:Connecting the Dots

Some quotes from a video I found on YouTube:

“They’re already socializing [online]; why not give them a venue where you can be part of the conversation?”

“The stuff that I know is valuable enough that people want to hear it.”

“We’re talking more… at all levels. I think we have to turn that transparency outward… and allow them to participate in the conversations as well.”

“Imagine a wikipedia not only populated by the masses looking for knowledge but also by a bunch of tech masters… who are also using the space for their own use. Now you’ve got the quality of the crowd and some zen masters.”

“We are moving from a role of being the ones who own the messages and deliver [them] to a role where we are just the facilitators. We’re encouraging, we’re enabling.”

I wish I could say these are quotes from students and teachers in some forward-looking, cutting edge school.  Unfortunately, they’re not.  They are Best Buy employees speaking in a video showcasing the company’s various social media tools and how they are helping to transform the company’s culture.  Clarence Fisher was the first to bring it to my attention in a brief post and the timing couldn’t be better: I’ll be introducing wikis to teachers in my inservice “New Technologies Seminar” course next week.

Now I’m no huge fan of Best Buy.  I was there last week and grew angry as I hovered next to two blue-shirted salespeople who were more interested in talking to each other than in helping me – and even angrier when I discovered that the GPS I wanted was out of stock.  But they certainly drank Circuit City’s milkshake and it seems like they are doing about as well as any retail outfit can in this economy.  Watching this video tells me that at least they’re trying.  Maybe one of those sales guys will be a little more attentive to his customers after reading about good customer service on the company’s wiki.

I’m sure many educators look down on places like Best Buy and the people who work there: pedestrian, commercial, too “Madison Ave.”  But if they can adopt these new technologies to serve their customers better, why can’t we?  No excuses in the video, no whining about time and training: just “I think what I have to say has value and I’m glad I have a place where I can express it, and read what my colleagues have to say, too.”

I hope that the day comes soon when it’s the educators who are providing the money quotes about collaboration, sharing, and empowerment, not floor workers in a retail electronics store.

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I saw “Intellagirl” Sarah Robbins give a keynote on Friday at the LHRIC Tech Expo and she spoke a lot about gaming, how the millennials learn, and how games may offer a glimpse at new ways to engage students in schools.  As far as I’m concerned, no new news there – I’ve been a gamer myself for some time and am well aware of how cognitively challenging games can be, and I’ve read James Gee and many of the others.

Then today I stumbled across Blizzard’s creative writing contest, in which entrants will submit stories that take place in the virtual worlds of Blizzard’s computer games.  Looking at this, I see even more clearly that the things we have to force kids to do in schools are things they might otherwise do willingly if given the chance to do so in ways that are meaningful to them.  Many students read and write fan fiction.  Why is it so hard to get them to write a five-paragraph essay of any quality?  They are enthusiastic about writing a story in a virtual world but not one that takes place in the “real” world of school.  Are we to assume then that the “real” world of school is so far removed from reality as to be completely foreign and uninteresting to them, even less so than the made-up world of Azeroth?

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Yes, it’s been a while.  It’s just too easy to push blogging to the back burner and too difficult to find something interesting to say.  But one thing has been gnawing at me lately. Watch:

To my knowledge, these are the only two commercials that Sprint created as part of this ad campaign: airlines and schools, and how they could be improved if “people who know how to get things done” were to take over.  So is this what it’s come to?  We’re down there with the airlines, perhaps the most hated, bureaucratic, customer-unfriendly industry in America?  Sad.  If the commercial reflects the values and beliefs of its intended audience (and I’m sure it does – Madison Avenue spends a lot of money understanding those values and beliefs), then it looks like the image of schools held by the American public is one where students are left on their own, floating around the neighborhood, administrators and teachers either unaware or unconcerned by their absence.  Inefficient.  Bloated.  Slow.

Who can do better?  Apparently workers in a job whose minimum qualifications are pretty much limited to a drug screening a clean driving record.

Either we’re doing a really bad job at educating students or else at educating the public about what goes on in schools.  Perhaps a little of both.  Clearly, change is going to require changing a lot of people’s minds about what education is now and what it can become.

