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.

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?

I am tremendously excited by the launch of iBooks Author today. Two or three years ago I was looking for some easy way for students to create their own course content; not just collections of note, but material worthy of study and worthy of sharing. 

Immediately after Apple's announcement a few tweets popped up saying, rightly to a degree, that Apple seemed a bit short on pedagogy, that textbooks--paper or electronic--are still old paradigm. I'm not so sure about that. Dramatically cutting the price of a textbook makes a significant difference in the large scale deployment of resources and that has an effect on education overall. Mostly though, there is nothing inherently wrong with textbooks themselves; it's how we use them that is the problem (else we would have to say all books, even great novels are flawed, wouldn't we?). the question we ought to ask is how iBooks 2 might change how we use them.

But the potential revolution comes through iBooks author. What happens to education if students make the textbooks themselves?

In traditional schooling, education is seen as an artefact or object that is passed on from a knower to a learner. Education is seen as knowledge transfer. Even everyday language reflects this: we say "I have knowledge," or "Let me give you some information."

Collaborative learning looks dramatically different:

(Both images from an excellent read by Richard Alder and John Seely Brown, Minds on Fire.)

I'm not suggesting Cartesian or didactic teaching is wrong. Indeed it can be a very efficient and sometimes extremely enjoyable way to learn--I've been to hear some stunning speakers over time. Rather, I want to say that while Cartesian models are necessary, they are not sufficient. We need to develop social or collaborative learning. (Do you think we can use those terms interchangeably?) The Finns have a good handle on this.

Below is a model methodology I developed when traveling the world with THINK Global School. We had 15 students from 11 different countries and lived and studied in three different international cities (Stockholm, Sydney and Beijing) during the year. 

Our experience suggests something like this is culturally and gender neutral: it lets all students engage naturally. I believe it's scalable to any size project. And it provides for long-term engagement.

Starting on the left there are three levels of learning:

• B: Baseline literacy, or the grammar of each subject; the basics you just have to know
• A: Application of that baseline literacy.
• E: Extension of B and A into real world problems

As metaphor, think of preparing a team for the World Cup. Baseline work is fitness training, passing drills etc. Application is the practice games. Extension is the final FIFA tournament--a real world, high stakes event. The baseline work is necessary for effective applied work and the practice gained in the applied work prepares students for big event.

What we found in our travels at THINK Global School was that at the Application stage, we could view all work as something like field research. Sometimes that was obvious as when we were taking physical measurements of the Great Wall of China, or recording a guest speaker. But we felt we could also consider reading a chapter in a novel as the same sort of thing: data gathering.

Next, when we had a chunk of data, we took it to the So What? stage at the bottom of the loop, and applied an analysis: Is the information accurate, comprehensive? do we have follow up questions. Once we were sure of all this, we'd tag the data and store it. We might use it right away, or much later, but in either case we could rest assured we had good data. In effect, we were creating our own course content. 

(The SM curving off to the right is our social media feed. After the data had been vetted in the So What? stage we found we had a lot of good material for promoting student work as well as the school itself. Our communications and marketing team drew on this content.)

But I wanted to push this farther. I feel it's important that students create work that has intrinsic value, that is, work that has value for something more than the upcoming test. If all students feel they can throw out their notes at the end of the year, we've done something terribly wrong in our classes. So, at the end of the day students need to either find and solve original problems or participate in the solving of other problems. For example, TGS students took part in a longitudinal study counting sea urchin populations in Sydney Harbour during their stay in that city. The statistics they gathered were an important addition to a study set up by the Sydney Harbour authority. 

To help students and teachers identify problems for solving we can apply this flow chart to the data we gathered in Application and So What stages:

I am especially interested in the final question--"is it worth keeping?" That question, essentially, replaces the final exam. (There's probably another loop in here that asks if we ran another iteration of the problem would we find a better answer.) 

