Dangerously Irrelevant

You’re about to hand laptops over to their 12– and 13–year-old children. What do you tell your school’s parents? Here are some excerpts from what , ICT Director for the Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland, New Zealand, told his…

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“Most of us went through school and, by and large, succeeded. When we had education done to us, we experienced what I call the “just in case model” of education. We learned things just in case they might be useful. Just in case they might be on the test. Just in case we might look for a job in that area. Just in case you might study physics later on.

And a key reason that education developed this model was that the predominant mode of teaching, and hence learning, relied on the predominant technology of the day: paper. . . .

The system kind of worked for a couple of reasons:

1. Not much had changed in the information landscape over the 20th century in terms of what was written down and accessible to students. 
2. It was too expensive and lengthy to rewrite textbooks all the time.

Right up until 1986, all of the information that mankind had collated since the dawn of time – all 2.64 billion gigabytes of it – only 0.02 billion gigabytes was digital. So over 99% of the information we had to work with was analog - written down.

What we have witnessed in the past 10 years is unprecedented growth in information – all of it digital. From our 2.6 billion gigabytes in 1986, we now have well over 400 billion gigabytes of collective human information – and growing at a rate of 5 billion gigabytes every 3 days according to Google. The big difference now is that – since 2001 when traditional paper-based information and digital information gained parity – digital data now accounts for well in excess of 95% of all information. The info landscape reversal looks like this…

If you were charged with designing a new model for education – and you came to the conclusion that you could ignore 95% of available information and operate without the “tool of the time” – would your system be given the go ahead?

By the way – this is also the reason why everyone – not just students – should be online and connected. To not be is shutting off 95% of what’s happening.

But we need do more than just equip ourselves – our model needs to change from “just in case” to “just in time.”

You see, with such dramatic changes in information, we can no longer rely on outmoded means of working. We’ve seen what happens to organisations that don’t adapt to the digital world – CD stores and book store chains are recent examples in New Zealand.

The same for education. No longer does it make sense to focus on content just in case it might be useful. . . .

What has become important is the “just in time” model. A model which sees essential habits and attitudes of learning being the focus. A model which sees the ability to think about our own thinking as a focus.

And expect to see traditionally-held beliefs challenged. Here is a model of the human brain showing the areas that are being engaged as the same person (an experienced Web surfer) reads a book and, at a separate time, is browsing the Web.

Let’s debunk a myth or two: Writing will be affected. Well, looks like that may be correct.

Point England School has had its kids blogging for a couple of years. One of the outcomes is that its students’ achievement in writing and reading have increased dramatically over this time. They don’t write earth shattering stuff all of the time – take Silas’ story, for example. But someone made a comment that wasn’t from his class … or school … or country. How cool is that for a young writer?

In early 2009 we ran a trial program with Year 9 students. It ran for four weeks and they studied the Horizon Report, a report focussing on emerging technologies in education. Their project finished in April 2009. We now find that the web site they created is accessed by around 50 to 60 people per day from the U.S., Canada, the U.K. Australia, Russia, Ireland… Obviously the work they did has some value for a lot of people in other parts of the world.

My 13–year-old son: “Can I have a guitar?” Great, another fad. What about some lessons? “No thanks. I’ll learn online.” So he goes to YouTube and does just that – for hours. He played lead guitar at his school’s end-of-year function last year.

Me? I don’t read much and certainly don’t write much. And yet my blog is read in 30 countries and – because of the usefulness of RSS – I now get what I am interested in reading delivered to my phone, iPad, and computer every minute. I read far more than I did because I can…

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You may know that New Zealand has a digital strategy. It’s tucked away on the Ministry of Economic Development’s web site. It says this: “New Zealand will be a leader in the use of information and technology to realize its economic, social, environmental and cultural goals, to the benefit of all of its people.”

How many other countries have a digital strategy? And how many of them are putting education at the front end?