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I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a somewhat heady but also very funny and insightful treatise on the importance of randomness in our lives – and our complete blindness to it.  He argues that we now live in “extremistan” – a world where it is likely that improbable events will occur- but we still think we’re living in mediocristan, where the bell curve accurately represents reality and almost anything can be explained and predicted through statistical analysis.  To those who disagree, Taleb would point to 9/11 and the current financial crisis, the most obvious examples of events which no one could possibly have forecast.  Taleb argues that life has just become too complex to render accurate predictions about anything worth predicting.  The best we can do is to be ready for anything: “luck favors the prepared”, as Louis Pasteur famously said.

Of course, to those of us in the technology world, this should be obvious.  Early on in Ed Tech, the advice to schools and districts was to write a five-year technology plan and even now anyone who wants eRate funding must submit a three-year plan.  Those of us who have lived through of few iterations of these plans – however throroughly they were researched, however collaboratively they were written – know that things never turn out quite as planned.  For example, my district’s current plan mentions nothing about a global financial crisis in year two that will severely limit our ability to fund purchases of new technologies.  Likewise, who wrote a technology plan in 1998 that anticipated the Columbine school shootings a year later and the subsequent millions of dollars that schools would pour into emergency notification systems?  Are we as in control as our technology plans suggest?

And it’s not all about bad news, either.  New technologies sprout up quickly and in ways we almost never expect.  Is a tech director just supposed to watch opporunity pass by because that exciting new technology wasn’t in the plan?  Who saw Voicethread coming?  Luck does favor the prepared, so maybe the best we can do with these tech plans is to keep them broad and focused on the things that don’t change: hiring the right people, keeping the channels of communication open, clarifying the vision.  I keep thinking about Google’s policy encouraging employee’s to spend 20% of their time on the clock working on side projects: they know something great is likely to come about if conditions are right to allow it to happen and they don’t try to force it.  Hence Google Chrome.

Are schools, with their yellowing technology plans, yearly budget fights, and stifling beauracracy, ready for randomness? 

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I’m working my way through Seth Godin’s Small is the New Big.  It’s a random collection of blog posts, commentary, and reflections by the new media guy famous for the remarkable purple cow.  I’m thinking in particular about “Guillotine or Rack?” and how it applies to the situation in many American schools right now.  Godin argues that most people in organizations are motivated by fear of the guillotine’s sudden, overwhelming violence: having your idea shot down in a meeting, getting fired, not making a sale.  But he convincingly argues that everyone in the organization also has to keep their eyes open for the rack: a long, painful death that occurs as companies and individuals doggedly pursue outdated strategies in spite of insistent and growing pressures to change.  In Godin’s words, “We don’t quake in our boots about a layoff that’s going to happen two years from now if we don’t migrate our systems before our competition does.”

Godin is talking primarily about the corporate world but I can’t help thinking that so many school organizations and individuals within schools suffer from the same short-sightedness.  We don’t implement a new program because the parents might not support it.  When deciding on a new piece of software, we ask what the five districts around us are using – not so we can find something better but so we can find something good enough, safe.  We worry over state test results that measure skills that grow less important by the day.

I’m thinking today about how I could weave this into an upcoming panel discussion on “cyber safety,” at which I intend to argue that the answer isn’t just to hide our heads in the sand by telling our kids to stay off of Facebook (which they won’t) instead of helping them to learn how to use it safely.  Yes, by “just saying no” we may be dodging that predator bullet – the All the while, the rack is stretching us and killing our kids.

