I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on demographic shifts. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on educational gaming. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on data-driven decision-making. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
Teachers aren’t integrating digital technologies into their instruction on a regular basis.
“Some are.”
The administrators who are in charge of leading their school organizations into the information age don’t really understand the information age.
“Some do.”
Schools aren’t providing the types of learning experiences necessary to prepare students to be 21st century citizens and workers.
“Some are.”
Some is not a rebuttal. Some is merely a reflection of the natural variation that exists among people and organizations. Some is not a reason to ignore the large-scale, widespread, policy- and practice-level decisions that need to be made to transition our schools into a digital, global society. Some is not permission to stand pat.
Some doesn’t get us very far. (Neither does all.)
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on teaching and learning. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on school leadership. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this Amazon widget, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
Jeff Utecht says that in America (as opposed to China):
[W]e focus on getting students to think different, we encourage them to think, to analyze, to question their findings. We teach them to learn on their own.
Do we, Jeff? Or do we just benefit from our country’s overall openness compared to China? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, I don’t see a lot of explicit instruction here in American schools regarding how to learn on your own, at least not using present-day information and communication technologies (which, of course, are what people need to master to be effective learners in this century). And I don’t see a lot of encouragement of students to really think, to critically dissect and analyze information that’s meaningful and important (as opposed to better regurgitating factual-procedural knowledge or doing what we say more often). And I see few opportunities for children to engage in discovery learning opportunities where they might actually have findings that are interesting and worth questioning (as opposed to the controlled and often contrived ‘experiments’ that accompany publishers’ science curricula).
I’m fairly certain that Postman & Weingartner’s quote from Teaching as a Subversive Activity is as applicable now as it was in 1969:
What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say) . . . Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. . . . Mostly, they are required to remember. . . . It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. . . . Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know . . . [However,] what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing . . . somebody else’s answers to somebody else’s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking questions – is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not “taught” in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued. It is doubtful if you can think of many schools that include question-asking, or methods of inquiry, as part of their curriculum.
I agree with the general theme of your post, Jeff, but so far I disagree with you on this issue. I think that whatever advantages America may enjoy over China regarding critical thinking, creativity, innovation, and the like might be occurring despite our schools, not because of them.
Thoughts, anyone else?
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on how the world has changed. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this Amazon widget, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
I ran across a great video by Richard Armand, the Mesquite (TX) Independent School District Administrative Officer for Technology. I have added it to the Moving Forward wiki.
You can view the video online or download it for presentations. I have a group next week for whom this will be perfect. Nice work, Richard!
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
State and federal accountability schemes require that students master low-level academic content. Our decisions regarding how we structure our instruction to facilitate student mastery of that content strike to the very heart of what we believe about teaching and learning. To facilitate conversations about this issue, I made a short video:
What do you believe is the best way to structure instruction to ensure student content mastery?
Music credit: Safe Passage, Freeplay Music
Last week I had a brand new middle school teacher ask me what the best online resources were for learning about (and teaching about) information literacy and/or media literacy. Since this isn’t the world I live in on a regular basis, I thought I’d throw the question out to you. What sites do you find valuable related to this topic?
We have a bunch of crazy dice at our house, including fractions dice, decimal dice, money dice, alien dice, dice with colored dots on them, and dice within dice. We also have a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons dice from a toy store in Duluth, Minnesota. Instead of six sides, those dice have four, eight, ten, twelve, and even twenty sides.
Yesterday I found my kids playing Monopoly with the crazy dice. If they paid $5 to the bank, they got to use one of the crazy dice. If they paid $10, they got to use two. If they used a die with a color dot, they got to move to the set of properties with that color.
Kids don’t need us to ‘train them’ to be creative. They just need permission, space for their creativity to blossom, and maybe a little active encouragement and/or nurturing of their creative spirits.
Roll the dice and see what happens!
Most schools currently expect students to somehow (maybe magically?) be responsible, successful digital citizens upon graduation from high school - able to navigate all of the intricacies of a digital, global world - despite having little to no opportunity to learn or meaningfully practice what that means during their 12+ years of schooling.
Continuing my analogy from my previous post, we have to stop pretending that students are like Athena, able to burst forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus (or the cocoon of schools), ready to successfully function in a complex adult world without prior practice or experience.
