Is it just me, or does it look like 2007 is shaping up to be a pivotal year in the school reform discussion? Just this week, two major events in the print publishing world (which is where 90% of the decision makers still reside) seem to be setting the table for some extremely interesting discussions. If you don’t have a del.icio.us tage named “edushifts” (or something similar) it might be time to start one.
First, Time has named us all the Person of the Year, and in doing so, it’s put some mainstream, traditional affirmation to much of what we’ve been saying in this community for the last couple of years. Some quotes from the article that especially resonate:
“It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.””The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”
“We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.”
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?”
“This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them.”
I like, however, that the lead in is tempered by caution.
“But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.”
But my, how interesting it will be to create that map together…
The other piece of news this week was the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, which, according to the executive summary, at least, paints a pretty compelling picture for change. It echoes a lot of what Daniel Pink is writing about creativity and the loss of jobs that can be automated. It echoes Friedman in terms of the global leveling that’s going on in the world thanks to the connectedness of technology. The full, 200+ page report comes out on Amazon on Friday which should make for some interesting holiday reading. From the summary, some quotes:
“This is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education–a very different kind of education than most of us have had–are going to be the only security there is.””Too often, our testing system rewards students who will be good at routine work, while not providing opportunities for students to display creative and innovative thinking and analysis.”
“The core problem is that our education and training systems were built for another era. We can get where we must go only by changing the system itself. To do that, we must face a few facts. The first is that we recruit a disproportionate share of our teachers from among the less able of the high school students who go to college.”
And that idea of systems is hammered home. I find this quote especially intriguing:
“The one thing that is indispensible is a new system. The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work.”
Yeah, talk is cheap. But that’s some heady stuff. And, I know I’m a geek, but on one level it gives me butterflies. Are we on the precipice of a serious, national discussion about education reform? And, if so, is it going to be one with real vision and foresight? And, if so, what is the best way for us to really engage in that conversation? I’ll say it again, if 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.
What do you think?
Have we created a closed loop?
You mention that we should stop blogging back and forth to each other and create a grassroots movement, how does that play out? I can tell you what most of us would immediately do, build a website.
So how does a grassroots effort manifest these days? Do we throw back to the days of direct mail (albeit not too far gone) or do we just make a stronger effort to have meaningful conversations that allude to “truth to power”?
I ask simply because I am at a loss! I agree that those in power to make the changes are probably not subscribed to my RSS feed, but it is sort of the only way I know to communicate to the masses. As a native, this is the way it has been communicated to me, via the media. I suppose the question ends up being,
In this digital age, how do you mount a grassroots effort to impact an analog system?
Chris…Don’t stop blogging! I didn’t say stop! I just think maybe we need to spend more time talking to folks, doing face to face presentations, suggesting or writing articles for the local paper, approaching board members and parent groups, writing e-mail, anything that focuses on getting this message out to the people, the vast majority of people, who aren’t reading our blogs or getting clued into this conversation. Sure, part of those conversations is to show this new Web to folks, help them understand it. But despite all of this buzz, many of them are not going to find it by themselves. Yet, they are probably now more ripe to the ideas. To bring an analog system into a digital age, I think you first have to meet it where it is, take it’s hand, and show it the way.
I’m thrilled to see that Time is helping move this discussion into the national forum. I think we’ll begin seeing quantam leaps in people starting to “get it” at some level.
I think we have to keep blogging because people like you were the early adapters who inspired many of us to venture into these new mediums and use new tools (and still do.) And I think as we blog or use many of the web 2.0 schools, we help our campuses and districts find them.
I ALSO agree that we need to spread the word in other forums–in school board meetings, small group trainings, emails to individual colleagues, at parent workshops, on committees where we serve, sharing books with others, etc.
I think you are right about a sea change coming. I felt that way when reading Daniel Pink’s book, personally.
They put it nicely in the Time article: “We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.”
I think the paragraph you quoted from Time about the small contributions now mattering is very significant for our students. We have to help them decide what they want their small contributions to be and what it means for what they say to matter.
Carolyn
Couldn’t this all be just narcissism run amok? Is this just a way to disempower folks by telling them that they have unprecedented power? I hope this isn’t an opiate that makes us think we’re making a difference from our couch.
