Dangerously Irrelevant

What if every student, not just those in Michigan, had to take at least
one high-quality online course before they graduated from high school?
What if every teacher and administrator also had to participate in at
least one high-quality online professional development experience every
three years or so? What would our schools be like? What would our
children’s lives be like?

What if every teacher received 40 hours a year of content-specific training in Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networking, photo sharing, social bookmarks, mashups, etc.) and also had access to these tools? What would our schools be like? What would our children’s lives be like?

The federal government spent $45.7
billion on elementary and secondary education in 2005–2006. This represented
about 8.2% of the overall government spending on P-12 education in our country,
with the rest of the monies coming from state and local sources.

The estimated P-12 public school enrollment for that same year was 48.7 million
children. Add in about 5 million private
school children and another 1.1 million
homeschooled children and we have an approximate total of 54.8 million students. Using
these numbers, we can calculate that currently the federal
government spends about $834 per school-age child.

Even knowing that many families could afford a better computer,
what if the federal government bought a $100 (or so) laptop for every child in
America? What would our schools be like? What would our children’s lives be like?

Today’s a good day to brag about some of our CASTLE friends…

A couple of weeks ago one of our School Technology Leadership alumni, Jennette Kane, was honored as one of NSBA’s 20 to Watch. Jennette is a technology integration supervisor for the Orange City (OH) Schools. Orange City was one of three districts selected last year by the NSBA Technology Leadership Network for a national site visit. Jennette’s supervisor, Kurt Bernardo, also is one of our alumni.

TetraData, which is one of CASTLE’s corporate partners, was recently honored with an Innovision Technology Award. TetraData has been a long-time supporter of the data-driven decision-making work that I do and has been generous enough to donate access to some dummy datasets so that my students can gain hands-on experience working with a data warehouse. We greatly appreciate its support and goodwill.

Yesterday I posted about some folks for whom I’m thankful. I have a few others to add that are a little more local. In addition to those I mentioned yesterday, I’m also thankful for…

• my students, particularly those in our School Technology Leadership graduate certificate program. They stretch me professionally in ways I could never imagine and I am regularly recharged by their dedication, their energy, and their enthusiasm.
• Joan, my CASTLE co-director, and the faculty in my department. Five years ago I said “Why don’t we apply to the U.S. Department of Education’s most competitive grant program to create the country’s first technology leadership graduate program?” None of them even blinked at the notion, and I have enjoyed that unblinking support ever since.
• the many, many wonderful educators with whom I have gotten to work across the state of Minnesota. My academic life would be much less rewarding without the opportunities that I have had to roll up my sleeves and get into schools to help with the difficult work of making meaningful change for the benefit of kids.

Of course the folks for whom I am most thankful are the members of my family. My kids don’t always understand why I’m away sometimes ("when will Daddy be home?") but their unrelenting love and support are constants. They also are some of the few folks that really, truly understand that my "work" is anything but.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

In the past few weeks I have received thank you notes from three current or former students. Here’s one example:

During this week of giving thanks, I am certainly thankful to have you as an instructor, advisor and part of my doctoral program. I have learned so much from you and you have inspired in me a stronger interest in technology than I had before. You have also reinforced my love of learning, which I came into the program with, but your classes were (and are) the challenge and the spark that keeps me wanting to know more. Thank you for all you do. I appreciate you more than you’ll know.

Of course this note made my day! Like K-12 teachers, it’s always great for us professors to hear positive comments from students, particularly after they’ve left the program and are out in the world.

So this recent flurry of unexpected gratitude got me thinking… for whom am I thankful this Thanksgiving season?

