innovation3

Leadership Day 2009

Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant fame invited edubloggers (educational bloggers) worldwide to post (write in our blogs) about digital technologies. As a former superintendent of schools and educational leader in my state, I have a strong foundation in pre-digital age education. That foundation has prepared me well to know what I don’t know and need to know. Two years ago I realized the world was rapidly changing in ways that have major implications for how we teach and students learn. I’m on a journey to learn what I need to know. In this post I share some of what I’ve learned in hopes that all teacher and administrative learners will begin their own journey into the digital world.

The Times They are A-Changin

In the 1960’s change was in the air. The Beatles first trip to the United States was in 1964 and the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held the summer of 1969 in Bethel, New York.  A whole generation was learning beyond school from the likes of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger.

When I graduated from college in 1970, there were transistor radios, TVs and record players or turntables. To the best of my knowledge, there were no computers; no Internet; no computer companies like Apple or Microsoft; no web browsers; no e-mail; no software for word processing, slide presenting, spread sheet making or video gaming; no ISPs; no SPAM; no .jpg or MIDI files, no MS Office; no RealAudio, no search engines; no modems, no Silicon Valley; no Napster; no cell phones.

All of these phenomena entered our world during the last three decades of the 20th Century. I continued to learn beyond school using these tools, but the pace of change was relatively slow. If the story ended there, maybe schools could continue to assign technology to the technology lab, ably managed by computer teachers or computer lab teacher assistants. In an imagined world we could control the learning environment by creating learning standards, routines and structures to prevent students from “growing up digital.” Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, the story did not end there and shortly after the beginning of the 21st Century, digital change began to dramatically accelerate. Technological innovation began to blossom. In fact, over the last few years, technology has began to transform our world in ways few of us could have imagined, a fact most people now recognize because we have experienced some of it. However, you may not be aware of the magnitude of the change because it is happening at breakneck speed — and it seems to be accelerating!

For Consideration

Consider this. Until the end of the century there were no intelligent mobile devices or PDAs; no Bluetooth; no IM/texting; no blogging; no Twitter; no Tweetdeck; no Skype; no Facebook or MySpace; no FlipVideo; no RSS feeds; no wikis; no podcasts; no iPods; no iPhone or iPhone apps; no Photo Booth; no GarageBand; no iMovie; no iTunes; no iTunes University; no YouTube or Vimeo; no Buzzword; no Diigo or delicious; no Flickr; no Skitch; no Mind42 or Mindomo; no Jing; no SecondLife; no Google Mail, Maps, Groups, Alerts, Docs, Books, Scholar, Calendar, Knol, Picasa, Reader, Sketch Up, Translate, Notebook, iGoogle, Custom Search; no Google Earth, Sky, or Ocean layer.

Now, I could continue the list for the rest of the article with a hundred more tools, but my point is that we are in the middle of a new revolution, the “Web 2.0,” “Read-Write,” “Participatory-Culture,” “Social-Learning,” revolution. Where this will evolve is uncertain, but I know from personal experience that the changes in technology are not slowing down. If there is a next stage, call it Web 3.0 for lack of a better term, you can be assured that the students learning today will direct future changes through their participation digital learning communities; communicating, collaborating and creating in ways we can’t even imagine.

Choices

When it comes to learning beyond school, students have choices. In many cases, students are beginning to see school as less and less relevant to their learning. Many students are using or learning to use the technology tools I mentioned above to learn without us. If this trend continues, combined with classroom activities that for too many students are unengaging, unmotivating, and unchallenging, some predict that as students develop personal learning environments less connected to what schools currently offer them, schooling as we know it will become less and less relevant.

As educators we have choices. Some of us are choosing to ignore the technological changes and are continuing to teach the next generation of students, who are growing up in this digital revolution as its citizens, the way we have always taught students. Then again, some of us are attacking the changes, pointing out the dangers, working to persuade the world that they know best. “Students have not changed,” is a comment some educators use to reinforce their argument against changing teaching practice.

