…which I hope you are, the session/facilitator lineup/schedule has been posted, and there are some great topics for conversation and some equally great people leading them. It’s the edu place to be on January 23-25.

If you are at all interested in joining the session I’m leading on “What Will Classroom Learning Look Like?” please be sure to note that this is not a presentation as much as it is a conversation around some ideas posted on this Google Notebook page. It would be helpful to peruse them beforehand if you think you might sit in, and if you have any other texts that might stimulate the discussion, please let me know. My plan is to simply give a 10 minute framing, break us up into small groups to discuss and then work our way back into a whole group conversation using some modified protocols that will hopefully create a vision that answers the question. If we have time, we’ll steer the conversation to the how do we get there part.

Here again is the session description:

Inspired by recent studies and reflections on the evolution of online social media and its uses by teens, we’ll spend some time attempting to paint a picture (in some broad strokes) around what effective classroom learning might look like in schools that have chosen to evolve their models. We’ll frame the conversation around the questions posed in the conclusion of the “Living and Learning with New Media” study released in November by the MacArthur Foundation. Those questions, as well as some other salient and relevant quotes are included on a Google Notebook page at http://tinyurl.com/educonlearning.

Now, I gotta register and get a hotel room…

I know I’ve been on this “do my kids really have to go to college?” bender for a while now, but yesterday’s New York Times column by Charles Murray has added some new fuel to the fire. In “Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?” Murray basically makes the case that a) a bachelor’s degree should not be the prime determiner of employment as an adult and b) for most kids, the bachelor’s is a credential that is “beyond their reach” yet we spend countless hours and dollars in preparation and pursuit anyway.

 Let me just say, once again, I am not anti college or anti-intellectual. What I am is anti the treadmill that we’ve set up for many kids in primarily upper middle class suburban schools that streamlines them into a very narrow track to a four year degree right out of high school. The treadmill my kids are going to be encouraged to climb on in the very near future. The one my wife and kids and I are going to have to decide whether we want them on. The statistics are pretty compelling: only about one in four Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and college dropout rates are over 50%. As Murray says,

For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work…[And] Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t think my kids can’t succeed at college. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t fully appreciate the advantages my kids have in growing up in a white, upper middle class home where both parents are educated by the traditional means and (hopefully) intellectually curious enough to motivate their kids to learn. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t know the economic benefits of a college degree. But I can’t help but think that my kids have opportunities to learn what they need to know to be successful in ways that I didn’t, ways that in some measure may have been there all along and that maybe I didn’t take advantage of, but ways that are also brand new and game-changers. This is not a suggestion that we replace a bachelor’s with a blog, btw, but it is an open question as to whether or not my kids have more ways to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful and show what they can do on an unprecedented scale. And if so, it’s a challenge to move them off of a college treadmill and onto a learning treadmill where the system’s job is not necessarily to raise it’s college acceptance rates but to prepare all kids for a variety of choices and scenarios upon which they can create their futures.

More and more, all I want from my kids’ school is to help me identify what they love, what their strengths are, and then help them create their own paths to mastery of their passions. Stop spending so much time focusing on subjects or courses that “they need for college” but don’t interest them in the least. Help them become learners who will be able to find and make good use of the knowledge that they need when they need it, whether that means finding an answer online or taking a college course to deepen their understanding. And finally, prepare them to create their own credentials that will powerfully display their capabilities, passions and potentials. (And I know that my more immediate challenge right now is to figure out whether or not my kids’ public school system can do that and, if not, what to do about it. More on that later.)

Maybe I’m dreaming. Or maybe it’s because the last seven years have turned me into an “alternate route” learner and passion-based professional, and intellectually I’ve just loved this SO much more than when I went to college (though college did have its moments…just not usually in the classroom.) Either way, it just feels like there’s going to be some shift happening here in the next few years as well, and I, at least, have to start thinking about it sooner rather than later.

