Dangerously Irrelevant

Many of you may have seen this commercial for Kaplan University. It made the rounds in the edublogosphere because of its message about change, talent, and learner-centered instruction. I’ve used it myself in several presentations to higher education folks.

Now Dr. Punya Mishra, of Michigan State University and TPACK fame, offers his take on the commercial as he reflects on his own new graduate program. I think you’ll enjoy his 2-minute video. Happy viewing!

In case you missed the news, Google’s latest service, Buzz, is now available to most users of Gmail. Here are three Google Buzz conversations from which I’m learning a lot:

• Bud Hunt
• Will Richardson
• Ben Wilkoff

I love how dynamic and helpful the conversations are about this new tool. It makes me feel sorry for folks who aren’t tapped into these types of channels for learning.

Here is Google’s video explaining Buzz. More information is available at the Google Buzz web site.

Here’s a 10-minute video I helped make that advocates for P-12 online learning. Created by Intermediate District 287 in Minnesota, which heads up the Northern Star Online collaborative, the video features Mike Smart, 2007 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, and a number of other Minnesota educators and students. The video will be used for educational and policy advocacy purposes with community members, parents, administrators, and legislators.

Here’s my favorite statement I made in the video (at 7:20):

One of the things I think we have to ask ourselves as school leaders is ‘What’s our moral imperative to prepare kids for a digital, global age?’ Right now we’re sort of ignoring that requirement. . . . I think you would take a look at much of what we do in our current schooling system and just toss it and essentially start over. So the question for school leaders and for policymakers is ‘How brave are you and how visionary are you going to be?’ And you don’t even have to be that visionary. Just look around right now and see the trends that already are happening and just project those out and see that it’s going to be a very different world.

Happy viewing!

Here’s the latest educational technology video that’s making the rounds. I know a few professors like this!

“If you are here, why are we Skyping?”

I am a big fan of student choice. When students work on projects, I think that they should have as much choice as possible regarding both the topic and the delivery. Choice increases student buy-in and ownership.

Teachers allow choice of topics, not delivery

When teachers and I talk about integrating technology into their lessons, I encourage them to try and build in more choice for students. Most teachers already allow students to choose topics of study, at least some of the time. For example, students are allowed to pick a historical figure, select a mystery book, decide what they sculpt out of clay, and so on.

Fewer teachers seem to be comfortable with student choice of delivery. For any given project, how students show their learning often is tightly circumscribed. Teachers, not students, typically decide whether the end product will be a written report, diorama, oral presentation, mobile, clay sculpture, poster, etc. Teachers, not students, determine what the evaluation criteria will be for delivery, often in excruciating detail. I have seen many of these delivery mechanism evaluation rubrics: they’re normally designed to be student-proof. There’s very little leeway for student decision-making and thus, in the teacher’s mind, error.

The digital technologies that we now have available to us open up a wealth of new ways for students to show their learning. Many of these tools also make it easy for students to work collaboratively. I think there is growing pressure on teachers to open up student delivery choices to include many of these new digital learning options. Parents and students see what the possibilites are and wonder why they aren’t available in their local classrooms.

The need to separate content from delivery

As teachers move in this direction, I think it’s going to be increasingly important to help teachers learn how to separate content (what students need to learn) from delivery (how students show they have learned). Often the two are intertwined in teachers’ minds, and it is hard for many educators to partition grading of the learned content from grading of the delivery mechanism.

I also have heard from teachers that, even if they’re amenable to - and/or experienced at - giving separate grades for content and delivery, they don’t know how to grade effective delivery when students use digital tools. Over time the teaching profession has evolved general ideas about what ‘quality’ looks like when it comes to a written report, a poster, or an oral presentation. Fewer instructors know what they should look for to determine the quality of a video, collaborative mind map, wiki, or photo essay.

It might be helpful for a group of teachers (and students) to come together to create a set of quality rubrics for various common digital tools. Those content-neutral rubrics could then be applied to relevant student work, regardless of subject area. Obviously these rubrics would have to be age-sensitive; what we’d expect from an 8-year-old would be different than what we’d look for from a high-schooler. Also, there may be certain projects for which the creation of a ‘content-neutral’ delivery evaluation rubric is infeasible because the content and delivery are too tightly intertwined. For many situations, however, I think that these rubrics could be incredibly useful.

We need to figure this out

I think we’re going to have to wrap our heads around this as educators. Our tools for exhibiting our learning are going to continue to proliferate. We can’t just keep assigning the tried-and-true, analog-only solutions that we still see dominating current classroom practice.

