Wednesday April 9: The ideas continue...

I am listening to a CBC program asking "Is classical music obsolete today?" What strikes me as interesting is its relation to school curriculum. If I was to ask the members of this class: Name 5 pieces of classical music you have studied in your school years. Or, for that matter, Name 5 works of art you have studied. -- how would you respond. Probably "nothing"? Yet we can all name the works of literature we studies, or the periods of Canadian history, or the topics of Math and Science that we took.

The arts have indeed been almost eliminated. And when they are taught, I wonder if the focus becomes production: choir, band, performance. Similarly in art or drama.

Indeed, I wonder if in my own field of technology we focus on the production side, the skill side -- wikis, i-Movies, blogs, etc. but not the culture side.

As I think back to this course, we can safely say that we did study works of art and music and cinema. Perhaps inadertently, but we did it nevertheless.

A case in point was last class analyses of Norman Rockwell's "The connoisseur" and Colville's "horse and train".

Both are fascinating works, which I would argue, thinking hypertextually, can be considered an integral component of how we think about curriculum, or at least as "texts" with "curriculum potential". What a wonderful term that one has turned out to be.

Monday April 7: Last Class

Final thoughts
April 7, 2008

First, I would like to remind you of some of the major course themes:

1. Curriculum is messy. There is no one way; there is no correct model.

2. The three major modes of curriculum, Aoki suggests, are technical/practical/critical. The technical needs standards and absolute clarity. The practical focuses on stakeholders. The critical attempts to delve into root interests.

3. The multiple readings were chosen to guide you into different curriculum explorations. What are some of the critical terms I hope you will take away with you?

• Curriculum potential from Ben Peretz;
• The map is not the territory from Baurillard.
• Curriculum as conversation from Applebee
• Mode of address from Ellsworth. Who does this curriculum think you are?
• There is a unique Canadian discourse on curriculum (Chambers)
• Postmodernism. From everybody.
• Laws of media: McLuhan’s insistence that we look at impact from the four foci of enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval, reversal.
• Deconstruction as a way to read a text critically and analytically.

Note that this list of critical terms (and these are only a selected few) are unique to this course. I have not ignored mainstream terminology, but consciously tried to present concepts that you may not have heard in other courses and that may not be a part of your common vocabulary.

4. Curriculum today is postmodern, and that means that it is full of contradictions. Slattery and Baudrillard push us in those directions.

5. Is there a model for curriculum development? Yes, but not just one. The moment you choose a model for curriculum development, you are limiting yourself. You are closing the doors. You are closing down the conversation. Some contributions from this course towards a curriculum development model might be the following:
a. Tyler’s four questions, even though posed in 1949 still provide one of the most useful frameworks of all:

• i. What educational purposes should schools seek to attain?
• ii. What educational experiences can be provided?
• iii. How can these experiences be organized?
• iv. How can we determine whether these experiences are being met? (evaluation)

b. Goodyear and his focus on provides a “pedagogic framework” for curriculum.

c. Schubert’s over-riding comment: "What knowledge is most worthwhile? Why is it worthwhile? How is it acquired or created? These are three of the most basic curriculum questions. "

d. Applebee’s structure, not often used, asks us to examine whether a curriculum has quality, quantity, relatedness (context) and manner.

e. I like Aoki, because he provides focusing questions for technical practical and critical models. If you are developing or evaluating a technical curriculum, he asks you to look for efficiency, goals, objectives, and congruencies. If you are developing a program with “practical” (situational interpretive) focus, you are directed to examine the role of parents, teachers, administrators, content experts, etc. If from a critical perspective, then you look for root interests, root assumptions, unintended and intended biases, gaps, and world views.


Two corollaries:
1. When you move into a master’s program, you become a scholar. You are no longer looking only to become a skilled administrator or teacher. That happens from a combination of things … from practice, from professional workshops, from on-the-job experience. Here, you step outside, even if only briefly, and you become a scholar. Being a scholar is not better than being a teacher or an administrator; it is different. If you are a student in an academic university program, you have selected a particular direction towards not just practice, but you become a scholar. When you go back to what you do on a daily basis, if this course has any value to you at all, then Applebee’s question, “Is this course geared to help you enter into the curricular conversation?” is critical.

