I came across the following statement at the AASLS Smackdown wiki this morning:

According to The Associated Colleges of the South, “using critical thinking skills and appropriate technologies, information fluency integrates the abilities to:

• collect the information necessary to consider a problem or issue
• employ critical thinking skills in the evaluation and analysis of the information and its sources
• formulate logical conclusions and present those conclusions in an appropriate and effective way” – Information Age Inquiry

Before I comment, I must make it clear that I am not opposed to teaching Information Fluency. I am, however, opposed to the idea that education is about knowledge accumulation and this concept, “information fluency”  tends to lend itself well to that way of thinking. “Collect, employ, formulate” these are not the skills of an information age – these are the skills of a process age.

These skills are process skills – something we use to do something else. Schools should revolve around educating process skills and not focus on content accumulation. Content is dead as a means for justifying education, process education’s time has come. So throw content out – right? No! Content must become a fluid component flowing freely between disciplines. Any content can be used to learn the process skills that are at the core of society today and content need not be relegated to a specified discipline.

The focus on “information” will only hold our students back from learning to innovate. The lauded Information Age is dead, and schools seem to have missed the fact that the Process Age is going to quickly bury American students in thier tombs of standardized testing knowledge.

• Collecting information involves the process of reading, evaluating, analyzing.

• Critical Thinking is a process that employs evaluation, analsis, and synthesis.

• Formulating logical conclusions is the result of the first two.

These describe the process of constructing meaning – and that should be the foundation of education in our schools. Instead leadership (maybe a misnomer today) contniues to send our students down the numerical rabbit hole by putting the spotlight, arguablly the entire focus of education, on standards, testing, and a narrowly focused curriculum. A curriculum that shatters the big picture into bits and pieces that are rarely reassembled into a whole. Students are thus left with the notion that you can never talk about writing in Science, nor do experiments in Social Studies, and never, ever do but read or write in a language class.

Go ahead and teach information fluency – but do not use it as the driving force. Take the spotlight off of “information” and place it on process. This is not simply a semantical considertion – it is one that will result in students learning how to construct meaning and produce additions to the knowledge base – and that is what they will need to do in the future.

I rarely find myself disagreeing with an idea that Dr. Scott McLeod places on the table, but this one raised my hackles a bit. I have always positioned myself as an avid anti-standardized testing professional. However, when I finished reading his piece I thought I would take a breath, step back, and consider it before responding. The argument played out in my thoughts this way:

“We must take ownership of our own culpability.”

The reaction to this statement was, “As teachers we have very little voice in the profession we work in.” That is the voice of the un-empowered. Where does it come from?

I contend that it occurs because society does not see teachers as practitioners. The power to conceive and architect learning is not often afforded to teachers. They are encouraged to take the pre-packaged materials and be creative, but not allowed to ask themselves and their students the question, “What is worth knowing?”

School is about learning, constrained learning. The constraints placed on the environment come from the idea that there is a single way to quantify learning. Enter the standardized test. It is an analytical tool too often abused and misused. It is not wrong to take regular snapshots of learning, analyze them, and improve practice. The problem arises when these snapshots are given an undo amount of significance in the process of improvement. The testing culture produces a vicious cycle, one that does not leave teachers feeling very secure in stepping out and “practicing their passion.” If teachers are culpable it is not in creating the testing culture, it is in not standing up against it. School should be about learning, unconstrained learning.

“Our prevalent instructional model that emphasizes low-level, de-contextualized, factual recall was dominant long before ‘the tests.’”

Standardized textbooks work nicely for standardized testing. However, they do not do much for the idea that life is a big picture. Integration of content into a whole is hard work. It is far easier to teach a fractured curriculum because the result demanded is a standardized test that seeks the ability to see myopically, one subject at a time. Dr. McLeod is correct. This fractured approach has long been the model for education. The assembly line reality of the industrial age required each worker to do one thing and to do it well. Employee A did not need to know what Employee B did to complete their task five feet further down the line. That worked. Today, standardized testing requires each student to know how to do each thing in exactly the same way in order to produce the same product. The world they live in however, requires them to see the integrated picture. The test does not fit with reality. If teachers are culpable it is not in creating the testing culture, it is in not standing up against the learning environment it requires.

“Have we all forgotten that school has been boring for generations?”