In my post for LeaderTalk this month, I’m going to quickly address three ideas related to video games, schools, and learning and offer a short wrap-up at the end…
1. Individualization of learning
The artificial intelligence engines that drive most video games are able to customize the learning experience for each individual player. In other words, the game you play is different than the game I play because we have different skills and knowledge and because we make different choices during the game. The gaming engine adjusts to our differences, providing each of us with a learning experience that is both unique and optimally challenging for us as individuals. That’s a pretty powerful argument for considering the use of video games in education. As I said in a post long ago:
Video games are structured so that learners constantly operate at the outer edge of their competence. Participants are continually challenged but the challenges are not so difficult that learners believe they are undoable. [Dr. James] Gee refers to this as the regime of competence principle. Lev Vygotsky, a famous developmental psychologist, called this concept the zone of proximal development - the area in which students are ready to grow. Video games are similar to teachers in that they take the role of what Vygotsky called the 'more knowledgeable other,' the entity that helps students bridge the gap between their current ability and new capabilities. In education, we often call this scaffolding - the idea that learners can progress to new skill levels with structured, individualized, just-in-time assistance. Video games are very adept at scaffolding participants' learning. One of the reasons that video games are so compelling / engaging / 'addictive' is that participants are continually faced with new challenges that are neither too easy nor too difficult. This motivates them to move forward because the next step is always in sight and is perceived as being achievable.
We can foresee a day in the hopefully-not-too-distant future when all students have laptops and teachers, rather than seeing video games as competitors for their students’ attention, will instead have a wide variety of powerful educational video games available to them. Teachers then will be able to work individually with one group of students while other student groups move forward with the help of meaningful, substantive (not simplistic drill-and-kill) gaming software. Voila! The age-old dilemma of effective classroom differentiation just got a huge boost of assistance!
2. Simulation of authentic experience
The sight and sound capabilities of today’s video games are increasingly realistic. Video game designers are getting better and better at reproducing reality through the use of sounds, images, and videos. Corporations, governments, and the military all are using video gaming engines to produce simulations for employee training. As I said in another post from my gaming series a while back:
As the educational and/or ‘serious’ games movement grows, we will begin to see complex, realistic, accurate simulations of ancient civilizations (e.g., Colonial Williamsburg, the Maya, Great Zimbabwe), historical events (e.g., the Pelopponesian War, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Long March), scientific and mathematical processes (e.g., space exploration, Archimedean physics, Euclidean geometry), and the like. I am looking forward to this day. Right now even the most popular education-oriented games (e.g., Reader Rabbit, JumpStart, Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?) have been notably simplistic compared to commercial virtual worlds such as Second Life, EverQuest, and World of Warcraft. I believe that education-oriented simulations will be much better at stimulating deeper, richer learning than the textbooks, videos, and learning games of today. It’s hard to argue that making authentic decisions in the role of a pharaoh or a slave or a farmer, while immersed in the realistic sights, sounds, and activities of ancient Egypt, wouldn’t be a better, more meaningful, and more permanent learning experience than merely reading a few textbook pages, seeing a few pictures, answering some “drill-and-kill” multiple choice questions on the computer, or watching a short video on the subject.
Reframing video gaming technologies as productive simulations rather than time-wasting games will go a long way toward fostering acceptance among educators. Simulations have a long history of use in K-12 classrooms. What today’s gaming technologies allow us to do is to create simulations that enable learners to do the actual work - and make the actual decisions – of whatever profession or society we wish (past, present, or future). This, of course, makes them incredibly authentic learning experiences and is why their use is skyrocketing in the professional world.
3. Intellectual complexity
Many advocates of video games in education focus on the fact that children find them engaging. They’re fun and they take advantage of powerful learning principles as described above. But one aspect that often gets neglected, I believe, is the fact that most good video games are pretty complex. As The New Yorker noted in its review of Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad Is Good For You:
Most of the people who denounce video games … haven’t actually played them - at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III” - that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities - is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.
Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes - like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess - which most of us grew up with. They don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification - sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”
At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coordinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking - simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”
If you talk to gamers, they will tell you that one of the key attractions of their video games is the complexity of their activities. Dr. Henry Jenkins at MIT has said that:
The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a video game is that it's too easy.
Wrap-up
When our students, nearly all of whom have grown up immersed in video game experiences, complain about school not being interesting or engaging, they’re not just looking to be entertained (as many teachers claim). They’re looking for learning experiences like they have at home that are individualized, authentic, and intellectually complex. Figuring out how to make that happen in our K-12 classrooms is the challenge for us as leaders as we consider what forms 21st-century learning environments need to take.
