The reason that I can not get eight hours of sleep is that I am haunted.  I become possessed by conversations I’ve had in my waking hours.  I am drawn from my sleep by cold boney fingers reaching out from the graves of past presentations — by the insightful, but initially unrealized, comments made by participants and those questions that I wish I’d answered better.

Yesterday, at Saint Marys, a private girls school here in Raleigh, I was asked, “Although I agree with your call to better prepare our children for the future with more authentic assignments, does that help us in our mission to prepare girls for college?”  Then the librarian asked, (and these questions are grossly paraphrased) “I know that Wikipedia and Google are invaluable tools — but what is the place for the online databases that we subscribe to?”

The ghost of workshops past that I must exorcise right now, was something that the Dean of Faculty said to me after the presentation.  He related a conversation he’d just had with a math teacher of many decades who told him that she started to “get it,” when the presenter suggested that we need to be asking ourselves,

What kind of questions will we ask on our tests, when our students walk into the classroom with Google in their pockets?

And then he (I) asked the audience to consider calculators — how, for years, we resisted the new devices because it wasn’t math.  It didn’t look like the math instruction we traditionally provided, and so we almost demonized the things.  But now that calculators have become a critical part of many mathematics classes, have they changed the questions we ask?  Have they changed the problems we ask our students to solve?  Has it changed the nature of math instruction?

The answer, of course, is, “Yes!”  Calculators empower learners to work numbers to an end.  They force students to transend paper and pencil, to truly utilize the language of numbers to solve problems, answer questions, accomplish goals — to learn new things.  I maintain that we should expect learning in the classroom to be the same as learning in the “real world” — that it is about ubiquitous access to the global flow of information and the tools that empower us to work that information.

It’s where the Obama Administration has it completely wrong.  According to Secretary Arne Duncan’s July 24 Washington Post op-ed, “The president starts from the understanding that maintaining the status quo in our schools is unacceptable.”¹  Yet, it appears to me that the status quo is exactly where we are staying.  Like the former failed administration, the answer seems to be do the same thing, just do it more, do it harder, do it longer, and our children will gain the skills they will need to “compete in the global economy.”  This is wrong on so many levels that I just want to throw up my hands give up.

So back to my haunt.  What interests me about the connection made by the math teacher between the calculator and the Google’d cell phone is that they are both about empower learning.  Of the four (entirely unoriginal) education reform areas (see left) being targeted by the administrations dangled carrot ($4.3 billion), the one that irks me the most is number three — data.

Now I love data.  I love what you can do with data.  Data visualization is one of my favorite themes to follow on Twitter.  But what’s wrong with “Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals..” and wrong with so much of the prevailing conversations about education reform, is that it’s about empowering teaching and schooling.  It’s designed to help us do our jobs better as educators — when we need to be figuring out how to empower our students to do their jobs better as learners.

Obama, through Duncan, wants us to use data to measure student learning — and by result, to further limit what we teach to that which can be measured.  What we should be doing is helping our students to use data, so that they can measure their world and better understand their relationship with that world — what can’t be measured.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that we are continuing down the same dumb path of thinking that we need high school and college graduates who know the answers to old questions.  This is wrong!

It’s new questions that will define our future.  Today, we need graduates who can invent answers to the “new questions.”

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1. Duncan. Arne. “Education Reform’s Moon Shot,” The Washington Post 24 Jul 2009. Web.18 Aug 2009. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/23/AR2009072302634.html>.
2. United States Government. Education Department. Race to the Top Fund — Executive Summary. Washington: GPO, 2009. Web/PDF. <http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/executive-summary.pdf>.

Trying to help Amber feel less conscious of her pregnant belly

In his blog post on Friday (Fertilizing the Grass Roots), Rodd wrote:

At today’s Western RCAC Symposium, educators from across southwestern Ontario were called to engage with emerging tools in order to ensure learning is relevant to 21st Century learners.

He went on to say,

My personal suspicions are that most attendees will fail to make effective use of any of the many tools introduced today. Even with everyone recognizing that we have a long way to go: A significant knowing-doing gap will remain!

Then Rodd listed some comments that he overheard during the conference, that support his concern.  I’m listing them here and will try to make some suggestions that may be useful.  My suggestions are indented just a bit to better distinguish them from the overheard statements.

