The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That’s why Google is in the phone business and the mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don’t have to type while walking or driving.

I don’t know about you, but it occurs to me that this idea should have a major impact on rethinking school. I say “should” because not only is the whole of education meandering into the 21st century to see how it works, even the pockets that are attempting to race forward are realistically moving at a mere jog (Check out: Yoda on learning, “You must on learn what you have learned.“). This is more evidence that what we call school is not a place that will prepare students to create their future. This future will be a place where their learning can be carried around in their pockets.

I don’t know about you, but my mind races when I read Jarvis’ paragraph above. What if my high school or university classroom is mobile? Where can I go and still teach (be connected to) my students? At the elementary level (a place where a classroom would still constitute a “base of operations” for teacher and students) where can my students and I go to discover and learn? The idea of mobile learning lends itself perfectly to the process of learning by doing. School can finally become a verb.

The paragraph provides so many questions to play with:

• What will school look like for the connected student if local does come to refer to where ever you happen to be?

• Will school become a year round reality as students are able to access work, teacher/professor presentations anywhere, anytime?

• What will this do to University enrollment models if mobile/local shortens the distance between me and my school to nothing regardless of where I am on the globe?

• Will classroom options, like Second Life, be the way students and teachers come together?

Why would I not be able to “attend” any university I desire? Currently I can complete whole courses from MIT, Yale, UC Berkley, Harvard, Duke, Emery, Columbia  all available at iTunes University, and others for free and anywhere I have a connected device. How will Universities design an accountability model so they can begin to defer degrees to anyone who completes the work?

Rethinking school just received its communique from the future and the parameters are changing faster than ever. Time to take a leap.

The world isn’t flat anymore, it just shrunk, now it fits entirely in your hand . . . the world is local.

Additional Reading:

“Ani & the iPad or ‘Much Madness is the Father’s Curse” by Bud Hunt (Blog, Twitter) at Bud the Teacher

“A Is for App: How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution” by Anya Kamenetz (Twitter) at Fast Company

“The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash.” by Charlie Stross (Blog) at Charlie’s Diary

Photo Credits:

Businessmen with laptop: pragyahira on Flickr

Classroom outside: JPhilipson on Flickr

Most Star War’s geeks know and love this scene, arguably one of the most memorable in the first trilogy. The segment of dialog that is usually referenced is:

“No! Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”

I like that, to me it pushes the point that you must have conviction when you take the leap. If you don’t, the experience may look like the first time Morpheus ran Neo through the “Jump Program”:

Okay, I know, the geek quotient is rather high at this point. I want to focus on a different line from Yoda in the scene with Luke and tie that message together with an article from the most recent issue of Wired magazine (yes, I do have a non-digital subscription, so sue me). The line I want to draw out is this:

“You must unlearn, what you have learned.”

There are numerous applications for this line that can be applied to various areas in the field of education and the process of school. I am going to apply it to those seen as leaders in the act of rethinking school. I know, some would argue that it more aptly applies to those that are dragging their feet or maintaining the status quo. That would work too, but here is why I think it applies more accurately to those who are at the front edge of changing school.

Too many students current reality

Many who are working diligently to rethink school and redefine the purpose and process of what happens in our classrooms often fancy themselves “early adopters” of new technologies and regularly lament the number of teachers who seem satisfied with perpetuating the status quo. Regularly on Twitter, I see conversations that include a form of the question, “What are we going to do with those who refuse to take the leap?” Those questions, asked by educators seen as leaders in developing new teaching approaches and making technology ubiquitous, carry with them an inherent assumption that the act of implementing technology in the classroom is the way to “bring schools into the 21st century.” I am going to argue that we, the early adopters and experimenters, are falling further behind at the very time we claim to be headed full steam ahead. Not that what is being done isn’t good, but often times it still lags far behind the ideas of those creating the technology we use. We need to leap forward and create learning environments in our classrooms that are predicated on where the “visionaries” see the reality of technology existing down the road.

If we want our schools to be places where students learn, we need to design them around the act of learning. We need to embrace the furthest edges of the ideas being imagined by those building the pathways to the future. But, how do we do that in a way that prepares students for this future we admit we can’t define? Should we be spending time deciding how to make Interactive White Boards actually become interactive or how to use software licensed and installed on each computer in the school? What about keyboarding or WebQuests? What about games and simulation programming?

While the new iPad has been praised and derided it has none-the-less generated much discussion about where things are going. In the latest issue of Wired that landed in my mailbox early last week, the cover story is about just this conversation. I contend that it has significant implications for education and if we listen now, letting this discussion lead in the process of rethinking schools, we just might make a major leap forward.

It’s often argued that the issue isn’t hardware and that is probably accurate most of the time. However, when hardware frames the view of the future it becomes a serious issue. Kevin Kelly (Blog, Twitter) refers to this new computer form not as tablets, but rather “windows that you carry.” These “portable portals” will “remake both book publishing and Hollywood” because they will “conflate books and video” resulting in “books you watch and movies you touch.” If our students are headed for a world of upside-down interactive data, what are we doing to provide them process knowledge to creatively integrate new tools of this sort into their learning lives?

How will Steve Johnson’s (Blog, Twitter) take on tablet computers change the way students arrive at our school house door? “For decades, futurists have dreamed of the ‘universal book’: a handheld device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era it is no longer technology holding us back from realizing that vision; it’s the copyright holders.”

Advances in technology will give us plenty of headroom with other kinds of data: streaming real-time video, conjuring virtual spaces, exploring real-world environments with geocoded data, modeling complex systems like weather. But in the tablet world, contextual innovation will not come from faster chips or wireless networks.

