{"id":47,"date":"2012-10-23T19:10:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T19:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pogo.lakesideschool.org\/library\/?p=47"},"modified":"2012-10-23T19:10:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T19:10:00","slug":"living-in-perpetual-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/2012\/10\/23\/living-in-perpetual-beta\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in Perpetual Beta"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a recovering perfectionist, all of the talk about risk and failure in the education world today makes me understandably nervous.\u00a0\u00a0 Our faculty started off the school year by learning about design thinking<\/a>, a concept made popular by Stanford\u2019s d. school<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the key philosophies of design thinking innovation is to fail early and often, not getting attached to early iterations of the creative process along the way.\u00a0 Our faculty then discussed the New York Times<\/em> article, What if the Secret to Success if Failure?<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0Here Paul Tough examines predictors of future success and as it turns out, grades are not necessarily the answer.\u00a0 Recently, I attended a design thinking workshop by Christian Long<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0He introduced me to the idea that if we want to be innovative educators, we need to live in the world of \u201cperpetual beta\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The phrase resonated with me.<\/p>\n

What does perpetual beta look like for me as a teacher librarian?\u00a0 It means stepping outside of my comfort zone and trying new approaches to research.\u00a0\u00a0 Last week I worked with a Modern Middle East class on how to use social media in research.\u00a0\u00a0 I put together a LibGuide<\/a>, had students set up Twitter accounts, and introduced them to TweetDeck<\/a>.\u00a0 Students found a relevant blog on their research topic and shared it with the class using their course number as a hashtag.\u00a0 Then I introduced ScoopIt<\/a> as an alternate way to create a works consulted list.\u00a0\u00a0 At the end of the class, I set up a research challenge for students to interview someone connected to their topic from another country via Skype.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A few students looked at me perplexed by what I had just suggested.<\/p>\n

The class went reasonably well but definitely left room for improvement.\u00a0 In retrospect, I should have had students use the online version of TweetDeck and I learned that not all students\u2019 tweets would show up if they had set up their accounts with higher privacy settings.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I assumed that our digital natives, having grown up in a participatory culture, would be well versed in Web 2.0 technologies.\u00a0 As it turned out, the students in the class had a wide range of knowledge and comfort with social media. \u00a0\u00a0My most important key takeaway was that although technology is the tool that facilitates research, information literacy skills should be at the core of the lesson.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The next iteration of this seminar will be redone based on these new understandings.<\/p>\n

Though I can\u2019t go back in time, I can still craft ways to assist my current students.\u00a0 My first step was scaffolding the research challenge.\u00a0\u00a0 After class, I reached out to a colleague in the international school community.\u00a0 She was able to connect me with history teachers at schools in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.\u00a0 The details still need to be worked out with pairing up students, but isn\u2019t that what life in perpetual beta is all about? \u00a0\u00a0As educators we need to embrace the journey of teaching as much as the destination.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Innovative methods involve creativity, risk, and sometimes even failure.\u00a0 I must say that being open to this less restrictive path is quite liberating for me as a teacher.\u00a0 By modeling these behaviors, my hope is that students will allow themselves more room for risk and demonstrate resilience when things don\u2019t go exactly as planned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a recovering perfectionist, all of the talk about risk and failure in the education world today makes me understandably nervous.\u00a0\u00a0 Our faculty started off the school year by learning about design thinking, a concept made popular by Stanford\u2019s d. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libpost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.pogolives.com\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}