I am thankful for…

• the members of the educational technology blogosphere, who have welcomed me to the fold and who make a difference through their writing, their thought leadership, and, perhaps most importantly, their willingness to take on current challenges with an earnest good cheer that often stands in stark contrast to the underlying, frustrating reality of K-12 educational technology.
• folks like Will and David and Wesley and Susan, who are traveling around the country, sacrificing time with loved ones and friends, to spread the message that the digital world has arrived and that schools need to change if they are to be relevant to our children’s future.
• educators like Doug and Miguel and Tim and Cheryl and Jeff and Vicki, who are working inside school systems – educating up, across, and down their internal hierarchies – to facilitate technology-related instructional and organizational change. They are our de facto technology leaders; all we have to do is figure out how to better empower them.
• the few educational leadership faculty like David Quinn (U. Florida), Jon Becker (Hofstra U.), and Sara Dexter (U. Virginia) who are making technology leadership their career focus. There are 500+ educational administration preparation programs in this country. The total number of educational leadership faculty who are paying attention to technology issues is only about 20 or so.
• CoSN and ISTE and ETAN, who work diligently to help our elected representatives understand that funding and support for educational technology is critical for our nation’s success.
• people like Doug Levin (Cable in the Classroom) and Ann Flynn (NSBA), who are relatively unknown to most educators and yet are doing extremely important work around technology leadership and policy.
• principals like Linda Perdaems and Dave Younce and Paul Doyle. Despite some uncertainty and maybe some unfamiliarity with the digital world, they’re willing to dive in and try stuff in order to stay current and to model good practice for their staffs.
• teachers, the vast majority of whom are trying their very best to do right by kids. They may not know much about technology, and they may sometimes be slow to recognize the instructional changes that are needed to keep up with societal shifts, but they’re in their classrooms, day in and day out, working hard to prepare our country’s next generation. Most of the problems we attribute to teachers are a result of inadequate training and support; they deserve better.
• preservice teachers. They’re entering a profession with low pay, even lower societal prestige, and no political respect, and yet they dare to join us anyway because they believe that they can make a difference. Preservice teachers represent the future of our profession. We owe them the very best that we can give them.

That’s my short list. Tomorrow on my own blog I’ll probably add some folks that are closer to home. For whom are you thankful? Drop them a note and let them know!

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

After meeting with a doctoral student yesterday who drove two hours each way for a one-hour meeting, I decided enough was enough, at least with my own advisees. I made a page on my web site that encourages students to work with me to use technology to solve some typical time / travel / communication challenges.

I then sent a listserv message to the rest of the faculty in my department about my new web page because I thought that some other folks might be interested in doing this too. Within minutes another message appeared on the listserv, this time from our department technology coordinator, notifying us of the University’s discouragement of Skype because it hogs resources and acts as a connective node for non-university-related data.

I encourage everyone to read the University of Minnesota recommendations regarding Skype. As I noted to our technology coordinator, the suggestion that Skype be turned off most of the time is somewhat problematic. I understand the U’s concern about bearing non-university-related data traffic. That said, I wish the U would think about Skype like it does our telephones, which we obviously don’t turn off except when we’re expecting a call.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Experiences and/or policies from your own organization?

Miguel took exception to my ISTE point/counterpoint article on using RFID chips to monitor schoolchildren in school. I knew my stance would be controversial when I wrote the piece, so I’ll take this opportunity to respond to Miguel’s criticisms. Here’s my thinking, using the Brittan Elementary (Sutter, CA) program as an example…

1. There’s nothing on the RFID chips except a number. No demographic information. No address information. No personally-identifiable information whatsoever. Nothing except a unique ID number that’s meaningful only to the specialized school software that matches kids with attendance records (and, maybe later, lunch records). There’s a big difference between the information stored on the kids’ RFID cards and what was on the British passports. Anyone who stole the info from the kids’ RFID chips literally would get bupkis…
2. We already have to monitor the whereabouts of kids on school grounds at all times. There is no right of students to roam freely. As such, I’ll stick by my argument that using technology to do this instead of expensive human personnel is at least arguably defensible.
3. Given #1 and #2, that’s why I said that RFID chips as used in Brittan Elementary are a non-issue. They’re no more invasive than student IDs (with or without bar codes) or biometric readers for school cafeterias or libraries. They’re arguably less invasive than networked security cameras, metal detectors, drug dog sniffs, or extracurricular students’ urine testing for illegal substances, all of which are commonplace.
4. Finally, I’m wary of the slippery slope argument that Miguel use ("RFID chips … are a precedent for using technology in ways that violate our privacy"). If we decide to go down this path, wouldn’t we also be against Internet cookies, secure login databases for financial web sites, GPS in cars/cell phones, Internet form-filling software, toll booth passcards, biometric scanners, security cameras, and all of the other technologies I mention in my article? Why is RFID so different than these other technologies?

The students who take my school law courses would tell you that I’m actually a pretty strong privacy advocate. That said, I also recognize that, as technology-using individuals, we make choices every day to sacrifice privacy for convenience. That trend is only going to intensify as the benefits of divulging certain types of information outweigh whatever privacy concerns most folks have.

We need to be careful to protect students’ private information from theft and other improper uses. That said, I’m not sure that a meaningless number on a students’ RFID chip is the red flag that others make it out to be.