Comment 1: “Our IT department won’t let us!”

Granted, it’s easy for me to say that IT should work for you, the teachers.  Their job is to make sure that you, the teachers, can do what you want to do — not prevent it.  Getting them to realize this is the challenge.  One of the best suggestions I’ve heard was when a tech director suggested that IT folks be required to follow students around for a day.  I would suggest that IT folks be required to sit in a classroom for a day, each month or so, to see not just the challenges of teaching, but the passion of mission.  We need to bring them into the mission.

I suspect that IT folks are evaluated each year just like teachers.  Give them an instructional goal to accomplish each year, find some way to technically facilitate better reading, global awareness, creativity, etc.

One final idea.  When you submit a request for technical service in writing, include a statement of it’s instructional benefit or goal, and write it clearly, succinctly, yet prominantly.  This way, refusing the request is documented as preventing instructional activities — and fulfilling the request makes you partners in a holy cause.

Comment 2: “My superintendent doesn’t get it.”

Suggest that your superintendent read “The World is Flat.”  I don’t agree with everything that Freedman says in the book, and some of it has been debunked.  Yet, this book has probably had a larger influence on our rethinking our place in a rapidly changing world than any other message.  You might start with your principal and work your way up.

Enlist your students.  Help them make (our get out of their way) public service announcement videos expressing the importance of digital networked learning in an increasingly global marketplace.

Organize a 21st century education fair, arranging for teachers and students to demonstrate what they are doing with contemporary information technologies.  Invite vendors to bring in interactive white boards, turn the kids loose on them.  Invite the local paper, radio, and television stations, and allow students to organize booths where they can demonstrate what they are doing with technology and information outside the classroom, i.e. video games, social media, and social networking.

Comment 3: “We don’t have enough money.”

True enough.  But I’m starting to wonder whether technology might be a cheaper way to do things.  Find out how much you’re paying for paper and printing.  Find out how much it costs to heat your buildings each day.  Find out how much you spend on textbooks, that are produced by 15th century technology.

Then, what would be the cost of equiping all teachers with a state of the art notebook computer, every student with a netbook, integrate virtual learning environments, and establish a consortium of schools where teachers would collaborate to create a dynamic, customizable, digital networked textbook — available for free to the entire province and beyond.

Comment 4: “Our computers are too old.”

Your computers may be too old to run MS Office 2007 or Photoshop, but probably not too old to run, through Firefox, Google Docs and and a growing array of cloud applications.  One young man, at the conference, talked about bringing in older donated computers, having his students refurbish them, and then install Ubuntu Linux, giving them an equal array of opensource software — and the cloud.

Comment 5: “The school networks are out of date.”

Well this is a problem.  It seems that Alberta has established fibre to every school in the province, recognizing the critical importance of the Internet to teaching and learning.  This is something that has to be accomplished from the top — connection to contemporary, digital, networked, and abundant information is as critical to education today as heat and electricity.

Comment 6: “We still ban cell phones in school!”

This is simply not one of the wagons I’m riding.  I think that it will come, that we’ll recognize the value of pocket-based information technologies in education as we stop being afraid and come to respect what our students are doing with them outside the classroom.

But I’d not focus on cell phones.  I do not believe that we should expect our children to learn about the world through a keyhole.  They need larger windows on the world, more powerful lenses.  We would never think of issuing textbooks the size of a matchbook.

If we’re working toward preparing our children for their (and our) future, then we can’t compromise on content space.

Comment 7: “I’ve never even heard of RSS.”

Well, my initial response is, “Why not?”  I think that we have to stop excusing educators from not keeping up with what’s happening around them.  It’s what’s wrong with Prenski’s otherwise brilliant distinguisher, Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  It can be an excuse for immigrants to say, “I can’t learn that.  I’m not a native.”

As I said in the PLN session, “Start small.”  Form study groups, set teachers up with RSS Readers (you don’t have to use the term RSS).  Suggest a few connections for them, and have them blog (again, you don’t have to call it a blog if that will help) to each other what they’re learning.  You have to start the connections.  You have to start the conversations.  You have to work toward the point to where the learning engine kicks in, and starts running on its own momentum.

Comment 8: “The kids know more than we do.”

