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?

While my trip to Australia this last week and a half was primarily pleasure with my family, I did get a few days to work with teachers in Brisbane and throughout Victoria (a la our PLP cohort there), and I had some great conversations about the state of the education world with some good friends. Since the trip also came on the heels of my annual two-day visit to Skywalker Ranch as a GLEF board member, these last couple of weeks have provided a lot to think about, but between travel and exorbitant internet fees and surfing expeditions, not a lot of time to write. (As usual, these days.)

One thread that seemed to pop up almost regularly throughout those conversations was the idea of “getting it,” as in how do we help school leaders or teachers or parents “get it” when it comes to understanding the shifts that social learning technologies are bringing about, and which group needs to “get it” most, etc. And while there is no doubt that there are still a lot of folks out there who haven’t wrapped their brains around what’s changing and what going to change when it comes to learning and education, what I’ve noticed is different definitions of what “getting it” mean depending on the conversation.

Level 1 seems to be “getting” that there are all these new tools and technologies out there and that we can now publish all sorts of content really easily. And that kids are already using social networks and that these tools are cropping up more and more in classrooms around the world. When I hear the question “How do we help other teachers to “get it?” I think this is what most people are asking. How can they get their colleagues to start incorporating some of these tools in the classroom?

Level 2 takes it a step further and implies that “getting it” means that there is some real change involved in what’s happening right now, that it’s not just about tools, but about connections and building learning networks for ourselves and for our students. I hear this most often in the context of leadership and vision, that the people steering the ship need to “get” that this is more than budgeting for a few more computers and revising the AUP.

Those two levels account for about 95% of the “getting it” conversations I hear. But I wonder if that’s what “getting it” really means? I’m not in any way suggesting that I completely “get it” myself, but there is much to suggest that the talk about tools and even learning networks is not really the end game here at all. That to really “get” what the implications of all of this might be, you have to really be willing to really think differently. That Level 3 is not so much about what happens in our practice or in our classrooms but what happens to our schools. That at a time when learning can be individualized and where creativity and passion are just as important as reading and math, our expectations for the roles of schools in educating our kids have to be more than just playing on the edges.

Each year at the GLEF meeting, George Lucas spends about 45 minutes with us talking about education and answering our questions. What he said this year was in that Level 3 area. To paraphrase, schools as we know them are going away. Not that we won’t still have physical spaces and teachers, but that the way we do school is going to have to change, will be actually forced to change by the Web and other technologies. That the questions we should be asking (and these are the ones I got listening to him talk, not words out of his mouth) are should we still be sorting kids by age or by discipline? How do we truly individualize instruction around kids’ interests and passions? How do we redefine the school day? What do we really want to assess and how do we assess it? Why should we bring kids together for physical space learning when much of what they can now learn doesn’t require it? As he describes the role of Edutopia.org in that context, the whole point is to keep finding schools who are grappling with those types of questions and share their stories with the world.

All of which leads me to wonder, when we talk about leaders and parents and teachers “getting it,” what are we really talking about when it comes to social learning technologies? What should we be talking about?

Earlier this week, I wrote a post bemoaning the ways in which the system treats teachers when it comes to technology and I hinted at a different reality for one school I’ve been working with. Well, that school happens to be my old school, the place where I worked as a teacher and an administrator for 21 years before setting out for my current very different existence. And now, due to a somewhat sudden, imminent move to a new house, the place where in all likelihood my own kids will go to high school.

While I love what Chris Lehmann is doing at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the problem with the SLA story has always been that it’s hard to replicate. Chris is a visionary who was given the chance to build a school pretty much from the ground up, and I think just about everyone would agree that he has done an absolutely amazing job of it. If I could take SLA and clone it, I would. But that’s not possible. So, the tougher question has always been how do schools that have been around for 50 or 100 years begin to undertake the real shifts and real changes that are required if they are to move systemically to a point where inquiry-based, student-centered, socially and globally networked learning becomes just the way they do their business? In all honesty, I haven’t seen many schools that have fundamentally set out to redefine what they do in the classroom in light of the affordances and opportunities that social technologies create for learning. (If you know of any who have a plan to fundamentally redefine what they do, please let me know.) There is a great deal of “tinkering on the edges” when it comes to technology, districts that hope that if they incrementally add enough technology into the mix that somehow that equals change. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve seen that have a whiteboard in every room yet have absolutely nothing different happening from a curriculum perspective. Old wine, new bottles.

