The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner

Brainstorm: 
The long term EDL 630 project is exciting, but I think I have too many passions. I have three passions I thought about for this project. These include: wine, gardening (I’ve been experimenting with this one, so I might already know too much about it), and cooking. Please see the three possible topics below and help me with my decision. 


What to do with my Wine Grapes—Learn to Make Wine or Jam?
I have been trying to grow grapes for the past few years with little success until this year. One of my wines broke through the container and went into the ground and totally took off. I’ve been blessed with about 40-50 clusters of Syrah grapes and they are about ready for picking. I’ve always wanted to learn to make wine. Although in terms of this project and what I know about wine, I don’t think the wine would be ready for us to sample like in the case of beer and I don’t know if that would be a requirement for this project. I went to a gardening class and it was suggested I make jam (the grapes do have seeds).

My authentic questions for making wine:

1. What materials are needed to start making wine besides the grapes?
   
2. Will I need to source grapes from other growers to make enough wine given that I only have 40-50 clusters? (I have a few wine makers and growers in mind)
   
3. What is the process of making wine?
   
4. Given the time involved, is this a doable project? (For example, the grapes have to ferment for awhile)
   
5. What temperature do I need to keep the grapes while they are fermenting?
   
6. Where do I go to bottle my wine?
   
7. What are the costs involved for this process? (Probably don’t need to buy too many grapes)
   
8. How do I label the wine?
   
9. Can the wine be entered in a home wine maker competition once produced?
   
10. When will the wine be ready to drink?
    

My authentic questions for making jam:

1. If I use the grapes for jam, how difficult and painful will it be to remove the seeds?
   
2. How do I remove the seeds?
   
3. What materials do I need to make jam?
   
4. What are the costs involved?
   
5.  How long does it take to make jam?
   
6. Do I have the right type of grapes to make jam?
   
7. How long does the jam keep? Does it need to be preserved?
   
8. How much jam can be made using my 40-50 bunches of grapes?
   
9.  How do I store the jam?
   
10. Do I need special jars?
    

Gardening
I’ve been gardening awhile, but haven’t always had success. I’ve had success with tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, eggplant, herbs, and more recently butterfly attracting plants and wine grapes. I have not been successful with growing from seeds (too impatient), squash, watermelon, and some of the root vegetables. I thought about trying to grow a pumpkin for Halloween.

My authentic questions for starting a pumpkin-patch:

1. Do I have the right soil?
   
2. How much space do I need?
   
3. Is it possible to grow at least one pumpkin by Halloween or Thanksgiving?
   
4. Do I use the same type of fertilizer as with any other garden crop?
   
5. What types of pests do I need to be concerned about?
   
6. How long does it take to grow a pumpkin?
   
7. Can I get a starter plant instead of growing it from seed?
   
8. Would it be better to grow it from seed?
   
9. What resources are available online for growing pumpkins?
   
10. What happens if nothing grows?
    

Cooking:
I’m extremely passionate about cooking, but I cannot bake. My specialties are Indian, Moroccan, Hungarian, and seafood. We do not really have the right oven for homemade bread, but I think my kitchen will work for homemade pasta, pies, cakes, soufflés, and tortes.

My authentic questions for cooking deserts

1. Do I have the cooking tools necessary to make deserts, particularly soufflés?
   
2. Does it have to be an original recipe or can I borrow ideas?
   
3. What is the history behind the recipe?
   
4. Are there particular deserts native to my family background? Should I start with these?
   
5. How much will it cost for baking supplies?
   
6. What kind of time does it involve? Will I be baking a 2 a.m.?
   
7. What is the cultural background for each desert?
   
8. Should I only focus on one kind of desert, for example soufflés or several?
   
9. What is the best way to document my project? 
   
10. Is there a way to make healthy deserts that still taste great?
    

Dr. White's theory about people's motivations on the Internet explains a lot and in some ways has helped me come to terms with my own identity on the net and why I might feel the way I do. I'm definitely a visitor and I'm finding residency is a challenge for me. When the Internet first took off and during the infancy of social media, I was more of a resident and it was almost an addiction. I would spend many of my nights playing srogue and interacting with others using Unix. I had an alias and even met a guy online and we started dating. This was extremely novel back then and I loved any chance to be online. It was a "second life" though most of it involved online gaming. However, as the Web 2.0 tools took off and social media tools and platforms became abundant, I found myself retreating into the shadows. I became a visitor. I think some of this was because I was and educator and was worried about my online persona. I was also an adult and concerned about identity theft, and I did view Facebook as a type of egomania. At some level, I wondered how the residents found the time and did not see the value of it. On another level, I felt left out. I wanted to be more visible but felt I had nothing to blog about, tweet about, or really post. My feelings about the value of it all changed during the Egyptian Revolution. The revolution in Egypt was a truly new social movement. Here the social space and meeting point was the Web. It gave voices and meaning and started to bring about change. It provided individuals a space to mobilize that would have been next to impossible without it. So, where do I see myself now? I think I'm becoming a resident, at least professionally.

