Lightning in a Bottle

I taught another Photoshop workshop last week. It was an evening class, so it ran from 4:30 to 7:30 over two nights. This means that the teachers involved had already worked a full day, then had to drive and arrive in the dark (this is the Pacific Northwest) and spend another three hours working with a very cool but often confusing piece of software. (It helps that the workshops are only $10, due to a generous grant from the Adobe company.)

I’d also worked a full day myself each of those days, so you’d think we would constitute a room of tired, cranky people. However, it wasn’t - we had two very enjoyable evenings of exploring and learning that I was sorry to see end. And horrors of horrors, I never once spoke about pedagogy, or GLEs, or curricular alignment. Each participant was able to explore the software and create images that had meaning and purpose to them. Sometimes it was personal (one participant used the software to rework scanned images of his own remarkable paintings), sometimes it was school related (two colleagues were working on images for the yearbook), and sometimes it was a bit of both. Regardless, each learner was learning what they wanted and needed to learn for themselves. The excitement and energy that came from this helped to carry them through the difficult and confusing parts of learning the software.

It was also modeling for what a classroom needs to look like. We actually did talk about that during class - is it really that radical of a concept that a teacher training experience should look like what student learning should look like?

I like teaching programs such as Photoshop because of the impact I see on the people that learn how to use it. Guy Kawasaki has a great video presentation called The Art of Innovation, and in it he talks about skipping the mission statement and going straight to a “mantra,” a short phrase that captures the essence of what it is you do. (For example, he says for FedEx it would be Peace of Mind.) I’ve decided that for my ed tech efforts, the mantra is Unleashing the Potential. Whether I’m helping a district plan for a better technology implementation or showing a teacher how to use Photoshop to improve their pictures of students, my goal is to remove the roadblocks that keep the technologies - and people using them - from reaching their full potential.

That’s why I like teaching Photoshop. When it’s 8:00 at night, and I’m by myself putting away the computers, if I feel like I’ve helped those fifteen people move a few steps closer to where they want to be, I’m not tired at all. I’m thinking about the next workshop and how to make it even better.

Michael Welsh and 200 of his students at Kansas State University created the this video about college students and how their lives relate (or don’t) to college. It’s a great discussion starter for a staff or board meeting! (I’d also love to see someone create a high school version of the project.)

The American School Board Journal cover story for October is about differences in brain function and learning between genders. What is fascinating about the article is that it shows the direct lines connecting what we now know about gender, brain function, behavior, learning style, and instructional strategies. Researchers are now able to directly image how the brains of girls and boys operate differently while engaged in the same tasks, whether they are math, language arts, or other efforts. More importantly, researchers such as the author of the article have documented how to change teaching practice to apply this knowledge, with significant impact on student success.

While this is not about technology per se, it certainly has great implications for educational technology. If boys write better by creating a visual storyboard rather than an outline, what tools could we use to improve that process? (Suddenly digital photography takes on new instructional possibilities.) If girls do better in math when instructional materials emphasise verbal elements, would that influence your choices of technology-delivered supplementary math materials (such as Fizz and Martina, Math Mysteries, or PrimeTime Math from Tom Snyder Productions)?

Of course, this all appeals to me because I’m a science and research nerd. I love to see how our increasing knowledge and understanding of how the brain works can help us see the process of learning through new eyes. We no longer need to argue about or guess why girls and boys learn differently; we now know how and why. Now we can concentrate on how to apply this knowledge to help kids learn the best ways possible, and hopefully apply technology to enhance these new approaches.

Kathy Sierra got the jump on me in her weblog Creating Passionate Users. While this weblog is aimed at software developers, she has a lot to say that I find valuable from an educational perspective.

Her post today is called Brain Death by Cubicle, and it’s her take on a great article called The Reinvention of the Self in the February print issue of Seed Magazine. It’s unfortunately not available online yet, but should be next month. The article looks at the concept of mammalian brains (including ours) growing new cells, or neurogenesis. Up until the very recent past it has been a commonly accepted fact that mammalian brains do not grow new cells, and that as we age we just simply lose them a little each day. Gad, how depressing!

Well, it turns out this isn’t true. A researcher named Elizabeth Gould is profiled in the article, and she has demonstrated that we do indeed grow new brain cells - unless we are stressed, or kept in dull, boring settings. In the latter settings, brain cell growth ceases. (This is why earlier researchers never found evidence of neurogenesis - all of their lab animals were kept in sterile cages.) Play and active learning create increased brain cell growth.

Kathy looks at this from the perspective of the office worker stuck in a cubicle. What are we doing to employees when we prevent them from having visually stimulating workplaces?

And as far as education is concerned, I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. If we know that uninteresting settings inhibit brain cell growth, and active, engaging settings increase brain cell growth, we have another piece of evidence for the value of activity-based, technology-rich learning environments. The kind of intense engagement that students experience not only “entertains” them, it literally changes the physical structure of their brains for the better. (The flip side is that uninteresting, dull settings change the brain, too - for the worse.)

It’s always satisfying to have science demonstrate what we knew all along - play and active learning are good for you! Read Kathy’s full post for a more in-depth discussion of the article, and then try to track down the original as well. There’s a lot of implications of this research that are worth considering at great length.