(Photo “Stairway to learning” by Point-Shoot-Edit.)

Time to shut down the laptop for spell. Have a great holiday and  very Happy New Year!

(Photo “Big Flare” by Alessandro Pinna)

The other night at a friend’s holiday party, I started picking the brains of people who had kids going to school at the local high school, the one that my own kids are scheduled to attend in a few short years. I got a variety of responses, most of them pretty positive. It”s a smallish country high school, about 950 students 9-12, mostly white middle class, and probably typical in most aspects. I don’t think anyone would rate it as outstanding, but it’ not near the bottom by traditional measures either.

It’s those traditional measures that struck me in the responses I got. One parent, who is a classroom teacher at another school, said “well my daughter scored really well on the PSAT’s, so they [the school] must be doing something right.” Another parent said “well, they’ve got like 10 AP courses which is pretty good.” And a few others commented on the fact that their kids were doing well socially and had a lot of friends. I was struck by how kind of programmed the responses felt. Almost like, it’s a school, what more can you say?

Ironically, I ran into an old friend right before the party who had recently retired from teaching at that school, and he articulated his assessment like this: “If you want your kids get the best experience, you have to advocate for them.” In other words, I’m going to have to find ways to help them get the “best” teachers and to be active in steering them through the program. “Look,” he said. “It’s like 25% of the teachers are great and your kids will learn a lot. Another 40% are fine, and they’ll make it interesting. The rest? They’re just doing their time. Not much different from anywhere else.”

Did I mention there is a board seat opening up this spring? Hmmm….

Finally, one of our good friends went and visited a Waldorf school nearby and spent the day watching students and teachers interact. It was interesting to listen to her talk about the experience. “It was amazing,” she said. “The kids were engaged, making things, talking to teachers. It was totally different.” They had a compost bin, too.

Now I know it’s not totally fair to make comparisons here, but I wish I would have heard more of those types of responses about the high school. I wish I would have heard stories of kids changing the world, of pushing through personal barriers, of creative expressions, of challenges met, of real work for real purposes. I wish it had been more than PSATs and AP tests.

So I’m wondering two things. How are you advocating for your kids? And more importantly, how are you assessing your kids’ schools? If you’re reading this, I’m thinking PSAT scores and number of AP courses probably aren’t too important. (Or are they?) In the 21st Century, what should we be demanding of our schools?

(Photo: “Rows Upon Rows” by natashalcd.)

So I’m still happy that in a few weeks Barack Obama will become president, but I have to admit I’m not as happy today as I was yesterday. I was hoping for the bold stroke, the real vision when it came to choosing a Secretary of Education, but alas, it doesn’t appear that’s what happened. And to be honest, I was really amazed at the tenor of the debate in the weeks leading up to the choice yesterday of Arne Duncan and the lack of any substantive discussion of change. We can wait and see if anything truly progressive comes out of this selection in terms of standardized tests, teacher accountability and equality of access among the many other things challenging our kids’s education right now, but looking at the track record, I’m skeptical.

It may just be that Obama looked at the landscape and sensed the time wasn’t right for a change agenda in education. Or perhaps, as Gary Stager would suggest, he doesn’t have a broad vision for how to educate students more effectively and compellingly than what we’ve already got. Or maybe it’s a combination of both (and more.) But I have to say, between his practical embrace of technology, the fact that he has two school age kids, and a mantra for change, I was primed for something great.

And here is the thing: I am so tired of waiting for something, at this point almost anything to meaningfully change in our collective story of education. I look at my own kids every day and grow more and more frustrated with their education, one that is not unlike millions of other kids in this country and one that is no doubt degrees better than millions more. And the world as it is is not helping out either. Huge budget cuts are looming almost everywhere you look. In our state, budgets will no doubt fail in April, and more cuts will ensue. And rest assured, there will be no bailout for education.

