Digital Filing Cabinet: Overview



 


 * "The strongest memory is not as strong as the weakest ink." (Confucius, 551-479 B.C.)


 * “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” (Samuel Johnson; British author and father of the English dictionary; 1709–1784.)

Introduction




Traditionally, a filing cabinet contains drawers suitable for storing print material.

The filing cabinet being discussed in this IAE-pedia document is electronic—it stores computer-readable documents.

I began to think about the idea of a Digital Filing Cabinet (DFC) about the time that CD-ROMs for computers began to be widely available. By the late 1980s, CD-ROMs could be mass produced and duplicated at a cost making it possible for free or inexpensive distribution to preservice and inservice teachers—provided that the content didn't cost much. I envisioned the various teacher professional societies developing CD-ROMs of material that they would make available free or at low cost to preservice and inservice teachers.

In those days, a CD-ROM could store about 500 million bytes of data. This is equivalent to about 500 medium-length books. At that time, I was particularly interested in math education and computers in education. I could imagine students taking one of my computers-in-education courses and being given a free library of many thousands of pages of material relevant to this emerging field of study.

I wrote about this idea while I was engaged in some 1987-88 volunteer math education work with the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Some of this work eventually contributed to the NCTM Standards that came out in 1989.

In 1987, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. That added a powerful new dimension to the storage and distribution of information.

I am sure that other people were having similar mass distribution ideas. However, the math education community and many other groups of educations did not seize upon and widely adopt the idea of free or inexpensive CD-ROMs full of "good stuff."

Now, more that 25 years later, the situation is greatly changed. We still have very inexpensive CD-ROM disks and CD-ROM read/write devices. In addition, we have very inexpensive thumb drives with greater capacity than a CD-ROM and faster read/write times. (On 8/17/2016 I say a 64 Gigabyte thumb drive for under $20.)

Overshadowing this, however, is the World Wide Web. Now, as we organize and prepare materials to make available to preservice and inservice teachers—and their students—we can just put the materials on the Web. Or, if the materials are already on the Web, all we need to do is to provide students with brief descriptions and links.

However, that misses several important points. The key idea of a personal Digital Filing Cabinet is that the owner has both personal knowledge of the meaning and use of the material, and choice of what material to include in the filing cabinet. A useful analogy is the idea of owning a collection of books that one has read and keeps in a personal library. These same books are likely available in a public or educational institution library, or can be readily purchased. Personal ownership, the added value of having read the content and integrated it into one's overall knowledge base, and ready availability are all important aspects of a personal electronic digital filing cabinet.

Still another important point is that you, personally, have screened materials in your DFC for validity and credibility. You are confident enough in the content so that you may well use it in the future and you are willing to share it with others. IAE has published a (free) book on this topic. See:


 * Moursund, D., & Sylwester, R., eds. (10/9/2015). Validity and Credibility of Information. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Download a free Microsoft Word file from http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/275-validity-and-credibility-of-information/file.html. Download a free PDF file from http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/277-validity-and-credibility-of-information-2/file.html.

Improving Teacher Education
The goal of the DFC project is to improve teacher education. It is built on three ideas:


 * To provide preservice and inservice teachers with materials that are specifically designed to help them during their initial and lifelong learning and teaching professional careers.
 * To help the preservice and inservice teachers to gain personal ownership of the materials through frequent use, addition to, modification of, and sharing of the materials.
 * To provide teachers of teachers with the materials from (1) above, help in making (2) occur, and make available additional materials designed to support the work of teachers of teachers.

As an example, consider a preservice elementary school teacher just beginning college. This student is thinking, "I believe I want to become an elementary school teacher." What can we give this student that can be stored on his or her computer, retrieved and used when useful, and edited and added to at will?

We want some of this material to be integrated into (or, at least made use of) in the various courses the student will take during the four to five years or more required to gain teacher certification. We want the preservice teacher to learn how to share such materials with other preservice and inservice teachers. We want the materials and their storage, manipulation, and retrieval system to be the foundations for a filing cabinet that the teacher will gain ownership of over time and will continue to add to and make use of throughout his or her teaching career.

A Grand Challenge to Education Researchers and Writers
In the most grand version of this DFC project, I think of a three-dimensional matrix. One axis is grade levels starting at PK, K, 1, 2, and extending up through or beyond a master's degree in teacher education. (This is about 20 levels.) The second axis is the content areas taught in school, including language arts, math, science, social science, and so on. (This might be 20 items or so.) The third axis is three items: Content Knowledge, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), and Pedagogical Knowledge.



