Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

"What Did You Create Today?"

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In a couple of weeks, both Tess and Tucker will be starting their first day at brand new schools. They’ll know no one, have all new teachers, new surroundings, and, hopefully, new opportunities. I’m not sure they’re totally at peace with these changes, but as I keep telling them, it’s the kind of stuff that builds character. (I keep regaling them with school switching stories of my own, the most challenging being when my mom moved us out to New Jersey from Chicago when I was beginning 6th grade and three days before school started I was wading barefoot in a creek, stepped on a broken bottle, and ended up with 10 stitches in the bottom of my foot and a pair of crutches for the first week of classes. Talk about character building.) Wendy and I have been trying to prepare them for this shift as best we can, and while I know it’s a bit scary for them, I’m really hopeful the change will be good for them on a lot of different levels.

What I’m most hopeful for, however, is that their stories about school will change. Last year, far too much of the reporting about their days started with “I got a ___ on my ___ test!” or “Yes, I’ve got homework” (said in the same voice as one might say “Yes, I’ve got ringworm.”) School was something that rarely sparked a conversation about learning. Usually, it was a topic to be avoided or ignored. I hope to hear more excitement this year, more passion about learning, more thinking and doing. To that end, I’ve been coming up with a mental list of the types of questions I’m hoping they might answer:

What did you make today that was meaningful?

What did you learn about the world?

Who are you working with?

What surprised you?

What did your teachers make with you?

What did you teach others?

What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

What’s something your teachers learned today?

What did you share with the world?

What do you want to know more about?

What did you love about today?

What made you laugh?

I think their answers to those questions (and others that I’m hoping you might add below) would tell me more about what they learned than any test or quiz or worksheet that they brought home for me to sign. And here’s the deal; I expect them to be talking answers to these types of questions every day. As a parent, I think I have every right to expect that my kids are immersed in spaces where learning is loved and enjoyed and shared every single day. Classrooms where they are engaged in meaningful work that makes them think, a majority of time doing stuff that can’t be measured by some impersoanl state test. (I can give them software to do much of that.) Where the adults that surround them are models for that learning work themselves. Is that too much to ask?

New schools, new opportunities, renewed expectations. We’ll see how it goes…

Digital Inclusion

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I’ve got a mental stack of blog posts piling up on a bunch of seemingly random though thinly connected topics on NECC, the environment, note taking with Evernote, my kids’ schooling, the death of RSS and other stuff which I’ll hopefully get to at some point here, but this morning I read a couple of things that seem more interesting, to me at least.

Dean’s reflection post on NECC drew a whole bunch of great comments, but the one that made me really think hard was by Ira Socol who wrote:

So, it is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?

That’s one of those really concise shift statements that makes me bend my own frame a bit. I think too often I fall into looking at these tools and wonder what they can add to our classrooms and our teaching when the real question is how can our classrooms and teaching add capacity to the tools. As he points out, we reframed education with the advent of the book; we need to reframe it once again with the advent of a networked, inter-connected medium that creates incredible new affordances for learning. He writes:

It is the job of education to alter itself to prove itself of value to the world which now exists.

Amen. Arguably, there is a great deal about the current system which has lost its value as compared to what is possible for those who are passionate learners with a connection. (More about that connection piece in a bit.) I mean grouping by geography and age are becoming less and less relevant, and while I’m not suggesting there isn’t a body of core knowledge all students should learn, the emphasis on what we know rather than how we learn it is becoming more and more frustrating to those who are already networked learners. As Ira Tweeted later:

Educators often think that school is the point, when it needs to be the path.

Part of being that path, however, is providing the access to our students that’s necessary for them to participate. Along those lines, I came across an interesting post from Renee Blodgett (via a Tweet from Howard Rheingold) who is writing about “Redefining Digital Inclusion.” The seminal question was “do those that enjoy the benefits of technology have a moral right over those who do not?” As Renee suggests, this isn’t a new thread, but the shift here is that the attitude of parents and teachers around this are just as important as the financial and logistical issues. Inclusion can no longer just be seen as having a device and a connection.

We need to redefine Digital Inclusion. The definition of digital inclusion today is basic access. It doesn’t include basic skills such as understanding some of the technology and social media schools to network and make friends not just locally for globally. It increases their job and life opportunities significantly. It’s time to move that definition beyond simple access. We need a new definition that policy makers, technology creators, parents, and educators can rally around. There will be a revolution when more and more students get their hands on some of these devices and start using them in the classroom.

While this is not a post on where the lever is, I’ve been arguing for a while now that not much of this is going to change until the stakeholders, in this case parents, take it upon themselves to demand something new. Something more relevant. But the only way that parents are going to DEMAND access is if they see that not simply as a way for kids to get a computer but to see connections online as a way to a better future, a way to help thier kids become more educated, better learners than by books and paper alone. Unfortunately, we’re losing the media war on this one right now. Feeling like a broken record, but we need to do a better job of making this case beyond our own still small, nascent network.

