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Not how, but why: Ferdi Serim on the Internet in the classroom
Musician, teacher, systems analyst--he's been all three, and from his experiences, he has derived a holistic view of answers to the question: "Why is technology important in teaching and learning?" By Linda Prior SCR*TEC I have found that through humor and through metaphors, you can take people who may be stuck approaching something directly head-on and just skew it a little bit off to the side. Then that new perspective opens up a possibility that wasn't there before. --Ferdi Serim |
 erdi Serim,
a computer teacher and technology coordinator for
the Princeton school district in New Jersey, has developed a unique voice
both in his writing and his music. A dynamic speaker, Ferdi can take a
complex issue and enable audiences to wrap their minds around the concept in a
new way by connecting it to more familiar issues.With a firm belief that educators are the best-equipped to help each other learn to utilize the unique capabilities of the Internet, Ferdi and Bonnie Bracey, teacher in residence at Arlington Career Center, in Arlington, Virginia, spearheaded the Online Internet Institute (OII). Proposed and funded in 1995, this project brings together a community of educators as learners and teachers, providing online and onsite support for integrating the Internet into their teaching. In another effort to help other educators, Ferdi and co-author Melissa Koch compiled a book of first-hand accounts from educators about their Net experiences, NetLearning: Why Teachers Use the Internet. The book deals less with the changing technology than it does with the more enduring question: why is it so important that technology become integral to teaching? |
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What brought about the Online Internet Institute? At my school there are about 30 teachers, but as technology coordinator for the Princeton school district, I also work 270 other teachers who aren't in my building. I realized that my time, 30 percent of which is devoted to these teachers, would give each one of them 41 minutes a year of my undivided attention, which obviously wasn't enough to bring them along. So what I did with that 40 minutes of time was use it in the few inservices that we did. I trained them on how to use our e-mail system. I said, "If you use this system, I am never more than two or three minutes away from helping you, because I keep my e-mail up all the time. If I hear it ding, I walk over to the screen, and half the time or more I can say, 'Here, that's what that is,' or 'Here is someone who knows what that is right in your same building.'" And people get help almost instantaneously. Plus, they begin to understand that they can help one another. |
Ferdi compares the spread of technology use among teachers to the spread of Be-Bop during
WWII.
Listen in! |
So, Bonnie Bracey and I looked at how we could create
something like that, like the spread of Be-Bop during WWII. We approached the National
Science Foundation and they said,
"No, we don't send people around, we don't do these kind of tours, but if you
build this online, maybe we could support that part of it." And so, I sent
out a single e-mail message in January of 1995 to 20 or so of the luminaries
on the Internet. And I posted this message to them saying, "We've got
this idea." I told them what the idea was, and I said, "Would you be willing to
advise us on a project?" Unanimously they said, "No, we don't want to advise
it, we want to do it." Because it offered them an opportunity to collaborate
that they simply didn't have . . . . It was a non-threatening way to try out some
of the things that would be too outrageous for them to try out in their own
grant. So, about two weeks later we had a pretty good proposal. . . And
indeed we were funded for one year. You know the rest, as they say, "is history
being written." We are unique in that we were born on the Internet and then took root in real life. Most of the things that you see on the Internet now were already existing in real life, and then transported themselves to the Net. . . . We have been a very distributed group--I see us more like the Iroquois Confederacy than anything else. We didn't even exist as an organization until last month, and, finally, we took the step of applying for non-profit status and becoming a legal entity. And we really didn't need to, because, like the Iroquois Confederacy, which was a bunch of sovereign nations, in this case individuals, coming together still retaining their identities, still retaining their own agendas and purposes, and needs. And yet they found that their common cause united them and that they could gain far more from cooperation than they could through competition. That's been the hallmark of the Internet, and it's been the hallmark of our way of operating, too. |
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Does this spill over into your teaching, this notion that people
learning to use technology can help each other? It has been very interesting, because the way I've structured it . . . my lab is the teacher's classroom when they are in here. I don't have any courses where I teach computer per se. I am the chameleon. This room teaches every subject in the school so far except physical education. . . . But we've done everything from nuclear physics to writing to multicultural to cooking to AIDS. Because of that, the objectives of this room are the objectives the teachers bring with them to the room. Everybody is learning how to do their work using the technology, which is the context that is required. . . . We, like other people, have a Wizard. Everyone needs a wizard who understands the technical aspects. In our case, Peter Thompson does all that. He's responsible for us having this wonderful network, he's the one who handles the money and the purchase of software and all that stuff. He does the hardware and the software. I call myself the "wetware"--what happens just between the ears. So we have a very good relationship. Since I've been a systems analyst for six years, I did nothing basically but play with computers for 15,000 hours on that job. Peter and I speak the same language. What took you from computer analyst into teaching? Well, I actually started as a music teacher. I am the poster child for five careers. I guess that's what the thing I send you will say in the bio. It is literally