Understandably, the fear of change and the lack of support systems can make both these choices seem reasonable. The standards do not assess these technological changes. The curriculum does not acknowledge the changes. Our professional learning does not account for the changes. Our administrator and teacher evaluations do not include standards for evaluating the changes. Most educational leaders are unaware of many of the changes so they do not use the tools or even think of including mention of them in strategic planning documents.

“Technology?”

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I know “technology” is mentioned in these contexts, but not in significant, fundamental, all pervasive ways. The times we live in, the times that are shaping our children’s future, are not just different from the world we learned to navigate as successful adults and educators. Understanding the digital, participatory, global, complex, challenging, flat world we live is a little like understanding Parkour.

Just as Parkour throws the mind off balance ~ how could someone do something so dangerous? ~ the digital world represents a paradigm mind shift that most of us have little time, patience, or interest in understanding. At some level that reaction, as I explained above, is natural but also counter-productive to our mission to educate students in ways that engage them in their education so they develop the capacity to pursue their personal goals and life-long learning as autonomous, self-directed, confident participants in communities of learners.

In Times of Change

Eric Hoffer sums up our challenge.

Creative Commons Image Credits

• The Beatles: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82887550@N00/311443651
• Web 2.0 Services: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pipeapple/3280609082/sizes/o/
• Twitter: What Are You Doing? http://www.flickr.com/photos/27786290@N05/341237946
• In Times of Change: http://www.180techtips.com/quoteslides.htm

Nourishment for Your Journey: A Few Learning Resources

• Minds on Fire: Open Education, The Long Tail, and Learning 2.0
• K12OnlineConference.org: http://k12onlineconference.org/
• Learning and Teaching Scotland on iTunes: http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/ltscotland.org.uk
• The Future of Education: http://www.futureofeducation.com/
• Moving at the Speed of Creativity: http://www.speedofcreativity.org/
• My Email: dennisar [at] gmail [dot] com

On Sunday I was lying on sunny, warm, refreshing Grape Bay Beach, Bermuda listening to my MP3 player. My wife, daughter, her husband and their eighteen month old son Michael were with me. Some of you may remember the song I was listening to that, when I first heard it in 1971 caused a “gust of hope” to rise up in me. I still get that feeling today. It seems that hope springs eternal.

I Googled the song and discovered that it had been sung in 2006 at a concert to honor the “Banker to the Poor,” Muhammad Yunus, who received 1/2 of the Nobel Peace Prize. The other half was shared with Grameen Bank. From the Nobel Prize site…

Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fueled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.

From Dr. Yunus’ personal loan of small amounts of money to destitute basketweavers in Bangladesh in the mid-70s, the Grameen Bank has advanced to the forefront of a burgeoning world movement toward eradicating poverty through microlending. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model operate in more than 100 countries worldwide.

To learn more about Dr. Yunus, Grameen Bank, and other Nobel related resources, check out the Nobel video site.

The song I was listening to on the beach was Peace Train by Cat Stevens, who later changed his name to Yusuf Islam. Stevens said

Peace Train’ is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again. As a member of humanity and as a Muslim, this is my contribution….

Peace Train

Now I’ve been happy lately
Thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be
Something good has begun
I’ve been smiling lately
Dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be
Something good’s bound to come

For out on the edge of darkness
There runs the peace train
Peace train take this country
Come take me home again

Peace train sounding louder
Ride on the peace train
Hoo-ah-eeh-ah-hoo-ah
Come on the peace train
Peace train’s a holy roller
Everyone jump upon the peace train
Hoo-ah-eeh-ah-hoo-ah
This is the peace train

Get your bags together
Come bring your good friends too
Because it’s getting nearer
Soon it will be with you
Come and join the living
It’s not so far from you
And it’s getting nearer
Soon it will all be true

Peace train sounding louder
Ride on the peace train
Hoo-ah-eeh-ah-hoo-ah
Come on the peace train

I’ve been crying lately
Thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating?
Why can’t we live in bliss?

