Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Teachers “Showing Up” as Students

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Jesse Stommel:

Learning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging ourselves to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust — trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community…

…Connected learning depends, then, not just on agency but also on generosity. In my classrooms (physical, virtual, or some mixture of both), I work extremely hard to keep my own expectations from being the fuel that makes everything go. My only real expectation as a teacher in a learning environment is that students don’t look to me for approval but take full ownership of their own learning. And I work to develop trust by showing up as a student myself. 

Pedagogical generosity is about making gaps in our work, space for the burgeoning expertise of other scholars and students to fill. It’s about advocacy, guarding space for growing expertise, dialogue, discovery, and disobedience.

Read the whole thing. Some excellent thinking on the changing role of the teacher in a connected world. 

Announcing: Educating Modern Learners

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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. 

Rethink Learning Top to Bottom

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Cathy Davidson

But there is also an investment opportunity for any educator (with or without degree) to rethink learning top to bottom, inside out. We have a potential for a learning mash-up of the loftiest, most creative, learner-centered kind. Whether we are talking about Khan’s millions of learners who have a handful of teachers or Ito’s billions of teachers learning from one another, the idea that we educators don’t have to force education, that people like to learn if there is something worth learning, is the gold mine for the digital age…

What would we do without “forced education” I wonder…

The “Khanification” of Education

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Yesterday I Tweeted out a link to a video titled “Meet the YouTube Next EDU Gurus,” a video that I found disconcerting on a number of levels, (not the least of which the music.) I know that in one way, the subjects of the video exemplify the participation, transparency, and, at times, creativity that I actually hope my kids aspire to. But what bothered me is that we seem to have reached a “Khanification” of education moment where anyone with a passion can make a video and be given “teacher” status. A moment captured by this Michael Schnieder Tweet back to me:

Which begs the questions, a) what should an education degree or a teaching certificate  require when increasingly anyone with a connection can be a teacher of content, and, b) more importantly, what changes when the world begins to accept a definition of “teacher” as someone who knows “how to make and post a video”? (Read the comments below the vid.)

In many ways, I’ve been pushed by Sal Khan’s lack of teaching experience more than by his videos. But now this growing acceptance of non-teachers as teachers of content and skills  (and, in some cases, better teachers of content and skills) poses an ever greater challenge for us to redefine the profession. And it circles back around to that question that I pose in the book: what is our value as classroom teachers in a world suddenly filled with teachers?

Here’s a hint: our value lies in that which cannot be Khanified. We better figure out ways pretty quickly to articulate that value in spades to parents, boards, corporations, etc. 

UPDATE: Related

The Five Percenters

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Andrew Hacker of Queens College, writing in today’s New York Times, ends a must read essay titled “Is Algebra Necessary?” with this:

Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.

Either have I. And it’s not just that I have an English teacher brain. It’s because, as Hacker notes:

…a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.

Five percent! I know…we don’t know in high school which five percent of our kids will actually need to be proficient in algebra. So we make 100% of our kids try to master it just in case. That’s just silly. 

I agree with Hacker; every child needs basic math skills. And I think every child, especially today, needs a good dose of statistics in order to understand the tidal wave of data we’re subjected to on a daily basis. But I look at my own kids and wonder about all they ways they could be going deep into the things they love, becoming better, more effective learners in the process, rather than struggling through four years of stuff of which they will ever use only a small portion.

And, to be honest, this is not just about math. This is about unlearning and relearning a system that built a curriculum based on the idea that if kids didn’t get this concept or that in school, they may not get it anywhere else. The world has changed. Curriculum is everywhere. Learning math can happen at any time and almost anywhere.

Hacker asks:

Why do we subject American students to this ordeal?

I wonder too.

Our New Value Proposition

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George Seimens writes about higher ed here, but I wonder to what extent this is relevant for K-12 as well:

What is valuable, however, is that which can’t be duplicated without additional input costs: personal feedback and assessment, contextualized and personalized navigation through complex topics, encouragement, questioning by a faculty member to promote deeper thinking, and a context and infrastructure of learning. Basically: human input costs make education valuable. We can’t duplicate personal interaction without spending more money. We can scale content, but we can’t scale encouragement. We can improve lecturing through peer teaching, but we can’t scale the timely interventions and nudges by faculty that influence deeper learning. [Emphasis mine.]

