learning Archives - Page 2 of 12

Greater Possibilities

June 10, 2014 By Will Richardson

Kids are competent. I believe that teachers are competent too. I find it unfortunate that so many educators behave as if teachers are incapable of adapting to modernity.

There is a fundamental difference in stance between assuming that as a teacher I know everything as a fountain of knowledge and that the kids are smarter than me. There may be a “creative bottleneck,” but giving up on teachers or schools is an unacceptable capitulation.

Great things are possible when the teacher gets out of the way, but even greater possibilities exist when the teacher is knowledgeable and has experience they [sic] can call upon to help a kid solve a tough problem, connect with an expert, or toss in a well-timed obstacle that will cause the student encounter a powerful idea at just the right teachable moment.

As usual, Gary is spot on here. Last week during my Australia visit, I was asked on a panel how we prevent kids from being disruptive or off task when every one of them has a device in the classroom. I think the questioner was almost shocked when I started my answer by channelling Gary, saying “I don’t think we give kids enough credit in their ability to stay focused when they’re doing work that matters.”

Every one of the Year 3 kids who I saw at Princes Hill Primary School just outside of Melbourne had their own laptops, yet none of them, zero, were “disengaged” during my visit. And this picture was taken during the 90 minutes of free learning time that every student gets every day at Princes Hill.

Read that again. 90 minutes of free learning time to write stories, make stop action video, read books…whatever.

Kids are more than competent when we give them opportunities to pursue the things they care about. Problem is, we don’t do enough of that.

An “Abundance Mindset”

June 8, 2014 By Will Richardson

Gayle Allen

In essence, we’re participating in a click-through curriculum, and it’s one we need to teach our students to navigate and encourage them to pursue. There’s no scarcity there, no worries about available rooms or staffing needs. Instead, it’s about self-direction, passion, interests, persistence, critical thinking, curation, and outcomes. There’s a greater focus on what they have done and will do with what you’ve learned, rather than how they learned it.

With an abundance mindset, we can create click-through spaces in our schools and in our curriculum. We can empower students to direct their own learning and to take full advantage of the unlimited courses and access they already have outside of school. By shifting from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, we can move from school world to [the] real world.

That “abundance mindset” is key. The question is how do we develop that mindset in the adults when it comes to curriculum? If heads and principals and policy makers had it, I think we’d be on a road to getting rid of over half the required curriculum we currently have. If parents had it, even more.

This is What We’re Up Against

June 6, 2014 By Will Richardson

“cyberike” commenting on this Alfie Kohn piece:

These points illustrate the stupidity and short sightedness of allowing immature students to decide what is important, and what is worth focusing their attention on. They don’t get to decide that, and any article that implies that students should have any control over what they decide to learn not only undermines the educational process, it can cost lives.

“It Just Doesn’t Matter”

May 21, 2014 By Will Richardson

David Perkins, author of Making Learning Whole:

To me, 90 percent of what we typically teach is a waste of time. 90 percent of what we teach probably constitutes particular skills and particular nuggets of knowledge that those kids will never encounter again in a significant way in their lives. It just doesn’t matter. Well, that is completely bizarre. We simply have to do better than that.

Learning to Box

May 17, 2014 By Will Richardson

Yesterday, I took my incredibly spoiled daughter into New York City for her first boxing workout at a basement gym in midtown. It was in a sweat-filled, fairly grungy, Rocky-type place with old fight posters plastered on the walls. And, no lie, the first person I saw when we came off the stairs was Gerry Cooney, a heavyweight boxer who almost killed Ken Norton in a fight I remember watching live on television in 1981. Suffice to say he looked older than his years.

Anyway, Tess wasn’t there to box as much as she was to work out. Without going into the details, she’s chasing a dream, and part of it revolves around getting really, really fit. We’d learned about a this trainer who worked with girls pursuing the same path, and yesterday was the “tryout.” Here’s a snip of what it was like. (I know, turn the phone sideways next time.)

An hour of that, and fifteen minutes in, she was drenched in sweat.