Wanted: School Chief Learning Officer

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So here’s a question I was discussing a couple of weeks ago with a superintendent at a gathering of educational leaders: What percentage of the teachers at your school do a good job of preparing kids to take meet the requirements, pass the tests, and get prepared for college, and what percentage do a good job of teaching them how to learn? Not suggesting that the two are mutually exclusive, but as we talked about it, she shook her head at one point and said “I think 90 percent of my staff is really good at delivering the goods, but only about 10 percent really get student centered, inquiry driven, lifelong learning.”

That answer stuck with me. I would guess that’s probably the case for most schools, and the reasons are obvious. I know many schools and districts have full-time positions for testing coordinators and college counselors and data-driven decision makers. We put a great deal of emphasis on outcomes with our kids, but I keep wondering how much more we could do in emphasizing the process of learning as well, not just for students but for everyone in the school.

So when I read Jay Cross’s latest piece in CLO magazine, I wondered how many schools could point to someone, anyone, who is in charge of learning. By that I mean someone who manages the culture of the school by focusing not on outcomes as much as how learning is writ large in the system. Someone who also understands the ways in which social Web technologies accentuate the need for the learning skills we’ve desired all along: creativity, critical thinking, independent thought, collaboration, etc. I know I keep going back to this, but I wonder how many of us can look at our colleagues and answer the question “How does that person learn?” And think of the leaders in our schools in that light as well.

And it really is about a culture that supports, celebrates and shares learning. Jay points to a survey about CLOs from TogetherLearn that I think acts as a good barometer of that work. Does your school:

  • Welcome innovation and contributions from its teachers?
  • Encourage (and provide time for) reflection on successes and flops?
  • Tolerate mistakes and reward thinking out of the box?
  • Share information openly?
  • Foster learning for everyone?
  • Experiment with new ways of doing things?
  • Work across departments and unit boundaries with ease?

All of that suggests a place that emphasizes process, not outcomes. (The rest of the survey is definitely worth a look in the context of schools as well.) And it also suggests intent, not just serendipity. We need to hire for learning, plan for learning, and share the learning of the entire system, students, teachers, and support staff alike. We need to leverage the potential of the local personal learning communities as well as the global networks of which we can become a part. We need people to lead that work, however, people who understand deeply the passion-based, self-directed potentials for learning in a connected world, and the importance of a vision for true learner-centered classrooms and curricula for everyone in the building.

So I’m wondering, do you have a CLO in your school either by name or reputation? Should we be thinking about hiring CLOs in our schools and districts? Modifying other positions to include these ideas?

Transparency = Leadership

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So here is the money question: What two things (and only two) would you tell educational leaders are the most important steps they can take to lead change today? I got that one from a professor at Oakland University last week, and after pausing for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, I answered “build a learning network online, and make your learning as transparent as possible for those around you.” And while I really think the first part of that answer would make sense to most leaders out there, I think the second would have them running for the hills.

It’s pretty obvious to me that my own kids are going to be living much more transparent lives than most of their teachers would be comfortable with. I’ve written and spoken ad nauseum of the need for them to be “Googled well”, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a parent’s responsibility to start that process for them. (That’s a post for another day.) I really do believe that in this moment, however, that schools also have a responsibility to help kids lead transparent lives online in ways that prepare them for the highly complex relationships they will be having in these virtual spaces as adults. But to do that, schools have to get more transparent themselves.

I pulled Dov Seidman’s book “How” off the shelves last week as it speaks so eloquently to this point. I blogged about it almost two years ago when it came out, but in light of how things have moved forward since then, it’s even more relevant today. While most people see it as a business book, I look at it as a parenting book, one that challenges me to think about how to best prepare my kids for the “hypertransparent and hyperconnected world” in which they are going to work and play. His point is that in that environment, “how” you do something is more important even than “what” you do. If you’re not doing it skillfully, ethically, and transparently, you’ll be ceding success to those that do.

A big part of my decision making process in terms of who to believe and who to trust stems from how willing a person is to share her ideas, what level of participation she engages in, how ethical or supportive those interactions are, and how relevant she is to my own learning needs. As I said to the many professors in that presentation last week, there is certainly much I could learn from them if they were sharing. But most of them are not.

In this same vein, I have more and more of an expectation of the teachers and especially the administrators in our schools to lead transparent lives. The fact that they are veritably “un-googleable” in terms of finding anything they have created and shared and perhaps collaborated with others on troubles me on a number of levels. First, I can’t see for myself whether or not they are learners. And, almost more importantly, I get no sense as to whether or not they are leaders of learners. Whether they are in the classroom or in the front office, I want (demand?) the adults in my schools to be effective models for living in a transparent world. I want my kids to see them navigating these spaces effectively, sharing what they know, teaching others outside of their physical space, and contributing to the conversation.