2. So what happens now when you go into your own curriculum meetings? My hope is that you will be able to ask questions that perhaps you never thought of asking. My hope is that you will not immediately fall into the technical model, but examine all sides, all possibilities.

...


And then there was Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s Wake did several things. First, it re-focused attention on the contemporary world – a world of all-at-once happenings. A world turned upside down by information overload. McLuhan presents the contemporary world via Edgar Allan Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom. Technology is not the only contributor to our technological society, but it is an important one. The nature of knowledge is changing. Today there are new ways of knowing. The internet really does change everything. Twenty-first century curriculum is still an unknown quantity. We … you … need to be a part of that determination.
.....

There is an interesting book by Lord Kenneth Clarke published in 1969 called CIVILIZATION. It was simultaneously a TV mini-series, one of the first of its kind. Ten programs, examining ten aspects of “civilization.” In the first chapter he writes

What is civilization? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms – yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.

Think about that. He can’t define it, but he can recognize it. I want to say the same about curriculum. Thirteen of you gave me thirteen definitions. There were some commonalities, but there were some significant differences. Narrow, value-laden, broad. You were intrigued that we could come up with thirteen variants.

And then, Kenneth Clark does something else. He says cannot define his subject; he recognizes it. So then he adds a subtitle to his book: Civilization: A personal view. This course is like that too. In retrospect, I would like to call it: Theory and Practice of Curriculum design and development: A personal view. It is very much a personal view.

Over the past years, I have kept track of some of the more interesting comments from your colleagues, other students who have taken this course. Here are some of your thoughts, showing an interaction with the content:

• “Thinking is messy.”
• “Schools train students to be employees and consumers, I want then to be leaders and adventurers.”
• “As I was reading this article, I felt very small, insignificant and even a little “dumb”
• “I came home from class that evening and truly felt like I “exercised my brain”. I was not able to sleep a wink. This feeling, of stretching what we know, what we think we know, and extrapolating to new uncharted ways of thinking is so exciting. I have learned that it is incredibly easy to accept ideas for what they are without thinking about them critically.”
• “It struck me as odd that Considering the strong push across the province towards an outcome based evaluation of student performance, how many of the class members had a more post-modern view of leaning, in regards to curriculum, perhaps without even knowing it.”
• “It does seem though that everything we do in this class makes me revisit and rethink the way I look at things. Which I’m sure is one of your major outcomes for the course!”

Monday we meet for the last time. You will fill in the course evaluation form. You will hand in the final paper. We shall spend an hour or less, pulling things together.

March 24

This is the second last class.
It will be devoted almost entirely to an examination of pedagogic frameworks.

But first a poem that I read in Teaching at the University of Manitoba: A Handbook p. 3.4

You encounter two bricklayers.
You ask each one what they are doing.
The first tells you he is just laying bricks.
The second tells you she is building a cathedral...
A grand structure that will seat 2000...
A building that will serve the community in many ways.

Hmmm... We will begin by looking at this poem. (This is what we call examining technology as text, or hermeneutics.) If you are confused when I call poetry a technology, let me remind you that McLuhan considered language to be the greatest technology of all. I checked this out further, and came across the poet lauriate of the USA, Robert Pinsky. From an interview:

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Some people might find modern technology antithetical to poetry, even dangerous to the very personal art that poetry is, but you don't, do you?

ROBERT PINSKY: Well, that's the conventional idea, but poetry is, itself, a technology. Verse is a very ancient technology designed for memory and that also achieves a lot of speed. It's a technology of the voice, of the grunts that a very resourceful primate makes.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/april97/poet_4-2.html

and elsewhere:

The human appetite for memory and entertainment is so immense that we seem to want to add every new technology we can; the model of one technology (TV, movies, cyberspace, whatever) replacing older technologies (print, poetry, memorization, etc.) seems to me faulty--it underestimates our ravenous appetite for All of the Above.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/aandc/trnscrpt/pinsky.htm

Sounds like I am way off the beaten track doesn't it? I hope a brief discussion at the beginning of the class will pull it together.

THEN THIS...

Two weeks ago we began to explore the concept of pedagogic frameworks which focuses on the “front end” of curriculum design. A traditional curriculum design model is based on a Tylerian technical model. In class we examined extensions of this model, most notably that of Oliva.