To a teacher, “them’s fightin’ words.”  This may be an issue of semantics, but school is not boring, it is not engaging. A toddler moves around their space looking at things and wondering, albeit in a very rudimentary way, “What is that?” “What does it do?” “What does it feel like?” “What does it look like on the other side?” and much to our chagrin at times, “What does it taste like?” As children grow, we intentionally place things in their hands, often without any instructions at all. They take them and ask a more sophisticated set of questions, “What is it?” “What are its capabilities?” “What do I want to do with it?” “What can I add to it?” Though generated from a more complex perspective, they are not much different from those asked by a toddler. School, currently, is not like this. I go back to the idea of asking the question, “What is worth knowing?” Textbook publishers, politicians, and society arbitrarily answer this question for students – so what results is an environment that is not engaging. It is not engaging because all of the most important questions have already been “answered” for the student. Yes, again, if teachers are culpable it is not in creating the testing culture, it is in not standing up against a societal culture that doesn’t allow the teacher to foster the inborn curiosity ever human is born with.

“It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better.”

In the end, this is the only comment with which I would take issue. I do not think it is an inability, as evidenced by the work of Dr. McLeod and other like-minded educators. Nor, is it an unwillingness to move the paradigm. It is also not about better . . . but it IS about different. Educators must begin to Rethink education and force the issue.

The testing culture is symptomatic. I would suggest the disease is a failure of the education professional to stand up and “be heard.” I wanted to argue Dr. McLeod’s point and I remain an avid anti-standardized testing professional, but in the end, the conversation in my thoughts led me to the same place. This is not an indictment of the teaching profession. Society bears a good portion of responsibility in not moving to a paradigm where teachers are viewed as “practicing professionals” like doctors, lawyers, nurses, etc. However, we can be in control of the issue, if we step up and make our voices heard.

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I was reading my Google Reader feeds yesterday and came across one by Todd Lucier at The Clever Sheep. His thought highlighted a constant refrain that seems to permeate education, “When have we arrived?”

Todd’s assessment about the effects of the change factor in education is spot-on. The situation is more acute than in many other areas of society, caused by education’s lagging behind the wave of change that is constantly sweeping over us. I am not sure if Todd was musing or lamenting, but the “end points” he mentioned are an underlying problem, which impedes any progress in educational change. The idea of an “end point” stifles possibility by suggesting that a perfect destination is quantifiable. The real question is, “Is there really ever a destination to be arrived at?” Politicians and society in general want schools to “arrive” so they can be comfortable in sending their children inside those walls. This perpetuates the idea of a final destination where we can all sit back, breathe a sigh of relief, and proclaim, “We have arrived.

This reminded me of a blog entry I read in January 2008 at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, written by Wesley Fryer. Wesley briefly follows the change path backward from NCLB to Dewey in pointing out that voices have always existed calling attention to the need for the education environment to be a fluid proposition. He goes on to paraphrase Alfie Kohn:

“we need to be focused on EXCELLENCE and inquiry, problem solving and process, much more than our classrooms today largely driven by the demands of educational constituents focused on simplistic and often meaningless outcomes like subjective grades and norm-referenced test scores.”

I would go a step further than Todd and say, leaders in education need to be in a constant state of evaluation as they move forward. All educators need to be constantly evaluating practice and engaging in collaborative learning opportunities with their peers. Ours is not an adventure with a destination, it is an ever-changing horizon with new opportunities over each hill. The standardized testing Kohn decries, governmental requirements to meet arbitrarily arrived at “standards,” and a “foolish consistency” evidenced by adherence to tradition are all impediments to educational change.

As the early explorers stood on the deck, they imagined the shores they would reach. However, the shore was not their destination, it was a starting point for further exploration and they contemplated that process long before arrival on the shore. I do not think they considered whether the shore was “good enough.” They did not see a destination; instead, they saw the horizon.

Though it is debated whether Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortez burned his ships upon landing on the shores of Mexico, the idea that he did suggests a powerful metaphor for education. Consider the math: Todd’s challenge, “How will you decide which distant horizons are most worthy of exploration?” increased by Wesley’s warning about “more of the same” multiplied by the idea of “burning the ships” so as not to retreat when the horizon looks daunting. This could be the formula for real, sustainable, substantive change in education.

Rethink education. Practice the art of learning. Facilitate the learning space with a map of ever-growing best practices. I suggest we need not be concerned about arrival; instead, we need to be ever vigilant to the beauty and adventure on the horizon and intentionally architect learning experiences that challenge our students, and ourselves as teachers.

