Yet, even as girls open new gender gaps by outpacing their male peers in most subjects, men still receive roughly 77 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and 85 percent of those in computer science. Why aren’t girls choosing to enter these critical fields of the future?
There are several familiar explanations: Girls lack sufficient female role models in computer science and engineering; girls prefer sciences that are clearly connected to helping others; girls are turned off by the “isolated geek” stereotype that dominates their view of computer science and engineering.
My Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency session at Educon 2.2 went very well. I’m waiting to hear if the recording glitches were solved or if it’s lost to eternity! (Don’t bother clicking on the Elluminate link on the session page, it just says the session is over.) I have heard, though, that they are working on putting up the links.
It was a great conversation. So many people participated and shared some really great ideas and stories. I will post some resources from the conversation soon.
Monday and Tuesday I’m in Washington DC for a big announcement - stay tuned for something exciting!
Wednesday I’m in New York City leading a workshop on project-based technology literacy with some independent schools.
If it’s Thursday and Friday (Jan 28/29) it must be Atlantic City for TECHSPO 2010 – the annual statewide technology exhibition and training conference for New Jersey school leaders, sponsored by the New Jersey Association of School Administrators. Alan November and Gary Stager are keynoting this conference so it ought to be a good one.
The cherry on top of this crazy week will be Educon in Philadelphia Jan 29-31. This is the third year for this conference put on by the Science Leadership Academy (SLA.) Educon and SLA are captained by their visionary principal, Chris Lehmann, and powered by the amazing teachers and dedicated students of SLA.
The sessions will likely be streamed online, so if you are interested in tuning in for “conversations” rather than “stand and deliver” - check it out. It’s an awesome session list.
My session on Tinkering Towards Technology Literacy will be Saturday morning at 10AM Eastern time. If you are attending Educon, I could definitely use a volunteer to help with the streaming! If you will not be in Philadelphia, check the Educon website for instructions on connecting remotely.
I’ll be heading to Philadelphia later this month for the Educon conference. This is a terrific small conference held at the Science Leadership Academy about education and change. Educon is famous for having “conversations” not “presentations.” This means that the wisdom of the crowd gets shared as we explore one topic in depth.
This year I’m leading a conversation on Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency
Conversation Description: Tinkering is a time-honored educational practice, focusing on a learner exploring a subject or problem without clear goals or time constraints, using objects or tools at hand, driven by passion and curiosity. Seymour Papert used the word, “bricolage” to describe a way to solve problems by trying things out, testing, playing, and trying again. This stands in direct contract to the way we teach students to use analytical methods (such as the scientific method) to solve problems. Current digital tools would seem to support this method of learning, with the rapid ability to build first drafts and easy to use editing tools. When mistakes and prototypes were expensive and time consuming, it certainly made sense to carefully plan your attack on a problem. However, this is no longer the case. In industry, the methodology of production planning has been revolutionized by rapid design tools. Accepted practices of design and planning have completely changed over the past 25 years, with linear “waterfall” planning completely replaced by new “spiral” design methodologies, especially in the design of digital products.
Beginning questions for the conversation are: How can tinkering influence our understanding of technology literacy as a set of skills to be mastered? How might this influence classroom practice when teaching analytical problem solving in any subject? How can tinkering fit in today’s structured classroom environment? How does a teacher maintain a schedule and series of learning objectives that result in learning, not just fooling around? Is anything a student does tinkering? What role does judgement and content knowledge play in tinkering?
If you are considering attending Educon, I hope you join the conversation!
Design in the real world is often a process of deliberate tinkering. Sometimes the goal may be clear, with timelines, budgets, and constraints. Or the goal may be less clear, as you struggle to come up with something “better” even though no one quite knows what that means. Sometimes you work for days or weeks, making small incremental steps, sometimes things come in a flash of brilliance.
Yet in school, there is often a rigid “design process” with stages that imply a linear progression from start to finish. Whether teaching writing, video production, the “scientific method”, or programming, it often seems most efficient to provide students with step-by-step assistance, tools, and tricks to organize their thoughts and get to a finished product.
However, this well-intentioned support may in fact have the effect of stifling creativity and forcing students into creating products that simply mirror the cookbook they have been given. In fact, some students, having been well-trained to follow directions, will simply march through the steps with little thought at all. On the other hand, students need some kind of support and structure, right?
So how do you combine the benefits of tinkering (creative chaos, brainstorming, time to reflect) with getting something done. I believe the answer lies in looking at the design process in the creative world - such as graphic artists and designers.
(1) Embrace constraints. (2) Practice restraint. (3) Adopt the beginner’s mind. (4) Check your ego at the door. (5) Focus on the experience of the design. (6) Become a master storyteller. (7) Think communication not decoration. (8) Obsess about ideas not tools. (9) Clarify your intention. (10) Sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you. (11) Learn all the “rules” and know when and why to break them.
