Integrated Thinking and Online Curating

 

 

 

 

Discussions about the necessity of integrated thinking abound today, as do large-scale educational experiments with this concept.  Quest University in Squamish B.C. was founded in 2007 to teach students techniques to creatively combine rather than simply reiterate what they have learned.  Students there are encouraged to integrate knowledge from across disciplines to explore a central, self-directed question.  More recently, the Rotman School of Management in Toronto has teamed up with a variety of public and private K-12 schools to provide students and staff with lessons in integrative thinking.  The brainchild of Rotman dean Roger Martin, the I-Think program is designed to teach students alternatives to either-or decision making.  Meanwhile, the Ontario Ministry of Education as a whole has been tinkering with the idea of providing more integrated course offerings since 2002.  Interdisciplinary Studies is an exciting framework which allows Ontario secondary school teachers to offer senior level courses covering ministry expectations from across the curriculum.

It is truly wonderful to see these progressive changes in educational thought; however, it has thus far proven challenging to apply integrative thinking techniques to the day to day realities of the classroom.  As with most philosophies, the devil is in the details.  This is why I have recently been experimenting with online curating as a tangible, accessible application for integrated thinking.  I first came across the amazing curating site Scoop.it while consulting for Twenty One Toys, an educational start-up working out of the Centre for Social Innovation.  In my brief time working in this environment I have been amazed at the seemingly natural ability of entrepreneurs to access and synthesize tremendous amounts of information.  This is precisely the kind of thinking I want to cultivate in my students (and in myself!)  Upon closer inspection, I have come to understand that the ability to navigate and creatively connect large amounts of information is a logical process which can be both learned and taught, with a little help from the internet.

Scoop.it is part of a growing group of sites which allow users to collect, organize, and reflect on online content.  This process begins by defining a unique topic which acts as a unifying arc for all content linked to the site.  When users post information which they have found online, they are asked to offer their brief insights.  They can choose to share these insights on a variety of social media sites, and when they have collected enough content they can even publish an online newsletter based on their efforts.  Using the site is very easy, but it allows for useful and challenging applications of integrative thought.  I am in the process of experimenting with it in a variety of ways:

·         Providing interactive homework: Homework should be an opportunity for students to build upon what was taught in class.  Scoop.it can be used to provide students opportunities to arrive at divergent rather than convergent conclusions about my courses. 

I am trying an approach to homework in which the majority of at home readings/video posts are provided on my scoop.it page.  Each student scoops course content from here onto a page they curate themselves.  More importantly, they will expand upon this content by finding a related item (article, video, photo, blog, poem, song…) for each resource I have provided.  By the end of the term, each student will have built an online “textbook” which reflects both the structure of the course, and their unique insights.  I am also encouraging students to publish their scoops on Twitter and/or Facebook to stimulate discussions outside of class.  And although I do not want to frame this as a numbers-based exercise, I do think that the possibility of gaining followers and increasing traffic to their Scoop.it page will provide additional incentive to curate interesting content.

      

·         Emphasizing interactive studying techniques: Tests have gained the unfortunate and inaccurate reputation as the ultimate crucibles of the educational process.  Rather than being a confrontational activity, a well composed test allows students to think holistically about a given section of a course.  It has always bothered me, therefore, that so many students prepare for these integrative exercises by re-writing course concepts in fragmented notes or flashcards.  While thinking that they are being efficient studiers by focusing on isolated areas of misunderstanding, what they are actually doing is robbing themselves of the context which makes the entire course cohere. 

Last semester, I challenged my students to use Scoop.it to prepare for their Communication Technologies exam.  I wanted to see if the process of actively searching for course content, rather than passively reiterating it from their notes, would lead to greater success.  Beyond that, this exercise was also used to encourage my students to go beyond what they had learned.  In addition to posting content related directly to course content, each student had to include and justify content which explored ways that the internet is fundamentally changing the history I had taught them.  An example of a student’s first attempt can be viewed here.