As schooling becomes more “personalized” through technology (and it will), our articulated value will have to change away from content delivery and more to a focus on the learning process. Still up for debate for me is to what extent to which that human input is done face to face or virtually. (See the Granny Cloud, for instance.)

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The traditional degree, with its four-year time commitment and steep price tag, made sense when the university centrally aggregated top academic minds with residency-based students. Education required extensive logistics, demanding deep commitment from students worthy of being rewarded with the all-or-nothing degree.

But education isn’t all-or-nothing. College and its primary credential, the degree, needn’t be either. The benefit of modern, online education is that the burden of logistics and infrastructure are greatly reduced, allowing for the potential of a fluid, lifelong education model. The problem, to date, is that formal, online education is still being packaged in all-or-nothing degree programs, falsely constraining education innovation. The New Republic writes, “Online for-profit colleges haven’t disrupted the industry because while their business methods are different, their product—traditional credentials in the form of a degree—is not.”

Technology creates efficiencies by decreasing unit size while increasing utility. To falsely constrain anything to historically larger canons is to render technology impotent to do what it does best.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/05/jailbreaking-the-degree/

This echoes the lack of disruption that tech has brought to the K-12 world as well.

https://willrichardson.com/the-traditional-degree-with-its-four-year-time/

The “Dirty Work of Education”

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No question, one of the most talked about, Tweeted about, blogged and written about ideas in the past year has been the “flipped classroom,” the idea that we can use technology to deliver the “lecture” as the homework and then use class time, ideally, to bring the concepts to life in meaningful, real world ways. And it’s been interesting to watch the “debate” around the merits. 2011 ed tech media darling Sal Khan and his Khan Academy supporters would tell you it’s a transformative, new way of thinking about the classroom fueled by technology. Detractors argue it’s old wine in new bottles, that a lecture is a lecture regardless of form, and that at best the opportunity is to help kids who need remediation or extra help.

While I’m still leaning to the latter (I’ve encouraged my own kids to use Khan as a way of answering questions about the concepts they’re covering in the classroom), my visit last week with the folks at Knewton has me wondering if “flipping” is going to be around very long at all regardless the positives or negatives. And even more, I’m wondering if Knewton’s vision of its role in education is in some ways as brilliant as it is inevitable given the direction things have turned.

In case you’re not up to speed on what Knewton is doing, here’s the brief from their website:

Knewton’s award-winning Adaptive Learning Platform™ uses proprietary algorithms to deliver a personalized learning path for each student, each day. Knewton’s technology identifies each student’s strengths, weaknesses and unique learning style. Taking into account both personal proficiencies and course requirements, the platform continuously tailors learning materials to each student’s exact needs, delivering the most relevant content in the most efficient and effective form.

But here’s some of what I found out during my visit. First, the data crunching that their platform does is mind-boggling. Without getting too far into the minutia, it’s not just identifying strengths and weaknesses. Basically, after a fairly short period of time working with Knewton, the platform can begin to identify, for example, what time of day is “best” for a student to be studying science as well as a myriad of other tendencies that then allows the platform to select the most effective stacks of content in its database based on what has been most successful for students with a similar profile. In the next year as the network of Knewton users grows, it will then be able to connect individual students to other users who share those profiles, allowing them to ask questions, work problems and help each other learn in real time. In other words, it’s able to “socially personalize” (my words) the content learning interaction solely using the technology. And more.

The bottom line? Knewton wants to do “the dirty work of education,” the content part that we’re so hepped up about testing. CEO Jose Ferreira feels that by putting individual students into Knewton’s data-driven, highly personalized and adaptable learning environment, they will more effectively learn the concept mastery necessary to then do great things in the classroom with teachers who spend far less time on skills and far more time on the practical application of the skills in real life. To put it another way, Jose says “we want to fix the factory side of education and do it better and let teachers do the important stuff that technology can’t.” When I asked him about other entrepreneurs who seemed much more focused on just having students do better on the test, he said “the practical application is the sea change; that’s the part that’s going to benefit kids.”

Let’s be really clear. This is not Khan Academy, which at the end of the day is a one-size-fits-all lecture with a little curricular personalization built in. This is one on one (student to machine) that creates a different path to understanding based on the individual needs and dispositions of the student. Your path to learning algebra in Knewton will be decidedly different from mine, but at the end of the day, in theory, we’ll both have mastered the concepts.

