Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?),  that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

https://bit.ly/scottsecondlife will get you there.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time. 

Stay well. Stay safe. 

Be Good and Have Fun.

The Way We've Always Done It, Another Look

 Good morning,

As Fall Solstice demonstrates itself (Wednesday) and we move, here in Nashville, from a rainy and warm start to a clear and cooler end of the week, I want to note that the world around us seems to be doing a spanking good job of pretending that people are not sickening and dying every day from the ongoing pandemic. 

I have been in two public places this week, Kroger on Charlotte Avenue and Midnight Oil on 51st Avenue; and I watched the Tennessee Titans pull an awesome win out of an out-of-town game hat in Seattle yesterday (on my tv). In the first gathering place, there seemed to be some effort and concern about safety as around half the shoppers, and all the staff, continued to wear face masks. In the second, as I picked up our tasty frozen Rose wine beverages to take home and enjoy, the place was packed and I was the only human in the building wearing a face covering. I saw one or two masks in Seattle as the cameras panned the jammed stadium, but clearly everyone knows the trouble is over up there. 

Oh, wait...

Maybe someone should tell them. 

Let's look at Nashville...

Well, that's Tennessee, as reported by the New York Times, So over the previous two weeks deaths have only risen 59%. That's good, isn't it? 

Ummm, No. Three days before the national news noted that 1 in 500 Americans have died from the coronavirus, news agencies in Tennessee announced that we had achieved that outstanding statistic.

Schools are working to stay open. Students, families, and administrations, and teachers are stressed. And yet we are married more firmly than ever to what is dictated by the seven most dangerous words in the English language:

"IT'S THE WAY WE'VE ALWAY DONE IT."

Come on, y'all. We can do better. I reference an article written and published during the heat of the early battle with Covid-19. Now Covid's soldiers are wearing different uniforms, but they are still being aided and abbetted by legions of deniers and extremists, many of whom run state legislations and local governments. I (re)call your attention to January's scottmerrickdotnet blog post, THE CASE FOR REAL VIRTUAL LEARNING. 

I do not rest my case.

Stay safe and love one another. Be good and have fun.

Now. New Work. Let's Stay in Touch!

Just popping in here to note that I turned in my keys to the Cohn Learning Center and the Virtual School today. It felt good. It's a long story and to be kind I don't want to tell it. Suffice it to say that though I poured my heart and soul into my work at MNPS Virtual School for six years of my life, I am done and gone. Best of luck to the school.

For all the kind and supportive words from all of my colleagues and friends on social media and other fronts, I have the most profound gratitude. You all got me through this tough spot in my professional career. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you. And to my family, with which I have been blessed despite my own failings, I love you completely and I hold you in my heart always.

Now, to the future. I am completely excited to be returning Monday to the K-4 computer lab, but this time not to an independent school, where I did similar work for 11 years, but to my new home--Warner Enhanced Option Elementary School.

When told the official ask had been requested, I created a blog for families similar to the one I maintained for a decade at University School of Nashville, and I'll likely be more often blogging there than here in upcoming weeks. I hope to to build a curriculum and a future for my  24 classes a week, K-4. I'm on it already. When my students leave for middle school, they will be armed with confidence that they have the skills to deal with the rapidly escalating flood if information. They will know how to stay safe online. They will be able to tell when information is manipulating them, instead of being there to be manipulated by them. We will scaffold all this around the new ISTE Technology Standards for Students, just released last month and exceedingly comprehensive and spot-on. Let's play. Let's be good and have fun. Let's learn, share, and enjoy our time together.

Here's a pano of my dear boy Colin in my newly spiffed up computer lab. Watch for more soon!

Have a great week.

Now I have to make some mouse pads. God bless Google. :)

Why Schools Don't Educate--"Disaster of Ignorance"

I sometimes wonder why I put so much of my time and energy into maintaining a network of learning that so floods me with information. This morning, sorting through my email, I noted one from the "Independent Schools Collaboration Group at Diigo.com" and its content drew me to investigate the bit of information it was sharing. This, I think, is why I network with other educators, the lagniappe learning that a sharing online teaching and learning community provides.

Why Schools Don't Educate - The Natural Child Project --- Add comment

- Tag: education independent teaching - Shared By: Sarah Hanawald 2008-05-03 03:19:45

is how it displayed in my email. I clicked to read, and though I don't always completely "read," more likely "scan" full documents, this one is so thoroughly thought-provoking I had to read it word for word. It was only when I reached one passage that mentioned "today in 1990" that I realized the comments from New York's "Teacher of the Year" were made by the 1990 recipient, that I was reading an 18 year-old document.

In part, he said,

I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

I'm not sure I agree with everything Gatto had to say, but I'm less sure when I consider it in the light of my personal very powerful push-back to the "homework" my son has been so thoroughly saddled with in his sixth grade year of "schooling." If you can read this in its entirety without having something to say about it, you're perhaps a very well-developed product of what John Gatto describes as an "anti-human" process of education. If you'd like to share what you have to say, please comment here.