Ten years from now, the next decade will be drawing to a close. My daughter will be 22, my son 20. I’ll be…older. It’s setting up to be a pretty important 10 years on a lot of fronts. If you believe the science, which I do, it may be the decade that we figure out how to work together to act on climate change and save ourselves (and our kids) from some hellish scenarios. Or not. If you believe, as I do, that the American political system is broken, it may be the decade that we take money out of the picture once and for all. Or not. And, if like me you believe that the current structure of the education system in this country (and elsewhere) is fundamentally flawed in preparing students for a life of learning, then this may be the decade real change breaks out. Or not.

I can’t help feeling that if I’m lucky enough to be sitting here blogging 10 years from now and there haven’t been some really big changes in the way we look at living and learning, we’ll have wasted another 10 years talking instead of evolving. And I think if you ask most people who are currently in education what they see things looking like 10 years from now, most wouldn’t paint much of a radically different picture.

I mentioned Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s new book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology in my previous post, and now that I’ve finished it, I wonder even more how all of this is going to play out. If you want to get to the crux of the argument in the book, Suchi Grover’s review at Teacher’s College Record does a pretty good job. (Note: Keep in mind, the book is published by Teacher’s College Press.)

Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s compelling argument for rethinking education may be encapsulated thus: We are not going to fix education by fixing the schools. They are a 19th century invention trying to cope in the 21st century…If schools cannot change fast enough to keep pace with the advances in learning technologies, learning will leave schooling behind. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology urges education stakeholders to envision a new kind of education that decouples learning and schooling.

That’s obviously a huge statement, that we’re not going to fix education by fixing the schools, and I’ve scarcely stopped thinking about it since I read it. I don’t think there is much question that schools cannot keep pace with what technology affords right now. What’s changing in education is happening outside the school walls with a few exceptions. That’s not to say that schools will cease to exist; obviously they won’t. As the authors write

Schools as we know them will not disappear anytime soon…but the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and they are already beginning to erode the identification of learning with schooling. As these new technologically driven seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more adaptive venues, and schools will have a narrower role in learning.

So what will that narrower role in learning look like? I think the big question for the next decade is this: In 2020, will schools be seen as just one of many important ways that our kids can become educated? And as a follow up, will there be other ways of “credentialing” what it means to be “educated”? Obviously, there are going to be huge disruptions that go along with a reduced importance of the traditional school model, and there are huge issues around equity and access that will have to be addressed among many others.

I think we’ve spent the last 10 years “tinkering on the edges” with these shifts. No doubt, the next 10 years are going to be pretty painful for schools in particular as we begin to really wake up to what all of this means for our kids’ learning lives. Or not. But even more, i the last 10 years are any indication, I think it’s going to be simply an amazing decade for learning in general.

Can’t wait to wade through it with you.

I always get in this reflective mood at the end of the year. I mean, I tend to do a lot of reflecting throughout the year (especially on planes), but at this point when the pace finally slows down a bit, I get to thinking about what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, and what it means, if anything. So much of this year has been a blur that it’s probably folly to try to capture it in some understandable way. But I’ve been trying to put some form to what’s changed, both in my own practice and in the larger conversation about schools.

My year can be summed up with less blogging, less online reading, more Tweeting, more PLP, more traveling. I’m feeling less connected to the online conversation, more connected to the on the ground conversation. I’ve met amazing people this year who have shared their successes and struggles, excitement and fears in profound ways. That coupled with our ongoing work with the 800 or so teachers in our PLP cohorts has really led me to a deeper understanding of how difficult these changes are and how ingrained traditional practice continues to be in schools. On balance, for me, it’s been a healthy, albeit difficult shift at times. It’s been a very good year.

But more on my mind for this space right now is what’s changed in terms of the larger conversation in 2009. And I mean changed, not just talked about. I’m in the midst of a great book by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson titled Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, and they spend about 20 pages writing about why the system is so resistant to change. The bottom line, they say, is that “teaching is an inevitably conservative practice.”

When embedded in institutions that protect instruction from systemic change, a conservative practice is reinforced by a conserving institution. It is difficult for teachers to implement substantially changed programs when they already have dedicated years adapting to what the traditional system of school offers (36).

They discuss three ways that schools deal with innovative technologies. First, they condemn them (see your local AUP), they co-opt them to support tried and true methods and curriculum, and, finally, they marginalize them, creating all of those “tinkering on the edges” initiatives to keep the reform minded happy. All of that resonates in the conversations I’ve had with folks this year. As much as people talk of change, the only stories that really get over the “transform” bar are what’s happening at my old school and from a superintendent in Iowa who told me he was in the process of “Napsterizing” education in his district. (I’m going to write more about both of those after the first of the year.)

So, as a way of taking stock, I’m asking, what’s changed?

I mean really changed in your school? What stories are there of moving wholesale to an inquiry-based curriculum, of real reinvention of assessments, of students participating in global learning networks, learning how to create their own personal networks around their own passions? Or even moving off of paper into a digital reading and writing space? Or moving from a teaching community to a learning community? Or other changes? My sense is that once again, there’s not all that much different today than a year ago.

Love to be proven wrong.

I’ve been thinking a lot again about phones and about the disruption they are already creating for most schools (high schools at least) and about the huge brain shift we’re going to have to through collectively to capture the potential for learning in our kids’ pockets. A few particular items have kind of come together of late that have been pushing the conversation in my head pretty hard.

First, this kinda cute little YouTube video titled “Phone Book.” Not sure who or what it was that led me to it, but it’s worth a quick couple of minutes to watch it.

Now take that concept and mix it with these four ideas:

• Apple’s next iTouch is coming out with 64GB of memory, and the iPhone won’t be too far behind that.
• In the next five years, every phone will be an iPhone. (And let’s not forget that there are already over 100,000 apps for that little sucker, many of them with relevance to the classroom.)
• We’ll soon be seeing what Steve Rubel is calling a “dumb shell” that takes the book idea in that video and creates a netbook sized (at least) keyboard and screen that your phone simply plugs into.
• According to NPR, the Pew Hispanic Center says that there is a definite trend toward phones being chosen over computers as computing devices, especially for those on the wrong end of the current digital divide. (The article makes more sense of that than I just did.)

All of which leads me to ask a whole bunch of questions:

• If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
• How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
• At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
• How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

And finally, the big kahuna, are we in the process of transforming (not just revising) our curriculum to work in a world that looks (metaphorically, at least) like this:

I wonder how many educators look at that picture and think “OMG, puhleeeese let me teach in that classroom!” (I suspect not many.) I wonder how many of them already do teach in classrooms that look like that if we consider the technology in kids pockets (or lockers) as the access point. (I suspect, more than you think.) The problem is, and I can guarantee you this, 95% of the curriculum currently being delivered in those classrooms would waste 95% of the potential in the room that we could glean from that access.

All too often we get hung up on the technology question, not the curriculum question. Here in New Jersey, every district has to submit a three year “Technology Plan” and as you can guess, most of them are about how many Smart Boards to install or how wireless access will be expanded. Very, very little of it is about how curriculum changes when we have anytime, anywhere learning with anyone in the world. Why aren’t we planning for that?

So I’m asking. When do we stop trying to fight the inevitable and start thinking about how to embrace it? Or, as Doug Johnson so eloquently suggests, when are we gonna saddle this horse and ride it?