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?

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. 

The central problem with school IT infrastrucuture is that it is set up to support administration, not teaching and learning. My hunch is that this is because a.) schools are driven by administration and b.) schools borrowed technologies designed for other businesses and industries where all the work was administrative.

But when you look at the work and the function of a school the whole institution suddenly seems as though it was built upside down:

In any school there will be a small number of administrators and support staff producing a relatively small volume of sensitive data (personal information covered by PIPPA and FOIPPA in Canada, forexample) and a very large number of students and teachers producing an enormous volume important but non-sensitive work. In my school, for example, we have about twenty times more students and teachers than admin and support staff. Yet all our systems--firewalls, authentications, blacklists, Blackbaud, PCR--are designed for high security needs of administration. The official software packages--Windows OS, Exchange and even MS Office--are big, enterprise-level products. But where schools are enterprises, real teaching is not; it's something more personal. What works for one inhibits development of the other: admin needs high security, teachers and students need open access. 

In looking for the right balance we need to consider that in any rationally constructed operation, the bulk of IT resources ought to be put toward the primary function of the business, in this case classroom learning. 

So our plan is to completely renew our conception of IT and the way it supports a school. The trick will be to buid two parallel systems--a secure, self-hosted network for administration and an open web- and cloud-based system for students and teachers--and get them to talk to each other. 

We've many more questions and answers at this point, this is where we are going.

More to come...

The problems associated with bringing social media into schools are neither practical or prudential ones. The problem--singular--is a conceptual one: Do we (still) conceive of schools as walled gardens or do we think they might be built on some other more open social structure that may benefit students and their communities? 

We need to answer that first. Building the rest is easy.

(Source: http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/01/students-want-social-media-in-schools/)

This is the best balanced look at the issues around using social media in schools I've seen yet. 

But the bottom line is simple: telling students they can't use social media is like telling them they can't socialize in the halls or talk during class. Social media is, well, social. We're social. So we need, urgently, to figure out a way to make it happen. 

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.

After setting out a Behance-style "energy line" for the IT department, I wanted a way for the team to team to take its temperature. We have a brief weekly standup meeting on Monday afternnoon, but that relies on having a leader in the room. I'm a big fan of building self-regulating systems: they give immediate feedback and hand people authority and hold them accountable at the same time, in equal measure.

This temperature gauge from Behance is perfect. Any one of the IT team can at any time adjust the flag and the whole team must repsond.

It's a good way to let people know that asking for help is an important part of getting the job done. 

This fall I took up the post of Director of Educational Technologies at Mulgrave School in Vancouver. Mulgrave, a co-ed K12 independent IB school, was an early adopter of ed tech and one of the first schools in the province of British Columbia with a 1:1 laptop program (for grades six through 12) and school-wide wifi. The whole thing--the technology and the pedagogy it supports--needs a major upgrade, however, and that will mean dramatic changes for the IT department and significant professional development for faculty and staff. The latter is my bailiwick, but the IT department also reports to me. And it's in the IT department that I've decided to begin for without the infrastructure to support innovation and development of best practices we're going to be lost.

The challenge here is to take the team from a group of maintenance experts and turn them into creatives. They're a good, hard-working group and take pride in their service record. But that's just it: they've have had nearly all their time taken up by just keeping things going. The budget I've inherited is likewise locked into maintaining an increasingly outdated assembly of both physical and human resources. But I have no desire to build the best school network in existence, much less maintain an aging one; I want to build the best one that doesn't yet exist. And that will take some powerful creatives.

I can't yet say just exactly what this all looks like and what these creatives will have to make though I think I'm pretty close--more in future posts. I can say we can start right away shifting the way we think and see ourselves at work. One of my first moves was to close the IT department an hour a day so the team could start working on projects without the usual interruptions that come in a school of 750 students. Think of it as a mini version of Google's 80/20 innovation model. I also wanted to send a message to the school community, but also to IT team itself, that the IT team is not entirely at the school's beck and call, that IT needs and deserves time to plan, create and assess, just as teachers do. The move has been well-supported by teachers and administration and as far as I know has not caused any real difficulties for anyone.

Secondly, I stole a page right out of Behance's book and layed down our energy line on a big bulletin board in the IT department foyer. 

I have a box nearby full of index cards, coloured markers, highlghters and push pins. Anyone on the team can grab an index card and add whatever is taking their energy and resources at the moment. Cards get colour-coded: blue for maintenance projects, green for creative projects and pink for fires we need to put out. The line is self-organizing; we never meet to discuss where to post the cards but just let users move them around as they think best. Completed projects get moved below the horizontal blue line.

The energy line is the first thing anyone sees when they come in. For those calling on the IT department for help and service it makes visible all the work the IT department does day-to-day, work that often goes unseen and unappreciated. For the IT team, it's a bit of the same. But the colour coding also vividly illustrates a.) how much of the day is taken up by just keeping things ticking and b.) how few of us are putting high energy into anything we do. The image above shows the enrgy line on day one, when I first set ut up. Here's what it looks like after a week:

We met today to talk over how we might off-load some of the maintenance and free up some more creative time. I don't think the IT team has ever had that sort of conversation before.