From a purely practical perspective, a curriculum document is a concrete example of such an approach. Another concrete example, more common at the university level is the so-called “course syllabus.

The pedagogic framework model argues for the necessity to step back and to look at course development from three perspectives. These are a pedagogic framework, the educational setting and the organizational context.

Two readings by Goodyear anchor this approach. At least two additional papers might shed light on this process. Nunes and McPherson (2003) focus in some detail on distinguishing between Constructivism and Objectivism from a practical perspective, noting that “pedagogical models based on moderate constructivist approaches” may be the most useful. Note: Full text is available if you sign in as a UM student.

On the other hand, a salutary caution is illustrated by Ixer (1999) arguing that There is no such thing as reflection. (Full text also available if you sign in as a UM student). What he is arguing is that “reflection” has simply become another step on an outcomes-based model. This, of course, is contradictory. Reflection is not the same thing as propositional knowledge or behavioural skills. It is “tacit knowledge”. The word tacit means “implied without being stated.”

We began by dividing into several small groups of 3-4.
Your initial task was to take Edub7560 as an example and then follow the Goodyear framework. Essentially we will pick up on this task.

The reason for choosing Edub7560 is so that we all have a common framework. In all cases, you should be able to extrapolate to your own situation. The idea is not to evaluate the course, but rather to attempt to position it within a pedagogical perspective.

Goodyear provides the outline; you will fill in the details. The result should be a useful reflective analysis of the course. Of course this is an after-the-fact analysis.

Your task:

Use the Goodyear pedagogic framework graphic as a model and the Goodyear document starting at Section 2 (page 12) of the EDNER document and examine this course from the following perspectives:
1. Identify the apparent philosophic orientations based on Shuell’s four models
2. Examine the propositions of good teaching (Table 2.1)
3. Examine Table 2.2 on conceptions of teaching.
4. Determine how to place all of these in the graphic framework.
5. Explore table 2.3
6. Explore the issues on the right hand side of the pedagogical framework graphic titled educational setting. Identify (and relate) Edub7560 tasks, student activity and environment. Don’t try to capture all the course activities/tasks. That would keep you here all night. Instead, attempt to capture a sampling.

End Product for the evening: In a normal course of events, this data would be formulated into a formal paper. In this case, for the last 30 minutes of class time, starting at say 7:45-8:00, each group will have the opportunity to present to the entire class their findings. You do not need to attempt to overview the elements of the entire Goodyear document. Rather, to mix metaphors: attempt a broad brushstroke to see what “comes to the top” after such an analysis. What have you learned (a) about the course Edub756, but more importantly (b) what does this exercise say about developing and explicating a pedagogic strategy. Do you do this already for your courses? Does it help? Does it focus differently than the traditional course curricula provided by the department? What else?


Some thoughts:
1. The idea of pedagogic framework seems especially popular in programs that are introducing new technologies into teaching and learning. The argument is that we have too often introduced technologies without a pedagogic framework, and that is the reason they have been unsuccessful in the past. However, to me, technology is something natural and not forced. At no time in this course did I deliberately say to myself (nor I think to you) that “I am going to deliberately attempt to integrate technology into this course,” Instead, I believe it came naturally. We used video, and DVD and blogs and Nicenet and YouTube and CDs … none of this, on my part, was a conscious attempt to integrate media. It was simply a natural way to deliver or supplement or explain content, or to provide a framework for communication.

2. I am a little puzzled at the use of the phrase e-learning. Again going back to Goodyear (Sorry to overuse him so much this time) e-learning is “the systematic use of networked multimedia computer technologies to empower learners, improve learning, connect learners to people and resources supportive of their needs, and to integrate learning with performance and individual with organizational goals.” Hmmm… Isn’t that natural at this point? Is not all learning e-learning? Or, to say it the other way, do we need the e? Can we not just say learning? Then looking at the first part of Goodyear’s definition, (“the systematic use of networked multimedia computer technologies”) one has to wonder why restrict the modes of learning? It is like saying “learning to cook with a microwave”, instead of “learning to cook”.

