Just finished facilitating a session (via Skype!) on how the future of education looks more and more like really ancient education at this weekend's ConnectEd conference in Calgary. I asked those in the room if they could do anything at all, what is the one thing they would do tomorrow that would make the biggest difference in their classrooms. The answers were surpsing in that not one person mentioned anything about technology, though I submit it's technology that's driving the imagined changes:

1. Get rid of grades-based assessment and make assessment a dialogue or conversation, not a point in time or a point on a grade-scale.
2. Get rid of textbooks and make creating content participatory.
3. Engage parents directly in the learning: hold formal sessions about emerging pedagogies and invite them to see them at work in classrooms
4. Engage universities, colleges and busineses in conversations about #1 and #2

In short, make learning a dialogue.

That's not new thinking of course. Socrates said this a couple millenia ago.

 

A couple days ago I took issue with Edudemic for an advertorial it ran on how to manage iPads in a classroom. It was, I said, more mis-management. Now Edudemic has done it again. Its post, Three Threats of Rapid Technology Change, makes the mistake of thinking the technololgy change is about devices and applications.

If we go with that mistake then it makes sense to take about the problems of proliferation, fragmentation and obsolescence and the corresponding needs for rationalization, standardization and program upgrades. (Which is where I'm guessing the writer is going in later parts of these series of posts.) But technology change is not about devices and apps. Indeed, in my experience, it just doesn't matter anymore what device or apps a person uses. Underneath all that sophisticated hardware and code is a set of very simple instructions--a formatted Word document is just a fancy ".txt" file--that one machine reads as easily as the next. My iPhone talks to my colleague's Android--politely to boot.

When I was head of THINK Global School we let students work with phones, tablets and laptops--didn't matter. We didn't specifiy any applications. We didn't have an intranet--we just connected directly to the web. In other words we let things proliferate and fragment. Obsolescence became, well, obsolete because when you say devices don't matter there is nothing to grow old. We let the users manage their devices so there was no need to cnetrally manage. When my students asked what they needed to bring to class I would answer by telling them what we are going to do and I let them decide what tools they wanted to use. It didn't matter to me if they wrote in Word, Pages, a text editor, Penultimate, an email or even on paper and took a picture of their work an SMS-ed it to me. Sometimes, a few would record their thoughts and send me a podcast or video.

And they did fine. In standardized tests (ACER) we ran as benchmarks for evaluating our program our students did as well as or better that top performing jurisdictions such as Singapore and Shanghai.

In an important way, the devices don't matter anymore. We are, at last, getting to a point where the technology is sophisticated enough to allow for genuine democratization and personalization of learning. Standardization looks so backward.

 

I don't mind suppliers giving away service or advice as a way of selling their wares. Hubspot does this well. And I mostly don't mind the practice of letting sponsors and suppliers do that on trade blogs, but this this post by Datamation Systems on Edudemic went up a litle too fast. It's patronizing, frankly, and not the best advice. Cui bono?-Who benefits?--we should always ask. I at least want the illusion that it's me.

First, I'm not saying using the iPad can't be fun to use, but the iPad isn't about fun, no more than a hammer or a pencil is about fun. One of the more troublesome obstacles we face in implementing the iPad in our junior school is that many perceive the iPad as a toy or entertainment device, albeit a sophisticated and expensive one. We spend a lot of time getting our students and their parents to see the device as a tool.

Secondly, most importantly, when the bell rings the iPads should go home with the students, not into a cart. The iPad is a personal device from the OS to the form factor (you cannot have multiple profiles as you can on a laptop, for example.) Putting it in a cart at the end of class kills the iPad's chief assets--its mobility and its capacity to personalize learning. It undoes the iPad's power to provide students anytime, anywhere learning and thus does nothing to change the standard classroom metaphor. What's the point of this particular device then?

Lastly, the iPad does not need the level of control that first generation computer labs did. (And we shouldn't be using technology, i.e. a cart, to control behaviour anyway. Behaviour is controlled through policy, expectations and above all good teaching and guidance.) As well, the business of syncing, charging and apps management issues are red herrings. The best way to manage a hundred iPads is to let a hundred people manage them for themselves. We've run a highly successful iPad program with about 75 devices among faculty and our two Grade 3 classes. We've made the individuals responisble for keeping their iPads ready and so far we've had no breakage, no dead batteries at classtime, all apps up-to-date.

(I appreciate practicalities, and if you can't go 1:1 BYOD, the next best thing is to let a group of students have the devices for a week, to complete a project, for example, then reset the devices and give them to a new group of kids. I have a report on this but can't find it at the moment.)

One of our Mandarin teachers, Tania Wei, walked into my office this morning with a couple technical questions about the iPad and her posterous blog which she uses to post Show Me and YouTube videos of her lessons and her students' work.

