Ideas are Better Than Sex

I've been looking forward to my Philosophy for Teens class that begins this week.  This will be the fourth time I teach this class and I am planning to take it down a slightly different road.  For starters, we will be using "More Philosophy for Teens: Examining Reality and Knowledge", the sequel to the text I used for the first three times I taught the course.  Next, I am going to include technology and the digital revolution in our discussion about aesthetics.  I recently watched the documentary, "Press, Pause, Play", an investigation into the role of technology in art and culture, and since then, have been thinking about who owns art and the power of the artist in this shifting digital landscape.

I am hyped for this new group and look forward to this course with relish!  I found myself thinking about how satisfying ideas can be, like the connections between technology, art and culture that I had never considered before.  Last week's CBC Spark's episode with Daniel Weinberger talking about the 'shape of knowledge' that changes because of networks was powerfully pleasing and exciting as it 'came together' with other similar ideas from Clay Shirkey's Cognitive Surplus  and Nicholas Christakis' Connected. 


 That lead to a silly list with this header, Why Ideas are Better Than Sex and with the following itemized points:

1. contagious without being harmful to your health
2. can bring great pleasure that lasts a lifetime
3. can make money (legally) from them
4. connects you to people you have never met (in person)
5. deepens connections between people .

I think I will begin my course this year with my silly list about ideas being better than sex.  It will get my students' attention and make my point about the power of ideas.  I wonder if they will agree with my observations and silly list.  I will report back next week.  In the meantime, if you want to add to the list, please leave your comment!

Instructional Videos That Don't Break Their Brains

I confess.  Straight up and out of the closet.  I love digital video editing.  I fell in love with screencasting on the first try.  My first video was made with Adobe Premier Elements (a terrible program); then I tried the free screencasting programs such as Jing Pro, Screenr (fabulously easy and great for quickies on the fly) and Screen-cast-O'Matic.  I was seriously hooked after I bought Camtasia Studio 7 and now I'm thinking of trying Sreenflow for Macs.






Why is this important?  For two reasons: a) because effective teaching should include multi-media elements and b) building digital content that teachers can archive on their wikis or class websites is easier today than ever before.  My class wikis are turning 4 years old this year and I've accumulated an impressive amount of digital content, both from my students' efforts and my own.

Flipping classroom instruction is garnering much attention and despite some controversy from inconclusive research, many teachers are setting out to build elements of the 'flipped classroom' into their instructional design.  That means videos or some multi-media presentation will become as important to teachers in the 21st century as paper was in the 20th!  We need to learn how to make effective instructional videos.  Correction; I need to improve my own videos.  When I look back over my instructional multi-media designs since 2008, I run the gamut of emotions from embarrassment (OMG, how terrible is that!) to indifference (ho, hum, boring) to satisfaction (hmm, not bad that one!).   So, I have committed to trying out a new screencasting program on my Mac (the past ones were made on PC) and will report my progress on the blog.

More importantly though, will be the implementation of multi-media design principles from studies done by Richard Mayer, an educational cognitive psychologist at the University of California (UCSB).  Since the late 90s, he has been researching 'cognitive overload' and 'dual processing system'; information comes to the brain through both the eyes and the ears, hence the 'dual' system.  Processing information and holding it in working memory long enough to make 'sense' of it is the brain's challenge.  The teacher's challenge, or anyone designing instructional videos, is avoiding the deadly brain shut-down that happens when too much information is aimed at the students.  Mayer proposes simple design principles that I will explore in the coming weeks and shamefully (or not) share my attempts at integrating these ideas in my videos.  You can give me a thumbs up or down, or maybe just some honest feedback.  I know my students will do the same!

A Story about Darkness, Light and Faith

This past week, the grade ten students heard some stories about light and darkness that they will not soon forget.  Mr. Fellner, a holocaust survivor and grandfather to one of our students, spoke to a group of 40 students and had their spellbound attention.  He was accompanied by his wife who spoke for him when his emotions, even after 66 years, choked his voice.  The students freely questioned Mr. Fellner and he candidly answered.  I took notes and recorded the presentation with my smartpen, (in order to remember the details for this post), but it was completely unnecessary as I will not soon forget his stories.

One student asked about making friends in the concentration camp at Birkenau (Auschwitz).  It was an innocent question from a teenage mind incapable of grasping the enormity of the suffering and cruelty that Mr. Fellner had lived.  He answer stunned me  because I had never considered its obvious truth; no one lived long enough to make friends.    