Peru, Afghanistan, Madagascar, Paraguay: just some of the countries involved in the One Laptop Per Child campaign aimed at trying to bring kids in developing countries on some kind of level playing field with kids in other countries.

In New Zealand, for education the government sees up to 100Mb bandwidth in 97% of schools by 2015. Too little, too late?

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What we need to do is to build the skills and attitudes with your daughters so that they can take advantage of the huge opportunities that await.

You need to give your daughters the opportunity to succeed in this ever-changing world. At the moment that means a laptop computer now is basically a table stake.”

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Nicely done, Rob, nicely done. Those of you with laptop and other learning technology initiatives, how have you framed the conversation with your parents?

Let’s dream for a minute. What if we lived in a world in which students and educators…

• had access to all of the information in their textbooks – and an incredible wealth of primary documents – for free?
• had access to free, robust, and often multimedia and interactive learning resources (texts, images, audio, video, games, simulations) to supplement and deepen what was being learned in school?
• photo © 2010 [F]oxymoron | more info (via: Wylio)could easily learn from and with students and teachers in other states or countries?
• could easily and quickly connect with authors, artists, scientists, business professionals, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, professors, and other experts?
• could more authentically replicate and/or actually do real-world work through the use of the same tools and resources used by scientists, engineers, designers, accountants, and a multitude of other professionals and artisans?
• could easily share their own knowledge, skills, and expertise with people all over the world?
• could easily and quickly find or form communities of interest around topics for which they were passionate?
• could be active (and valued) contributors to the world’s information commons, both individually and collaboratively with others?
• essentially had the ability to learn about whatever they wanted, whenever and wherever they wanted, and to contribute to this learning environment for the benefit of others?

Wouldn’t the possibilities for learning and teaching in this kind of world be both amazing and nearly limitless? If this world existed, wouldn’t we as educators and parents and policymakers do everything we could to help students and schools take full advantage of these learning affordances? If we actually had access to this world, wouldn’t we be chomping at the bit to get these resources into the hands of kids and teachers?

Oh, wait a minute… Apparently not.

What if a learning revolution occurred and many of us didn’t care?

[cross-posted at The Huffington Post]

I’ve watched this TED talk by Sugata Mitra several times now. And every time I watch it, my brain keeps asking the same question:

In the world’s richest country - indeed, in all ‘Westernized’ societies - what are our (pitiful?) excuses, again, for not putting computers in the hands of our children every day at school and giving them greater agency over their own learning?

[I love the Indian child’s quote: ‘Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else.’]

Steve Dembo said:

I don’t see it as teachers spurning technology, or choosing not to take advantage of those new ideas and tools. I think most teachers don’t even realize that there’s a decision to be made. It’s not a matter of choosing the red pill or the blue pill… if you don’t know that there are even two pills available as options.

… A teacher that has never heard of Blabberize or Glogster or Prezi, has never been introduced to the new world of online applications that are available to them. They likely don’t follow blogs or listen to podcasts. They have probably never been to an EdTech conference or seen a TED talk. In short, they’re just ordinary, average educators who aren’t aware that there’s a whole other world that they have easy access to… if they just ‘take the blue pill’.

… I’m all for conversations about ‘big’ change. And yes, I agree, it’s not the technology, it’s the pedagogy. However, I also think that you need at least a minimal base to build from before you can have those conversations. And the vast majority of the educators in this country do NOT have that base yet.

Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.

Darren Draper said:

the large majority of teachers that I know are very caring individuals that believe firmly in life-long learning. Most love teaching because making a difference in the lives of our youth can be the most rewarding profession on the planet. Most love kids, love community, and want to share. It’s not that they don’t want to try new things, it’s not that they’re lazy, and it’s not that they’re incapable. Rather, it’s that their priorities don’t always line up with those of other progressive educators in and out of the blogosphere. I’m not saying it’s right, but I am trying to describe the reality that so many in the blogosphere seem to misunderstand.

