Once again, from the “Shameless Self-Promotion Deptartment” comes this essay I wrote for the December issue of Edutopia Magazine. As always, would love to know what you think.
So I’m home from Seattle today with some mixed feelings about Microsoft’s School of the Future Summit, which was really excellent in some respects but left me wanting in others. The best part without question (and not that surprisingly) were the conversations with folks outside of the session rooms. With 250 or so people from 31 countries, it was probably the most diverse setting (geographically, at least) that I’ve found myself in. I had some interesting conversations with folks from Norway, Chile, Hong Kong, Sweden, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, the UK and others that no doubt gave me a much broader perspective of what the conversation feels like abroad. And it was diverse in ideas as well. My sense is that we’re all obviously feeling the pressure to think differently about schools and schooling, but depending on cultures and circumstances, there were a wide variety of approaches to the shift. I heard about models that ranged from kids doing one subject per full day throughout the week (as in math on Monday, science on Tuesday, etc.) to ones that made real use of mobile technologies, to others that were entirely online. (More about that in a second.) I talked to folks who taught in schools where every student had a computer and to others whose few classroom computers ran on dial up, some who were integrating social tools with depth, others who had never really considered them. It was, to put it mildly, a very eclectic and by and large passionate group.
But after a couple of days of listening to speakers like Michael Horn (”Disrupting Class“) and Tony Wagner (”The Global Achievement Gap“) I can’t say that I feel any greater clarity in the conversation around just what schools of the future are supposed to be about. Horn said that in 15 years almost 50% of all courses will be delivered online. Wagner said that we need to reinvent schools but didn’t give a very cohesive vision on how to do that. And while it was encouraging to hear Martin Bean of Microsoft talk about teachers and students learning in “media rich, socially connected” spaces as “content creators and knowledge starters,” it was less so when he seemed to define the idea of “nurturing powerful communities of learning” simply as creating portals to connect various constituencies. Admittedly, those snippets may not be totally fair to those speakers’ larger messages, but they were indicative of the general sense that I got, one that said “yes, we need to do something, but we’re not very close to having a cohesive vision around what exactly we should do.”
Or something like that.
All of which made Rob Paterson’s post that came through my Twitter feed in the middle of the conference yesterday so much more thought-provoking. In talking about the pressures facing universities from decreasing budgets and relevance, Rob says
It’s going to be interesting to see how this unfolds. The web offers a whole new way of restoring this way of learning directly from an expert rather than from an institution.
Rob offers up a vastly different “hang out a shingle” driven model for some seeking learning after high school, one which challenges the diploma driven status quo pretty compellingly. And it really got me wondering (once again) about the relevance of the pretty standard K-12 curriculum and assessments that are driving our systems. As I commented to Rob, I think I’m finally getting to the root of my continued frustration with my kids’ education which is the system’s inability to help them find and nurture the areas they truly have passion for. It would be nice if the institution were the place that connected my kids to the experts they desired and needed to support their learning, wouldn’t it? Again, I know it’s more complex than that, but you get the point.
As would be expected, much of the conversation was spent on the barriers to change, and at some point I found myself amazed at how deeply woven the reasons why not are ingrained in our conversations. At one conversation, someone said that many of her teachers didn’t feel like they needed to teach with technology at all since their students were doing just fine passing the tests without it. And I wanted to scream (but instead politely said) ‘then we gotta change the assessments.” Nothing in these conversations changed my view that to really change what we do in schools we have to first change our understanding of what it means to teach in this moment. That doesn’t mean than we throw out all of the good pedagogy that we’ve developed over the years and make everything about technology. But it does mean, I think, that technology has to be a part of the way we do our learning business these days.
Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference. Andy agreed to come on and do a UStream at some point in the near future, and I’ll be sure to be posting times and dates in case you’d be interested.
Anway, just some reflecting on an interesting couple of days…
(Photo “green tree core” by pbo31.)
So just a couple of quick education centered observations about this past weekend, spent with various family members from both sides:
First, one of my tribe is a teacher at one of the top 15 high schools as listed in the current version of Connecticut Magazine. It’s a very well off district that sends a high number of it’s graduates to college, a good number of them to the “best” schools in the world. Over the years, he’s been hearing my spiel about technology and the Web, and he and a couple of his colleagues have been dipping their toes into the social tools waters with varying degrees of success with one very notable, very positive exception. So here’s the news: almost all of it is being done pretty much under the radar with very little discussion, investment or support of technology of any kind in the classroom. Most of the professional development is centered around the learning theory author du jour, and the focus of all of it is maintaining or increasing test scores. In other words, it’s pretty much all about trying to do better what we’ve been doing all along, assessing it all the same way, and hoping for the same result. There is little or no talk of “21st Century” (or whatever you want to call them) skills or literacies in terms of global collaboration, networking, connecting and problem solving.