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
I’m in the midst of reading Clark Aldrich’s Simulations and the Future of Learning. As Aldrich walks me through the process of developing a leadership simulation, he has a number of interesting things to say about video game and simulation design. Thanks to Aldrich’s clear and engaging prose, I’m finding myself unexpectedly captivated by the nitty-gritty of the workflow of simulation production.
So far the statement that has resonated with me the most, however, pertains as much to education as it does to the gaming industry. Aldrich said:
The goal of learning in any organization (business, educational, governmental) should be to make its members more productive (p. 3).
I’ll agree with that. And I probably would add to the end of that statement “… and more powerful.” I think that additional phrase takes the edge off what might be construed as a focus solely on preparation for work and expands it to include personal empowerment.
Productive and powerful. Isn’t that what we want for the children in our schools? Isn’t that we want for the educators with whom we work? Productive and powerful. I like it.
We have 50 million public school students in the United States. Are the thousands of worksheets that they will complete in their lifetime making them more productive? Are their countless hours of individual seat work going to lead to greater personal empowerment? Are they getting opportunities to be both productive and powerful on a regular basis?
What about our subpopulations? Are socioeconomically-disadvantaged students often getting the chance to be powerful? Do our students with disabilities or our students whose primary language is not English have multiple, ongoing opportunities to feel like they are productive, contributing members of our communities?
What about our 3 million public school teachers? Are the tens of millions of hours that they spend in staff development and training each year actually making them more productive? Do you think the bulk of them feel empowered by their ‘learning opportunities?’
Do we regularly ask ourselves these kinds of questions in our school organizations? As educators, should we?
I have some hard thinking to do about my own graduate classes and degree programs here at Iowa State…
Samuel Smiles, a Scottish author, said:
We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.
Kenneth Boulding, an economist and systems scientist, said:
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
Given our schools’ dominant emphasis on getting the right answer, I wonder how often students get a chance to actually learn from their failures (as opposed to simply being told that they are unsuccessful or incorrect). I’m guessing probably not enough…
Head on over to Leading From the Heart and leave Tracy Rosen a comment on her thought-provoking post about revisiting digital literacy. Here’s the comment I just left her:
I am by no means a ‘literacy’ expert. For me, the idea of literacy means something like ‘fluency in the dominant information landscape(s) of your time, both as a consumer and as a producer.’ In the past, that has meant being an adequate reader and an adequate writer. It is increasingly clear that the dominant information landscape of our present and future is one that is digital, networked, interactive, hyperconnected, dispersed, rapidly-changing, multimedia, and so on. This new information landscape requires additional fluencies beyond those needed for a paper-based world.
Fluency in paper-bound text and graphics is still a necessary skill today. The need to be a high-level reader and writer is going to be around for a long while. But the dominance of the written word slowly will be eroded by other forms of audio/video expression. For me, the exciting thing about many of these new ‘literacies’ is that students and educators now have unprecedented opportunities to create things of value to the larger world, to have a legitimate voice, and to reach authentic audiences.
Like any good progressive, Chris Lehmann advocates emphasis on facilitation of students as digital citizens rather than emphasis on preparing students to be digital workers. I too am very much in favor of empowering students personally and on the citizenship front. But I also want my kids to have a meaningful, rewarding career (that, hopefully, also contributes to society in some way). And that means getting what Richard Florida calls a ‘creative class’ job – one that requires autonomy, independent judgment, creativity, innovation, creative problem-solving, and, yes, fluency with digital technologies. Creative class jobs are facilitated and enhanced by digital technologies, not replaced by them (as often happens with service or working class jobs).
So I empathize with your concern, Tracy, about respecting others’ approaches to sense-making. And I too am concerned with the differential access that developing countries and underserved student populations have. But I think the task for all of us is to bring them into the digital, global 21st century, not to define ‘literacy’ in ways that continue to disempower them socially and/or economically for decades to come (note: I’m not saying you’re doing this).
Here’s an old post of mine on social justice that might be of interest:
Thanks for a thoughtful, thought-provoking post. I look forward to reading others’ comments!
Of course not all “olden days” teachers were drilling students. . . . When people think about the past, of course we all have had different experiences. Talking about how school used to be is meaningless; it’s too dependent on your personal experience. Unfortunately, we hear this kind of language all the time, whether it’s to point at the “bad old days” or the “good old days” Neither of them exist in reality.