Darren also said:

Those content to lurk but still hesitant (or unable, for whatever reason) to contribute.

The fact of the matter is that there exist a very large number of effective educators that are simply not able to contribute in any significantly recurrent amount to online discussion. All told, it’s not that they’re incapable of participating and it’s not that they’re unwilling. Rather, this group maintains perceived silence online because their professional priorities prohibit them from spending the time or energy required to provide plausible contribution.

To which I say, NO, WE CAN’T LET EDUCATORS OFF THE HOOK. Whether they’re teachers or administrators or librarians or education professors, they have a voluntarily-assumed, paid responsibility to be relevant to the needs of children and education TODAY and to prepare graduates as best they are able for TOMORROW. ‘Professional priorities’ must be aimed at preparing students for the world as it is and will be. Otherwise, what are educators there for?

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

Look, it’s not like those of us who now ‘get it’ were born with this knowledge. We weren’t like this at the beginning. At some point in our personal histories we were the same as these educators that for some reason now get to be labeled as ‘unable’ to do this. Unable to do this? Poppycock. At no time in the personal computer / Internet era has this technology and social media stuff been easier to initiate. It’s not like back when you needed to know computer coding. Want to use a wiki? Click Edit; type; click Save. Want to leave a comment on a blog? Click on Comments; type in your name, e-mail, school web site, and comment; click on Save. There isn’t an educator alive who ‘can’t do that.’ They engage in similarly-easy activity every time they search or order something online.

The reason many of us now ‘get it’ is because we realized that the world is changing, we recognized our responsibility to our students and schools, and we dived in and learned as we went along. Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity – that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.

If you’re a teacher / administrator / librarian / education professor that somehow ‘doesn’t even realize [yet] that there’s a decision to be made,’ should you even be working in a school or university? Don’t our children and our school systems need and deserve someone who’s in a different place than you are? It’s one thing to still be a learner; heck, we’re all learners with this technology stuff. It’s another to opt out or not even recognize the choice. If we look at what our kids need, shouldn’t we replace you with someone else? 

It’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.

We can’t let educators off the hook. Not a single one. So keep that fishhook firmly wedged in their mouths. Keep tugging them along on the line. Keep scooping them up in our nets. Feed them tasty tidbits if need be. Do whatever it takes to make this happen. But insist on them doing the same.

Image credits: My fish hook; Slide – Should teachers get to choose?

Last week was another phenomenal week of guest blogging here at Dangerously Irrelevant. I had invited guests to reflect on how to reconcile standards- and data-driven accountability with so-called ‘21st century skills.’ Some of the best posts of the week were when my guests all but ignored the assignment!

Here are all of the posts from last week:

1. An Apple (Inc.) in 21st century classrooms
2. How to teach for jobs that don’t exist
3. Ignore the test
4. Teach wisely, teach well
5. Can we just skip the whole “data-driven” part if the technology is free?
6. Collaboration: The lost skill?
7. The death of subjective values
8. 26 centuries of skills
9. Writing – The elephant in the class room
10. Reclaiming the language
11. To whom are we accountable?
12. It’s all about building culture
13. Can states assess creativity?
14. Sharing reconciliation with the people formerly known as the audience

Thank you Shawn, Aaron, Jason, Karen, Kyle, Tony, Carl, Dave, Joe, Dan, Matt, Tyler, Richard, and Andrew for an incredible week of writing, thinking, and reflecting. I am humbled by the thoughtfulness (and excellence) of your work and your willingness to share your perspectives with me and my readers.

Happy reading, everyone. I strongly encourage you to click through at each post and see my guests’ other writing. Also, feel free to forward this wrap-up post on to your local school administrators and/or university educational leadership professors; there’s lots of good stuff here for them and/or their students!

by Richard Kassissieh

A student gazes at a mystery solution. Its contents are unknown. The student reaches into her toolkit, a set of known solutions, and one by one, combines them with a small portion of the mystery solution. One test changes the color to bright yellow. Another produces a milky, solid substance. Gradually, the student pieces together the clues that allow her to identify the unknown solution.

