Speaker 1: It's my privilege to be a teacher. I get to teach university physics classes. I get to run science programs for kids and their families. I get to teach teachers how to teach, which is a ridiculously high-stakes, bizarre kind of gig. And in all of this, I have the unique qualification that I am confident that I don't know what I'm doing. And through that, what I find myself doing is continually looking for some kind of new innovation or new tool that I could be using in education. So that's kind of my quest. That is my dream. That's the kind of path I want to take you along with on this particular talk. One of the tools that I'm particularly intrigued with has actually been around for a long time, and I'm actually using it today. It is the PowerPoint slide. This is the first PowerPoint slide. Some of you recognize it as being newspaper rock. And I imagine that someone, I imagine his name was Pedro, after these glyphs are now known as Pedro's glyphs. He thought that I have a story, yeah, thank you for getting it. I have a story to tell, and I want that story to be embedded into some kind of script. So he put the glyphs onto the rock so that others can kind of follow along with the story. Now it's subtly different from PowerPoint slides that you're familiar with, but pretty much the same kind of thing. You've got some kind of wall there. You've got some kind of understanding that you want to get across. And it's the classic PowerPoint slide because it's got way too much information on it all at once. No one can understand it unless Pedro is there to kind of explain it to you. And students all over the desert southwest have taken notes and inscribed it into their own walls everywhere that we go. So you can kind of see where this is going. I've got these innovations that I'm looking for, and I can also see that some of these we've seen before. In fact, one of those, the TEDx lecture, actually started back in medieval times. This is TED. And you can see some kind of format that's very similar to what we have right here. Some kind of genius eloquent speaker coming up next is up there in front. And we've got several people in the audience, some of whom don't seem to be able to persevere through the 15-minute talk, and they're falling asleep in the third row. So free tickets. What can we say? So this lecture format is something, the idea is worth spreading, is something we've done before and we're kind of recapturing it for today. Of course, lecture isn't the only way that we'd want to have our courses constructed. So we often look to flipped courses. And flipped courses, the idea being you'd go home, you get some kind of information, you bring it into yourself so that when you get to the class, you can actually do something other than the lecture. And nowadays, we have some kind of technology that allows that material to be readily accessed through the internet. Back in my day, we called these things textbooks. And they came along after the printing press so that you could actually go home, read the things that you're supposed to read, and do other things besides lecture in the classroom. Of course, if you wanted to expand this quite broadly, you could have something that would be massive, that could be transmitted to lots of people, and the internet is a great tool for that. So are these things called televisions. And back in the 1960s, this was seen as a great way to expand our reach, vastly extending the reach of the nation's best teachers, which strangely hasn't really taken off as much as they thought it would. And we wonder about these things called MOOCs, massively open online courses, and will they expand in the same way that television did? That open of the massively open online courses, that's something else that we should kind of investigate. Can we get materials out there to the people that aren't copyrighted or don't cost very much or somehow are readily accessible? And open educational resources are trying to do just this. This idea is brand new as of 2,000 years ago. There was this fellow by the name of Jesus, and he literally stood on the mountaintops to kind of get this understanding out there to the world. And now you can read what he said in all kinds of books that are freely distributed and probably in every nightstand drawer of every hotel you ever stay at. The problem is not that we haven't read the words, blessed are the meek, or do unto others, or love thy neighbor. It's just that we have a hard time getting that into practice. Of these innovations, my favorite is probably the one that came about at our Sputnik moment, the first Sputnik moment, the moment when the Russians sent the big shiny beach ball up into space that went beep, beep, beep, and we all had this collective expletive panic of what do we do now? We need to start the space race and protect ourselves from nuclear holocaust. And so education kicked in and did their part, and they produced the first interactive whiteboard or smartboard known as the overhead projector. In 1957 or after 1957, science teaching textbooks literally would tell you as a science teacher how to build one of these and how to use them, how to manipulate things, annotate things, the same things that we do with smartboards, and they actually impacted things like classrooms. You can see this is a diverse classroom. We've got some left-handed people and some right-handed people. We have long-haired people and short-haired people, and we have a screen off to the side so that we can kind of get the best use of that overhead projector. And of course, we continue to use the same kind of classroom format and lots of settings. This