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I'm very excited to be part of the team putting together the first-ever, collaboratively built professional development day for members of the Independent Schools Association of British Columbia, the organization that represents the top independent schools in the province.

On February 10, we have more than 450 teachers and administrators from 22 schools coming together to present and participate in more than 60 sessions at two venues: Brentwood College School on Vancouver Island and my own Mulgrave School on the mainland.

It's a remarkable event:

• It's self-organized--ISABC put a call out for presenters who spoke up and offered their passions and expertise and then participants voted with their feet to create a schedule of sessions.
• It's all volunteer--presenters and participants are giving their time to make this happen and that shows a fantastic commitment to their profession.
• It's celebratory--with almost all the presenters in-service teachers from the participating schools, the event has brought out the incredible breadth of talent that exists in our schools
• It's collegial and collaborative--the school heads and ISABC are showing the rest of the country what a forward-thinking group of schools can do. 

We've also created an open Google Doc for each of the 60 or so sessions. Here's the template we're using.

This is where presenters and participants can add ideas, comments and resources before, during and after the event itself. The docs form a user-generated record of all the sessions and will remain open indefinitely so everyone can continue to build on the results of the day.

We'll be tweeting the event under the hashtag #isabcpd12. I can hardly wait.

Update: The videos have been taken down temporarily, sorry. I'll update when they're available again.

 

My presentations at BLC 11.

Last year I spent a year on the road as head of Think Global School, a global, mobile high school that took 15 grade nine students from 11 different countries to live, study and explore three different international cities: Stockholm, Sydney and Beijing. There is no building the schools calls home. Instead, it gave every student an iPhone, iPad and Macbook Pro and bounnd them together with a custom-built, ELGG-based web platform nicknamed Spot.

The videos below present some of my initial conclusions after running a heavy technology program on the road.

More is Less: A 3:1 Program Demonstrates That More Technology is Paradoxically Less Disruptive Than a Little Technology

Making technology ubiquitous paradoxically makes it less visible (pens and pencils are everywhere but we do not notice them) and the less visible the technology, the less disruptive it is; for similar reasons, ubiquitous connectivity is important; apps do not matter but the the idea "there's an app for that" does, which means users can choose apps based on personal preferences; finally while there is overlap in their capabilities, each device is best suited to different purposes (iPhones are superb data capturing tools, laptops better data processing and production tools) But if we could only have just one tool it would be the iPhone--not an iPad or Laptop.

The Digital Learning Farm as Core Practice.

In this session I look at why we set up the Digital Learning Farm and how we set up our technology to support it as a core practice. I show some examples of student work and discuss the results of working with the Farm. The short story is I firmly believe making this core practice improves student engagement, in particualr with higher order thinking. 

One of the threads to emerge out of a number of terrific presentations at November Learning's Building Learning Communities 2011 conference in Boston was the idea that we are shifting to a new pedagogy.

We might describe the old model of teaching--let's call it "education 1.0"--as a problem-solving pedagogy. In it, students are asked to solve hundreds of trivial problems in textbooks and worksheets. Page-tall columns of algebra equations come to mind immediately, but we find equally dull work in other subjects, too: book reports in language arts classes, listing provinces and their capitals in Social Studies classes, for example. I realize I'm being a bit hasty here. There is a good argument for drilling in order to build skills. There is also great value in just knowing things. However, it's not hard to see that if this is all we do we are in danger of creating a classroom of highly skilled but not very imaginative or creative students. This is the lament of China's education leaders.

Education 1.0 was replaced by a problem-based learning model--let's call this education 2.0. Here, curricula and student work are driven by relatively complex problems meant to give purpose to the sort of drilling that went on in vacuo before. In order to solve a problem, students--it's believed--will naturally search for and hone the skills they need to solve it. The critique heard at BLC 11, quite loudly from Ewan McIntosh, is that these problems are artificial. The answers are already known by the teachers or some other authority so the problem is not in fact a problem to be solved at all. More importantly, as Dr. Eric Mazur and Dr. Steven Wolfram pointed out in their keynotes, this sort of contrivance does little to prepare students to be the life-long learners schools universally claim they are creating. Again, I'm aware I'm taking some liberties. It is indeed well worth the effort to walk through some old problems just to see how others went about solving them, to study their methods, as we say. This is what Newton meant when he said he stood on the shoulders of giants. He did not mean, however, that the purpose of that study was to add another hammer in the problem-solving toolbox. He meant the purpose of that study was to find where old methods were insufficient for cracking open knew knowledge.

So here at BLC 11, the buzz is about giving education 2.0 another turn turn to create a problem-finding pedagogy. Let's call this education 3.0. Here we want students to engage with problems to which even the teachers do not know the answers, to engage with the "unknown unknowns" as Ewan McIntosh says. 

It's there in the terra icognita of knowledge that learning gets exciting. Discoveries in this area have genuine value not just to the student, but to everyone. I've heard many teachers express chagrin at the way students toss out their notebooks at year-end. But if those notes aren't much more than a record of drills--the equivalent of a record of the pushups one has done all year--I can hardly fault the students. Indeed, I think we have a serious moral problem if we are compelling students to attend classes and don't help them produce something of intrinsic worth. 