Reference:

White, D. S. (2011). Visitors and Residents. Retrieved on September 11, 2014 at http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2009/10/14/visitors-residents-the-video/t

In his essay, “Why School?” Will Richardson examines’ the value of school with the abundance of learning opportunities and choices provided to today’s globalized student. The way students access the curriculum and knowledge, and process it, is changing. He argues that instead of trying to find ways to improve upon traditional methods, there is a need to look at “doing school” differently and “re-envisioning” teaching as well as assessments (Richardson 2012). Although this approach poses much in the way of challenges and even runs the risk of devaluing human knowledge or blurring the distinction between human knowledge and memories with computer memory, I agree with his position. To borrow a phrase from writer Clive Thompson (2007), maybe we should “outboard” memory in order to better prepare our students for today’s challenges. Why rely on memory and learned knowledge when Google is within a hand’s reach? The problem here is that learners need to have some schema or prior knowledge to know what to do with the abundance of resources and data.

According to Richardson, there are six unlearning/relearning ideas for educators to support. These include: Share everything, discover rather than delivering the curriculum, talking to strangers, mastering learning, working for real audiences, and transferring the power (Richardson 2012). Of these, educators should commit to teaching students how to be learners and how to apply the information being “out-boarded” from Google memory. Perhaps, nothing motivates this better than real work for real audiences, especially with how “public and shared” information has become. In terms of challenges this world of abundance affords, not all online interactions are safe and some are dangerous, misleading, or lack knowledge. Finding the right “strangers” to connect and collaborate with online, avoiding the wrong ones, and knowing how to decipher the abundance of information is something that needs to be “learned”.

References:

Thompson, C. (2007, September 25). From Your Outboard Brain Knows All. Retrieved September 9, 2014, from http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson.

Richardson, W. (2012). From Why School? Retrieved September 6, 2014.

The Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies Special Report affords several interesting articles on student engagement, but I also found all of the scholarly readings useful as well. I only wish I had access to these last year, as our Instructional Leadership team spent several meetings trying to define “student engagement” with little success, as it is difficult to both measure and evaluate as an administrator.

In terms of the articles from the Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies Special Report, the piece most intriguing is Errol Sull’s article, Teaching Online with Errol: A Tried and True Mini-Guide to Engaging Online Students. Sull emphasizes six strategies to effectively engage students online. These include: Posting a “Welcome” message, participating in one’s own discussion forums in a timely manner (even being the first to post), providing overviews of the each module before it begins, showing you are an “engaged” instructor, responding within 24 hours, and providing positive feedback, as well as what student’s need to do to improve (Sull, 2012). Although I have implemented some of these strategies to engage my students online, a few pose quite a challenge. For example, responding to discussion posts in a timely manner. Last year, I set-up a discussion forum that required students to read a primary source, listen to a pod case, and respond to a focus question. My intention was to have an “engaging” discussion. However, I found it difficult to reply enthusiastically to all 70 of them. This was particularly the case when students waited until 11:50 p.m. to post their response and seemed disappointed the next day in class that I had not responded. Integration of audiovisual components online, are also a challenge for me, which I hope to overcome with this course. Given I work at a performing arts school, this is not the case for most of my students. Sull discusses the use of audiovisual in his article on personality and why it matters online (2012). This is something I had not thought much about until recently, but it makes a lot of sense. What did not occur to me is that my personality and its presentation would be constantly revisited online.

References

Sull, E. C. (2012, February). Teaching Online with Errol: A Tried and True Mini-Guide to Engaging Online Students. Reprinted from Online Classroom, Nov. 2010 in  Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies Special Report . A Magna Publication. Retreived August 27, 2014, from http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/FF-Online-Student-Engagement-Report.pdf.

Sull, E. C. (2012, February). Teaching Online with Errol: Personalty DOES Matter in Teaching Online! Reprinted from Online Classroom, Dec.2010 in Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies Special Report . A Magna Publication. Retreived August 27, 2014, from http://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/images/FF-Online-Student-Engagement-Report.pdf.