But more than anything, why this choice depresses me so was articulated in an Ira Socol post from a couple of days ago that just resonated deeply with what I’ve been witnessing the last few years: we generally seem to have lost our imagination when we think about education. And to me, that’s just such a huge irony right now. In the twenty-five years since I entered public schools as a teacher there has never been a time with so much reason to dream, to imagine the possibilities. One of the strongest pulls of this network is that we get to see snippets of what’s possible in classrooms from around the world, places where kids are truly excited about learning, where they are empowered by technology and vision to do things differently.  The world is literally a few mouse clicks or phone taps away, people, information, shared knowledge, tools…learning. The passion of these teachers and students is palpable. And this is not to suggest, btw, that there aren’t many of those experiences happening in classrooms offline, without technology. But the scope and scale of what we could do right now are, I think, unprecedented.

But my problem, our problem, is that this is not reality. It’s not reality for 90% of teachers in classrooms (if not more.) As Socol says:

But in schools, we go backwards. We even declare it, saying, we’re going “back”wards “to basics.” When we let a few new things trickle in, we control them so fiercely that they change almost nothing. Rather than tearing down classroom walls our kids now spend more time in school and even take fewer field trips. Rather than alternative evaluations we now have standardized tests for all ages. Rather than project-based learning we now have Core Curriculum. Rather than social justice we have “zero tolerance.” And rather than the freedom of mobiles in the classroom we have the coercive control of clickers. Rather than the freedom of the internet we have filters and blocks. Rather than the interaction of messaging and blogs and Twitter and Skype we have rules against these technologies. Rather than pushing past Wikipedia and print-based knowledge design, we don’t even allow Wikipedia in so that we can discover its limits. Rather than computers allowing for individualization, we “lock them down.”

And with all of that, is it any wonder that we’ve stopped dreaming of what can be? Of all the teachers I’ve had the privilege of speaking and working with in the last few years, I doubt that many of them can even now really dream of a different way, one that celebrates learning and connections and independence in the ways that many of those networked classrooms we see. They might be able to visualize it, but I don’t think many see it as a potential reality in their classrooms, in their schools. There are too many reasons why it can’t happen. Too many obstacles. Too little vision. (I would be happy to be proven wrong, btw.)

And that’s why when I heard the Duncan choice, I drifted back to this, to what Ira Socol blogged, to what I would have loved for Obama to read and take to heart:

It is time to stop hiding and start dreaming. It is time to reject what we are doing now: hell, that’s easy, we know it does not work. And it is time to reject all the “tinkering around the edges” which wastes our energy and accomplishes nothing. We have to say no to everything that is not sufficiently transformative, which does not change what education is, and put all of our energies into ideas which will transform.

This appointment does not fit that bill, unfortunately. And in a moment when we really, really, really could have used some vision for transformative change, I don’t think we got it.

So, we’ll have to continue changing one parent at a time, one teacher at a time, one classroom at a time, one school at a time, connecting the good works and finding a wider and wider audience for the conversation. And we have to continue to create that compelling new reality of what’s possible, post by post, tweet by tweet. And, we have to continue to dream it.

(Photo by PeterDuke.)

So there seems to be a little string of really good blog posts that are laying out some definite re-vision of what schools can look like. This one, by Bill Farren, fits nicely with those Mark Pesce posts that I’ve been drifting in and out of here and here. But with Bill’s post the graphics are almost too good for description. How’s this for a visual on networked learning?

And I just love this description:

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?  Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions.

Again, this is higher ed context more than K-12, but I think there is much to think about here… Has me wondering what, realistically, we can expect from schools not just in terms of opening up their eyes to confront what is in front of them but then re-envisioning themselves accordingly. Funny, but as I read more and more of this, I grow increasingly excited and increasingly skeptical all at once.

