So, yesterday I tried to articulate what I think might be a new story to tell around education, one that acknowledges that schools will soon no longer be seen as the only path to learning though they can and should still play a crucial role in our children’s learning lives despite the “unbundling” of what schools have pretty much held a monopoly on for 125 years. Obviously, it’s a story that has yet to gain any traction in terms of the national or local conversations going on about schools. Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do. Current “reformists” don’t want real change because it would upset the business of schools in some fundamental ways. And those like Jeb Bush who are now engaging in reform talk around access to technology no doubt are driven by the $$$ that many businesses are seeing right now in the “personalized learning” space. (If you haven’t guessed, it’s going to be huge.)

But for me, the question comes back to how do we expand the conversation about the new roles that schools will play in this interaction. And it seems to me that one place to start is with parents. If we can get parents to advocate for change, then maybe we can move the needle a bit, so to speak. And if we can get lots of parents and give them a different story from the one that most are telling, then, who knows?

That’s what my Educon conversation is about on Sunday. Actually it’s a question:

Can we leverage the networks that we currently have to bring 10,000 (or more) parents together across the country next fall to hold a real conversation about education and change?

Obviously, that’s a lofty goal:

• Are there 500 people/schools out there in the network who could get 20 people to a “meet up”? (Or some other combination?)
• Can we agree on a coherent message?
• Can we market that message?
• Can we create a compelling presentation that will spark this conversation?
• Can we build a movement around it?
• Can we create a core group of organizers to take this idea and run with it?

I may be nuts, but I’d like to find out. I’m thinking it’s time we see whether or not all of these “weak ties” can coalesce into something that actually can make some noise. In some ways, I offer this as a challenge or a test to see if all of this Web and network and community goodness can lead to something tangible at scale. What do you think?

Anyway, since my session is the last block of the conference and I’m thinking there may only be a few interested souls that will stick around for it, maybe we can get the conversation going online first. I’ve started a sort of “Brain Dump” Google Doc for anyone who wants to put some thinking to this idea. Also, I’ve created a form for those who might like to tentatively sign up to host such an event.

If you’re at all into this idea, spread the word. Use #pbtsn11 as the tag for Tweets and posts.

On many levels, I think this could be a pretty interesting effort for our communities to create some collective action around change. Or not. Fun to dream at any rate…

(Offered for discussion, not as complete thinking…)

A few months from now, I’ll be marking my 10 year anniversary as a blogger. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s been a surprising one in more than a couple of ways. Obviously, it’s changed my life, changed who I am, and changed my view of the world. For all of that I’m thankful. But it’s also been surprising in that so little has really changed in that time when it comes to schools and education. Sure, we have many more voices, and the community of connected teachers and learners is growing every day. There are lots more computers in classrooms, and we’re carrying around a heck of lot more in our pockets that can lead us to learning. But our collective ability to articulate a different vision for what to do with all of that stuff has still not manifested itself in anything cohesive, anything that we can point to that’s moved the needle on the conversation very much. Case in point, I gave a keynote to an audience of about 900 educators recently and only a handful (as in count ‘em on my fingers and toes) raised their hands when I asked if they’d participated in social spaces online aside from Facebook. Learning in networks was not in their frame. And at most of my presentations, I still get this “I never knew” reaction from most of the people who sit in. Seriously, I’m thinking 90% of educators still don’t know that the Web is turning into a profoundly important place for learning and creating together, and even fewer students in this country are doing anything that resembles networked learning in their schools. Push back if you like, but I’m not sensing anywhere near 600,000 educators (10%) participating in these spaces. Not even close.

In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.

But it is a story that is slowly but surely going to go away. I really believe that. We’re seeing the outlines of a compelling “new” story to tell about learning and education, and it’s this: there no longer is one story, one narrative around how to become educated. Not to say there haven’t always been options to schools. But now there are a growing number of  stories, many unbundled paths to getting an education, and the future will be filled with many others as learning opportunities become more ubiquitous, more personalized, more varied, and more accessible through the Web. For now at least, this new story doesn’t exclude schools as an important part of the path,  but it demands different things from them. They will be nodes in a network of many different learning environments, and their charge will be to help students be, as Charles Leadbetter says, “investors in their own learning,” able to flourish by pulling in information and teachers instead of having those things pushed upon them as is currently the case. Teachers in schools will be master learners first, content experts second, connecting students to knowledge and mentors outside of the physical space, helping students acquire the skills and literacies to learn deeply on their own. Their focus will be to help students become great at creating and sharing and connecting around new knowledge as opposed to being great at consuming the old. As Stephen Downes suggests, schools will build the capacity in all students to create an education for themselves, not wait for it to be delivered to them. And all of this will, in the words of Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, “make us rethink the dominant role of K-12 schools in education.”