true. I started out in '73, when I was leaving school. I had to decide if I wanted to be a musician or a teacher. I decided at that point that it would take me at least 10 years to learn how to play my instrument to the level I wanted. At that time, I was worried that in 10 years there wouldn't be any--or they would be very hard to find--audiences that understood how to listen to the type of music that I played. So I said, "I better grow some of these people," and I became a music teacher. But I put up a prayer and said, "Please, please don't let me be one of those teachers who, at the end of 10 years, can teach but can't play." And 10 years from that day, just about, I was no longer a teacher --I was on the bandstand with Dissie Gilespie. So I guess the prayer was answered. Great! It's been a lot of fun. Working with Dissie gave me the courage to try a lot of things I do today. He showed me that you can follow almost any dream and not worry too much about whether people are there yet or not. |
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In one of your essays you say that teaching is a life sentence, and
that many don't feel that they have been accused of premeditated curiosity.
How do we encourage people to have premeditated curiosity? Well, I think that it's a blending. There are some things that we can't control, there are some things that we can nurture. There has to be a readiness and that readiness has been conditioned by experience. And there has to be support. There have to be people who are willing to go to where that person is and make them feel comfortable, make them feel confident enough to take the step. You learn to swim upstream, to swim against the tide. But you learn that there are many others out there, with whom you can bond. And I think that there are far many more people who are sort of in that middle state who just simply don't identify themselves with certain practices. On the Internet, we're concerned with URLs, which are Universal Resource Locators. And in my book, I say the quote, "May your URLs give you richer IRLs," and IRL is "In Real Life." The purpose of everything is to change what is happening in real life, and becoming acquainted with what is happening in cyber space is merely a transitional stage. There is a certain point where we become enamoured of it. We become addicted to it. We jump into it headlong. Then there's another stage, I believe, beyond that, where we take friendships we develop and also the information that we gather, the challenges that we get, and the support that we get--we take all of those and we apply them back to our real life. It's not just simply a matter of perfecting one's thoughts or one's wishes for the world, but how you play them out with other people. The conundrum here is that our society places a very, very high premium on individuality and yet we've created more conformity than any other culture. Far more of us could be reacting in creative ways if we didn't have it beaten out of us through various experiences. |
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Let's go on to NetLearning. How did you come up with the concept
and what went into the book? The book that was written twice. It's really interesting to me now. The book was started in 1994, right before I came to Princeton. And two very good friends of mine had been writing this book for a year and a half before that. It was going to be the K-12 Internet book. They gathered so much research, so much stuff, my take on it is that they went snow blind. Literally, they lost the power of speech before the enormity of information they collected. They recommended to the publisher that I finish it. So I said, "Okay, that sounds good." And they said, "We'll give you all our stuff, if you want." You know, I could never bring myself to see it. Because I was afraid that the same thing would happen to me. I knew that there is so much stuff out there that you could lose the power of speech over it. And so, I tried to think what would be helpful and what would be lasting. |
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How should teaching and learning change? Listen
in! |
The first time I wrote the book, I did have the idea that
"Why?" is more of a durable question than "How?" would be. Because how
would be continually changing. What people didn't understand as well as
the technology was the context into which that technology needs to be
introduced--the environment that supports certain types of things.
And I understood from my own experience that the types of changes that
are required in teaching and learning are exactly coherent with the types
of changes that reformers have been advocating ever since Dewey. It's about learning how to learn. It's about getting the confidence that you can learn what you need to know and that other people will help you. It's about knowing how to relate to other people. And then finally, it's about knowing how to collaborate with other people. These things are not right now in the top 10 curriculum outcomes for most experiences happening in most schools, in most classrooms. Even when the goals are there, the ways they are carried out is not, the walk doesn't match the talk, the music doesn't match the words, etc., etc. There's still a disconnect. I think the technology takes things up so much that there's just the possibility you might reorganize things in a way that is more conducive to those kinds of outcomes. |
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So, all that went into NetLearning. The first time I wrote it,
Gopher was the hot thing. And by the time it was done, it sat at the
publishers for about six months while they were figuring out what to do about
editing it. And then in that six months was the time, and really this did happen
in six months, when Mosaic was introduced, and it was sort of like, some
day there will be enough schools to get on there with enough connectivity to do
it. And then Netscape came out. It literally changed everything. So the
book had to be totally rewritten. And as that happened, it was really
wonderful. Melissa was the editor of the book originally, and as it had to become
rewritten, it became very clear that it would be a very boring book if all it had
were my stories in it. And it would also put the wrong message out there. So
Melissa went out and found a couple hundred other people who had been
doing wonderful stuff and also did the existing project type stuff . . .
