Come Together

by Shelly Blake-Plock

Wine AND Cheese. Laurel AND Hardy. Mick AND Keef. Lennon AND McCartney.

The best things in life compliment one another.

And so it should be with Analog AND Digital.

The new paradigm shouldn't be about exclusion. It should be about dynamics. We don't exclude Paper because we include Digital. Rather, we strive to exclude the static modes of thinking often represented by paper -- but also easily represented by poorly-used digital.

The new paradigm shouldn't be about closing down schools and taking learning exclusively online. A computer screen will never replace a football field. A smartphone will never replace a theater. A Skype chat will never replace a high-five.

But neither will arguments berating tech alter the fact that digital tech is the context of the present and that we owe it to our kids to educate them in the world in which they find themselves living and not in the world some of us may wish still existed.

And so we look to augment one with the other to the exclusion of neither. We seek to bring the speed and democratizing openness of the digital to the solidity of the analog and bring the warmth and experience of the analog to the cool intelligence of the digital.

Schools themselves are changing and they will continue to change. So let's use what we've got -- both analog and digital -- to the full benefit they both offer. We don't need a classroom in which to learn poetry. A tree and some shade will do. In winter, we can take inspiration from the museum school model and take the kids directly into the experience. In the meantime, use all that space in the old classrooms to do what those types of building do well: let them be labs, let them be community spaces. Turn your rooms into STEM innovation centers. Let the science loose. Let the math live and let it get messy. Use your on-site tech and know-how to train, empower, and embolden the children AND adults in your community.

While we're at it, create those partnerships with museums, historical societies, libraries, state parks, local farms, and public institutions. Spend Mon, Wed, Fri in the lab and Tues and Thurs taking in Van Goghs, or farm animals, or new friendships and alliances through community outreach.

Teach English by reading about whatever it is that you are doing. Make art on the move and in the field. Learn history by learning how to talk to strangers; make new friends who are not like you, and listen to perspectives different than your own.

Keep those smartphones handy all the while.

Turn lab time into bring-a-scientist-to-school time. Turn math into a worldwide problem solving mission. Pull out that smartphone and turn a stroll through the art gallery into an augmented trip through history.

Try things out. See what happens.

Bring the Analog and the Digital together. The life of the heart and the life of the mind. The mathematician and the poet.

Enough with the idea that one thing excludes another. The only thing worth excluding is fear. Fear, ignorance, and banality.

Write that out on a Post-It and stick it to your monitor.

Thinking: Augmented Renaissance

Blogging late this eve because I spent the day at the Maryland Renaissance Festival.

The MD Ren Fest is sort of particularized among Ren Faires for two things: 1) its commitment to history (each year's theme follows a year in the life of Henry VIII and there are tons of historically accurate acts throughout the fairegrounds) and 2) its quantity and quality of handmade goods (unlike many so-called ren faires, the MD Ren Fest actively supports the culture of handmade clothing and crafts rather than just giving booth time to Ren-kitsch and imported generic Ren-garb).

Beings that I'm a teacher, I think about the classroom 24 hrs a day; and so on the drive home (before I fell asleep in the passenger's seat), I thought about what experiential learning of the sort you might get at a really well done re-enactment might mean for kids these days.

And I came to think that it means a whole lot.

And I thought to myself about the possibilities if the Faire offered free Wi-Fi.

Now, with full knowledge that combining Ren Faires and Wi-Fi in the same post posits me to new epochs of geekdom, I dare say that access to the online world is the one thing long missing from experiential learning of the field-trip variety.

Falling asleep in that passenger seat, I thought about the possibilities for augmenting live experience with virtual compendiums of knowledge and vital platforms for immediately connecting experience with conversation via blogging, microblogging, Twitter, augmented reality in a contact lens, and whathaveyou.

Real experience is still the best 'paperless' experience. I'm certainly one of the biggest proponents of field-trips and travel-based learning you will ever meet. And I am excited -- thrilled, in fact -- about the sorts of opportunities Web-augmented field-based learning offers to students and teachers.

I dare say Augmented Reality is the future of education.

So get yr schools to load up on iTouches, max out the bus with satellite radio, and get yourselves to the places where things happen (and in the case of re-enactments, where they re-happen). Find yourselves places where physical-experiential teaching and digital-experimental teaching cross paths; and advocate for our public airwaves (especially in any government building -- where in my opinion it is ghastly to deny universal free public Wi-Fi Internet accessibility) to carry free access while you are at it.

Because it just ain't that geeky anymore to merge our analogue and digital forms of experience; it's in fact something quite worthwhile, and increasingly do-able.

Maybe we're even up for a new Renaissance on account of this.

A new augmented-reality Renaissance.

Augmented Reality apps: (Not so) Far Out...

Been talking about new ways of integrating tech with the 'real' world ever since seeing this video of Pattie Maes from MIT, demonstrating the work of Pranav Mistry.

Thinking alot about how we tend to view the Internet almost exclusively through various 'screens'. Why do we limit our digital networks to what we can fit on a screen? What if we could drag the digital and ephemeral world into the physical and concrete world?

Augmented Reality starts to go there. Here's a post from ReadWriteWeb that introduces Wikitude, an Android mobile app.

Still, even in AR, the problem is one of 'screens': in bringing the digital realm into the physical are we just using the physical realm as a 'screen'?

Is there a different way of thinking about this?