How’s YouTube doing at ending the war in Iraq, fighting chronic poverty here and abroad or making schools anything like Dewey, Papert or others imagined?
Time Magazine copped out on the “Person of the Year” and is too clever by half. This follows on the heels of last week’s education cover story that also gave the illusion of saying something when it just rehashed the same old tired talking points while projecting the illusion that Time is “on the beat.”
I’ll be writing a bunch about education and the media’s constant linking of it with “the global economy” over the next few weeks at The Pulse – http://www.districtadministraiton.com/pulse I hope you’ll join in the discussion there.
Well, in actuality, YouTube is not the only web 2.0 tool that Time is referring to.
Using tools like blogs people did indeed make a difference from “their couch” and continue to(witness the election buzz, the fact-checking during the Presidential debates, etc., the raised profile of the Darfur crisis, and the general effects of blogs on the news and television media).
Corporations like Best Buy and Ebay are using wikis in the workplace to build a knowledge base.
And blogs like Fischbowl (http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/) are helping a school community create a new vision and allow that work to be shared with other educators, easily. Tools like these, and flickr, and Google Earth and Tapped In, among many others, have broken down the walls between campuses who have a tremendous amount to share with one another.
The old model of education was too often a teacher in a room with a closed door and a group of students, and now there are tremendous and easily available possibilities for that teacher and his/her students to broaden their view and to reach outside of their classroom, their city, and their country.
Aren’t those types of contacts how we as adults learn? When we step outside of our comfort zone, attend a conference, travel, meet colleagues from other places, etc?
Now we can not only have easier ways of doing those things, but we can open those options up to our students much more easily as well.
So, I for one, think Time has their finger on the pulse of what’s happening and the enthusiasm that “web 2.0” (or whatever you’d like to call it) is generating.
I only wish Time had gone a bit further in their analysis of Web 2.0 tools. You Tube and Myspace, in my opinion, aren’t the best examples of social change. Although, my browsing habits might be a bit differnt because when I go to YouTube I’m looking for that vintage Van Halen video–not cutting edge information. Perhaps Time hasn’t caught onto some of the real citizen journalism (Oh My News, Current TV, etc.)happening out there. But I give them kudos for at least starting the conversation with the mainstream. There will always be an underground movement that is 5 steps ahead of the general public. But this article shows that the landscape is truly changing.
Great post, Will.
I have to say it’s hard not to be impressed that Time Magazine is so far in front of this. If you take a look at a classroom–at least out here in Seattle where I live–they are right on. But, I’d also have to say, that the idea of what a fully 2.0 classroom is not only shrouded in mystery; it’s almost impossible to find. Who out there has–as a part of their everyday practice–students linking up with other students in collaborative meaning making? Most of us are still at the stage where we are replicating what we’ve done before in to YouTube videos or blogs replacing journals.
Still, does the Time article have links to teacher blogs and other pioneers (such as Marco Vargas or the The Fischbowl or Wes Fryer)? Currently, in order to get a classroom collaboration going you have to go through Global Schoolhouse or troll through school blogs, convince someone you’re not a stalker, and then figure out a way to do something useful.
A quick plug for our efforts out here. This is a school-wide movie making collaboration which is shamelessly derivative of Marco Vargas. Check it out here.
I love the quote you chose,
“The one thing that is indispensable is a new system. The problem is not with our educators. It is with the system in which they work.â€
A quote from Stafford Beer that I wrote in my first ever blog entry, not too long ago…
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
Our system is good for weeding out those that don’t fit in, rather than creating a learning space where all students can blossom. Systemic change is neither simple nor comfortable… but it is necessary!
A good rule of thumb: if Time says it, then it may be a fact, but it hardly qualifies as the truth, a distinction that Faulkner said we should never mistake.
I don’t think you get wisdom from conventional people. If you do, it is a very guarded, status quo-ish and careful kind as opposed to the kind that helps you live in the new world that is unfolding.