My sense of it is that not many people at the head of the “reform” movement really understand this yet. And it will take a whole heap of humility for schools to get this right. We can see this as a threat or as an opportunity. In essence, we need to be teaching ourselves out of our current jobs, empowering and enabling our students to do the difficult and joyful work of learning on their own, supporting and nurturing their individual and collective efforts as we learn with them. On many levels, it’s more important, more difficult work than what we currently do. But if we are to keep schools relevant in our kids’ lives as places where they are cared for and appreciated and loved, something I desperately want to be the case, we’ll need to get comfortable with this new role. And we’ll need to advocate for these shifts in even more compelling ways.

So, assuming this comes close to the “new” narrative of education, how do we do that? Tomorrow, I’ll share one idea that we as a community might work together on.

Maybe I’m a little too fascinated by discussions of how all this networking online might play out in the next decade or so; guess I’m trying to act in the moment in ways that might better prepare me for what’s to come. Which of course is something we should be doing in our schools as well, right? As in trying to figure out what the skills and literacies are that the kids in our classrooms are going to have to grapple with down the road. (Doubting that handwriting is one of them.)

At any rate, from Robert Greco’s most excellent Delicious feed I snagged this link to “Oivallus-A Project on Future Education.” Here we have some Finns, already basking in all of their educational excellence glory, trying to figure out what teaching and learning are going to look like in a “networked economy.” (What a concept.) Not that there is anything earth shattering here, but the idea that Finnish Industries, the European Union, and The Finnish National Board of Education are seeking to “explore and outline progressive operating and learning environments” shows they’re not just resting on their laurels. And the outlines they’re sketching also show that they’re not just thinking about doing what they currently do better. They get that things are changing.

For instance:

However, one trend is clear: we will respond to the waves of development by networking with and learning from a range of experts and actors in different fields. These systems of interconnected people and organisations are known as learning networks.

And, even better:

Network skills and the ability to obtain, utilise and share knowledge lay the foundations of future work. At best, a learning network can use its extended knowledge-base to identify new opportunities and find solutions for contemporary challenges – the key is to work together with people of different backgrounds and capabilities. Learning from one another and building on existing ideas are skills that require practicing. These competences should be developed from early on and throughout education.

Obviously, I think they’re spot on in those assessments. And I’m hoping that when the final report is released later this year, it might generate even more ideas for discussion.

Why aren’t more of us here in the States not seeing these trends and their impact on education more clearly? (Rhetorical question…been there done that.) I know the National Ed Tech Plan gets some ways down this road, and there is some rhetoric along these lines in a few other places, but these ideas aren’t really on the radar in more than a few schools and systems, and certainly they’re not a big part of the national conversation around education. We’re not developing new competencies to fit what is, I think at least, a pretty clear vision of where this road is taking us.

Somehow, we have to get this party started…more on that in a couple of days.

Ever since The Social Life of Information came out in 2000, John Seely Brown has been one of my favorite thinkers and authors around how learning and schools are changed by social media. I loved Pull, and his Big Shift blog at Harvard Business Review is always one of my favorite reads. Most of his work to date has been centered on business shifts and informal learning in the work environment. But this week, he’s releasing a new book that’s aimed directly at learning in school titled “A New Culture of Learning,” the first three chapters of which have already been released in pdf format. It offers an interesting, shifted view of schools away from the mechanistic “learning as a series of steps to be mastered” current system to schools as a “learning environment” where “digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the processes that occur within those environments are integral to the results.” It’s not teaching about the world as much as it is “learning within the world” which reminds me of Chris Lehmann’s oft asked question “What if school wasn’t just preparation for real life; what if school is real life?”

I love this snip especially:

Finally, in the teaching-based approach, students must prove that they have received the information transferred to them—that they quite literally “get it.” As we will see, however, in the new culture of learning the point is to embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. The goal is for each of us to take the world in and make it part of ourselves. In doing so, it turns out, we can re-create it.