For out on the edge of darkness
There rides the peace train
Peace train take this country
Come take me home again

Peace train sounding louder
Ride on the peace train
Hoo-ah-eeh-ah-hoo-ah
Come on the peace train

Come on, come on, come on the peace train…

Chris Harbeck and Darren Kuropatwa are mathematics teachers in Canada; Chris at Sargent Park School, a junior high school in Winnipeg and Darren at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate only a few blocks from Sargent Park. In April 2008 they brought a few of their students to Manitoba for the Pan-Canadian Interactive Literacy Forum to speak about their learning experiences in their respective math classes using Web 2.0 tools. Listen to Chris and Darren and their students speak. Be ready to take notes on the interactive internet tools the students refer to that have become signposts for how technology has become a transparent backdrop to the real business of school – learning. More important however, be ready to be inspired by these teachers’ comments and the students’ presentations. Remember as you are watching and listening to these SlideShares that if students do not have teachers like Darren and Chis who are willing to learn how to use Web 2.0 tools and use them to push learning off the charts for their students, the students in our schools will never have the learning experiences of which these students speak.

Here is Chris Harbeck and three of his students, Kate, Karen, and Angelo, speaking about their learning.

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Here is Darren Kuropatwa and three of his students, Chris Cadonic, Graeme Weiss, and Mark Rabena, speaking about their learning.

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Finally, don’t miss the Q and A after the presentations, which you can find on Darren’s blog in a post on the conference right here.

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 , a post by Will Richardson prompted this comment on a project I am beginning with my grandson.

Will, I’ve been thinking a lot about the juxtaposition of the tremendous challenges we face as we try to improve schools systemically and the individual learner’s right to learn. Is it the story of learning students experience in schools that which is preventing them from fulfilling the promise we see for web 2.0 pedagogies, is it a broader issue of cultural norms and expectations that students have internalized, or is it something else?

I keep seeing in my mind’s eye the pictures of your children sitting in your home with their laptops open ready to learn with a teacher who is with them via the internet. (Don’t remember where the picture came from. Probably Pageflakes.) Right to learn triumphs over attempts to improve schools!

Here’s a conference session proposal I just submitted to MassCUE for their November 2008 conference that describes the platform my grandson and I intend to use to learn more on the topic.

In the original Greek version of the story Pygmalion is a sculptor who creates a statue into which Aphrodite breathes life. Every day students in schools throughout our country are learning without the benefit of 21st Century Web 2.0 pedagogies. What would happen if someone tried to add those pedagogies from outside the system? Google applications, digital story telling tools, blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds and aggregators are some of the tools teachers are using to help students become self-directed learners. If a high school student is not asked by teachers to use those tools, is it possible for a student to learn how to apply those tools to complete his assignments and breathe live into his own learning? In this session John, a Massachusetts public high school student who once told me he did not mind learning, it was the homework he could not stand, will join me to report on our efforts to add Web 2.0 pedagogies into his learning environment. Which tools help John with assignments? Which carry him beyond the assignments into new learning? We will report on what happened and speculate about the implications for John’s future learning and schooling in general.

Here’s John’s first assignment.

I’d love to have my network join the conversation as this project (Pygmalion Project) moves forward. I’m flying somewhat blind here and could use everyone’s help. You can start by commenting on this post.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. ~ Eric Hoffer

The Future is Upon Us

The world my grandson Aidan will inherit is not the world of my childhood. A few weeks ago, for example, I learned that seeds are now more important to our future than I could have ever imagined. Norway has decided to help the planet bounce back from disaster by establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on an island that lies in the Arctic Ocean only 620 miles from the North Pole.

The Seed Vault can store up to 2.25 billion seeds and exists to preserve the biodiversity of the planet. Over 100 countries are contributing seeds to the vault. This is truly an international effort aimed at research, food preservation, and hope in a time when the world is predicted to experience drastic global climate change over the next 100 years.

This is the world my grandchildren and our communities’ children will inherit. Are we equipped to prepare our students for it? Does the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and hundreds of stories like it have a place in our curriculum?

I virtually attended the February 26, 2008 opening ceremonies inside the vault and you can too. It really is a trip to the future. Coincidentally, February 26 was Aidan’s sixth birthday; he is a kindergartener looking forward to a life of learning. What skills or literacies does he need for the 21st Century?