Let’s also be clear that this is still in the early stages of development, and Knewton hasn’t made any inroads into the K-12 space…yet. No question, its recent $33 million investment from Pearson is going to steer it down that path soon enough. Currently, Knewton’s being used at a number of universities, primarily for remediation. For instance, at Arizona State University, 30% of incoming freshmen need remediation in math. (Says a lot about the current standardized testing regime, doesn’t it? Every one of those kids had to pass the math section in their states I’m sure.) So rather than spend teacher and class time getting those students up to speed, ASU uses Knewton to do the bulk of that work. But it’s not hard to see the path to Knewton-esque platforms becoming the primary methods of concept instruction (and, inevitably, more.)

Which, as I’ve been droning on about here and elsewhere for most of this highly disruptive year in learning, compels us to begin figuring out both the challenges and the opportunities of what is quickly becoming a viable “new story” for education whether we like it or agree with it or see it as good for our kids or not. I’d love to get rid of the factory side of education, not just do it better, but that’s a far off reality given the current climate. So what are the questions we need to be asking at this moment?

Here are some of the random bullet points that have been hanging around in my brain of late:

  • For some kids, especially those in classrooms with 50 other students who have little chance at having any real differentiated, personalized instruction, these technologies will be a boon. In schools where the emphasis is on the factory, however wrong we may feel that may be, being able to do the factory better will be a good thing for the students ensconced there.
  • But having said that, if we continue to value the factory and the assessments that test for that factory learning at the expense of real world problem solving and effective writing and speaking skills and adaptability and all of those important learning dispositions that we want kids to have, schools in their current iteration are toast. We’ll simply be Knewton factories, irony intended. (Interestingly, Jose has a bit of a different view on the whole testing debate, saying that he feels raising test scores is important if only to reduce the focus on the test. “Once we get everyone passing the test better, the pressure will come off.” Not sure I agree, but I hadn’t heard that line of thinking before.) 
  • While it’s great in concept that teachers will be “freed up” to do the really important learning with students who have concept mastery, I wonder what percentage of teachers will be able to take advantage of that opportunity in meaningful ways. Let’s be honest, by and large, we’re still preparing new teachers to be curriculum delivery specialists, not participants in and facilitators of deep student inquiry in the classroom.
  • And to what extent (and when) will technology make inroads into the practical application piece of it as well? Digital gaming environments are already becoming more socially constructivist and focusing on problem solving, and they will continue to evolve to present content and skills and application. What, with all of that, is the role of the face to face teacher and physical space classroom? (I think there is still an extremely important role for both, btw, but it’s one we’re not articulating very clearly yet.)
  • And finally, who gets Knewton and who doesn’t? While I think it’s admirable that the company wants to use 20% of its profits to provide free access to students in schools or developing countries that can’t afford it, I don’t think we’ll escape a developing divide in this type of “learning” either.

Look, at the end of this day, at least, I’m feeling conflicted about much of this. I worry that we’re heading down a path that will turn schools into private, for-profit spaces that will put our kids’ best interests behind bottom lines, and that rather than starting a decidedly new conversation around learning, we’re just going to keep reaching for the low-hanging fruit of knowing, the stuff that’s easy to assess, the efficiencies that businesses love. That Nation article from a few weeks ago paints that picture all too compellingly, and as one of my network friends said in an e-mail after reading it, “last one out, turn the lights off.” It could be that bad.

But I can’t help holding out hope that at some point, the idiocy of the current regime will fall out of favor. I think a growing number of parents (like me) who have pretty much had it with the current emphasis will find themselves wondering what relevance much of our kids’ education has in their ability to live and flourish in a growingly complex world, and they’ll start really screaming “Stop!” (Hey, a guy can dream.) 

I’m sure for some, that test score will always be a powerful way of defining “educated” for their kids, and if technology can raise that score, they’ll buy in. But we educators who see learning as more than a score have to advocate even more loudly for for a different definition. While there may be a certain appeal in the world Knewton proposes, I worry it will be too easy to lose the best of what that world offers simply because the good stuff that teachers do that technology can’t isn’t easy. It’s messy, complex, resistant to standardization which despite being better for kids, is harder to define and deliver. In the near term, that “defining and delivering” part may be our greatest challenge of all.

