Transcriber: Silvia Rivera Reviewer: Shlomo Adam
(Applause)
It's my privilege to be a teacher.
I get to teach university Physics classes,
I get to run science programmes for kids and their families.
I get to teach teachers how to teach which is a ridiculously high stake
bizarre kind of gig.
And in all of this I have the unique qualification
that I'm confident that I don't know what I'm doing.
(Laughter)
And through that, what I find myself doing this continually looking for
some kind of new innovation or
new tool that I could be using in education.
So that's kind of my quest, that is my dream
and that's the kind of path I want to take you along with
on this particular talk.
One of the tools that I'm particularly intrigued with
has actually been around for a long time
and I'm actually using it today. It is the Powerpoint slide.
This is the first Powerpoint slide. (Laughter)
Some of you recognize it as being Newspaper Rock
and I imagine, that someone, I imagine his name is Petro,
after these glyphs are now known as Petroglyphs
he thought that, "I have a story" --
Yeah, thank you for getting it. (laughter)
--"I have a story to tell and I want that story to be embedded
into some kind of script", so he put the glyphs on to the rocks
so that others could kind of follow along the story
Now, it's subtlely different from Powerpoint slides that you're familiar with
but pretty much the same kind of thing:
you've got some kind of wall there, you've some kind of understanding
that you want to get across
and it's the classic Powerpoint slide
because it's got way too much information on it all at once.
(Laughter)
No one can understand it unless Petro is there
to kind of explain it to you, and students all over
the dessert South West have taken notes and inscribed it into their own walls
everywhere that we go.
So, you can kind of see where this is going.
I've got these innovations that I'm looking for
and I can also see that some of these we've seen before,
in fact, one of those, the TEDx lecture actually started back in medieval times.
This is TED. (Laughter)
You can see some kind of format that is very similar of what we have right here
some kind of. . .
genius eloquent speaker,
coming up next, is at the front and we've got several people in the audience,
some of whom don't seem be able to persevere through the 15-minute talk
and they're falling asleep in the third row.
(Laughter) So free ticket.
What can we say?
So, this lecture format is something, the ideas worth spreading,
is something we've done before, and we're kind of recapturing it for today.
Of course, lecture isn't the only way that we want to have our courses constructed
so we often look to flipped courses and flipped courses, the idea being
you go home, you get some kind of information, you bring it into yourself
so when you get to the class, you can actually do something other
than the lecture, and nowadays we have some kind of technology
that allows that material to be readily accessed through the Internet.
Back in my day, we call these things "textbooks" and they came along
after the printing press, so you could actually go home and read the things
that you were supposed to read and do other things besides
lecture in the classroom.
Of course, if you wanted to expand this quiet broadly, you could have something
that would be massive, that could be transmitted to lots of people
and the Internet is a great tool for that, so are these things called televisions.
And back in the 1960's this was seen as a great way to expand our reach.
It's vastly extending the reach of the nation's best teachers,
which strangely hasn't really taken off as much as they thought it would,
and we wonder about these things called MOOCs, Massively Open Online Courses,
and will they expand the same way that television did. (Laughter)
That open... are the Massively Open Online Courses--
That's something else that we should kind of investigate,
Can we get materials out there to the people that aren't copyrighted
or don't cost very much or somehow are readily accessible?
And open educational resources are trying to do just this.
This idea is brand new as of 2,000 years ago. (Laughter)
There was this fellow by the name of Jesus
and he literally stood on the mountain tops
to kind of get this understanding out there to the world
and now you can read what he said in all kinds of books
that are freely distributed probably in every nightstand drawer
of every hotel you ever stay at.
The problem is not that we haven't read the words: "Blessed are the meek",
or "do unto others" or "love thy neighbor",
it's just that we have a hard time getting that into practice.
Of these innovations, my favourite is probably the one that came about
at our Sputnik moment, the first Sputnik moment,
the moment when the Russians sent the big shiny beach ball up into space
they went bip, bip, bip
and we all had this collective explit of panic of "What do we do now?
"We need to start the space race and protect ourselves
from some nuclear holocaust."
And so, education kicked in and did their part
and they produced the first interactive whiteboard or smartboard,
known as the overhead projector.
(Laughter)
In 1957 or after 1957, science teaching textbooks
literally would tell you, as a science teacher,
how to build one of these and how to use them,
how to manipulate things and attain things, the same things that we do
with smartboards and they actually impacted things like classrooms,
(Laughter)
You can see this is a diverse classroom we've got some left-handed people
and some right-handed people
(laughter)
we have long-haired people and short-haired people,
and we have a screen off to the side
so that we kind of get the best use of that overhead projector,
and of course we continue to use the same kind of classroom format
in lots of settings,
this is probably not unfamiliar to you,
including this conference presentation. It's a little different,
the screen is on the right, there is no windows,
this is part of a conference on educational reform, just so you know,
it was a while ago, it's in 2013; it was a year ago.