No they don’t.  They are more savvy at using technology, but we are better at using information.  They know how to play the information.  They desperately need us to teach them to work the information.

It’s one of the benefits of redefining teachers as Master Learners, that it give us permission to say, “Can you teach me how to do that with a digital camera?”

Comment 9: “I don’t have the time!”

This is too true.  When Amber MacArthur interviewed me for her podcast after her keynote, lack of time is the barrier to retooling classrooms that I zero’ed in on.  The teacher-day is virtually unchanged from the classrooms I attended in the ’50s and ’60s.  Think of lawyers, surgeons, or even farmers.  Do they spend all of their time in front of juries, in operating rooms, or in the fields.  No!  An important part of their job is research, collaboration, reflection, resource development, and professional development.

Now think of factory workers, who spend all of their time on the assembly line, installing parts.  And think of teachers, spending all their time with students on a conveyor belt, moving through kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, while we install math on them, reading, science…  Education is still an industrial age institution, trying to address information age problems.

This is a tough one, but, as you publish information about your schools, and take pictures of teachers on the job — include lots of pictures of teachers researching, collaborating, engaged in professional development, liaising with the community.  These are all critical elements of being a teacher today.  We have to get that message out there.

It has been a few days since I’ve had time to get back to this, and this question is particularly irksome, though it’s something that we’ve all talked about — almost constantly.

Identify the two most significant barriers to using connective technologies in schools, and suggest a strategy/strategies for overcoming them.

1. Access to information
2. Time to react, reshape, and adapt

We live in an information-abundant world, where many of us walk around with Google in our pockets — a profound transformation from the information scarce world that I grew up and even taught in.  Our schools at that time were defined by their limits, what could be taught within the four walls of the classroom, the flat space of a chalkboard, and the two covers of a textbook.

Being able to live, work, and prosper in an information-abundant environment requires, above all other things, the ability to relentlessly learn, and this is what our students should be doing now — learning in schools that are defined by their lack of limits.  We need to assure that every learner, on both sides of the teacher’s desk, have nearly unfettered access to global content, and tools for accessing, working, and contributing back to that content.  This will be achieved through a
new vision for education, courageous leadership, and acceptance that a forward-reaching society has no choice but to pay for it.

Providing teachers with three or four hours of planning time every day will certainly be more difficult to achieve.  It runs more counter to schooling-as-usual than tossing textbooks for laptops.  Yet, when
considering the possible benefits to our students learning experience, boost to the profession, and relief to the families of classroom teachers, it behooves us not to easily set this suggestion aside.  If we are not willing to at lease consider changes as radical as restructuring the school day/week to give teachers more professional time, then we’re simply not going to make it.

There are several ways that this could be accomplished.  Simply require students to spend less time in the classroom by redefining homework, structuring more engaging, project-based work for students that results in learning. With more planning time scheduled into the day, we would likely have more talent coming into the profession.  The establishment of a trained and capable paraprofessional league of educators and/or an apprenticeship program would free up master teachers for planning,
collaboration, research, materials development, liaising with families and the community, professional development, assessment, and more.

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Sitting here at RDU, waiting for my 8:00AM flight to Bismarck (by way of Minneapolis), I realize that I’ve been sitting on this one for a couple of days, a presentation that Chris Lehmann (principal of Science Leadership Academy and Practical Theory Author) delivered at IgnitePhilly, where,

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers… and now it has come to Philadelphia!

First of all, I didn’t know that Chris could talk any faster.  But his usual fast paced and quick minded stream of ideas is surpassed here, in front of the crowd, pressured by the automatically advancing slides.  What you see in the performance is why SLA is one of the top schools in the country that I recommend to my clients as they are looking for exemplary programs to visit.

I know that Chris’ performance video has already rounded the edublog circuit.  But I wanted to post just a few of his comments that I think deserve an appearance in print.

Good data is the work kids do every day, not the answers they get on the test.

Chris says that we need good data, and we preach the need for data driven decision making, but we can’t afford it.

How is it that we have so many passionate dedicated educators and so many really failing schools?  The problem is, that you put a good person in a bad system, the system wins every time..  We need to change the system.

Teachers become teachers because they have a vision of successful learning looks like.  When the system is not set up for success, well, we lose them.