That fundamental redefinition is hard. It takes an awareness on the part of leaders that the world is indeed changing and that current assessment regimes and requirements are becoming less and less relevant to the learning goals of the organization. It takes a vision to imagine what the change might look like, not to paint it with hard lines but to at least have the basic brushstrokes down. It takes a culture that celebrates learning not just among students but among teachers and front office personnel and administrators alike, what Phillip Schlechty calls a “learning organization.” It takes leadership that while admitting its own discomfort and uncertainty with these shifts is prescient and humble enough to know that the only way to deal with those uncertainties is to meet them full on and to support the messiness that will no doubt occur as the organization works through them. It takes time, years of time, maybe decades to effect these types of changes. It takes money and infrastructure. And I think, most importantly, it takes a plan that’s developed collaboratively with every constituency at the table, one that is constantly worked and reworked and adjusted in the process, but one that makes that long-term investment time well spent instead of time spinning wheels. And it takes more, even, than that.

I’m seeing a lot of that happening at Hunterdon Central, my old school. And you can take this perspective for what it’s worth since I feel like I played some small part in this process five years ago when we formulated a long-ish term plan for technology that started with piloting a teacher/classroom model for technology when I was there to today, when they are piloting a student 1-1 model (netbooks) for technology this fall. My good friend and former co-conspirator Rob Mancabelli is guiding the work, and he’s had amazing success in bringing teachers, supervisors, upper administration, community, students and others into a really “big” conversation about what teaching and learning looks like today, how global and collaborative and transparent it is, and what the implications are for the curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms. This is not tinkering on the edges; this, instead, is a deeply collaborative and reflective process for a small cohort of 30 or so teachers whose kids this fall will all have technology and a ubiquitous connection in hand, a process that encourages them to be creative, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to pursue their own personal learning as well. All of it as a first building block for the systemic, culture change that is hopefully to come in the next few years.

Tuesday, I had the chance to spend a few hours with a part of this group, and I came away just totally energized by the experience. The main reason? Lisa Brady, the superintendent. The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. And on Tuesday, now as the school year begins to loom large, Rob asked Lisa to address the group and make sure they understood their efforts would be supported. Lisa started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed.” I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the first graph gives you the gist:

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally–our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

I hadn’t expected to try to capture any of what Lisa said next, but as she talked to the teachers, I started writing some of it down. And I started imaging what it would be like if every superintendent walked into a meeting of teachers who are engaged in reaching beyond their comfort zones and learning something new and said things like:

My question to you is how willing are you to be disturbed?…We have to be willing to examine our practice, to be disturbed about what we think we know about teaching and learning…We don’t really know what we’re doing; we’re teachers, we’re supposed to know, but we don’t know everything…I’m as unsure about all of this as you are unsure, but I believe we are doing the right thing. It is of critical importance to this organization, of critical importance to our kids…Your classrooms are learning labs; we want you be exploring, looking, analyzing…You are fully supported in this work; don’t be afraid of what you are doing…at this school, we don’t change easily, but we change well.

It was really powerful stuff, the superintendent of schools encouraging teachers to take risks, to think differently, to be okay with not knowing, and to know that it’s a process, that it’s not going to happen overnight.  And this is the same type of message Lisa plans to deliver to the full faculty on the first day of school. (The Wheatley piece is being sent to all staff this week.) Already, Central has decided to end the practice of monthly full faculty meetings this year and instead engage in professional conversations around the question “What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century?” Since May, all of the supervisors have voluntarily been meeting on a regular basis to study and discuss the shifts around an inquiry/problem based curriculum delivered in networked learning environments. And the teachers in the cohort are archiving and communicating on a Ning site specifically for the work.

Now I know there are some caveats here and not all of this is replicable either. For the last two years, 99% of teachers at Central (3,200 students 9-12, btw) have had their own Tablet PC (for personal and professional use) with wireless connection to an LCD and wireless Internet in every classroom, part of the teacher model that Rob and I started before I left. I would defy anyone to show me a school that has a better customer service oriented technology support plan for teachers and classrooms to make sure everything works. The school has made a fairly substantial financial commitment to the work (with the support of the community…budgets pass). And, 99% of kids in the district have Internet access at home.