My other story deals with a third grader on Wendy’s side of the family. She came to visit over the weekend and at one point she pulled out a little red workbook and started doing problems in it. “It’s homework,” she said, adding that she had six pages to do over the weekend. Later, when she was done and had left it open on the dining room table, I flipped through it a bit and saw page after page of pretty basic math and word problems and (fill in the blank). When I closed it, I finally noticed the title: “Preparation for the 3rd Grade New Jersey ASK Assessment.”
Oy.
Ok, so humor me for a minute here…
Here’s what I LOVE about reading on the Web, when I get into a link flow that dances me from blog to blog, post to connected post and comments, and after about 20 minutes of just letting myself be carried away by the threads of conversations I land on something that makes a small part of my brain blow up in wonder. (This is also, by the way, something that I think too many of us fight when we read online, this idea that if we just let ourselves get caught up in the link trip, reading snippets here and there, scanning there and here, that we’re not really reading deeply somehow. Like my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Tharp is on my shoulder shaking her head in disdain. It’s just a different depth, I think.)
So bear with me as I try to capture this: somehow I got to Sarah Stewart’s post on the Connectivism course and hopped from there over to this mind-bending post at Mike Bogle’s blog which led me to graze around his site a bit to find this post which sent me to this conversation about Open Educational Resources on Brian Lamb’s site which led me to this comment by Mike Caulfield which provoked me to search for and find this very cool concept of Rip-Mix Learners. Setting aside the beauty of that idea, let’s reflect for a second on that process, one that I’d bet most teachers would dissuade their students from practicing. At every point, my decision to click was motivated by an interest for context, for moving more deeply into the one idea in the maze of stuff that was pulling me most at the moment. I didn’t read half of these posts in their entirety, nor do I feel the need to go back and do so. If I had, I most certainly would not have ended up where I did. And while I know that I just as easily could have ended up someplace even better, I let my interest drive the narrative, not the expectations.
While I’m not suggesting I understand fully the implications of reading in this way, I do know that these flow moments are, on balance, a good thing. I love being lost in it. And it’s almost as if I’ve done this enough to know that if I just give myself to it, the thing I’m supposed to find and learn will eventually make itself known, like it’s finding me somehow. Ok, that may be a bit over the top; suffice to say it’s Zen in a way that I wish all of my moments were.
So anyway…
…this concept of Rip-Mix Learners has my brain taking off in all different directions.:
Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online.
I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.
The horror!
So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:
If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.
Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be 
tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.
And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.
This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.
As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.
And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”
Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.
In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:
Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it - the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.
Oh. Yeah.
(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)
So here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):
New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.
I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.
And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:
Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)
Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:
Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.
Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.
- Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
- They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
- They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
- Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
- We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.
So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:
New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?
What do you think?
My friend Bruce Dixon pointed out to me a few weeks ago that if you do a search for “lesson plans” in Google you get almost 9 million hits, which, when you think about it, is a pretty amazing number. Not saying that they are all great plans, mind you, but when you think about the scope and variety of classroom related content that we can mine these days as opposed to just a few years ago.
Yet this concept of sharing content online still seems problematic for a lot of educators. As I travel around talking to teachers, very few of them argue when I suggest that this is still an isolated profession, and I get the strong sense that there is very little articulation around plans, practice or classroom experiences using online tools much less any local digital databases of documents or what have you. When I ask teachers to talk even in general terms about the experiences their students have had previous to arriving in their classes, most sit quietly and scrunch their shoulders. I know, I know…there is a time factor involved in doing this, or least a perception of one. But it just seems amazing to me that at this point there is no real shift towards publishing more of what we do, more of what our kids do, not only to expand our own knowledge base but to model for our students that potentials of sharing.
All of this was brought to mind, once again, in an by Issac Mao titled “Sharism: A Mind Revolution.” While I think the ideas may wax a bit too poetic at times, the thesis is powerful: in this world, the less we share, the less power we have. It’s an interesting discussion of the challenges to intellectual property and copyright and to the still ingrained perspective that to own and keep private our own best thinking is in some way protective and sustaining of our cultures.
Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox is: The less you share, the less power you have.
Mao discusses a lot of the benefits to blogging and sharing, the rewards we can potentially reap, and the positive consequences for the world. And he touches on the implications for education in terms of at least giving our students a leg up in “communication, collaboration and mutual understanding.” Not to mention the idea of helping our students to create a digital portfolio that can not only serve to help their teachers get to know them and their passions more effectively but that can connect them to other teachers and mentors who share those passions. And that is power, not only in the knowledge that we gain but in the learning relationships we foster.
(Photo “Sharing” by Kymberly Janisch)
So, I’m thinking it’s got to be a good sign when one of the people Obama has picked to head up the FCC review team has been quoted as saying this:
“We’re not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a US industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there’s been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed internet access,” she said.
And in a final introductory statement during her talk (that’s likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a “utility.”
“This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state,” she said at the time.
What a concept.
The other day I was talking to a school administrator about an upcoming hands-on workshop and she asked if I could e-mail her the schedule to handout the morning of the event. For some strange reason I just said “Nope. No paper.”
After a short silence, she said, “Oh…ok.”
“No, I mean it,” I said. “We’re going to be spending the whole day online; there is no reason to bring paper.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“No paper,” she said, thinking, finally adding “How exciting!”
Now I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still read lots of paper books, but I’m working on that.)
Yet just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room, paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, “paper trained,” and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.
At one planning session I was in a few weeks ago, twenty people were all furiously scribbling down notes on their pads, filling page after page after page. The same notes, 20 times. (I’d love to know where those notes are now.) At the end of the session, I gave everyone a TinyUrl to a wiki page where I had stowed my observations and asked them to come in and add anything I missed. Two people have.
At the end of a presentation a few days ago with a couple of hundred pen and paper note taking attendees (and the odd laptop user sprinkled here and there) I answered a question about “What do we do now?” by saying “Well, first off, it’s a shame that the collective experience of the people in this room is about to walk off in two hundred different directions without any way to share and reflect on the thinking they’ve been doing all day. Next year, no paper.”
I don’t think most were excited.
It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.
“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”
“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”
Um, no. You don’t.
Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?
(Photo “Magnus Christensson’s notes” by Jacob Botter.)
So it was pretty humbling to get a chance to meet George Lucas on Friday and to hear him give his take on the future of education for about 45 minutes. And it was a pretty amazing day overall at Big Rock/Skywalker Ranch, sitting with some very passionate educators and fellow GLEF advisors from around the country to share ideas and experiences. It’s all got my brain buzzing.
But without question, what’s rolling in my brain as I write this on this long flight home are a few of the things that Lucas started the day off with. First and foremost, this quote:
“The system falls apart around innovation. This is going to happen because there is a disease out there called digital technology. It is going to change education. All we can do is run out in front of it and guide people along.”
No question, it was an interesting metaphor to use. And the more I keep turning it in my brain, the more I wonder how much of what we do right now is going to inevitably die off because of ways technology will attack the system. And if it will take the 20-plus years that he seemed to suggest before we get, finally, to a “much more sophisticated, global learning environment” than the one we have now. What was also interesting, however, was to understand how he sees that happening, basically one teacher, one school, one district at a time, convincing them all that “there is a new way of doing things.”
It’s a huge mountain, one that can only be climbed by educating the educators, the central role that he sees for the GLEF and it’s magazine Edutopia. He said;
“We build the swords for the crusaders. The sword is information and knowledge. That’s all we can do to change the world…Our mandate is to figure out how to scale up the the good work that schools are doing.”
There’s much more, obviously, but rather than try to weave it into some sense-making post, let me just share a few of the other major points that he made:
On the speed of change: “Education is the dragging force on innovation. The reason is well intentioned and that is we want everyone to be educated.”
On preservice preparation for new teachers: “Universities a at the core of the problem; there’s nothing more conservative than schools of education.”
On shifting the “why”: “We need to get kids asking ‘why does that happen?’ as opposed to ‘why am I learning this?’”
And finally, a few strung together quotes about the future: “We have a long way to go…the steamroller is coming, and we can hear it now. We were way ahead of it before, but now it’s closing in on us…This change is way bigger than all of us. Technology is going to change it. This will happen. The change will happen.”
(Photo of George Lucas by Bunkfordbraun.)
