Myth #6: Digital Learning is Creative

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8 Myths About Digital Learning

The myth is not that digital tools can be used creatively or to create. The myth is that digital creativity is essential in the k12 classroom.

As long as Creativity is one of the 3 C's or 4 C's of 21st century learning, the myth will persist.  When it became a C-word, creativity was raised to mythic level in the k12 world.  It sits there now as a goal of digital learning.  But what does that involve?

Creative thought and innovation do not require a digital environment, re. Bruce Mau's Manifesto #29: "Think with your mind...Creativity is not device-dependent".  My thinking leads me to believe that creativity and innovation require, in order:

1. the ability to access the whole of one's experiences and learning (obviously the more of both the better)
2. the inclination to think about the whole of one's experiences and learning
3. intuition - the ability to recognize the right combination of these experiences and learning to apply to the project or problem at hand
4. introspection - time for ideas to percolate, collect, and coalesce - time for intuition to happen

Ron Berger of Expeditionary Schools would argue that persistence is also a necessary part of creativity. I agree, having taken it off of my list because persistence transcends the digital world. Read Ron's excellent post about Deeper Learning.

I would argue that, in most k12 classrooms, digital learning is - should be - more about developing than creating, and in this I suspect that Ron and I agree. Each item on the above list is a skill, or mind-set, than can be developed and enhanced by digital tools.  Without the skills, innovation and creativity will not happen in the student's post-HS world.  We need to alter the digital focus - let students go about the business of developing and take the focus off of creative product.

The digital environment certainly applies to #1 - the ability to access the whole of one's experiences and learning. It enables a curious or diligent student to expand experiences and learning through the internet. The digital environment is not the only way, perhaps not even the best way, as the movement toward PBL and experience-based learning suggests. Realistically, however, it is trending.

Additionally, digital tools used to catalog, collect and share learning or information objects can certainly enhance a student's access to what has been digitally explored. Pinterest, Wallwisher, Scoop.it, Wikispaces and similar sites and apps are widely used for this purpose. What makes these especially cool tools is the crowdsourcing of ideas and experiences that they allow. Students are no longer limited to their own catalog.  

The best case scenario is that students will move from collecting/accessing to #2 - thinking about the ideas.   Listen also to NPR's mashup of three different TED talks that relate to the relationship of groups to ideas, Where Ideas Come From.  Matt Ridley and Steven Johnson (they have their own TED talks) talk to the need for access to ideas from a diversity of others.

Often enough, however, the apps used to provide this access, and the assignments made, encourage a superficial sense of accomplishment, not unlike an adult might feel after pinning 20 web images of crystal ice buckets.  Using the tools effectively in education, on the other hand, makes them about developing ideas, whether the topic be vocabulary, characterization, or close literary analysis.  

[There is hope. Check out this list of 27 Ways to publish student thinking [my emphasis]. Making the process more important than a (creative) product is the right road for k12 learning.]

The digital environment applies also to #3 - intuition, the ability to recognize the right combination of these experiences and learning for the project or problem at hand. Viewing "creation" tools as a means of exploring combinations of experiences and understandings/learning, rather than as platforms for final expression, is important.

Students need to learn the depth and value and uses of multiple tools so that they will be able to best employ tools of the future. Tools for mashing up collected information and media in visual, audio and multimedia environments are readily available for any 1:1 platform (see, for example, this review of Screencasting Apps for the iPad, and other excellent apps, such as Prizi, Haiku Deck, Wixie, DoodleCast (Pro and for Kids), Animoto, iMovie and Drop'n'Roll/V.I.K.T.O.R).  

made in ShowMe

Teachers, however, often mistake engaging presentations full of  original artwork and music for creative and innovative thinking.  Myth #6 encourages this. The fact is that many students excel at media bells and whistles. Since most digital projects assigned are about content, not about the growth of learning, it is easy for student to do use the "fun" work of media-making rather than the hard work of thinking.

The myth-breaking fact is that most student content-products lack depth of thought, instead relaying surface knowledge that could as easily be conveyed on posterboard or a short stack of notecards.  This is also true of the polished adult products which serve as models for students. Compare, for example, this Animated History of Malaria to your student products.  Aside from the slickness of the animation, it does little more to demonstrate creative understanding of the topic than would a picture book.