Students who live in a world like that BEFORE they enter school will find they have stepped back in time when the walk into a classroom. In  an article for Time.com Johnson explained his early take on the iPad:

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

This vision is forming while we teach kids about folders and keeping their work organized. Are we really that far ahead in bringing schools forward? The argument about application or practicality of a tablet environment is moot. James Fallows (Blog, Twitter), national correspondent for The Atlantic explains in a sidebar of the Wired article, that pilots have been using a tablet device for some time. These Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs) include models that are similar to the Apple iPad. The idea of tablet computing is not new, it is just beginning to expand. Schools are a perfect incubator space to discover what can be done with hardware of this sort. An initial thought is that they would appear to automatically make the Interactive White Board obsolete before it has even been largely adopted.

Johnson speaks of a “universal book,” which in itself should send the mind spinning when, as educators, we contemplate the possibility of all school related materials being contained in one easy to carry device or even less constrained than that. Co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein (Blog), takes the idea even further:

The most important thing my colleagues and I learned from experiments with “networked books” is that as discourse moves from the page to the networked screen, the social aspect of reading and writing move to the fore. A book is becoming a “place” where people congregate and converse. [ ] Simply moving printed text to tablets (as with the Kindle) will be of limited value. To succeed, publishers will have to embrace multimedia and community-building. My guess is that the gaming industry will show us the way. Unlike publishing, the culture of video games is much less stifled by legacy products and thinking.

School has perfected the art of legacy thinking. The status quo is dressed up in new outfits occasionally, like a host at an awards show, but when the discussion turns to getting a new host, the brakes areinstantly applied. The entire system comes to a screeching halt until someone trots the host out in a new outfit and claims it’s “all new and improved.” The current political administration has done exactly this by taking No Child Left Behind and buying it a new wardrobe. It remains, at its core, the status quo.

Seymour Papert, addressing the House Committee Economic and Educational Opportunities Hearing on Technology in Education in October of 1995, addressed what was being presented as the future of education saying, “We are putting [ ] technology in a school system that was designed for a totally different epoch [ ].” His words evidence the glacial pace at which the conversations about rethinking school develop. He also addressed what was then being presented as the classroom of the future, “I object strongly to what you saw being called a classroom of the future. It’s a classroom of the very, very, very near future. I doubt if there will be classrooms in the real future, there will be something else. Obviously there will be places children learn, but they won’t resemble what we see today.” I can’t embed the video here, but you can view it at Techno Constructivist by Carl Anderson, (Twitter) in his post “Stager, Papert & the War Path” which is where I was introduced to it.

Are the schools we teach in meeting any of this potential vision? Are they on their way to, not resembling what we see today? We implement Voicethread, Elluminate, UStream, wikis, blogs, Nings, Etherpad, and a variety of other Web 2.0 tools.

But that is what “IS,” not what will “BE.” I know, we can’t create learning environments with things that haven’t been invented or developed yet. However, are we taking those things that have been put in our hands (or at least could be) and designing spaces and opportunities to launch our students forward?

Chris Anderson (TED, Twitter) addresses some of the arguments that might arise when discussing the power of a new form of hardware, the tablet:

I think most of us are willing to carry two devices (one a phone) [ ]. So why would [users] dump a keyboard for a touchscreen? Look to three data points for the answer: the iPhone, the Kindle, and the cloud.

He goes on to tie these data points together as evidence for a new form of “portable portals,” as Johnson refereed to them, the most potentially powerful idea for education that Anderson addresses is “the cloud”:

Finally, the cloud shows that as more and more of our data and software lives in servers somewhere, the computers we  carry with us can be less and less powerful – thinner, lighter, longer battery life. Let Google buy the big iron; you can buy sexy aluminum and glass that’s a delight to hold. [ ] Modern smartphones have shown us what efficient mobile operating systems and specialized apps can do with hardware that wouldn’t fill a single drive bay on a desktop PC.

Steven Levy, author of the article, reinforces this idea:

While Apple wants to move computing to a curated environment where everything adheres to a carefully honed interface, Google believes that the operating system should be nearly invisible. Good-bye to files, client apps, and onboard storage – Chrome OS channels users directly into the cloud, with the confidence that the Web will soon provide everything from native-quality applications to printer drivers. Google hopes that a wave of Chrome-powered netbooks set for release this fall will hasten that day and its designers are already sketching out the next generation of Chrome OS devices, including touchscreen tablets.

Google vice president Sundar Pichai contends that having an iTunes-like app store is unnecessary, because desktop software is just about dead. ‘In the past 10 years, we’ve seen almost no new major native applications,’ he says, ticking off the few exceptions: Skype, iTunes, Google Desktop, and the Firefox and Chrome browsers. ‘We are betting on the fact that all the users will need are advanced Web apps.’

Unconstrained access. Google is looking for ways to facilitate the unchaining of our learning and the products of our actions. In a future where students arrive at the school house door having immersed themselves in the very latest technology tools and the tools have developed along the lines imagined by those most involved with their development, what should school be? What should it look like? What will we do when the open-source mindset hits the educational system full force? It will, it has already begun to. Students who have had the freedom to develop ideas and interests without constraints will challenge a system that wants to categorize and organize them and then define their learning for them. As parents take notice of what their children are doing, they will see the disparity of options and opportunities available in schools compared to those outside of school and may very well make the decision to forgo the formalized status quo of school. How many will opt for online learning or hybrid learning, or even a fully self-directed models using open educations sources like Harvard and MIT?

In her just release book, DYI U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Edcuation, Anya Kamenetz (Blog, Twitter) in Chapter 7 provides, “A four part guide for the student who wants to hack [their] own education.”

The so-called path – graduating from high school at eighteen, going straight to college and living on campus, graduating at twenty-two and going straight into the workforce with a college appropriate job – describes the experience of just 10 percent of people today. If you belong to the other 90 percent, whether you’re sixteen or sixty-one, here’s how to take the first steps down your own personal learning path.

In the introduction to the book, Kamenetz makes a point that, I think, is critical to rethinking school and discovering its purpose in our society today:

Technology upsets the traditional hierarchies and categories of education. It can put the learner at the center of the educational process. Increasingly this means students will decide what they want to learn; when, where, and with whom; and  they will learn by doing. Functions that have long hung together, like research and teaching, learning and assessment, or content, skills, accreditation, and socialization, can be delivered separately.