Privacy in a Networked World

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danah boyd articulates the move from private to public in online spaces about as well as anyone, I think:

Social media has prompted a radical shift. We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.” Most of our conversations in a face-to-face setting are too mundane for anyone to bother recording and publicizing. They stay relatively private simply because there’s no need or desire to make them public. Online, social technologies encourage broad sharing and thus, participating on sites like Facebook or Twitter means sharing to large audiences. When people interact casually online, they share the mundane. They aren’t publicizing; they’re socializing. While socializing, people have no interest in going through the efforts required by digital technologies to make their pithy conversations more private. When things truly matter, they leverage complex social and technical strategies to maintain privacy. [Emphasis mine.]

And this is more than just knowing how to “leverage complex social and technical strategies to maintain privacy,” something that in and of itself should be a required literacy for anyone using social media. (Are we teaching this?) It’s also about how we consume and share what others make public. 

We had this discussion during a Leading Edge session yesterday, and I was struck by how little I had really thought about that piece of it. That it’s not just about making good decisions when we publish, but it’s also about making good decisions when we consume what others publish as well. Not so much in terms of what’s good content and what’s not so good content. But in terms of what responsibility each one of us has as gatekeeper for the other. 

Are we teaching that, too?

All of which leads me back to why, I think, we have to help move educators into these public spaces online. There are levels of complexity here that can only be understood by participating, and while I realize there are risks, we have to find ways to mitigate them for the sake of teaching our kids those network literacies that will allow them to flourish. 

Fundamentally New Types of Value

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I’m convinced this our new work when it comes to schools as well:

There isn’t one solution. Each retailer will need to find its own unique formula. But I can say with confidence that the retailers that win the future are the ones that start from scratch and figure out how to create fundamentally new types of value for customers.

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http://learningmatters.tv/wp-content/plugins/wordtube/player.swf

A pretty sobering and realistic look at the struggles that public schools are facing across the country. Tons of questions raised, the biggest of which to me at least is what does a fiscally leaner education look like in the end? What will the economic stresses force schools to evolve into? Some of those answers are obvious. Others…notsomuch.

(via In Mifflin County, PA, budget cuts are severely hurting education | Learning Matters: Reporting you trust on education stories that matter)

(Source: http://learningmatters.tv/)

https://willrichardson.com/a-pretty-sobering-and-realistic-look-at-the/

The Global Culture of the Internet

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Interesting study out of the UK that looks at the global effects of the Internet. 

Findings from this study show that a global Internet culture has emerged as users across countries often share similar viewpoints and habits related to these vital matters pertaining to the Internet. Users worldwide generally support and desire the core Internet values, without signaling a willingness for tradeoffs among these potentially conflicting values and priorities. However, users in nations that are more recently embracing the Internet, who are becoming the dominant online population, express even greater support for the most basic value underpinning the Internet – freedom of expression. In addition, these users also outpace users in older-adopting nations in their innovative uses of the Internet. We conclude that a new Internet world is emerging which may lead to many shifts in the Internet’s global centre of gravity – shifts that will have major implications for the future of the Internet. 

Key Findings: (1.) There is a global culture developing around the Internet, in which users worldwide share similar values and attitudes related to online freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security. (2.) The newly emerging nations online, primarily in the developing regions of Asia and Latin and South America, are becoming the dominant nations online, having the greatest number of users, despite lower levels of adoption. (3.) Users want it all: they desire freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security without viewing these as mutually exclusive. (4.) Newly adopting countries are more liberal in attitudes, such as support for freedom of expression, and behaviours, such as use of social networking platforms, while older-adopting countries are more conservative, tied to more traditional Internet applications and content. These findings point to the beginning of a new Internet world in which the developing nations move into a leading role in shaping the use and governance of this global network of networks.

That last line is especially interesting to me in the sense, once again, of whether or not we are fully appreciating the redefinition of the US role in the world and making sure our kids undersand the potentil ramifications of that in their lives as well. 

“I Didn’t Know We Could”

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Scott McLeod is by no means the first to ask this question, nor will he be the last, I’m sure. 

In an era in which the possibilities for ongoing professional learning are numerous and significant, I wonder how long will it take us for us to start expecting educators to use these social media tools. It’s been 30 years since the advent of the personal computer and we’re still struggling to get teachers and administrators to integrate digital technologies into their daily work in ways that are substantive and meaningful. Meanwhile, we now have a bevy of powerful learning tools available to us that can advance our own professional learning (and, of course, make our technology integration and implementation efforts more efficient and effective).