Now, I had no idea Tania had even set up a blog for her class. She's a tech newbie. But she's also an exceptionally professional--meaning fearless--teacher. So she's figured out how to set up a blog and two different video accounts and record and uplaod video to them.

I see three great things happening here:

1. As Tania says, the kids scramble to be the ones recorded and shared on the services: "The students are more engaged and practice more," she says. 
2. Tania posts videos demonstrating proper pronunciation of Mandarin and proper form of characters. This is important, she says, because many of the students have no Mandarin speakers at home.
3. Tania is a tech newbie. Increasingly, I find, these are the best users of technology. Experts are often distracted by the tool itself. For Tania, and others like her, the technology is just a means to an end. Though she's using the iPad for leverage, she's kept her work focussed on her teaching and her students' learning. The technology in her classroom is invisible and transformative.

 

Here's a good list of twitter hashtags that will let you get in on some good coversations on education reform.

But can we call it a renaissance, not a reform?

A couple days ago I wrote a post saying education is not broken, so let's not try to fix it...or reform it, as the case may be. Reform has connotations of half-measures, of rehabilitation and it starts from place of criticism: this here is broken or gone astray and wants correction. In contrast, a renaissance is an entirely creative business, focussing on building, not breaking down. It's scope is broader--we can create anything--and it's mood is brighter. I am making no value judgments here, but historically speaking I would say the Renaissance was a cheerier moment then the Reformation.

And we do need a bit of cheer and an end to beating up ourselves and our profession. A little bit of linguistic determinism is not a bad thing.

 Smack in the middle of a conversation with a colleague it occured to me with a flush of embarrassment that all my critiques of contemporary education have been entirely misplaced; not so much wrong perhaps, but certainly unfairly aimed.

Contemporary edcuation is not broken. Indeed, it's wildly, unimpeachably successful. The contemporary model was never intended to do anything more than bring broad basic literacy--the Three R's--to millions. In that it has been brilliantly successful. Between 1870 and 1979, illiteracy rates (the percentage of the population that could not read or write in any language) in the U.S. fell from 20% to 0.6%. That, by any accounting, is a stunning achievement. Instead of criticizing it, we should be throwing education a party; a retirement party perhaps, but one where we nevertheless congratulate ourselves on a job well done. (Even so, we will want to keep the old schools around in a consulting role for a while. Our current cry for reform glosses over the fact that the educational needs of all communities are not uniform. There are many places at home and abroad where we have not yet achieved basic literacy and for that we have a proven model to deploy.) 

Sadly, our current discussions around educational reform are characterized by destructive and frustrating criticism and, worse I am afraid, shameful blame--on both sides. State authorities blame teachers for failing to meet prescribed outcomes; teachers blame authorites for failing to see those outcomes are losing their relevance. Perhaps those outcomes are out of step, but it won't do either to replace them with yet another set, even if they are called something like 21st Century literacies. Swapping "literacies" says we have not significantly changed our thinking. We have to imagine a wholesale structural change, just as we did when we invented public schooling in the first place. 

Forgive the crude generalization, but we might say there are just two models of edcuation: the first and the oldest, an education for the privileged that was is meant to prepare a them for politics, business and higher study. Call this a liberal education. The second, only a century or two old, a basic literacy education, meant to prepare everyone else to take a place on the shop floor. But now that we have achieved the broad literacy that is the prerequisite for a broad liberal education we can seriously talk about delivering what was once reserved for the priviledged few to everyone. 

I'm not sure we yet properly appreciate the enormity of that proposition. No one has any idea what that looks like because it's never been seen before. For me at least, this makes our time the most exciting time--not the most depressing or desperate and hardly the most frustrating--in the history of education. We quite seriously have a chance to make history.

In a recent blog post, online learning insights, quotes former Harvard president Lawrence Summers saying education changes little over time. Indeed, as the post-writer says, education is perceived to be highly resistant to change.

That percerption is based on a too-short, toonarrow view of education. Education today looks nothing like the sort of teaching that went on in the agora, for example. And I don't think that is too remote to consider. It 's a general problem these days that we are ignorant, or at least choose note to consider in our contemproary talk about reform, the 2500-year old conversation about edcuation.

I am reminded of a sharp comment by Zhou Enlai to Richard Nixon. During that president's visit to China in 1972, he asked the chinese premiere what he tought of the effects of the French Revolution, arguably the mother of the United States.

It's too soon to say, he replied.

 

I just love 53's new drawing app, Paper. Put it together with iPad's fabulous Keynote (the limited tool set keeps you focused on content and connected to Apple TV using AirPlay you can move about the presentation room) and you have a beautful, custom preso. 

Here's a sample slide deck for a presentation I gave at a workshop on using the iPad in the learning resource centre. Not voice or text, so it won't mean much, but it shows you what you can do with a few pen and brush strokes in Paper.

There are more than a half million iOS apps. These are the 11 I wouldn't want to be without.