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I am days away from completing a two semester program that will take me in a new career direction. That is both happy and sad. I love learning and being able to keep intellectually challenged, I will miss  that. However, I love new challenges and looking at the unknown horizion, map in hand.

A significant part of my plan is to return to my blog and be more focused in my writing. Though the map is heading me toward the legal and policy side of education, my heart remains in the classroom, with students, and hearing the voices in the marketplace of ideas among my Twitter and FB educator friends. I hope to be, even tangentially, a voice of revolutionary thought in the rethinking of American education.

@tylerbreed tweeted a link this morning to one of my favorite blogs (which due to my own course work I haven’t kept up with since last September) and I received a nice shot of invigoration from the thoughts in David Warlick’s post: The Continerless Learning Environment.

David addresses many antiquated ideas that still pervade the reality of education in America, and succinctly summarizes much of what I have written about in one paragraph:

“I’ve written about this before, that we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that you need containers to teach and learn.  It happens within the fixed walls of the classroom, between the covers of our pre-packaged textbooks, and the inflexible confines of the daily schedule.  We even measure learning, to a certain degree, by the amount of time students are contained in their seats.”

Therein lies what holds American education back. Technology in many forms, even some that don’t plug into the wall or need a battery, have  altered the paradigm and education generally has not paid attention. We are, as David points out, stuck inside a box, inside a box, inside box which does not encourage or value the idea of open and free learning environments.

David’s voice is salient and his implied challenge exciting. I would only disagree with one statement, that what he is talking about is Project Based Learning (PBL). It is something greater than that. The idea he is developing is learning within the context of learning. One can not embark on an adventure without being in the adventure itself. The adventure is limitless and boundles as it may develop in many different directions simultaniously (ala differentiated learning). This is the type of explosive classroom or collegial collaborative where innovation within the learner experience occurs.

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One of my former eighth grade students is in her junior year and studying education . . . she contacted me via Facebook and asked for my responses to a series of questions in an area I have always had an interest in. I thought it would be something to share . . . so here it is:

Hi Lakeshia . . . I hope I am not too late with this . . . but here goes:

1. How do you figure out the various learning styles of the students?

A. There are a number of ways. The best way is to familiarize yourself with a number of the learning styles theories that exist. Some are stronger and more reliable than others, but understanding the underlying theories in them gives you a well rounded, broad perspective from which to either choose one, or develop your own approach to looking at your students. I would suggest exploring the following individuals ideas about learning styles:

Carl Gustav Jung, David Kolb, Bernice McCarthy, Howard Gardner, Anthony Gregorc, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers among others . . . not all of these focus on “learning styles” but at a minimum they address issues surrounding the study of learning styles.

Dateline: some time in the near future, in a newspaper of your choice: Kaplan to take over the educational system in the United States in an effort to make sure test scores are the best in the world!

I have been on a hiatus of sorts as I go back to school to earn a paralegal degree. My intent is to work within my state legislature to have an active role in the process of educational policy development and enactment. However, the combination of an article in USAToday, a blog post by Darren Draper (Technology Specialist in Utah), and another by Jeff Utecht (K-12 Technology Resource Facilitator at Shanghai American School in Shanghai, China) pulled me away from my practice in writing case briefs to write today.

“Teachers take test scores to the bank as bonuses” blares a headline in USAToday. The article addresses the idea of teacher pay and the ways in which different districts are approcahing the issue. Two approaches are highlighted:

• In Chicago, teachers at a handful of schools can earn up to $8,000 in annual bonuses for improved scores, while mentor teachers and “lead teachers” can earn an extra $7,000 or $15,000, respectively.

• In Nashville, middle-school math teachers can earn up to $15,000 based on student performance.

The writer then asks, “Do such plans work?” and cites research done by Vanderbilt that has found, “mostly promising, if limited, results.” This is the wrong question to ask, the wrong answer to seek. The real question begging to be asked is, “What does this approach do to the quality of education in the United States?” If our goal is to turn out good test takers who can learn and play the test question game it only makes sense that we turn the entire educational system over to a business such as Kaplan, who makes wonderful profits teaching students how to take tests.

What does such an approach to education do to the teaching professional? What does it do to the profession?