3. I am clearly a radical when it comes to technology, because, although I agree that it is critically important (if only because technology is ubiquitous), I do not agree that specific technologies need to be selected out. Teachers need to understand the pedagogy of using technologies more than the technology itself. Nardi and O’Day in Information Ecologies: Using Technologies with Heart write : “We define an information ecology to be a system of people practices value, and technologies in particular local environment. In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology” Famously, and in the same vein, Martin Heidegger remarked that “the question concerning technology is nothing technological.”

4. Pedagogically we are getting and receiving mixed signals. On the one hand, we are told that constructivism is a model of teaching/learning that focuses away from telling and towards getting the learner actively (and authentically) involved. Yet we evaluate by a time-honoured technical model. Look at the University SEEQ evaluation and you will see that it is built on the assumptions of a behaviourist / technical model. So, as we have already begun to ask: What might a postmodern curriculum look like? Are we really moving towards a constructivist philosophy?

More later...

March 17

More to follow:

Kala on Marsh
Focus on "cyberbullying."

The commentaries in the blogs by most of you are so thorough, that I have little more to add. That is why these last few entries have been quite minimalist, other than identifying the major foci. Even this seems to be hardly necessary, once the blog entries are examined. PLEASE do read each others blogs. They are insightful and make interesting reading as well.

For Monday Jan 10

Reminder:

Ornstein presented by Francis will be moved up from March 17 to March 10.
Also, copy the papers noted in the last blog entry.

Denis

What happened on March 3 ... and what to bring for Mar 10

Please find, download and print. And bring to class. This paper by Peter Goodyear is one of the current trends in curriculum design ...

Actually this one is somewhat better... But is 50 pages long... 

March 3 class: 

This class began with Slattery. Marc set the stage nicely, setting a postmodern perspective. Garry followed with what was arguably the most complex and least reachable paper in the entire set. I have a feeling that I did not do as good a job as I might have in preparing you to read Baudrillard. Some of you got it; others are more uncertain. I am looking very closely at your blog comments to gauge your reactions. 

The key question has to be "Where is the curriculum in this." And, even more specifically, what has this to do with curriculum design. After all, Baudrillard is not an educator, nor a curriculum designer. He is a philosopher. He is the only non-curriculum person in our readings for this course. So what he has to say needs to be looped back into education, curriculum, and curriculum design.

It is easy of course to "cop out" by reminding you of McLuhan's view that everything is tied to everything, somehow and that you can find connections in the strangest places, if you only look. That was the philosophic position behind Douglas Adams' wildly popular "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" novels ... that is, the "interrelationship of all things." 

So we need to revisit this basic question. I might add that Dr. Ralph Mason and myself are wrestling with the same idea, with hopes of writing a paper looking at Baudrillard as a fundamental way of looking at 21st century curriculum.  But that is for another time.

There was more to the class. I tried to build on some of the ideas of Baudrillard such as reversability, and his relationship to McLuhan. 

I presented three other examples of artists and scholars doing similar things.

First, Lewis Carroll, in The hunting of the snark wrote three verses that resembled Baudrillard's map:

He bought a large map representing the sea

Without the least vestige of land...

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand...

The idea of an empty piece of paper representing something real is at least a little frightening.

Then I turned to artist Mark Tansey and his work "The Innocent Eye Test." It shows a cow looking at a painting of a cow, and the cow itself being observed by experts and critics. We, in turn are looking at the critics looking at the cow looking at the picture of the cow.

To me, Tansey's philosophy of painting can easily be changed to my philosophy of curriculum, by merely replacing a few words. Is that plagiarism? Or is it a new idea?

Finally, I tried to demonstrate through music that the medium really is the message. I presented a message in the form of a song text. Then we heard two versions. The first was by Gordon MacRae, a broadway singer of the 40s. He sang that traditional version of the song, which was essentially about building an army. Then we heard a version by Barbra Streisand. Not a word was changed but when we moved from male to female; from MacRae to Streisand, from March to cool jazz, from the 40s to the 70s, from a Broadway musical to a cabaret ... the entire message seemed to change.  You decide for yourself whether it worked.

As usual, I had more to cover than time permitted. Perhaps next Monday...

