Collect, Classify, Listen, Copy: Unplugged Learning

In 1972, my Sixth Grade teacher had us create our own leaf collection. Mr. Walker, an avid botanist and environmentalist, had done this for many generations of students, who had grown up, graduated, and come back to visit him and tell him, "I still have that leaf collection we made in Sixth Grade."

Many of the elements of what is known as "21st Century Learning" were completely absent. We traveled around campus in early Fall or took field trips to local parks or private properties to collect leaves. Each student got a leaf from each specimen of tree or shrub; each student pressed it when we returned to the classroom; each student mounted it on paper exactly as Mr. Walker instructed us to. Once the leaves where pressed and mounted, Mr. Walker wrote the Latin name of the specimen on board; we copied the name into our book; he read a brief description of the specimen from his notes; we copied exactly what he dictated. At the end of the project, we all had exactly the same thick, three ring binder full of mounted, classified leaves.

There was absolutely no creativity, no individualism, no differentiated learning, no analytical thinking, no "higher-level" skills, no critical thinking, no technology or media literacy, no innovation. Nor was there an assessment at the end of the project.

Naturally you can guess what ironic observation I am going to pass on to you now: that we learned a lot from that project; that no one will ever forget doing it; that we developed authentic confidence by acquiring skills and mastery; that we were very proud of our very own, first book. We had to be exact. We learned to listen, imitate, copy, reproduce. And the book we produced was a completely accurate, flawless recreation of a small circle of useful, existing scientific knowledge.

That experience was very similar to the experience my father would have had when he was in Sixth Grade. But my son has had a very different experience. It would be hard to validate the following comparison, but in some ways I believe that I feel older at the age of 52 than my father felt when he was 52. His world changed pretty fast, but mine has changed faster. He was a child in the era of steam locomotives, watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on a black and white tv with his own, young children, and had grandchildren who used computers in college. But he never owned his own computer. And neither did I until I was 28. His sons copied notes into a notebook; my son does research using online sources.

There was nothing wrong with the leaf collection project in 1972 and there is still nothing wrong with it. But it cannot be repeated today. Those activities will not resonate with 6th graders in 2013 as they did in 1972. They will not recognize it as education and will not respond to it. Is our 21st Century way better? It's no better and no worse; but now it is the only way.

Save Your School: Maintain Maximum Signal Strength

If you want to keep your school growing and thriving, turn up the signal. Yes, you need high bandwidth, but take that as a metaphor for learning and teaching.

Schools have to let in as much new content as they can bear. The quality of online content is soaring. At first the promise of the internet was over-hyped: the complete universe of written matter was available, but who wanted to read through all that?

Now the content has been formed, indexed, packaged and polished. It is easy to find age-appropriate material that fits into any curriculum. There are ingenious tools that deliver adaptive, intelligent content. The medium -- the way the instruction is delivered -- has become more interesting than the message -- the content. For the very best stuff you have to pay money; a lot of it is free.

But if you really want to pursue excellence, you need to transmit as well as receive. Make sure your signal is a two-way synchronous signal. Your school should generate its own content and methods. Dont strain yourselves: we don't need every teacher to be publishing original textbooks. Think more along the lines of the remixes that make M.I.T.'s Scratch social engineering site so brilliant. Receive the signal and remix it; respond to the signal; reply.

The Online Credential

When I first saw the World Wide Web using my Netscape browser, I was skeptical of its commercial potential. Would people really type in their credit card numbers and expect goods and services in return? Just like the early days of credit cards, however, there was just too much money to be made for such a revolutionary idea to fail. And so internet engineers developed systems that inspired consumer confidence and trust.

We are at the same point with online education. It is now possible not only to get a great education online, but it is possible to get credentialed because the engineers are at it again and have developed a way to inspire confidence and trust. ProctorU has developed a way to ensure that when a student takes an assessment online there is no cheating; ProctorU has just signed a contract with Coursera, the largest vendor of online courses or MOOC's, to proctor their assessments. (See this article in the New York Times from 3/2/2013.)

Will brick and mortar schools go the way of book stores, video stores, music stores (and the music industry for that matter), broadcast television, newspapers and magazines? Each of these industries died in their own, unique way and they were reborn in new forms. That is also inevitable for schools. More content will be delivered online and more assessment will be done online. Even portions of our schools' communal lives will be led online. Students will be credentialed without ever being physically present on a campus.

It is difficult to know just how this transformation will take place. The textbook industry has been working for years now to continue to exist and be profitable while adjusting to the revolution in content delivery. Education is notoriously conservative and evolves very slowly. Schools need to be thinking about this now, but it is probably too soon to set up a private K-8 on Minecraft just yet.

Define "Technology" at the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley

In the Sunday NYTimes today there is an article about a Waldorf School in Silicon Valley that has no computers in the lower grades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The cover picture -- front page of the times and pretty big too -- is of a school girl lying on her back, legs dangling over the table, reading a book.