As much as some teachers have moved forward, experimenting with technology in the learning environment, have we really made strides that would allow school to propel students along the trajectory suggested above? How far have we really come? Kamentez’s suggestion indicates that Christensen, Johnson, and Horn didn’t go far enough with the idea of disruption; technology isn’t just disrupting the educational hierarchies in existence, it is upsetting them.

This isn’t an attempt to legitimize the iPad as “the next best thing for education,” rather it uses it as a catalyst for discussing the big questions that face us today:

1. What is the purpose of school and the systems that support it?

2. How do we design schools for unconstrained learning: physical design and learning design?

3. How do we design new organizational structures to support this new idea of school: teachers, administration, finances?

4. How do we keep the answers from 1 – 3 from becoming the entrenched status quo?

We have expended great efforts to experiment with the implementation of technology in learning environments. It just might be time for us to “unlearn what we have learned” and start learning a whole new way, by asking ourselves the questions above; by listening to those who work tirelessly to study, imagine, and move creativity and innovation forward; and to begin to aggressively challenge each other and become the type of “critical collaborative” we ask our students to become in the classroom.

Additional Reading:

“Is ‘The School of One’ the future of schooling?” by Scott McLeod (Twitter) at Dangerously Irrelevant

Open High School of Utah

“Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad Centric Education” by Brian X. Chen (Blog, Twitter) at Wired

“Anya Kamenetz talks about her new book DIY U and the future of higher education” by Andy Santamaria (Twitter) at CMTY

“Ani & the iPad or ‘Much Madness is the Father’s Curse” by Bud Hunt (Blog, Twitter) at Bud the Teacher

“iRrational iPolarization” by Alan Levine (Twitter) at CogDogBlog

Artwork is linked to its source.

I have also have been following Tom on Twitter since he jumped into that pool about a year ago. I enjoy what he shares in 140 or fewer. This morning one really struck me and I decided to respond. I have responded to other “top shelf gurus” not expecting a response, and they have never let me down. Tom responded. Now, it was not an hour over coffee, but I appreciate his attention to “customer service” (the man practices what he preaches!) and count myself lucky to have had the brief interaction.

Reflecting on the momentary experience I find myself asking, “What power can be brought into classrooms around the world by ensuring interactions between our students and experts in the fields of architecture, art, medicine, sciences, business, engineering, technology, and especially authors, artists, thinkers and inventors?”

There is tremendous power in establishing, within our classrooms, the reality that we as teachers don’t have all the answers. At the start of every year in the classroom I began with a statement of my manifesto (of sorts) for the learning that would occur over the next nine months. My first line was an unapologetic announcement that they better be prepared for the fact that, “Your teacher doesn’t have all the answers.” Following on the heels of that announcement was a promise to always work with students to discover the answer to any question when none of us in the room knew the answer. I remember that every year at least one student would comment on how shocking it was for a teacher to admit the truth. They would also remark that teachers they had had previously allowed the “sage” aura to be perpetuated and they admitted they would often remark (usually under their breath or in their heads), “But you’re suppose to know, you’re the teacher” (my own kids have a version of that statement using “dad” in place of “the teacher”).

How many students in classrooms across the country have had the opportunities I have had today? Not just my short interaction with Tom Peters, but prior to that I was in an Elluminate session with amazing teachers from China, Germany, Spain, Qatar, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Alaska (Flat Earth Project 10-1). In the past month I have virtually “attended”  TEDx events in Austin, Texas (#TEDxATX and #TEDxAustin) and New York (#TEDxNYED), listened to Jon Becker (Blog, Twitter) from Virginia Commonwealth University, throw everyone under the bus discussing “The Logic of ‘Our’ Arguments” and listened to a conversation with Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the University of Regina (I watched/listened to the archived presentation the following day as it occurred at the same time as Jon Becker’s presentation). This is just a sampling from the past two months. How many students don’t even have the benefit of a field trip to their local museum? I went with my daughters classroom to the Milwaukee Public Museum yesterday to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit and will go with them to tour the Wisconsin state capital building later this month which will include twenty minutes of conversation with a justice from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Another great example of the power of reaching outside the existent walls is shared in a post by Karl Fisch (Blog, Twitter) in his post, “Sometimes This Stuff Mazes Me.“:

Just a quick post to note that I still find my own personal networked world to be pretty fascinating and amazing. Yesterday I was talking with my wife about a homework assignment Abby had in math where she needed to gather some data. So I threw together a quick Google Form, posted on my blog, and tweeted it out.

Very quickly the responses started coming in, mostly from Twitter I suspect because I doubt that many folks had seen the post at that point. (Next time I may add a question about where they found out about the survey just to confirm that.) About a day later we now have 299 responses (as of this writing) from 43 states and 18 countries (counting the U.S.). (You can see the results embedded in that post.)

Now this particular survey and this particular post are nothing earth-shattering, but it again reminds me of how different the world is from when I was growing up; how easy it is to connect with others around the world, and certainly how easy it is to gather data via Google Forms, a blog and Twitter. While I certainly still need to do a lot of thinking about how best to utilize this capability in meaningful ways, I think we all as educators need to be constantly asking ourselves the question, “What can we do now (that is relevant and meaningful for students) that we couldn’t do before?”

