A Stick in the Sand

the ancients stole all our good ideas

The future of ed tech

I'm a big fan of bringing your own device to school (BYOD). But I'm an even bigger promoter of letting students and teachers use whatever apps and platforms they choose. 

There is little, and increasingly less, need for stadardization of hard- and software in classrooms. In principle, it seems to me, telling my Grade 11 TOK class they have to do their work in OneNote is like telling them they have to all write using a Hilroy HB pencil and 20# stock. Why? I'm not evaluatong their ability to work OneNote. Last year, I ran THINK Global School, a mobile global high school that takes students to live and study in three different internatioinal cities each year. By second term, when my students would ask "What do we need to bring to class, Mr. O-C?" and I would glibly answer something like "You'll be writing about 500 words today." It was up to them what they brought along--iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro--and up to them to choose which apps they used. My only requirement was that they submit their work electronically. Now and again, one or two would even handwrite their work, shoot a picture and submit that. And it worked. Seamlessly.
 
The future of learning lies in this direction. And the future of educational technology lies in developing services that get diverse tools to talk to each other, seamlessly. ConnectYard looks like the kickoff. The service lets users connect through their preferred media: a teacher can send an email and it's delivered in whatever format the student prefers--through Facebook, for instance. And vice versa.

3 new services to help turn down the noise and boost the signal

This week we see three new services intended to help us turn down the noise and boost the signal.
 
Engag.io and Bottlenose both launched this week as slick services for aggregating and filtering our social media streams. At the same time, the internet's newest boy genius, Nick D'Aloisio, has produced Summly, an iPhone app that claims to use some rather sophisticated heuristics for digesting and summing up entire web pages for you. 
 
They look handy and I'll give them a spin over the next few days.
 
Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) is quite right: filtering and "infotention" are top 21C skills and these new service might help us wade through the dreck. But, I must say I still think this signal-to-noise problem is an old phenomenon, nothing 21C at all. There's always been a lot of noise, but the great ones, I said back in March '09 in a post called "Like a long-legend fly upon the data stream," have been particularly good at tuning the data stream. Jobs had the gift but so did Caesar. 

The Perfect Communications App

There is way, way too much noise in most communications channels. Altos, Europe's largest IT services company, just announced its 18-month plan to shut down email and move its 70,000+ employees to face-to-face, phone, text and a wiki-like platform because it found  only about 10% of the messages employees receive are worth their time. Altos CEO, Thierry Breton, who hasn't sent a work email in three years, says email is a "pollutant" and "an instrument to shirk responsibility."

That noise rises up in systems that are built on control, rather than trust. It's not just employees who shirk taking on responsibility either; management shirks giving it out. So, people send buckets of emails back and forth checking in, updating and butt-covering. Systems-heavy architectures, characteristic of control oriented organizations, is doubly debilitating. It hides poor performance all round and inhibits the professional development of people at all levels.

Increasingly I see rebuilding IT infrastructure as building trust infrastructure. (Heidegger is right: the essence of technology has nothing whatsoever to do with anything technological.) If trust is high, we don't have to bother people with details. We let them get on with the work trusting it will be done right and done on time and trusting that if it can't be done right or on time that we will hear about it in timely fashion. Trust fosters professionalism.

Thus, if I could build apps I'd build somehting like this, the perfect communications app, or more accurately, all the app you'd need in perfectly trusting environment. There are just three possible responses:

Yup - I'm on it, you can let go, I will take it from here and will deliver the goods on time
Nope - Can't or won't take on the task at this time
Groovy - I'm all over this and you'll be blown away by what I produce

You really only need two--"Yup" and "Nope"--but I think playing to enthusiasm with a "Groovy" is a nice way to put a positive spin in the office. There's no need to have any more back and forth. If the sender trusts me, she knows I have good reasons whatever my response.  

Groovy_app

What if we thought of schools as creative houses?

Just a thought...

As education becomes more social, more collaborative, deos it still make sense to think of student work in terms of "assignments"? 

When creative teams work together to produce something new, they use a task manager, not an assignment manager, to share out the work. Yes?

So, if students and teachers are collaborating to create new knowledge, would a task manager be a better tool for managing work that needs doing?

I mean, I get excited thinking about what teaching and learning would look like a whole school--students, teachers and admins--used something like Behance's Action Method, at least as a metaphor for their work flow.