I confess that to date I have exhibited a lack of flair for creating these types of rubrics, so I’m not sure I’m the one to look to for examples. Others, I know, have a real gift for making rubrics; at least some of them have to be tech-savvy enough to take this task on. Does anyone know of folks who are doing good work in this area? Do you have other thoughts on this topic?

Photo credit: Making the grade

I’m reading a fantastic book right now: Futurecast, by Robert Shapiro. In the section on globalization, Shapiro notes that the first waves of globalization primarily affected manufacturing. Millions of American jobs were 'offshored' in the 1970s and 1980s as global companies set up factories overseas instead of here in the U.S. For all of the current rhetoric about ‘Benedict Arnold’ corporations that offshore jobs, they essentially have to since their competitors are doing so. Few companies can survive in a hypercompetitive global economy when they’re paying labor rates 5 to 25 times that of the competition. FYI, the average manufacturing worker earns between $21 and $25 per hour in the USA, France, and Japan. Contrast that with the average hourly rate of a manufacturing employee in Korea ($14), Taiwan ($7), or Mexico ($3). Or recognize that factory workers in China or India earn an average of less than $1 an hour. It’s easy to see why any manufacturing job that can be offshored probably will be offshored.

Although manufacturing has been an important component (about 20%) of the American economy, the services industries are a much larger segment (about 60%) of our economic productivity. Shapiro notes that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’re going to see this employment sector dramatically impacted by globalization and offshoring due to advances in software. It is now possible to take many complex service jobs and break them up into component parts, much as we did in previous decades for manufacturing work. Once these tasks are disaggregated, it becomes much easier to train lower-skilled workers to do these discrete components of the overall work, facilitated by software. In other words, instead of companies needing highly-paid American workers, developing countries ‘will be able to train millions of their young people to carry out discrete subsets of those jobs’ (p. 103). Corporations ‘can divvy out the pieces of larger service jobs to any number of professional staffs, connected through Internet networks, and then assemble the results in one place’ (p. 104) [again, like in manufacturing]. As you can imagine, the impacts of this on the American economy are going to be quite significant.

Yet another reason to teach our students to be adaptive and for them to spend as much time as possible on higher-level cognitive work (i.e., the kind of work that can’t be turned into piece work).

Seth Godin wrote today that:

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."

I think another big reason is that most people spent at least 12 years of their life being deeply socialized in the “just tell me what to do” model.

We know that schools strongly emphasize compliance in the name of order and discipline. We know that the fact-regurgitation model that still dominates schooling mostly leads to the student mentality of “Just tell me what to do to get a B,” rather than “Inspire me to follow my passions and interests and learn more about this on my own.” We shouldn’t be surprised when our graduates take that mentality with them into higher education and/or the workplace.

A baker's dozen of great Scott blogs…

1. Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams
2. Scott Berkun, Scott Berkun (wrote a fantastic book, BTW!)
3. Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider, Scott Kelby
4. HELLO, my name is Blog!, Scott Ginsberg
5. The Social Media Marketing Blog, Scott Monty
6. Laughing Squid, Scott Beale
7. World in Motion, Scott Erb
8. ISO50, Scott Hansen
9. Higher Edison, Scott Schwister
10. Smeech.net, Scott Meech
11. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?, Scott Elias
12. Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod (yours truly)
13. edu.blogs.com, Ewan McIntosh (technically a Scot, not a Scott)

Not a bad read in the bunch!

Update: I can't believe I forgot to include Scott McCloud.com by Scott McCloud. He was born Scott McLeod, just like me. Embarrassing!

Iowa’s first-ever conference dedicated solely to P-12 laptop programs, the Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I), will be on April 7, 2010 at the Polk County Convention Complex in Des Moines. Administrators, teachers, media specialists, technology staff, and other educators are all encouraged to attend.

Registration is FREE.

• Learn more about the Institute
• Register to attend (registration is now CLOSED)
• See who else is attending
• Register to present  (no commercial sales pitches allowed)

Also, the Iowa 1:1 Network is growing rapidly. Learn more and join yourself!

On January 28, several students in the Van Meter Community School District demonstrated to Iowa legislators the work that they are now able to do as a result of the district’s 1:1 laptop initiative. Sandra Dop, the Department of Education’s 21st Century Skills Coordinator, wrote about the encounter:

When the legislators asked, “So what can we do to get out of your way and let you go?”, I nearly cried.

I will forever be proud to have witnessed it!

Will the legislators follow up their words with action? I can be hopeful, can’t I?