SXSWedu 2017: Day 3 “Recap”

Published in

eduCreators

7 min readMar 17, 2017

In which I try to recap 1.5% of an entire day of the SXSWedu conference in Austin, TX; an impossible task, thanks to the sheer number of sessions, panels, and just general awesomeness taking place.

Keynote: Tim Ferriss

Author of The Four Hour Workweek, The Four Hour Body, The Four Hour Chef, and most recently, Tools of Titans. Host of The Tim Ferriss Show, and his own favorite guinea pig.

For what it’s worth, I had already registered for SXSWedu before Tim was announced as a keynote speaker. It didn’t influence my decision to go, but it certainly created an outstanding thing to look forward to. And I’m proud to say that he didn’t disappoint me — although a heckler in the audience may have been less happy to see him take the stage. But I digress.

I’ve been a fan of Tim’s for many years and own each and every one of his books. I was a bit surprised when he was announced as a keynote speaker because, despite being an advisor to DonorsChoose, I didn’t really know where Tim fell on the issue of classroom education. He’s known for his ability to pick up almost any skill or ability and boil it down to its most important components, but he’s never publicly turned his eye towards public education in America.

His message, fortunately, was not full of mandates for how teachers should teach and how schools should be run, but instead focused on what is actually important: how (and why) we learn.

Because of the nature of this keynote — a conversation between Charles Best of DonorsChoose and Tim — the subject tended to jump from time to time, so it’d be best to check out my entire assortment of notes in the link below. Here are some of the more significant things that stood out, though:

Now, more than ever, we should all read the book Bad Science.
When asked who should lead the “ultimate” school, Tim suggested Josh Waitzkin, the real-life inspiration for the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Among several reasons, Tim noted that Waitzkin is excellent at identifying the “lead domino” in any complex situation.
In the modern age, the ability to singletask is a superpower.
What’s the best “operating system” for life? Stoicism. (Agreed.)
Why has Tim supported DonorsChoose throughout the years? It’s run like a lean for-profit, and they’re transparent about how every dollar is spent. Further, you get tangible results for your investment.
Tim’s mission, at least so far as he outlined it for those attending SXSWedu, is to create “a benevolent army of learners”. I can get behind that.

For more information about this session, visit my notes. And if you also attended this keynote, feel free to add your own thoughts. Everyone has the access to both view and edit that document.

Workshop: Creating Communities of Opportunity for All

Speaking from personal experience, it happens every once in awhile that you prepare a presentation, a class, a lecture, etc. and only once you step into the room and come before your audience does the content take on a life of its own. I think that may have been the case in this workshop; with about 15 minutes left on the clock, I suddenly realized that there hadn’t been much interactivity in this interactive workshop.

That being said, there was a lot to take from this session, which became more like a lecture from presenters Michael McAfee (Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute) and Jessica Pizarek (PolicyLink associate) and allowed for enough time to get meaningful questions and feedback from those who attended. This information is best viewed in the notes in the link below.

For more information about this session, visit my notes. And if you also attended this workshop, feel free to add your own thoughts. Everyone has the access to both view and edit that document.

Workshop: Examining Truth: Teaching the New Nonfiction

From one extreme to the other: Jason Griffith, teaching associate and PhD student from Arizona State University, has classroom experience, and it shows in the way he’s able to take any audience, including a room full of adults, and make them feel like they’re back in school… in a good way!

“How many truths are there?” A simple question, but one with a multitude of answers. A conservative response might be to distinguish between truth and Truth; there are many truths (how we individually perceive things to be), but only one Truth (the actual event that occurs). A dangerous answer, especially in our current political climate, might be to say that there are an infinite number of truths.

And the right answer? We’re still waiting on that one.

“Anyone who thinks narrative is easy hasn’t written a single story in a long time. Perhaps ever.” — Penny Kittle

Narrative disrespect

There’s a tendency to consider creative nonfiction/literary nonfiction/narrative nonfiction as being inferior to true nonfiction writing. But in fact, narrative writing is possibly the most difficult genre to do well. Going back to the question of truth — for some stories, what’s more important, telling the story exactly as it happened, or telling the story so that anyone wants to hear it?

Reading activities for nonfiction study

Just a few quick takeaways in terms of potential activities that classroom teachers can use when focusing on creative nonfiction or narrative writing:

Before reading, create inquiry questions on the topic
1:1:1 research paper — students choose one source, one quote, and write one page about the idea
Empathy checkins — how are the characters feeling, why are they feeling that way, what about their background or experience leads them to act the way they do, etc.
Investigate “ancillary nonfiction” about the subject — other books or articles, podcasts, videos, photographs or charts, etc.
When watching a movie based on nonfiction, or vice versa, act as “rhetorical detectives” and compare/contrast the two different stories, and consider why the author or director chose to make any changes to the narrative
Reach out and interact directly with authors, experts, or “characters” in a story or article you’re reading

For more information about this session, visit my notes. And if you also attended this workshop, feel free to add your own thoughts. Everyone has the access to both view and edit that document.

Panel: Oh, I Get It!

There was an underlying theme to some of the sessions that I attended today: no matter how important a truth may be, a story told poorly does no one any good. In this panel discussion featuring Ardon Shorr (researcher and student at Carnegie-Mellon and co-founder of Public Communication for Researchers), Jon Marcus (Higher-Ed editor for The Hechinger Report), and Bari Walsh (Editor of Usable Knowledge for the Harvard Graduate School of Education) this theme was explored even further to apply to scientists, researchers, and educators.

Because we’re trained to establish credibility, professionals without plenty of communication training tend to front-load their audiences with background information, followed by extensive details supporting the inevitable results, which finally comes in the form of overwhelming data and vague conclusions… but as Ardon pointed out, complex doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, if you take that same approach and flip it upside down, you can create a much more effective means of communicating important information.

When sharing results of a study, researchers should start with the bottom line (the outcome) and then answer the inevitable question of “so what?” Later in the discussion, Ardon shared a formula that he teaches the researchers he works with: We want [goal], but [obstacle]. When you start with what’s at stake, your audience is invested in the outcome, for better or for worse.

The panel also warned professionals of overly hedging their words. For instance, we often want to phrase things in a way that gives us an escape route if we’re incorrect or the circumstances change. When talking about a project, you might want to say that the results will “substantially transform” an industry, but instead you settle on claiming that the experiment is “designed to explore the topic”.

And finally, Walsh suggested that the question for journalists or writers tasked with summarizing complex information to ask themselves shouldn’t be “who is this important to?”… the more important question is “who SHOULD it be important to?”

For more information about this session, visit my notes. And if you also attended this panel discussion, feel free to add your own thoughts. Everyone has the access to both view and edit that document.

Panel: Is A PhD Right for Me?

Spoiler alert: I don’t think a PhD is right for me.

Presenting their thoughts on the process of considering a PhD program was Adam Fontecchio (Drexel University), Christopher Laincz (Drexel University), Dianne Le (Stanford University), and Cora MacBeth (Emory University); and they did so in one of the most honest and straightforward conversations I’ve been present for.

A PhD is an intensely difficult thing to attain, made even more difficult if you’re not pursuing it for the right reasons. The primary goal of a PhD program is to train you to do academic research; the secondary goal is to be an educator. For many in attendance at SXSWedu, such as myself, an EdD might be more desirable, because while PhDs do research and work on finding solutions to problems, it’s the EdD’s responsibility to implement them, and that’s where the real distinction between those programs is made.