I hope you read this article; it provides much food for thought.
Once a year at the TED conference, invited speakers from all fields and backgrounds gather to give short talks about their subjects of interest. The conference website holds a treasure trove of brilliant, moving examples of storytelling about things that matter.
In this 4 minute video, Gever Tulley talks about his Tinkering School. This is a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, especially in regards to technology. My post a few months ago, Technology Literacy and Sustained Tinkering Time was about how looking at technology through the lens of tinkering makes more sense than approaching it through checklists and skill acquisition charts.
But I think this TED talk is nice because it shows kids doing things, and he talks about what is necessary to facilitate this kind of learning — time, materials, and openness to the serendipity of both success and failure. Time is such a key element. Time to think, time to change your mind, and time to work through frustration.
In the comment page for the video, there is a a lively discussion of how computers fit into this world of “stuff” for kids to mess around with. Some people look at computers (and video games) as taking children out of the “real world” of making things with hammers and nails, but I know that computers are not in opposition to children tinkering. Children, especially with open-ended, creative software tools can flow seamlessly between creating virtual and real things that have meaning to them.
This fits in perfectly with my work next week at the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. I’m looking forward to 4 days of tinkering with all the cool materials and software we bring in. According to Gary Stager, who leads the institute, teachers often see student frustration as a failure, and want to “help” students through it as quickly as possible. He says that teachers simply need to fine tune their reactions to differentiate between “mouth up” and “mouth down” frustration. No one wants to just leave a student stuck forever in an endless loop of problems. But to rescue them too soon means they never develop the problem solving skills they need. At CMK, the teachers learn that lesson by going through it themselves, tackling complex projects that have natural cycles of success, frustration, and more success.
Here’s a video from CMK last year, made during the event by one of the participants, that shows some of this in action.
By the way, there are a few places left, so sign up and come on down. What better way to spend a week than going to technology tinkering school!
By now you’ve probably heard of Twitter, the latest techno-craze taken up by those-in-the-know, celebrities, and well, me too. It’s so popular that the inevitable “it’s not so great” stories are now making their way into the news. According to this Harvard study (link from BBC news) Twitter hype punctured by study, “…most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime…”
“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.
That quote alone got me thinking. Since when does everyone have to love the same thing instantly and do things in exactly the same way. Oh, right — school.
Part of the magic of tinkering is that everyone does not do the same thing, that people can easily pick up tools and materials (digital or otherwise) and quickly do something that is personally engaging.
Hurray for Twitter for making it so easy to try out, so easy to decide if it’s right (or wrong) for you. Hurray for a world where you can twitter about lunch and twitter to save your country.
Are there parallels to learning?
In some ways, yes… especially for technology, making simple tools available means people (students and teachers) can try them out and find immediate uses. Or discard them quickly. They have a low barrier to entry. Twitter fits this bill nicely.
In some ways, no… education is about asking youth to find their passion and make meaning of the world, without making them hate it. Even if it takes effort to push them into it, even if it takes a caring, persistent adult to show a youth that that passion does indeed exist. Tools that offer a high ceiling, a potential to go further than you ever thought possible, to create, to creep into complexity, to explore a craft deeply, meet this need. That’s not Twitter, nor most of the Web 2.0 world.
Tools that offer both are indeed extremely rare and valuable.
The MacArthur Foundation brought together educators, “tinkerers,” curators, artists, performers and “makers” to grapple with questions around ensuring that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully and creatively in public, community, and economic life.
These interviews from five of the participants were produced to provide some insights into the thoughtful and passionate conversations from that convening.
These videos make connections between tinkering, innovative ideas, the idea of making work public as in a studio, creativity and collaboration, the ability to incorporate criticism, and more. Well worth watching!
Seymour Papert, the father of educational computing, often used the French word bricolage to describe the kind of playful attitude both children and scientists use to tinker, build, test, and rebuild their way to solving problems. Bricolage has the additional advantage (besides being cool sounding) of implying that you are using materials that you find around you - a very eco-green idea!
Problem-solving in schools is typically taught as an analytical process with clear plans and steps, like the “scientific method.” But bricolage is clearly closer to the way real scientists, mathematicians and engineers solve problems. Sure, they make plans. But they also follow hunches, iterate, make mistakes, re-think, start over, argue, sleep on it, collaborate, and have a cup of tea. Bricolage encourages making connections, whereas School tends to like “clean” disconnected problems with clear, unambiguous step-by-step solutions.
“For planners, mistakes are steps in the wrong direction; bricoleurs navigate through midcourse corrections. Bricoleurs approach problem-solving by entering into a conversation with their work materials that has more the flavor of a conversation than a monologue. ” - Papert & Turkle
* Note: the Papert & Turkle quote is from their seminal paper, Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete. I found this on the Edutech Wiki, hosted by the University of Geneva.