Thanks so much to those of you who participated in today’s inaugural George Lucas Education Foundation webinar. Here’s hoping that you found the conversation thought-provoking and valuable.
As promised, because of the limited time for questions, please feel free to use the commenting function on my blog to ask anything that we may not have had time for earlier. Remember that if you leave the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box checked, you’ll receive any answers and also other questions in via e-mail. I’ll try to respond to as many of these as I can in the next few days.
Again, thanks for tuning in.
Doesn’t matter who you voted for, history was made last night. I, for one, am happy for my kids.
No matter how the impact of paper newspapers is declining, at moments like these, there’s still nothing like the front page of the paper, not the website, that gives me goosebumps. And in that vein, I’m cruising through the hundreds of covers from around the world at Newseum. Amazing.
From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Department” I just wanted to note that for whatever reason, my essay in the November issue of Educational Leadership has been picked for free Web viewing. Would love to hear your thoughts…
I remember when I first starting teaching journalism way back in the day actually using one of those stinky, buzz-inducing ditto machines to publish my students’ work “widely” up and down the hallways. I remember copy-editing by hand with green Flair pen, the same color my dreaded college journalism professors used, teaching my kids the fine art of marking up each other’s stories and adding suggestions for improvement. And I remember buying about 15 copies of various newspapers every Friday just so we could all spend some time getting our fingers black with ink as we searched for interesting and/or well written stories.
When I think of those days, I feel really old, for sure, but I also feel amazed at how much has changed in terms of media. And now, when it seems that “old” media is finally tipping full force into a “new” digital media model, I have to say I’m somewhat wistful.
Ok. I’m over it.
Yesterday’s New York Times piece by David Carr “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” got me really thinking again, however, about how much more important journalism has become in these days when newsrooms are being cut and reporters laid off. The Christian Science Monitor is closing its print edition. The Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and others are making deeper cuts. All of which is going to increase our reliance on not only online media but participatory online media, the form of media that is largely unedited, essay-driven and agenda-ridden. All of which, by the way, should be driving our conversations about how to fundamentally rewrite our curriculum and our delivery system to prepare students to be, um, participants both as readers and as writers.
I loved this graph from the article:
Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.
The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.
We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…
Recently, during a Q & A after a presentation, I had an interesting exchange with a high school principal that went something like this:
Principal: So I just want to give you my take on this.
Me: Sure
Principal: You bring up those examples of kids on MySpace and make the point that no one is really teaching them how to use those sites well.
Me: Yep
Principal: Well, I’ll tell you when they learn about that stuff. When I drag them into my office and read them the riot act about what they’ve been posting to their Facebook pages and they tell me that they never thought other people would look at their pages. They seem genuinely astonished that I could find them.
Me: And whose fault is that?
Principal: Well, I’d like to blame their parents. (Laughter.)
Me: Well, I think it’s your fault. (More laughter.) I mean, maybe not you in particular. But whose job is it to educate kids to use those sites well and appropriately? I doubt that most of their parents really have enough of an understanding of what their doing to prepare them.
Principal: So how do we do that?
I get into some variation of this discussion on a pretty regular basis, but I’m always amazed at how willing school leaders are to admit this reality and how little they are doing to deal with it. There is a solution to this, one that we all know, but one that for some reason few seem willing to implement other than in the guise of a “parent awareness night” or some type of scary Internet predator presentation by a state policeman. For the life of me, I can’t understand what is so hard about opening up the first and second and third grade curriculum and find ways to integrate these skills and literacies in a systemic way. If you want kids to be educated about these tools and environments, then maybe we should, um, educate them.
If we start talking about this stuff in first grade (in age appropriate ways), AND we involved parents in the process by being transparent about our intentions and our outcomes, I’m pretty sure that we could minimize the number of kids who get pulled into the principal’s office when they behave badly on their Facebook pages.
The Britannica blog is hosting a conversation about Web 2.0 in education, and Steve Hargadon argues that the technologies will make a huge impact on the future or learning while Daniel Willingham says not so fast. Both posts are very well done and provide a measured starting point for the discussion. What I found really interesting though was Willingham’s take on the potential for project based learning in these environments compared to the potentials that we’ve been trying to realize in traditional classrooms. Importantly, I think, he says:
Hargadon is clear-eyed in his list of challenges to making Web 2.0 an important part of K-12 education, but I think he underestimates the seriousness of his third point, “Teachers will need time and training to use these tools in the classroom.”