Those along with other obvious questions ran through my mind as I read the USAToday piece. As I read, I recalled a blog post by Darren Draper from this past weekend. Darren says:

“I mean, think about it. Did not we, or well-intentioned people just like us, create the policies and bureaucracies that currently regulate how things are handled within our schools? Are not we the ones that built the system, played the games, and engaged in the politics that have made schools what they are today?” (emphasis his own)

and goes on to quote Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal:

“If we tried to get better people, where would we find them? Even if found, how could we ensure that they too would not become ensnared by the political forces at work?”

But the article in USAToday suggests a vein of thought that says if you narrowly define what a teachers role is (making sure kids perform well on standardized tests) and throw more money their way we will magically have the wonderful schools we need and the worlds most accomplished students. Is a plan to reward teachers for improved students standardized tests scores going to solve the inherent problems in our educational system? No. Why? Because it fails to address the root cause of the mediocrity that is occuring our educational system. Darren makes the salient point that the system exists and was designed by well meaning individuals and Bolman and Deal support it by pointing out you can change the faces, but when the system doesn’t change it won’t matter.

“Stony River” replied to Darren and brings to the fore the real question that needs asking:

The expression ‘why fix it if it ain’t broke?’ does not answer the question ‘Who said the system ever worked?’

This is the question never asked. The idea of school reform has been around for ages. Piecemeal approaches to improvement have been undertaken. All educators have worked in a school or district where the “reform du jour” is presented each fall just prior to the start of school. Far too often those good ideas die by Christmas Break because the training was insufficient and follow-up and mentoring never took place. Reform doesn’t work, “River” identifies what would:

Re-New, Re-Invent, Re-Design, Re-Think, Re-Make, Re-Create – dead systems cannot be resurrrected no matter how much bail-out money is donated. The irony is that to bail out a sinking vessel it is best to use an empty bucket!

“River’s” comment connects well with the ideas presented by Utecht this morning in his blog:

Systematic change does not come easy. There are many factors, people, and a history to overcome. Yet educational organizations find themselves struggling with the changes needed to stay relevant in a connected, digital world.

There is the avenue, systemic change, not reforming . . . changing it. Tom Peters loves to use the phrase “Re-imagine.” It is time to move past the reform mentality and realize that all the band-aids being placed all over education in recent years can not stem the bleeding, re-constructive surgery is needed. Utecht continues with his idea:

There are many ways to approach systematic change, yet systematic change begins and ends with a vision. A vision of what your organization hopes to aspire to some day. A vision is never really meant to be accomplished, but is instead a guiding light for an organization. A statement that allows the organization and it’s employees to focus on the task at hand.

So I am left wondering at that USAToday piece . . . what is the vision conveyed by the approach it describes? Do we want kids that can innovate, creatively innovate, astound us with new ideas and unexpected twists on old ones? Is that going to happen if we continue to create systems that discourage true learning and innovation? “Jorgie“, in another reply to Darren’s post:

“. . . the reality is there is very little motivation for most people to innovate and a very big incentive not to.”

We need policy that encourages innovation, that allows it, that requires it. We need a new system, to re-imagine what school is and build something new that accomplishes what we all dream about. I hope my lane change in education will allow me to influence policy so that great teachers like Draper, Utecht, and Demitrious C. Sinor have the chance to build something we can all be proud of . . . a system that encourages our children to think, explore, and invent.

]]> http://constructingmeaning.com/2008/10/22/kaplan-to-run-us-schools/feed/ 2 akamrt 41_04_89-school-ahead_web http://constructingmeaning.com/2008/05/23/what-if-your-school-blew-up-the-little-becky-approach-to-school-reform/ http://constructingmeaning.com/2008/05/23/what-if-your-school-blew-up-the-little-becky-approach-to-school-reform/#comments Fri, 23 May 2008 16:02:57 +0000 Greg http://akamrt.wordpress.com/?p=43 ]]>

One of the most debilitating aspects of today’s educational environment is the fear of failure. No, I am not talking about students, I am talking about teachers and administrators. There is a constant fear of losing jobs, funding, the chance to do all they hoped they would by working the field of education, specifically . . . making a difference. This fear is the largest barrier to educational reform.

The obsessive focus on standardized testing, textbooks, and core curriculum has done more damage to the learning environment in the United States than just about anything else. It is as simple as the fact that, continually studying for a test just isn’t fun for students, nor does it engage their innate curiosity about life and the world around them . . . and much worse, it creates a permanent perception that school is a boring place, with educators (highly skilled professionals) primarily taking the blame.