What she holds in her hands is a technology. It is a codex. If she were reading a scroll she would not be able to lie on her back like that; she would have to sit at the table and unroll the scroll on the table to read it. She would not be able to go back and forth to reread sections very easily.

In addition, it is a printed codex and not a manuscript. We all know about that revolution.

Once upon a time, the printing press and the codex were brand new technologies. They were resisted by traditionalists and extolled by enthusiasts. Now these technologies are invisible.

Printed codexes never fail. Only once or twice in my life have I encountered a defective book -- one where the pages were somehow messed up or bound in the wrong order. Paper and pencils never seem to fail either. Nor do knitting needles and wool, as mentioned in the article.

It may be that the element of failure itself defines what is technology and what is not.

On my kitchen counter sits a black, bakelite, 1950's era, piece of technology that was once the property of Bell Telephone and leased to my grandmother until the '80's, when Ma Bell was broken into parts. Stamped in the thick metal base plate are the words, "BELL SYSTEM PROPERTY NOT FOR SALE." It was just another piece of equipment in Bell's network and it didn't belong to you any more than the telephone pole on the street belonged to you. Bell owned the whole network and made damned sure that it all worked the way it was supposed to.

Compare that to my iPhone 4s. SIRI, the voice recognition geni, is a remarkable achievement. David Pogue, technology editor  of the NYTimes, calls it "magic". And he is not easily pleased. And yet SIRI fails constantly. And that's not the only problem. I get dropped calls. The system hangs sometimes. The battery dies after a day's use. Facetime only works on wifi.

The rotary phone does not seem like a technology to us and yet the iPhone does.

Given the right economic conditions and technological advances, people will begin to see some of things they call technology today as simply the things they are. Online or digital educational resources will become invisible as technologies and the hard work of learning will be what it always has been, from learning the order of operations in arithmetic to writing long, complex arguments of literary analysis.

What used to belong to the world of technology will belong to you. It may say "Property of Bell" or "Apple" or "Intel inside", but it will be the property of the people.

E-Textbooks: "They Always Take Longer Than You Think" -- Pooh

That's a quote from Winnie the Pooh as he plays "pooh sticks" with his friends, a game in which you throw sticks off a bridge into a stream on one side and run to the other side to watch them come out.

Today, in the New York Times, I read about a school district that uses digital resources to the exclusion of paper ones:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/education/19textbooks.html

If you look back through this blog, you can see that it began pretty much at the same time as the original iPad came out in February of 2010. The Kindle had already been out for a year.

Two years later, I'm still seeing a lot of paper. At Episcopal, the usual pattern is that we still get the bound paper book but we also get access to online resources. The resources are not downloads; they are not like kindle books. So you must be connected to the internet all the time to access them. The teacher gets a master account and sets up accounts for all the kids to access the materials. Kids leave their paper books at home, study with them, mark them up, and use the online resources both at home and everywhere else.

I think it is just too scary for the multi-billion dollar educational textbook publishing complex to give up on a tangible product that they can charge serious money for in exchange for a flimsy contract over digital intellectual property that can easily be ripped off.

And yet, in Munster, Indiana, they are going all digital, with lots of problems, complaints and resistance.

As we continue looking at a one-to-one laptop program at Episcopal, having digital resources available in class and at home is a significant benefit, one that weighs heavily in our deliberations. Unlike the first wave of e-books, this generation is not going away any time soon. It's just taking longer than you'd think it would.

Halfway to E-books

Many classes at Episcopal use E-books. Sometimes. Everybody gets a bound paper book, but they also get access to the online version with supplementary materials. So lots of kids just leave their paper books home and access the online version when they need to at school.

We have a committee to study implementing a one-to-one laptop program at Episcopal right now. One of the things we are considering is the price of paper books versus the price of e-books. And the associated weight reduction.

There are definitely some savings to be had solely on the basis of switching to e-books.

If we do implement a one-to-one program, and if we do it right, we will be delivering an experience that is more like a lab and less like a lecture. And in this lab-like setting students may be more apt to reference the textbook from time to time, which will be right there on their screens. The bound paper book will be back home.

Personal Versus Corporate Technology

We distribute iPhones, iPads or laptops to various employees at Episcopal and now we are considering giving laptops to students as well and asking them to use them in class. All of these technologies have an oddly personal touch to them. And the smaller they are, the more personal, culminating in the iPhones that ride around in pockets and contain family pictures and personal contact information in addition to lots of corporate data.

We want our employees and students to be comfortable with the technology we give them, and yet we need to maintain it to our standards.

One way to approach a laptop program is to allow students to bring in whatever they have at home and just cross their fingers that the battery will last through they day.

Another way of doing it is to give them a choice, perhaps in 5th grade before any purchasing decisions have been made, between three models of computers that we recommend.

And the most corporate way of doing this is to crank out a hundred or so identically imaged machines that we lease for exactly four years and then make disappear, following by another wave or "refresh" of standardized platforms.

What is the right balance for us between the corporate and the personal?