Teachers lament the learning curve (for them) of new technologies, curricula, pedagogy, etc. They spend countless hours in conversations about how they don’t have time to learn to use technology, or they can’t see the possible benefit to them or their students. Most of these artifices are constructed out of fear, but these, and other excuses, just don’t stand up. My own personal experience today is evidence that the equation isn’t complex like a theoretical physics concept, isn’t expensive like the top-shelf MacBook Pro, and isn’t constrained by time. The status quo no longer suffices. Here are a few simple, dare I say game-changing equations for our classrooms:

(Computer + Internet Connection) x Skype = Powerful Conversations

equally as powerful

(Computer + Internet Connection) x Elluminate = Powerful Collaborative Interactions

a little higher up the learning curve

(Computer + Internet Connection) x (Google Forms + Blog + Twitter) = Powerful and Meaningful Research

or the very barest of minimums

(Computer + Internet Connection) x TED.com = Sowing Powerful Idea Seeds

The only constraints placed on those equations would be the limits of the teachers creativity and desire to open their classroom to the world (Skype, Elluminate). An email or phone call to potential experts  is all it takes to begin the process . . . what’s the worst they could say? No. Then you move on. I would wager however, that teachers would receive far more enthusiastic “Yes” responses than “No” and would then have the opportunity to share their classroom with many wonderful individuals. The power of such opportunities for students is obvious. Equally as important, teachers would have the opportunity design a classroom environment that would escape the restrictive confines of the physical building.

David Jakes (Blog, Twitter) in a recent blog post, “Rethinking Conversation and Change,” took on the tension that exists between talking about change and actually doing it.

Continually talking about the need for change isn’t helping.  At some point you have to do it what you are advocating for.  How exactly does that get done?

He argued that we need to pull our larger conversations into our daily ecosystem and dig deep. Then act.

Let’s see if I can tie it all together, at least as it sounds in my head. Tom’s response, “The first step is a defacto leap” is the point. Teachers need to leap or get out of the way (or, as may be necessary, be asked nicely to get out of the way). One of the first leaps we can make is to turn in our “Guru Badge” and open our constrained classroom to the world. The act of teaching, by nature, is a learning experience for teachers as well as the students. The call to all teachers should be:

Stop generating artificial obstacles to rethinking your classroom. Give up the false constructs that money, time, fellow teachers, or administrators will keep you in check if you decide to take your first leap – and there will be many that need to be taken.

David said it best:

Simply stated, change begins at home.

If we care about our students, as discussed by Chris Lehman (Blog, Twitter) in his post “Educon 2.2 Reflections – What Do You Think?” we have a responsibility to,

[Ask our students the] question — “What do you think?” and then listening, fully and deeply, to their answer. That is the ethic of care made manifest in the inquiry process.

Providing opportunities for our students to interact and collaborate with experts, thinkers, innovators, artists, risk-takers, leaders, and arguably most important: their global peers, will be a brilliant first leap. Then, we ask them Chris’s question and allow the learning to grow exponentially. The equations above are cheap, easy, and already exist in our classrooms today. It’s not hard to move past the conversation to action . . . It’s harder to make the decision to leap.

What great leap will you take in the next week, quarter, semester, year . . . personally, professionally . . . for your students, because, it’s the right thing to do for them?

Additional Reading:

While I advocate the leap above, it is always wise to look while you are jumping. Brian C. Smith (Blog, Twitter) talks about a crucial part of the process in his post, Being Critical: Transformations on his blog.

Thoughts on Assessment 1: A response

Thoughts on Assessment 2: A conversation

I have been researching and toying with this post for a few weeks and recently saw a link, in my Twitter stream, to a post by Jim Blecher (Blog, Twitter), entitled, “SocialMedia CreativityCommunity.” It really clicked for me and brought the pieces of this post together. I am a firm believer that even the most jaded students enjoy learning, what they hate, is school. There can be any number of reasons this is true, but one that is arguably universal across the student spectrum is the fact that far too much of school is organized around testing and not around learning. School is focused on the process of knowledge inoculation as opposed to knowledge appropriation. Teachers need to vaccinate themselves against the evils of high stakes testing and in order to do that, they design learning that focuses on the fractured knowledge that is required to successfully produce on those tests. Students, on the other hand, want to know “stuff” and want to see what can be created out of it, they want to appropriate the knowledge to themselves, shall we say, Construct Meaning. The missing element in the equation is relevance and it is missing because it has been tested out of the school process. I am not referencing just the high-stakes standardized tests, those are merely the most egregious example. What I want to focus on in this post is, hopefully writing an obituary for the idea of summative testing, or at least declare it in critical condition.

In Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, Allan Collins (Profile, Wikipedia) and Richard Halverson (Profile) talk about the way in which we determined the learning progress of a student (apprentice in those days) years ago:

In the apprenticeship era, the adult carefully observed learners and corrected them as they went along, giving them tasks they were ready for, and seeing whether they completed them successfully. Observation during the course of task completion combined the functions of formative and summative assessment. Ongoing, formative encouragement or critique provided feedback to guide the learner through tasks, and the final, summative judgment gave learners feedback on whether the task was successfully completed.

As education began to drift, leading to its current condition of having no apparent purpose, testing began to be the tool of choice to determine if students had “learned” the appropriate information and skills determined as “necessary” to indicate that learning had occurred. This model also fit nicely into the industrial age economy. Students went to school, learned the prescribed material, proved they had learned that material via a test that required no creative or original thought, and then went on to jobs that required them to perform assembly line tasks or develop assembly line thinking and procedures, what Tom Peters (Blog, Twitter) refers to as the Ford Motor Company model of education (see his four minute presentation in this post). More and more the idea of assessment moved from helping a student see their growth and development to a judgment of their “status of learning,” which was then used to classify and categorize them – not to assist in the learning. R. J. Stiggens, writing in Phi Delta Kappan explains the the difference of “assessment for” and “assessment of” learning this way:

Assessment for learning can contribute to the development of effective schools. If assessments of learning provide evidence of achievement for public reporting, then assessments for learning serve to help students learn more. The crucial distinction is between assessment to determine the status of learning and assessment to promote greater learning.

More recently, assessment as moved from a tool with potential to help students develop mastery to one that is used to secure funding. It no longer aids students in learning, but performs a punitive function to the determent of learning. Formative assessment, far too often, is given only cursory acknowledgment and all the eggs are put in the summative assessment basket. There is something fundamentally wrong with this current situation. Formative assessment is the most powerful of the assessments in helping students learn and move toward mastery. In fact formative assessment enables a teacher to determine incremental amounts of mastery as the student moves through the learning process. Done effectively it renders summative assessment redundant and unnecessary. So, here is were I hope to put the last nail in the coffin of summative assessment (my apologies for the rather dark metaphor – but summative assessment is a dark cloud hanging over school).

