Jenkins, even though the students’ blogs, the subject of the article, are not listed. Nor are they indexed on Google from what I can see. Which is not to say that Kathleen West, the author of the study, doesn’t have interesting things to say in her account of her 11th grade AP English students using weblogs to engage in authentic talk about books.

I did find a copy [doc] of the article on a digital media course wiki. West used discourse analysis for a case study of three variously successful students to show how each of them created distinct identities and integrated their social language with the discourse of literary analysis. She showed how the “relationship-savvy teen,” the “tempered rebel,” and the “pop-cultured humorist” all constructed hybrid identities as “serious literature students” and “web-literate communicators.” She provides samples of coded transcriptions, and quotes from the student’s blogs as exemplars. The article, written for a university course, is slightly different from the version published by JAAL, but West’s data and discussion are essentially the same in each.

A couple of things about this piece bother me, though. West’s research question, “What is the nature of literary response as communicated via weblog?” was asked about kids in an AP English class at a school which West described as an “AP-saturated,” white, upper or middle class context. She concluded that the discourse of “serious literature student” could coexist with the more non-standard, non-academic online discourse. Fair enough. But what about kids who come from less privileged neighborhoods? Case study documentations that tell only success stories, especially when they come from upper middle class school environments, have limited use for teachers who work with less privileged student populations. I am always curious about what case studies don’t show, because the disappointments in my classroom are often more instructive for me than my successes. What about the kids who weren’t “serious literature students?”

The research question about literary response and weblogs tries to bridge the rift between academic and online discourse, where “socially situated identities” are constructed around different norms and conventions. Case in point from the article: The f-word was spelled out in the JAAL piece, where West apparently has to explain the meaning of ‘WTF’ for the academic readership. It was funny to see them explicitly deal with it, tacitly acknowledging their own cluelessness, like a parent using teen jargon.

Control of academic discourse is challenged by the read/write web. Anyone can publish now, about anything they like, in any style they choose. But the academy still has the credentialing job. For how long? I wonder. We’re publishing our own research, and linking directly to the evidence, every day. So, what can the academy tell us about blogging that we don’t already know, or won’t find out on our own? And when will the academy admit the social languages that kids are bringing with them into the groves of academe?

Source:
West, K.C. (2008, April). Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class Blogs. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(7), 588–598.