Dangerously Irrelevant

A middle school librarian in New Jersey has gotten some media attention for her anti-Wikipedia campaign:

Linda O’Connor regards Wikipedia the same way former first lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against drugs. . . . She put up a sign saying "Just Say No to Wikipedia" over the computers in the school library. . . . Wikipedia is blocked on all computers in the Warren Hills Regional School District.

I’m highly skeptical.

If the district is going to take a principled stand against Wikipedia because some information is biased or incorrect, is it also taking out all of the encyclopedias (which research has shown, on average, to be as inaccurate as Wikipedia)? Is it removing all of the news magazines and newspapers? The article makes a big deal about how school librarians preview materials before they’re placed on the shelves, but I can guarantee you that librarians and media specialists do not have time to screen every word of every incoming publication. They miss errors and biases just like the Wikipedia community does. Also, it’s ludicrous to pretend that the school library vetting process is free of bias. Oh, and I challenge you to find a school library that doesn’t have old, outdated (and thus inaccurate) non-fiction and/or reference materials on its shelves.

This is all of a bunch of hooey. This shouldn’t have even been a story. When is the Associated Press going to run this story?

Schools teach kids how to wisely and appropriately navigate 21st century information channels

Or this one?

New Jersey school district blocks kids from using one of the most important and powerful information resources in existence because of mistaken beliefs about inaccuracy and bias

Or maybe this one?

Wikipedia is an amazing contribution to the body of human knowledge. New Jersey school district says ‘No thanks.’

Or is it asking too much of the newspaper press to avoid bias by showing the other side of this issue?

Yesterday Karl Fisch and I were e-mailed a link to a video from Shocking Economics. Although I’m neither a demographer nor an economist, the video got me thinking… (bear with me here; there’s a point at the end of all of this!)

As you can see in the spreadheet I made [.xls or .pdf], there is an extremely strong positive correlation (cell E2) between a state’s overall population rank (column D) and its overall GDP rank (column F). In other words, the more people in the state, the bigger GDP it has. California has the most people and it has the biggest GDP. This makes sense.

However, some states seem to be more GDP-efficient than others. For example, Connecticut is ranked 29th in overall population and 23rd in overall GDP, but is the 4th-ranked state when it comes to GDP per capita (column G). In contrast, Alabama is ranked 23rd in overall population and 25th in overall GDP, but is the 45th-ranked state in terms of GDP per capita. Connecticut’s GDP over/under (column H) is +19 (23 minus 4). Alabama’s is -20 (25 minus 45). Connecticut appears to be a GDP overachiever, while Alabama seems to be an underachiever. Dollar for dollar, person for person, Connecticuters are contributing more to the overall national economy than Alabamans.

As the spreadsheet shows (cells K26:K29), states in the Northeast and Pacific regions (as defined by the U.S. Census) are, on average, more GDP-efficient than states in the Midwest or South. There are moderately strong correlations between states’ over/under ratio and their overall population rank (cell E4), overall GDP rank (cell H5), and GDP per capita rank (cell H6). States with smaller populations are moderately more likely to have a higher GDP per capita rank and a better GDP over/under ratio.

So here are 10 select states [click on image for larger version or download the PDF]:

While some of the states (Montana, Maine, New Jersey, and Maryland) have overall GDP ranks and GDP per capita ranks that are congruent, you can see that there are large discrepancies in GDP over/under between the lowest states (Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Arizona) and the highest states (Wyoming, Alaska, Delaware, and Rhode Island). Florida is #4 in overall GDP but #34 in GDP per capita. Wyoming is #48 in overall GDP but #5 in GDP per capita. The lower states seem to be under-contributing to the national economy.

So how does a state like Michigan or Arizona increase its GDP per capita? Well, in today’s day and age, I think these states need to follow the lead of West Virginia (over/under of -9). West Virginia is making strategic, long-term investments in 21st century skills initiatives for its schools. To its credit, it sees that a focus on digital technologies and preparation of a globally-competitive workforce is the best solution for an anemic state economy. It’s probably no coincidence that five of the first six states to join up with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (in red on the spreadsheet) have neutral or negative GDP over/under ratios.

