Something has been really bothering me lately. I’m taking a college course called Introduction to the Internet for Educators. When I first saw the title I was really excited because I figured the teacher would be teaching me all about how to use the Internet to help kids learn. However, thats not quite how it played out.

His post struck a chord that is constant with me so I had to reply (not to mention I appreciate @mrplough07‘s Twitter stream and blog)

Cory,

You are spot on! This is one of the main reasons that technology continues to have little impact on education. It may empower tiny enclaves here and there – but it has not had the massive impact that it should. Your experience identifies one of the major reasons.

EdTech isn’t about coding, it’s about taking what coders have already done and empowering student learning and teachers professional growth. There are plenty of people out there already creating new and usable applications every day – teachers don’t need to worry about this. It is incumbent on EdTech leaders, like yourself, to continue to push the envelope and wildly imagine ways that these tools can open the learning architecture in your classroom.

True, it is beneficial to know the underlying ideas of coding and design – it’s even fun to play with on the side (and may help you see its power more clearly). However, it does not create a new vision of education and THAT is what your class should be doing, creating vision, opening new windows.

Here is the dichotomy, your in the choir and within this space are mostly choir members. How do we stop singing to the choir and go about creating a voice outside that will foster and nurture change? How do we release the potential energy of technology/the web so that it becomes a viable vehicle for true educational reinvention?

I found a simple definition of inertia , “An object that is not subject to any outside forces moves at a constant velocity, covering equal distances in equal times along a straight-line path.” Tech/the web is moving along slowly because so many are trying to “fit it in” or use it to simply to do what they are already doing, just differently. The power of Tech/the web is that we can use it to re-conceptualize our learning architectures so that they become powerful and visionary – creating what now doesn’t exist.

You are in a position to do that, to make a change where it is needed – be a revolutionary in your class . . . sing outside of the choir. And, not to sound too grandiose and melodramatic, then go on to teach these possibilities to those around you.

- Greg

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Who participates? What defines the participation in school? In the model that currently pervades, the participants are the teachers and administrators. These individuals do the planning, the administering, the teaching, the grading, the assessing . . . and students attend and simply follow and do as they are told. Okay, maybe it isn’t that simple and maybe far too many students don’t even engage to the point of “following and obeying,” but the fact remains that there isn’t much participation on the part of students.

Participation requires some level of control by all the parties involved in an endeavor. In school, administrations decide what will be taught and by whom. In the classroom teachers decide the flow of curriculum and implement the directives from above. Students only control is to buy into the plan and then learn what is “taught”, prepare for and perform well on tests, and do it all in the way prescribed by teachers and school administrators (this includes administrators all the up to the US Secretary of Education).

What I hope to outline in this series of posts is way to more evenly distribute control of the learning experience among the individuals involved. The solution, as I see it, to improving the educational experience and results in the US is not going to be found in more dollars. Sure, more money would mean more “things” to teach with – but if there is no concrete plan on how the “things” are used, no vision for a different way of “doing school” . . . then the money will be spent, but never lead to anything better. One of the first steps to a new vision of education is to redistribute power/control over the experience and let it evolve.

Education isn’t about proprietary thinking and behavior, it’s about thinking. I recently twittered, “TWIT [This Week In Tech, a podcast by Leo Laporte and friends] is talk about tech for tech/business, they
ignore edu because by its actions edu has asked to be ignored, demanded
as much, too bad.” My friend, and fellow edtech evangelist Joe followed that with a blog post extending the lament. The problems with technology never truly gaining traction in education is not because it doesn’t fit – it is because it is eschewed. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I would argue that the one at the heart of the matter is a belief that the methods of education are not broken, so, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Education continues to increase the amount of content required to be covered, demands more standardized testing to gauge improvements, and bellies up to the cash bar with the textbook publishers and curriculum mills. Folks, it is broken, but it doesn’t need fixing.

You don’t fix things that have obviously been replaced by innovation. For instance you won’t fix a old IBM Selectric typewriter unless it is for nostalgic purposes or to re-purpose it (such as using it as a “guest register” at home for visitors to leave a little note when they visit). There are a myriad of other innovative options for writing. Education needs innovative thinking, thinking that goes past the “How do we use this new stuff to keep doing what we have always done” attitude. What is a new picture, vision, concept of education . . . how do we innovate education?

I think students today already know how. The problem is they have little if any control over their education and have to leave their tools behind as they enter the school each day. “There is a forceful interplay between society and its technologies. Society creates technology, but society is also created by technology.” says Lloyd Morrisett in a paper titled “Technologies of Freedom?” So how can students and technology innovate education today? How can teachers, in concert with students, use technology to innovate education? They can’t unless the administrations that oversee the process are not willing to give up some of their control to allow for innovation to occur.

No, not an overthrow of the administration building or a peaceful sit in. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.” Administration needs to see teachers and students as partners in the process of education and allow these “in the trenches” partners to have control over designing how to meet the expectations set by administration.

In the next six “chapters” I want to begin laying out the seeds of a vision for innovating education, hopefully to start a rapidly increasing dialogue and subsequent action toward innovation.