In Gary Hamel’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. The Fortune 500, he writes

Contribution counts for more than credentials. When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.

I totally agree. My kids need to be surrounded by contributors, people who understand the nuances of these spaces and relationships that we interact with on a daily basis. And not only do they need to see contribution, they need to see it done well, ethically, honestly, meaningfully. In other words, this is more than a twice daily update on Facebook or Twitter.

Bringing all of this together, I just started reading the updated version of Howard Gardner’s “Five Minds for the Future” and there are all sorts of connections to this conversation. Transparency can support all of the ways in which my kids must be able to acquire expertise, act ethically, display creativity, respect diversity, and synthesize and make sense of information. I look at the way my own experience over the last eight years have pushed me in all of those directions, primarily because I built a network around my passion and I shared most everything I did. I hope I’m being a good role model for my kids in that respect at least.

For most principals or superintendents, however, the idea of making their learning lives transparent is not one that sits too comfortably. It’s another one of those huge shifts that is, I think, inevitable but is going to be agonizingly slow in the making. As Seidman asks

The question before us as we consider what we need to thrive in the inter-networked world is: How do we conquer our fear of exposure and turn these new realities into new abilities and behaviors? How can we become proactive about transparency?

Proactive instead of reactive, which is what we’re all about when it comes to transparency in schools right now. What a concept.

(Photo “sunflowers” by marcomagrini.)

One School's Journey to Online Social Learning

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So if you’re looking for a model of a school that’s heavily invested in social tools but using all open source or home grown apps to begin to teach even their youngest kids the benefits of publishing and networking, read on. During my visit to Melbourne I met Richard Olsen, a former teacher and ICT co-ordinator at the Concord School who now has a role at IdeasLab, a group that is exploring the best ways to implement large scale technology projects across Victoria. We talked at some length about the ways in which over the last three years he implemented everything from blogging, to photo sharing to bookmarking with his students in some big ways. Big like in over 70,000 photos that are housed on the school’s server documenting just about every aspect of learning that goes on there.

Embedded below you will see a brochure that Richard created before he left documenting his efforts. You can see from the introductory statement that Richard’s attempt to leverage the potential of these tools is pretty visionary.  Lumil was the Flickr-type app that Richard himself coded. It uses tags, sets, albums, the whole deal. As you’ll see, you can even sort the pictures by a particular date range, so viewers can get a sense of what’s happening at any given moment. They used Scuttle to house their own social bookmarks, WordPress MU to blog, and Scratch and others for social game making activities. Be sure to spend some time on the skills matrix at the bottom. All in all, it’s an impressive suite of tools and pedagogies that did much to change learning at his school.

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

As Parents, How Should We Assess Schools?

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The other night at a friend’s holiday party, I started picking the brains of people who had kids going to school at the local high school, the one that my own kids are scheduled to attend in a few short years. I got a variety of responses, most of them pretty positive. It”s a smallish country high school, about 950 students 9-12, mostly white middle class, and probably typical in most aspects. I don’t think anyone would rate it as outstanding, but it’ not near the bottom by traditional measures either.

It’s those traditional measures that struck me in the responses I got. One parent, who is a classroom teacher at another school, said “well my daughter scored really well on the PSAT’s, so they [the school] must be doing something right.” Another parent said “well, they’ve got like 10 AP courses which is pretty good.” And a few others commented on the fact that their kids were doing well socially and had a lot of friends. I was struck by how kind of programmed the responses felt. Almost like, it’s a school, what more can you say?

Ironically, I ran into an old friend right before the party who had recently retired from teaching at that school, and he articulated his assessment like this: “If you want your kids get the best experience, you have to advocate for them.” In other words, I’m going to have to find ways to help them get the “best” teachers and to be active in steering them through the program. “Look,” he said. “It’s like 25% of the teachers are great and your kids will learn a lot. Another 40% are fine, and they’ll make it interesting. The rest? They’re just doing their time. Not much different from anywhere else.”

Did I mention there is a board seat opening up this spring? Hmmm….

Finally, one of our good friends went and visited a Waldorf school nearby and spent the day watching students and teachers interact. It was interesting to listen to her talk about the experience. “It was amazing,” she said. “The kids were engaged, making things, talking to teachers. It was totally different.” They had a compost bin, too.

Now I know it’s not totally fair to make comparisons here, but I wish I would have heard more of those types of responses about the high school. I wish I would have heard stories of kids changing the world, of pushing through personal barriers, of creative expressions, of challenges met, of real work for real purposes. I wish it had been more than PSATs and AP tests.

So I’m wondering two things. How are you advocating for your kids? And more importantly, how are you assessing your kids’ schools? If you’re reading this, I’m thinking PSAT scores and number of AP courses probably aren’t too important. (Or are they?) In the 21st Century, what should we be demanding of our schools?

(Photo: “Rows Upon Rows” by natashalcd.)

So What is the Future of Schools?

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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.)

