Digital Filing Cabinet/Overview

From IAE-Pedia

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Improving Teacher Education 3 Three Dimensional Matrix 4 The IAE-pedia as an Example 5 Substantial Progress is Occurring 6 Guidelines and Suggestions for Authors 6.1 Useful Lesson Plans 6.2 Multiple Stakeholders 7 Request to Teachers of Teachers 8 References 9 Author or Authors

Several of Information Age Education Wiki pages are about Digital Filing Cabinets.

• Digital Filing Cabinet/Overview.
• Digital Filing Cabinet/General Purpose Documents.
• Digital Filing Cabinet/Tools.

• Digital Filing Cabinet/Secondary School History.
• Math Education Digital Filing Cabinets.

"The strongest memory is not as strong as the weakest ink." (Confucius, 551-479 B.C.)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed; it's the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead. 1901—1978)

Introduction

I began to think about the Digital Filing Cabinet idea about the time that CD-ROMs for computers began to be widely available. By the mid 1980s, CD-ROMs could be mass duplicated at a cost making it possible for free or inexpensive distribution to preservice and inservice teachers—provided that the content didn't cost much.

At that time, I was engaged in some volunteer math education work with the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Some of this work eventually contributed to the NCTM Standards that came out in 1989. At that time it seemed "obvious" to me that CD-ROMs would be of considerable benefit to preservice math teachers (including elementary teachers). We could provide such preservice teachers with many thousands of pages of material that would be useful to them during their preservice program of study and then continue to be useful to them after them became teachers.

I am sure that other people were having similar ideas at this time. However, the math education community did not seize upon and widely adopt the idea of free or inexpensive CD-ROM full of "good stuff."

Now, more that 20 years later, the situation is somewhat improved. A steadily growing and very large amount of appropriate material is available on the Web and in other formats. There is plenty of material to support having a CD-ROM full of relevant materials in each of a number of different discipline areas. Connectivity has improved so that the concept of putting a collection of such materials on a CD-ROM is increasingly out of date. Rather, a "virtual CD-ROM"—that is, a "Drawer" in a Digital Filing Cabinet, is more appropriate. A preservice or inservice teacher might have a DFC with many different virtual drawers of material.

Improving Teacher Education

The goal of the DFC project is to improve teacher education. It s built on three ideas:

1. Provide preservice and inservice teachers with materials that are specifically designed to help them during their lifelong learning and teaching professional careers.
2. Help the preservice and inservice teachers to gain personal ownership of the materials through frequent use, addition to, modification of, and sharing of the materials.
3. Provide teachers of teachers with the materials from (1) above, help in making (2) occur, and specific additional materials designed to support the work of teachers of teachers.

The approach being discussed in this article uses a metaphor of a digital filing cabinet(DFC) of materials. As an example, consider a preservice elementary school teacher just beginning college. What can we give this student that can be stored on his or her computer, retrieved and used when useful, and edited and added to at will. We want some of this material to be integrated into (or, at least made use of) in the various courses the student will take during the four to five years it takes to gain teacher certification. We want the preservice teacher to learn how to share such materials with other preservice and inservice teachers. We want the materials and their storage, manipulation, and retrieval system to be the foundations for a filing cabinet that the person will gain ownership of over time and will continue to add to and make use of throughout his or her teaching career.

Three Dimensional Matrix

In the most grand version of this DFC project, I think of a three dimensional matrix. One axis is grade levels starting at PK, K, 1, 2, and extending up through or beyond a master's degree in teacher education. (This is about 20 levels.) The second axis is the content areas taught in school, including language arts, math, science, social science, and so on. (This might be 20 items or so.) The third axis is three items: Content, PCK, and Pedagogy.

This means there may well be over a thousand cells that are relevant to the task at hand. There is a cell for second grade science content. There is a cell for 10 grade biology PCK. Many of the cells would benefit by having quite a lot of information presented from varying points of view. In addition, each cell can benefit by having an annotated bibliography of references to good, up to date, and long lasting free materials on the Web. By "annotated" I mean a complete reference accompanied by a paragraph or two summarizing the most important idea or ideas available at the reference site. By long lasting, I mean Web sites that are being run by stable organizations and people in a manner that they are apt to still exist and be of still more use a number of years from now.

