XplanaZine

Every day here in Boston, the mailman comes walking down the street about the same time my wife is leaving to head to Starbucks for her morning coffee. The mailman always greets her with a typical south Boston “How ah yuh” (pronounced pretty much like the state of Hawaii), and my wife always responds with a friendly “Howdy do.” To be honest, I’m not sure that either one of them really understands the other. It’s more like they’re simply reading voice and contextual cues. It’s the morning; a greeting is in order; the other person is smiling; they must be asking about my well being.

Since we moved here on a permanent basis, my wife has actually been collecting examples of dialectical differences and all the things she doesn’t really understand in spite of being a native speaker of English. For me, it’s been enlightening, and it’s made me consider a bunch of situations where people are engaging in some form of communication but no one is really understanding the words coming our of anybody else’s mouth.

Take a lot of the buzz going on around education and technology of late. If you’ve been listening, you might have been hearing terms like Web 2.0, taxonomies, e-learning frameworks, social bookmarking, blogging, podcasting, LMS, RSS, and others. And, unless you’re a proper initiate into the Innovators and Early Adopters Club (and actually know the clubhouse password), you probably find yourself wondering what any of that has to do with teaching and learning. You may even wonder if people whom you can’t understand really have the same mission you do.

In reality, it’s simply a case of “How ah yuh” and “Howdy do.” Both groups are really saying the same thing — “Let’s make learning as good as humanly possible.” Technologist and non-technologist educators alike have this one and only important thing in common — improving our world by passing along valuable lessons to others. The rest is dialect, vocabulary preference, and geographical setting.

My point is that in education, as in the rest of our lives, we often find it easy to focus on strange external variables that really have no significance. True communication is based on underlying reality, on the ability to see and operate from a common base of understanding.

In education, most of us are starting at the same place. We may say it differently, but there is a common understanding — Let’s improve learning.

The key is being able to listen to people’s passion as well ss their words. I may not understand or I may disagree with people in my school or blogging community, but I never doubt that our mission is the same because I can feel their passion for learning.

My word of advice is this. The next time you’re in a discussion with a student, teacher, parent, administrator, or colleague, and you’re not sure you’re speaking the same language as the other person, take a look at their passion instead of their words. You’ll probably find yourself thinking, “It’s a discussion of some sort; participation seems to be in order; the other person is passionate about learning; I am too; we must be on the same page.”

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