This means there may well be over a thousand cells that are relevant to the task at hand. There is a cell for second grade science content. There is a cell for 10th grade biology PCK. Many of the cells would benefit by having quite a lot of information presented from varying points of view. In addition, each cell can benefit by having an annotated bibliography of references to good, up-to-date, and long-lasting free materials on the Web. By "annotated" I mean a complete reference accompanied by a paragraph or two summarizing the most important idea or ideas available at the reference site. By long-lasting, I mean Web sites that are being run by stable organizations and people in such a manner that they are apt to still exist and be of still more use a number of years from now.

The articles themselves need to be written by highly qualified experts on the topic of each cell. A required qualification is that the writer thoroughly know the problems of the teachers the cell is written for and what will help them. To a large extent, this requires a "been there, tried, suffered, learned, have continued to learn, and I can help you" approach.

The general discipline that covers this type of accumulated knowledge, skills, and resources is called the Science of Teaching and Learning or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Notice that both titles use the acronym SoTL. See.

The content of a cell can be aimed at a person as a teacher, a person as a learner, or both. The content of a cell is designed to:


 * Help the person gain increased expertise. The emphasis is on expertise that will be of long-lasting, continuing value, and that can be used and built upon to lead to still higher levels of understanding and expertise.
 * Help the person do a "just in time" review of key aspects of SoTL. Forgetting is a natural process. A quick review of fundamental ideas and definitions can help a person quickly refresh knowledge that is slowly fading into the background of his or her mind.
 * Provide a framework, encouragement, and perhaps leading questions that will facilitate the reader personalizing the content of the cell, thereby gaining increased ownership and understanding of the content. You want the reader to practice saying, thinking, and writing the ideas in their own words.

A teacher of teachers might well want to have DFCs containing all of the content described above. In addition, the teacher of teacher needs materials that are specific to the content, PCK, and pedagogy of being a teacher of teachers.

The IAE-pedia As an Example
When I started the IAE-pedia in 2007, I really did not have a clear idea about what it would be or where it would go. I just wanted to organize some of my years of work in education and share it with others. Gradually it dawned on me that the IAE-pedia is much like a Digital Filing Cabinet with two audiences:


 * Myself.
 * People who are interested in improving informal and formal education throughout the world. These people want to improve their own education and the education of others. It includes preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and teachers of teachers, as well as parents, other educators, and so on.

It has become obvious to me that the creation of an education-oriented DFC to serve the needs and wants of these two audiences is well beyond the capabilities of any one individual.

What I think is needed is a combination of:


 * Having the creation and use of personal electronic digital filing cabinets become a routine component of preservice and inservice teacher education.
 * Having many people make DFC contributions to the IAE-pedia and to other websites that don't charge for access to their content.

Perhaps the single most important idea of a personal DFC is that the creator/owner needs to be using it regularly, adding to it, integrating it with his or her previous knowledge and collected materials, and doing other things to increase personal ownership, familiarity, and comfort of use.

Another really important idea is the extent to which a person wants to share contents of his or her personal DFC. It is now common for people to have collections of digital photographs and videos that they want to make available to either restricted audiences (such as one's family and close friends) or to the world. A Blog might well be a part of one's personal DFC. Some people make use of various versions of Wiki software.

The idea of sharing with the world is a key aspect of the DFC. The Wikipedia provides an excellent example, as do various social networking systems. From my personal point of view, every person is a lifelong learner and a lifelong teacher. As teachers, we help others learn through our conversations with and interactions with others. We can also help others to learn through our postings to the Web.

One of the things I would like to see happen is for each teacher education institution or program of study to develop a Digital Filing Cabinet that is aligned to its courses, programs of study, and other college/university coursework relevant to preservice and inservice teachers. For example, it may be that preservice elementary teachers take a math methods course from the College of Education and some Math for Elementary Teachers courses from the Mathematics Department. Each of these types of courses needs to be covered in the DFC.

I want to stress once more the importance of students becoming personally acquainted with the content of each item selected for their own personal DFC. The Web or any online library can be thought of as a DFC. But a personal DFC is like an extension of one's personal knowledge and experiences. Items in it are "mentally" linked with a person's total knowledge and experience, and these links are maintained and grow through regular use.

Example: A DFC as a Term Project in a Teacher Education Course
It is now routine for preservice and inservice teacher education courses to include assignments in which the students find, develop, organize, and share materials with their fellow students. This idea can be broadened so that the goals are to provide such materials for future students in the course, and for preservice and inservice teachers who could benefit by access to the materials. Thus, think of these course projects as part of a larger and continuing project that is powered by students, one that contributes to improving the education of current and future teachers.

I have used this idea as an important component of a distance learning course for inservice K-8 math and science teachers. Click here for an extensive syllabus for the course.

I used a somewhat similar idea many years earlier when I had students in one of my graduate seminars write a book that was subsequently published by the International Society for Technology in Education.