21st century skills . . . is a solution to a problem that may not exist. It may just be a reflection of our vast, yet fundamentally faulty collective memory of things that never were.
To which I say: [see also the reports cited at The hits just keep on coming]
The chief source of the “problem of discipline” in schools is that … a premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers’ business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)
And:
What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say) . . . Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. . . . Mostly, they are required to remember. . . . It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. . . . Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know . . . [However,] what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing . . . somebody else’s answers to somebody else’s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking questions – is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not “taught” in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued. It is doubtful if you can think of many schools that include question-asking, or methods of inquiry, as part of their curriculum.
– Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
And:
The data from our observations in more than 1,000 classrooms support the popular image of a teacher standing or sitting in front of a class imparting knowledge to a group of students. Explaining and lecturing constituted the most frequent teaching activities … And the frequency of these activities increased steadily from the primary to the senior high school years. Teachers also spent a substantial amount of time observing students at work or monitoring their seat-work … Our data show not only an increase in these activities but also a decline in teachers interacting with groups of students within their classes from the primary to the secondary years. . . . Three categories of student activity marked by passivity - written work, listening, and preparing for assignments - dominate … The chances are better than 50–50 that if you were to walk into any of the classrooms of our sample, you would see one of these three activities under way … All three activities are almost exclusively set and monitored by teachers. We saw a contrastingly low incidence of activities invoking active modes of learning.
– John Goodlad, A Place Called School (1984)
And:
Classrooms in which there was evidence of higher-order thinking: 3 percent. Classrooms in which high-yield [instructional] strategies were being used: 0.2 percent. Classrooms in which fewer than one-half of students were paying attention: 85 percent.
– Mike Schmoker, Results Now (2006) [citing a study of 1,500+ classroom observations]
And:
The average fifth grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in first and third grades.
– Robert C. Pianta, et al., Opportunities to Learn in America’s Elementary Classrooms (2007) [study of 2500+ classrooms in more than 1,000 elementary schools and 400 school districts]
And:
When you code classroom practice for level of cognitive demand . . . 80% of the work is at the factual and procedural level. . . . [Teachers] will do low-level work and call it high-level work.
– Richard Elmore, excerpt from Education Leadership as the Practice of Improvement (2006)
And:
It’s so boring, daddy.
– 7-year-old Tess Richardson, excerpt from Boring Schools, Boring Content (2005)
What do YOU think?
For the past few months, I have played around the edge of the new philosophers. I have been reading their blogs, listening to the podcasts, reading the books they recommend, joining their Ustreams, and even observing the Twitter conversations about everything from baseball to new uses of technology. I have been an observer and an active participant. . . .
I wish I could Twitter and Plurk all day too.
I wish I could research blogs and contribute to the online conversation like they do.
I wish I could Ustream and connect with this global philosophy shift in live streaming.
I wish I could participate in their witty and fun conversations and travel tips they share all day and night.
I wish I could get online and ask for participants from your district because mine…well..they gave up on listening to me months ago because I am “too far out there”.
I wish I could read all those books you all talk about and listen to those podcasts while I get ready to take on a new day.But I can’t. I have to work.
To which I responded…
[Y]ou know what?, I have a job too. I’m director of a national center, a postsecondary instructor / researcher, and coordinator of the Educational Leadership program at a major research university. Like most of us, I’m unbelievably busy. And, yet, I find time to do some of this stuff also because it’s IMPORTANT.
So we have to recognize the time challenges that people face. But we can’t go around saying that the issues are insurmountable because they’re not and because if we believe that then our K-12 teachers (and postsecondary instructors) get a free pass to ignore the societal revolution that’s swirling around them.
What do you think? Head on over to Joel’s post and let him know…
I attended the SIGTC Forum, run by Ferdi Serim, on Sunday for about an hour. SIGTC is ISTE’s special interest group for technology coordinators. Two things from the session that troubled me…
1. No recognition of principals as instructional leaders
Ferdi outlined five different roles that needed to be involved in discussions about teaching and learning:
Notice the emphasis on the managerial roles of principals. Nary a mention of the instructional leadership responsibilities of building-level leaders. Very disappointing.
2. The equity trap
There was some discussion about digital equity. Specifically, there seemed to be a fair amount of agreement in the group that – when it comes to digital technologies or whatever – if we don’t have enough for everybody, we can’t do it at all because of the complaints from the folks that don’t receive it.