But despite all of that, what interests me more is the stuff that they’re doing that just about any school could do right now: have the conversations, begin to build a culture around change, encourage learning on the part of every segment in the school, and create a long term vision and plan that attempts at least to account for whatever deficiencies or roadblocks currently exist. I see so many schools (SO many) where huge sums of money are spent on technology without any thought of professional learning or thinking about what changes. It’s all haphazard, unplanned, unsupported. I talk to so many teachers who just roll their eyes at the newest initiative because a) they haven’t had a voice in the process and b) because they know the next initiative is right around the corner. There’s no thread that binds all of it together, that congeals into a fundamentally different vision of teaching and learning. As Chris often says (channeling Roger Schank) “Technology is not additive; it’s transformative.” But that transformation doesn’t come on its own. It comes only when the ground for transformation has been well plowed. Whether we have the budgets or the technology in hand right now, there is little externally, at least, that’s preventing these conversations to start, assuming we have real leaders who are willing to be disturbed at the helm.

I’m hoping to follow this story pretty closely this year, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. Would love to hear your take on what Central is doing and on other attempts at moving old schools systemically into new places of learning.

(Photo “Do Not Disturb” by Sue)

So here is the money question: What two things (and only two) would you tell educational leaders are the most important steps they can take to lead change today? I got that one from a professor at Oakland University last week, and after pausing for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, I answered “build a learning network online, and make your learning as transparent as possible for those around you.” And while I really think the first part of that answer would make sense to most leaders out there, I think the second would have them running for the hills.

It’s pretty obvious to me that my own kids are going to be living much more transparent lives than most of their teachers would be comfortable with. I’ve written and spoken ad nauseum of the need for them to be “Googled well”, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a parent’s responsibility to start that process for them. (That’s a post for another day.) I really do believe that in this moment, however, that schools also have a responsibility to help kids lead transparent lives online in ways that prepare them for the highly complex relationships they will be having in these virtual spaces as adults. But to do that, schools have to get more transparent themselves.

I pulled Dov Seidman’s book “How” off the shelves last week as it speaks so eloquently to this point. I blogged about it almost two years ago when it came out, but in light of how things have moved forward since then, it’s even more relevant today. While most people see it as a business book, I look at it as a parenting book, one that challenges me to think about how to best prepare my kids for the “hypertransparent and hyperconnected world” in which they are going to work and play. His point is that in that environment, “how” you do something is more important even than “what” you do. If you’re not doing it skillfully, ethically, and transparently, you’ll be ceding success to those that do.

A big part of my decision making process in terms of who to believe and who to trust stems from how willing a person is to share her ideas, what level of participation she engages in, how ethical or supportive those interactions are, and how relevant she is to my own learning needs. As I said to the many professors in that presentation last week, there is certainly much I could learn from them if they were sharing. But most of them are not.

In this same vein, I have more and more of an expectation of the teachers and especially the administrators in our schools to lead transparent lives. The fact that they are veritably “un-googleable” in terms of finding anything they have created and shared and perhaps collaborated with others on troubles me on a number of levels. First, I can’t see for myself whether or not they are learners. And, almost more importantly, I get no sense as to whether or not they are leaders of learners. Whether they are in the classroom or in the front office, I want (demand?) the adults in my schools to be effective models for living in a transparent world. I want my kids to see them navigating these spaces effectively, sharing what they know, teaching others outside of their physical space, and contributing to the conversation.

In Gary Hamel’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. The Fortune 500, he writes

Contribution counts for more than credentials. When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.

I totally agree. My kids need to be surrounded by contributors, people who understand the nuances of these spaces and relationships that we interact with on a daily basis. And not only do they need to see contribution, they need to see it done well, ethically, honestly, meaningfully. In other words, this is more than a twice daily update on Facebook or Twitter.

Bringing all of this together, I just started reading the updated version of Howard Gardner’s “Five Minds for the Future” and there are all sorts of connections to this conversation. Transparency can support all of the ways in which my kids must be able to acquire expertise, act ethically, display creativity, respect diversity, and synthesize and make sense of information. I look at the way my own experience over the last eight years have pushed me in all of those directions, primarily because I built a network around my passion and I shared most everything I did. I hope I’m being a good role model for my kids in that respect at least.