It’s not about a workforce.  It’s about a citizenry.

I admit an emphasis on workforce in my presentations.  To be compelling, the story has to fit the market place.  But, to be compelling, the story also has to resonate with deeply held values.  Democracy and the future well-being of our children (and ourselves) is critical — and so much of that depends on our what and how our children are learning today.

Talk about learning…

Our kids built a flow-process biodiesel generator.  We’re patenting it, and we’re sharing the plans with a village in Guatemala and a school in Ecuador.  They’re taking their villages off the grid.  Kids doing it, because it matters.  “Applause”

That was powerful, plus, I really wanted to write, “flow-process biodiesel generator“.

It’s (what we assess and are accountable for today) recall-based learning, and you know what?  In the age of Google it’s just absolutely obsolete.

My line, “What are we going to ask on our tests, when our students are walking in with Google in their pocket?”  “Are they going to be better questions than we ask today?”

If you want to see what kids have learned, give ‘em a project.  Dare them to show you what they can do with their own head, heart, and hands. That’s when you’ll get kids engaged.  That’s when you’ll get kids learning.  That’s when you get kids who can change the world.

More applauds!

When preparing for my AV-free presentation (scary), I was reminded of a Nicolas Negroponte quote that I often used in my ThinkQuest presentations in the middle nineties.  I had it printed on a small piece of paper, and stacks of them planted with people throughout the audience.  They were instructed to hand out the sheets when they heard me say “Negroponte.”  The quote, from a 1994 WIRED column, said:

…the average age of an Internet user today is 26… I expect that number to drop to 15 by the year 2000.¹

I would ask the audience to fold the piece of paper, slip it into their pocket book or walet, so that they would run across it at some point after the presentation.  Then I asked that they take a minute, upon running across the paper, and reflect on the implications to teaching and learning.

It seemed outrageous at that time, it’s ligitimacy coming only from the reputation of the MIT Media Lab’s director and chief evangelist.  I don’t know what the numbers ended out being by 2000, but the impact of that quote and teachers’ reflection on the prediction have certainly born out.

Anyway, wish me luck on the speech.  I think I also have to stay behind the lecturn.  Yikes!

1. Negroponte, Nicolas. “Learning by Doing: Don’t Dissect the Frog, Build it.” WIRED Magazine 2.07Jul 1994 12 Sep 2008 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.07/negroponte.html>.

Hall just showed a very powerful video clip of a cave drawing. But, thanks to animation, one of the horses, peals off the wall, and starts to run away. The end is sad, but the message is, how we express our selves has advanced madly.

Hall is talking about using mobile phones as an instructional avenue. I don’t agree with this. As Nicholas Negroponte says, “You can’t teach children about the world though a keyhole.” However, he suggests that as we subscribe to online information services, like united streaming, that we find a way to channel the content to our students’ pockets. This is an interesting concept, and something that I see in the future of Aggregators, that they not only collect, but they also push. Podcatchers already do this, but it’s a concept that needs to expand.

I’ll also add here, that Hall’s stolen my best stuff. He’s shown the “I am not Afraid” blog, the Wikipedia entries about the London Bombings, and has introduced the Wiki concept. I’m actually flattered, that Hall Davidson is pointing educators to the same things that I do.

I’m sitting with Gwen Solomon, who just commented that the technologies we are seeing Hall demonstrate, are brand new. However, their application has not changed that much. The reasons are the same. Today, we video conference. In the 1980s, we e-mailed. The communication is richer, but it’s all about technology. He is now describing the Erothostenes project, where student measure the shadow cast by the sun at a specific time, and then share their measures with their latitudinal position. Then they use geometry to calculate the circumference of the earth. We were doing this almost 20 years ago, using FrEdMail’s e-mail.

Davidson just demonstrated a fantastic Google Activity. You search for a controversial issue (Ronald Reagan greatest president agree) and then enter the number of hits into a spreadsheet. Then search, limiting to French web pages, and German. And then use the spreadsheet to compare with a graph. More than anything else, the activity spurs questions, and this is a good thing.

Being Hall Davidson, there are a lot of examples of student produced video. He is emphasizing student remixed content, students taking video and still content from the Net and then importing it into video editing software, and assembling a meaningful information products.