In his presentation yesterday morning (5/22) at the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Spring Meeting, Dr. Yong Zhao, Technology in Education & Educational Psychology Director for the Center Of Teaching & Technology College of Education, Michigan State University, commented that standardized testing kills creativity and teaches students that they all need to know exactly the same material in exactly the same way. More importantly he presented a challenging idea, that it might be a positive move to throw out core curriculum. (Listen to his presentation here: Innovation3)

There has been much hand wringing over education for a long time. There have been reform movements and public policy attempts to “turn things around” in school. While the intent has been admirable, the results have not been effective – but why?

After 9/11 the United States scrambled to put policy, organizations, and laws in place that would ensure that the country would be safe from those kinds of attacks ever again. That’s the problem. The terrorist organizations, no doubt, anticipated this so they were already planning ways to disrupt the lives of the citizens of the United States differentlty . . . ways that weren’t being planned for.

There is a direct corollary to educational environments as they exist today: schools are designed to solve yesterdays, and occassionally todays problems – but not tomorrows. The solution is the re-imagining of what learning is, looks like, and how to facilitate it. But to do that, we must be willing to blow up what currently exists. That’s where Rebecca Barry enters the discussion.

Little Becky, as she is known around Dublin, Ireland, is an adorable little girl who was put up to making prank calls by a morning radio show in Dublin. Here she is trying to get her school blown up:

What would happen if your school made a “crash or a whollop,” what would you do? Of course I don’t mean this literally, but figuratively. What if there were no rules, no traditions, no rituals and the idea of school could be re-imagined?

In her book The Future and Its Enemies, Virgina Postrel (blog) asks a series of pertinent questions:

“How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization.: Do we search for stasis – a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embraced dynamism – a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? . . . Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape.”

There seems to be a steady march towards the writing of a new educational manifesto and it is taking place primarily online. EdTech leaders have seen email turn into listservs and then social networks (Ning, Twitter, Pownce), bookmarks in your browser turn into social bookmarking (Digg, Diigo, del.icio.us) and YouTube into Ustream. Technology was misapplied when it was brought into the classroom, being used to maintain stasis, perpetuate tradition and ritual that has existed in education for 100+ years. It hasn’t had the type of influence that was imagined 25 years ago. But, it can . . . and I believe it will in the hands of dedicated EdTech leaders and innovative teachers. It isn’t a panacea, it is the vehicle to implement the process of re-imagining education.

Right now the tools that students are using to construct meaning, identity, and place are considered, by the majority of the educational community, to be disruptive. This can even be the case among the staunchest of EdTech leaders. Considering this: I recall being part of a conversation in Boulder, Colorado while attending the Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference as part of my MA work in Pepperdine University’s OMAET program. We used TappedIn as our classroom venue during the distance phases of the program and during the conference a number of us were sitting around talking to a few of our professors and mentioned the fact that while we were attending their classes in TappedIn, we also opened an instance of AOL Instant Messenger and carried on a parallel conversation. The immediate reaction from some of the professors was indignation. How dare we sit and whisper in the back of the classroom while class was going on. Remember these were professors in a technology rich program designed to prepare us to be EdTech leaders. We explained how this peripheral conversation revolved around the main discussion and actually deepened and extended the one taking place in the “classroom” – and though it appeared to be “disruptive” it actually was as essential as the main discussion. (A caveat, those professors remain, to this day, as the most positive influences in my professional life, many thanks to Linda Polin, Gary Stager, Paul Sparks, Margret Reil, Mercedes Fisher, and Sue Talley.)

The world around the classroom is in hyper-flux, changing constantly at an ever increasing pace. But what about education? The best word to describe change in education is, “incrementalism.” It seems as if reform in the educational arena is always designed to proceed at a baby step pace. This doesn’t work! So let’s blow it up and re-imagine. In his book Re-Imagine!, Tom Peters talks a lot about “relevance” in the business world, (Tom Peters photo by Allison Shirreffs):

“To my 30-year old readers: I hereby wager that when you’re my age, Wal*Mart and Dell will be either dead or irrelevant.”

Sure Peters is a “business guru” but the content of this particular book has massive implications for education. Is he right? We will find out one day, but he has been spot on far more than he has been wrong. So, if Dell can one day be irrelevant, can schools be so as they exist today? Are they already irrelevent as they exist today? How about this from Education Next a journal published by the Hoover Institute at Stanford University:

“Computer-based learning is on the cusp of transforming traditional public education, say Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen and his colleague Michael B. Horn in the summer 2008 issue of Education Next. Based on their analysis of data on enrollments, about half of all education courses will be delivered online in just over a decade’s time.”