Both of my kids live in their bodies more than their brains. That’s not to say that they’re not smart; they both are. But let’s just say that at this point in their lives, academics and school are not what they are most interested in. They’re not chasing 4.0s; they’re not working to get into Princeton, if you get my drift. My son is focused on the AAU state basketball tournament games he has this weekend, and he’s been putting in hours shooting, dribbling, and working out. Tess is literally by far the healthiest eater I know right now. I’m totally impressed by the dedication both of them have shown to their current passions.

But here’s the larger point to the story. When Tess finished up yesterday and we got in the car so we could spend the next hour trying to get out of the city at 5 pm on a Friday (doh!), I turned to her and said “So, how do you feel?” Her response was interesting.

“My brain hurts,” she said.

Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, there were no real punches thrown; she didn’t take any jabs to the head or anything. Instead, it was about learning. That was probably about the most in-the-moment hour my daughter has spent in quite some time, primarily because she was learning something new, something that interested her, something that challenged her. “Hard fun” as Seymour Papert might have called it. I’d expected her to say that she was physically exhausted. Instead, she’d been working even harder in her head.

Obviously, there’s a whole lot more tied up in this regarding teaching and persistence and failure and more. And I know that schools weren’t built for “hard fun."

But man do I wish that my kids would come home from school much more often with the good "brain hurt” that my daughter got at that gym yesterday.

What Does Every Person Need to Know?

May 13, 2014 By Will Richardson

Peter Greene:

But The List approach is, in fact, List-centered, and I’m well-anchored to an approach to teaching that is student-centered. It is, I have become convinced, the only way to teach. We cannot be rules-centered or standards-centered or test-centered or teacher-centered or list-centered, even though we need to include and consider all of those elements. How to weigh and balance and evaluate all these elements? The answer has been, and continues to be, right in front of us. We balance all the elements of education by centering on the student. As long as we keep our focus on the students’ needs, strengths, weaknesses, stage of development, hopes, dreams, obstacles, aspirations– as long as we stay focused on all that, we’ll be good.

What does every educated person need? Every educated person needs– and deserves– an education that is built around the student. Everything else must be open to discussion.

Students as People or Profile?

April 10, 2014 By Will Richardson

Audrey Watters:

We have to ask more questions about the collection and analysis of student data that is feeding algorithms that promise “personalization.” What do technology companies actually mean by “personalization”? We have to consider if we are reducing students from people to profile — and we must ask these questions, knowing full well that education institutions have never really done a good job recognizing students as people.

How might the marketing promise surrounding “personalization” steer us away from self-direction and into pre-determined, pre-ordained pathways? Can we have “personalization” if it’s built on top of standardized of content?

If, as I said at the beginning of this talk, this is a great time to be a self-directed learner, how might technology be used to dull rather than empower learner agency?

What are the repercussions of competency-based and mastery-based learning? What are the repercussions of choice? What are the repercussions of distance? What are the repercussions of scaling? Who gains? Who gains from “choice” — how do we reconcile the individual’s needs, how the individual benefits — from society’s?

There’s a very powerful strain of American individualism — and California exceptionalism — that permeates technology: personal responsibility, self-management, autonomy. All that sounds great when you frame this — as I have repeatedly in this talk — in terms of self-directed learning. But how do we reconcile that individualism with the social and political and community development that schools are also supposed to support? How do we address these strains of individualism and libertarianism — anti-institutional, anti-governmental, and pro-“free market"? What do we do about the ways in which these ideologies are embedded deeply within many aspects digital technology in society?

I’m sure these questions are being considered in admin team meetings in schools across the country and the world.

Right?

It’s the Delivery, Silly

January 29, 2014 By Will Richardson

Winter weather may have kept Bishop Donahue High School students home from school Monday, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have to go class.

So starts a story in a West Virginia paper yesterday titled “Snow Days Become ‘Cyber Days’ at BDHS.” It’s as if school is now taking on the postal service’s famous creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these teachers from the swift completion of their appointed deliveries of education…thanks to the internet.”

Yay!

Words matter here, right? So, it’s interesting that the “cyber day” has nothing to do with learning. (The word itself is mentioned just once when talking about “distance learning"being offered by colleges.) Instead, it’s ”the school’s answer to lost instruction time.“ Because all that instruction time is just way more important than playing in the snow or reading a good book or going on Minecraft or watching a few hours of tv and just chillin’.