Technology’s steady advance has made the challenge of controlling students’ use of electronic gadgets – cell phones, handheld video games, MP3 players – during school time ever more difficult.

It’s a lead into a story published in the August 14 issues of the Houston Chronicle, called Schools Try to draw the line for wired kids.

VETERAN teacher Andy Dewey has taken to quizzing his students on a new subject — where their hands are.

Tucked away in pockets or camouflaged behind backpacks, hidden fingers could be typing text messages, surfing the Web or even taking pictures. In today’s era of tiny, high-tech devices, it’s a constant struggle to make sure hands are kept in plain sight, he said.

OK, our kids are connected. Technology is part of their lives. But lets try to picture this in a different way. As you are, by now, accustomed to my saying, “It’s not technology, it’s information”. These gadgets are their links to information. They talk, text message, and google with their mobile phones, IM on their laptops, access the world wide web, Net-based video games like Halo, MMORPG (did I get that right?) games like EverQuest and Second Life. These gadgets represent intellectual appendages to our children. They are the hands and feet that carry children to new experiences, and cutting these links is like cutting an appendage — and that makes no constructive sense to these children and their world view.

Yet we try to cut it off. And it’s because of something that David Weinberger said in his keynote address at NECC, something that I have carried with me ever sense.

Weinberger talked about the traditional view of knowledge as being something that could be put in a container. He described Encyclopedia Britannica as 33 volumes with 65,000 articles, that it will never hold more than 65,000 articles, because they will never add a 34th volume. By the way, the shipping weight of Encyclopedia Britannica is 125 pounds.

The Wikipedia, on the other hand, holds nearly 600,000 articles (that was late June 2005). At this moment, it is approaching 700,000 [694,000] articles. At .002 pounds an article, Wikipedia would way three-quarters of a ton right now. Add in the other languages and we’re approaching two tons — and no matter how big it gets, it will never get any harder to find your information. He went on to talk about dewey decimal and how the shelves of a decimal based container system can hold only so much information, forcing us to make decisions on what’s going to be put there.

• 88 numbers for Christianity and its related topics
• 1 for Judism
• Islam and all of its related groups get 1
• Budhists go to the right of the decimal

But this idea of containers was what our lives were about. Even the schedule of the day. During the summer months, we played in the neighborhood. But darkness was a border to the daylight container, and we went home. You could play in the daylight, but not in the dark. However, my children, during their summer months, are up until 4:00 in the morning, with friends, playing video games, and IMing. Darkness means nothing to them because it does not limit their intellectual appendages.

Starting tonight, we are forcing my Son back into a container schedule, because tomorrow he goes back to his learning container (his school), where he’ll receive information containers (textbooks), tied to our knowledge container (the standards), and we will struggle to control their gadgets, cutting off their intellectual appendages, because…

Our schools are leaking!

Through their mobile phones, wireless handhelds, mobile game systems, their laptops, and a simple, yet pervasive sense of a broader world that ignores time and distance, our children’s attention is leaking out of our classrooms, our textbooks, and our state and national standards.

The question that looms overhead is…

Do we continue to container our children, amputating their intellectual appendages during “learning” time?

or

Do we try to integrate learning into the flow of their attentions, taking advantage of the new porous nature their lives, using their appendages to connect children to the world that we are teaching them about?

If we decide to join the flow, what does that look like?

• Do textbooks go away? No, textbooks can lay open beside of a laptop, or textmessaging mobile phone (though I suspect that textbooks will be evolving into something else).
• Do we abandon our classroom and go exclusively online? No, though I suspect that we may be able to teach our children better by spending less time in the classroom and more time working and playing the information outside the classroom.
• Do we still need teachers with a teacher’s desk, chalk board, and pointer? Yes, though the chalkboard must change as must the pointer. However, our definition of what a teacher does will change from that of delivering skills and content, to that of creating and crafting experiences through which students will learn to teach themselves.
• Will the class bell go away? No, but study hall and homework are going to become something entirely different.
• Will college training for teachers change? Yes, but more important than that, the job of being a teacher will also be that of being a student. We will learn constantly, and each day, we will share with our students something that we have just learned.

Your comments are welcomed?

…and, hey, is anyone reading this stuff?