March 3: How to read Baudrillard

We will carry over the issues from last class that we did not get to. In particular:

1. An "music" example of "the medium is the message"
2. A CBC blog from last Sunday Edition show.

In addition, two postmodern readings. I am not sure that I spent enough time on how to approach the Baudrillard article. Do not read it in the normal way. His style is radically different and you can easily throw your hands in disgust and confusion. Read holistically. Try to engage in his radical ideas. Better yet, be playful with this paper. It is considered a classic and is without doubt the most well known of the class readings. Indeed, if there is one paper you need to remember from this course, it is Baudrillard's.

Feb 24. Is curriculum design merely a method to deliver propaganda?

Or, how can we know whether we are teaching "the right stuff?" It is well and good to show how we can select, design , teach, and evaluate content. And we always give "lip service" to critical thinking skills. But do we really examine why we do what we do, and whether we are teaching the right material? Most often, we don't have time for such considerations. We, in the words of the Nike slogan, "just do it".

So, I would like to take some time examining simple things we miss.

The assumption in what follows is that curriculum lies between what we teach and how we teach it. 

1. I have just purchased a copy of the Manitoba Encyclopedia. Now here is a unique curriculum resource that Winnipeg Foundation has given free to every school in the province. Pretty nice. So in class, I will go over a few bothersome issues for me. At some level, the bothersome issues may take over from the value of the book. I will demonstrate in class...

2. I am also a reviewer for a Grade 3 set of math books. My task is to help assure that the book is culturally appropriate for Canadian audiences. Again, we shall take a look...

3. CBC Sunday Edition of Feb 24, 2008 began with a 3 minute editorial on the purposes of education... an editorial by Robert Enright. We will listen to the blog of that broadcast and relate it to "curriculum."

4. To get back to Marshall McLuhan, time permitting, I want to provide you with a concrete example of "the medium is the mesage." I will present (like last day, through music) a message... using two different media. If it works to you, then the message will be different in both cases, though the message is identical! in fact. I will present the message in three ways!

 

Feb 24. Picking up the pieces after the break...

Hello, everyone. We are almost back. We only missed one class...both midterm break and Louis Riel, but it is quite amazing how the momentum that we had built up tends to dry up. I notice that most have not gotten back to entering reflections on the blogs re private schools and McNeil, though both of those topics stimulated serious discussion. (Brad, you were having trouble with your UM account. Is that cleared up yet?)

This Monday, we have three presentations. That should take us 30 minutes each (counting discussion) and some time for me to refocus.

The major issue will be putting together a final paper.

For those who are still mulling around ideas, I did present you via email and on nicenet a possibility to explore "curriculum in the 21st century." What I wrote then was the following:

I have just been told that this fall I am potentially assigned to teach a graduate course titled "Curriculum in the 21st century." It struck me that that might be an excellent topic for several of you, especially if you are still looking for a topic and have not yet settled in.

What is a 21st century curriculum? Does it have explicit characteristics already developed as we come to the end of the first decade of the century? Is the 21st century merely an extension of the 20th century curriculum? Does the concept "21st century curriculum" really mean a technology based curriculum? Or, on the other hand, since we are already in the 21st century, is not the 21st century curriculum nothing more than the curriculum we are currently teaching?

It would be fascinating for me to collect some data for this course from the real experts: YOU. You both are teaching and will teach a 21st century curriculum. Perhaps the term is not a useful one. Or perhaps it does suggest certain parameters, ideas and directions.

Anyone interested in traveling this road? growing into the concept? putting the basic elements onto the assembly line to see the final product?

Of course, just because I have a technology orientation, that does not mean that an exploration in this direction needs to be about technology. On the contrary, there is more to future and present curriculum that technology. Regardless of how anyone might want to tackle this issue, there is ample room for exploration.

As we move into a postmodern mindset, traditional ways of doing things become more unsettling. I have tried to "explode" the definition of curriculum design from its normal and traditional view. There is no doubt that we think of curriculum design as some variant of Tyler's four questions. Some of the papers we are exploring expand upon Tyler, but others start to take a different trajectory. A case in point is today's discussion of Vallance. (Remember you will have to download this from JSTOR. Elizabeth Vallance ( a student and colleague of Elliot Eisner is interested in applying an aesthetic dimension to the evaluation component of curriculum design. You will quickly see that this is not normally how we evaluate curriculum. In fact, Valance argues that in fact this is really curriculum description, something we don't do enough of.