This qualitative analysis laboratory required the student to recall properties of different solutions, understand reaction processes, and synthesize the results of different experimental tests while under pressure. To practice, the student had worked together with classmates to identify a series of mystery solutions and shared their findings with their classmates.

Did this performance assessment play out in the classroom of an innovative, 21st-century educator? No, the qualitative analysis laboratory has been part of British national chemistry examinations for decades.

It is tempting to rail against high-stakes state tests in the United States. They emphasize basic skills and fact recall, pressuring school districts to strip programs to the basics and eliminate or reduce “non-core” subjects such as art and history. For example, many school districts “double dose” language arts and mathematics classes in order to improve students’ performances on state tests (see this EdWeek article).

Are large-scale, standardized assessments bound to forever measure a narrow range of skills and knowledge?

Summative work has to insist on standards of uniformity and reliability in collection and recording of data, which are not needed in formative work, and which inhibit the freedom and attention to individual needs that formative work requires.

External tests which are economical are bound to only take a short time. Therefore, their reliability and validity are bound to be severely constrained: they can only use a limited range of methods and must be limited in respect to their sampling of relevant domains.

Paul Black, Testing: Friend or Foe?

On a brighter note, some national assessments include hands-on performance assessments. Not only do we have the IGCSE national examination described above, but the U.S. Advanced Placement examinations test higher-order thinking skills through essays in many subjects and the submission of a portfolio of work in art.

The International Baccalaureate program, originally from Switzerland and growing in popularity in the U.S., includes summative assessments that measure creative problem solving, analysis and presentation of information, and argumentation (IB Diploma Programme Assessment Philosophy).

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills reports on work in progress in several states to develop “demonstrations of 21st century skills graded based on a common rubric” (p21.org).

The U.S. college admission process represents another effort to assess higher-order thinking skills fairly across a broad pool of candidates. Most selective colleges use multiple measures to evaluate students: essays, standardized test scores, lists of accomplishments, interviews, the reputation of one’s high school, and letters of recommendation.

It may well be possible to develop standardized assessments that measure 21st century skills. Cost is the main obstacle. How much would it cost to systematically test problem-solving, collaboration, and presentation skills across all U.S. schools?

Though we may see inconsistencies between standardized assessments and 21st century skills, we can advocate for an increased role of performance assessment and the assessment of higher-order thinking skills in these high-stakes tests.

Richard Kassissieh is director of information technology at Catlin Gabel School (Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.) You may find him at http://kassblog.com and @kassissieh.

Photo credit: judybaxter on Flickr

Have you ever taken part in a conversation about progressive education or school reform and left the dialogue wondering if you were even talking about the same topic? Often I’m left wondering how this can happen. How can two people talk about the same topic with very similar vocabulary, and yet be having two separate conversations at once?

It would be convenient if we could simply differentiate the discussion via politics; however, it would also be inaccurate. There’s a reason why Rep. John Kline (R-MN) recently remarked with chilling accuracy that the Obama-Duncan education game plan is “straight from the traditional Republican playbook.” The larger point to be taken here is that it doesn’t matter whether you are speaking with a liberal, a conservative, a Democrat, a Republican, reading the Washington Post or Newsweek – when it comes to education, most of them are indistinguishable from Fox News.

Joe Bower teaches in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and is the author of for the love of learning.

In the 35 years since I got my first job  teaching writing, a few new tools that make writing easier have been invented. I used a retractable fountain pen, one of the green marble ones, when I was in 3rd grade to write those ‘important papers’ – really messy.  I thought mechanical pencils were cool -I think the ones I used worked better than the cheap ones floating around my class these days.  Copiers were a big improvement over mimeographs; computers are way better than IBM Selectrics which were way better than Remington ‘portables.’  

