(Cross posted at the ASCD Whole Child Blog, here is a snip from my new book, co-authored with Rob Manabelli, which comes out in May.)

Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher has an interesting way of describing his classroom up in Snow Lake, Manitoba. As he tells it, it has “thin walls,” meaning that despite being eight hours north of the nearest metropolitan airport, his students are getting out into the world on a regular basis, using the Web to connect and collaborate with students in far flung places from around the globe. The name of Clarence’s blog, “Remote Access,” sums up nicely the opportunities that his students have in their networked classroom.

“Learning is only as powerful as the network it occurs in,” Clarence says. “No doubt, there is still value in the learning that occurs between teachers and students in classrooms. But the power of that learning is more solid and more relevant at the end of the day if the networks and the connections are larger.”

Without question, Clarence imbues the notion of the “connected learner.” Aside from reflecting on his life and his practice on his blog, he uses Twitter to grow his network, uses Delicious to capture and share bookmarks, and makes other tools like Skype and YouTube a regular part of his learning life. In other words, he’s deeply rooted in the learning networks he advocates for his students.

“It’s changed everything for me as a learner,” he says. “I teach in a small school of 145 kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have a lot of colleagues. I can’t imagine closing my door and having to generate all of these ideas on my own.”

So Clarence helps his students create these networked interactions at every turn. A few years ago, his students collaborated with a classroom in Los Angeles to study S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, using Skype for live conversations and blogs to capture their reflections on both the story and the interactions. More recently, his students studied The Book Thief by Markus Zusak with a class of Ontario students, listening online as their teachers read the book aloud while conducting a chat in the background filled with questions, reflections, and predictions as to what would happen next. Over the years, his students have worked with kids in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and China, just to name a few.

But here’s the thing. While Clarence may be the conductor of these connections at the outset, most of the networking quickly starts coming from his students. As he was beginning to explore the idea of the “thin walled” classroom back in 2006, he wrote on his blog:

The connections have had very little to do with me. I’ve provided access, direction, and time, but little else. I have not had to make elaborate plans with teachers, nor have I had to coordinate efforts, parceling out contacts and juggling numbers. It is all about the kids. The kids have made contacts. They have begun to find voices that are meaningful to them, and voices they are interested in hearing more from. They are becoming connectors and mavens, drawing together strings of a community. They are beginning to expect to work in this way. They want to know what the people in their network are saying, to hear about their lives and their learning. They want feedback on their own learning, and they want to know they are surrounded by a community who hears them. They make no distinction about class, about race, about proficiency in English, or about geography. They are only interested in the conversation and what it means to them.

That’s a very different picture from what happens in most traditional classrooms, but it captures the essence of what student (and teacher) learning can look like in schools these days. “Thin walls” expand the classroom, and in the process deepen our understanding and practice of all of those “21st Century Skills” that we examined earlier, the critical thinking, the problem solving skills, and the rest. And as students begin to experience the powerful pull of connection to other students and teachers outside of their physical spaces, they also begin to see the world writ large as a part of their daily learning lives. Just as Clarence says that these networks “changed everything for me as a learner” they also change just about everything about our interactions with the kids we teach, the way we think about classrooms, and the way we see the world. Those are big statements, but these shifts are being played out every day in profound ways. And more and more they reflect the real world of learning that our students will graduate into, whether we help them get there or not.

No doubt, all of this has huge implications for us as educators. In fact, even those of us living at the heart of these changes feel some discomfort trying to think through all the ways that the Web challenges the traditional structures of schools and classrooms and learning. But here’s the thing: given these opportunities for connection that the Web now brings us, schools will have to start leveraging the power of these networks. And here are the two game-changing conditions that make that statement hard to deny: right now, if we have access, we now have two billion potential teachers and, soon, the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

That, in no uncertain terms, is different.

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them “educated” when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a “literacy” in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they’ve pretty much delivered what we’ve asked them to.