Students also have to consider how they will store that data for later use. I favour a bucket to hold huge piles of unstructured data that users can can reorder as they need, hence my note to tag rather than file. It seems the semantic web, which would be ideal here, is still a ways off, but there are ways to set up unstructured data collections even primary students could use. We had a custom-built prototype bucket at THINK Global School and I am pretty sure one can build a good workarounds using a combination of off-the-shelf tools. Blogs come to mind because they are already set up around tags and categories

The key is at each stage students are in charge of organizing the work, assigning student roles, leading the evaluations in the So What? stage and determining the quality of the emerging problems. I think in a collaborative project, these roles could be distributed between schools to great effect.

Notice, too, that the loop in the methodology diagram feeds back onto itself. This is to show that the results of the Extension work, i.e. the solutions to problems, ought to create more questions and data for yet more applied work and so on. I think here is the point where we could see long-term collaborative work.

Now, finally, back to iBooks Author. This, and derivatives of it, would be an ideal tool for working at the "So what?" and "Extension" stages of this methodolgy. If they answered yes to the question "Is it worth keeping?' tehn an ebook would be a great place to put it and a great medium for sharing socially cosntructed knowledge.

Last Wednesday we handed out iPads to our junior school teachers and sent them away to play. As you can imagine, excitement is high and the 27 faculty are coming forward with all kinds of ideas and apps.

But there are indications of something much bigger happening. A number of faculty have come forward saying, with a great deal of pride and enthusiasm, "Look what I did--this completely changes the way I teach..." 

Part comes from the device and what it can do. The bigger part, I think, comes from giving faculty freedom to play: see this great post from my colleague Melanie: 3 reasons our iPad pilot has been successful: freedom, flexibility and assimilation. 

In any case, what I'm seeing is an entire school division--spontaneously, voluntarily--begin to reflect on their practice. What ever apps and tricks the staff develop, this may become the greatest benefit of implementing an iPad program.

At our first full faculty meeting of the calendar year I invited everyone to pledge to do try something new in educational technology.

Here's mine. I showed it to everyone at our meeting:

Email is a nightmare here so taking a cue from Altos CEO, Thierry Breton, I'm going to try to cut my internal email completely. I'm going to make every possible effort to find some other way of answering other than hitting "Reply." I don't think it will work in the long run without building an laternative communication too, like Altos did. But this is the start and from here I'll find out what our real communciation needs are (Altos' research showed only 10% of internal email was useful or actionable.) I'd love to see something like my fantasy communucations app.

Now, after I read through my inbox I draw up a list of people I need to repsond to then get out of my chair and walk around the school to meet face to face. Sometimes I phone, but as most of those I talk to in my day are teachers, they're not usually at their desks.

To be sure, I'm not asking anyone to stop emailing me--that's just not fair as we don't have any alternative set up yet. But an interesting thing has started to happen. A few staff have also decided to walk to my office and chat with me, instead of sending me an email.

And if feels good to talk!

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.  

I have a few thousand books in my personal library. That's more than I will read in the remainder of my lifetime, a friend pointed out to me. That's neither here nor there, I said. It's a great comfort to know there is more to human knowledge than I could ever read in a dozen lifetimes read. My unread books keep me humble.

Here's a beautiful bookshelf to remind one of the beautiful imbalance between what we each know and don't know: http://www.designtaxi.com/news/350334/A-Bookshelf-to-Remind-You-of-Your-Growi...

(screenshot from my iPad, hence the error message)

I've been using Alan November's Digital Learning Farm for nearly three years. It was core school practice when I ran THINK Global School. Making students (allowing them to be!) contributors to their own learning changes the way they engage in the classroom; I see significantly higher order thinking, generally, for using it.

One of the regular jobs on the Digital Learning Farm is that of official researcher, a student who sits with a computer or smartphone connected to the web ready to look up information on the fly as the class needs. Snapify, a handy Chrome extension, will make the job of the official researcher that much easier. Users highlight a word or click on an image marker and click "Snap It" Snapify then opens a search box with results from the main search engines such as Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google News and Google Maps.

Beluga CEO, Ben Davenport, rightly points out that messaging is a core mobile experience and in that speed matters. The standalone app linked to FB's own SMS service bypasses the bunch of clicks you'd need to get into FB itself.

This move looks very user-friendly and, well, Apple-y to me. Apple sees an app-based Internet where Google (especially) and, until now, Facebook see a web-based Internet. The departure is significant.

Read the details of the new Facebook Messenger here.