In the mean time, you might want to check out what Abilene Christian University is trying to do with iPhones in education. It is a nice step in the right direction.

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According to Peter Senge, “the rationale for any strategy for building a learning organization revolves around the premise that such organizations will produce dramatically improved results.” Are our schools learning organizations or are they repositories for that which is already learned – and determined to be “necessary” for students to learn. The dichotomy seems to be that learning isn’t an underlying reason for education today – supported by an endless march toward standardizing all learning in the system and measuring it to make sure that everyone meets the least common denominator expectations of the system.

Technology has come in and “flattened the world,” to borrow from Thomas L. Friedman, but had little effect in our educational systems. There are pockets of educational innovation, supported or driven by technology, that swirl in a tiny nexus here and there. Edutopia and the GLEF Learning Interchange (both part of The George Lucas Educational Foundation) do a wonderful job of highlighting many of these, but they still remain the rare exception.

When technology has been brought into the classroom, more often than not it has been to merely do what is already being done, just a little differently. Smart boards, for instance, have made their way into classrooms, but for the most part are not changing things – they merely are the new chalkboard where children go to prove they have learned a mathematical or scientific formula. Teachers occasionally use slide show software such as PowerPoint or Keynote to project their lecture notes onto a screen. You might argue that both of these simple examples are the “changing” of education, after all the teacher can print the students math computations for them to evaluate or the slide show can be printed for students to review later. Fine, but is that really “change” or innovation, or more importantly, is that redefining the educational process? No. That is why technology isn’t changing education, because our thinking about education hasn’t and isn’t changing. Technology should already have empowered us to rethink the educational process and invent an entirely new system that supports the ways in which people (including our children) now learn.

Jack Welch says, “You can’t behave in a calm, rational manner; you’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe.” (thanks to Tom Peters for the quote) Education has throughout history been a calm, rational endeavor where the “learner” enters a room and is told what is important by the “learned” and then asked to repeat this “learning” at some later point in time. This model of the “learned” providing information to the “learner” is totally out of sync with the daily (outside of schools) life experience of today’s students. A prime example of the out of step relationship between education and society/technology was detailed in an article in the New York Times. Samuel G. Freedman recounted the antics of Professor Ali Nazemi, a professor at Roanoke College and suggested his cell phone smashing drama should earn him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Freedman suggests that education is in a war with technology, “Their perpetual war of attrition with defiantly inattentive students has escalated from the quaint pursuits of pigtail-pulling, spitball-lobbing and notebook-doodling to a high-tech arsenal of laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries and the like.”

The entire process of brining technology and formal education together hasn’t worked, or maybe even happened. There has been a mad rush to fill our schools with computers and to connect them to the Internet. Little attention has been paid to digital cameras, digital camcorders, software that can loose creative spirits in students, scanners, and other peripherals that can make those chained desktops become learning tools. The computers are locked away in a lab, they can’t travel, they can’t bring their power to the real learning opportunities, most of which exist outside of the lab, the classroom, the school itself. Why? Because knowledge and the perceived tools of knowledge have to remain within the confines and management of the “learned.”

We are well aware of the hue and cry of those who feel that computers are more likely to bring unsavory elements or even danger into our learning institutions. The surprising thing is that they are right – but only because there is an unspoken refusal to include, within the educational experience, instruction and leadership in appropriate digital citizenship behavior. (Caveat: there is much debate about the term “digital citizen” and its derivatives, but to date I haven’t seen a better term so I use it with a mental caution that it may not be as accurate as I would like, maybe I should call it “digital behavior.”) For technology to be the power in learning it can be, our mindsets about how it is situated there must change.

Stephen Downes offers an equation for digital behavior, “literacy” + “safety ” + “etiquette” + “learning strategies” + “networking”. The key connection in this conversation is “safety” and its relationship to technology in the learning environment. Again, the hue and cry of the naysayers is accurate. We do not want to bring a potential for danger into our classrooms or learning institutions. Of course they have, for the most part, been successful in using this argument to keep technology out of the learning process. However, those advocates of redesigning learning environments that are supported or driven by technology must begin to employ the same thinking that has driven the rest of the digital society. Technology using and supporting educators need to stop trying to reinvent what is already working. Why do we need a specialized space to host dialogues or videos or podcasts when we have blogs, YouTube, and iTunes as a means to distribute and facilitate all of these things. But “YouTube isn’t secure and we certainly don’t want students wandering through some of what exists there” – fine, agreed, so put pressure on Google to provide a safe/secure space to legitimate educational outlets for the presentation of both student and teacher/professor created video that supports the educational process. The same strategy should be employed at web venues such as WordPress, demand a safe/secure space for education to be set free. Many wiki spaces already provide this type of safety and iTunes already provides access to many universities education presentation and class offerings – here is a great place to begin exploring this possibility.

Technology can’t change education because education resists being changed. We have a lot invested in the way we do learning and change is not comfortable – however, society continues, by its actions, to demand that we develop a new concept of what a learning institution is, and what it looks like, and how we go about learning with it. Until that happens technology will not change education – it will remain in opposition to the status quo.