But, what happens when knowledge and teachers aren’t scarce? What happens when it becomes exceedingly easy to people and content around the things you want to learn when you want to learn them? What happens when in the next decade or so, almost everyone gains access to these profoundly different learning spaces, filled with teachers and content outside the walls through the devices they carry in their pockets? What happens when we don’t need schools to manage the delivery of content any more, when we can get it on our own, anytime we need it, from anywhere we’re connected, from anyone who might be connected with us?

In a word, things change.

For each of us as learners in the world at large, the fundamental change is that we can be much more in control of the learning we do. It’s not about the next unit in the curriculum as much as it is what we need to know when we need to know it. And it’s not so much even what we carry around in our heads, all of that “just in case” knowledge that schools are so good at making sure students get these days. As Jay Cross, the author of Informal Learning, suggests, in a connected world, it’s more about how much knowledge you can access. “‘What can you do?’ has been replaced with, ‘What can you and your network connections do?’ Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts.” If we have access to our networks, we’re a lot smarter than we used to be. In fact, “connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a wide repository of knowledge,” according to Vance Stevens of the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. In other words, if we want to make the most of our brains these days, we need to connect online.

What hasn’t changed is this: learning, online or off, is still social, and that’s good news for all of us. If you’re seeing a vision of students sitting in front of computers working through self-paced curricula and interacting with a teacher only on occasion, you’re way, way off. That’s not effective online learning. What is possible, however, is that because of the connections we can now make on the web, there is as much potential (if not more) for meaningful learning to occur in the interactions between people online than in their face to face places. Why? Primarily because online, we can connect to others who share our passions to learn in extended, deeper ways that in many ways can’t occur offline. That’s not to say that face-to-face learning isn’t important or valuable. It is. But so is the learning we can now do on the Web. And it’s the melding of the two that will shape our schools in the 21st century.

Excerpted with permission from R. Mancabelli & W. Richardson (in press), Personal Learning Networks, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Meant to post this yesterday, but didn’t get time. I think the headlines tell the tale around education right now.

MICHIGAN

NEW JERSEY

WISCONSIN

CONNECTICUT

I didn’t even get to look at Texas…

These are some crazy days, and I fear we haven’t even seen the half of it. And I wonder a couple of things. What will it take for people to figure out that the disruption here is far greater than budgets and unions which are right now the easy scapegoats in the reform message? And, if we keep going down this road to oblivion, what rises from the ashes?

(Cross posted to the Powerful Learning Practice blog.)

So what does the following list suggest to you about the value of “online learning”:

1. I can work ahead if I’m able to
2. I get nearly instant responses from my teachers
3. I get personalized support when I need it
4. My teachers are just as excited about online learning as I am
5. I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to
6. I know how I’m doing, my grades are right on the screen
7. My parents can see my work and grades
8. My courses are more challenging
9. I can keep up with my work when my family travels
10. I can work around a busy schedule

Those are the “benefits” touted by a group of Utah sophomores in this Huffington Post piece by Tom Vander Ark, ones that apparently impressed senators, representatives and school board members. I’m not as impressed.

Sure, taking a course online may offer more individuation and student choice in how to manage the process, but at the end of the day, I wonder what those online students have learned more or better than the ones who took the course in a classroom. And if we’re touting the online experience has superior because kids can take trips and still do the work or because their teachers are excited, that speaks to bigger, more fundamental issues that aren’t being addressed. This is still all about content delivery,  old wine in a new bottle that’s being motivated more by economics and convenience than good or better design. And it’s about, as I mentioned yesterday, a growing business interest that sees an opportunity to make inroads into education as “approved providers.” Hmmmm.

Learning online is not about finishing the course requirements a few days early or answering the questions that the text or the teacher dictate. It’s about finding our own path through the material.  As I asked in a comment on the post, do students practice inquiry in these settings? Are they able to ask their own questions? Are they assessed any differently? Do they create any new knowledge in the process and, if so, is that knowledge shared anywhere? Does their experience in the course replicate real life in any new way? Does it teach them how to learn on their own? To go deep? Not that any of that shouldn’t be taking place in face to face classrooms as well, but if you’re going to suggest something as different…

My point is that if this vision of online learning is being touted as reform, why? What’s really different here? Obviously, I’m a big believer in the value of online networks and communities to support lifelong and lifewide learning. The work that Sheryl and I and our amazing colleagues have been doing with PLP attests to fact that there is another way to learn online aside from digitizing a curriculum. We have goals and outcomes for our participants, but we don’t say to them “here is the path, work ahead if you like, and your grades will be posted online.” We let them find their own way, supporting and prodding as needed, trying to keep them moving in the general direction of shift. With any luck, they experience the change in their own way, on their own terms.