A simple student audio file attached to a project, digital notes, or an oral presentation is always a better measure of thought and learning than is the project itself.

Or, better yet, have students truly create products from Scratch, as discussed in this guest blog post by Rob Ackerman.  This applies to HyperStudio and other Logo media products as well, staples of many defunct computer labs.

Which brings us to the importance of #4 - introspection, or time for ideas to percolate, collect, and coalesce.

If you have not already done so, listen to Susan Cain's TED Talk The Power of Introverts.  Cain, the author of best seller and Best Nonfiction title Quiet, is passionate about the need of individuals  - and she directly addresses both education the workplace - for isolated quiet time. In this time, ideas happen. In this time, creativity brews. She attacks the myth that "the new creativity comes from a .... gregarious place."  An extrapolation of her talk is the suggestion that the digital learning environment, although it plays a role in the development of creative ideas, is not ideal for nurturing them.

Many of my students would argue that the digital world serves as "background" for thinking, much as music helps many to read.  When we accept this as true, we also accept the vacuity of much of the digital student experience.  Learning how to disconnect, then, is a skill for our students to develop.

How to turn your classroom into an idea factory, from Mindshift, provides eight solid suggestions - not one of which includes the word "digital."  The pedagogy of reaching out to a larger-than-classroom world is, however, embedded in "the idea factory" concept. Of course, this pedagogy does not require digital devices beyond the phone. (In fact, it can be argued that a face-to-face conversation with a real person is more powerful than a tweet stream in terms of input from an authentic contributor to a thought stream.)

Creative thought just might come most often, most successfully, post-digitally.  Or altogether non-digitally.

[Note: An additional dimension of creative possibility is found in digital tools that are ONLY for creative expression. The art-focused apps found in 10 Essential Apps for the Digital Artist and Creating on the iPads, and serious apps for music (see Creating music with iPads, which could but does not mention Garageband or other basic apps), are tools with which students can, in fact, create original artworks. Students have always been able to write creatively, but digital tools (such as the screencast and movie-making tools mentioned above) open up a new dimension of digital storytelling. However, not many ELA or history students will use these same tools creatively to demonstrate content learning. Using them productively requires a level of competency and (dare I say it) talent that is outside of the mainstream in the ELA classroom, and therefore not considered in this post.]

Frustration is Good: The True Meaning of the CCSS

The secret is out: the true meaning of the CCSS is not challenges, problems, raised expectations, or gap-closing.  It is not creativity.  It is FRUSTRATION.

Why? Because we now know that frustration is the key to creativity.  Brain Pickings' Maria Popova has made the idea accessible. 

And creativity, especially creative questioning, is essential to learning (see previous post), which is essential to testing well, and which, hand-in-hand with collaborative problem-solving, will close the skills and learning gap.

Educating our children to have creative, problem-solving minds so that they will become creative, problem-solving college and career ready pre-adults, so that they will eventually lead a creative, problem-solving high-achieving nation, is the goal of the CCSS. 

So it makes total sense to me that frustration is, cleverly and purposefully, at the very essence of the common core.

• Students will be frustrated in kindergarten because they can not reach the end-of-year literacy goals for emergent reading;
• Students of all ages will be frustrated by facing every day the fact that they are further behind those who are "ready";
• Students of all ages will be frustrated because they can not fluently read and demonstrate understanding of the grade-appropriate literary and information texts put before them in ELA, science and social studies;
• Students in grades above 2 will be frustrated because writing and re-writing and re-writing yet another persuasive or evidence-based essay is so damned boring;
• Students in all grades will be frustrated because reading, writing and thinking creatively about the really interesting stuff is not happening;
• Students in all grades will be frustrated because new mobile and digital tools are used to look for answers to essential questions that are essentially adult questions;
• Students of all ages will be frustrated by the pace and willy nilly disconnect at which units come and go;
• Students in all grades will be frustrated by highly choreographed group work;
• Teachers of all grades will be frustrated by managing all of the above without promised and necessary economic or leadership support, knowing that their evaluations hinge on student testing;
• Everyone in every school building will be frustrated by reading glowing articles about small test score increases elsewhere.