The article goes on to point out that the online student population was 22 times larger in 2007 than in 2000. Are schools irrelevant? Yes, as they are today. But, is the idea of education irrelevant? NO! So when does the re-imagine revolution start? It begins when we look for answers in the way students learn outside the structures of the classroom. It begins when we admit they might be learning far more, and far more practical material, outside of the classroom. It begins when we pick up the phone and call the demolition company – the people who also carry the vision for designing something new – and start taking risks and leave behind the fear of failure (failure = success), leave behind the traditional proprietary attitudes of the educational arena. It begins when we plant idea seeds outside of the comfort of our networks and use our networks to extend our discussions. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child program, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Labratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology, once said,

“Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

Be sure and read Dr. Scott McLeod’s post at Dangerously Irrelevant: So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?

(A final caveat: I am unashamed about the influence that books, people, and ideas have on my thinking and this post was heavily influenced by the book Re-imagine! . . . the word itself I adopt as a hue-and-cry and I think Mr. Peters would approve)

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There are scouts, those who go ahead and explore the landscape and discover the possibilities. They are followed by early settlers who arrive immediately after and discover uses of the landscape and begin to build a new settlement. Following them are those who’ve heard the tales of a new world and made the decision to join the experiment. Those who remained behind had one of two options; ignore the new world developing out of their immediate sight, or become a facilitator for the development while maintaining the necessities and structures of the old settlements that supported the new.

This post started rattling around my head a couple of weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I was reading Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi while I was trying to sweat off the pounds accumulating while I read my RSS feeds. I had begun this book previously, but left it bookmarked on the shelf for quite a awhile, until a tweet by @bokardo (his blog) that eventually led me to his Amazon list of must read books. Linked was listed and I pulled it off the shelf and stared anew. I had begun the book before I was Twitterized, even before I started to seriously blog about EdTech. The book took on a new dimension this time and my brain went into overdrive as I considered it’s message in light of Twitter, Ning’s such as Classroom 2.0, Slideshare, Diigo, and the list goes on.

The more I read, the more I focused on my experience with my Twitter stream. I find my stream to be the place I discover much insight and wisdom, as well as information and directions to great ideas on the web. There is a large EdTech community within Twitter and the flow of information and exchange of ideas is far beyond anything I experienced as a classroom teacher for 20+ years. Since being Twitterized, I have often thought of a Tom Peters‘ quote I read in Re-imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,

A New Social Contract. Societies that educate their young to break the rules and invent vivid new futures.

This appears to be the attitude of the network of EdTech practitioners and evangelists I follow on Twitter. There is a strong network that has emerged and nurtured itself there, so as I was reading and running in place I grabbed my phone and tweeted the following three tweets:

I was struck by the cocktail party picture that Barabasi was playing with early in the book, using it as a description of the process of network formation. The path that information can travel seems to be something like a drop of water gathering with others to form a trickle, the trickle ending up in a rivulet, the rivulet to a stream, and on to a tributary, to a river, to the sea. There is power in the social joining of similar minds. With the Internet and social networks it happens at a significantly greater pace than that – but the idea works for me.

Barabasi’s “Third Link” brought the idea of “six degrees of separation” to the discussion in my head and this is where the thoughts began to coalesce.

“Six degrees of separation is intriguing because it suggests that, despite our society’s enormous size, it can easily be navigated by following social links from one person to another – a network or six billion nodes in which any pair of nodes are on average six links from each other.”

Now, the idea of six degrees of separation has been made somewhat trite by public media (old media primarily), but it has proven, over time, to be a reliable theory. No, this isn’t a book review, so here is the next connection that surfaced as I was reading.

I regularly pick up new links to Twitter toys via the Twitter Freaks group on Diigo (started by Lucy Gray of Infinite Thinking Machine and High Techpectations). Just prior to my reading I had been playing with TweetWheel a tool developed by Augusto Becciu and plotted my network:

I noticed some interesting things. First, some of the EdTech practitioners I followed also follow tech industry icons such as Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and Cali Lewis or information outlets such as Ars Techinca, but not many. Now that isn’t a big deal, just interesting. The second thing I noticed was that none of the above were following any EdTech practitioners, evangelists, or bloggers that I an following, now that I found disconcerting. The final observation was how many of the EdTech’s I was following were following each other – the web was amazing.