21st Century Literacies

We are well on our way to answering that question. A Google search to define 21st Century Literacy turns up 246,000 hits. A perusal of the top ten sites reveals references to multimedia literacy, information literacy (three mentions), digital-age literacy, multicultural literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, technology literacy, and network literacy. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that technology is having a tremendous impact on the thinking about what students need to know for the future.

Mary Devaney Columbo in an article New Literacy Skills for the 21st Century discusses the work of the Internet Reading Group at Clemson University and the New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut. They have identified five new literacy skills students need to acquire for online reading. In On the Road to New Literacies Nancy Gustafson and Grace Maley discuss how their school district is implementing the Framework for 21st Century Skills developed by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Both articles appear in the spring 2008 issue of MASCD’s journal Perspectives.

Three more important sources for information on 21st Century Literacies are:

• Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Project New Media Literacies,
• National Educational Technology Standards for Students, Second Edition. International Society for Technology in Education,
• enGauge: A Framework for Effective Technology Use. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Learning Point Associates. (Unfortunately there is this notice on the enGauge website: Effective 3/31/08, the enGauge website will no longer be available.)

Toward A Definition of 21st Century Literacies

Recently the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) issued a statement they called Toward A Definition of 21st Century Literacies that summarizes a lot of what I have learned about this topic.

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments1

The digital universe where these literacies are evident is far removed from the world in which most parents, educators, researchers and politicians live. It is at best a foreign country and at worse the “dark side.” The language, behaviors, norms, tools, and learning environments, although at times virtual, are very real for those who use them; however, unless you experience them yourself, you will not be able to understand them or realize their importance for learning in the 21st Century. Perhaps if we acknowledge how difficult change is for us, we can overcome our resistance to the dramatic shift the digital world represents.
Resistance to Change

Frank Duffey in I Think, Therefore I Am Resistant to Change describes the psychological barrier we have to overcome if we are to understand these new literacies and transform education to prepare our children for their Svalbard-Global-Seed-Bank future.

Mental models resist change. People don’t like to change what they think they know. Given new information to consider, individuals will search their existing mental models to ensure that the new information is consistent with what they know…. If the individual cannot link … new information to an existing mental model, he or she may … discard the information as irrelevant, unimportant, or wrong.2
Building Learning Communities

I was introduced to the digital world of learning at a conference in Massachusetts last summer, Building Learning Communities 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2rv9lv. It was the first time in my life I sat in a conference room to hear a keynote address where every other person had a computer open on his or her lap, and most if not all of the laptops were connected to the Internet. What I was slow to realize then was that some of the computers were communicating with colleagues who for whatever reason could not be physically present in the room, but who were nonetheless present virtually via computer They could be any place on the planet with an Internet connection.

K12 Digital Instructional Development

I went on from that experience to learn more about the digital world of learning that is currently evolving and, I predict, will continue to do so for some time. In October 2007 I attended a free three-week online conference called K12 Online Conference 2007 that is archived on the Internet at http://tinyurl.com/24h2o6 and will be held again in October 2008. Mark it on your calendar! What I learned at the conference opened my eyes to teaching and learning environments that were virtually unknown to me. Since then, with the help of a few people I met online at the conference, I have developed an online network of teachers, administrators, technology specialists and librarians from across the United States and the planet. They have helped me experience and understand the potential importance of the National Council of Teachers of English defined 21st Century Literacies to education for the future. They are part of my Twitter.com virtual network, and I cannot thank them enough for all they are doing to prepare our profession for education in the future.

Collective Intelligences

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligences, http://tinyurl.com/2zo9yl, was recently established to answer one research question: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? For the sake of my grandson Aidan and all the children, I urge you to take the first step.Drop any resistance to the new literacies paradigm, commit yourself to learn more about it, and as you do, invite the colleagues from your professional learning community to join you on the journey I have begun into the digital universe our children will inherit. I am convinced, as MIT apparently is, that collectively we have an opportunity to pool intelligences globally in ways we cannot imagine today to answer the questions of tomorrow. We have to claim these opportunities and help our students to claim them. I suspect it may be the only way we will be able to live creatively and successfully in a world that could be very different from the one we are equipped to live in, a world that is rapidly disappearing.