For most principals or superintendents, however, the idea of making their learning lives transparent is not one that sits too comfortably. It’s another one of those huge shifts that is, I think, inevitable but is going to be agonizingly slow in the making. As Seidman asks

The question before us as we consider what we need to thrive in the inter-networked world is: How do we conquer our fear of exposure and turn these new realities into new abilities and behaviors? How can we become proactive about transparency?

Proactive instead of reactive, which is what we’re all about when it comes to transparency in schools right now. What a concept.

(Photo “sunflowers” by marcomagrini.)

danah boyd delivered a talk for Microsoft recently with the title “Social Media is Here to Stay,” and I’d classify it as must reading for educators wanting to get nudged a little further down the path to rethinking classrooms. I just love the matter of fact way she describes what has happened in terms of kids’ uses of social media and what it all means for us. The whole thing is definitely worth the 10-15 minutes or so that it takes to read it, but let me cut to the chase with this snip:

Specific genres of social media may come and go, but these underlying properties are here to stay. We won’t turn the clock back on these. Social network sites may end up being a fad from the first decade of the 21st century, but new forms of technology will continue to leverage social network as we go forward. If we get away from thinking about the specific technologies and focus on the properties and dynamics, we can see how change is unfolding before our eyes. One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem. We are all implicated in it - as developers and policy makers, as parents and friends, as individuals and as citizens. Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it.

A couple of things strike me here, not the least of which is the de-emphasis on the tools and a focus instead on the “properties and dynamics” or the “network effects” that they bring about. I think it’s safe to say that we have made huge inroads in getting people to use the tools. Last week at NCTIES about half of a roomful of people raised their hands when I asked how many of them taught at schools where kids are blogging somewhere in the curriculum. (It turned out it wasn’t happening with a lot of regularity, but still…) Where we still have a long way to go, however, is in truly understanding that stuff danah is talking about. And that’s the important part, because that’s what should be driving our decision making and pedagogy around using these technologies in the classroom. But as I’ve said many times before, that’s the hard part, because it really does involve some buy in on the part of teachers in terms of changing their own practice.

But there is another telling passage in this piece that really got my brain thinking. When talking about how kids don’t really use Twitter very much because it’s so much more of a public space, danah writes

Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends and they learned a harsh lesson with social network sites. Even if they are just trying to talk to their friends, those who hold power over them are going to access everything they wrote if it’s in public. While the ethos among teens is “public by default, private when necessary,” many are learning that it’s just not worth it to have a worrying mother obsess over every mood you seek to convey. This dynamic showcases how social factors are key to the adoption of new forms of social media.

It’s funny (not) how when I read that “those who hold power over them” part I immediately thought of schools and the aversion we have to kids creating in public, social spaces. Kids are being driven to become more private in a world where transparency and openness create huge learning opportunities for those that know what to do with them.

Make sure to read the five properties of social media and the three social dynamics that danah says have been “reconfigured” by social media. And then think about the idea that

All of this means that we’re forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. So what does this mean? As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.

Those are the questions that we have to be examining deeply for ourselves as educators. And right now, those are the questions that few schools really want to have any serious discussions about in terms of the implications on school culture and curriculum. As systems, we’re not even close to getting on the reconfiguration road.

Well, most of us aren’t, at least:

From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. titled “Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with my Homework.” This is another one of those pieces you’ll want to print out, xerox, and put in your administrators’ mailboxes. (Yes, my cynicism gene is in full gear.) They will like it because a) it’s from Harvard (ooooohhh) b) it’s based on research (more ooooohhhs) and c) it’s from Harvard.

Seriously, there has been a run of these of late, articles by traditionally reputable institutions that advocate (gulp) the use of social networks by teachers. And lord knows we need them. I sat in on a recent presentation by a union representative who told teachers not to e-mail students individually. (Group e-mails were ok, however.) And, as I recounted earlier, I’ve been in a couple of conversations of late with teachers whose state associations are basically telling them not to even create a Facebook profile for fear of litigation. We could spend hours discussing the challenges here; I’d rather focus on the slight breeze beginning to blow at our backs, especially in this article. Here are some of the compelling points to highlight.