Feb 11: Goodson and McNeil

We continue our examination of the course readings. Goodson and McNeil will provide two very different takes on curriculum.

Some guiding questions on curriculum design...

The following set of questions comes from a course outline for a CTL course titled Teaching and Learning in Post-Secondary Education. The questions below are useful guiding questions for this course. As you continue your assigned readings, keep these in mind:

1. What decisions do teachers need to make prior to teaching?
2. How do teachers organize ideas, knoweldge, and skills into meaningful course structures for teaching purposes?
3. What organizing elements do teachers consider when developing courses?

• scope
• sequence
• continuity
• balance
• big ideas
• key questions
• assignments
• assessment procedures

4. How are course elements balanced to achieve curriculum consonance?
5. What instructional tools and resources are available to teachers?
6. What organizing elements do teachers consider in their planning for everyday classes?

1. group interaction
2. guided discovery
3. inquiry
4. concept attainment
5. critical thinking
6. problem based
7. active experience based
8. direct instruction
9. lecture-discussion
10. questioning
11. demonstration
12. other

What organizing elements do teachers consider in their planning for everyday classes

1. descriptive course data
2. guiding questions/themes/objective
3. learning strategies and procedures
4. special considerations
5. notes
6. reminders
7. materials and equipment
8. assessment tools
9. reflective notes for improved practice

In addition, a qualifier to the above, should be that our focus at the advanced graduate level should be on depth more than breadth; on the deep dive rather than a superficial overview.
This is where the greatest challenge lies.

Timeline for presentations and readings

January 28

• Ellsworth(Michelle)
• Applebee (Angela)

Feb 4.

• Aoki (Kim)

Feb 11

• Goodson. (Roland and Jason)
• McNeil (Gwen)
  

Feb 25

• Vallance (Dianne) (Note: This reading must be downloaded from JSTOR)
• Toepfer (Jamie)
• Chambers (McColm)

March 3

• Slattery (Marc) 

• Baudrillard (Garry). (Download from google. Search <"Precession of simulacrum" Baudrillard>

March 17

• Ornstein (Francis)

TBA: Marsh (Kala)

For Monday Jan 28

1. Picking up the pieces. We lost some data, namely the list of presentations. Did anyone write down the complete list?

About McLuhan: So our ongoing question will be: What has McLuhan got to do with curriculum?

Introducing McLuhan
Initial thoughts

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that education would be transformed as society embraced what he called variously “electric technologies”, electronic technologies, or media. His arguments were both provocative and controversial. He became a celebrity. Some thought him a genius; others a charlatan. His most famous statement was the provocative “the medium is the message.”

After his death in 1980, his ideas seemed to vanish quickly. But somewhere around the beginning of the 21st century, people began to look back and to realize that his predictions and theories were coming true. Contemporary technologies were indeed having a critical impact on contemporary schooling and contemporary education.

Sir Ken Robinson said that we have no idea what we are teaching kids for. The future, he says, is just too unknown. His answer: We need to encourage creativity. McLuhan’s answer: Teaching about technology is the only way we can avoid being pulled down by the vortex of commercialism, hype, globalization.

We are living in a world of empire, but it is a new and different empire, but an empire nontheless. It is not the destructive empires such as the Roman or Spanish or Soviet or Russian empires, nor a benign empire such as the British Empire. Today’s empire is global, run by technology and capitalism and commercialism. The empire we exist in is a subtle hidden empire. An empire is “characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries. Empire’s rule has no limits. The concept of empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, a regime that rules over the entire civilized world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign.” (Hardt and Negri, 2000 quoted in Reynolds, Expanding Curriculum Theory (2004). McLuhan's global village concept is precisely a practical example of empire.

McLuhan and his Canadian colleagues argued that the growing information technologies would transform formal education.

The basic idea behind media theory is that communication media are not simply conduits for transmitting information. Instead the media themselves influence the meaning of a message and therefore the media shape our society. Therefore, the media ultimately shape our educational system. The medium is the message. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

McLuhan argued that all media do four things: They enhance a human function; they extend our senses. They make obsolete something that we used to use. They retrieve a function that we previously had lost. When pushed to the extreme they reverse into unintended functions.