So sue me if sometimes I get too smitten with those who write compellingly and with vision about what all of this connective learning stuff means for the long term, but I love to read stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time. Case in point is this post by Mark Pesce titled “Fluid Learning” which I read first last week and have reread a few time since. I know it’s not free of holes, but I have to admit that the picture he paints of higher education in the near future resonates with a lot of my own thinking, and it’s got me ruminating even more deeply on what all of this means for my 9 and 11 year old in terms of what their education is preparing them for.

Start with this:

The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning.

That will at least give you a sense of where he’s going with this, and I’ll give you the briefest of synopsis with the hope you’ll read the whole thing.

He starts with the story of RateMyProfessors.com and the influence it’s having on decision making by students and universities in terms of the courses they take and the people they hire respectively. During a PLP session last night where we were talking about this, Robin Ellis chimed in that her son had relied heavily on the site throughout his college career, and I’m sure others would attest to that as well. (I pinged a few of my former students on Facebook and they all were avid users.) While this wasn’t the original intent of the guys who created the site

…knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

But what I’m really chewing on is the idea that we can do much of what higher ed offers on our own these days. That, I think, has huge implications for my kids and for the way we prepare students for their learning futures. Pesce asks

Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?…Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?

And, to really push that thought:

In this near future world, students are the administrators.

Whether or not my kids decide to go to college, the question for me right now is shouldn’t my school system be preparing them equally as well for a world where traditional college is not the only route to academic success? Shouldn’t my kids get some concept of how to gather their own information, find their own teachers, develop their own collaborative classrooms and write their own curricula? I mean at the very least, shouldn’t we let kids know that is an option these days?

And as the role of students changes, so to does the role of teachers and classrooms. Teachers are mentors and facilitators (not a new idea, I know) and classrooms can be anywhere.

The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom.

Pesce ends with four recommendations. First, “Capture Everything”:

This should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

Second, “Share Everything”:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

Third, “Open Everything” not just using open source, but creating “device interdependence” and in taking down the filters:

Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital…Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

And fourth, “Only Connect”, connecting students to their teachers and their peers:

Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education… Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

I know this last is a huge challenge for teachers and schools, but the reality is that we can connect to our teachers any time we like these days, and there are always teachers available. It’s just another way in which the traditional classroom is looking less and less like the real world.

Read the whole thing and, if you like, come back here and push the conversation in terms of K-12. I’ll write more about this later, but I am approaching the breaking point in terms of what my kids are getting at school. I’ve got to figure out a better way…

So, I’ve been telling everyone I see to come to EduCon 2.1 in Philly next month. After reading Chris’s info below, please register, and let me know if you’d like to help frame my discussion on “What Will Classroom Learning Look Like?”

Registration is now open for EduCon 2.1, the second annual conference and conversation on education and innovation hosted by Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy in conjunction with The Franklin Institute. We will be convening January 23-25, 2009. During the conference, educators from around the world will descend upon Philly to teach, to think and to learn how to improve their own practices and inform the larger dialogue on education as well. Aaron Sorkin wrote, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” It is time to show up.

EduCon is built on the Axioms:

1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members

2) Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen

3) Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.

4) Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate

5) Learning can — and must — be networked.

Visit the EduCon wiki to learn about the conversation schedule. Aside from the conversations, Friday night will feature a panel discussion where deep thinkers from various non-academic strata investigate the question, “What is the purpose of school?” While the need for a new educational course is clear, the path to that shift is not as obvious. Sunday’s panel will highlight those divergent paths as educational leaders for varying pedagogies engage each other in an attempt to make the case for how we should approach our educational evolution.

EduCon will also feature a pre-conference event on January 22nd this year – Constructing Modern Math/Science Knowledge – with participants Dr. David Thornburg, Dr. Gary Stager and more.

The stage is set for an amazing conference. No vendors. No sponsors. Simply – ideas, inquiry and pedagogy.

Show up.

General conference registration is $150 and $100 for School District of Philadelphia employees and includes Friday admittance to SLA’s partner museum The Franklin Institute and The National Constitution Center. Pre-Conference registration is $100.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Lehmann.

What Chris said: Show up!