is probably not unfamiliar to you, including this conference presentation. It's a little different. The screen is on the right. There's no windows. This is part of a conference on educational reform, just so you know. It was a while ago. It was in 2013, and it was a year ago. So I'm being kind of a jerk. At first, it was funny, and now I'm just being a jerk. I see all of these innovations that I'm told or offered as this is a great way to innovate what you're doing to improve education, and I see all of these as being things that I think we've done before, maybe a long time ago. So I'm left with the thought of what else can I turn to? So I turn to a scrapbook I have, and I collect pictures or I take pictures in the scrapbook of learningful moments, and I want those learningful moments to kind of inform me about what I want learning to be. Some of those include things that we do at Science in the Parks. This is a whole bunch of kids with their hands literally in the science of the stuff called oobleck. We say it's a non-Newtonian fluid. That just means we don't know what it is really. It's cornstarch and water. They're mixing it together. They're letting it run through their hands, and when they squish it together, it compacts, and they can ball it up, and they can smack it. It feels hard and soft and gooey all at the same time. Or these kids playing around with gyroscopes, and if you've never felt a gyroscope spinning before, it's magic. I don't know how to explain it. My four-year-old nephew, Sam, will say it's not magic, it's science, but no, it really feels like magic, and if you haven't felt that, you don't know what rotation momentum is all about. Or this kid who, with me, we put our bellies down into the grass, got some hand lenses, and explored the jungle of the grass and the dirt and the critters that were there. Or these teachers wandering off into the do-not-enter-there's-a-flood-here zone, because they needed to meet with a geologist, or the teachers on the other side crawling out of fiery furnace and arches literally getting their hands on the geology to do this. These teachers are trying to figure out what's the relationship between the sun and the earth and the motions therein, and a little bit about where it is that they are on this globe by using a mop broom, a shadow of that mop broom, and then tracing out with chalk that shadow being cast over the course of a day. These science education researchers, they're getting together without an overhead projector, because they don't have answers. They're coming to this conference that we've run, Science Education at the Crossroads, to try to figure out what are their problems and how can they continue to work on these problems. They're also wearing name badges that are hand-printed by first graders so that they could be continually reminded of why they're there. These moms and daughters are balancing so that they can understand the center of mass of astronomical systems by actually becoming that astronomical system themselves, getting involved in that process. This, well, that's me, my favorite picture, and a bunch of groupies after a physics open house. These are the kids that hung out after we've shown them all the lectures and the demos and the cool things. They couldn't leave. They wanted to see what exactly does it look like when that balloon is going into the liquid nitrogen. I've got liquid nitrogen in between my legs. It's a couple hundred degrees below freezing, but I've got a safety vest, apparently a misplaced precaution. They really wanted to know what exactly is going on. They couldn't leave. Their parents are off there on the side, kind of tapping their foot. All of these images leave me with another thought, that maybe there are other alternatives to our innovations in education. In particular, there are two things that I take away from this. The first is that when we talk about overhead projectors and we talk about MOOCs and we talk about open educational resources, we're often stuck in that narrow view of learning as being, how do I get this information from here into here? Of course, learning is a lot more than that. Learning is about dancing. It's about serving. It's about reading. It's about doing. It's about practicing. It's about becoming. We have all these possibilities for learning. We have to think about what those could possibly be before we start to think about how we're going to innovate. Second of all, I think often we're asking the wrong question altogether when we ask the question, how do I teach or how do I innovate? If we're already thinking about how do I get information from here to here, then we're going to keep doing the same thing, obviously, over and over again. I think we need to ask the question, why are we educating? Why would we innovate? You could have many different answers for this. If you don't have one, here's a couple. These are my answers. You can borrow them if you want. Anna and Grace, depending on the day, Anna and Grace represent for me as my daughters not just themselves but also their peers, their generation, the society that they're growing into, the world that they inherit from us. For me, that's the why. That's the question we need to pose. If we look at them and look them in the eye and say, this smart board's good enough. I can't do it. That's not good enough. This is messy. We can't wait for an innovation to come down from somewhere else and be bestowed upon us to save our educational systems or even improve my own class. This is hard work. This takes gumption. This takes bravery. This is going to be messy and we can't afford for it to be otherwise. Thank you.