Words matter:

The principal says "This way, we can keep students engaged and continue with lessons with school is canceled." Really? This is engagement?

"Teachers sent online assignments in the morning through email and students were expected to get the work done by early evening. Students could ask questions by email in the early afternoon and the assignments were graded at the end of the day.”

And why can they do this? Because every student has an…wait for it…iPad “they can take with them to complete schoolwork.”

Wow.

And here is the absolute worst part.

“It’s a benefit if a child is sick or hospitalized or if they are on vacation, they still have access to school. It’s a real benefit. You’ll never replace a teacher in a classroom, but this is an awful good way to still have education continue on days that would have been lost.”

Now, read that again.

It still shocks me, the extent to which we continue to dumb down the affordances of the Web and technology for authentic learning in the service of keeping the system grinding no matter what the obstacle. It still shocks me that even before we get to the tech discussion, we can’t seem to even get to the learning discussion. It’s all about schooling. This is the narrative we need to push back hard against.

I’m sure most read this article and think “Progress!” Instead, we should be thinking “Why?”

(See also.)

Making and Learning

January 23, 2014 By Will Richardson

Phil Shapiro:

Treating human beings more humanely can never be a mistake. Learning by making is one of the most humane ways for students to learn. If we were wise, we’d move all our schools—private schools and public schools—rapidly in this direction. In years hence, youth will laugh at old movies showing students sitting obediently in rows of desks in a classroom. “What were they thinking back then?” our youth will mutter. “Were they really so clueless about learning?”

Yes, we really were so clueless about learning.

Announcing: Educating Modern Learners

January 21, 2014 By Will Richardson

Today, I’m happy to announce that my friend and colleague Bruce Dixon and I are starting a new membership website, Educating Modern Learners (EML). It’s a site and an accompanying newsletter that’s aimed specifically at helping school leaders and policy makers from around the globe be better informed about the huge technological changes that are impacting education, and to help them make better, more pertinent decisions for the students they serve. And I’m equally excited to announce that we’ve hired one of the best education bloggers / thinkers we know, Audrey Watters, to be the editorial director / lead writer for the site. Our official launch is scheduled for mid-February.

Our hope is that EML will offer a reader-supported, independent voice to help articulate what is as yet a struggling but growing new narrative in the school reform discussion, one that provokes serious conversation at the leadership level around a more learner-centered, inquiry-based, technology and access-rich school experience that more powerfully and relevantly serves children in this fast-changing modern world. We’ll be commissioning some of the best writers and thought-leaders in the world to produce analysis and commentary on all aspects of modern learning, from local, state and ministry level policy issues, new literacies and pedagogies for 21st Century learners, effective change-centered leadership, new technologies, and best school practices, among others. Also in the mix are regular whitepapers, live events, podcasts, and more. More details to come.

Here’s some of where we’re starting from in our thinking about this:

We believe that we live and learn at a moment of rapid and radical change across institutions and cultures, and that technologies are in large part driving those changes.
We believe that today’s students will be immersed in creative and connected technologies throughout their adult learning lives, and that they require new skills, literacies, and dispositions to succeed in the modern world.
We believe that the web and other technologies can be a powerful source for good in the world.
We believe that schools must move away from “delivering” an education to, instead, empowering students to organize their own education.
We believe technology implemented with vision can be a powerful part of effective teaching and learning in schools.
We believe that relevant reforms are occurring too slowly because not enough of our efforts are aimed at those who make decisions regarding technology’s role in learning in schools.
We believe that top level decision makers often act without a relevant, global, modern lens for how technologies can best serve progressive teaching and learning. This is through no fault of their own as much as it is the consequence of leading at a moment of rapid and radical change.
We believe there is a real need for a diverse set of expert voices to use a global lens to intelligently curate and contextualize the changes, new technologies, future trends, best practices and more on a regular basis.
We believe this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. A time for boldness, and a time for well-informed leadership to shape new thinking around what schools could and should be; about where, when, and how learning takes place. A time for us to truly rethink the possibilities that technology offers education, and a time for creative and courageous leadership to show the way.