So it’s been a whacky couple of days both in virtual and physical space. First my blog got hacked by some Cialis spammer who left invisible links in a post from a couple of weeks ago, which led to it being delisted by Google, which led to an upgrade and server transfer at edublogs (my host) which hit a couple of snags and left me blogless for a couple of days. (The shakes are just now abating.) Then last night on my way to Tess’s basketball practice, this doofus deer runs out in front of my little Prius too late for me to stop and I BANG into his right rear flank sending him flopping into a cornfield and sending me into a stream of profanities even I didn’t know existed. (Unfortunately, Tess’s friend was in the car. Fortunately, when I called her mom to fill her in and apologize, she said she was sure it was nothing she hadn’t heard before. I’ll take her word for it.) Upshot: one seriously banged up hybrid, one dead deer, and a couple of amazed kids.

But here’s the warm fuzzy side to both of these stories. (You knew there had to be one, right?) Shortly after I realized my blog was in Google hell, I Tweeted out its demise. Within a few minutes, Tim Lauer had diagnosed the problem, sending screen shots of the wonderful Cialis ads that came up on a Google search of my blog and later scouring my source code to find the offending post. Soon after, Steve Dembo, who was having the same problem, Tweeted a link to the “claim your blog” function in Google to get the relisting process started. (Steve’s is back in the Google database…mine, notsomuch, and they’re saying up to three weeks. Ugh.) Then, after my whole blog went down on Sunday to finally come back this morning, I got an e-mail from Lennie Symes, a total blog stranger, letting me know that my RSS feed wasn’t working properly. Got that squared away now too. And, I can’t not mention the efforts of Dean Shareski, he of too much time on his hands, who created a blog update status page to chronicle the event. Nice.

On the deer side (not a pretty picture, btw) when I went to the State Police barracks to file a report (for the insurance process), I decided to Tweet up a quick recap of the event while waiting for the paperwork. Within about 2 minutes I must have had 20 Tweets of concern back (well, most of concern, some bad poetry thrown in) from folks wondering if I was ok and how the deer was and if anyone was hurt, etc. I got a half dozen DM Tweets from people, even, surprisingly from a family member. (Who knew?) One even offered legal help if I needed it. (No, his name was not Vinny.) And there were a couple of venison recipes thrown in for good measure. It was, um, what’s the word, um, not surprising but, um, kinda nice 2.0, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, you don’t need me to make the point here, do you?

Thanks, everyone.

(Photo “Winking at You” by cyclewidow.)

Once again, from the “Shameless Self-Promotion Deptartment” comes this essay I wrote for the December issue of Edutopia Magazine. As always, would love to know what you think.

So I’m home from Seattle today with some mixed feelings about Microsoft’s School of the Future Summit, which was really excellent in some respects but left me wanting in others. The best part without question (and not that surprisingly) were the conversations with folks outside of the session rooms. With 250 or so people from 31 countries, it was probably the most diverse setting (geographically, at least) that I’ve found myself in. I had some interesting conversations with folks from Norway, Chile, Hong Kong, Sweden, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, the UK and others that no doubt gave me a much broader perspective of what the conversation feels like abroad. And it was diverse in ideas as well. My sense is that we’re all obviously feeling the pressure to think differently about schools and schooling, but depending on cultures and circumstances, there were a wide variety of approaches to the shift. I heard about models that ranged from kids doing one subject per full day throughout the week (as in math on Monday, science on Tuesday, etc.) to ones that made real use of mobile technologies, to others that were entirely online. (More about that in a second.) I talked to folks who taught in schools where every student had a computer and to others whose few classroom computers ran on dial up, some who were integrating social tools with depth, others who had never really considered them. It was, to put it mildly, a very eclectic and by and large passionate group.