But remember - frustration is good.  This is what the CCSS is all about. 

The problem is, we are at our most creative in the take-a-deep-breath-and-relax after frustration and failure phase.  We are at our most creative when we have, as a result of frustration, made time for nothing else but being creative. 

All we have to do is to make time during the educational day of every child to so that he can reap the benefits of all of that frustration.  Recess, lunch, art classes, bathrooms with lounges and endless hall-passes to access high quality bubblers and social seating arrangements, large well-lit rooms equipped for creative construction and open-ended learning play (open early and late every day):  Bring them on - support student creativity. 

We have to make time during the day for every teacher to reap the benefits of all that frustration.  Lunch, socialization breaks, bathrooms with lounges and access  to high quality bottled water and social seating arrangements, large well-lit classrooms equipped for creative construction and open-ended exploration (staffed by others early and late every day):  Bring them on - support teacher creativity.

So stop griping about the CCSS and focus instead on what has to happen to schools in order to make the standards work for all.  

The Answer is Not in the Book (or the iPad): On the end of the print Britannica and rise of the iPad

photo by Joi Ito accessed 3/26/12

David Warlick writes an interesting post in his 2¢ Worth: "Coolest Thing I've Seen in a While." He muses about the interconnectedness of knowledge and about the concept of disparate search topics sharing a common root, perhaps multiple common roots.  Mining-down to these roots, he suggests, might (must?) be the true nature of learning.

To many, the Britannica is emblematic of ready access to interconnected knowledge, just as (ironically) Wikipedia is in Warlick's article. "Mining-down" with a print encyclopedia means following cross-references within an article (if there are any), using one's own imagination and good sense to follow up on textual leads (such as the index, citations, section headings, highlights, vocabulary, proper nouns), and - if all else fails - enlisting the aid of an adult.  In the old days there was little mining done in school. One topic correlated to one article.  Within that one article was found all of the information on the topic that it was deemed important for the student to know. It was the perfect correlation of one learning goal to one tool. 

In fact, between encyclopedias, magazines, and textbooks, it used to be possible to teach oneself just about anything.  If you have the interest, read Heinlein's neglected YA SF novel: Have Spacesuit - Will Travel.  He nails this optimistic spirit of can-do learning, circa 1958 (along with insight into the dangers of "child-focused" schooling).

For Warlick and a mounting corps of educators, on the other hand, print encyclopedias and texts, libraries and classrooms, are antithetical to 21st century learning.  In this view, mining-down requires multiple knowledge contexts and access to a vast cloud of opportunities for individual and social construction of learning. This can not happen deeply in a traditional paper and classroom environment.  The new can-do learning optimism says that we can "find anything [we] need" online.  I tend to agree with that statement, but I don't think this is much to shout about.  In fact, I think it is a dangerous confidence.

I thought, when I began this column, that I was going to write about my sorrow for Britannica's disappearance from print - its feel, look, smell, weight, and space taken on the shelf will be sorely missed by me. However, the more I thought about my own experiences with Britannica and other print texts, the more I realized that what I was sorrowing for was something intangible. I sorrow for the experience of finding that the answer is not in the book after all. 

How liberating that moment is!  Learning begins when mining-down ends - not with answers, but with frustration, inspiration, and questions - with a fresh look at sources and research paths - with a desire for more - and with proximal, face to face conversation about all of this.  This might be called mining-up, digging out from the specific and getting lost in larger questions and deeper understandings: learning.  For all of its limitations, the Britannica (and by extension, libraries and classrooms) gave the motivated learner this push - spacial and informational limits became strengths. 

Do we leverage iPads and the internet for not finding the answer? For frustration, inspiration, questioning, and conversations about learning?

No yet, although it is a common belief that we do - that the iPad and other digital tools will make a new level of learning happen.  It is not happening, as Elliot Soloway and educators also realize (source article).  What internet access, especially with mobile tools, has given students is a vast digital book.  More often than not, an app or a teacher-generated site list is still viewed as the perfect correlation of one learning goal to one tool. 

A profound shift in educational process is required to change this, but the shift is not simply away from physical spaces and time-clocked classrooms.  After all, questioning and conversation are older than Socrates - they do not require a digital classroom.  Nor do they require that we rid ourselves of print, libraries, buses, schools, classes, or 7-hour days. 