How are we ever going to move forward if this is the mentality of our school organizations?
Other notes from the session
Cisco white paper: Equipping every learner for the 21st century
21st century pedagogy to teach 21st century skills which is enabled by technology and supported by adapted system reform
The goal is to move from automation to facilitation to transformation
Desired educational technology outcomes will occur only if they are supported by the entire system
Gartner’s hype cycle
Sources of information on emerging technologies
I ran across an interesting article, From Literacy to Digiracy, in The Economist (hat tip to Angela Maiers). Here’s the money quote:
For anyone under the age of 20, the world being experienced is one where the internet has always existed, and where everyone who matters is only a click, speed dial or text message away. “Tomorrow’s adults,” says Mr. Federman, “live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.” Their direct experience of the world is wholly different from yours or mine.
So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.
I love the use of the word incarcerate. It sums up so well the listless, bored, apathetic students that are prevalent in all too many of today’s high school classrooms. As others have noted, it’s awfully difficult to be a passive information consumer once you’ve had the opportunity to be an active content producer.
Could be a good article to share with administrators!
Wow. Could The Age of the Millenials have been any more one-sided? I know the audience for 60 Minutes skews older but this episode was pretty over the top, even for a generation gap story (hat tip to the Twitterverse). Here are a few phrases from the episode:
Where is the understanding that every generation is different than those that came before? Where is the recognition of the many talents that the Millenials bring to the workplace? Where is the idea that perhaps these millenials have a pretty keen understanding of their current worth in the American employment market?
Did there have to be so much grumpiness? Are the boomers just reaping what they sowed?
After much deliberation and several delays, Wesley Fryer and I have picked a winner for the NECC button design contest. We had 22 different button submissions. We narrowed it down to 5 finalists, did some rank ordering, and then I made the ultimate call (so blame me, not Wesley, if yours didn’t get chosen). All the submissions were much better than anything I would have designed, so I’m glad that we had the contest!
Kudos to Bill Moseley for having the winning design. As promised, Bill receives everlasting fame, a CASTLE mug, one of the buttons, a t-shirt with his design on it, a picture of a monster from my 4-year-old (Colin’s the one with the curly hair), and a copy of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Nice work, Bill!
[update: Bill has released this image with a Creative Commons license, saying, "Share it with anyone and everyone. This is about communicating the idea, right? If my image helps, then great!"]
A big, big thanks to everyone who participated. I will bring several hundred of the buttons to Edubloggercon 2008 and will give them out there and throughout NECC until they’re gone. If your design wasn’t selected, I’ll save you a button in San Antonio. If you’re not attending NECC and submitted a design, e-mail me your mailing address and I’ll send you a button!
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
I’m going to do something I’ve never done before as a blogger: resurrect an old post. Over the past few months I’ve read all or some of Innovation Nation, Five Regions of the Future, Sixteen Trends, and The 2010 Meltdown. I then decided it was time to finally read Teaching as a Subversive Activity and The End of Education. So I started on the former and then today I picked up the latest issue of Educational Leadership, which is focused on reshaping high schools. As the echoes of K-12 naysayers reverberated through my head, I found myself asking once again:
So what if schools don’t adjust to the demands of the digital, global economy? So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?
As McLuhan stated, school may be irrelevant. As Wiener noted, schools may shield children from reality. As Gardner said, schools may educate for obsolescence. As Bruner stated, schools may not develop intelligence. As Rogers noted, schools may not promote significant learnings. As Friedenberg said, schools may punish creativity and independence [all closely quoted from Postman & Weingartner, 1968, p. xiv). And yet the economy chugs along, sometimes up, sometimes down, but mostly up. And the overall well-being of most citizens continues to improve by most historical measures.
So, without further ado, below is my post from March 2007, which I’m hoping will spark some additional conversation 14 months later, particularly now that both the TechLearning blog and Dangerously Irrelevant have larger audiences. I hope you find the post to still be as challenging and relevant today as I do.
– – – – –
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
[Law students learn to argue both sides of any issue because as attorneys they may be hired for either side of a case. Knowledge of the other side’s arguments also allows attorneys to counter those arguments and thus strengthen their own side. So with that in mind, here’s a little contrarian perspective on School 2.0. As technology advocates, we must be able to offer real solutions, not just empty rhetoric.]
Dear School 2.0 advocates,
We’ve heard it all before. The sky is falling. America is in danger of losing its role as lead actor on the global stage. What else is new?