So,
so, I'm being kind of a jerk, at first it was funny
and now I'm just being a jerk.
I see all of these innovations that I'm told or offered
as, "This is a great way to innovate what you're doing,
to improve education",
and I see all of these as being things that I think we've done before,
maybe a long time ago.
So, I'm left with the thought of what else can I turn to?
So I turned to a scrapbook I have,
I collect pictures or I take pictures in the scrapbook of learningful moments
and I want those learningful moments to kind of inform me about
what I want learning to be.
Some of those include things that we do at Science in the Park.
This is a whole bunch of kids with their hands literally in the science
of the stuff called "Oobleck", we say it's a Non-Newtonian fluid
that just means we don't know what it is really,
it's cornstarch and water, they're mixing it together,
they're letting it run through their hands and when they squish it together,
it compacts and they can bubble it up and they can smack it,
it feels hard and soft and gooey all at the same time.
Or these kids playing around with gyroscopes.
And if you've never felt a gyroscope spinning before, it's magic,
I don't know how to explain it.
My four-year old nephew, Sam, would say it's not magic, it's science,
but no, it really feels like magic and if you haven't felt that,
you don't know what rotation momentum is all about.
Or this kid, who, with me, we put our bellies down into the grass,
got some hand-lenses and explored the jungle of the grass
in the dirt, and the critters that were there.
Or these teachers, wandering off into the "do not enter,,
there is a flood here" zone, as they needed to meet
with the geologists or the teachers on the other side crawling out
of fiery furnace and arches, literally getting their hands on the geology to do this.
These teachers are trying to figure out what is the relationship between the sun
and the Earth and the motions therein,
and a little bit about where it is where they are
on this globe by using a mop broom and the shadow of that mop broom
and tracing it out with chalk, that shadow being cast over the course of the day.
These science education researches, they're getting together without
an overhead projector, because they don't have answers,
they're coming to this conference that we've run,
Science Education at the Crossroads,
to try to figure out what are their problems
and how they can continue to work on these problems.
They're wearing name badges that are hands-printed
by first graders, so that they can be continually reminded
of why they are there.
And these moms and daughters are balancing so they can understand
the center of mass of astronomical systems by actually becoming
that astronomical system themselves, getting involve in that process.
And this, well, that's me,
my favourite picture,
and a bunch of groupies after a physics open house,
and these are the kids that hung out after we've showed them all the lectures
and the demos and the cool things and they couldn't leave,
they wanted to see what exactly does it look like when that balloon
is going into the liquid nitrogen.
I've got liquid nitrogen in between my legs, it's a couple of hundred degrees
below freezing but I've got a safety vest, apparently... (Laughter)
a misplaced precaution...
but they really wanted to know what exactly is going on,
they couldn't leave, their parents were off there on the side,
tapping their foot.
So, all these images leave me with another thought,
that maybe there are other alternatives for innovations and education;
and in particular there are two things that I take away from this:
the first is that we're talking about overhead projectors and we talk about
MOOCs and we talk about open educational resources, we're often stuck in that
narrow view of learning as being how do I get this information
from here into here.
But, of course learning is a lot more than that.
Learning is about dancing, it's about serving, it's about reading, it's about doing,
it's about practicing, it's about becoming.
We have all these possibilities for learning,
we have to think about what those could possibly be
before we start to think about how we're going to innovate.
Second of all, I think often we're asking the wrong question altogether
when we ask the question: how do I teach? how do I innovate?
Because if we are already thinking how do I get information from here to here,
then we're going to keep doing the same thing obviously
over and over again.
So, I think we need to ask the question: Why are we educating?
Why would we innovate?
You could have many different answers for this,
if you don't have one, here is a couple:
these are my answers,
you can borrow them if you want and (laughter) depending on the day!
Ann and Grace represent for me, as my daughters, not just themselves
but also their peers, their generation, the society they're growing into,
the world that they inherit from us.
For me that's the Why, that's the question we need to pose.
And if we look at them and look them in the eye, and say:
"A smart board is good enough,"
I can't do it.
That's not good enough.
This is messy.
We can't wait for an innovation to come down from somewhere else
and be bestowed upon us to save our educational systems
or even improve my own class.
This is hard work, this takes gumption, this takes bravery,
this is going to be messy and we can't afford for it to be otherwise.
Thank you.
(Applause)