Mr. Fellner and his family

He spoke of the dark horrors he had witnessed and of suffering we can not begin to fathom.  He recalled the inhumanity, animal-like conditions and the imaginative brutality of their captors.   But he also spoke of light and faith.  The day the camp was liberated by the Americans, his emaciated 54 pound body (he entered the camps at 14 years of age weighing 173 pounds one year earlier) had been 'discarded' atop the heaps of the dead.  American physicians, under orders to 'take anyone with a pulse' miraculously found Mr. Fellner and immediately transported him to a hospital, where a doctor sat vigil by his bed until he regained some semblance of health.

I asked Mr. Fellner what he thought about the sentiment sometimes expressed that G-d should be put on trial for what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.  His answer was one I will not soon forget.  "I can't answer you that.  How can I answer?"  And then, he touched his chest and said, "I suffered for my faith.  I will never lose it."

Suffering confers a priceless value to our lessons learned.  Mr. Fellner learned about the dark face of humanity and 66 years later, he taught the young teens the generation of his granddaughter about the light that is also a part of our human face.

Christmas lights in front
 Christ Church
downtown Montréal

On this fifth night of Hanukkah and Christmas Eve,  people all over the world celebrate the light that we believe is also a part of the human experience.  Mr. Fellner's story of incredible survival against the odds ended with his affirmation of the light.  His unshakeable faith is a light for our students, and to me.  Thank you Mr. Fellner for sharing your stories.  Thank you for reminding me, us, about the light that comes from faith.  Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas to all.   May your story be a light to someone as his were to us.

Do You Leave Your Mark or Model Your Passion?

The highest praise a teacher can receive generally comes years after the students have graduated and left the building.  Sometimes it finds you in an email when the ex-student, now an accomplished adult, reaches out to say thank you.  Another more serendipitous context finds teacher and ex-student together on a street corner, with the now young adult 'confessing' that the teacher was the reason for their life's career and intellectual direction.

Either one of these, (and many more contexts) have happened to you, dear reader, to be sure.  It happened to me yesterday.  A very cherished, very bright and wonderful young woman (who was my student two years ago) told me of her plans to study philosophy and the unspoken compliment was that the Philosophy for Teens course that she took with me was the reason for her decision.  As I studied her face and demeanour, it occurred to me that she wanted me to feel not only proud of her but of myself for having been the mentor on her path.  But I didn't feel that at all.

christinacosta's Flickr stream

Instead, I had one of those 'ah ha' moments that arrive in a flash in our consciousness.  (Sometimes I see them as inner pictures, other times I hear them in sentences and other times they simply come as a 'feeling'.)  As much as I want to 'leave my mark' and make a difference in the life of my students, that is really not what happens.  In the case of yesterday's student, I think she found her question and it is the question that is 'leaving its mark' and guiding her down a path that she attributes to me.  It might have also be that she connected with her own passion and enthusiasm for wisdom because she saw mine; but the bottom line is that she connected to herself.


When I think of the teachers who 'left their mark' on me, I see the same process and patterning.  Their passion was contagious because it was authentic.  Their questioning (that's the heart of philosophy) modelled good thinking and that's what did it for me because I found that in myself.

So my friends, do we really leave a mark or are we instrumental in helping our students connect to themselves?  What do you think?  I'd love to engage with you so leave a comment!

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

  Google explains the web in easy language.  

  tags: Google explains the web web Web2.0 browser

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

From 'Whatever' to 'Wow Miss!'

Some while ago, my students and I had a discussion about public versus private wikis.  A few of them still felt the need for the security of a closed space but most of them were fine with the idea of 'going public'.  Actually, the response I had was more like, 'Yea, whatever Miss.  No one is actually going to be looking at our work.'  I told them about David Truss and his science class wiki but they remained skeptical.

Then I pulled a fast one on them.  I embedded a cluster map onto the side bar of our Anthropology wiki and today, showed them that people from all over the world have visited!  Their faces said it all; buggy-eyed, mouths agape and then, 'Wow Miss that's actually cool!'  In a flash, the work they do and post on the wiki, has leaped into warp drive (Star Trek fan here - can you tell?) and through the worm hole of banal to brilliant.  They are accustomed to have friends from class see their work and leave comments but to have somebody from New Zealand, or Denmark looking at the wiki is mind-blowing.

Now how cool would it be if someone (other than teacher or classmate) read one of their blogs and left a comment!  The links to their blogs are on the side bar of the class wiki in case you are curious.  One can only hope...

Enough Time

This post is an homage to my cousin Luc who lost his life this Thursday, October 27th.   His courage and skill helped save the lives of others.

In the surreal moments, in the aftermath of a sudden and tragic loss, I found myself staring at the clock and thinking about time, about him and the time he no longer has, about his new wife and their baby, about his parents and their broken hearts and simply frozen but the immensity of what this all means for those he left behind.  Let me never say that I have no time.   Let us remember that we have time enough for the really important things because that's all we ever really have.