Let's Just Scare the #$%& Out of Them, Ok?

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Some stories are so bizarre that you have to wonder if they’re true, but this one (via Ewan’s Delicious bookmarks) about a policeman in Cheyenne, Wyoming who was brought in to “teach” kids about MySpace is beyond the pale:

“Officer Gay chose it as an opportunity to take Shaylah’s pictures and her MySpace and use it as an example of what not to do, but then just really publicly humiliate her and mocked her,” said Nordic, who coaches wrestling at the high school and football and track at Windsor Middle School. “She left the auditorium in tears and busted out crying. He told the student body that he took her information from MySpace and showed it to a predator in prison and asked him what he would do with it.”

Nordic said Gay used inappropriate language when describing to the students what the predator would do to Shaylah.

It gets worse.

Anyone with any experience with social Web tools can tell you that INVITING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO AN ASSEMBLY TO SCARE THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL KIDS FOR POSTING STUFF TO MYSPACE IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST WAY TO “TEACH” THEM ABOUT SOCIAL NETWORKS.

First of all, it’s too late by that point. Second of all, it’s LAZY. Schools do this because they don’t want to do the hard work of understanding what 75% or more of their kids are actually doing online.

Here is a suggestion: Go to your principal or superintendent right now and ask her/him this: Would you really rather have your students learn about safety online from some “authority” figure who drops in and attempts to make them fearful, or from people who they know and trust and see every day in their classrooms who over the course of time in appropriate and balanced ways can educate them instead?

Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.

Oy.

But then again, scaring them is so, so much easier…

“You could imagine her sitting there and hearing that,” Nordic said. “He asked everybody there, ‘Is Shaylah Nordic here?’ So she raised her hand and then he went on to post the pictures and talk about it. He said she was likely to be raped and murdered because how easy it was to access this stuff, and how easy it was to get information.”

Nordic said Gay gave the example of a girl in another state who had been targeted on MySpace, and the girl was taken to an empty warehouse, was raped and shot dead.

Nice.

Accepting "Predictably Mediocre"

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Chris shook my brain awake this morning with his reflections on change and Shirky and I’m still trying to sort through some of his finer points. Suffice to say, that it’s among the best posts I’ve read this year because it articulates so clearly where much of this is at and, perhaps, where it needs to go.

The where it’s at stuff is easy to get to, but hard to accept. And, as Chris says, our collective fear of failure, both of our schools and of our kids, is at the crux of the problem. Most are content with “predictably mediocre” schools because the risks associated with change are simply not worth it at this moment. It’s this risk/reward equation that I keep getting drawn to as well, and I keep feeling more and more that schools will not change until the external expectations change, and that the expectations that matter most reside in parents. We need to reframe that lens, and we need to do it fast. And “predictably mediocre” as language may not be a bad starting point. (That’s not what I want for my kids’ school.) But until we can celebrate the successes of “riskier”, change oriented schools like SLA, until we can make a compelling case that not only are the risks a) not that risky and b) imperative for preparing our kids, those risks will continue to be unpalatable.

And then there’s Tom, who is helping me understand “The Role of Chris Lehmann in the Universe.” As Tom points out, there are other progressive schools that might fit that bill, but their efforts are not nearly as transparent as Chris’s in the context of the technologies and tools we use in this community. I love the exclamation point he adds when he suggests that there have been “whole books” written about these places! The idea!

Tom asks if this is a problem in any sense, the fact that these schools and their principals aren’t blogging and Twittering and going to NECC. I wonder in the context of Shirky’s larger point that group action is enhanced by the ability to connect online if it isn’t a problem on some level. I wonder if a transparent network of successful “high-risk” schools connected through social tools wouldn’t at this moment be a boon to the larger discussion of school reform. And this is one of the more interesting effects of all of this, that right now, connecting around books is simply not as easy as connecting around blogs.

Which brings things to the “where all this needs to go” part of Chris’s post which is easier to read but harder to get to. How do we, in Shirky’s parlance, act collectively? Chris offers up some great, concrete, starting points, all of which are daunting to think about on any number of different levels because they inexorably lead to that inherent friction between traditional organization and collaborative group effort. There are new models being built in this process as well. What structure would we build? To what extent can it be owned by the many and not the few? Wikipedia is struggling with this right now. Obama is. It would be an interesting, yet difficult road, one that, as Chris points out, would be easier today than it was 10 years ago. And it could be oh so amazing if we pulled it off.

Much to think about, no doubt.

One more thing: Yesterday, when I picked Tess up from shooting (basketball) camp, she was sporting a new t-shirt, on the back of which read: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Hmmm…

NECC '08/NECC '09

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Been trying to get my brain around last week’s NECC experience for a few days now, reading some of the other post mortems, thinking about what the lasting impressions are and will be for my own thinking and learning. For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, San Antonio was not a home run for me, not like last year in Atlanta when the energy and ideas seemed to be flowing more intently, more spontaneously. And before anyone starts throwing things at me, let me just say that was my experience; I’m sure that many, many others found this year’s event to be a celebration, perhaps a transformation in their thinking about teaching and learning and education. In that regard, I’m sincerely happy that more voices have been added to the chorus, and that more practitioners have entered the conversation. We need more voices. We need more good pedagogy and thinking.