There has been an enormous push to leverage technology in K-12 education in the last decade. The costs in infrastructure, personnel, training, and ongoing access are difficult to pin down, but conservative estimates are in the billions each year.
Why has technology not revolutionized teaching, but rather been a series of “computer fads,” in Hargadon’s term, and an all-around disappointment?
At least part of the reason is that, despite expenditures, support has been inadequate. For example, support personnel tend not to be specialized, although the technology needs of the English teacher are different than those of the Science teacher. If still more money were spent, would that alleviate the problem? It might solve the technology problem, but the inherent difficulty of executing project-based learning well would remain.
Especially when attempting to infuse project-based learning using Web 2.0 tools. As Willingham points out, project based pedagogies are more complex, require more planning, and aren’t as easily aligned to standards as more traditional teaching methods. Throw in some transformative technologies and…
Unless of course you have teachers who “get” the potentials of the technologies and can draw on their own practice to guide their pedagogy, which I still think is the most important answer we need to find in this conversation. How do we help teachers get to that point where using project-based pedagogies (when appropriate and when more effective than other pedagogies) in Web rich environments is as natural as picking up a piece of chalk?
On that note, I have to agree with one of the commentors on the Willingham post, David Zuckerman:
Proceeding from Shirky’s dictum that, “Social tools don’t create collective action – they merely remove the obstacles to it,” I would argue that Ed2.0 needs to concentrate now on the teachers, not the students, and among the corpus of teachers, focus ONLY on those who want to try to make some change, the “early adapters” if you will. The others, some of them, will follow along in due course or they will not; but the enterprise moves forward on the energy of its best players, not on continued, and boring, Soviet-like efforts to lift everyone at once by dint of big meetings where All Teachers are obligated to come so they can receive some hours of poor teaching practice (being talked at, mostly) in the evident expectation (still!?) that somehow, this experience, the lead, will be transmuted into gold.
A bit harsh, maybe, but to the point. Inherent in that statement and in Willingham’s post is the idea that we have to think differently about how we do professional development. The drive by trainings for every teacher are not the answer. We should be investing in those who do show an appetite for learning, for risk-taking, for reflective practice.
Lots more in those posts to mull over…
Longtime readers of this blog know that I really, really respect and admire Lawrence Lessig who early on pushed my thinking in all sorts of directions with his presentations, books, and blog entries. I’m still a big admirer of his work, and I seriously think he will come to be known as one of the great change agents of our times. That’s why his new book about he cultural shifts that are occurring around copyright, intellectual property and art went to the top of the list when it arrived a couple of days ago. (I’ve got a long list to get to, but I’ve also got some long flights ahead of me…)
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a treatise on how we need to start rethinking traditional copyright law in the context of these easy sharing and copying technologies. And what’s especially relevant to our conversation is that he frames it in the way this all shakes out for our kids. In talking about how the government continues to create laws that “wage war” against the copyright infringement that many youngsters engage in every day, he says:
…I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?
And then he asks the central question:
In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural.
To Lessig, this is a war that can not be won.
What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and there kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distibution of “copies” simply will not exist?
Lots of questions that he will no doubt answer in the book, and that I hope to get back to here. But no doubt, these are questions we should be asking ourselves no matter how difficult or disruptive they may be. If you are reading this, you are doing so on your own personal printing press. That is a different world than the one current copyright laws were written under.
So New Zealand turned out to be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, and aside from some pretty unhelpful airline personnel, the people were more than friendly and helpful. Even though I didn’t get to play as much as I would have liked to, we saw a lot of the South Island and can honestly say there’s nary a bad view in the place. Wendy and the kids absolutely loved it, and we can’t wait to get back someday. (Problem now is I’ve got about 250 pictures to sort and upload and make sense of…)
Of all the places we visited, however, all the beautiful lakes and cliffs and beaches and parks and mountains and gorges, we all agreed that the highlight of the trip was a place called the Adrenaline Forest which is basically an ever increasing in difficulty set of zip lines and wire-climbs strung across a beautiful pine forest culminating in some very hairy highwire walks about 60 feet in the air. Now, this had absolutely nothing to do with New Zealand per se; they have these spots in the States from what I hear. But this was our first encounter, and with the snow capped mountains off in the distance, and the New Zealand birds singing in the branches, it was pretty amazing.
