The ATL Hub

Well, I finally did it. I may have been the last person in the world to do it, but I finally saw Avatar. My overall reaction: very pretty. Because I waited so long to see it, I was primed to think about several different things I’d heard about it over the past months – not the least of which was that it shares pretty much the exact same plot as Disney’s Pocahontas (which, as it turns out, seems pretty true).

The movie also left me with several questions, the first of which is who on the production team was responsible for sneaking so much marine life onto Pandora. I’ll explain – well, first I should mention that, in the pursuit to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist, I took a marine biology course at Wheaton for part of my biology minor. The bulk of the course was covered in a Spring Break trip to Belize, where we stayed on a tiny island a few miles off the coast, and went on several snorkeling dives every day (including one night dive – still one of the most alien experiences I’ve ever had) but anyway, there were a lot of shout-outs to marine life on the planet Pandora that I began to notice pretty early in the film:

Obviously there was a lot of bioluminescence happening throughout the world, which has been well documented in marine life, especially algae, etc. (in Belize, it would sometimes look like patches of water were glowing because of that) but it was something in one of the very first scenes in the forest that tipped me off to the marine life influence – when Jake first takes his avatar into the forest, he encounters some strange, spiral-y looking plants. When I saw them, I leaned over to my husband and excitedly told him that those plants looked exactly like my favorite (gorgeous) little marine critter, the Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus), which often grows on brain coral (which, of course, I also have an affinity for). You can imagine my surprise, then, when Jake tries to touch the plant, and it sucks itself back down into its hole…exactly what a Christmas Tree Worm does when it feels something approaching in the water! Don’t believe me? Check out this video...and long live the Christmas Tree Worm!

I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals.

But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity.

Rather than proliferate crude measures of recall or reductive “normed” evaluations of various templated essays, we should think much more deeply and comprehensively about assessment. To do this, we’ll have to start with what it means not only to learn something in the sense of committing it to memory, vital as that is, but also to understand it, to be able to sense and articulate and share the structure of that knowledge as well as the conjectures and dilemmas that surround it and propel it into new areas of inquiry. We need to think about domain transfer, and ask what kind of learning fosters the analogical and metaphorical thinking that leads to conceptual breakthroughs. We need to think about the teacher’s theory of other minds, as well as the students’. We need to master strategies of indirection that empower each other to imagine and perform what Douglas Hofstadter calls “perceptual regrouping,” that trick of the mind that can perform figure-ground reversals, separate sequences into smaller groups to yield new possibilities, and adapt Polya-esque heuristics to apparently novel situations to reveal surprising connections with apparently far-flung domains.

I have colleagues working as hard as they can to answer the need for complexity. I just hope their work can stem the tide of unthinking “learning outcomes assessment” that Jonathan Kozol pillories in Letters to a Young Teacher.

I really, truly do not think that Likert scales or uniform tests or other simplistic measures are up to the task of helping us map or understand this most profound practice we call “education,” by which I take it we mean a deliberate approach to learning, part of which must include learning about one’s own learning. In other words, the deliberate practice of leading another’s cognition into a richer and more effective relationship with itself.

Of empowering and advancing the brain’s self-shaping capabilities.

I don’t have answers, but I do have a deep intuition that we can best think about this kind of complexity by thinking about similar networks of complexity that have emerged in human experience. (Here’s where I wish I’d majored in anthropology.) There are two such networks I think about a lot these days: language, particularly written language, and the Internet. In this podcast, which records a presentation I did over a year ago at an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting at the invitation of my hero, friend, and colleague Chuck Dziuban, I try to think about assessment by thinking about the emergent properties of the World Wide Web. It seems to me very interesting that a big part of Web 2.0 has to do with assessment, evaluation, reviews, and so forth. Is there a way these emergent phenomena could suggest more comprehensive, inclusive, and meaningful modes of assessing learning? I don’t know, but I do think it’s a question worth asking.

Longtime listeners will hear some familiar themes in this podcast, but cast in a different light. The Shakespeare bits develop some ideas I first began to work on in the “Proof That Matters” talk I did for a K-12 Online Conference a few months before I did this talk. All the ideas here need a great deal more development. I do hope, however, that they’re moving in a more answerable direction than most of the assessment talk I’ve encountered during the last few years.

EDIT: Janet Hawkins alerts me to some parallel thoughts:

http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2010/03/rttt-antithetical-to-public-education.html
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4956989639073843954&postID=3538222791054286821

I’ve found myself struggling recently with something that I haven’t really thought about in a long time – actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about in reference to myself before – curiosity. I’ve always (sort of by default, I guess) considered myself a curious person. I like knowing how things (especially biological things) work, I loved my liberal arts education because I got to take literature classes at the same time as chemistry, etc.

flickr cc by fotologic

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my interest in most things outside of my discipline has been waning. I find myself making giant lists of great books that I should read and things I should learn how to do (play piano, train my dog, etc.) and then never getting to it. This isn’t, as I first thought, because I was too busy. I am pretty busy, but I’d be embarrassed to admit how many hours I’ve managed to find to watch the Olympics in the last two weeks. I think I have the time, but I just don’t seem to care very much. When I get home after a long day in lab/teaching, I want to grab a glass of wine and pretty much sit as still as possible on my couch for the rest of the evening.

This is worrisome to me. I’m really hoping is no more than a result of graduate school burnout, but what happens if it’s not? Can I purposefully go about re-kindling my own curiosity in things? I still very much enjoy learning about new things/ideas as long as it doesn’t take much effort on my part (for instance, if you sit me down and tell me about something new, I’m generally very happy to know about it), I just can’t seem to find the motivation to go out of my way to pursue new interests even if I think I’ll enjoy it once I do.

I have no idea if this is a common occurrence, or whether it’s a one-time change (I was a curious person, and I am now no longer a curious person) or just a phase (I was a curious person, and I will be once again…someday…when I finish my PhD). And on a bigger scale, if this is common, what can be done to keep this from happening to graduate students? Anything? Or are we just destined to have all our academic vigor sucked out of us by the time we’re in candidacy? I guess only time will tell.

Here’s a recent article from the Washington Post related to some of my dissertation work in autism. The article talks about a study in which autistic adults took the hormone oxytocin (primarily known for its role in pair bonding) in a nasal spray, and on a subsequent test performed better at tasks involving social interaction and facial recognition. Pretty cool stuff.

In the past, oxytocin (OT) has been used to treat another main symptom category in autism spectrum disorders: repetitive movements. So this new study in addition to that information is now strongly pointing us in the OT direction as far as research and clinical trials.

Obviously this is just one study, so cautious optimism is suggested – certainly until we can replicate the study in a larger trial (as well as considering the efficacy in children). But hey, cautious optimism is still optimism, right?

I had heard at some point that one of my favorite books (also the subject of the reading group I’m leading), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was adapted into an opera. I suppose this makes some sort of sense, given the connection Dr. P (the subject of the story) feels to music. In a funny twist of  providence, I was looking into seeing an opera at the encouragement of my husband’s great Aunt Mary, who was herself an opera singer in the 1940s and 50s. I began my search at the Austin Lyric Opera – and to my very great surprise, found that they will be performing The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in July!

The performances are July 9, 10, & 11 and it looks like tickets run anywhere from $20 to $200. I’d love to get a group of people together to go see it (I’ll certainly be going – albeit most likely with a $20 ticket) – hopefully I’ll get some reading-group participants to come as well. If you’re interested (or have seen it) let me know!