National commissions? Esteemed task forces? Corporate leaders as education critics? We’ll see your Bill Gates and raise you a Sputnik.
We heard it in the 1950s:
We are engaged in a grim duel. We are beginning to recognize the threat to American technical supremacy which could materialize if Russia succeeds in her ambitious program of achieving world scientific and engineering supremacy by turning out vast numbers of well-trained scientists and engineers. . . We have let our educational problem grow much too big for comfort and safety. We are beginning to see now that we must solve it without delay. - Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1959
We heard it in the 1980s:
The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. . . If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering. - A Nation at Risk, 1983
We heard it in the 1990s:
America’s education system is broken. - IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, 1994
And we’re hearing it again today:
Whereas for most of the 20th century the United States could take pride in having the best-educated workforce in the world, that is no longer true. Over the past 30 years, one country after another has surpassed us. . . . While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. . . . Our relative position in the world's education league tables [continues] its long slow decline. - The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2006
America’s high schools are obsolete. - Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 2005
And yet, somehow, despite our educational system’s long history of alleged mediocrity, our country and our economy keep chugging along quite nicely. Our standard of living is the envy of most of the world. Our gross domestic product per capita literally dwarfs those of China or India, the latest international competition du jour. Despite our country’s creativity-stifling schools, our citizens and workers continue, quite astonishingly, to build upon our nation’s well recognized and long-standing traditions of innovation and excellence to create new products, new systems, and new markets.
We’ve heard it all before. Creative thinking. Problem solving. Independent, self-directed learning. Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, John Seely Brown…
Ho hum. Ever heard of progressive education? The turn of the LAST century? Summerhill? John Dewey? Neil Postman? The 1960s? Been there, done that. Why is THIS time any different? Why is it that THIS time we should replace the entire system?
Yes, we get it. Most kids think schools are boring. Big surprise. John Goodlad told us that long ago. As if we needed ANYONE to tell us that. Isn’t that just the way school is?
Fine. School 2.0 is the “right” thing to do. Technology has the potential to transform education. Our educational institutions could be doing so much more. Educators should feel more of a moral imperative to do things differently. Blah blah blah… Let’s be honest: isn’t this true for ANY bureaucratic government entity? Do we really expect our public schools to be any different?
We’ve heard it all before. The status quo is inadequate. Too many kids drop out, our assessment systems are all wrong, and we’re squandering our children’s future. The problem is that you offer no concrete, tangible, publicly- and politically-viable alternatives.
It’s easy to throw stones at glass houses. It’s much harder to replace a venerable system that’s served us well for a century with something else. The old saw, “Never make a complaint without offering potential solutions” applies here in spades. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that we “tore down the walls” tomorrow. What would education look like instead? How would we ever get there from where we are now? How are you going to persuade educators, and politicians, and your local community members that this is worth moving toward? That it’s not just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking?
What’s your plan? We mean a real plan. Not just “kids learning independently on matters of personal interest, taking advantage of the power of digital technology to help them do so.” What will the structures look like? Policies? Laws? Funding streams? How will we know if kids have learned anything important? How will we handle parents’ very real needs for someone to take their kids while they go to work?
Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.
We’ve heard it all before. What else you got?
If you haven’t yet done so, The Rise of the Rest in Newsweek is worth reading. Here’s an excerpt (hat tip to Richard Florida):
American parochialism is particularly evident in foreign policy. Economically, as other countries grow, for the most part the pie expands and everyone wins. But geopolitics is a struggle for influence: as other nations become more active internationally, they will seek greater freedom of action. This necessarily means that America's unimpeded influence will decline. But if the world that's being created has more power centers, nearly all are invested in order, stability and progress. Rather than narrowly obsessing about our own short-term interests and interest groups, our chief priority should be to bring these rising forces into the global system, to integrate them so that they in turn broaden and deepen global economic, political, and cultural ties. If China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order, there will be less danger of war, depression, panics, and breakdowns. There will be lots of problems, crisis, and tensions, but they will occur against a backdrop of systemic stability. This benefits them but also us. It's the ultimate win-win.
To bring others into this world, the United States needs to make its own commitment to the system clear. So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn't always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others. Only three countries in the world don't use the metric system—Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. For America to continue to lead the world, we will have to first join it.