We live in spaces. If our vision is highlighted, then we live in a visual space.
When audio is highlighted, we are in an acoustic space. Spaces were assumed to be based on our senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
Today, there seems to be a new electronic space. Or, digital space. Being thoughtful about digital space is sometimes dubbed digital citizenship.

McLuhan’s Wake is a 90 minute documentary film that explores McLuhan structured loosely through his “four laws”.

See an excellent review at http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/mcluhanswake.php

The resource guide for the film is available at
http://www.nfb.ca/webextension/mcluhanswake/resource.html

A really tough paper, which we will discuss in class eventually, can be found by googling “Household at the shore”. This paper appears in the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies in 2006.The narrative part of the text is only three pages. After that, the language is poetry. Not sure if anyone who does not yet have a topic actually wants to present this, but take a look…

Jan 21 Class: Not a summary but some pointers

We are beginning to "collect" some necessary names and concepts.
These should become automatic in your thinking about curriculum:

Kliebard for his three metaphors of production, travel and growth.
Tyler for his four focusing questions from 1949.
Ben Peretz for her concept of Curriculum Potential.
Eisner and Vallance for their five approaches to curriculum: production, academic rationalism, etc.

I tried to survey curriculum design in one hour. Tyler's questions set the stage; Oliva's 16 step model is simply an expansion of Tyler. The ABCD objectives model (audience, behavior, conditions, degree) is a tylerian focus. Two other dimensions were left unfinished. In the next class, I will provide an overview of a postmodern approach by William Doll and a tongue-in-cheek examination of how curriculum texts are produced. Doll eschews a step by step approach and suggested four characteristics that need to be part of every curriculum. (More on that next week.)

The excerpt from Camelot is presented as an example of curriculum defined as the passing on of the heritage of the past. Also significant is the "postmodern" juxtaposition of King Arthur with Sir Thomas Mallory. Arthur lived in the fifth-sixth century; Malory died 1471. The content of the conversation between the two reaches across time. (Sounds like a TV episode of Medium.)

And finally, we began our exploration into Marshall McLuhan. The over-riding question here must be "What in the world does Marshall McLuhan have to do with curriculum theory?"
One answer, so far, is that he believed strongly that everything is interrelated. Obviously, curriculum, too. A second answer is in his definition of medium: extensions of man. Media are not merely machines and information technologies. Media means anything that extends our senses. Gloves, clothes, houses, ... and even curriculum.

Curriculum Potential and the Hydrogen 7

I have read all the submitted papers. They were thoughtful and well written. There was one thing, however that almost everyone missed. (though some comments sort of side-swiped the issue). My interest was triggered by the one student who said that the purpose of the commercial was to sell those BMWs. But no one went on line to see whether there really was a Hydrogen 7. There was or is. So, look at this:

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/09/12/bmw-officially-announces-the-bmw-hydrogen-7/

There is clearly a debate as to whether the Hydrogen 7 is truly ecologically friendly, or whether swe are barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, notice that the critics sign only their name, not their credentials. Who are these guys. As it stands, this is no more than "talkback" or letters to the editors.

All of this has additional relevance to curriculum design and development. How do we know that we are teaching, as Robin Barrow asked, the right things?

Getting Ready for Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is arguably the most important University of Manitoba alumnus. He spent his formative years in Winnipeg, attending elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools. He received both his Master's and has PhD here at the U of M.

And yet, we seem to ignore him. Or, at the very least he has been forgotten. Too bad.

McLuhan's contribution to curriculum design and curriculum theory is tenuous at best. Or is it? What a wonderful topic for a thesis, or practicum topic!

What McLuhan said was that there are four laws the govern how media/technology influence us. They happen all at once in a kind of a tetrad. In order to understand our global world, we need to ask these four questions simultaneously. They are:

• What does the technology enhance?
• What does the technology obsolesce?
• What does the technology retrieve (that we have lost)?
• When pushed to the extreme, what does the technology reverse into?

We are going to explore McLuhan's real or virtual or imagined contribution to curriculum. It will take us on a journey (Remember Kliebard?). At the very least it will be a challenging journey, perhaps even "going where no one has gone before. (Those lines come from Star Trek)" The original narration of that 1966 series was

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Later, when it was determiend that the phrase was sexist, the final line was changed to "where no one has gone before.