EML is hopefully just the first step in what we hope will be a collection of resources and events that will help expand the contexts for learning and leading in the education leadership space. If you’d like to be notified when we officially launch, just sign up on our “Coming Soon!” page.

Making Ourselves Vulnerable

January 14, 2014 By Will Richardson

George Siemens:

Learning is vulnerability. When we learn, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we engage in learning, we communicate that we want to grow, to become better, to improve ourselves. When I first started blogging, I had a sense of fear with every post (“did that sound stupid?”), loss of sleep soul-searching when a critical comment was posted, and envy when peers posted something brilliant (“wow, why didn’t I think of that?”). When a student posts an opinion in a discussion forum or when someone offers a controversial opinion – these are vulnerability-inducing expressions. On a smaller scale, posting a tweet, sharing an image, or speaking into the void can be intimidating for a new user. (I’m less clear about how being vulnerable becomes craving attention for some people as they get immersed in media!). While the learning process can’t be short-circuited, and the ambiguity and messiness can’t be eliminated, it is helpful for educators to recognize the social, identity, and emotional factors that influence learners. Often, these factors matter more than content/knowledge elements in contributing to learner success.

Walk down the vendor floor of any big edu-conference and you’ll see our obsession with making learning less messy and less “vulnerable.” Struggle, patience, courage, persistence, failure, passion…none of these are quantifiable to the degree that reformers or most edupreneurs need them to be to “count.” Yet schools will spend time and money (lots of it) on stuff that organizes, compartmentalizes, personalizes, standardizes, and captures “learning” in order to be compared “successfully” to other districts down the road.

If we fail to recognize the inherent risk that goes with learning something new, we fail our kids. Yet we try to mitigate that risk in almost every decision we make.

Please, Make it Stop

January 2, 2014 By Will Richardson

From the “We Just Can’t Seem to Understand How Learning Really Happens Department” I bring you Crystal Hunter, CEO of Edmodo:

From my perspective, 2013 demonstrated that teachers are more connected than ever before. These connections give teachers the ability to build relationships and share content worldwide, including app recommendations, alternative approaches to lesson plans, links to videos, and more—all of which save them time and augment student comprehension of subject material. As the industry determines how to define success in education, it’s important to allow educators to lead the dialogue. Teachers are the ones shaping today’s youth, one student at a time, and much can be learned from the ways they collaborate. In 2014, we’ll see how much these connections positively influence student success.

No need, obviously, for teachers to actually create anything with these technologies and connections. And I’ve been waiting for something to “augment” my kids’ “comprehension of subject material” for some time now. And I’m just tickled that the “industry” will define success and…wait for it… “allow” teachers to lead the dialogue. Wow! How exciting!

If this is the best that 2014 has to offer, we might as well close up shop.

(And not for nothing, but if teachers using blogs to connect their kids to global others is “best practice” in 2013, then what was it some 12 years ago when we were doing that in my lit and journalism classrooms? Mercy.)

Setting Norms

October 1, 2013 By Will Richardson

Chris Lehmann and I spent most of today visiting a number of schools in Philadelphia, among them his newly opened second high school, SLA-Bieber. (No, not that Bieber.) It was great to see Chris’s vision spreading into a second high school; only three weeks old, I could already feel that SLA vibe i.e. kids who actually wanted to be in school. That visit was sandwiched in-between a quick visit to Microsoft’s School of the Future, which I’d never actually seen, and a brand new startup called The Workshop School It’s the latter that I want to dive into here a bit, because I found a part of their process that happened to be playing out today to be both interesting and inspiring.

The Workshop School has a project based vision for learning, and the schedule allows time for kids to go deep into their work: two 100-minute project blocks in the morning and a series of three shorter periods in the afternoon for more traditional class time. Simon Haugher, who has taken on the “principal” role, says the goal is to have students create projects that live in the real world, that the value in project based learning comes in the authenticity of it. The 70 or so inaugural freshmen started the year doing what they called the “Who Am I?” project, and they’re in the process of beginning to develop a culture of learning and operating. And, interestingly, they have a “Maker” teacher who will be working with kids in a Fab lab type space they’re slowing putting together.