Something else exciting happens when we pass the edge of the knowns, too, I think. Students are encouraged to work at a very high level of thinking when they are asked to analyze a collection of data, judge it's worth, synthesize it and draw out a question for further study. (I wonder if structure of education itself inhibits, even excludes, higher-order thinking. That would make the efforts of teachers to encourage students to think more deeply and richly largely misplaced. If we want to change behaviour, we have to make sure the environment supports the new behaviour. It's a study I'd like to pursue.)

Wolfram created his fabulous apps to relieve the students of the burden of trivial calculations so that they can apply there mental energy to finding the new problem in set of data. Marco Torres looks at apps like Thumbjam and Hex OSC Full  the same way, as tools that let the non-piano player get on with making a soundtrack for a video, for example. (Hans Rosling, not at the conference, created his Gapminder software for the same reason.) I am proposing a model workflow for a problem-finding school that could employ these tools and get on with finding new problems:

This is a sketch. I need to spend some time thinking about what this looks like in practice, especially across all the grades. But I'm suggesting that as the students consider the questions in the diamonds, they must do some hard thinking. They would also have to think carefully--critically--about where to get help. I can see links to building social networks and teaching social search here.

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 my previous school and I am pretty sure one can build a good workarounds using a combination of off-the-shelf tools. (More on that later.)

I'll spend the next few weeks of summer tinkering with this plan and have it ready to run with my students when school starts in the fall. In the meantime, I'd appreciate any thoughts.

 

I wasn't there, but this is encouraging. The key take away at #ISTE11 has got to be giving students agency. And, I'll add, responsibility. In my experience, young people are capable of much more than we give them credit for. It's hard work, giving them room and holding them accountable. And it can be messy. But the rewards are great. http://edtechleadership.com/wordpress3/?p=1263

Everyone says that the great part of a conference is all the informal networking and chat that happens between the keynotes and presentations. Here’s what I’ve overheard in the in-between at November Learning's Building Learning Communities 10 conference: N.B. this is cross=posted at November Learning's blog.

I'm not sure if I'm gazing into a crystal ball or peering into a wishing well. But here's what I think will be important in 2010. School administrators will enter the conversation. They'll do it because they have to. Innovation was the buzzword in 2009. It will be in 2010, too, but it will refer to structural or pedagogical innovation, not technology itself. And here we need K12 school administrators--I'm one of them--to weigh in. They were noticeably absent in online dialogue in 2009. They probably didn't need to be online at the start of the year. The technology field was chaotic, characterized by rapid pace of development and liberal experimenting, mostly by teachers. But at the end of the year, we have enough data to classify web tools and, more importantly, to draw a reasonably coherent picture of the potential change these tools might make. The big questions raised by web technologies are strategic questions, not technical ones. We're witnessing the shift from an industrial model of education to...a post-industrial model? That's a weak descriptor. To call it a 21st Century model is equally weak because no two people can agree on what "21st Century" means, not in terms of education anyway. We should search for a good term, but in the meantime, we can see that just as the web itself is distributed, the new model will be characterized by more distributed learning, facilitated by people I hope we will still call teachers. The big technology trends of 2009 were Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things, but it's budgets, personnel, assessment, course content and pedagogy--things that have nothing to do with anything technological--that we need to talk about now. Independent schools should have an edge here. They are, well, more independent and nimble than public schools which are administered at a district level. One school to watch: Think Global School, which has abandoned brick-and-mortar completely and taken the school on the road, is heading to 12 cities around the world in 12 semesters. Everyone will wake up to the idea that students are not digital natives. In September I began rolling out wikis, Nings, blogs, Edmodo and even a little Twitter to our Grade 6 - 9 students. But it wasn't long before they began putting up resistance to the new technologies. "Why can't we just write this in Google Docs?" they cried. I thought this might be unique to the cohort of students here on Bowen Island or to middle school students. But colleagues in other schools teaching higher and lower grades were seeing the same thing. I called up Chris Betcher in Australia and he was seeing it there, too: Here is his blog post on the idea that the notion of the digital native is a myth. None of the potential advantages of social media or cloud computing are self-evident. Students are very quick to learn how to work with a new tool, but they still need to be shown why they ought to use it. As with anything else, online skill and even the inclination to work online seems to follow a normal distribution, so it's unreasonable to expect that a classroom of students will leap onto the social media/cloud computing bandwagon. This means we have to teach the why as well as the how of tools. (Just as we did this with pencil and paper!) We'll put philosophy back on the table. A couple years ago I presented a paper at conference on the humanities at Columbia University calling for the reanimation of the teaching of metaphysics in grade schools. Metaphysics is something of a dirty word, so let's substitute philosophy. But the idea is that if, even in principle, the web makes all information available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, we are left to ask what should we do with all that data. Google wants to index all the information in the world. What happens when we have perfect knowledge of the facts? Now, unless we are considering trivial decisions, such as what pizzeria should we go to for dinner, the moment we utter the word "should" we enter into a moral or ethical discussion. Yes, students stepping into the data stream need to know how to filter and evaluate information, but they also need to know what to do with it once they've qualified it. They need teaching in both practical reasoning and ethics. I doubt we'll see schools add courses in philosophy by year's end, but I do think we'll see schools start talking about the need.

My contribution to the Teach Meet 09 EdTechRoundup Edition for December 6, '09. Sorry everyone--ran into issues converting the Jing swf format to a Youtube friendly format. so here's the link to the screencast. Link to Alan November's 6 jobs for students.