For the last three years, the 21st Century tool, Moodle,  has enabled me to make writing fun for 8 and 9 year olds, the ones who start welling up with tears when you tell them that all of the words they just managed to get on a piece of paper with a pencil should be reordered or changed. A word processor and the Moodle software make editing, all that adding and subtracting of words, peer comments, and teacher comments easier and doable for the young minds and fingers that are still wrestling with this puzzle called written language. (I share Donald Murray’s notion that writers never really quit wrestling with language.)

Moodle was designed in the early days of this century as a distance learning tool.  It’s rapidly becoming an invaluable tool for teaching in all kinds of classrooms.  There are over a million teachers in over 200 countries using it, so far.  Last spring on Earth Day, my class was paperless for the day. We took a learning walk and explored the history and science rich neighborhood near our school.  I posted this and and a few other photos when we got back from our walk.  In less than an hour my students had posted over a hundred comments on the pictures. (With a click or two, I can show them to you, too.) 

Moodle also enables me to post pictures from our sessions with the U of Mn Teaching Smart scientists that then serve as prompts for my students to go deeper into their understanding of the activities they do with the scientists by writing and sharing their writing with each other and me. 

         U of Mn  biologist, Brandon Breen, showed the students how to identify scavengers.

Some of those scientists who can’t get away from their labs at the University use Moodle to act as online tutors for my 3rd and 4th graders in their science writing- a real win-win-win.  It’s real time authentic assessment, and it’s engaging students with their wider learning community, connecting them with real doctors of science who know about insects and worms and skulls and rocks and butterflies, the kind of things that excite 8 and 9 year old kids.

Already this year, my students have taken to using our new Google Apps like ducks to water. Google docs adds some nice new capabilities for formatting, printing and sharing that weren’t as easily available with Moodle. Google Apps and Moodle work very nicely together.

The ‘standards’ based curriculum being prescribed by the data-driven accountability that put my school on AYP hardly mentions computers or 21st Century communication tools of any kind (and I don’t think that’s atypical of most curricula in K-12.)  The guest speaker at our summer elementary science professional development session spent a whole day talking about how important writing is to scientific inquiry, but never said a word about the tools that almost every scientist uses these days to record and write up their data and reports – computers. The irony is that these new writing and reading standards based curricula that ignore computers like the Taliban ignores razors are based on the process theory of writing fathered by Donald Murray who noted way back in 1985 how computers significantly improved the writing process (his observations are listed down the page in this post.) Murray said in his last days, “Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can.”[1]

Our students need instruction and practice using the tools that the world is now using and will be using in the future for writing of all kinds.  21st Century tools like Moodle, Google docs, and e-Portfolios can replace data-driven accountability with knowledge and skill driven accountability. The National Education Technology Plan 2010 does a good job laying out the way to get where we need to go; we just need to start working the plan. 

Dan McGuire is the 1976 recipient of the Archer B. Gilfillan Prize for Poetry.  He lives with his wife and children in Minneapolis in the vortex of the Hiawatha, Minnehaha, Nokomis, and Keywadin neighborhoods. He’s on Twitter as @sabier

In the past several years I’ve been very fond of saying that moving into the 21 century has very much been a return to our roots. We are finding words like ‘tribe’ and ‘community’ ringing through the din of post-war individualism and we are turning to each other with words of trust and collaboration. Some of us are starting to see the established (and, pre-internet, necessary) forms of identifying reliability, competence, insight and creativity as outdated and difficult to work with. We are looking to the whole identity of a person, to the ways in which they have built the work and network they have as method of vetting the people we wish to work and innovate with. We are less interested in degrees, in ‘certificates’, as, for many of us in technology or education, these degrees do not actually mean very much. These are not new things… they are very old things… very old words, coming back to us.