Today, each of five advisory groups were sharing out the results of a norms building exercise that was pretty cool. Each group of about 15 students had spent a good chunk of time over the first few weeks trying to select four words that they would use to represent their group to the school. Surprisingly, there was some pretty wide variety…one group had even briefly considered the word “chivalrous,” though most others had landed on words like “intelligent” and “hard-working” and “creative.” Students in the advisories were selected to present the word to the rest of the classes as they moved around the building, and they all asked questions of one another: Why did a particular class select that word? How were they defining the words? What words didn’t they choose and why? It was fun to watch.

Simon said that the idea was to create some personal language around expectations for the students as they do their work. Using the group in the picture as an example, it would be fair to ask a student at any time “How is what you’re doing right now showing ambition? Art? Intelligence? Hard work?” It reminded me of how they frame expectations at SLA: the only “rules” are that you are respecting yourself, respecting the community, and respecting the school as a place of learning. That’s it. Everything flows from there.

All of which is decidedly different from most schools, where the “norms” are created by administration and documented in a handbook along with the consequences for infractions. I’m sure many probably read stories of schools doing it the way Chris and Simon do it and think they must be operating in some parallel universe, that their students could never be trusted to create their own expectations and culture around learning, or that they would abuse it if they did. It’s not perfect, I’m sure, but when you walk into places like The Workshop School and SLA and now SLA-Bieber (and I’m sure others scattered about) there’s just a different feel. There’s an investment, and rootedness that is missing from the vast majority of schools I’ve been to where kids are playing by the rules, not writing them.

I’ll be interested to see the trajectory of Simon’s kids and their projects as for many if not most, this is a whole new definition to school. My gut says they’ll figure it out, because the vision is really clear: learning is about experience and doing and creating real, meaningful stuff together as a community. That’s a great place to start.

First Chance to Make a Learning Impression

August 1, 2013 By Will Richardson

So, the “Welcome to School” packet came last week. It was about 25 pages of papers, mostly forms and permissions and information about orientations and homerooms. The opening letter was one of welcome and expectations. You know the drill.

Just for fun, I set out to see how long it would take to find the word “learning” somewhere in the mix. Nothing on the first page, or the second, or the third…by the time I finally found the first instance I had stopped counting. It was a buried line in a letter from the principal explaining that due to NCLB, every teacher has to be “highly qualified” and that “every teacher continues life-long learning through professional development activities.”

Interestingly, I really hit the “learning” jackpot on the information page for the BYOD program, citing the effects of having a “personal learning device is school” as “greater productivity and satisfaction and access to information.”

That page was at the end of the packet.

My point? When the first thing you read (halfway down the opening page) from your chid’s new school is that they expect that “compliance [to the dress code] should begin on orientation day,” and the first thing you do is sign ten “consent” or waiver forms, you can’t help but get the message: Play by the rules and we’ll provide you with an education. Do not color outside the lines. Do not pass “Go” until you are told to do so.

Ugh.

What if that “Welcome to School” packet took a bit of a different path. What if that first communication home articulated a clear vision of what teaching and learning looked like in classrooms, supported by teachers and students telling stories of the authentic, real world work they were accomplishing on a regular basis? What if the quality of that work was at a level that instilled real excitement? What if parents were given a web address to see the work, to hear the teachers and students in their own words? Heck, what if there were an app for that? I mean I’m sure that work exists.

Why is it that rules and regs come before learning and making and creating in schools?

Final wondering: I wonder how many other parents who got that packet were absolutely fine with the contents.

Your thoughts?

Uncommon, Not Common

July 11, 2013 By Will Richardson

Brandon Busteed:

The biggest problem with standardized testing is that it seeks standardized answers. We’re not just overinvesting in standardized testing, we’re actually testing standardization. That is to say, most standardized tests are designed to have students come up with the same answers. We’re teaching them how to be similar, not different. And although we need to test certain competencies and intelligence, it is becoming quite clear that there are many kinds of competencies and many forms of intelligence that we are not picking up on with our current testing approaches.