Brown hammers home the idea that schools in their current configuration simply cannot serve students in a time of huge, hairy, fast change:

Many educators, for example, consider the principle underlying the adage, “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime,” to represent the height of educational practice today. Yet it is hardly cutting edge. It assumes that there will always be an endless supply of fish to catch and that the techniques for catching them will last a lifetime. And therein lies the major pitfall of the twenty-first century’s teaching model—namely, the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring it. Certainly there are some ideas, facts, and concepts for which this holds true. But our contention is that the pool of unchanging resources is shrinking, and that the pond is providing us with fewer and fewer things that we can even identify as fish anymore.

The whole “embracing change” idea has been one on my mind a lot of late as we put the finishing touches on a new book that is attempting to create a road map for existing schools to create, as Brown suggests, a different culture around learning. The fish = facts and knowledge metaphor will not work any longer, not now when we have immediate access to information and people that will allow us to learn whatever we want to learn at the moment. Now, the “fish” so to speak are more about the learning skills we need to navigate that interaction between anytime, anywhere content and teachers really well. That’s a very difficult new emphasis for most schools which are all about stability. How do we become places that “thrive on change” instead of avoid it?

This isn’t deconstructivist when it comes to school, either.

By reframing the discussion this way, we can see how the new culture of learning will augment—rather than replace—  traditional educational venues. For example, people today often describe schools as “broken.” At first, it seems hard to argue with that. But what the proponents of that position mean is that schools have ceased to function efficiently; they are failing as machines. If we change the vocabulary and consider schools as learning environments, however, it makes no sense to talk about them being broken because environments don’t break.

It’s a lot to ask, but I think in many ways, that captures the size of the re-envision work we have in front of us. It’s more than about the language and the lens we bring, but that’s an important starting point in the work

So what did I glean in my almost month-long hiatus from my social online world? Not much that I didn’t already know. The world didn’t end. My family will always be more important than Twitter. I can learn without being online. There are bigger fish to fry. Etc. It gave me some time to rest and reflect and recharge, something I don’t often give myself enough time to do. And it gave me the opportunity to rethink some of my approach to the networks and communities I’m a part of online. Nothing earth shattering, and nothing I’m suggesting for anyone else either. But helpful to me, I hope, if I’m actually going to still be here on this blog and in these conversations as I hit the 10-year marker later this spring.

I thought a lot about Twitter, actually, and realized (again) that for me at least, it’s become as much of a bane as it has a boon. (This really isn’t news.) Much of the reason I don’t blog any longer, I think, is the Twitter effect. It’s easier just to Tweet out an interesting idea than to examine it more deeply here. I envy the many people who can do both, but I just don’t have the attention span or the time these days. So, I’m going to try to be much more structured about my Twitter time. I’m using Proxlet to sift out only Tweets with links. I’ve started using the scheduled Tweets feature in TweetDeck. I’ve cut down and really tried to diversify the hashtags I follow. I’m not going to check Twitter 20 or more times a day any longer, which was a habit that I was finding myself getting into late last year.

That all led me to consider even more deeply my time spent online in general. Robin Dunbar’s essay in the Times right after Christmas, “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends” really stoked my thinking as well.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.

That’s not to say that I feel like I have more than a couple of handfulls of “close relationships” online…I don’t. But it is a reminder that even the more superficial interactions we have online are not just intellectual ones. Learning in these spaces requires some of that limited “emotional capital,” and frankly, I think I was getting to the point where I was expending too much of it at the box and not enough of it in my f2f life. I’ve been doing a great deal of offline writing of late, and I’ve found the “flow” that comes from that work to be blissful in a way that my online practice had lost. I still love the feel of getting lost in the links, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, it’s really, really nice to have my hours of work reflected in a substantive piece of work, whether it’s text or anything else, instead of an assortment of Tweets, bookmarks and Evernotes. That’s not to say I’m giving up Tweeting or bookmarking or Evernoting. I’m just trying to make sure that all of that effort turns into something more useful…for me. To each his own.

This morning I found this amazing blog post by Dan Perez, “The Klout Myth and Living Above the Influence.” (Yes, I Tweeted it out.) In it, he makes a highly compelling case, to me at least, to take a hard look at how we spend our time online. It does a much better job than I in articulating the challenge. The message, in a nutshell, is “Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.” It’s definitely worth about 50 Tweets of your time.

I’ve pretty much stopped making resolutions, but I’m hoping that balance for me this year means more blogging, more reflecting, and more creating in general in the time I do give to these important albeit secondary pursuits. As always, we’ll see.

So what are your struggles this New Year as you reflect on your practice? Or am I the only one in reconfiguration mode?