I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.

The good news is that the level of passion among those that count themselves in this community is, in a word, amazing. It was evident from the conversations I eavesdropped on in the Blogger’s Cafe to the late night debates on the River Walk, to the back channel chats, the sessions on how to put the tools to good work, to the collective efforts to capture as much of NECC as possible for those who couldn’t attend. I don’t think it was possible to sit in on the sessions or walk by the Cafe and not simply admire the level of engagement of both long standing and relatively new participants in this conversation. All of us, whether evangelists or practitioners or even the naysayers, are deeply invested in trying to make sense of these giant shifts that are occurring, and that is all good.

And there was an international flavor to NECC this year that seemed stronger than in years’ past. (BTW, I don’t count the Canadian contingent as international, thought I know I should.) It was great to see folks from Australia and the UK and many, many other far flung spots around the globe. We need more of their perspectives as well, and that seems to be happening.

But for me, at least, at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering, “what’s really changed?” And, where will we be a year from now?

NECC is the echo chamber writ large and in living color; more than any other conference, it’s where we feel “big.” But the reality of it is, as Dean suggests, the powerful learning that most of us experience in these online communities is still little more than a blip on the radar screen. (I wonder what percentage of the 8 million+ educators in this country are aware of these shifts on a basic level.) And this is a tech conference. As I read through some of the back channel conversations, some were asking about presenting to school boards or parents or even town councils. Others were talking about getting out to non-edtech conferences. Some were, again, searching for that elusive tipping point that will get the conversation jump started outside the chamber.

And I think it’s time we get serious about all of that. No doubt, the vendor floor in Washington will be filled with “Web 2.0 in a Box” and “Safe Social Networking” and control, control, control. And I’m going to guess that, like this year, “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts” will be “Hot Topics” as well as a few other new tools. And we’ll be talking once again about new standards and 21st Century Literacies and all of that. But while we as a community have no control over some of that, is that what we aspire to? Is that what we want the emphasis on NECC 09 to be, once again? Or do we want it to be more?

I hope it’s more. More about learning and figuring out what it means to be connected. More about what we can do to begin systemic change. More tangible, non-toolsy, results oriented thinking. More models that work, models that provide realistic options for educators to wrap their brains around.

More like what Chris Lehmann presented in his session, a session that since it had a “specific pedagogical focus” felt like it was “high stakes,” in an of itself a comment that should get us thinking. More like the conversations on leadership that Scott McLeod and Chris and others tried to have at EduBloggerCon on Saturday. More about ideas and connections.

And in general, without speaking for others, I again think I need to do more to try to get these ideas and these questions outside the walls of my learning community. I’m afraid we’re stalling because without some larger force or lever, these ideas have no where (or very limited routes) to go in a comprehensive discussion about what schools need to be and to do in response to the scale of change that is upon us. (That thinking is influenced heavily by Sir Ken Robinson’s latest presentation to the RSA, btw.) For me, at least, I think it’s time to start writing. (I know; I’ve said that before.)

Change on any level is not easy, and I’m not suggesting that there is one way to change or one thing that needs to be changed or that we all need to change in one particular way. It’s all incremental and personal, I know, but it’s also about doing what will create the most change, do the most good. I’ve been thinking about Lessig a lot and his attempt to attack the root cause of the smaller problems. I wonder what the root impediment for school change is? And, reffing Sir Ken again, we are at a moment where we all must change if we’re to sustain this existence. Along those lines, I’ve also, strangely, been thinking about all of the devoted carnivores that I hung around with last week in steak and barbecue land, thinking about how much healthier they would be and how much better off we’d all be if they and everyone else, for that matter, ate lower to the ground. But that is tough change as well.

Anyway, proposals for NECC ’09 are only a couple of months away…

Not "The Dumbest Generation"

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So with the caveat that I am only halfway through Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, I have some early impressions to throw out there. While I think there is some merit to this side of the debate (much like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur) what really bothers me about this book so far is, as the title suggests, this sense that our kids are at fault. Let me put it plainly: our kids are not “dumb” nor is this generation “dumb” simply because they spend a lot of time in front of television screens and computers or because they haven’t worked out for themselves how to get smarter using the Read/Write Web. And to label them so is demeaning and smacks more of marketing than reality.

Here is a sampling of quotes that I think pretty accurately reflect the tenor of the book:

In an average young person’s online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn’t expand, memory doesn’t improve, analytic talents don’t develop, and erudition doesn’t ensue. (109)

For must young users, it is clear, the Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers. (110)

The major finding: “More than half the students failed to sort the information to clarify related material.” It graded the very communications skills Web 2.0, the Read/Write Web, supposedly instills, and “only a few test takers could accurately adapt material for a new audience.” (115)

And just whose fault is this?