Gallup’s work on strengths development has shown that every human on the planet has a unique talent signature – like a fingerprint. And we’ve found that each person’s success is best determined by how well they leverage their unique talents on a daily basis. Not by trying to be the same as others. And not by trying to “fix their weaknesses.”

I ask this all the time to my parent friends: Why do you want your kids to be common? Why do they all need a “common core” of answers and skills? The answers are almost always around “well, everyone needs to read and write and do math.” Sure, I agree. But we don’t want every kid to read and write and do math in the same way, to the same level, do we?

How about we focus on developing kids as “uncommon” learners?

The Three Narratives

April 2, 2013 By Will Richardson

So, this is really thin, early-morning thinking, but I’m trying to describe what I think are the three competing narratives around schooling at the moment. To be honest, I think I’ve done a pretty bad job of it, but I thought I’d post it up anyway to see if some of you might help me flesh it out a bit more clearly.

Here they are:

1. Schools are broken. The way forward is to make schools better by doubling down on traditional outcomes, state-mandated standardized tests, school choice, and test-based accountability for teachers. The state decides what will be taught and when it will be taught, and, importantly, what will be assessed. Technology’s dual role in this is first to “personalize” delivery of the curriculum to each student using adaptive learning platforms and, second, to provide all students access to “the best teachers” and “best content” available via the Web as a way to increase efficiency. "Student learning" is defined by comparison test scores year to year and is “managed” by the system. Policy makers and businessmen who are, for the most part, not educators, are chief drivers of reforms.

2. Schools are not broken, but can be improved. The way forward is to make schools better by reducing the emphasis on standardized tests, rethinking teacher training and assessment, and increasing local control over school decisions. Thinking about curriculum and classrooms is rooted in traditional systems and structures, and schools are still places where state-created outcomes are delivered to students. Technology’s role is to support instruction and student learning, which is measured primarily by teacher created assessments and summative evaluations. Traditional educators are the primary drivers of change thinking and reforms.

3. Schools as currently constructed are not broken but increasingly irrelevant. Abundant connections to content, knowledge and people created by the Web requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional structures and systems. The way forward is to change the emphasis on student learning from “what” to learn to, instead, “how” to learn. Technology’s role is to support both students and teachers as inquiry, discovery based learners with an emphasis on creating, connecting, collaborating, and sharing authentic, real-world work. Learning is assessed by performance, achievement of teacher-student negotiated outcomes, and contribution. Educators and connected learners are the chief drivers of these reforms.

My biggest struggle is with #2. I’m pretty clear what this group doesn’t want (see #1), but I’m not totally sure what they advocate for, especially in terms of the role of technology.

Anyway…be gentle. ;0)

It’s Not an Audition

March 26, 2013 By Will Richardson

Seth Godin:

We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there’s a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don’t know who they are.

That means that the old systems, the ones where just a few people were anointed to be the chosen authors, chosen contributors, chosen musicians–that system left a lot of people out in the cold. The new open systems embrace waste. They understand that most people won’t contribute and most contributions won’t be any good. But that’s fine, because this openness means that the previously unfound star now gets found.

The curated business, then, will ultimately fail because it keeps missing this shoulder, this untapped group of talented, eager, hard-working people shut out by their deliberately closed ecosystem. Over time, the open systems use their embrace of waste to winnow out the masses and end up with a new elite, a self-selected group who demonstrate their talent and hard work and genius over time, not in an audition.

Go ahead and minimize these open systems at your own peril. Point to their negative outliers, inconsistency and errors, sure, but you can only do that if you willfully ignore the real power: some people, some of the time, are going to do amazing and generous work… If we’ll just give them access to tools and get out of their way.

And this is especially true in closed systems that have hard and fast measures around “quality.” As Tony Baldasaro points out, there is great genius in our children that our systems don’t explicitly value or account for. Now that our kids can share that value and connect around it without us, our inability to embrace and honor the work that doesn’t fit neatly into our box of curriculum will decrease our value moving forward even more.

