Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Open Up Those Budgets

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That technology as education deliverer thing seems to be ramping up. “Smart Education” to boot.

…The Global Smart Education and Learning market is expected to reach $220.0 billion by 2017 at a CAGR of 20.3% from 2012 to 2017.

Smart Education consists of a wide range of technologies that are used to convert traditional education systems into automated virtual learning environment through web based courses, assessment materials, online tutoring, professional development, and data management systems. Smart Education technology will speed the processes of providing curriculum, communicating with and managing the education communities. These technologies comprise of software such as educational ERP to disruptive technologies such as LMS and LCMS. Interactive whiteboards and simulation based learning hardware are also included within the ambit of this smart education market report. [Emphasis mine.]

Follow the money.

Entrepreneurial Learners

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John Seely Brown’s keynote from the recent DML conference is worth the watch if nothing else for his overview of “entrepreneurial learning.” I could summarize, but I found this snip from Sarah Vaala to be a more than adequate overview:

Entrepreneurial Learning. The morning began with a keynote address from John Seely Brown (University of Southern California; Deloitte Center for the Edge) entitled “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century.” An entrepreneur, he contended, is someone who is constantly looking around at their environment for new and innovative ideas and puting those ideas into practice. In the context of education, then, entrepreneurship should take two forms.

1. Students should be encouraged and enabled to learn through an interest-driven process of ‘thinking’ and ‘making.’ Entrepreneurial learning is the point at which thinking (about ideas and interests) and making (context and things) meet. As examples he pointed to wikis, fan fiction sites, blogs, and online game discussion boards that allow kids to practice writing skills, knowledge production, and knowledge dissemination while making their own content in an inherently motivating way.

2. Practitioners and educational policy-makers must become entrepreneurs as well, by scaling up the innovative ideas and practices that enable students’ learning in the 21st century. Kids are engaging in very profound learning experiences outside the classroom through production and remixing of digital media. Institutional learning needs to begin to incorporate those experiences inside its formal institutions as well. If the typical 20th century learning institution was a steamship plodding along at a consistent speed on a set course, explained Brown; then the optimal learning institution of the 21st century should be a white water raft moving quickly with the ability and agility to traverse whatever direction or waves the immediate environment dictates.

What I especially like in this description is the idea that it conveys a real sense of the flexibility our kids are going to have to have to succeed. They will need to adapt to many different opportunities, be self-directed and creative, and transparent in the ways they share their work. All of which is brought home in a short but relevant article in the New York Times today titled Our Workplace: How Three Companies Innovate. Google, General Electric and Dreamworks all expect this type of entrepreneurial learning disposition.

At Google, it’s about getting outside the box:

Google provides resources — infrastructure, money, time and people — but most important, a vision that tests most entrepreneurs to think bigger than they ever have before. We believe in big bets, and in high-risk and high-reward projects such as driverless cars and Android. By encouraging people to think bigger, we often achieve far more than what we initially imagine.

At GE, it’s about encouraging people to take risks:

…We literally measure employees based on their capacity to take risks in championing ideas, learn from the experience and drive improvement.

And at DreamWorks, it’s about supporting failure:

We feel it is critical to empower employees to take risks, move boundaries and test the limits of their imagination. Simply put: individuals must be allowed to fail in order to innovate.

Thinking outside the box, taking risks, learning from failure…how much of that happens for students in today’s schools?

Adapting to Change

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A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…

Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:

  • The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
  • New organizational ways of working
  • Challenging previously held values
  • Requires gaining new knowledge and skills

And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)

I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:

Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”

That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.

So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.

And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.

(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

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First Monday is out with a collection of essays that might be of interest in terms of contextualizing where the whole 2.0 thing is at. From the introduction:

The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.

I’ve added a bunch of these to my “To Read” list (which just keeps getting longer), but I settled into one by David Silver titled “History, Hype and Hope: An Afterword.” Here is a part from the “Hope” section:

This is the writeable generation, a generation of young people who think of media as something they read and something they write – often simultaneously. This is a generation of content creators, a generation of young people who with the help of Web 2.0 tools know how to create content, how to share content, and how to converse about content. This is the generation for whom broadcast media – and its silent, obedient audiences – is rapidly fading and for whom conversations make more sense than lectures. This is a new generation with new writeable behaviors and it’s hard not to be hopeful about that.

I’ve got a post brewing about what our students really know and can do in this Web 2.0 world, and I think I’m slowly coming to understand that this type of rhetoric (of which I have been guilty of kind of dreamily espousing myself) is really still hope, not reality. Kids have the potential to do this in ways that no other generation ever has, but not so many are doing a great job of creating content and coversations and exhibiting “writeable behaviors” to the extent that most would like to think.

At any rate, just offering up the link for those that might be interested…

Teenagers as "Teamagers"…What do You Think?

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Tom Austin, a researcher for Gartner, is interviewed in Fast Company this month and makes some interesting points about the value that businesses can find in implementing and using social tools in their workplaces. I like the idea that we should be hiring more “cultural anthropologists” in our IT departments, people who understand the social shifts that are occurring. It’s a pretty interesting interview throughout, with some points made about how we assess collaboration and what we should look for in our employees.

But here’s the quote that I thought was most interesting:

Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.

Nice twist on the word, but I’m wondering if you agree that teens have group collaboration down as a part of the way they do their business. What are you seeing?