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Well, Doug Johnson saw my link to LifeHack’s 10 Essential Skills and has challenged the Edublogosphere to come up with their own lists.  Here’s mine:

1. The ability to understand and interpret data: So many people – especially in education – try to prop up weak arguments and ideas with even weaker/incomplete/misleading statistics.  Worse, many people lack the tools to see when others are doing the same.
2. Seeing the big picture/putting things into perspective:  People who consider only their little corner of the organization when making decisions will forever remain in that little corner.  Teamwork means not only understanding your own “stuff” but how it fits in with everyone else’s “stuff” and collaborating to chart a path accordingly.
3. Communication: Okay, I’m a former English teacher, so I suppose this is to be expected.  Whether it’s writing, speaking, reading, or listening, there are few jobs that don’t require us to interact with others in varied settings and through diverse media.  It’s sad that one of our assistant principals had to send out a blast e-mail to the school clericals reminding them to be polite when answering the phone.  And I’ve seen people lose their jobs because they couldn’t write to save their lives.
4. Being a good compromiser: The ability to walk into a room where people are fighting and find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is very valuable.  It’s a creative, thinking-out-of-the-box act: taking a situation that has reached an impasse and finding a way out.
5. Empathy: Right on, Doug.  I would go beyond just understanding the needs of others, however, and ask that all leaders know how to minister to those needs.  Asking about family, sending a note when someone is sick, complementing a co-worker on a job well done: these little actions mean a lot.
6. Critical understanding of technology: It’s about more than just knowing which buttons to push and which icons to click.  People need to be able to recognize appropriate tools for a task and use them properly to achieve the desired outcome.  They need to be able to reject those tools that are poorly-designed, harmful, and/or irrelevent.  Otherwise money gets wasted and there is a backlash.
7. Math and logic:  The greatest value in math is the habit of mind toward logic which it develops.  Geometric proofs, in particular, are valuable because they help students to understand how to work methodically through a problem.   I’ve seen so many poor decisions made because people lacked the ability to temper emotion and intuition with a little hard reasoning.
8. Creativity: In a world where so many insitutions appear to be failing and/or inadequate to meet the needs of such a rapidly-developing culture, people need to be able to dream up innovative, new solutions to the problems we face.  People who succeed are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, and I think that’s what creativity is all about when you come right down to it.
9. Knowing where you put things- both physically and mentally:  Complexity seems to be increasing faster than our brains’ capability to manage it.  The ability to leverage tools to stay organized – both in terms of physical items, contacts, and appointments as well as ideas and facts – are invaluable.  And perhaps part of that means managing a storehouse of facts that we can quickly and easily recall – you never know when someone will name-drop “Harold Pinter” or need to know how to convert gallons to liters.  No, I’m not saying it should all be memorized and yes, it can be Googled, but we need to be able to contextualize and use that knowledge effectively.
10. Responding well to setbacks:  We all identify this as an important skill in children.  It even shows up on standards-based elementary report cards.  I think it’s equally valuable for adults: the ability to work through any crisis without giving up and without losing your head.   In the words of Judge Smails:

It’s easy to grin, when your ship comes in,
And you feel you’ve got the stock market beat,
But the man worthwhile, is the man who can smile,
When his pants are too tight in the seat!

I know I’ll think of at least 2-3 more over the next few hours now that my motor is going…

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I presented at NECC Unplugged today in a very noisy but welcoming Blogger’s Cafe.  My topic was, “Grassroots Technology Change, or: Stop Telling People What to Do.”  I spent a long time preparing a long text for a 10-minute “TED-type” talk.  When the time came, I plugged in my mic and opened the floodgates.  It was hard to stay focused on the text and hard to keep people engaged with so many people walking past and so many conversations going on around the room.  But more clapped than booed  (OK, no one booed) and at least one attendee came up afterwards to congratulate me and discuss.  It was over before it began but I’m glad I did it.  Click here to view the complete version of that long text.

The weirdest moment occured as I was waiting to present and took a casual look around the room.  The woman sitting next to me was reading this blog!  So strange to see your writing on someone else’s screen…

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Last week I had the pleasure of hearing George Siemens discussing the challenges involved in organizational change. Some very thought-provoking ideas from our neighbor to the north. What I keep coming back to is a comment that one audience member made, something along the lines of, “how can we teach kids in our classrooms when they are constantly being bombarded with information from the many devices and media to which they are connected 24/7?” There was some nodding in the room as he said it. And it’s a complaint I hear frequently when I talk to teachers about kids’ infatuation with technology and their need to stay constantly connected. How can we compete?