Not saying there isn’t any value to offering classes online. But if we do, let’s make sure they take advantage of the online piece to let participants develop the connections that will sustain them far beyond the class. Or, if not, let’s call it what it is…online coursework, not learning.

I feel like I should do some fun tool blogging or great classroom blogging or something before heading down the depressing road of writing more about change in schools, but I guess I can’t help myself. Especially after taking pictures like the one at right at a school I visited a couple of weeks ago and after reading quotes like this one:

“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.”

That’s Stan Karp of the New Jersey Education Law Center lamenting the cuts and “reforms” here in my great state and elsewhere in a blog post in the Washington Post. (If you want to see a video of Karp giving basically the same riff on the topic, check out his YouTube video and there is a transcript here.) It’s a really powerful exploration of the current conversation around change and the many problems surrounding it.

The critical point to me, however, is this: all of this orchestrated bashing of teachers and schools is opening the door for folks outside of education to come in and “save the day” Superman style, a fact that, as Karp suggests, could undermine the whole democratic ideal that we built schools upon. You can catch whiffs of it everywhere, when people say that “competition” is what will save education, to the “approved providers” the Jeb Bush and his Excellence for Education crew are promoting in their reforms to the growing number of personalized and customized tutoring programs that are cropping up all over the place. It may not be on a lot of folks’ radar at the moment, but rest assured, we’re going to see more and more corporate attempts to not just provide content (as they’ve done forever with textbooks) but, increasingly, to provide instruction as well. And, as Karp suggests in the quote above, that reality will surely make worse the already growing educational divide for our kids.

There is no question that businesses will play a part in the “reforms” or “transforms” that we so often talk about in this community. And there is also no question that we need to promote a different vision for what teaching and learning look like. But there is a big difference between the vision we have for students having equitable, thoughtful access to technology and teachers as opposed to the vision where only a few do. I’ll once again quote Allan Collins and Richard Halverson:

For education to embrace both equity and economic development, we believe that our leaders will have to stretch the traditional practices to embrace the capacity of new information technologies. This will require schools to forfeit some control over the learning processes, but will once again put the latest tools for improving learning in the hands of public institutions (as opposed to the hands of families and learners who can afford access.) (145)

As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can. That’s the real urgency of the debate right now, how do we use these new (and old) technologies to lift everyone up instead of just a few.

So first I just want to thank all of you who stuck around during the last session at Educon last week to extend this conversation, and to those of you who have signed on to see if we can make this happen. I thought for the most part, the conversation was valuable, and it’s left me thinking a lot this week about what we can and, perhaps, cannot do.

But I wanted to start this post with some context from a Jon Becker blog post that Chris alluded to in his session as well. It’s a quote by former NYC education head Joel Klein commenting on the “Political Education of Michelle Rhee.” He says:

This is a game about power, and I think you have a vacuum on one side…She’s concluded — and I think with some wisdom — that there’s really no countervailing force that is well-funded, is well-organized. What I think she wants to build is an organization that can really step up and amass political support and play hardball.

As Jon notes, Klein is right. There is no alternative narrative to the “do what we’re currently doing only better” “reform” that Rhee and her cohorts are espousing. And as much as I’d like to agree with Jon that the Educon axioms suggest an alternative narrative, I still don’t see an “elevator pitch” that articulates those ideas in sound-bitey ways that people will take a chance on. And I do mean take a chance. As natural and as logical as those axioms may seem to the attendees at Educon, I’m not sure the general public is able or willing to accept them for their own schools. I know the parents at SLA have done so, and I’m totally hoping to be convinced otherwise, but for now, it’s easier to put “Students First,” the name Rhee has wrapped her “reform” around.

