Dangerously Irrelevant

Hey, all you educational bloggers! Get the vote out! Vote for Will, or Stephen, or Women of the Web, or (if you’re delusional) me, or whomever, but vote!

It may be friendly, but you still want to make sure there’s nothing breakable within reach.

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’ve been reading Everyware:
The dawning age of ubiquitous computing by Adam Greenfield. It’s a
fascinating book and I’m learning a lot.

Greenfield’s essential premise is that in the foreseeable future sensors and
transmitters can and will be embedded into everyday objects, ranging from the
clothes on our body to the milk in our refrigerator to the blanket on our bed to
the picture frame on our wall. This essentially makes the things we use everyday
into quasi-digital devices. The rapid evolution, miniaturization, and
affordability of RFID chips, and their incorporation into various aspects of
life, is one example of this trend. The inclusion of GPS technologies in cars,
cell phones, and watches is another. So is some of the work currently being done
with mesh networks, smart
dust, and the like. Once embedded, these sensors and transmitters will be
able to communicate with each other and with more complex digital technologies
like your home computer.

Why will sensors and transmitters be embedded into everyday things? Because,
as Greenfield notes, in the battle between convenience and privacy, most folks
are more than willing to give up some privacy for convenience. I saw this in
action quite clearly during my visit to the Microsoft
Home of the Future in 2006. A few illustrative examples:

• Imagine that your kitchen counter can discern what you put on it (milk,
  eggs, flour) and that a recipe appears on the counter surface informing you of
  the various things that you can make with those ingredients.
• Imagine that your electronic shopping list updates itself because the pantry
  has informed it that you’re running low on pancake mix.
• Imagine that a red light begins glowing on your bedside picture frame
  because the motion sensors in Grandma’s apartment haven’t registered any
  movement for the past six hours even though it’s mid-day.
• Imagine that the rooms in your house can
  sense the people who enter and adjust the art, lighting, temperature, etc.
  to reflect  individual preferences.
• Imagine the memory augmentation assistance that you could get from a sensor
  in your eyeglasses that could register the identity of the person walking toward
  you and quickly say into your ear her name and how you know her.

These are just a few of the many, many possibilities. Think medicine bottles
and backpacks, toilets and toys, floors and doors, and…

Greenfield believes that the arrival of ambient
informatics is inevitable. The power and potential will be too
great for most people to refuse and, in many cases, the capabilities will be in
place before folks even have a chance to think too hard about it and/or make
objections. However, Greenfield also notes that we need to start thinking and
talking about whatever social, ethical, and other concerns we may have right
now. After these informatics are embedded and installed, it often will be too
late because there are logic rules that are built into the construction of the
sensors and transmitters. For example, maybe you don’t want your floor or front
door or toilet ‘spying’ on you but you do want your refrigerator to do so. You
need to think about that at the front end during the design and/or purchasing
stage, not after the fact.

There’s a lot more I could say on this, but I’ll close with a strong
recommendation that folks read Everyware.
It’s a very different way to think about digital technologies and yet I agree
with Greenfield that it will be our future. We need to start talking about this
aspect of ubiquitous computing and we need to ask
ourselves, “How much privacy are we willing to give
up?”

As part of his five-point proposal to reform schools, Chris Whittle, founder of Edison Schools, proposes that we create five ‘principal universities.’ As Whittle notes, these would be the equivalent of the Air Force Academy, West Point, and Annapolis but for K-12 school principals. Each would serve approximately 3,000 students, whose tuition and expenses would be fully covered.

Whittle believes that these universities ‘could dramatically enhance school leadership in the United States‘ (he’s got a similar idea to create five new teacher colleges too). It’s an interesting idea. I’ll have to think about this one a bit.

I have a research team that’s going to spend the summer interviewing as many of the eSchoolNews technology-savvy superintendents as we can. eSchoolNews has named 10 tech-savvy superintendents for each of the past 7 years, so our total number of interviews could be as high as 70.

We’re trying to learn what makes these superintendents tick: how they think about digital technologies, what makes them different from other superintendents, what they do in terms of internal support and training, etc. We’d love to have your input as to what questions we should ask these folks.

Got a great idea for an interview question we should ask these superintendents? If so, please post it as a comment below. Thanks!

[cross-posted at Moving at the Speed of Creativity]

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is under fire. Not only is the Department of Education dealing with the Reading First corruption scandal, challenges to the reauthorization of NCLB, and blowback from the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, apparently Secretary Spellings also is receiving heat from members of Congress and others for the Department’s proposal to cut all educational technology funding at a time when many folks are quite concerned about America’s ability to remain globally competitive (see, e.g.., A nation left behind on ed tech?).

What’s Spellings’ solution to her ed tech problem? Well, according to one of my well-connected sources inside Washington, she seems to be setting up a series of invite-only ‘ed tech roundtables’ to talk about educational technology issues. Her first one was in March in New York. She said that she met with some of the ‘leading minds in technology and education,’ but two of the three people she listed, Wendy Kopp of Teach for America and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, aren’t obvious fits for that label and many of the other participants seemed to either be government types or corporations. She did hear from a few K-12 educators about their uses of digital technologies.