Americans—particularly the American government—have not really understood the rise of the rest. This is one of the most thrilling stories in history. Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty. The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers. This is all happening because of American ideas and actions. For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid of change, to join the advanced world, to learn the secrets of our success. Yet just as they are beginning to do so, we are losing faith in such ideas. We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it's not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America. Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world. We don't want them to write that along the way, we forgot to globalize ourselves.
I love those last two paragraphs!
I think I may have just found the opening video for my Monday presentation to the Ames Noon Rotary.
Kudos to the Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance and the Consortium for School Networking (and a hat tip to David Warlick) for a great resource!
My latest article for the American Association of School Administrators is now online. Titled Blocking the Future, it’s only a page long but I’m really excited about it. Here’s an excerpt:
[S]chool district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. . . . I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”
Hopefully this will be a useful reading for your administrators and teachers. Feel free to distribute liberally!
My latest roundup of links and tools…
I read blocked blogs
Are you up to the challenge?
Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia
No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!
I was incredulous to read ... the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely ... school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on.
– Gareth Long
Like Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer forces us to rethink / justify
New tools I’m finding quite useful
The impetus is on us, not them
Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] ... focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation.
– Wesley Fryer
A couple of gems from Clay Burell…
And a couple more from Gerald Bracey
We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?
And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson
One year ago: Well, what's your answer? and Principal blogging not allowed
Credits: F Minus by Tony Carrillo, Dist. by UFS, Inc. [permission for use granted 4–24–2008]
Stephanie Sandifer recently blogged about the concept of ‘teachers as learners’:
Rather than immediately engage in a technology purchasing frenzy, take some time to begin discussions on your campus about how to transform your school into a place where teachers see themselves first as LEARNERS who are invested in improving their instructional practice through reflection and inquiry
This is an old edublogosphere theme. For example, here’s a post by Will Richardson from way back in 2006:
In a world where knowledge is scarce (and I know I’m using that phrase an awful lot these days), I can see why we needed teachers to be, well, teachers. But here’s what I’m wondering: in a world where knowledge is abundant, is that still the case? In a world where, if we have access, we can find what we need to know, doesn’t a teacher’s role fundamentally change? Isn’t it more important that the adults we put into the rooms with our kids be learners first? Real, continual learners? Real models for the practice of learning? People who make learning transparent and really become a part of the community?
So what do we mean, exactly, when we say we want teachers to be ‘learners?’ The operationalization of the answer to this question is important, I believe. For example, I once asked a group of high school guidance counselors in Minnesota, ‘How do you know if you’re a successful high school guidance program?’ They responded, ‘When every student has a meaningful connection to at least one adult in the building.’ I said, ‘That’s great! Now, how do you know when you’ve gotten there? How do you know where you are now? How do you know if you’re making progress?’ And then there was silence - crickets chirping - because they didn’t know how to operationalize what they said was the ultimate measure of success for themselves.
I’ve asked similar questions of school administrators:
If, like 98.7% of all schools and districts in the country, your mission and/or vision statement says something like ‘blah blah blah blah lifelong learners blah blah blah,’ how do you know when you’ve gotten there? How do you know if you’re making progress? What does that look like? Can you tell me?
And, again, crickets chirping - because they can’t operationalize what they say is the ultimate intended outcome of the organization.
So what’s your answer? If we want teachers to be ‘learners’ - if that’s important to us - how do we define that? What do we look for? How do we know if we’ve got it?
If we can’t define it, we can’t recognize it / hire for it / reward it / remediate for the lack of it.
Anyone want to take a shot at it?
One year ago: Don't hold your breath
The Iowa Technology Education Connection (ITEC) conference each year is fairly small. Despite its size, however, it tends to bring in some really big-name speakers for its keynote addresses. Last year the keynote speakers were Steve Wozniak and David Pogue (I also had a chance to finally meet Dennis Harper, which was super fun for me). This year’s keynotes are Hall Davidson and Alan November.
Below are the proposals I just submitted to ITEC 2008. Hopefully some will get accepted. Hope to see you in Des Moines in October!
Getting your principals and superintendent on board
If the leaders don't get it, it's not going to happen. This highly-interactive workshop will focus on some techniques and strategies for getting principals and superintendents to be better supporters of technology integration efforts. Bring your laptop!
Establishing an effective online presence in an attention economy
In an attention economy - when there is more information than people can possibly pay attention to - it's hard to get noticed. Learn why an effective online presence is now necessary and how to get started.
Why aren't you having a bigger impact?
Feel like you're working hard but making less of an impact than you'd hoped? Join us for an interactive discussion about technology, school change, and informal leadership.