I don’t know if all of this would make sense to an economist, much less a ‘shocking’ one, but it sits well intuitively with me. Although the video points out that our system has worked well for us to date, it also is true that our world is transforming itself in revolutionary ways. Don’t we want our state educational systems to be proactive rather than resting on their laurels and one day waking up to find that their economic models no longer work?

From Simon Evans:

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in a different time.  – Hebrew proverb

From Greg Farr:

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.  – Jacob Bronowski

From Richard Florida:

In the US, there are nine cities with more than 1m inhabitants. In China, there are 49. You can be travelling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think: I’ve never even heard of this place.  – Rob Gifford

This arrived in my e-mail inbox yesterday:

CDC REVIEW OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA AND YOUTH VIOLENCE
Research Shows Increase in Electronic Aggression

In September 2006, experts from academic institutions, federal agencies, and nonprofit organizations gathered at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, to better understand the varied ways new media technology – blogs, instant messaging, chat rooms, email, text messaging and the Internet – influences youth aggression. The two-day meeting, "Electronic Media and Youth Violence," was held to review current research and to discuss the implications for youth, parents, school staff, and educational policymakers. Data from the review show although rates of electronic aggression are lower than rates of physical and verbal aggression, these rates seem to be increasing. In 2000, 6 percent of internet users ages 10 to 17 said they had been subjected to online harassment; by 2005, the percentage had risen to 9 percent – an increase of 50 percent. 

The complete review can found in the December 2007 supplement of the Journal of Adolescent Health. To access a complete copy of the Journal and the supporting issue briefs, which summarize the research and discuss the implications of these findings for youth, parents, school staff, and educational policy makers, please visit www.cdc.gov/injury.

A few thoughts…

1. Most parents probably don’t do near enough at home to teach and monitor children’s appropriate usage of electronic communication tools. We know that schools and religious institutions don’t when kids are with them. So why should we be surprised that some children and adolescents are using these tools for inappropriate purposes? It’s like Lord of the Flies out there when it comes to adult supervision!
2. The JAH research articles on this topic are impressive. It’s going to take me a while to read through them all. My first scan, however, is that while there seems to be a bevy of top notch, peer-review-quality research there, it’s all on the harmful effects of communication technologies and none on the empowering effects of the same. We need good, data-based information on this topic, but I’d like to see academia provide some counterpoint research on the positive aspects too, not just more fear-driven research. I want to also see a two-day meeting on Electronic Media and Youth Empowerment. We’re not going to back to a tech-less society. Why can’t we get info on both sides of the coin so that we can make intelligent decisions about this stuff?
3. ‘An increase of 50 percent’ sounds ominous. An actual rise from 6 percent to 9 percent doesn’t. Presentation makes all the difference.
4. The policy implications from the expert panel crack me up. Essentially the panel said ‘The federal government should do very little. The states should do more. School districts and schools should do the most.’ In other words, they could have just typed the word ‘federalism’ on a piece of paper, handed it in, and gone out for coffee. Nice job, folks!

The American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the national organization for school superintendents, asked me to write a column for its monthly magazine, The School Administrator. That article is now available:

• Responsibility for asking the right questions

In the article, I recommended that superintendents ask some key leadership questions:

• When and why do we use digital technology in our classrooms?
• How does our usage of digital technologies align with our curricula and instructional goals?
• How do we know whether technology is being used effectively in the classroom?
• What positive results are we seeing from our use of digital instructional technologies?
• What are the barriers to effective technology usage by students and teachers?
• How can technology better facilitate student learning?

What would you add to the list?

I blogged before about my regular column on technology and higher education for Technology & Learning magazine. My latest article is now available:

• The importance of being ‘clickable’

Here’s an excerpt:

In the Internet era, it’s not enough to have good ideas or content.
People also have to be able to find you. Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics,
puts it this way: "[The risk is] obscurity: the risk that one’s work
will get lost in the vast digital wilderness of content and
voices….In today’s information-soaked environment, writers and
content creators need to find ways to permeate people’s consciousness." . . . [M]y academic colleagues are not clickable.