Painting Our Own Canvas

March 8, 2013 By Will Richardson

Brian Hoffstein:

Deciding what to juice our minds with and what to outsource to the machines has no definitive answer. However, rote memorization, knowledge regurgitation, and anything inside-the-box will only have depleting effects on a growing creative class. We need more artists and entrepreneurs, engineers and programmers. People that dream, and know how to make that dream come true. This is what our education system needs to embrace, this is what our Renaissance is all about.

The irony of all this – if the past is any indication of the future – is that the innovation in education, to teach the skills behind creativity and execution, will not come from the bureaucrats but rather the innovators themselves. Just as a painter teaches painting, and a pianist teaches the piano, it will be an entrepreneur who dreams, designs and builds the platform that can effectively teach entrepreneurship. But the time is here and now, with cell phones outnumbering toilets in the developing world, we must democratize this novel art form and empower individuals to paint their own canvas.

And the frustrating part is that the dreams of the policy makers and, in many cases, the parents of the kids we teach are decidedly less lofty. Those dreams are ignited by a vision of schooling, not a vision of learning as it might exist today. Once again, the context for having these conversations needs to be modernized if our Renaissance will truly come about.

Amplify Tablet Amplifies What, Exactly?

March 6, 2013 By Will Richardson

Terrence O’Brien on NewsCorp’s new tablet offering:

Amplify aims to be not just a tool but a platform for managing a 21st century classroom. Where past efforts to incorporate tablets into a K-12 environment have been satisfied with simple (and carefully controlled) social features and some reference materials, this actually offers features to teachers aimed at delivering instant feedback and differentiated instruction. Everything from taking attendance and blocking distracting apps, to polling students comprehension and pushing supplemental materials to those that need it can be managed from the educator’s unit. There’s also the ability to build custom lesson plans called Playlists, that can incorporate material from locally stored textbooks, pre-loaded Khan Academy videos and the internet.

Wow. Sounds just great. Is there anything in this vision that supports kids as learners rather than as consumers of a curriculum that teachers manage and deliver? Managing. Blocking. Pushing. Incorporating.

Good stuff. No really…I mean it. Can’t wait.

UPDATE: This description from USA Today might be even better:

What’s perhaps more significant, Amplify will give teachers the ability to both monitor and control what students do with the device. Teachers can conduct lessons with an entire class or small group and can instantly see what websites or lesson areas students are visiting. A teacher dashboard allows them to take instant polls, ask kids to “raise their hands” virtually and, if things get out of hand, redirect the entire class with an “Eyes on Teacher” button that instantly pushes the message out to every screen.

Wow, again.

The Questions

March 4, 2013 By Will Richardson

Audrey Watters, in her most excellent post deconstructing Sugata Mitra’s $1 million TED prize award from last week:

I have questions about this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it, about colonialism and neo-colonialism. I have questions about the funding of the initial “Hole in the Wall” project (it came from NIIT, an India-based “enterprise learning solution” company that offers 2- and 4-year IT diplomas). I have questions about these commercial interests in “child-driven education” (As Ellen Seitler asks, “can the customer base be expanded to reach people without a computer, without literacy, and without any formal teaching whatsoever?”). I have questions about the research from the “Hole in the Wall” project — the research, not the 15 minute TED spiel about it. I have questions about girls’ lack of participation in the kiosks. I have questions about project’s usage of retired British schoolteachers — “grannies” — to interact with Indian children via Skype.

I have questions about community support. I have questions about what happens when we dismantle public institutions like schools — questions about social justice, questions about community, questions about care. I have questions about the promise of a liberation via a “child-driven education,” questions about this particular brand of neo-liberalism, techno-humanitarianism, and techno-individualism.

Here’s my question: What happens to these questions (and others) that we need to be asking about schools and classrooms and learning in general? How do we answer them? How do they enter the larger debate which, by and large, has and is ignoring them?

Whether you agree/believe/get tingly about Mitra’s work or not, and regardless how you feel about the whole TED approach, this award does, I think, serve a positive purpose in our little corner of the student-centered reform world here. There are now whole bunches of more people considering the role of schools, the value of technology in learning, and the new paths that are opening up to learning. In many cases, his vision is going to pull this conversation to a different place. There are lots more questions being asked. I think, on balance, that can be a good thing.