Our purpose here is to set the stage for an analysis of McLuhan and curriculum. our mission will not be a five year one, only three months. And perhaps we are not exploring the final frontier. On the other hand, we could be breaking new ground, as we explore...Curriculum and McLuhan.

The following excerpt, found on an online blog relates mcLuhan to curriculum:

Eric McLuhan, “The new media won’t fit into the classroom”
I had the pleasure of sitting down and reading the Walrus Magazine this evening. There was a rather unflattering article on The McLuhan International Festival of the Future held recently in Toronto. This piece at the end of the article really caught my attention:

As the last few intellectual thrusts of "Probing McLuhan" wound down, a figure rose from the crowd and said a few words. The voice was eerily reminiscent of the Master, as was the rhetoric. It was Eric McLuhan. "The new media won’t fit into the classroom", he told the audience. "It already surrounds it. Perhaps that is the challenge of the counterculture. The problem is to know what questions to ask."
For the first time that afternoon there was silence, and it spoke volumes.

All of the action is outside the classroom - blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting - you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a telephone (c. 1876) in every classroom yet.
( found at http://www.jarche.com/node/view/475).

As they say on TV, stay tuned for more...

Access Class Blogs here...

In the last class we set up blogs for the assigment requiring each student to interact with the content and the ideas of each class period. Please post your blog address here as a comment.

Class Two: January 14

Class Two began with the question what is curriculum. Using the document reader, each individual presented a brief definition of what curriculum meant to them. A follow up looked a curriculum from the perspective of three metaphors presented by Kliebard: production, growth and travel. Each metaphor was found to have both strengths and problems. It was noted that while most class participants felt that their preferred metaphor was travel or growth, the official curriculum documents clearly follow the production metaphor. This disconnect provides a gap in which this course will need to explore.

A half hour break took the entire class to the computer lab (Rm 328) where everyone set up a blog. The purpose of a blog or web log is to be a kind of diary. In this course, each student is asked to keep a running blog in which individuals can interact with the content of the classes.

The final portion of the class looked at the concept of curriculum potential, a term posited by Mirriam Ben-Peretz. Her complete paper is available on JSTOR, accessible through the University of Manitoba.

In class we previewed a 60 second "commercial" titled "Hydrogen 7". (It can be accessed by doing a google search for the words Bezos and Ted. the commercial appears at the tail end of a 20 minute lecture titled "After the gold rush, there's innovation.") Don't watch the lecture; cut to the commercial starting at minute 18:00. Your task: write a one page exploration of the "curriculum potential" you see inherent in the commercial.

The argument behind the concept of curriculum potential is clearly stated by Ben-Peretz. She says that while "curriculum is the embodiment of the developers' intentions", that once the materials have left the developers hand's, they may be interpreted and used in many ways."

So what exactly is curriculum potential? I leave it to you to tease out its meaning based on the Ben-Peretz paper.

For those of you with a technology focus, there is an interesting connection to what is called learning objects. Learning objects are small units of learning, usually technologically available, that are re-useable, re-purposable, tagged, and readily available. They are the building blocks of instruction, therefore, at a wider level, the basic building blocks of curriculum.

Summary of keywords from this class:
Kliebard, curriculum metaphors, blogger, blog, Ben-Peretz, Curriculum potential, curriculum, learning object.

Class One: January 7

The opening class focused on an extended example of the Christmas Canon. Christmas as such is not a part of the formal curriculum (or is it?) And yet, it is one of the very few days in the Canadian year in which everything is closed down. The only other such day is New Year's Day. All others seem to be susceptible to political and commercial influence.

So what is special about Christmas? Is there a canon a "representative works" in music that exists. What is the "story" underlying that canon.

This demonstration illustrates that there are in fact many "stories", many legends, many songs, many practices. Christmas becomes a postmodern phenomenon that transcends any initial canonical discussion. Issues of audience, power, and genealogy are all part of the discussion.

Ultimately, this is a metaphor for curriculum itself as we move beyond a specific story into the broad world of education, curriculum and society.

*****

Day One also introduced the course outline and set the stage for what is to follow.

Welcome to EDUB7560

This is the official course blog for EDUB 7560 Theory and Practice of Curriculum Design.

The course runs from January to March 2008.