FYI, I sent Will Richardson a big thank you for his post that inspired the article.

It’s time to vote for the 2007 Edublog Awards. There are LOTS of great candidates. Go vote for your favorites and discover new ones!

The Did You Know? video that went viral (10 million online viewers and counting!) is nominated for most influential blog post. Although it was my slightly modified version of the video that went viral, a vote for the post is really a vote for Karl Fisch’s vision and creativity. Although Karl’s own blog is nominated in this category, I confess that I am hoping that Did You Know? wins instead.

I’m also delighted that LeaderTalk is nominated for best group blog. This is a real tribute to the nearly 50 busy administrators and faculty who somehow find time each month to share what it’s like to live the life of a school leader today. FYI, we’re always looking for new authors. Drop me a note if you’d like to write for LeaderTalk!

[revision: I forgot to note that the TechLearning blog (for which I am a contributor) is also a nominee for best group blog. Oops!]

The Edublog Awards are one way to recognize great blogging. In December I’m going to highlight some other bloggers who I think deserve a bigger audience. Stay tuned!

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

We can imagine a continuum of frequency of technology usage that looks something like this (click on image for larger version):

People use digital technologies at various levels at both home and work. We can arbitrarily categorize the frequency of their technology usage as a range of very low to very high. Of course individuals may fall into one category at home and another at their workplace.

We can imagine a second continuum of technology usage overlap that looks something like this:

In other words, the digital technologies that people use at work will overlap to various degrees with those used at home. Some folks will have little to no overlap, using one set of tools at home and another at work, while others will utilize similar software and hardware in both locations.

[There’s at least a third possible continuum: type of technology usage. However, I’m not smart enough to figure out how to incorporate into this post how people use their digital technologies so I’ll leave that for someone else. There probably are other dimensions of this as well. Maybe we’ll hear from the tech integration folks!]

We can conceptualize different individuals or job classes by using these two continua. For example, we probably would be safe in guessing that someone working in the information technology industry is likely to use technology a lot both at work and at home. That IT professional also may have substantial crossover between home and work in terms of tool usage. In contrast, a secretary might have a technology-intensive work life, using a computer nearly every minute of every day, but have a less-intensive technology experience at home. Finally, a fast food worker may not use technology much at work or at home, the latter perhaps because of income challenges. Lest I offend anyone, let me note that these are just generalizations to illustrate the use of the two continua; we all can think of many exceptions to these examples.

If we use these continua to think about K-12 schools, then I believe the issue probably looks something like this:

Speaking generally, the people in charge of implementing technology initiatives likely are high users at both home and work, with a fair amount of overlap in terms of the tools that they use. Teachers and administrators, on the other hand, probably are not using technology near as often. Also, they likely have relatively little crossover between the specialized technology systems they use at work (e.g., student information systems, electronic gradebooks, PowerPoint, parent portal software, and “clickers” for formative assessment) and what they use at home (e.g., digital photo management, games). What overlap does exist is probably mostly in the arenas of e-mail, word processing, and browsing the Internet. Finally, as we know, students’ personal lives usually are much more technology-rich at home than at school. They use many more tools, most of which are not allowed during the school day.

It would be interesting to discuss these continua with a school staff, ask educators to draw their own diagrams, and then compile the results in some way. For example, if we assign the numbers 1 (very low) through 5 (very high) to the first continuum and 1 (no overlap) through 4 (high overlap) to the second, we can think of individuals as numeric triads (home-work-overlap). Using the examples above, an IT professional thus would be 5–5–4, a secretary 3–4–3, and a fast food worker 1–1–0. A media specialist might be 4–4–3, a principal 1–1–1, and a student 5–1–1. Once the triads were determined, they could be analyzed for purposes of sparking discussion.