They do requires that there be a shift from a learning culture of answers to a learning culture of questions.  If we don't make this shift, if we look at the internet (digital spaces) as a virtual place where we can "find everything," we might as well be sitting in a 1958-era classroom. 

Think how deeply this search for answers is embedded in our pedagogy. Essential Questions are used to focus each lesson, every day.  We assess with answer-based questions that are based on standards - which are the answers that guide curriculum. Librarians spend an enormous amount of creative energy to get students to mine-down to a single research question that can be answered. Guided reading is no more than reading with specific questions in mind (or on an organizer).  Organizers themselves organize answers. Teachers themselves mine data for answers that will guide what happens in the classroom. 

And very little of any of this is driven by the student's curiosity and questions. How then will the internet or an iPad change the learning experience?

I have taken individual learning journeys consistently since college, but most intensely in the last few days. Temporarily invalided,  I have wandered through some neglected and niggling print fiction, eBooks, print and digital magazines, brainless brain apps, films, HD TV, and of course the net.  I have been entirely free of limits to learning. I have also been, due to pain and pills, virtually free of questions.

No questions?  Well, actually, I began with no questions - but I have ended with at least five zingers that will consume my thinking about war, iteration, heroes, and humanness for quite a while.

Learning as a journey toward questions - not toward answers.  Think of questions not as iterative and determinate, but as creative and sprawling.  Think of creative, sprawling questions not as impersonal, but as highly personal.  Learning happens when these questions are hazily formulated, tentatively answered, supported/explained, tested, and then both questions and tentative answers are reviewed, revised, and expanded again.  Questions form the framework of learning.  It is a creative process.

Interestingly enough, this is the topic of David Warlick's latest post: About Creativity...  He must have read my mind.

I also don't see a "let them do it" (read Warlick's post) process used often in the day-to-day learning experience k-12.  Why not?

First, creative questioning is not goal-oriented learning. No product or end-game is defined or anticipated at the outset. This is a tough path for kids and tougher for teachers, who ask "Exactly what is it I am teaching?"  It is much easier to frame learning as problem-solving than it is to frame it as problem creation.  We have before us the new Bloom's Taxonomy, with Create as the ultimate goal.  But the general perception of educators is that this means to create a product.  I believe it means to create a new question.

Second, digital technology gets in the way.   It is too easy to find and communicate the answers using the internet and digital tools, so easy that we hardly pause to make time for thinking creatively about all of the input.  And rarely will we generate a creative question solely by using digital tools. This is a great misperception about Prezis, Glogs, blogs, Lit Trips, iMovies, wikis... These are all platforms for digital answers.  All can be components of a good questioning journey, but rarely are they used for this purpose.  Apps may be creative in terms of manipulation of the multimedia used, but they are not significantly different in learning weight and value than the hand-drawn book jackets I made in grade 6, circa 1958.

Third, we do not value questions or the journey toward them.  As a teacher, I always put this at the top of a rubric - at times it was the entire rubric. But this is a minority opinion.  Even the in-development national testing places no value on the questions - only on the answers. What happens to the most creative questions in a student group?  Teachers experienced with group work know they are lost.  It is the answerable questions that are valued.  

Fourth, educators do not know much about encouraging and fostering creative questioning.   The pressures to ask those concrete questions that will yield concrete answers (data that can be measured) are so strong that this is what teachers are learning to do.  The pressures to present learning creatively (eg. in a media product) is being driven by the digital classroom, but in my head creative thinking is disappearing from the ELA classroom (reading without organizers, visual aids or the front-loading of a knowledge base, creative writing, the reading of fiction).  Creative response to literature is itself subsumed by 5-paragraph essays and standards-driven textual analysis.  

We are really not much further along than we were in 1958.  The answer to better education is not in a book, on the net, delivered and archived in a webinar.  It is going to come from good minds asking good, creative questions after accessing a vast cloud of opinions, resources and experiences, and then having lively conversations about change.

Trouble is, a lot of educators think we have already done that.  It is awfully easy to find the answer on the net.

[update: It must be in the air.  TeachPaperless posted this piece this morning: How Did School Do? This is a blog to follow.]