 

·         Teaching integrative research techniques: Increasing instances of plagiarism, and the less serious but still troublesome problem of students equating research success with quantity both stem from the same misguided assumption that research is only about gathering information.  The age old adage that “knowledge is power” needs to be updated to reflect the realities of a knowledge soaked digital world; “connections are power” is a much more fitting slogan for the age of the web.  Using techniques practiced throughout the term in activities briefly outlined above, I hope to convince my students of this.      

 

 

                       

 

 

                       

In difense of speling

                Over the past decade, I have marked the end of each high school term with the same ritual: swearing quietly under my breath as I attempt to extract meaning from the maze of spelling and grammatical errors which wind their way through the final essays and exams I must grade.  The swearing is knee-jerk, but once I have calmed down, I force myself to consider the implications of and reasons for the state of the written word.

                The first thing that I must accept is the fact that English, perhaps more than any other language, is an exceptionally malleable mode of communication.  Indeed, its success and richness are largely predicated on its willingness to borrow, repurpose, and create entirely new words.  The Oxford English Dictionary contains well over 600,000 words, and publishes quarterly lists of new entries.  The OED estimates that each of its quarterly reports contain upwards of 2000 new entries.  And as English teachers love to point out, Shakespeare alone contributed hundreds of commonly used words by adding or subtracting suffixes and prefixes to existing words, and by creating entirely new words to fit within the rhyme scheme and meter of his writing.  It is also interesting to note that Shakespeare himself spelled his own name no fewer than five different ways.  (Interestingly, the modern spelling seems to be one of the spellings he did not routinely use.)             

                The second reality that I must come to terms with is the fact that, as a result of this malleability, English spelling has acquired some very arbitrary characteristics.  The extensive list of homonyms that pepper our language is just one example of the wackiness built into our system of spelling.  “I’ll”, “Isle”, and “Aisle” are as differently spelled as they are similar sounding.  At the root of this baffling system is a love of fusion which underpins our language.  The tendency for written English to incorporate the verbal shorthand of spoken English is demonstrated in its multiplicity of contractions.  “I will” was long ago deemed too inefficient to leave unmolested, so the verbal slurring of “I’ll” found its way onto the page.  Of course, if English was content merely to fuse its verbal and written forms, its phonetics would make a lot more sense.  However, English also relishes the opportunity to adopt words from other languages.  “Isle” comes from the Latin word “insula”, which incidentally is also where we get the words “Island” and “Insulate”.   “Aisle” comes from the Old French word “Aile”, meaning “wing”.    

                As a result of this spirit of inclusion, English developed as a patchwork of disparate and constantly evolving rules and spellings.  It was not until the Enlightenment, when the English speaking world was ascending to a place of political dominance, that this dynamic mosaic started to be formalized.  The combination of the hegemonic forces of English colonization, and Enlightenment ideals of scientific rigour and uniformity led to the publication of the first comprehensive English dictionaries in the 1700s.  Perhaps the most famous speller of this time was Noah Webster (1758 – 1843).  He published A Grammatical Institute of the English Language in 1783, the year the American Revolution officially ended.  Commonly referred to as The “Blue-Backed Speller”, this formalized account of rules for written English would sell 100 million copies in the century after it was published; a literary reach second only to the bible.

                So, if the success of English has historically rested on its malleability, and its system of arbitrary rules was codified at a time bearing little resemblance to our own, why should I get upset when my students can’t spell?  Aren’t text messages and emoticons simply the next phase of English evolution?  After careful consideration, I can say with great confidence that spelling needs to be a continuing area of focus in education.  However, the methodology with which teachers present this skill is in need of change.  Rote memorization of arbitrary rules is antithetical to the creative demands of the post-industrial work place.  As is, I must concede, my knee-jerk anger directed towards students who don’t see the logic in this system.  Instead, spelling and grammar must be explored for what they really are: windows into a fascinating history of cultural exchange and evolution.  The English language needs to be taught using discussions of word etymology, and analysis of both how and why written communication changes.  Students should consider both the benefits and the drawbacks of communicating 140 characters at a time, and apply the same level of critical thinking when considering why teachers continue to ask them for formal essays and reports. 

                As with all significant areas of human endeavor, language is a process rather than an end point.  To be fully valued, therefore, we must learn to appreciate its past, present, and future.