I’m not strongly invested in these continua. There probably are better ways to think about these two dimensions and, if so, I’d love to hear them. But I do think it’s helpful to try and diagram issues in a way that makes sense to people. If we believe that moving schools forward on the technology front is desirable, we have to help educators create mental models that are easily understandable and useful.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Friday was the first day of sessions at the UCEA convention. CASTLE sponsored a panel discussion on national K-12 educational technology policy, moderated by Drs. Sara Dexter (U. Virginia) and Matt Militello (U. Massachusetts-Amherst).

 Listen to the podcast! (73.9 Mb, 81 minutes)

Panelists

• Hilary Goldman, Director of Government Affairs, ISTE
• Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, Executive Director, SETDA
• Doug Levin, Senior Director of Education Policy, Cable in the Classroom

Some main themes

• In the mid– to late 1990s, there were LOTS of national funding initiatives aimed at K-12 ed tech – all were replaced by EETT, which is much smaller and more limited – today, EETT has declined from over $700 million to $272 million – in the past, the Bush administration has even attempted to zero out the EETT budget – Congress has saved the program but at increasingly lower levels
• There is a perception that the job is done
• Teachers have not been trained how to use technology to improve student learning outcomes
• Educators are moving slow – lots of missed opportunities – extremely incremental change in a revolutionary environment
• TPCK model – preservice teachers should not take separate ed tech classes – should be integrated with content-specific methods courses
• We are finally starting to get research that is helpful for policy purposes – for example, the eMints program in Missouri and other states
• The amount of education that people need is astounding – state and federal policymakers, education associations, the public – they make major assumptions about what is happening that just aren’t true
• Example: because nearly all schools are wired, people truly think that means that all kids have access to the Internet – far from being true – only buildings and teacher computers are wired – every student is NOT wired and connected
• Example: lots of money has been poured into student information systems – as a result, people think that teachers are getting data that informs their day-to-day instructional practice – again, this is far from true – in most districts, the data that are in these systems are not that granular
• You have to use sexy vocabulary – the terms of art – that capture policymakers’ attention – right now it is global competitiveness
• High school reform and other change efforts – technology is not specifically articulated as a component – it thus gets lost or left out
• Ed tech policy is still fairly immature – we’re in our tweens
• Groups like NEA, AFT, NSBA, AASA, NASSP, and NAESP are not knowledgeable about technology – they advocate for Title I, IDEA – they don’t advocate for ed tech
• The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is trying to change the conversation rather than trying to figure out how to fit ed tech into existing paradigms / models / laws – this is a real herky-jerky process
• There is not, and has not been, a systemic long-term research agenda, funded by policymakers, to answer key research questions about K-12 educational technology
• What kind of research is needed to further the cause of K-12 educational technology?
• Most education academics are naive about how policy gets made – don’t really understand the policy process – much educational research is not pertinent or helpful to policy conversations and the questions that are being asked by policymakers – we have to remember that ed tech is only one voice of many
• ETAN – www.edtechactionnetwork.org – you don’t have to get to DC – can plug in your e-mail and zip code and get resources and information – just 12 letters can make a difference – meeting in local offices back home also make an impact – asking questions at local town halls sponsored by legislators
• We were blessed in the 1990s with the folks that were in the U.S. Department of Education (US DOE) – there are lots of places where this can break down – there are not strong advocates there today – one place to focus advocacy efforts is the US DOE, not just legislators
• Why has school leadership been left out of the ed tech policy conversation and policy efforts? – historically, efforts were focused on affecting the classroom, not on changing the system – promising levers appear to be 21st century skills, data-driven decision-making, and cybersafety
• We could draft Title II legislation around professional development for administrators regarding technology leadership

[left to right: Sara Dexter, Matt Militello, Hilary Goldman, Mary Ann Wolf, Doug Levin]

Richard Florida has a great post on his blog about how government agencies are the last bastion of ‘organizational age’ thinking and activity. This is definitely true for the state departments of education I know and much of this rings true for school districts as well.