26 centuries ago, a now very famous philosopher was bemoaning the advent of writing. Socrates was very much afraid that people would use the text of a written book to simply recall things that were said… that there would be no need for them to understand and engage with the work itself. He very much worried about the ideas that were printed in a collection of pages, that once written down they would not be able to defend themselves, that the ideas would become stagnant and unmoving. He wasn’t wrong, I don’t think, to be worried about these things, as texts have very much become things that are static, that can be stagnant, and they’ve become things that we in education expect people to simply be able to ‘recall’ and not to understand.

St. Michel de Montaigne

5 centuries ago, a quite excellent philosopher was sitting in his reading room at what is a quite incredible Chateau. He was a very odd philosopher in some ways, as he saw working on books as a conversation with the authors themselves, and, indeed, as a long term conversation with himself. He would leave three or four paragraph reviews on each of his books, giving himself or a future reader of the book a sense of what they had to expect from this book should they ever pick it up. He was also fond of the personal essay. He would write of himself, of ethics and morals, of the things that were important to him in an open, easy style, that focused on the audience as much as the ideas. He was, in many, many ways… a blogger

80 years ago, a senate resolution was considered on the banning of dial telephones from every senators office. They claimed that this new fangled technology contributed not one whit to the efficiency or ease of use of the telephone, that it simply complicated matters, and they wanted to return to the manual phone. They complained that in order to efficiently use a dial telephone one had to be constantly concerned about the light being in the right position, and, iniquity of all iniquities, if one did not turn the dial the entire way around, one was connected to the wrong person. It was an impossible situation. And one, I might add, that was only solved by the installation of two entirely different sets of telephone systems running side by side inside the same building. One manual, run by operators, the other automated through the use of dials.

Three simple examples of people being a bit outside of their time. Our poor friend socrates was watching the dialectic, open discussion as the pathway to enlightenement and the refining of the intellect slowly drain away. Montaigne was out there, blogging to us, from 500 years away. And 100 powerful men were afraid to change, nervous of new ideas, and complaining that they didn’t work, rather than make the little adjustments they needed to make in order to live in a world that was changing around them. We are playing out one of the many sine waves of history. Control centralizes, and it moves apart. We need to lock many people up in one location to build a pyramid, then spread them out to ride horses through Gaul. We brought them back together again to work in the factories and are now coming to terms with spreading them out again.

One thing that certainly hasn’t changed is that the old guard is still slow to adopt. They are still comfortable in the ways that brought them to power, and many see any change of the status quo as an implicit threat to the power that they worked hard to get to. And we ourselves have mostly lost track of what we are trying to do when we educate people. Socrates, he was sure I think. We wanted people to understand justice, love, honour. He thought that if you forced people to question their ideas enough, you would come to see the truth. For Montaigne, he saw the sharing of himself, of his thoughts, of his humility of spirit as the best gift he could hand off to his fellow man[sic]. So often, though, education is just about maintaining what we had before.

If we are to teach 21st century skills, what are they for? Are they for the world we feel we know they need to live in, as with Socrates? Are we moving forward with Montaigne’s humility? Or are we simply going to try and make them the things that we understand… the three Rs of remembering and testing?

dave cormier is a lover of cast iron pots, a believer in the power of communities and a inveterate blogger and educational theorist.

North Scott High School in Eldridge, Iowa is allowing students to use their cell phones for practice tests. Teachers are using PollEverywhere to assess students’ knowledge and see what course material needs additional attention.

It would be even better if all schools, including North Scott, allowed students to use their cell phones for any assignment or assessment. A world’s worth of information is now at our fingertips, anytime and anywhere. If we permitted students to instantly look up any low-level factual recall knowledge - like we adults do daily in the real world - wouldn’t this force schools to employ better, more complex assessments that got at higher levels of understanding? I think it might!

Kudos to North Scott High for starting the journey of figuring out how to integrate into classroom instruction and assessment the powerful mobile computers that their students carry with them every day. Now, is it ready for the next step? Is your school?

Image credit: Business baby