I am still constantly amazed at the number of educators who I speak to at conferences and pd days that have not made technology a part of their learning culture. Last week, in a room of 100 people, 3 brought laptops. When I asked how many owned laptops but didn’t bring them, almost every hand went up. When I asked them why they didn’t bring them, the quick response was “I didn’t know we could.” Didn’t know we could? Really? 

Here is the deal…technology is no longer a choice. Some of us may not feel comfortable with it; time to get over it. Tens of thousands of educators are already in the water, and the temperature is fine. Stop waiting for permission and jump in.

And just for the record, my patience tank is running on empty. 

The Culture of Booking

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This Kevin Kelly post is worth the read in its entirety, but I especially like this shift in thinking. It parallels the way we have to start thinking about learning, as a continuous process, not just an event. Hope to write more about that in a bit. 

The primary shift is one of thinking of the book as a process rather than artifact. We are moving from the culture of the book to the culture of booking. Our focus is no longer on the book, the noun, but on booking, the verb – on that continuous process of thinking, writing, editing, writing, sharing, editing, screening, writing, screening, sharing, thinking, writing – and so on that incidentally throws off books. Books, even ebooks, are by-products of the booking process.

Censorship in Public Spaces

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This echoes one of my concerns in moving over to Tumblr, but it also suggests a huge new complexity when it comes to how we can maintain control over our ideas and online spaces. Thinking a lot about that.

As the British blogger notes in his post on the incident, Facebook is “increasingly the space within which people receive their information, including civic information.” We are living more and more of our public lives and getting more of our information through networks such as Facebook, and while that can be a very powerful thing — as we’ve seen with events such as the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — it also means that more of our information is being filtered by a corporate entity, with its own desires and rules, not all of which are obvious. The implications of that are profound.

In Praise of Not Knowing

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This quote really resonates. There is value in not knowing.

I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know.

But How Will Kids Know?

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Interesting things happen when kids undertake real projects. They have specific real-life models for success to emulate, they feel very responsible for their participation and production, since other people will be impacted by it, their work is often fluid, so that when they do something wrong, they can correct it without that mistake defining the outcome of the entire project. They learn skills that apply to the real world, and they often actually learn them, rather than memorizing and forgetting, because they HAVE to learn them. Just memorizing how to lay a floor or coordinate topics on a newspaper page isn’t enough. And it doesn’t really work that way in any case. Because these skills are much more comprehensive than the sets of often disconnected facts that tests require students to hold briefly in their heads. –Kate Fridkis

I get really tired of people saying we can’t assess learning without the test. It’s just pushing the easy/lazy button. Our kids deserve better. 

Sugata Mitra's New TED Talk

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“Education is a self organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”

So what are we to make of this? (Take the 17 minutes to watch the video…you won’t be disappointed.)


I want to chime in here, obviously, but I am really interested at what questions, comments, etc. this provokes from educators. On one level, it’s inspiring to think that technology can change the educational playing field in this way. On another, it’s a huge challenge to the structure and systems we have in place. Seriously, what do you make of this?

It’s no secret that I lean toward seeing a future where self-organized learning rules, and that the role of school is to develop the passion, motivation and skills necessary to help kids become amazing learners as opposed to pretty good “knowers.” I love Mitra’s inspired vision of that future as it’s now made possible through access to Web. But if we value that, and if we want that for our kids, it means we’re going to have to start teaching ourselves out of our jobs (at least as they are currently defined.)

Not everyone is feeling it yet, but we’re entering a real big, huge hairy transition period for schools. I’m honestly not sure what comes out the other side of it.

Seriously, what swims in your head after watching this?

Redefining Education

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(All definitions from dictionary.com)

Is a school “an institution where instruction is given,”or is it a place where we come together to create and share knowledge?

Is a classroom “a  room, as in a school or college, in which classes are held,” or is it any place we can learn with others or on our own?

Is learning “knowledge acquired by systematic study in any field of scholarly application,” or is it knowledge created through exploration, inquiry and construction for our own application?

Is a teacher “a person who instructs,” or is it a person who “models and demonstrates” learning?

Is curriculum “a particular course of study in a school, college” that is delivered to the student, or is it more about a particular passion, around which a student constructs her own study?

Is assessment “the evaluation of a student’s achievement on a course,” or is it about the student reflecting deeply on the process?