The articles themselves need to be written by highly qualified experts on the cell topic being written. A required qualification is that the writer thoroughly know the problems of the people the cell is written for and what will help them. To a large extent, this requires a "been their, tried, suffered, learned, have continued to learn, and I can help you" approach.

The overall philosophy of the IAE-pedia is that each person is a lifelong learner and a lifelong teacher. Thus, the content of a cell can be aimed at a person as a teacher, a person as a learner, or both. The content of a cell is designed to:

1. Help the person gain increased expertise. The emphasis is on expertise that will be of long lasting, continuing value, and that can be used and built upon to lead to still higher levels of understanding and expertise.
2. Help the person do a just in time review of key aspects of SoTL. Forgetting is a natural process. A quick review of fundamental ideas and definitions can help a person quickly refresh knowledge that is slowly fading into the background dept of his or her mind.
3. Provide a framework, encouragement, and perhaps leading questions that will facilitate the reader personalizing the content of the cell, thereby gaining increased ownership and understanding of the content. You want the reader to practice saying, thinking, and writing the ideas in their own words.

A teacher of teachers might well want to have DFCs containing all of the content described above. In addition, the teacher of teacher needs materials that are specific to the content, PCK, and pedagogy of being a teacher of teachers.

The IAE-pedia as an Example

During the past year, I have spent a lot of time creating and adding to the IAE-pedia. I do this to meet my needs and the possible needs of others. Gradually it has dawned on me that this initial version of the IAE-pedia is much like a Digital Filing Cabinet with two audiences:

1. Me.
2. People who are interested in improving informal and formal education throughout the world. This is people who want to improve their own education and the education of others. It includes preservice teacher, inservice teachers, and their teachers.

It has become obvious to me that the creation of an education-oriented DFC to serve the needs and wants of these two audiences is well beyond the capabilities of any one individual.

What I think is needed is a combination of:

1. Each person who is interested in having a personal education-oriented DFC is provided with some sort of template or scaffold into which they can collect, organize, and make their personal contributions to their own personal DFC. This template comes with a representative and useful sample of content.
2. Many people making contributions to the IAE-pedia and to other Websites that don't charge for access to their content.

Initially, a personal DFC might consist of a folder of documents stored on one's personal computer. One of the key ideas is to organize these documents in a manner that they are easily retrieved when one has a personal need to do so. One's personal collection might also be stored on a file server—and the file server might be located thousands of miles away!

Perhaps the single most important idea of a personal DFC is that the owner of a personal DFC needs to be using it regularly, adding to it, integrating it with his or her previous knowledge and collected materials, and doing other things to increase personal ownership.

Another really important idea is issue is the extent to which a person wants to share contents of his or her personal DFC. It is now common for people to have collections of digital photographs and video that they want to make available to either restricted audiences (such as one's family and close friends) or to the world. A Blog might well be a part of one's personal DFC. Some people make use of various versions of Wiki software.

The idea of sharing with the world is a key aspect of the DFC. The Wikipedia provides an excellent example, as do various social networking systems. From my personal point of view, every person is a lifelong learner and a lifelong teacher. As teachers, we help others learn through our conversations with and interactions with others. We can also help others learn through our postings to the Web.

The Brain Science and Math sections in this IAE-pedia are primitive examples of what I feel is needed. The IAE-pedia has a Home Page (Main Page) that includes a Table of Contents. Each item listed in the Table of Contents is a link to what might be called an extension (an extended piece) of the Table of Contents. The extension includes:

1. A very brief introduction the topic.
2. Links to related resources in the IAE-pedia. Sometime a brief summary is provided. Most of these materials are open source, so that any reader can edit them. Each has an accompanying Discussion page where any reader can make comments.
3. Links to related free resources at other locations on the Web.

Substantial Progress is Occurring

Millions of preservice and inservice teachers are now creating and making use of their own versions of a Digital Filing Cabinet. Teachers of teachers routinely provide links to content to be added and often provide such content. Preservice and inservice teachers share with each other, providing both content and links.

Each teacher of teachers can add to this progress. A good way to do this is to think about any course or workshop you run as being a source for a start on a specific Drawer in a DFC. Think of one of the responsibilities in teaching a course or running a workshop is to provide participants with a template and some initial content for a DFC Drawer. What do you want participants to carry away from the course or workshop, so that they can access it, add to it, and share with others in the future?