Review - The Artifacts : an iPad storybook app

Slap Happy Larry has released The Artifacts, a interactive story book app ($1.99) designed with iPad toting middle schoolers in mind.  Or it is an interactive children's book for iPad grabbing curious kids as young as 3 or 4.  It works well both ways.


I celebrate this effort from Lynley Stace (illustration and story) and Dan Hare (code) for many reasons.  First, the concept of a book written entirely for the iPad environment is exciting.  In this particular case, animations are of course clever and generally hidden - meant to be discovered by the reader - but most iPad children's books contain this feature. What is new is the depth and number of animations hidden on a single page.  In some ways, this book reminds me of visual logo projects I directed a decade ago. The better students used every possible pixel to hide a triggered effect, at times having event trigger event, at times having a click or random timing do the same, and included layer upon layer of events. All senses are essential to the story of this boy who has only his own imagination and mind for company.  He uses both differently on every page. This switching up is a large part of the fun of The Artifacts.  Better yet, it makes for the perfect classroom text: it self-teaches.



Second, there is learning to be done here. On pages 9 (my new room) and 18 (brushing my choppers), tapping produces an endless stream of wonderful words that must be read.  Patterns can be discerned by the patient readers.  Page 15 (inside my head) produces a fireworks of dates and random facts that are the stuff of middle school. 


Third, there is something comfortably and familiarly Harry Potterish about The Artifacts.  Even the music seems to echo the opening theme of the Potter movies. The texts would be great twins.  Comparing the characters, the plots, and the visual effects would be a terrific and engaging exercise for middle school.  It is about time for Harry to surface again in the classroom library.  There are allusions also to The Little Prince, to fairy tales, to great sea tales, and to the stuff of horror and magic.  There is much here for a wide-ranging reader to muse about.


Last, a small point. The "credits" that end this little text contain a long list of sound clips from open sources.  That is a model for student creators.

Which is just right, as The Artifacts is a celebration of the power of individual thought and imagination. It is at the top of Bloom's triangle.  I highly recommend it for middle school iPads.

Read about The Artifacts

• Appmodo announcement
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Graphic Novels

[Update: check out my Graphic Novels page for book lists.]

Below is a post I made today in response to a serious query on English Companion Ning about the validity of teaching graphic novels as "text."  I got so excited about the topic that I ordered three graphic novels while working on the comment.  My love of the graphic began with picture books - my own childhood books, many of which were saved by my mother and now live in my granddaughter Bea's bookcase.

I believe that my fascination with this genre is also connected to my reading history.  I learned to read in Nebraska and Wisconsin cemeteries, on long walks with my college professor dad.  From him I also learned early to love fantasy (Arthurian) and SF.  From my mother's collection of Horizon magazines I learned the power of myth and image.  Graphic novels, like the best iPad apps, are among today's best tactile and literary venues for showing students different paths to reading and learning.

Learning what?   

• "The need to conduct research and to produce and consume media is embedded into every aspect of today’s curriculum."  (Common Core Standards, Key Design Considerations).
• "Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally." (Common Core Standards, Anchor Standards)
• every single ELA analytical term and method can be visually demonstrated using selected graphic novels - the best of them cover most of the tested content

Comparing texts in different formats is not a new idea - I was doing that with 16mm film long ago - what a pain.  It is now much easier to integrate film media, thanks to YouTube, but graphic media has been more of a challenge to teachers.  The graphic novel, it seems to me, fits the bill for today's teachers, at all grade levels.

Matching graphic text to student in terms of appropriateness is important.  So read the books before giving them to students.

My post is in response to this query (the following discussion is going to be good as well - take note of the post by Karen LaBonte pointing teachers to Scoop.It, which in turn points us at this Book Shelf interview: Graphic storytelling and the new literacies and many more terrific resources for teaching with graphic novels.  Check it out.

You might also want to explore the concept of the picto-essay.  Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays is a starter collection. These short graphic pieces eyeball an experience (e.g. memoir), place, or time, crossing back and forth from history to "you are there" as only the visual world can.  I would use them along with the web to enrich visual literacy and visual history lessons. Students with drawing-disability can generally create a wonderful product with a digital camera.