Is a credential “evidence of authority, status, rights, entitlement to privileges, or the like, usually in written form,” or is it a peer-reviewed collection of artifacts, acts and shared learning?

I wonder.

Yeah, You've Got Problems. So Solve Them.

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Recently during a presentation a teacher raised his hand and asked what is a fairly common question.

“Look, I agree with most of what you’re saying, but I’ve got kids in my class who don’t have the devices, who don’t have the access,” he said. “What are we supposed to do when every student can’t do this?”

I could hear in the voice of the questioner that this lack of access was offered not as a problem to solve but as a reason for inaction, an excuse to maintain the status quo. Normally, the answer I give to that question includes the words “moral imperative” and “digital divide” or some other fairly typical phraseology that tries to honor the challenge, but this time, for some reason, I just looked at the person and said “Great question. How you going to fix that?”

Silence.

I think that’s going to be my new strategy, actually, for all of the “yeah buts.”

“My students’ parents don’t approve of these technologies.” I hear ya’. How you gonna fix that?

“I don’t have time to do all of this.” That is a problem. What are you going to do about that?

“My superintendent/principal/supervisor doesn’t have a vision for these types of changes.” Yeah, that stinks. So, how you gonna help her with that?

We say we want our kids to be problem solvers, but all too often, when faced with the challenges of a changing educational landscape, we don’t offer solutions. Instead, we offer excuses as to why we shouldn’t solve the problem, why it’s better to just keep on keepin’ on. And solving these problems is getting easier and easier, actually, as more and more schools have already done the heavy lifting to find and implement solutions. It’s not like anyone needs to reinvent the wheel any more. And it’s also not like you need a solution overnight, either. Frame the problem, create a timeline and a process, and have at it. If you had say, two years, is there really NO way to solve that access problem?

I know at some level you have to see all of this as a “problem” to solve. You have to REALLY want those kids to have access. You have to look at the world and the ways in which information and communication are changing, and the ways that online communities and networks are becoming powerful learning opportunities, and the move to digital texts and products and look at your school and classroom and have that “Houston, we have a problem moment.” But once you do that, it becomes your problem to solve, not someone else’s.

So yeah, you’ve got challenges. What are you gonna do about it?

tl;dr

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So, might just be me, but I hadn’t run across the “tl;dr” thing until I was reading a Mark Pesce’s “What Ever Happened to the Book?” post from a few weeks ago. As usual, it’s a totally great piece about “connective reading,” one that explores the motivations of following links and the pressures that linked environments put on the act of reading. As a former English teacher, I love that conversation, and I see myself all over it:

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?

Not sure why, but I love thinking about this stuff. It’s fascinating to step back from time to time and go all meta on my own reading and writing. For instance, the process I’ve got down for using Google Reader and Twitter to lead me to lots (too much?) good stuff to read, then to save it to Delicious, or to read it later with Instapaper, or to snip it into Evernote, or to throw it up on Posterous, or even mix it into a blog post here (or there.) Looks a little different from what I did ten or five or even two years ago. The public nature of it all is a big enough shift for most, but my brain just operates totally differently now when reading and writing. Both are a participatory sports these days.

And I know I keep coming around to how my kids aren’t getting any of this in schools, and my frustrations as a parent that most of the good souls in the schools where my kids are don’t create links on a regular basis. Or that they’re not teaching “connective reading” in any real sense. That there not helping my kids with the challenges of this changed reading space, which, continuing from the snip above, Pesce makes pretty clear:

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge.  Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough.  It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments.  We have other places to spend our limited attention.  This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;dr”, for “too long; didn’t read”.  It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.

So, it begs the question, I think, what do we do? Just like I alluded to a changed reality in the Facebook post yesterday, there is a changed reality here, too. The act of reading and writing is different. The habits are different. And it’s still changing and evolving, just like reading and writing always have, but with what feels like, to me at least, more speed. No one is teaching our kids.

Assuming you didn’t go “tl;dr” to this post, what ways are you thinking about or actually implementing change around reading and writing instruction in your classrooms? How are you helping your kids read and write differently? What’s different about the way you read and write today compared to ten years ago, and what are the implications? Reflect away.

The End of Books? (For Me, At Least?)

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So, let me say at the outset that I love books. All my life, I’ve been a reader of books. I have at least 1,000 of them in my home (on shelves, in stacks on the floor, in boxes in the basement.) I have books of every type; novels, non-fiction, story books, picture books and more. Life feels better when I’m surrounded by books.