The post by Jim Blecher (Blog, Twitter), entitled, “SocialMedia CreativityCommunity” highlighted the process of “perception and processing,” something students do every day in school (or we hope they do). Jim begins by talking about a song by Jonathan Coulton (embedded below):

I hope the metaphor I see here works for you as well. Let’s say that this video represents the learning that each teacher carefully crafts in their classroom. This includes a variety of pieces that students play with in the process of internalizing the information, practicing skills, and making them part of their knowing.  At various points in this process the teacher stops to check and determine if the internalization process is happening and/or to what degree (formative assessment). When gaps appear she/he work with the student(s) to insure that mastery is being developed. Better yet, let’s assume that this is a true project based learning environment. Project based learning is the process of small bits of convergent learning designed to lead to divergent assessment (that’s my theory on it any way). The small modules are designed to converge into formative checks and then open up directly into the next piece of connected learning (all within the context of understanding the big picture, which is always where learning should begin). By the time the student reaches the cumulative point of the project they have achieved mastery. If the teacher were to use a summative assessment tool (test) that was predicated on all the formative checks (as is usually the case) what would it tell the teacher? Nothing new. Lets put summative assessment, as a tool to gauge learning, out of our students misery. Back to Jim Blecher’s post.

Jim addresses the process of creativity and play within the context of a media enhanced social community – that’s not a bad description of what classrooms should be, is it? He highlights a couple of YouTube videos that grew out of Coulton’s (I did a search and there are currently 1,990 hits when searching for “code monkey”). I liked this one the best:

Continuing the metaphor from above. After working through the process of constructing meaning (internalizing learning) and mastering skills, students should be turned lose to generate something new, in other words we need divergent assessment where we now have summative assessment. Students need to add themselves to their new knowledge. In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown (Profile, Blog) describes the idea this way:

Convergent thinking is a practical way of deciding among existing alternatives. What convergent thinking is not so good at, however, is probing the future and creating new possibilities. Think of a funnel, where the flared opening represents a broad set of initial possibilities and the small spout represents the narrowly convergent solution. This is clearly the most efficient way to fill up a test tube or drive toward a set of fine-grained solutions.

If the convergent phase of problem solving is what drives us toward solutions, the objective iof divergent thinking is to multiply the options to create choices . . . By testing competing ideas against one another, there is an increased likelihood that the outcome will be bolder, more creatively disruptive, and more complelling. Linus Pauling said it best, “To have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas.” – and he won two Nobel Prizes.

Summative assessment is convergent, all learning leads to one final set of questions and every student must answer them in exactly the same way. Formative assessment can be convergent and maintain integrity, using convergent assessment at the completion of learning lacks integrity. I am not suggesting we recouch summative assessment, I am advocating for its extinction. Divergent assessment is not summative. Upon completion of the mastery phase of learning students need to be set free to use their new wisdom and the requirement should be, “Show us something new, amaze us!” That is opposed to the current reality in schools. Let me paraphrase Brown from the same chapter:

The natural tendency of [education] is to constrain problem-solving and restrict [student] choices in favor of the obvious and the incremental. Though this tendency may be more efficient in the short run, in the long run it tends to make a [student] conservative, inflexible, and vulnerable to game-changing ideas from outside. Divergent thinking is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.

Divergent assessment, by design, requires the use of the top layers of Bloom’s ideas about learning. Because students have achieved mastery along the way, of information and skills, they have a new embedded knowing that allows them to take their learning and apply it in ways that intrigue them and allow them to find purposeful meaning in their process. At this point, the restrictions are minimal – very minimal – and students are allowed to evidence their learning in powerful and meaning ways. An example of this type of expression of learning can be found in Chris Lehmann’s (Blog, Twitter) NYSCATE presentation (the segment I am referencing begins at 42:27 and a shorter version can be found here beginning at 2:40):

I don’t know if the development of the flow-process bio-diesel generator was a form of assessment, I use the example as a way for you to envision divergent assessment. The result of student learning in this situation was powerful – purposeful. It is an example of what the results of divergent assessment can look like. Students set free to play with their learning will generate this type of evidence. And, this type of evidence has the integrity that is lacking in current forms of summative assessment. This approach to assessment will, as Howard Gardner (Profile) puts it, reveal not just what students know and understand, but “also capture how those new understandings metamorphose.” Students at Science Leadership Academy complete what I feel is the closest thing to real divergent assessment in their Capstone:

The Capstone Project at Science Leadership Academy is an opportunity for students to show the scholars they have become. It represents the culmination of four years of intellectual growth towards an independent and self-directed learner who can contribute meaningfully to his or her community, whatever that means to the individual. It will enable the student to focus his interests and curiosity into a coherent representation of how he thinks and what he believes as he leave high school. The capstone represents a synthesis of the SLA mission and vision as students attempt to answer the questions: “How do we learn?” “What can we create?” and “What does it mean to lead” through a self-selected and designed independent project. As with everything we do, it should embody the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. The final product will look different for each student, just as each student has a unique perspective and approach to learning.

Yes, I hope that soon we will see the extinction of what we currently call summative assessment. It is necessary in a reality that as Tom Peters points out is, “[An] age of creation intensification.” This shift must be part of the process of rethinking school and will begin to move us toward fulfilling the lip service we pay to the statement that, “We are educating students for a future we don’t even know and can’t imagine.” Let’s write the obituary on summative assessment before it’s too late.

Convergence and Divergence graphics are from Dr. Scott McLeod and can be found on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, in the post, “Convergent v. divergent thinking in K – 12 schools.“

Stiggins, R. J. 2002. Assessment Crisis: The Absence of Assessment FOR Learning, in Phi Delta Kappan Vol.83, No.10 pp758-765.