But only if we’re engaging in those conversations critically. Only if, like Audrey, we’re willing to read further, to engage in the debate, to articulate our own thinking around it not just to those we know in our local communities but in our online communities as well. Only if we’re brave enough to take the learner’s stance and say “I’ve got an opinion, but I want to know more.”

This is hard, especially in the online space. And it’s not just the idea that online spaces can bend toward an uncivil, almost bullying tone. It takes a confidence and boldness to engage. This is not easy even for someone like me who has been doing it for a dozen years or so. My brain explodes when I think of all the people (many of whom I know) who are just much smarter than I who might read this and might chuckle at my ignorance.

Yet I’ll read and I’ll write because I want to know more, and I want those who might read this to help me clarify my thinking, and I trust them to do so with civility and not disdain. But I also know full well that the vast majority of people who read this won’t engage either here or elsewhere.

Which, as almost always, brings me back to my kids. How do I/we help them help them want to learn more, help them understand the value of engagement, and help them become able to navigate the rough spots in all of this? I’m not sure Mitra’s vision is the definitive answer, and as Audrey suggests, there is much more a potential public good in community schools that can be replaced by grannies in the cloud.

But it does beg that ongoing question that we still need to push: are our schools and systems helping our kids develop into the types of modern learners that will flourish in this modern world? And if not, what do we do about that?

Good Luck With That

February 11, 2013 By Will Richardson

Alex Reid on the National Council Teachers of English updated release of their literacy framework:

What NCTE recognizes is that English should be the means by which such literacy is acquired (at least in the US, which is the nation in “National Council”). To that I say, “good luck.” Good luck providing this professional development for existing teachers, who are not prepared to do this. Good luck finding university English departments with faculty to provide this literacy to the general population of college students, let alone educate preservice K-12 teachers or graduate students who will become university faculty. Good luck finding English departments who even remotely view digital literacy as a subject that even marginally concerns them, let alone one that would be central to their curriculum in the way that print literacy is now. As I suggested above, I think you’d have better luck selling the average college English department on becoming grammar-centric than you would on becoming digital-centric.

…The truth is that if this was 2003 and a department recognized that digital literacy was going to become the issue that might make or break their disciplinary future, then by now they might have four or five digital scholars hired and a couple tenured. Maybe they’d be in a position to deliver this content today. But few departments did that. This means the transition is likely to be rocky.

Rocky, indeed.

“Connect to New People on a Regular Basis”

February 11, 2013 By Will Richardson

danah boyd:

Building lifelong learners means instilling curiosity, but it also means helping people recognize how important it is that they continuously surround themselves by people that they can learn from. And what this means is that people need to learn how to connect to new people on a regular basis.

And:

Are you preparing learners for the organizational ecosystem of today? Or are you helping them develop networks so that they’re prepared for the organizational shifts that are coming?

This is why we need to develop our own networks now. I know we’re in this hugely messy transition period into this self-directed, self-organized world, but at what point do we start making this a requirement rather than an option?

Read the whole post.

As Goes Journalism…?

February 7, 2013 By Will Richardson

Ryan McCarthy:

The dirty secret about the web media business is that there’s a massive oversupply problem. Everyday, content creators are producing more journalism, more think-pieces, more interactive graphics, more photo galleries, more tweets, more slideshows, more videos, more GIFs, and more deviously socially-optimized Corgi listicles. All of that is being distributed via more channels on more devices. This creates more supply for display ads, web media’s favorite and still growing revenue generator. All that supply, however, drags down ad prices…

…a wide swath of media — journalism included — is becoming less and less valuable as the Internet gets bigger.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that if you want to get a sense of what’s in store for education, look at what’s happening to journalism. Reporters and writers are now everywhere. Content and news is everywhere. It’s changing the very nature of the business.

Same for education, just that now it’s content and teachers that are increasingly everywhere you turn. The economics are the hard part…what happens when you need scale to make a living? What happens when teachers find themselves competing with other teachers for students? What happens when school is something your organize for yourself?

Pretty sure we’re about to find out…