First, kids are already using these spaces to learn, though there are huge opportunities for us to teach them how to to do it well:

Greenhow has found a virtual creative writing boom among students spending long hours writing stories and poetry to paste on their blogs for feedback from friends, or creating videos on social issues to bring awareness to a cause. Far from media stories about cyber bullying, meanwhile, she found that most students use the medium to reach out to their peers for emotional support and as a way to develop self-esteem. One student created a video of his intramural soccer team to entice his friends to come to his games. Another created an online radio show to express his opinions, then used Facebook to promote a URL where friends could stream it live, and then used one of Facebook’s add-in applications to create a fan site for the show.

They are learning skills that will serve them well in the future:

The kind of skills students are developing on social networking sites, says Greenhow, are the very same 21st century skills that educators have identified as important for the next generation of knowledge workers — empathy, appreciation for diversity of viewpoints, and an ability to multitask and collaborate with peers on complex projects. In fact, despite cautionary tales of employers trolling social networking sites to find inappropriate Halloween pictures or drug slang laced in discussion forums, many employers are increasingly using these sites as a way to find talent. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers cited this spring in The New York Times found that more than half of employers now use SNSs to network with job candidates. The website CareerBuilder.com even added an application to allow employers to search Facebook for candidates. “Savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking,” says the Times.

No one, however, is teaching them how to use these tools well:

What was more surprising to her, however, is how few teachers were using the Internet at all — and even fewer were aware of, much less using, social networking sites, despite their heavy usage by students. “It is the kids who are leading the way on this,” she says. “They are forming networks with people they meet every day as well as people they have barely met. If we can’t understand what kids are doing and integrate these tools into a classroom, what kind of message are we sending them? I think we’ll see an even bigger disconnect than already exists.”

As such, the kids are asea:

Even so, with the exceptions like Theresa Sommers, few students were actually using these sites for the purpose they were ostensibly created for — namely, networking with strangers in their intended college or career field. “The networking aspects weren’t even on their radars,” says Greenhow, who argues for a role in educators and guidance counselors in nudging students to take advantage of these opportunities. “Kids are conceiving of reaching out to others outside of school, they are getting there. What teachers can bring from their mindset is the added value of networking.”

The solution? We have to suck it up and get our brains around this for ourselves:

If that is going to be possible, however, first teachers must learn from the students’ mindsets — that is, rolling up their sleeves and creating Facebook profile themselves.

Look, I know it’s starting to sound like a broken blog-ord around here, but this really is the only way to put it: The world is changing because of social web technologies. Our kids are using them. No one is teaching them how to use them to their full learning potential, and ultimately, as teachers and learners, that’s our responsibility. To do that, we need to be able to learn in these contexts for ourselves.

(Photo “Creating Networks” by carf.)

From Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve, in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, writing about “How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis“:

Indeed, the whole learning process is changing thanks to the Internet. First professors posted syllabi online and used e-mail to supplement their office hours. Then learning activities like classroom presentations were supplemented by student-published Web pages, searchable discussion forums, and collaborative wikis. In a curve that has only been accelerating these past 20 years, we now have an educational economy of information abundance confronting an educational delivery system that was built for a time of information scarcity. Colleges have shared some of their best teaching using new systems like Apple’s iTunes U, OpenCourseWare, and explosive content-creation activities underway in countries like India and China.

Future generations of learners will no doubt look back at the global economic crisis of 2008-9 and reflect on which institutions were agile enough to make a difference by bringing the wisdom of their scholars together with the acumen of their technology officers and the ingenuity and determination of their university leaders. It’s actually not only the future of the university that is in play. How we produce, organize, and distribute open education resources is at the heart of the future of education around the world. [Emphasis mine.]

While this is obviously a look at higher ed, it has implications for the K-12 set, no doubt. He also talks about the looming demise of the textbook industry. Good stuff.

The January issue of District Administration Magazine has a brief titled “Who’s Keeping Students Safe Online?” (at the bottom of the link) that states this:

Fewer than 25 percent of educators feel comfortable teaching students how to protect themselves from online predators, cyberbullies and identity thieves, says a new study from the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Educational Technology, Policy Research and Outreach (ET PRO).

I would say that’s a problem. You?

From the just released 2009 Horizon Report:

Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time. (Emphasis mine.)