and I did the more contextual stuff--community outreach,
professional development, all that. Plus, in the mean time, OII
happened. First the book spawned OII, but then OII was happening and it provided some very compelling examples of collaboration that could go into it. About the nicest thing people have said is, "You know this has saved me hundreds of hours. And this has given me courage to go and try stuff and I still find it useful, and I show it to other people and they begin to understand." It's a good question to ask, whether the Internet is hope or hype, but once you figure that out, you still have the question, "What do I do with it? Okay, if I do get this connection, how can it help me? How can it help me as a learner?" So where did NetLearning come from? It was an idea that by telling these stories it might help people to expand the number of people who could help themselves and help each other. |
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What role does technology have in teaching and learning? It makes it possible for the first time for truly individualized learning to happen. It makes it possible for us to have access to informational resources that no school could have ever had before. It makes it possible for us to have it outside of school. It makes it possible for us to have it at any time, if we have access to the technology. The other thing--it makes it possible for us to collaborate with people who share our interests and share our needs in ways that are not mediated by existing cultural and organizational structures, so that it can be one-to-one out of millions of people, or two-to-one, or one-to-many. There are options now that are just free-ranging. Every day there are more demands being placed on the user of this technology in terms of their higher level thinking, in terms of their information literacy. By that I mean not only their ability to read, but their ability to do independent learning, their ability to tie their learning to things that interact in their world. [The] gap between the people who use [technology] as just another form of TV and those who grasp that this can actually change and enrich their lives is growing by the minute. And the more powerful technology becomes, the worse the gap becomes. So, I think in a way, we're in a race. And so far the hardware is doing better than the software, and the software is doing better than the people. |
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What's the role of government, communities, and business? What
should they do? What can they do in education and educational technology? That role will emerge if they ever start talking to each other and each realizes that each one is not the problem, but that together they are collectively the solution. . . . I would love to see it where everybody . . . if you are running for the school board, you would maybe spend a week in the school. If you are making government regulations, it would be nice if you had to do payroll for a month. In other words, we need to walk in each others' shoes for a little bit before we have enough understanding, almost like prison reform, where everyone has these really great ideas about what we should do to these people, but no one has ever spent any time in any of those situations. It is easy to have easy solutions when you are not in the situations. If we can find ways of crossing these boundaries between government, between business, between education, between community, and begin to see that the community is really all of its people and that some of the people are serving in government, some of the people are serving in education, some of the people are serving by organizing wealth in terms of business . . . it's got to be a win-win situation. It's got to take different kinds of thinking and behaviors. One of the things that recently became clear is that if we applied what's known as systems thinking to that question, "What is the role?" we would come out with very different answers and behaviors and instruction than we have right now. And people are beginning to do that, so that is also very encouraging. |
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What do you think is the greatest barrier to using technology? Time. . . . It takes an amazing amount of time to acclimate oneself to the environment and to . . . see the potentials and to know what to do with the potential that you see. I think I may be at a 40 percent level of being able to grab the potential that I see. . . . I did a workshop yesterday, and the people really know quite a bit, but they don't have the time to take what they know and a lot of it will die on the vine. . . . There's no way out but through, is what it boils down to, and so much of the teacher's time is taken up with stuff that doesn't further their growth and so many people don't have connectivity at home where they might have the time to do this. There's not time within the day to orient your students to doing work . . . project-type work, and I don't think that projects are the answer to everything, they're simply a strategy. It's pretty tricky. What's the answer? Restructuring and prioritizing. Taking a hard look at what we do and jettisoning that which doesn't work. A very good friend of mine said that she was in a workshop once, and that someone asked at this workshop, "How long would it take to change education?" and the presenter answered, "You could do it virtually instantly, but it's taking you forever to make up your minds to do it." And that's pretty much true. |
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