That new message is the hard part, and we grappled with that during our session. In fact we tried to plan around it, and I actually think we got a decent start on it. But try as we might to trust that we’d eventually coalesce around that “new story,” it was obviously on our minds. Take a look at the ideas we added to the brain dump doc:

It needs some organization, no doubt (and if anyone wants to take a shot at that, have at it), but there are definitely some great thoughts that we’ve already amassed. We’ve also got 38 people who have committed to getting about 2,000 parents organized, and John Pederson was nice enough to put together a Facebook group that we can use, all of which leaves me hopeful that we can actually make this idea come to fruition.

In a nutshell, here are the logistical themes that we can glean already:

• There should be a consistent, formal presentation piece followed by facilitated discussion
• Part of the presentation should involve students, perhaps in helping to create a video
• Create a way for these conversations to be captured and continued…make a movement
• We want to think about a name and a brand and a marketing plan.
• We want to plan the facilitation of these events carefully and provide opportunities for organizers to connect and plan together.
• And, let me add, we’re going to need some folks to take on an organizing role around some of these specific tasks. (Don’t be shy.)

But it’s gonna come down to the message. I think what we’re going to be suggesting is a conversation around transform, not reform, a conversation that necessarily will move parents out of their comfort zones a bit to really look at how schools simply have to change to better serve our kids. But even that last statement is loaded with all sorts of assumptions that I’m not sure are fair to make. Thus, the problem.

So, time for some ideas on next steps. What’s our next move?

If there is one thing you can count on upon leaving Educon it’s that you want to change things, most likely in a pretty big way. It’s not just the vibe at SLA with the kids and the teachers who actually seem to want to be there every day (and even on snow days and weekends) to be learning and leading. And it’s not just the assembled masses who are sharing and prodding and asking great questions in the “conversation” sessions. It’s more the stolen moments in the hallways and the quiet back and forths that happen over lunch when you start to sense this shared feeling of “WTF are we doing to our kids by sticking them in a system that’s just not working anymore?” Or something like that. I can’t tell you how struck I was by how many parent-educators almost grieved at the experience their kids were having in schools. It’s like we know in our hearts there is a better way, but we just don’t know how to make it happen at scale in the next three months. (Years are out of the question.)

We’ve talked about starting a “movement” for a long time now. Chris spent his session this weekend on the subject, and I used mine to offer up an idea for a tangible start to a new conversation. (I’ll be reporting out more on that in the next few days, I hope.) What with Michelle Rhee and Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan dominating the ed change conversation, I think we’re all pining for a bigger voice. That will be tough. We’re underfunded (or should I say unfunded), and I’ll say again that 90% or more of educators in the US really have no context for change in the way that we talk about it in our networks. Sure, we’ve got more people at the party who think the system needs to be transformed instead of reformed, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re still dancing down at the Legion Hall with a Polka band as the headliner.

This weekend I kept thinking, when will we have our Egypt moment? When will we get to the point where enough people feel dissatisfied with the whole school thing and want change badly enough to rise up and say “That’s it! We’re not going to do this anymore!” I know there’s a slim chance that our collective sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo around education will ever match the passion of those people in the streets of Cairo today. But I’m beginning to wonder if there may not be an untapped feeling of frustration around schools that those bigger voices are just not getting. That’s it’s not about improving the current system but, instead, creating a different, better path for our kids. But I also sense that while many people may feel this discomfort, they don’t quite yet know what to do with it.

Those folks in Egypt don’t know exactly what they want either. They just know what they don’t want. They’ve become disaffected enough to rise up and take it on faith that something better will rise from the ashes. At the end of the day, I doubt most parents will take their children out of a system they may have serious reservations about if there’s not a safe and effective and convenient alternative. But if the headlines of the past year are any indication, this system is starting to crash, be it economics, “competition,” lack of equity or whatever else. I’m wondering what we’ll build that will rise up and take its place.