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“Willinsky’s case for open access is multifaceted. It draws on the spirit of copyright law, the mandate of scholarly associations, the promise of global knowledge exchanges, the public’s right to know, the prospect of enhanced reading and indexing, the improved economic efficiencies of publishing, and the history of the academic journal.

Willinsky is careful to explain that ‘open access’ does not mean ‘free access.’ Open access articles cannot be read without a substantial investment in hardware, software, and networking. The open access movement does not operate in denial of economic realities, he says; it is simply acting on a scholarly tradition that has long been concerned with extending the circulation of knowledge.”

How do Web 2.0 tools fit into this discussion?

With an ever increasing number of students entering college as accomplished bloggers or participants in wiki projects what will these students do when it comes to scholarly research?

Maybe a broader idea of open access suggests that as research is ongoing it is published in a very public and digital fashion – even more “free” than Willinsky suggests. Will these future researchers and scholars want to wait to announce their findings, or will they blog about them as they happen?

I can see it now, a group of researchers stumbles across the cure for cancer and across the Twitter universe the announcement is made that cancer is now curable. Not the details of “how and why,” but instead the announcement and a link to the researchers wiki where the final papers are currently in production. The public can read, other researchers can test the ideas before they are even published so that independent replication can be determined before the researchers go to press. This will certainly raise issues of copyright and patent concerns that researchers will have to be aware of as they proceed.

Will the Web 2.0 generation be willing to end their habits of blogging and building collective knowledge and understanding in order to protect the current ideas of academic research and publishing? Will they suddenly become protective of their “property” and hide it until they publish? It would be difficult to see such a drastic shift in behavior. It is more likely that they will carry with them their “open source” mentality and find ways to protect their intellectual property at the same time as they publicly share their learning and discovery.

The social web will become ever more influential in scholarly pursuits as those who are discovering its power now move up the educational ladder. These generations are more adept at figuring out where technology fits into the learning process and even the current educational technology leaders lag behind them. The small pockets of voices in education crying out to take the example of those using Web 2.0 tools are being ignored in favor of the standardized education voices. Innovation is the best place for education to occur – however, that isn’t happening very often, much less at a rate to achieve a new conceptualization of the education process.

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In discussing the idea of what students need to “know to succeed” Rebecca Martin, who is the senior vice president for the UW Sytems academic affairs department says, “[It] is an issue we’re constantly looking at because there are things that are important to learn that have been important for many, many years, but there are also things that (we need to address) to prepare students to be successful in the challenges they’re going to face 20, 30 years from now.”

How can anyone decide how to test students in order to see if they have learned what they will need in 30 years to be successful in dealing with the challenges they will face? Who will decide “what” gets tested and how will the results of such an assessment concept be interpreted? For decades politicians and administrators have been using standardized test scoring in this country to rank our students against the students of the world. When the numbers are in our favor (a rarity at this point) they laud the the public educational system patting themselves on the back for funding it. Then when the numbers are not in our favor, these same politicians search for places to lay the blame, most often at the feet of the classroom teacher. There is rarely any mention of the fact that you are comparing lemons and limes – sure they are all students, but the educational systems, values, pedagogy and priorities in these various countries are markedly different.

Politicians and educational bureaucrats have done a marvelous job at conditioning the American public to believe that the only way to know if a child has “learned” is to administer a test. Not a test that shows if a student can use knowledge or skills they have learned to solve problems, but a test to inventory the requisite knowledge that has been established as necessary by these same bureaucrats and politicians. Margret Spelling, Education Secretary, offers this warning in regards to the idea of testing college graduates, “My feeling is if we don’t do it well to ourselves, it’s inevitable the government will do it to us.” I am not sure if that is a warning or threat.

It is interesting that the testing being considered by the University of Wisconsin System is said to measure students competency “in what educators call core competencies – things such as creative problem-solving, critical thinking and communication skills.” Most college courses I remember taking required you to be reasonably competent in these skills in order to pass the course. If I earned my diploma, I knew I had learned to do these things – I had to. How would you develop a single test to measure, let’s say communication skills, that would effectively address this skill as it applies to the future application of a student in Theoretical Physics, or Agricultural Journalism, or Middle Eastern Studies, or International Finance, or Communicative Disorders in Education . . . get the picture?

The article indicates that “university administrators say it’s important that universities develop an accountability system for themselves.” It would only seem logical that if a university wanted to determine how well it was preparing its graduates for the “real world” that they could look at the amount of money the corporate world is spending on training new employees in the very skills this testing is designed to measure. Why don’t they use real world situations to answer the question? Observers such as Tom Peters and Peter Senge have been decrying the problem of retraining for years.

If a university wants to know how well it is training its graduates in these “core competencies,” it need not spend obscene amounts of money perpetuating the myth that standardized testing can tell us anything . . . they need to keep track of their grads and see how many of them are required to go through training in these areas at the request of their employers. This would be a far more powerful assessment than would a test concocted by a group of cloistered academics, politicians bureaucrats.

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