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Other’s thoughts and ideas on assessment:

“Guiding Principles for Assessment“ by Daniel Meyer at dy/dan

“I Test, Therefore I Am” at DragonPhysics Blog

“Assessment, Giving Students A Choice” by Maggie Hos-McGrane at Tech Transformation

“It Is The Test! Or is it . . .“ at Constructing Meaning

“It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s us.” by Scott McLeod (Twitter) at Dangerously Irrelevant

“Assess the Assessment“ by Tom Whitby at My Island View

“Assessment as (re)search” at University Writing Assessment

“Trivial Pursuit and Assessment” by Aaron Eyler (Twitter) at Synthesizing Education

“A Vision of Standardized Assessment” by Jason T Bedell (Twitter) at Jason T Bedell: Reflections on Teaching and Learning

“Assessment Matters” by John Wilkie at Learning & Teaching

“TEDxBANFF is Now a Memory & I was Wrong about Creativity” by David Warlick (Twitter) at Two Cents Worth

“Transparent Algebra: Assessment” by Karl Fisch (Twitter) at The Fischbowl

“Where are we?“ by Joe Bower (Twitter) at For the Love of Learning

“Assessment is a Bad Word?” by Ben Grey (Twitter) at The Edge of Tomorrow

“Can Standardized Test Data be Formative?” by Ben Grey (Twitter) at The Edge of Tomorrow

“Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3 . . .” by Heather Mason (Twitter) at Teacher In Transition

Larry Lessig

Key Idea: “We can’t stop our kids from using it [technology]; we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again; we can only make them, quote, “pirates.” And is that good? We live in this weird time, it’s kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life,we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what I — we — are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business.”

Tim Brown

Key Idea 1: “OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.”

Key Idea 2: “Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly — when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really, kind of, interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?

We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.”

Tim Brown

Key Idea 1: “Instead of starting with technology, the team started with people and culture. So if human need is the place to start, then design thinking rapidly moves on to learning by making. Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think. Now prototypes speed up the process of innovation. Because it is only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve.”

Key Idea 2: “So why design thinking? Because it gives us a new way of tackling problems. Instead of defaulting to our normal convergent approach where we make the best choice out of available alternatives, it encourages us to take a divergent approach, to explore new alternatives, new solutions, new ideas that have not existed before. But before we go through that process of divergence, there is actually quite an important first step. And that is, what is the question that we’re trying to answer? What’s the design brief? Now Brunel may have asked a question like this, “How do I take a train from London to New York?” But what are the kinds of questions that we might ask today?”

Tom Peters

Key Idea 1: “We live in a world that begs for creativity and what do we do? When the nine year old boy gets out of his seat inappropriately in the fourth grade we send him to the school nurse and say, ‘Dose the lad with Ritalin from now until death.”

Key Idea 2: “We are rapidly moving into the age of creation intensification.”

Key Idea 3: “We nail facts into students heads and there is nothing wrong with it if the goal is to employ somebody for forty years in a Ford  Motor Company Model A factory, right? Because the deal is, ‘Park your brains at the door, dude.’”

The idea of professional development is, in my opinion, predicated on reflective activity. Without asking ones self questions, there can be no growth. What most caught my attention, after the title, was the list of seven items that Lehman identified:

Read A Lot: The more knowledge you can get from other thinkers and innovators (in other fields), the better. Doing this, you will probably find some new ways to approach complex problems, break them down and come up with sophisticated and practical design solutions.
Bend Boundaries: Set creative boundaries for yourself when you are facing a challenging design issue or problem. By exaggerating or minimizing boundaries that you are used to, it will force you to think about your design dilemma in new ways. For instance, give yourself a small allotted amount of time in which to “solve” a design issue. Or, pretend that you have three times the budget than you actually have. This might just free your mind, getting you to think of a totally different way of solving your original problem.
Streamline your Organization: Become an active thinker. During or after visiting a site, another great building, reading a magazine or even having a discussion with a fellow architect , make it a habit to record the most important thoughts that will spark your future action(s). Organizing your ideas will result in better ways for you to create new ones. Organization actually can spark creativity and innovation.
Switch Your Perspective: While working on the day-to-day details that surface for specific building projects, don’t forget to take that eagle-eyed view. Think of how Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid would approach your design problem. Or think of what a good architectural critic might say about your design challenge.
Get Out More: Although having a consistent design setting (like your office) is very conducive to being creative, so too is changing your scenery. Try thinking about a design problem in a totally different place. Go see a great architectural lecture. Or go have a brainstorming session with your colleague in a new setting.
Remember Your Colleagues: Don’t forget about the people around you. They can help you stay inspired too. Coming up with new ways to communicate with your colleagues to generate creative ideas can be quite motivational.
Set Your Goals: Don’t lose sight of your goals, whatever they may be. Be sure to revisit them often — both so your time is spent working toward them and so that you remember why you are doing what you do. One of the keys to maintaining inspiration, is also to reward yourself. After you reach certain goals be sure to enjoy them, take a break and then use that energy to renewing your momentum.

Here are the connections I see and the resulting ideas:

Read, a lot: Another constant lament of the classroom teacher is, “I don’t have enough time to do what I am suppose to do, when I am suppose to read. And read someone from another field or discipline, give me a break, I can’t even read stuff in my own.” Teachers and the administrators who create the conditions within which they work, need to be far more aware of the power in this idea. Teachers must read, read a lot, and read from a wide variety of thinkers. A way to create the possibility of more reading is by allowing teachers to bank credit necessary for re-certification or as part of professional development requirements.

Bend boundaries: This strategy would require administrators to allow teachers greater autonomy (and of course that responsibility would flow up the “chain of command” as well by necessity). School has become an environment of ever increasing constrains. Learning however happens best in an environment that allows for malleable boundaries. I remember a scene in The School of Rock, Jack Black and Joan Cusack were in the cafeteria (okay, Black’s character was rather manipulative with duplicity motives) when he floated an idea about taking the students on a field trip:

Black: Listen Roz, I was thinking about organizing a field trip. What do you think.

Cusack: Well . . . substitutes, as a rule, do not organize field trips.