If the argument is that these types of gains are not possible through the Web, that’s one thing. But, speaking for myself, I know that is not true. My interactions using social tools have definitely expanded my vocabulary, improved my memory, improved my analytic abilities, made me a more discerning critic and all the rest. And I would be that many reading this would agree to those shifts in their own experience. Networks push our thinking. Networks can push our kids’ thinking.

Bauerline guzzles the “Digital Native” metaphor and leverages it to the extreme, expressing genuine surprise that our kids aren’t able to figure this all out on their own and then, worse, blaming them for the failure when the failure is ours. It’s our own lack of context and practical skills for what is happening right now that is the failure, not just at school but at home. How many millions of parents have no clue what their kids are doing with their online time, have no ability to counsel or model for their own children the ways in which these technologies can facilitate new opportunities for learning? How many tens of thousands of educators?

And that really is the time challenge that we have, not so much the lack of time in the day to get our brains around this but the time it’s going to take for adults to get on some sort of more than equal footing with our kids in their uses of these technologies. We’ve always known more, been able to do more, been “smarter.” In these contexts, however, we’re not smarter any longer at a time when our kids really need us to be.

We’re the dummies, not our kids.

If Clay Shirky is right, and all us baby boomers are carrying around a boatload of “cognitive surplus“, we better start unleashing it sooner rather than later.

(Photo “Bored” by foreversouls.)

Many Models

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My last full day here in Australia before the long trip home tomorrow. I get my day back, but who knows how long it will be before I get my body clock back. Last summer it took almost two weeks for me to get straight. Tips anyone? (Be nice.)

Haven’t had time to think much of this through, so excuse the relatively thin thinking. (Feel free to poke holes in it, as always.)

I’ve visited a couple of pretty interesting schools during my visit, one that’s in the process of being built, another that’s been around for 30 years, both different in their design. The new school, a high school, will be one built on open spaces for learning, project based learning concepts, individualized learning plans and very different roles for teachers and classrooms. The spaces have been designed with the great thinkers in mind, DaVinci and Einstein spaces, spaces that on blueprint at least offer up a great deal of potential for creativity and independence and passion based learning. Arts are embedded in the curriculum, and there is a really different concept of assessment. With any luck, I’ll be writing more about this place in the near future.

The other school was out in the country, surrounded by fields filled with cows and chickens and pigs. It was a small, PreK-6 school where the classrooms had all sorts of angles and skylights and patterns. Everywhere you look there is evidence of performance learning. Every classroom has a kitchen where kids do a lot of cooking. Outside, playground spaces are performance spaces as well. And the kids tend to the livestock and the farm as well as the school. I loved the feel.

Technology plays a role in both of these schools, though the roles are different to be sure. The high school will be a 1-1 school. The other is expanding the access of computers to its kids. Both are ripe for the ways in which technology can supplement real learning in the classroom, not just information processing. Obviously, there is much more about the culture and the infrastructure and the climate that goes into all of this.

The early thinking that’s evolved from those visits for me is this: we have been living in a world with pretty much one, ubiquitous model for schools for a long time now. This strikes me every time I take off on a plane to somewhere and am able without any trouble to pick out the school buildings we’re flying over. They’re all at right angles, with baseball and football fields nearby. The sizes and number of buildings vary, but it’s rare that I see yellow school buses parked next to anything that looks like something other than a factory.

In my own thinking about what schools might become, I’m realizing that I’ve been thinking that this old model is going to turn into a different model. But what’s really going to happen, I think, is that we’re about to explode into many different models. Obviously, this may not happen with any great momentum until we free up our ideas about assessment and learning culture, neither of which is an easy road. But we do need to find ways to support more unique, passion-based schools, places that like our kids, come in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember when he said it, whether blog or e-mail, but Tom Hoffman reminded me a while ago that we have a lot of different models out there already, many of which are successful in their own right. And as we move away from that one factory model, we need to be open to whatever types of new models might evolve.

(Photo “old classroom” by shuichiro.)

"Clueless in America"

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Still digging through my stack of reading that I neglected, and this Bob Herbert column from the Times last week bubbled up.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

I think that the lack of discussion about education in this election cycle is what is depressing me most about the state of change right now. We’ll be watching reruns of Paula Abdul’s “meltdown” on Idol last night for at least another week, or wasting even more time on Rev. Wright, but the idea of having a serious sit down about education that involves the interested parties (read: EVERYONE) just can’t happen.

I will say however, that if we are going to measure the success of education in America by how many people can accurately date the Civil War or identify Adolf Hitler, we may not be ready for the real conversation that has to take place.