Here’s the rub. There is such a wonderful network of EdTech’s thinking, sharing, learning, growing within the Twitter universe (and other places, but Twitter was on my mind) . . . BUT . . . isn’t this just preaching to the choir? I remember how wonderful it was, while I was in the classroom, to run into another educator who had visions for how technology was going to re-invent the learning environment in their classroom. There is an amazing energy that is generated by that interaction. Even more exciting was the rare situation when a teacher sitting nearby would interrupt the discussion, eventually joining in, and getting excited about beginning to bring tech tools and applications into their classrooms for the first time.

It is that last experience that ties this all together. Before Twitter, I didn’t have any contact with @ijohnpederson, @mrplough07, @lsshanks or @markwagner, I didn’t know who they were much less that they were involved in the EdTech arena. Through Twitter I gained access to their current thoughts and ideas, their blogs, and most importantly I reduced the six degrees of separation to ZERO. No this isn’t a pro-Twitter rant, it is a chance to point out that not only did I reduce the distance between the people I follow from six to zero, but I also reduced the distance between the people they work with and want to influence (think the ones following the early settlers) from six to one. This network is the strongest tool possible for making massive change in the way education happens. This network is directly connected to other strong EdTech networks giving it added strength with each connection.

How can I help those in my Twitter stream or my friends at Classroom 2.0 make a difference in their educational venues? How can I allow them to enter my classroom or school and help me make a difference there? There are many options, such as responding when someone I follow is presenting Twitter as part of a Web 2.0 enhanced approach to classroom re-invention, staff development, or professional growth. I can share the links I gather using my Twitter stream + Yahoo Pipes + my RSS Feed aggregater in the most advantageous way in my building. I can print hard copies of their blog posts, as well as send links via email to teachers within my building (or that I have worked with over the years), addressing the things I have heard them talk about in the lounge, the halls, or the parking lot. By doing this, I bring these great voices from six degrees away, to one, and then to zero. I can effectively bring you, the EdTech’s from my social networks, into the classroom of many other teachers that you would not otherwise have any contact with. Hopefully, your insight, wisdom, and vision will inspire and encourage and the movement to re-imagine education will grow exponentially – that would be the true releasing of the power of the EdTech network I have discovered in the Web 2.0 world – which would change the answer to my third tweet from May 5:

We increase our listening audience by reducing the degrees of separation between good teachers and good ideas and by increasing each others sphere of influence. Barabasi said in the introduction to Linked ,

“. . . we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else.”

Hope you won’t mind when I link you and your ideas with other great teachers and watch how things can change.

Blogs of Twitter-ers I mentioned above:

@ijohnpederson: IJOHNPEDERSON

@mrplough07: The Next Step

@lsshanks: 2020 Nexus

@markwagner: Educational Technology and Life

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Sitting at Beans ‘n Cream having my morning tea and a tweet came through the stream . . . @mrplough07 linked to a new blog entry decrying his experience in a class he is taking as part of his EdTech masters work. He opened with his lament:

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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I was having my morning tea, reading my feeds, and following my Twitter stream when @markwagner linked to a blog post he wrote in ‘07 and asked what message we would send from the future to the principals of today . . . paused a moment and decided to give it a shot. I logged into the Google doc that @markwagner was using and shared:

School is no longer passive, learning and technology have converged allowing students the power to guide their learning. This has created a myriad of new degrees and avenues for creativity that weren’t even imagined when you were directing your student. Please imagine . . . the wild. Visualize . . . the unknown. Remember that vision is the art of seeing the invisible. Create new places of learning that don’t resemble the “tried and true.” But, rather, open the windows to the art of possibility. (With appreciations to both Emerson and Benjamin Zander for having vision.)

It felt fantastic to write that, to bring together the ideas floating around in my head and express them concisely. It was heartening to envision the possibility that educational leaders would exercise the potential of their positions, working together to design new learning environments that are not predicated upon the timeworn structures and ideas that pervade todays educational systems.

I may sound like a broken record, but what we need within the educational arena is a dedication to take only the essentials and leave the “old” behind and create something new – schools that are true learning ecosystems . . . living, fluid places were learning grows and spreads like the underground runners of the tiger lilies that grow wild here in Wisconsin. New ideas blossoming miles away from the original thought . . . but tied back to it via the network of underground roots that continue to venture out to new places.

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