And I love the fact that my kids love books, that Tucker spent an hour at the public library yesterday, gliding through the stacks, pulling books down, sitting cross legged on the floor, testing them out, that the first thing Tess wanted to do when we moved last fall was organize her books. I totally understand why living in a house full of books is worth upwards of like three grades of literacy in school schooling.

So, with that bit of context, let me try to explain how my book loving brain got really, seriously rocked the other day, rocked to the point where I’m wondering how many more paper books I might accumulate in my life.

Last year, I put the Kindle app on my iPhone and downloaded a couple of books to read. I was surprised in that the experience actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The first book, a great novel by Anita Shreve, was not much different from reading on paper. The story flew by, and other than being surprised when I got to the end (because I didn’t know how many pages I had left to go) it was a great reading experience. But non-fiction wasn’t so great. If you look at most of the non-fiction books in my library, you’ll see they’re totally marked up, underlined, annotated and messy. It’s the way I attempt to cement in those most important points, and it helps me recall the good stuff in a book more easily. On the Kindle, I could highlight, and take a note, but it just wasn’t as useful. The notes were hard to find, and the highlights just weren’t feeling as sticky. I wasn’t impressed; in fact, it was frustrating.

Last week, when I downloaded my first book to my shiny new iPad, things improved. The larger screen made a big difference, creating highlights and typing in reflective notes was a breeze, but I was still feeling the same frustration with the limitations; just because the pages were bigger didn’t mean the notes left behind were any easier to find, and stuff just felt too disjointed. I kept searching for a way to copy and paste sections of the book out into Evernote, albeit a clunky process on the iPad, but still worth it if I could make my notes digital (i.e. searchable, remixable, etc.) My searches didn’t come up with anything, and I finally turned to Twitter and asked the question there. Ted Bongiovanni (@teddyb109) came to the rescue:

@willrich45 – re: iPad Kindle cut and paste, sort of. You can highlight, and then grab them from kindle.amazon.com #iPad #kindle

Turns out my iPad Kindle app syncs up all of my highlights and notes to my Amazon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every highlight and every note that I had taken on my Kindle version of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sudden, by reading the book electronically as opposed to in print, I now have:

  • all of the most relevant, thought-provoking passages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own condensed version of just the best pieces
  • all of my notes and reflections attached to those individual notes
  • the ability to copy and paste all of those notes and highlights into Evernote which makes them searchable, editable, organizable, connectable and remixable
  • the ability to access my book notes and highlights from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep thinking, what if I had every note and highlight that I had ever taken in a paper book available to search through, to connect with other similar ideas from other books, to synthesize electronically? It reminds me of the Kevin Kelly quote that I share from time to time in my presentations, the one from the New York Times magazine in 2006 titled “Scan This Book“:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

And I also keep thinking about what changes now? How does my note taking in books change? (Do I start using tags and keywords along with adding my reflections?) Now that I can post my notes and highlights publicly, what copyright ramifications are there? How might others find that useful? And the biggest question, do I buy any more paper books?

I know others might not find this earth shattering, but this is a pretty heady shift for me right now, one that is definitely disrupting my worldview. And it’s, as always, making think of the implications for my kids. What if they could export out the notes from their own texts, store them, search them, share them? Yikes.

I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on it more as it all plays out.

Quote O' the Day: Institutional Change

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From Pull, by John Seeley Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison:

The institutional changes ahead will be quite different. These changes will be driven by passionate individuals distributed throughout and even outside the institution, supported by institutional leaders who understand the need for change but who also realize that this wave of change cannot be imposed from the top down. The new institutional model will involve a complete refocusing: Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs (Location 150, Kindle version). [Emphasis mine.]

Love that part about the “complete refocusing” because it resonates so much with a lot of the other stuff I’ve been reading and thinking. But the part I’m really diving into is that last, the idea of schools providing platforms to help students achieve their full potential through connecting with others. What if we spent the bulk of our planning and visioning conversations in schools around just that one thought?

Great read so far.

[Sidenote(s): How do I cite a quote from a Kindle? And for those of you who, like me, are frustrated by the inability to copy and paste on the Kindle, you can always go to the synced up reading notes and highlights that you’ve taken when logged in at kindle.amazon.com/kindle/list. Just click on the title. Thanks to Ted Bongiovanni for that little piece of assistance.]