(In)Effective presentations
Death by PowerPoint. Everyone knows the phrase and yet dry, boring, ineffective slideware presentations continue to be the norm. Both educators and students can learn how to create and deliver memorable presentations that leave audiences wanting more!
If you’ve been reading Speed of Creativity lately, you probably noticed Wesley Fryer’s nifty phrase: I’m here for the learning revolution.
I AM here for the learning revolution! Are you?
I suggested to Wesley that we have a button design contest because I love the idea of all of us wearing these at NECC. He agreed, so this is the official announcement that he and I are hereby sponsoring a contest!
CASTLE will pay for prizes and the buttons. Anyone who attends the Edubloggercon 2008 & Classroom 2.0 ‘LIVE’ session at NECC gets a free button. I’ll pass out the rest during NECC until they’re gone.
So I’ll be sporting at least two buttons at NECC: this one and another nifty one that says I read blocked blogs (designed by Stephanie, inspired by Bud). Awesome.
Happy designing!
Update: See the winning entry!
My latest roundup of links and tools…
Some really cool posts about Twitter
Reading blogs is like visiting a new city
Rethink trust
Zamzar
Lame-o
As someone in a Ed leadership program right now, I couldn’t agree more that it is a waste of time and hoop-jumping to get an administrative license. My professor lectured for two hours to a class of adults on the importance of collaboration in adult education. Lame-o.
– Jethro
A great way to think about the social Web
The firestorm subsides
Happy reading, everyone. Like Wesley, I am here for the learning revolution. Hope you are too.
Here's a nifty video by Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. The book looks interesting. I don't know how much it overlaps Clay Shirky's phenomenally excellent book, Here Comes Everybody, but I might have to get it (it's only available at Amazon UK?).
Many thanks to Rob Jacobs for leading me to this video. I have a feeling I'll be using it in some presentations in the near future.
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
Chart 1: A discrepancy of beliefs
Here is a chart of some findings from the recently-released Speak Up 2007 surveys of nearly 368,000 students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The chart shows the agreement of each school stakeholder group with the statement that the local school is preparing students for jobs of the future. It would have been interesting to see the results for students with more basic technology skills…
Some questions I have:
Chart 2: We’re losing them
Here is a chart of how I think about students as they progress through the K-12 system. Almost invariably, they start out in kindergarten as insatiable learners. You can’t stop them from learning. And then, as the years go by, their intellectual curiosity – their overall engagement with their academic content – dwindles. By the time they leave us in high school, they’re often (primarily?) bored and apathetic. It’s probably not a linear process (line A). I think most students’ engagement levels probably stay fairly high into upper elementary school (line B). And then we start losing them.
Some questions I have:
Charts 3 & 4: Is this all they expect?
Finally, here are two charts from an informal poll done of 76 graduate students in one of the departments here in the Iowa State University College of Human Sciences (okay, it’s my department but don’t tell anyone!). We asked them if they were satisfied with students’ and instructors’ classroom technology usage. Overwhelmingly they said yes. But when asked what they liked (or disliked), nearly all of the comments pertained to PowerPoint and/or WebCT, our online course management system. Nary a word of any other technologies, good or bad.
Some questions I have:
Education Canada has published a great article from Michael Wesch, author of several videos that should be seen by every school administrator. Here’s an excerpt from Anti-teaching: Confronting the crisis of significance:
If you want to see the significance problem first hand, visit a classroom and pay attention to the types of questions asked by students. Good questions are the driving force of critical and creative thinking and therefore one of the best indicators of significant learning. Good questions are those that force students to challenge their taken-forgranted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. Oftentimes the answer to a good question is irrelevant – the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to the best questions is another good question. And so the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.
Unfortunately, such great questions are rarely asked by students in an education system facing a crisis of significance. Much more common are administrative questions: “How long does this paper need to be?” “Is attendance mandatory?” Or the worst (and most common) of all: “What do we need to know for this test?” Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (students and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.
Contrary to many of my faculty peers, I do not blame the students themselves for asking these kinds of questions. As teachers we have created and continue to maintain an education system that inevitably produces them. If we accept John Dewey’s notion that people learn what they do, the lecture format, which is the mainstay of teaching (especially in large introductory courses), teaches students to sit in neat rows and to respect, believe, and defer to authority (the teacher).
Wesch calls students educators’ ‘most important critics.’ I wonder how many teachers or professors would agree with him?
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