Black: But, I figure I’m gonna be here for awhile . . .

Cusack: Well, that remains to be seen. Have you met the other teachers?

Black: No. But, the kids could learn by getting out of the classroom.

Cusack: It’s more complicated than that. There’s safety issues. Parent’s need to be notified. It’s against school policy.

An environment that is rigid can’t withstand change, change will destroy it. “Bendable boundaries” must become policy for learning to thrive. Rigid boundaries, like those in the school in the movie, stifle creativity, innovation, and ultimately do harm to students learning. Teachers must be given latitude to, not to think outside the box, but remove the box from their line of sight. The response from administrators shouldn’t be all the reasons “why not,” but should be “how do I help make this happen.” By affording their teachers greater autonomy, through bendable boundaries, administrators will be modeling for the school and community how to view and treat teachers as the professionals they are.

Streamline the organization: Power sharing! This too, plays into the idea of greater teacher autonomy. We need to find ways in education that allow teachers to make more substantive decisions. This will require divorcing education from the testing culture that currently controls it and most of our learning systems. I was tweeting with Vanessa Miemis (Blog, Twitter) this morning about an article she had tweeted about in SmashingMagazine.com titled The Death of the Blog. One of the quotes in the article spoke volumes:

While, yes, this is a redesign of sorts, I consider it much more a rethinking. ~ Jason Santa Maria

The article was about rethinking the way blogging is done. The thought occurred to me that this way of thinking, supported by action, would allow teachers to move away from textbook dominated (controlled!) curricula and encourage “collaborative content sourcing.” This would result in cost savings and streamlining the decision making process, especially at the classroom level. It would also place more authentic sources and voices in the hands of learners than they experience with a textbook.

Switch your perspective: This one is more than obvious. Teacher must ask themselves, “Am I learning anything in all of this?” If a teacher isn’t learning more about the art of teaching each day, well, they need to find a new career. Fast! And they may need some help or a push to realize this truth. Teachers should reflectively consider if they are learners and imagine they are sitting in a desk in their classroom (new perspective) and consider if their students are seeing the model of a successful learner. Do our student’s parents see a learner at the front of their child’s classroom? What about administrators? Community members? Teachers need to look at themselves through the eyes of those watching them and consider what they see.

Get out more: Teachers suffer from a professional debilitating disease, “isolationist.” Many bring the disease on themselves, some resist, but the environment that currently is defined as school is the prime breading ground for this menace. Teachers (and administrators) need opportunities to go out and explore the worlds they teach about in their classrooms. One way to facilitate this exploration would be to move from the idea that teachers should only be paid when they are in the classroom. Hire good teachers, sign them to 12 month contracts, and require them to explore during the summer and give extra credit to those who explore outside their comfort of their discipline. A second way to facilitate this goes one step further. Move to a 12 month academic calendar. Research has indicated that learning occurs more abundantly in an environment that allows for regular breaks. We know this to be true inside the classroom, so why do we continue to blindly follow the traditions established in an agrarian culture. Classrooms that are open for learning for 45 days followed by 15 days of refreshing mind and spirit would, I argue, greatly improve the climate of learning in our schools. Having four breaks throughout the year would afford a greater diversity of options for exploration. Again, hire good teachers, sign them to 12 month contracts, and require them to explore during their breaks.

Remember your colleagues: I’m not sure I can add more to this, “Don’t forget about the people around you. They can help you stay inspired too. Coming up with new ways to communicate with your colleagues to generate creative ideas can be quite motivational.” Again, this will raise the “time” concern. If administrators want to insure the quality of professional growth in their building(s) they must creatively find ways to allow for collaboration, activity in a Personal Learning Network, or Community of Practice. Nothing is more powerful for professional development than the hallways at an educational conference. Administrators need to intentionally create spaces and environments that encourage an ever increasing amount of collegiality.

Set your goals: Deciding ahead of time what the end will look like is an imperative. The vision must be mastery and the environment must allow that dynamic to exist and flourish. Social promotion must also be abandoned in favor of learning. Learning is a dynamic, fluid event and schools (teachers, administrators, policy makers, and parents) must embrace the idea of ending social promotion, realizing that by doing so they end the abusive practice short changing students. This point also requires that in the act of rethinking school we must first identify its purpose. The old purpose(s) are no longer relevant (and one might argue the old ones were bad anyway). School is no longer relevant because the purpose for its existence and the requirement of attendance have no foundational purpose. This is the most critical discussion in education that we can embark on as we enter a new decade.

Photo Credits:

Reading: Norby at Flickr

Jack Black at imdb.com

Letters: Jason Santa Maria at jasonsantamaria.com

Library: New York Public Library at Flickr

Goals: Dan Callahan at Flickr

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

And Clay’s response:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”¹

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

The responses were also intriguing, but I kept coming back to a singular point, resparked by the above exchange, that I find fundamental to the discussion. I have worked with students in Grade 5 (US) through grad school, both online and in a physical classroom. Caveat: I have worked in self-contained classrooms, teaching almost all subject matter and settings were I worked only with specific disciplines.

I am going to disagree with a point the Clay made in his response, regarding content. We are all well aware that what passes as content increases exponentially at a rate that teachers and textbook publishers can’t keep up with. If they tried, the iteration cycle for new textbooks would be about three months (think of THAT cost). Andrew Marcinek (Blog, Twitter) concisely makes the content point in his post “My Decade“:

We can connect to copious amounts of information and communicate faster than ever before. We have even started condensing our language in order to express how we feel in 140 characters . . .