I prefer another kind of truth, crazy wisdom, the favored fountain of which for me is William Blake. In his aphoristic essay(?) “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” he speaks as sage and fool when he prophesizes that, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Chris is looking for a grassroot efforts and what amounts to more of the same, but Gary on the other hand understands that there must be a significant breakdown in the power relations in order for crazy-wise change to occur.
Even the monk Thomas Merton in the hinterlands of Kentucky and removed utterly from the world realized just before he died that his community of practice, the monastery, had become a “bunch of cozy cheesemakers.” Time Magazine is not wise. It is in both fact and truth the largest possible scheme for promoting the status quo. My question to all of us is simple: are you a cozy cheesemaker? If not, what are you?
As an archivist in the library at St. Bonaventure University in the late 1980s, I could not agree with the Thomas Merton analogy more. Call me a simple, a techno-geek, a Web 2.0 drone, or just call me excited, but I agree this year may be a watershed year in classrooms across the country. Locally, the superintendent within the district I teach, conducted a skype call with Karl Fisch, (http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/) to brainstorm ideas of change. It is these types of exchanges that may have the greatest effect on grass roots transformation within the districts across the country. The traditional managerial role of superintendents is being transformed with the technology of the times. No longer will administrators be CEOs, rather, they will become the catalyst for curriculum re-engineering. 2007 will be a tremendously important year, whether or not the mainstream media catches on.
Will,
Thanks for a great article. I have learned much from you in the last several months and am beginning to catch your passion.
Are we on the precipice of a serious, national discussion about education reform? Maybe. I certainly hope so. However, those who hold the reins power are still steeped in traditional ideas about what learning should look like. I am afraid that until adminstrators, legislators, parents, and unfortunately, many teachers hold on to what worked in the 50’s, there will be no meaningful system wide reform. I have a “revolution” tag and I think the revolution has begun, but it is still in its infancy, not many soldiers have signed on yet. We all know that change is painfully slow, but change we must. If we don’t, as a nation and a culture we will be left in the ash-heep of history.
Will,
As an English teacher, could you imagine asking students to discuss the Time selection of “Person of the Year” in terms related to Orwell’s 1984? Al Gore’s film may change the world. Who knows? Weren’t Jack Murtha or Nancy Pelosi or Howard Dean or Rahm Emmanuel or Chuck Schumer or President Bush or Rummy or one of the Middle East leaders more important than me/you? I fear that all of this hooplah by the powerful is just Potemkin Village 2.0.
Sure there is citzen journalism in the blogosphere. How does that compare to the work of Thomas Paine or Woodward and Bernstein? Everyone gets excited about how Dan Rather was brought down by a blogger who announced that the 60 Minutes documents were bogus. What we forget in all of this self-congratulatory euphoria across the blogosphere is that the substance of the forged documents has never been in doubt. In fact, the discussion of the document’s provenance may have obscured the truth at the heart of the story.
Much of what I come across in the blogosphere strikes me as personal confesssions or someone else reading the newspaper on my behalf. Of course there is wonderful reportage to be found on blogs, just as there is in other forms of media.
Having an audience is critically important to the author whether or not the audience is well-served.
Kids have been engaged in collaborative problem solving and project-based learning for thousands of years – naturally and before we had a theoretical context for it. Perhaps we marvel at the novelty of online collaboration because schools have imperiled such social learning over the past few generations.
I defy anyone who read last week’s Time cover story on “reinventing education” to identify ONE new idea. The state of discourse regarding learning is woeful. It is pretty sad indeed that those of us in the knowledge “business” are so self-loathing and filled with doubt that we seek affirmation from Time Magazine or Tom Friedman.
Don’t get me wrong. I love YouTube, etc… Finding videos of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers from the 1960s or Keith Olbermann’s special comments from last night is wondrous. It just won’t sustain a democracy. It is certainly not revolutionary.
Gary Stager
http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse
Will,
I agree that something seems about to happen. For the last four years, I’ve been trying to encourage teachers to use the read/write web with little success. You mentioned Tim Tyson. He had few teachers volunteer to blog initially. He mandated school blogging and now Mabry teachers see the value.