An Open Mind (In Higher Ed at Least)

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The New York Times has its Education Life section out today, and one of the main pieces is titled “An Open Mind,” an article that takes an interesting look at the impact of open educational resources since the advent of MIT OpenCourseWare 10 years ago now. It’s a pretty balanced read, one that makes clear the potential of passion-based, DIY learning, but also gives fair treatment to the difficulties that go along with it, especially if we’re looking to get something more than just a bit more knowledge in the process. For instance, will OER “lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college?” Certainly, access to all of these courses (which obviously vary in quality and relevance) may be a boon to third world learners whose only desire may be to pursue learning. But for those looking to credentialize the experience in some way, very few grades are  in the offing.

It’s been a current here of late, but that whole “how do we credentialize informal learning” question has been really tweaking my brain quite a bit. As always, I wonder about this in the context of my own children, trying to imagine ways that they might begin to build something other than a diploma that might showcase their expertise in the same ways that a piece of paper might. Tall order, I know, and probably not doable in the short window that they have (10-15 years). But interesting nonetheless, especially when I read quotes like this one from Neeru Paharia, one of the  founders of Peer 2 Peer University:

She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio. “We live in a new society,” Ms. Paharia says. “People are mobile. We have the Internet. We don’t necessarily need to work within the confines of what defines a traditional education.”

Right now, that is “radical” thinking, but it’s provocative nonetheless. That “signals” piece is exactly where a lot of my own thinking and reading has been centered of late. And while this is about higher ed, a shift like that obviously has big implications for K-12. Not only is it about how we prepare our kids to learn more effectively in informal environments around the things they are passionate about, but also how we help them begin to build those portfolios of work that have real world applications, that can be used to highlight their learning and their ability to learn throughout their lives. I mean how, right now, are schools helping students be self-directed participants in their own learning who are able to share openly the learning they do and connect with others to pursue that learning even further?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t continue to help our kids aspire to college, especially in the near term. One-third of our kids are still going to get college degrees, and many others will go down that road even though they won’t finish. But when we consider the growing scale of  collaborative study with experts that they are going to be able to do in their lives, we need to help them aspire to that as well, right?

"The Notion of School is Changing"

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So it was my great honor to serve on the 2010 K-12 Horizon Project Advisory Board this year, and “our” report was released a couple of days ago. If you want another piece to add to your “compelling case for change” argument, it’s worthy of your consideration. Obviously, I’m hoping you’ll read the whole thing, but I wanted to pick out some of the pieces that I find particularly thought-provoking.

I’ve used parts of past “key trends” listed in the report in my presentations, and some of this year’s are continuations of year’s past. But there are two parts of this year’s trends that I want to highlight:

• There is increasing interest in just-in-time, alternate, or non-formal avenues of education, such as online learning, mentoring, and independent study. More and more, the notion of the school as the seat of educational practice is changing as learners avail themselves of learning opportunities from other sources. There is a tremendous opportunity for schools to work hand-in-hand with alternate sources, to examine traditional approaches, and to reevaluate the content and experiences they are able to offer. [Italics mine]

• The way we think of learning environments is changing. Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

Both of these speak directly to the concepts that Leadbetter and Wong wrote about in the Cisco report I highlighted yesterday. These “radically new ways” of thinking about learning, while no where near mainstream, are unquestionably starting to bubble up, and as more and more people begin to step back from  the seemingly intractable equation that learning=schools, there will be more and more pressure on the system to change. And all of this makes me believe even more that sooner rather than later, we will see families with access and the means to do so opting out more and more from the traditional school structure.

The other piece of the report that I found most enlightening is the section on game-based learning. I’m not a gamer by any stretch (though I love RealRacingHD on my iPad…not a lot of real learning going on there, I know), but more and more I’m trying to get my head around the implications. One part of the narrative here that has me thinking deals with the ways in which we can seamlessly integrate educational content with game play:

What makes MMO games especially compelling and effective is the variety of sub-games or paths of engagement that are available to players — there are social aspects, large and small goals to work towards, often an interesting back story that sets the context, and more. Players dedicate enormous amounts of time on task pursuing the goals of these games. The problem that needs to be solved, and which is being tackled on many fronts today, is that of embedding educational content in such a way that it becomes a natural part of playing the game.

It’s just another way that we are starting to “radically” rethink learning, and I for one continue to find it a totally engaging conversation to follow. Hope you’ll join in.