We can not possibly cover all of the available content in a school year, much less a series of 12 school years. Content as an engine of learning design must end. It is cumbersome and ultimately keeps schooling mired in the morass of data point driven learning. Content driven curriculum and learning design ends up looking like this example from Dr. Scott McLeod’s (Blog, Twitter) post, “4 Tales Out of School“

Four questions from a study packet for a middle school World Civilizations class:

A. Nubia developed trade routes over land because:

1. there was not enough wood to build boats
2. the Egyptians controlled the Nile
3. the cataracts prevented river travel in Nubia
4. Nubians only traded with West Africans

B. According to legend, who united Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt?

1. Hatshepsut
2. Menes
3. Amon-Re
4. Thutmose III

C. Thutmose III was all of the following except:

1. a conqueror
2. an educated man
3. unmerciful to the defeated
4. a great Pharaoh

D. What was the kingdom of Kerma known for?

1. great poverty
2. skilled archers
3. delicate pottery
4. ironworking

These are just a sample; most of the items in the packet are similar. Students have to ‘learn’ these because they’ll be quizzed on them.

It’s very hard for me to see this kind of schoolwork and not think that vast amounts of student time are just being wasted. And I’m the first to admit that I did this when I taught 8th grade. I didn’t know any better, but that didn’t make it right.

We pay a lot of lip service to “teaching students to be life long learners.” Where we fail is in not making a shift from content driven curriculum and learning, to process driven curriculum and learning. I contend that “how” to learn is more important than “what” is learned (Yes, I know that is a dangerous statement to make and I should expound upon it, but not right now. Suffice it to say I do think there are elemental content bits that do need to be learned). Either we really mean that we want to teach students how to learn and be life long learners or we don’t, and the current general approaches to schooling do not evidence this stated purpose. A content driven approach to school ends up being a “race to the end,” the end of the book that is. The reason this occurs is the mistaken assumption that everything printed in a textbook or curriculum guide or standards list has been thoughtfully placed there. Do teachers pause and ask, “Why am I teaching this?” What about administrators? The thinking behind content driven curriculum is that it is all “necessary” for a complete education. Who made the determination of what would be printed in the afore mentioned documents? Did they ask, “Why should this be included?” or is far to much of it there due to tradition? How often has a student expressed disappointment because a historical event, science concept, or piece of literature is skimmed over (or worse, ignored), only to receive the answer, “I am sorry, but we have to finish the book, we have a lot to cover.”

Hugh MacLeod (Blog, Twitter) in his post, “Don’t Worry if You Don’t Know ‘Absolutely Everything’ Before Starting Out” describes the end result of a content based approach and how it negatively effects our students:

They want to have ALL the ans­wers, before ever ris­king get­ting their feet wet. Hell, before even get­ting their little toe wet…

Ending his post, Clay asked:

Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Clay is right, if educators do answer his question “yes,’ then much caution should be used in experimenting in the classroom – whether with Web 2.0 applications or other technological tools. However, I think this is the wrong focus. Let me provide two examples of what process driven learning might look like, one mine, the other from Silvia Tolisano (Blog, Twitter).

During my MA work in Pepperdine’s OMAET program (c. 2001) I was required to do an Action Research Project. I always loved literature and I tried to introduce my students to great books. I was teaching a primarily self-contained 8th grade classroom in an urban school at the time. I went to my administrator and told him I wanted to have my 8th literature students read Charles Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I explained that I wasn’t looking for a high school or college level evaluation of the text. Instead, I reminded him that I had a room full of early teens who were in the early stages of learning about relationship building and I felt the book offered insight into human relationship dynamics that they would be intrigued by. I explained that my goal was teaching my students the process of critically evaluating what they read – the content wasn’t the driver. He agreed to allow me the latitude to design a month long project and incorporate technology into the process. The catch was that I had to raise funds to bring in the technology. I raised $6,000.00 in about three weeks and within a month had new computers, wireless hubs, and software in place.

The students were organized in groups and we read corporately and individually, had complete class discussion and smaller group discussions. My students already spent tremendous amounts of time at night in AOL Instant Messenger, so I appropriated the technology. Once a week each group engaged in an AIM conversation (outside of the classroom) which revolved around three seed questions that I would provide. The group them emailed the transcript of the dialog to me. Additionally, once a week I held an optional AIM group chat that I led, to dig further into the relationships in the story. To complete the project each group collaboratively developed a graphic representation of the relationships using Inspiration. Each student also prepared an introspective essay on A. How they understood relationships, B. How they understood the formation of relationships, and C. Revelations derived from their reading and interacting in collaboration. I thrilled at the results. The technologies allowed the quiet back row students to shine and gain “expert” status and it pushed the front-row hand raising student who always had the “right” content answer to be pushed to explore new avenues of discovery. The point? It didn’t matter what book I used, the content was value neutral to the process. I could just as easily have designed a similar project in Math, Science, or Social Studies. It was about the process and not the content.

I was following my Twitter stream one day and noticed an “urgent” request from Silvia Tolisano for help in identifying a skeleton that her students had discovered on the school campus. I posit this as another example of how learning is about process and not content and technology easily fits in a process driven learning environment. Silvia chronicles the process brilliantly in her post, “CSI Twitter – Crime Scene Investigation.” I have to admit being thoroughly enthralled watching the process unfold. Yes, there was content involved, but it could have just as easily been used in Math (Scale), Language (Communication), Technology (Web 2.0 tools), as it could in the obvious Science discipline. Process, though, was king. Silvia points out:

I am amazed, again, at the power of the network. As the investigation spread across our school campus, so it did across the network. Having a support team, a flood of resources and experts at your fingertips (literally), it is truly an example how learning, research, has changed through the collaboration, connecting and communication tools of the social network era.

Learning, Research, Collaboration, Connecting, Communication are processes (filled with various skills, but content neutral) that are essential in our world. School needs to revolve around process. Content needs to become fluid allowing teachers to use various, seemingly disparate, content pieces to facilitate the learning of processes. I always said that the process I wanted my two children to learn in their first three years of school was, reading. If they learned that process well, they could learn anything they wanted to, as deeply as they wanted to. Let’s make process the engine upon which schools run and let the students play with content.

I hope that made some sense, it is an important soap box.

Photo Credits:

Books: Valentinian at Flicker

Poster: Tale of Two Cities at allposters.com

Skeleton: Silvia Tolisano at “CSI Twitter – Crime Scene Investigation.