Yet as with so many of these criticisms that are frequently leveled at the younger generation, I’m finding it helpful to turn it around and ask the opposite about “us” – the old folk. Why are we so obsessed with being the center of attention? Why does it all have to be about us? Perhaps the real question to be asking as this rising floodwater of information makes its way up the walls of our classrooms is, “how can we allow our learning environments to be so impoverished, so stale, so univocal?”

I couldn’t help thinking as I drove back to work after Siemens’ talk that for so long our classrooms have been so many little Gilligan’s Islands – places where everyone has a role and those roles are played out week after week with only the slightest variations in theme and content and scant few new ideas or ways of doing things. No one grows, no one changes, no one really learns. At the end of each week the Gilligans are still Gilligans, the Professors are still Professors, the nerds are still nerds and the “dumb” kids are still “dumb.” Or as Ani DiFranco says, to the goldfish in his bowl, “the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.” Scary as it may be, I think it’s time to open our classrooms to some of the surprises from the world outside and get off that island.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something that has nothing – and everything – to do with educational technology. I’ve been thinking about higher order thinking skills and the emphasis that educational reformers place on them. There is definitely a bias among progressive education critics against rote memorization and towards critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity. Let me start by saying that I would generally place myself in that group and I do think that it is important for students to build those skills throughout their educational careers.

Yet something’s been troubling me lately. In reflecting on teaching and learning in schools, I oftentimes find it helpful to consider my own learning experiences outside of the classroom. I think it’s healthy to be someone else’s student and to struggle with something that is new, foreign, exciting, maybe a little intimidating. My recent return to guitar lessons and time spent a few years ago studying karate have helped me to remember how simultaneously fulfilling and frustrating it can be to learn.

As I’ve thought about these experiences lately, though, I keep coming back to one fact: both rely to a great extent on rote memorization, “drill and kill.” In karate, there are the kata: memorized sequences of punches, kicks, blocks, and dodges performed against invisible opponents. To move from level to level, students must spend hours practicing and then perform these kata perfectly. There is no room for improvisation, no room for personal styling. In a sense, it is the most inauthentic assessment possible. You are fighting invisible people according to a script. What good would pinan-nidan kata do me if I launched into it after being jumped in a dark alleyway?

In music, there are the scales. Major, minor, pentatonic, dominant, and on and on. To what end? Who wants to hear a musician walk on stage and play the A major scale in five positions up and down the guitar neck? This is particularly ironic given the association of musicianship with creativity. Musicians are supposed to “just let go” and “play what you feel.” How does memorizing and tuning scales help with that?

I think in both cases, the masters would say that the benefit of these exercises is discipline and automaticity: after a few hundred times, those scales are in your fingers and you don’t need to think about what note you’re playing before you play it. With kata, the form of the kick is perfect because you’ve done it thousands of times. Internalizing the fundamentals and relegating them to muscle memory frees up mental resources to concentrate on the big picture: what are my opponent’s strengths and weaknesses? what mood am I trying to create in this solo? In a recent edition of the excellent Smartboard Lessons Podcast, Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger discussed an online poetry generator that, according to Ben, allows students to focus on content rather than struggling with form. It’s about giving kids a structure, a toolbox to help them be creative, rather than just pushing them out on stage and saying, “do something creative. Do something smart.”

Is there a valid connection here to what we do in K-12 classrooms? What are the implications for technology use in instruction? And if we decide that this is indeed an important activity to include in a meaningful way in our curricula, how do we integrate it to support and not displace those very-important higher order thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy? I think educators are right that students can quickly become bored and frustrated when faced with this kind of work. But maybe we can’t afford not to engage our students in these activities…

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This video was made in 1989 – a high school student’s vision of what school would be like 30 years down the road.  Well, here we are 18 years later.  What did he get right?  What did he miss?  I look at this video and see project-based learning, multimedia, content management systems, distance learning, student collaboration… but no teachers! 

 What an interesting exercise for students in today’s classrooms: Ask them to describe the classroom of the future.  I think that would tell us a lot about what students find exciting – and lacking – in the classrooms where they are learning today.

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