Another pebble for the pile…

Jay Matthews wrote a piece in the Post this morning titled “The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st Century Skills” to which I replied what follows. Would be interested to hear your thoughts, here or there…

I don’t disagree that the majority of “21st Century Skills” are nothing new, and that we should have been teaching them all along. As computer and online technologies evolve, we have more tools that we can use to teach those skills in perhaps more relevant or compelling ways. But that depends on the teacher’s familiarity and comfort level with those technologies, obviously.

What is different here, though, is something that is not being articulated by the Partnership or many others, and that is the learning that can be done (and is being done already) using online social tools and networks. I’d point you to a recent MacArthur Foundation study which concludes that “New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn” and that this has very important implications for schools and teaching (http://tinyurl.com/55a878, pdf). While most kids’ uses of these technologies are “friendship based”, the more compelling shift is when their use is “interest based” or when they connect with other kids or adults around the topics or ideas they are passionate to learn about. With access to the Internet, and with an understanding of how to create and navigate these online, social learning spaces, opportunities for learning widely and deeply reside in the connections that we make with other people who can teach or mentor us and/or collaboarate with us in the learning process. That, I think, is where we find 21st Century skills that are different and important. Sure, those connections require a well developed reading and writing literacy, and critical thinking and creativity and many of the others are skills inherent to the process. But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Having blogged now for seven years and having learned in these interest or passion-based online networks and communities for almost as long, it’s hard to begin to describe how different it is from the classroom teaching that I did for 18 years in a public high school. My learning is self-directed, and everyone in these virtual classrooms wants to be there because they too are interested in pursuing their interests. They come from all over the world, all different cultures, all different experiences, a diversity that is hard to fashion in most school classrooms. We share our learning openly, admit anyone into the conversation, and constantly seek to make each other smarter.

But while that can sound like a pretty positive and powerful space, it is fraught with complexity. We have to learn to read not only texts but to edit them as well, not just for accuracy but for bias, agenda and motive. In the online learning world, we have to be full fledged editors, not just readers, because the traditional editors are gone from the process. And, we have to be creators as well. In order for us to be found by potential teachers and collaborators, we need to have a presence, a footprint. I’m fully convinced that my own kids need to publish, need to establish their reputations early by creating and sharing and engaging in ideas in provocative and appropriate ways. These are not easy skills to master.(I’d refer you to Dan Gillmor’s new essay “Principles for a New Media Literacy” http://tinyurl.com/4b3pos for more on that.)

My kids need the help of teachers in their classrooms who understand all of this on some personal, practical level. They need teachers who can help them navigate these complex spaces and relationships online that require, at the very least, a different application of traditional skills and literacies. I think as educators we have a duty to do so. You can call it a “fad” if you like, but the reality is that these skills are sorely lacking in our teachers who are suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces. It’s imperative, I think, that we change that. To quote Kansas State professor Michael Wesch, “We [need to] use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them - that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create” (http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=192). To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.

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.)

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 here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.

And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they   need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.

• Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
• They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
• They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
• Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
• We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.

So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:

New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

What do you think?

I remember when I first starting teaching journalism way back in the day actually using one of those stinky, buzz-inducing ditto machines to publish my students’ work “widely” up and down the hallways. I remember copy-editing by hand with green Flair pen, the same color my dreaded college journalism professors used, teaching my kids the fine art of marking up each other’s stories and adding suggestions for improvement. And I remember buying about 15 copies of various newspapers every Friday just so we could all spend some time getting our fingers black with ink as we searched for interesting and/or well written stories.

When I think of those days, I feel really old, for sure, but I also feel amazed at how much has changed in terms of media. And now, when it seems that “old” media is finally tipping full force into a “new” digital media model, I have to say I’m somewhat wistful.

Ok. I’m over it.

Yesterday’s New York Times piece by David Carr “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” got me really thinking again, however, about how much more important journalism has become in these days when newsrooms are being cut and reporters laid off. The Christian Science Monitor is closing its print edition. The Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and others are making deeper cuts. All of which is going to increase our reliance on not only online media but participatory online media, the form of media that is largely unedited, essay-driven and agenda-ridden. All of which, by the way, should be driving our conversations about how to fundamentally rewrite our curriculum and our delivery system to prepare students to be, um, participants both as readers and as writers.

I loved this graph from the article:

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.

We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…

(Photo: News by Kazze.)