Quote of the Day: New Knowledge

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From “Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace” (600+ page .pdf) comes this passage by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation:”

Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledege tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

While this is in the context of national security and intelligence, I think it’s applicable to the ways in which we think about networked learning, which is why we need to publish what we know and share it widely.

Dispatches from the Front Lines #346

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I have a good friend who teaches in a graduate preservice program at a nearby university. He related this story from one of his students. The names have been changed to protect the, um…well, you know.

This week I subbed at “Normal” High School where I did my student teaching. I was in the room with my cooperating teacher and we were catching up. She was checking her email and received this message from one of her students. It read: “Hi Mrs. Smith. This is John. I had a question about the Hamlet homework you assigned. I am texting you from my cell phone in [in-school suspension].” The school has a simple cell phone policy: “No cell phones or text messaging during class.” The policy holds true when you are in [in-school suspension] because it is on school grounds. You are in [in-school suspension] to do school work, that is it; no socializing, no talking, no sleeping, no listening to I-pods, and no texting. Anyway, my cooperating teacher was appalled. She printed out the email, brought it to her supervisor, and apparently someone went to the [in-school suspension] room to retrieve John’s phone. He refused to give it to the teacher, which landed him in [in-school suspension] for another 2 days for insubordination. In the end, what does this all mean? John never received the help he needed for his homework.

Oy.

Redefining Teachers as Experts

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I’m reading another book that I want to blog more about at some point, but I thought I’d throw out a snip that might start some discussion. (Watch…it won’t.) Axel Bruns just published Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, and while I just can’t get comfortable with that word he assigns to the concept of creating and consuming all at the same time, he frames a lot of his points just differently enough to make it pretty compelling reading. Like here:

…teachers are now no longer positioned as experts simply by virtue of their accredidation as experts, outside of the pordusage process itself; instead they come to be seen as experts because of their role as leaders of the produsage community. In other words, the argument that they should be respected by their students is made no longer on the basis of their role in the academic hierarchy, their positions and titles, but by their established track record as produsers themselves.

Again, for some reason, that word doesn’t work for me, but the concept that we might at some point begin to value and respect the ability to model the participatory literacies that these tools require as much if not more than the degree on the wall is worth considering, I think. What if we assessed teachers in large part on their abilities to create and consume content effectively as co-learners and co-creators with their students, and to share that work in transparent ways?

Universal Learning Care

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Take 53 seconds to watch this snippet from Stephen Heppel via Greg Whitby.

Hard to pack more thinkable ideas into that short a time. But the one I love is the idea that we have to start thinking of learning like health; it goes with us throughout our lives. And the idea that schools don’t want to grow up.

It troubles me that my kids are a part of what he calls this “lost generation,” stuck in this “never-never-land” period, but I just can’t get my brain around the idea that it’s only going to take 10 years to play out. (See previous post.) If our students’ frustration really is becoming a policy issue, I wonder how we can work smarter to harness that energy for change.

Students Pay a Price (Literally) for Cell Phone Ban

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Yesterday, I had the real pleasure of spending some time in a 9th English classroom again, this time with a group of students from an under achieving, 3,000 pupil high school in midtown Manhattan. Ostensibly, I was there as a tag team with Alan November talking to city technology liasons and support teachers about the changes and challenges we’re facing, so while Alan spoke, I visited kids and vice versa. (I UStreamed the last 20 minutes or so of a Q & A that we did at the end of the day. Not great in terms of audio an video, but some good Alan rants.)

Anyway, the kids were the highlight. We talked about the technologies they used, how they used it, and what they might use it for, and the conversation was fairly predictable. Many of them had a decent Internet connection at home, but many had none. Despite that, they guessed almost 90% of the school had MySpace pages, that they went there every day, that they used it to communicate and get information about homework, and that, of course, it was blocked in school. (MySpace is blocked in NYC schools to everyone, even administrators. Ironically, up until a phone call was made on my behalf yesterday, this blog was also being blocked as a “social networking” site. Oy.) Surprisingly, (or maybe not so surprisingly) they seemed amazed at the idea that their sites would be looked at by employers or by colleges, and they seemed never to have thought about the idea that they would be Googled by their future mates. (And that they would be doing some Googling as well.) Now that was a moment.

Almost all of them had cell phones as well, phones which are banned in school. (The policy is that if you are caught with a cell phone in school, it’s taken away and it can only be returned to a parent who comes to pick it up on a Friday.) I hooked most of them when I took out my phone and had them ask me a question that they thought I wouldn’t know, which after a few more colorful attempts ended up being “What’s the population of Spain?” They watched as I sent a text message “Spain population” to 46645 (GOOGL) and get the answer back about 10 seconds later. Amazement ensued.