[My response to Raef Earl Williams, who writes: "With the pressures of teaching all standards and standardized testing, can you rationalize teaching this type of text year in and year out? "] There is also new pressure to teach creative thinking and textual interpretation, and to have students work in purposeful discussion groups.  I think that the best graphic novels are a legitimate text source for developing higher order skills - including comprehension.  I also agree with you that the power of images is a literacy that should be taught.  One approach might be to compare graphic to text versions of literature.  I did this with Fahrenheit 451. The Gunslinger, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Twilight, The Odyssey, and Beowulf (several graphic and comic versions of this are available) are other possibilities  [and, I have since discovered, most of Shakespeare and Mark Twain, many great moments in US history... the concept of compare/contrast is HUGE using this format].

It is certainly possible to study any element of literature through its visual presentation in graphic novels - much as you might study a visual image (painting, photograph, etc.).  [in fact, some concepts might be best introduced or reinforced with graphic novels: irony, mood, point of view, contrast, parallelism - to name a few]

Here are some titles I would love to teach: American Vampire, Vol. 1 (because Stephen King was involved - but there are also a vol.2 and 3 is on the way), Persepolis, Trickster (Native American storytellers and graphic artists), American Born Chinese, Stitches - a Memoir, Shaun Tan (The Arrival, Lost and Found), and (of course - you would have to offer this) Maus.

American Library Association maintains lists of the best YA graphic novels published each year.  The number of titles alone is one reason to attend to them in the classroom.

Since I am having fun imagining this:

• Hark a Vagrant and Wondermark are online sources of excellent, intelligent "shorts" - check out the Hark archives to show kids that graphic is not "dumb." Find a 1-panel short called "The Hole" at this unlikely source: ELL online resource Grammarman (also noted in my post Storytelling Spirit). Grammarman Comic also offers short graphic lessons: comics with errors, worksheets, answer sheets.  And another in the .pdf download from, of all places, spirit - the journal of Southwest Airlines, October 2011.
• There are many comic apps - so your students should have no trouble finding DC and other titles for their smart phones. I use Comics, the reader for ComiXology.com.
• I would probably begin with a study of wordless picture books: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (there is a collection of short stories - one for each picture - due out this fall), Woolvs in the Sitee, Varmints, and Chalk are four of my favorites, but ask a children's librarian. 
• Inanimate Alice is a terrific graphic puzzle story - a good problem-solving challenge for a visual reader. There will surely be more of these fully digital visual stories in the months to come.
• It would be interesting to have students do some deep thinking about the mood, tone, and content of graphic novels - so little humor, so much violence and darkness (just a study of color across several titles would be fun).

On the "create" end of learning, you might want to have groups collaborate on a graphic story - apps like Comic Life and online tools like Make Beliefs Comix can support the non-artistic.  With middle schoolers, we did work on large pages as well as digital ones.   Have fun!

ITYS

 I told you so.  Creativity is the NEW idea in education.  I haven't seen it this strong since the late 60's and then the 70's. This country is on a role.

Newsweek.com

Well, at least 33.333% of that is true.  An alert and optimistic colleague broadcast the link to a current Newsweek article that I would have missed (I am a Time reader only because my dad seems to have purchased a subscription without end-date in the year before he died): The Creativity Crisis.

Read it. Pay careful attention to the populations studied and to the charts and graphs.  Do they apply to you?  Where?  Then ignore them.  Creativity as a learning "strategy" is important for ALL students ALL of the time.  Rephrase: We learn best when we can be creative.

Those of us who have been around for a third of a century are riding the crest of this wave. We know this truth about creativity in our ed-souls.  We had teachers who used film, art, drawing, drama and experience to teach us literature and writing.  Many of us continue these lessons today. Many of us are responsible for middle school, high school, state, district testing reports in reading.  But we are a retiring cohort - so we are often fog-horn voices in staff/administrative meetings about standards, test scores, and core curriculum.

WAKE UP!  We shout into tunneled ears (not tone deaf ears, because our administrators and colleagues also have creative passions..).

Do what my colleague did and broadcast this article to your staff list.  It does not make a flawless argument, but it makes a starting argument.

BE PREPARED!  OMG! - there might be another adjustment to standards if this innovative idea catches on...