Nevertheless, I sense that teachers’ reticence may change as applications become simpler. Blogging still involves too many steps for most busy teachers to want to learn. Wikis, however, are word documents and Wikispaces is giving them away free to teachers. Presently, I am building a wiki for our library pathfinders and teachers are starting to add their own material as I show it to them – even teachers who have been averse to technology in the past. Perhaps educators have finally found a simple enough point of entry into the great conversation.
I suppose I have reacted to the Time article so positively because of what I see going on around me in my own school.
It’s not just about blogs or YouTube. It’s about teachers’ excitement when they see Google Earth or PBwiki or Google Docs. And YouTube isn’t just about finding a video that aired on television. An educator at my school are uses it to have students create a whiteboard lesson, post the video and then link to it from their class wiki. Simple collaborative tools like GE’s Imagination tool allow us to help a child with math homework over the internet. It’s about our students debating online over our school’s website on wikipedia, and making corrections and tinkering with opinion versus fact on the site.
It’s about tools that allow students and teachers to collaborate online simultaneously, to contribute content, tools that NATURALLY cause them to evaluate their words as they are contributing, and tools that allow them to connect with other schools, other experts, etc.
You can feel this excitement in a class when you show them Google Docs. You can feel it when they are editing their own wiki page or collaborating across class periods on a project.
I feel it when I find photos of activities at another library on flickr which gives me a good idea. I feel it when I participated in K12 online and was skyping with educators in Wales from my home. I feel it when our school board decides to read the World is Flat or Whole New Mind. I feel it when I see free tools that our teachers can immediately adopt without waiting for licenses, funding, etc. To me, that is a huge part of the revolution I see coming online in terms of educators getting involved.
I feel it when my campus is much more driven to push against the boundaries of our infrastructure limits and filters and ask for more, because they WANT to incorporate tools into their teaching.
Whether you do think Time’s coverage is too simplistic or not, I do think they are on the money in recognizing this trend, and how we are on the precipice of change. I agree it may be slow but I have seen a sea change at the speed at which our campus is reacting to and adopting these tools which has been surprising.
The issues I hear from teachers continuously is, lack of time–time to learn new software, hardware, and time to practice with it. Although the beauty of many of these tools is that they are readily available and the teacher isnt’ limited to practicing at school on software the school purchased, I do think training and conversation is where campuses need to rethink their models.
I’m not sure yet that the report from the New Commission on Skills is cause for great optimism. Hopefully, it will spark a national discussion; my concern is that it will be a discussion in which teachers are once again kept on the periphery while the policy that affects our daily professional lives is dealt out like so many cards in a marked deck. Putting local schools under the control of private contractors does not give me warm and fuzzies.
Renee, I agree with your sense of caution. I hope it does spark a national discussion. The introduction and stating of the problem was very exciting, but I was concerned when I started to read the recommendations. Many of the recommendations sounded impractical or even unhelpful. They described a system of board exams which reminded me of European Education. I am not sure this is an improvement. I also got the feeling that the committee was proposing that market forces would improve schools….
I am a classroom teacher of fifth grade language arts, three sections a day of 65 minutes each. Our district technology coordinator and her assisstant coordinator want us to utilize technology in our classrooms as much as we can. The big problem at the level I teach is that students do not come to me prepared to use the computers. Yes, they know how to turn them on and take tests on them, use the sound systems and play games, but they have virtually no keyboarding skills. I have a blog of my own, and I would love to see my students be able to use blogs to comunicate with others and to publish and hone their writing and communicating skills but I end up having to teach too many other skills before they can use the technology.
Everything goes back to the issue of educational reform. When I am teaching the state standards and testing for the benchmarks in my grade level, those standards and bencharks incorporate very few electronic (?) standards. Something does have to give! We can’t teach more in the time allotted to us, and if we keep teaching the same way our educational system is set up for us to teach, we are in trouble! I agree with some of the people who have commented so far; how can we do anything? Our “education” president has helped drive an ever-growing reliance on the big publishers and test makers. What fuels this? Why money, of course! And as long as we get mandates and people in key government positions who are standing up saying that we need to have accountability through standardized testing, we will not experience any appreciable form of education reform. I don’t have the answer- I just know that I need to teach smarter, not more. We live in such a different society, and our grandkids will live in even more different times, that we have to do something.