Although this quote from Worldchanging doesn’t pertain directly to education or educational technology, I thought it was pretty relevant to what we’re trying to make happen in the next few years…

Check out the WorldChanging web site. It’s pretty nifty.

As a professor at a large research institution, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of academic publishing. While this topic may not seem to be of interest to many of you who are K-12 educators, in the end I think the implications around this issue are worth considering by all of us.

As we know, the Internet is revolutionizing publication. No longer need you be a large publishing company or a mainstream media corporation to reach a significant audience with your text, images, photographs, audio, and/or video. Search engines, blogs, social networking sites, RSS aggregators, and other tools already are connecting the content of millions to audiences of billions. These tools have only been around for a few years; imagine what it’s going to be like a decade or two from now. This story has been told before, by others with more expertise and experience than me, but it’s worth noting that this revolution has been slow to permeate academia.

The traditional publication paradigm of higher education is still alive; the “publish or perish” mantra still holds true. Professors publish articles, preferably in peer-reviewed journals, and others (arguably? hopefully?) read them. Articles are typically accessed by strolling down to the local university library and making a photocopy, accessing a PDF version of a print article via an online institutional subscription-only service, or by requesting a copy of an unavailable article via interlibrary loan. All three of these mechanisms inhibit access to cutting-edge (as well as ordinary or irrelevant) scholarship by the general public, practitioner audiences, individuals at resource-poor institutions, etc. After all, who wants to get out of bed, go to the university library, find parking (always difficult), search through the stacks, and make paper copies? No one. Not even undergraduates who live on campus want to do this. Even if you know what you’re looking for, it’s too cumbersome compared to the Internet.

In addition to time, effort, and access drawbacks, this system has other disadvantages. For example, because the joint processes of peer review and print publication take months or years to occur, scholarly research in cutting-edge, fast-changing subject areas (think technology, biomedicine, genetics, etc.) often is out of date by the time it’s printed. This is especially true of research that investigates the utility or capabilities of technology solutions. By the time research into the effectiveness of some technology is conducted, written up, submitted for peer review, revised, submitted again for peer and/or editorial review, revised again, submitted once more, formatted for printing, actually printed, and then mailed out to individual and library subscribers, the technology solution may have undergone several version changes, been bought out by a larger competitor, disappeared altogether, and so on. The fast pace of change in the world of technology and a few other fields is ill-served by the traditional publishing paradigm.

So what do I think the new academic publishing paradigm might look like?

• Scholarship will be more open. Rather than being locked down by academic publishers, future scholarship will be available to all who are interested. The proposed Federal Public Research Act (S.2695) is a first step in that direction. The Act basically requires all federally-funded research to be made freely and publicly available online within six months of publication. Academics love this idea - information wants to be free - but, as you can imagine, it is facing stiff opposition from publishing companies.
• Scholarship will be more available. Not only will more articles be publicly accessible, they also will be easier to find. Inclusion of the world’s research base in Internet search engines opens up scholarly knowledge to everyone on the planet, not just those with specialized training or skills. Similarly, hyperlinking has great promise. Imagine being able to get a source cited in an article by simply clicking on the link.
• Academia will require a different conceptualization of what constitutes scholarship. Right now most printed journals require that authors follow certain writing, structural, formatting, and citation conventions. The world of the Internet allows for limitless possibilities, particularly in terms of style (multimedia versus print) and length (there are few size restrictions online). Can a digital video, or an interactive web site, or some other kind of online resource be as scholarly and rigorous as an article that’s printed text? Absolutely. University experiments with multimedia “digital dissertations” give us some idea of what this might look like.
• Academia will require a different conceptualization of peer review. When an article literally can be made available to everyone worldwide, what constitutes appropriate review? When scholarship can be conducted and posted by anyone without going through traditional gatekeeping mechanisms, who is considered the peer review group? Is there still a place for high-level scholars to weigh in regarding the quality of the work? Should any and all visitors be allowed to comment and let the chips fall where they may? Nature already is experimenting with some alternative peer review paradigms. Others will follow.
• Academia will require a different conceptualization of quality. Rather than an article’s worthiness being judged by the opinions of a few “experts,” it may be judged by the number of page visits, or number of comments, or number of trackback hyperlinks, or its usage by and impact upon practitioners…

There’s more I could probably write here, but these notions come to mind immediately. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to all of this – we will gain some things but lose others. Ultimately, however, making researchers’ work more accessible, and more accountable, to the public should have positive effects for schools and the people who work in them.

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.