Guidelines and Suggestions for Authors

Here is a summary of some ideas to think about as you develop a DFC-oriented document to include in the IAE-pedia.

1. Who is the intended audience? Make this explicit. The reader is unlikely to have a good mental image of the "big picture" of a DFC or a DFC Drawer in a particular academic discipline.
2. Think in terms of lesson planning rather than in terms of specific lesson plans. The DFC is not a collection of lesson plans. If a lesson plan is presented it is because the lesson plan illustrates the results of a certain type of thinking and planning.
3. Think in terms of empowering teachers. Read some of the IAE-pedia documents about empowerment. Then, think carefully about how a teacher is empowered by reading your document. Make this empowerment explicit in the document.
4. Think in terms of what a teacher can do that will empower his or her students. What can you say to a preservice or inservice teacher—what can you help a teacher learn—that will help his or her students to get a better Information Age Education? You want teachers to explicitly think about how a lesson or unit of study they are presenting empowers their students in a foundation building and long lasting manner.
5. It is not necessary that a document include an emphasis on using any particular Information and Communication Technology. Remember, the overriding goal is to improve the quality of educational that students are receiving. ICT purely for the sake of ICT is a poor approach to improving education.

Useful Lesson Plans

Think in terms of what a preservice or inservice teacher would find useful. Some of the things in a filing cabinet are lesson plans. Some are handouts (readings). Some are "good ideas" that the the teacher just wants to save for possible use in the future. Some may be quizzes. Some may be worksheets. Some may be specifically designed to give to a substitute teacher.

We should try to not get bogged down in the detail of trying to put together an ideal format for a lesson plan to fit every conceivable teaching situation. However, we might agree that there are certain core aspects of a a lesson plan.

Let me suggest a core aspect. I believe that every lesson or unit of study should:

1. Empower students by helping them to gain an increased level of expertise in an area (piece of a discipline) that is considered important by some combination of the student, the teacher, and other stakeholders. Here, "other stakeholders" includes people who establish state benchmarks or standards.
2. Empower students by helping them to gain in cognitive maturity—that is, move up a Piagetian-type cognitive scale—within the overall discipline or disciplines being taught in the lesson.
3. Empower teachers by:

a. providing them a plan and a purpose which—when adequately carried out—will bring personal satisfaction and will empower students as in (1) and (2) above.

b. providing an environment in which the teacher can make professional and personal growth.

The developer of a lesson plan should have these ideas in mind, so a lesson plan should reflect these ideas. However, that does not say there needs to be a section of a lesson plan that specifically addresses these topics. If there is such a section, it might be part of the "After Teaching the Lesson" part of the lesson plan. The teacher grows by reflection on what worked well, what didn't work so well. what to do differently next time, and so on. This metacognition—perhaps done in a personal journal or as a note attached to the end of a lesson plan, certainly is not part of a lesson plan that one person creates and a different person uses. It is an important aspect of a the teacher gaining ownership of a lesson plan that is in a Digital Filing Cabinet.

Multiple Stakeholders

A teacher tends to be at the middle of a large and varied group of stakeholders who feel they should have some say in what is going on. That is, they expect to be empowered. Stakeholders include the teacher, students, school administrators, parents, school boards, a variety of groups of government officials and elected officials, and so on.

My personal feeling that attempting to meet demands from so many different stakeholder groups is not possible. Thus, in planning and teaching a lesson or unit of study, I feel it is important to focus mainly on just three stakeholder groups:

1. Students. Empower your students and help them to learn to effectively and responsibly use their increased expertise.
2. Oneself. Empower yourself and facilitate a lifelong process of gaining in expertise as a professional in your field.
3. One's fellow professionals, with their professional standards and professional ethics. Think of yourself part of a team of teachers, other educators, and support staff that serves both students and the team.

Request to Teachers of Teachers

I know that many of you are helping your students to create personal DFCs and that you, personally, have large amounts of materials worth sharing. I would like to hear from you about what you have been doing and how well it is working. I strongly encourage you to share what you are doing with other teachers of teachers.

References

Empowering Learners and Teachers.

Author or Authors

The initial version of this document was written by David Moursund.