I told them I was a cell phone is schools advocate, and we talked about what they might say in making a case for a policy change. (The teacher was very ok with this, btw.) Since many of these kids commuted from over 30 minutes away by subway each day, almost to a person they said they needed their phones in case of an emergency. But when I nudged them past the safety issue, they talked about using the phone to make movies, to do interviews, even to write, (which surprised me until I learned Sidekicks were all the rage.) And, now, they said, for research. We talked about the “appropriate behavior” piece of this, that, just like with MySpace, there is an appropriateness issue here, that they would have some real responsibility on their shoulders should the phones ever be allowed. By and large, I was impressed by the way they made the case.

But here was the moment that floored me. Obviously, these kids don’t leave their cell phones at home. They are too important as a communications tool for safety’s sake and for social connections. Yet they can’t get these phones through the airport like scanners at the front of the building. So what do they do? Seems a little cottage industry as sprung up at the delis and bodegas around the school so that kids can check their phones in for the day at $3 a pop. They get a ticket, just like a coat check, on their way into school, and they pick it up on the way out.

Amazing.

So, the cell phone ban not only denies students the opportunity to use the device in all sorts of ways that are relevant to learning, it also costs them real money. Start doing some math, and it’s not hard to get to the answer that this high school’s kids are out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to check their phones. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To me, this is the vision thing again. In a school where there are about 300 computers for 3,000 students, doesn’t it make more sense to get creative about not only how we might use phones in the classroom but teach phones and phone use in the curriculum? I mean, are the economies worth working toward a solution of the “disruption” problem? And I’m sorry, but I just believe that if we show kids from an early age the appropriate and effective use of the technology, if we make it a valuable and necessary part of the way they do their school business, the widespread disruptions will abate.

End of rant. (Doing a lot of that lately.)

I do want to end this on a positive note. I started a UStream show with them, and thanks to Twitter, within a few minutes had about 20 folks from around the world (Canada, Romania, across America). They were blown away. I asked them what they thought they could do with UStream for themselves, and immediately they were talking about cooking shows, news broadcasts, and much more. They. Were. Engaged.

(Photo “Cell Phone Camera” by  L-ines.)

Out of the Box Thinking About Education and Teaching

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So Leigh Blackall points to “The Personal MBA“, a “pdf version of a pay for text that guides people through an equivalent curriculum to a MBA.” It’s basically a reading list of all sorts of good stuff, from George Leonard’s “Mastery” (which I really need to read again) to “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki. It’s billed as an experiment in educational entrepreneurism, a way to save about $100,000 and still get the knowledge you need to succeed in business. Does it work? Well, I think the better question is “Can it work?” And to that, I would say, absolutely. Yes.

As Leigh points out, it won’t just work by reading the books in isolation. You’ll probably get a lot smarter, but you need the conversations and connections that the expensive MBA offers as well. So, Leigh says, leverage the social technologies we have at hand:

Enter a networked learning model to support this text perhaps. A way for people who are using this text to make contact and communicate about their efforts. Clearly the information doesn’t change all that much, but the packaging (and the fees) change considerably.  Is this the niche that traditional education ought to be looking at more closely? I think so.

I think so too. I don’t think there is any doubt that it is possible if you are motivated to learn and have the network building and organizing skills to pull it off. And it doesn’t hurt when the guys putting out the free curriculum build a site around it where folks can connect. As I know I say here a lot, we can build our own classrooms, find our own teachers, writing our own flexible texts and curricula as we go. Right now, everyone still gets hung up on the creds, I know. But we’re already seeing disruptions in that thinking. In this world, what you can do is a better assessment of what you know.

On a similar note, I’ve been struck by the mostly inside the box thinking about teaching and classrooms that’s been running through the responses on my recent post and on Clay’s post that spurred it. There are passionate defenses of teaching and classrooms and the importance of being with kids, all of them absolutely genuine and valid. For instance, Mark Ahlness says:

But this is what keeps me going: The 9:00 bell. That’s when the kids come in the door. Thank goodness for the kids. There, I’ve said it again…But that 9:00 bell keeps ringing. For one year my kids and I will have an incredible experience. Nobody can take that away from us, and my kids will remember.

I know a lot of teachers feel like that. I used to feel like that when I was teaching. The presence of Mark and others like him in our kids lives will always be important. But here is the thing. In the midst of the quote above, Mark writes:

Yes, it kills me when I see dysfunction in my educational system. Yes, it breaks my heart when I see 4th and 5th graders not using, and losing, the incredible tech skills they had in my classroom. Yes, it is incredibly frustrating when absolutely nothing I have tried in over a decade of encouraging technology use with my colleagues has made a bit of difference.

What jumps out at me here and many of those other responses is that despite what the system takes away from good teaching, few write about teaching as if it is something that can be done just as meaningfully outside of the system. That’s obviously what Clay is struggling with. And it’s what my brain continues to be chewing on. How can we start to think differently about teaching? How can we teach in meaningful, important ways outside of the current construct? How can we give good teachers the opportunity to teach without the inconsistencies and constraints of the system? And how do we do it in ways that can still serve all of the kids the system currently serves?

That last one is the really tough one…

(“Group Failure” by Cold Cut)

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