Corning has thrown down its updated vision of the future of touchscreen technology: A Day Made of Class 2.

Amazing imagination. 

So why aren't we doing the same in edcuation, making big picture visions of what is possible? 

We in education talk a lot about what is broken, an affliction of modern thinking said G. K. Chesterton: we only know good because we have a withering knowledge of evil. We don't talk so much about what is possible except in narrow, disconnected ways as, for example, how to collaborate using Google Apps and how to make iBooks. 

So we have nothing to move towards. Instead we move away from and that is not at all the same thing.

Time to start drafting a new story for ourselves...

 Source: Gizmodo

"In 2011, manufacturers shipped 487.7 million smartphones and only 414.6 million computers--that's desktops, laptops and tablets. Combined."

A couple things coming out of this read:

• 487.7 to 414.6 is better than parity: my students are very likely to have at least two devices of their own, or two if they bring their smartphone along with their school-issued device
  
• so it seems silly to be banning or restricting smartphones instead of exploiting them--they're capabilities and their ubiquity--in schools.
  
• It's worth noting, too, that in 2011 manufacturers shipped nearly a billion devices. In one year. Give those devices a lifespan of say, two years. Before we feel like upgrading again we'll have at least 3 billion newish devices floating about. That's a lot of processing power. I want as much of it as I can get in my school.

Read Rick McManus in Read Write Web: Get Ready for the World of Connected Devices

I had a couple conversations of the past week with teachers and admins talking about their 1:1 laptop programs they're building and I have said to them that this is a narrow vision. Building a 1:1 program is building for today, not tomorrow. And by the time the buildout is complete it will be yesterday's architecture. We should be thinking 2:1 or 3:1 (smartphone, tablet and laptop.) Even this, as a picture of the future of education, is limited. The world of the "internet of things" is right around the corner.

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 Punya Mishra's work from 2008 has surfaced at the III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight being held in held February 1^st – 3^rd, 2012. Alas, I'm not there. Next year maybe. So I'm following along as best I can: Ismael Peña-López is pushing our some good notes. like these on Mishra's presentation.

I've had Mishra's diagram on my doodle wall in my office since I started in my new post as Driector of Education Technologies at Mulgrave School back in September. It's one of the drivers for my reconceptualizing how we use tech. I particulaly like Mishra's thinking on technology in education: his Venn diagram isn't so breathless as most postings on the subject and he understands the distinctions and relationships between what and how we teach. Moreover, he is careful to place all of that in a larger context which is where we answer why we teach. This will emerge in the next couple years as the central question in education.

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.