 * Austin Tackett; Francisco Caracheo; Robin Davis; Octavio Henao; Beth Morgan; Dave Moursund; John Owens; Mark Standley (1993, 2004). The Technology Advisory Council: A Vehicle for Improving Education. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Access at http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/190-the-technology-advisory-council-a-vehicle-for-improving-our-schools-.html.

Guidelines and Suggestions for Potential IAE-pedia DFC Article Authors
Here is a summary of some ideas to think about as you develop a DFC type of document to include in the IAE-pedia.


 * Who is the intended audience? Make this explicit. The reader is unlikely to have a good mental image of the "big picture" of a DFC in a particular academic discipline. So, include a discussion of the"big picture."
 * Think in terms of lesson planning rather than in terms of specific lesson plans. The DFC is not just a collection of lesson plans. If a lesson plan is presented, it is because the lesson plan illustrates the results of a certain type of thinking and planning.
 * Think in terms of empowering teachers.Browse the document, Empowering learners and teachers. Then, think carefully about how a teacher is empowered by reading your document. Make this empowerment explicit in the document.
 * Think in terms of what a teacher can do that will empower his or her students. What can you say to a preservice or inservice teacher—what can you help a teacher learn—that will help his or her students to get a better Information Age Education? You want teachers to explicitly think about how a lesson or unit of study they are presenting empowers their students in a foundation building and long-lasting manner.
 * It is not necessary that a document include an emphasis on using any particular Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Remember, the overriding goal is to improve the quality of education that students are receiving. Using ICT purely for the sake of ICT is a poor approach to improving education.

Useful Lesson Plans
Focus on what a preservice or inservice teacher would find useful. Some of the things that a DFC may contain are lesson plans, handouts (readings), quizzes, worksheets, and "good ideas" that the the teacher just wants to save for possible personal use in the future. Some may be specifically designed to give to a substitute teacher.

You should try to not get bogged down in the detail of trying to put together an ideal format for a lesson plan to fit every conceivable teaching situation. Instead perhaps we might agree that there are certain core aspects of a a lesson plan.

Let me suggest such core aspects. I believe that every lesson or unit of study should:
 * Empower students by helping them to gain an increased level of expertise in one area of a discipline that is considered important by some combination of the student, the teacher, and other stakeholders. Here, "other stakeholders" includes people who establish state and national benchmarks or standards.
 * Empower students by helping them to gain in cognitive maturity—that is, move up a Piagetian-type cognitive scale—within the overall discipline or disciplines being taught in the lesson.
 * Empower teachers by:
 * a. providing them with a plan and a purpose that—when adequately carried out—will bring personal satisfaction and will empower students as in (1) and (2) above.
 * b. providing an environment in which the teacher can achieve professional and personal growth.

The developer of a lesson plan should have these ideas in mind, so the lesson plan will reflect the ideas. However, that does not say there needs to be a section of a lesson plan that specifically addresses these topics. If there is such a section, it might be in the "After Teaching the Lesson" part of the lesson plan. The teacher grows by reflection on what worked well, what didn't work so well, what to do differently next time, and so on. This metacognition—perhaps done in a personal journal or as a note attached to the end of a lesson plan—certainly is not part of a lesson plan that one person creates and a different person uses. It is an important aspect of the teacher gaining ownership of a lesson plan that is in a personal Digital Filing Cabinet.

Multiple Stakeholders
A teacher tends to be at the middle of a large and varied group of stakeholders who believe they should have some say in what is going on. That is, they expect to be empowered. Stakeholders include the teacher, students, school administrators, parents, school board members, a variety of groups of government officials and elected officials, and so on.

My personal feeling is that attempting to meet demands from so many different stakeholder groups is not possible. Thus, in planning and teaching a lesson or unit of study, I believe it is important to focus mainly on just three stakeholder groups:


 * Students. Empower your students and help them to learn to effectively and responsibly use their increased expertise.
 * Oneself. Empower yourself and facilitate a lifelong process of gaining in expertise as a professional in your field.
 * One's fellow professionals, with their professional standards and professional ethics. Think of yourself as part of a team of teachers, other educators, and support staff serving both students and the team.

IAE Resources
Moursund, D. (2016). Digital filing cabinet: Math education. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/18/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Digital_Filing_Cabinet:_Math_Education.

Moursund, D. (2016). Digital filing cabinet: Secondary school history. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/18/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Digital_Filing_Cabinet:_Secondary_School_History.

Moursund, D. (10/1/2013). A personal digital filing cabinet for every teacher. IAE Blog. Retrieved 8/18/2016 from http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/a-personal-digital-filing-cabinet-for-every-teacher.html.

Moursund, D. (11/14/2010). In some sense, all teachers are ethnographers. IAE Blog. Retrieved 7/22/2016 from http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/in-some-sense-all-teachers-are-ethnographers.html.

Author or Authors
This document was written by David Moursund.