My inside source’s biggest concern is that the major ed tech organizations – ISTE, CoSN, SETDA, NACOL, many of the foundations, etc. – are being completely left out of the conversation. These groups have done an awful lot to further the cause of K-12 educational technology. At some point one hopes that they will have an opportunity to participate in these roundtables. Moreover, Secretary Spellings likely has some purpose in mind for these discussions. The last time she did this kind of thing it resulted in the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which immediately made most postsecondary institutions quite unhappy. Is she planning a similar group for K-12 educational technology?

Another issue that will be of concern to many is her seeming interest in technology for data collection purposes, not for pedagogical purposes. As a participant in the first roundtable said, “She was especially interested in the role of technology in collecting data about kids and their achievement levels.” If students truly are to become globally competitive workers, attention must be given to effective classroom technology usage that helps students learn, be creative, and become collaborative problem-solvers. Technology to collect performance data on yearly, summative, standardized tests of basic skills isn’t going to cut it.

The biggest challenge for Spellings is that her rhetoric doesn’t coincide with her actions. She says that underfunding of technology in schools is a big problem, but the Department’s failure to fund the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program gives her statements no credibility. The federal Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program, the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) program, the Community Technology Centers, and the Regional Technology in Education Consortia – they are all gone. The only thing left is EETT, and now the feds have proposed zeroing out that budget yet again.

If you’re an educational technology advocate, it is time to spread the word about what’s occurring (e.g., link to this post!), express your concerns to politicians and policymakers, and educate those around you about what the issues are and what potential responses might be. Although it’s not quite clear what Secretary Spellings is doing with these roundtables, the notable absence of the ed tech organizations and a seeming emphasis on NCLB-related technologies is of at least some concern. And of course the biggest concern of all is the fact that the U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary Spellings’ watch, keeps trying to walk away from our children’s technologically-suffused future. I wish it weren’t so, but it’s hard to interpret the facts any other way.

Be informed. Be proactive, not reactive. Get involved.

[cross-posted at Moving at the Speed of Creativity]

eSchoolNews has a fantastic letter from the editor regarding the federal government's recent evaluation of learning software for schools. The editor lambasts reporters' overblown headlines, inappropriate and overbroad conclusions, and failure to adequately criticize and critically reflect upon the report and its accompanying publicity material.

There was a recent dust-up at Dangerously Irrelevant as well regarding information sources for Did You Know?. As we all do our own original writing or write about others' work, these are important reminders that we need to be careful, thoughtful, and appropriately critical before we put information out into the easily-searchable, publicly-findable blogosphere.

[cross-posted at Moving at the Speed of Creativity]

I’ve got high schools on my mind.

A high school teacher told me recently that her school allows students to try harder courses than they normally might take. For example, students might sign up for an Honors English class instead of a regular English class or an AP Government class instead of a normal Government class. These are big issues in secondary schools: who gets to take advanced / Honors / AP courses, who gets to be exposed to rigorous course content, and who doesn’t. At first I thought that this was great, that here’s a school that’s trying to open up learning opportunities for students. But then my back brain registered how she talked about the school policy. She said that the school gives students “permission to fail.” And that’s when it all fell apart for me.

Permission to fail. What a horribly sad and depressing term. Does a permission to fail policy recognize that these kids might need a little extra support to be successful or does it simply thrust them into the challenging learning environment and say, “Good luck!”? Is a permission to fail policy premised on student success or on a belief that “these kids really can’t do the work but we’ll let them try because it looks and feels good” (to us, to parents, to the public)? Perceptions and beliefs shape reality. Will a permission to fail policy ever result in large numbers of successful students?

I left that school wishing it had a permission to succeed policy.

[cross-posted at Moving at the Speed of Creativity]

One of the key beliefs of many edubloggers and educational technology enthusiasts is that digital technologies can, and should, empower students to be active, engaged learners who have greater control over their own learning. I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with secondary schools and, unfortunately, I’ve got to report that I think there is a huge lack of congruence between this pedagogical belief and the existing belief systems of high school teachers and parents (at least the ones with whom I’ve been interacting).

For example, I’ve asked several groups of parents recently whether it was important that student learning experiences were interesting or engaging. Sometimes I also cited student survey statistics from their children’s school that 65% to 75% of students reported that most of their work was “busy work.” Here are some fairly typical parent statements:

Life is not always interesting and engaging. They need to learn how the real world is.

Students expect to be entertained all the time. What is the teacher supposed to do, dance?

Teacher comments were similar in kind, if not quite in degree:

I’d like to think that we all try to make our instruction interesting. But there’s only so much we can do.

Our teaching would be easier if there weren’t so many distractions such as headphones, text messaging, etc.

Some of these topics bore me too. I don’ t know how to make them interesting.

Moreover, neither teachers nor parents seem very inclined to give up much control over student learning experiences. I have heard a lot lately about the importance of ramping expectations up further regarding student mastery of core knowledge, that students will have to do whatever their supervisor tells them in their later careers so they better get used to it now, and that high school students don’t really know what’s best for themselves at this stage of life.

To the extent that my recent interactions with parents and teachers are generalizable, what all this means is that educational technology advocates are facing a losing battle if their advocacy strategy is based on persuading teachers and parents that these digital tools will foster student creativity, engagement, and autonomy. Educational technology efforts based on this premise are doomed to either marginalization or outright failure until parents, teachers, and administrators are inclined to give up control and to place greater importance on engaging learning environments.