But after a couple of days of listening to speakers like Michael Horn (“Disrupting Class“) and Tony Wagner (“The Global Achievement Gap“) I can’t say that I feel any greater clarity in the conversation around just what schools of the future are supposed to be about. Horn said that in 15 years almost 50% of all courses will be delivered online. Wagner said that we need to reinvent schools but didn’t give a very cohesive vision on how to do that.  And while it was encouraging to hear Martin Bean of Microsoft talk about teachers and students learning in “media rich, socially connected” spaces as “content creators and knowledge starters,” it was less so when he seemed to define the idea of “nurturing powerful communities of learning” simply as creating portals to connect various constituencies. Admittedly, those snippets may not be totally fair to those speakers’ larger messages, but they were indicative of the general sense that I got, one that said “yes, we need to do something, but we’re not very close to having a cohesive vision around what exactly we should do.”

Or something like that.

All of which made Rob Paterson’s post that came through my Twitter feed in the middle of the conference yesterday so much more thought-provoking. In talking about the pressures facing universities from decreasing budgets and relevance, Rob says

It’s going to be interesting to see how this unfolds. The web offers a whole new way of restoring this way of learning directly from an expert rather than from an institution.

Rob offers up a vastly different “hang out a shingle” driven model for some seeking learning after high school, one which challenges the diploma driven status quo pretty compellingly. And it really got me wondering (once again) about the relevance of the pretty standard K-12 curriculum and assessments that are driving our systems. As I commented to Rob, I think I’m finally getting to the root of my continued frustration with my kids’ education which is the system’s inability to help them find and nurture the areas they truly have passion for. It would be nice if the institution were the place that connected my kids to the experts they desired and needed to support their learning, wouldn’t it? Again, I know it’s more complex than that, but you get the point.

As would be expected, much of the conversation was spent on the barriers to change, and at some point I found myself amazed at how deeply woven the reasons why not are ingrained in our conversations. At one conversation, someone said that many of her teachers didn’t feel like they needed to teach with technology at all since their students were doing just fine passing the tests without it. And I wanted to scream (but instead politely said) ‘then we gotta change the assessments.” Nothing in these conversations changed my view that to really change what we do in schools we have to first change our understanding of what it means to teach in this moment. That doesn’t mean than we throw out all of the good pedagogy that we’ve developed over the years and make everything about technology. But it does mean, I think, that technology has to be a part of the way we do our learning business these days.

Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference. Andy agreed to come on and do a UStream at some point in the near future, and I’ll be sure to be posting times and dates in case you’d be interested.

Anway, just some reflecting on an interesting couple of days…

(Photo “green tree core” by pbo31.)

So just a couple of quick education centered observations about this past weekend, spent with various family members from both sides:

First, one of my tribe is a teacher at one of the top 15 high schools as listed in the current version of Connecticut Magazine. It’s a very well off district that sends a high number of it’s graduates to college, a good number of them to the “best” schools in the world. Over the years, he’s been hearing my spiel about technology and the Web, and he and a couple of his colleagues have been dipping their toes into the social tools waters with varying degrees of success with one very notable, very positive exception. So here’s the news: almost all of it is being done pretty much under the radar with very little discussion, investment or support of technology of any kind in the classroom. Most of the professional development is centered around the learning theory author du jour, and the focus of all of it is maintaining or increasing test scores. In other words, it’s pretty much all about trying to do better what we’ve been doing all along, assessing it all the same way, and hoping for the same result. There is little or no talk of “21st Century” (or whatever you want to call them) skills or literacies in terms of global collaboration, networking, connecting and problem solving.

My other story deals with a third grader on Wendy’s side of the family. She came to visit over the weekend and at one point she pulled out a little red workbook and started doing problems in it. “It’s homework,” she said, adding that she had six pages to do over the weekend. Later, when she was done and had left it open on the dining room table, I flipped through it a bit and saw page after page of pretty basic math and word problems and (fill in the blank). When I closed it, I finally noticed the title: “Preparation for the 3rd Grade New Jersey ASK Assessment.”

Oy.