Basically, you get a harness and two carabiner straps one of which has to be hooked onto a wire at all times in case you fall. So as you keep progressing up, you’re constantly clipping and reclipping with the idea that something will always catch you. That’s fine for the lower elevations, but when you get up to Level 5 (which just opened) you’re working on faith. In all, there are over 60 traverses that you have to make, some are zip lines, some are walking on logs, some even more creative. It was really fun…
…until the last level. I mean, it started out ok, but then there were two highwire walks over about a 75-foot span, uphill, that just busted my psyche. I’m not afraid of heights, but these two humbled me. I had several “Oh *$%^, I can’t do this” moments, and in those instances, I felt very old and very scared. Little half-seconds of panic pulsed through me before my brain reeled me in, told me to keep breathing, keep moving, keep going. If you want to get a sense of what it was like, here’s the last 30 seconds or so of the last, long traverse. Listen to my kids (who had already finished like 30 minutes beforehand) cheer me on way down below, and listen carefully to what I say and look at my eyes right at the end.
Adrenaline.
But here is the thing. As much as I hated those moments, as much as they made me nauseous with fear, I will not soon forget the feeling of pushing through it. Of not getting stuck. Of continuing to move forward, and of sailing through the air on that last, long zip line to the ground. It was a great reminder.
And it’s got me thinking…
(BTW, in case you’re interested, here’s a Wendy-eyed view of one of the zip lines.)
Just back from New Zealand and still wondering what day it is, but I did want to make sure to post this before I got into one of the other 47 things on my list. The deadline for submissions is November 1, and if it’s anything like 2.0, this may be the best gathering of the year for those of us immersed in this conversation.
EduCon only happens when a community of educators come together to make it something special. With that in mind, we are announcing our Call for Conversations for EduCon 2.1 — January 23rd - 25th at Science Leadership Academy.
About EduCon 2.1:
EduCon 2.1 is both a conversation and a conference.
And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.The Guiding Principles of EduCon 2.1
- Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
- Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
- Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
- Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
- Learning can — and must — be networked.
We want people to share ideas, lead conversations, challenge each other and have conversations that can further our dreams of what schools can and should be. We want sessions that move past the traditional presentation style of conferences to create interactive and engaging moments of learning for all involved.
Please consider submitting a proposal. All proposals are due Nov. 1st. Feel free to examine last year’s sessions as a reference point.
Really hope to see you there.
Nelson, New Zealand
Yesterday, we drove about four hours from a beautiful little town named Hanmer Springs (many Flickr photos to come) up here to Nelson which sits at the top of the south island. On the way, we stopped to zip line across a gorge, herd some sheep off the road that had gotten through an open fence, and roll some boulders out of the way on a one lane (barely) gravel and dirt (to be generous) mountain pass road that when we finally descended to the bottom turned out to be closed to all vehicles trying to come up the way we had just come down.
Pretty boring day.
What was occupying much of my brain power when we were on the two-lane, paved roads, however, was trying to stay on the right (or should I say left) side of the road. It took a while for my driving mind to get into some balance after the initial dissonance, and I was trying to pay attention to all of the things I had to “unlearn” in the process. For about the first hour, every time I went to signal a turn, the windshield wipers started up. Right hand turns were a real, real struggle, as you can imagine, surpassed in difficulty at the outset only by trying to navigate the roundabouts and always feeling like I was looking the wrong way. (A couple of times after going over one-laned bridges, I reflexively went over to the right hand side of the road only to have my kids scream “DAD! Wrong side!”) And the hardest part for me, at least, was getting in the habit of glancing to the left to see the rear view mirror. A bunch of times, cars that I didn’t even realize were behind me came whizzing by (on our right) almost causing me to drive off the road in the process. After a few hours, though, it all started to make sense in my head. No more wipers. No more screaming from the backseat. No more surprising passes. I actually started enjoying the view. (Actually, that part was easy.)
There is a point in here somewhere about unlearning and re-learning and fighting through the dissonance of change to come out the other side doing some things differently. Maybe a microcosm of what Sheryl and I have been over here prodding teachers to do. There is no question that they are further down the road in all of this than we seem to be, at least from an understanding that there are some technologies out there that are challenging the status quo of classrooms. And, from the standpoint of making it a national initiative to understand that stuff as well. New Zealanders seem to be much more in tune with the value of reflective assessment and the uses of assessment in general to help guide choices that kids make in addition to seeing what they “know.”
Still, it comes down to individuals getting comfortable with doing things differently. Driving on the “other” side of the road really isn’t so hard once you get used to it.
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