OK, I never bought the idea that school is about readying people for a career. It is, but only as secondary thing. Education is about something much, much bigger. But for interest's and argument's sake, let's take workplace prep as our schools' raison d'etre. It follows that we ought to be looking at the workplace to get an idea of what we are preparing our students to take on.

Not only are jobs changing, the definition of a job is changing, according to enterprise research firm, Berson and Associates. They predicted a "borderless workplace will drive new talent and learning strategies in 2011." They continue to push the idea in early 2012 saying we've seen the end of the job as we know it. 

... "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how today's workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a regular basis. And this shift has redefined what a “job” actually is.

Source: Berson & Assoc. 

So, what does this mean for schools? Are we preparing students to take on jobs, or roles?

I think, inherently, schools understand the idea of roles. A lot of classroom practice, at least at my school, looks like what Berson & Associates describe as the best practices of high-performing organizations, i.e. they focus on results and expertise and not position, they reward continuous learning and so on. So we ought to be in good position--I think we're agile enough, to use the industry term--to make changes without calling for dramatic cultural change, just maybe some subtle shifts in thinking.

Nevertheless, there's something nagging at me. I want to take this to our working group looking at so-called 21C skills and see what they think: Are we missing something?

Quite a good bun toss last night between @amichetti, @ryanbretag and me re the merits of 1:1, multi-device:1, iPad v. laptop. In the end I think we're all more or less on the same page: the iPad is a companion device to a laptop or the laptop is a companion to the iPad, one does not replace the other, schools individually have to decide what's best for their communities...

All of this is moot, really. Education is not about devices, as @ryanbretag rightly says. My blog is called "A Stick in the Sand" because, like Alan Kay, I think tech is great but there are very few ideas that can't be taught equallly well with a stick in the sand. 

And so all of our tweeting made rather narrow debating. We limited ourselves to seeing technology as additive or substitutive, not transformative. (Here's a good example of transformative practice.) I hate when I get suckered into that talk. I'm only passingly interested in what we can do now on all our devices. We tweeted about what iPads and laptops can and can't do today--run Google Docs or not, run Flash or not, run Adobe CS or not. Good schooling is not about those applications any more than it is about devices. 

What's much more interesting to me is a discussion about what we can imagine doing with our devices tomorrow. Can we really build a classroom without walls using iPads? (A BC school did after a fire destroyed their school building.) How might schooling change if all students had a personal learning device, such as an iPad, with them all the time? Does that change the notion of a school day? (At my previous school, Think Global School, we used mobile technologies to tear down the Mon-Fri-8-3 idea of school work.) Hence my repeated comment that if you're vision is a 1:1 program, you're already behind the curve. You're visioning for today, not tomorrow. (I'm ignoring very real practical considerations, but I'm talking about visioning here.)

Therein lay the differences between @amichetti, @ryanbretag and me: we were talking different contexts. (It doesn't take very many replies before the limitations of 140 characters begin to distort people's positions.) I was speaking very broadly about education, my colleagues in the Twitterverse about local issues...sort of like Einstein's physics and quantum mechanics. Maybe we're looking for some grand unifying theory? 

This piece in Read Write Web, 5 Signs of a Great User Experience, had me asking what the user experience at my school is like. I've been saying for a while that we need to stop thinking about Exchange, Windows, PC, Mac, iOS, smart phone and laptops ad nauseum and start thinking about the school itslef as the OS. We connect to it when we walk in the building, when we pull out a smartphone to check a timetable while riding a bus, when we open a laptop to access a class blog at our desks. How does every one of these experiences score on RWW's checklist:

Bill Ferriter (aka @plugusin) reports from Educon: What if we had a culture of "Do" instead of "Know?"

Well, you can't have the first without the second, not meaningfully anyways, so let's be careful not to leave babies sitting in puddles. But it is a huge relief to me to hear that some at least are thinking that education has a purpose. 

Almost 500 years ago, Ignatius Loyola built a great school founded on the idea that the purpose of an education was to go out in the world and do, that is make intelligent and effective contributions to the welfare of society.

Regardless of our worldview, we do this ultimately in order to improve ourselves. Everyone exists as both a unique person and as an individual in society. As an individuals, we contribute to society so that society's goods flow back on us and make us better persons. As better persons, we can contribute more as individuals and this receive yet more goods, and so on.

What we still need to do, however, is ask "What should the person look like?" or "What are we trying to beceome?" To the Jesuits, the answer is Christ. To Buddhists, it's Buddha. To the humanist, it's perhaps a Socratic idea of the just human.

But however we answer, education has as a fundamental quality this idea of action. 

 

Found this on Present / Plus tumblr, via @nalden's very cool Nalden blog ( download the Nalden app if you have an iPad.) 

Love it. Some good thinking on personal branding there, too.

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors. Clay Shirky, Her Comes Everybody The more I work with technology the less my work has anything to do with things technological. Instead, it's more and more about creating and holding open a space where people can change into, so to speak. The new wave of education is an emergent culture. But the problem with emergent cultures is that you can't know in advance what are the original conditions for creating them. The end always justifies those original conditions--post hoc. Because of this, you need someone both to feed the emergent culture and to curb it, so that it is filled only with good things. The role of boundary holders, the leaders, is to hold onto core principles at all costs but to let things, good things, grow around those principles.

I work as the Director of Educational Technologies at Mulgrave school, a coed independent K12 school and a member of the Independent Schools Association of B.C. My counterparts in a dozen other ISABC school meet several times a year to collaborate on and coordinate our work. At out last meeting, just a wek ago, I suggested an amendment to our mission. We ought to add in a line that tells us when our work is done: that is, if our job is to ease and speed the integration of emerging technologies, won't there come a point when that's all done? If we do our work properly, we'll work ourselves out of a job. There was some initial bristling. But it's much like teaching or doctoring. If teachers and doctors do their work students and patient move on.

In meetings and hallway chats over the past several week we've been talking about the need to come to terms on, well, terms in education. So I like this effort by Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey. Essentially, they've defined personalized learning as student-centred learning and differentiated and individualized learning as teacher-centred. I'm not sure I agree, but since Bray and McClaskey got there first they get to call the shot. Bray's earlier post gives a bit more explanation of the differences

Regardless of any personal questions about definitions, however, the personalization of learning makes me anxious. Like much of contemporary edcuation (including the other models presented here,) it derives from a focus on issues, not fundamental questions about purpose of education. It threatens to slide into self-indulgence at any moment. If we can remember that Bray's models are means to ends then we'll be OK. Otherwise, we're in trouble when the mean become ends in themselves.