1 Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies, Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, February 15, 2008

2 I Think, Therefore I Am Resistant to Change. Francis M. Duffy. Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2003 (Vol. 24, No. 1). National Staff Development Council. http://tinyurl.com/37cl66

This article is in the Spring 2008 edition of Perspectives, MA Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development.

The two images come from Classroom 2.0.ning.com and are used with permission of the site creator.

This is the most recent version of Did You Know – IV? video that I have seen. It reminds me of a 60 Minutes interview with Al Gore that aired tonight on Global Climate Change. This week a marketing campaign will begin (April 1, 2008) to convince people to acknowledge the truth of global climate change; Gore says, “this is about survival,” and comments that Vice-President Dick Cheney and others like him, who say the jury’s out on whether or not global climate change is being caused by humans, are similar to people who “still believe the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat.”

Later in the interview at CBS Gore says, “We don’t have any other choice; we just don’t have any other choice. I wish I knew a better way to do it. I constantly ask myself, how can I be more effective in getting this message across? It’s so clear. It’s so … compelling and yet it takes time to get the facts out.

This new version of the Did You Know video is an attempt to get the facts out on a different topic – the global digital shift.

If you are new to making presentations on Web 2.0 pedagogies and want to see someone’s work to emulate for content and style, here is a good example from a South Carolinian, Cathy Nelson. Good stuff Cathy!

Creating, Contributing, Collaborating

Comment on the features in this this style of presentation. How does this style of presentation differ from a typical bulleted slide presentation? To ignore it is to choose ~ Death by PowerPoint.

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John Maklary from Katy, Texas, United States is a Technology Coordinator and Middle School Computer teacher at a PK-8 parochial school in Houston, Texas. His ed tech interests as of late include Digital Storytelling, Geo-Literacy projects, and incorporating more read-write web tools in his classroom.

He attended a workshop session on Interactive American History Websites and did a live blog post on what he was learning. Cover-It-Live was the tool he used.

Cover It Live Blog Post from Workshop on Interactive American History Websites from Learning 2.0 Resources.

Transcript

I think this is an interesting development in the world of networked learning. Although I don’t like the corporate slant to the applications of research, perhaps we could have some influence on directing part of the energy of the center to education.

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’

The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together.

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Launch Video (Requires RealPlayer 8.0+)

The Apple Tour of 21st Century Learning I attended this week offered a lot to think about. I created a mind42.com (a really useful free online tool) MindMap Apple: A Tour of 21st Century Learning to represent some of the ideas that were presented in the Opening Presentation and three hands-on-the-computer-they-give-you sessions. The differences between this event and EduCon 2.0 in Philadelphia in January 2008 were striking:

1. These were very “teacher-at-the-center-of-the-learning” controlled experiences of technology and core subject content.
2. The questions on control of technology and by implication of student learning were noticeable from the participants in the one session where we had time to talk.
3. These were rehersed presentations and carefully orchestrated to deliver content through a simulated hands on use of the loaned computer.
4. No Ustream.tv broadcasts; no wiki to go to for follow up resources to support ongoing learning.
5. No conversations except over lunch (no Philly steak and cheese).
6. No free applications/technology tools.
7. No students.
8. None of the energy, excitement, sharing, or audience-presenter interaction.
9. Ideas on technology were “corporatized,” a real word in case you are wondering.
10. The “core values” for 21st Century Student Learning presented at the beginning of the day (Creation – Distribution – Access – Collaboration) were invisible beyond the scripts we followed in the classrooms.

Despite these failings, I praise the Apple team for their efforts. Their hearts are definitely in the right place and they worked hard to deliver a good day. I just think we all have a lot to learn, myself included, before we know how to consistently push learning off the charts for students and educators. All children need to be healthy, safe, supported, engaged and challenged every day. We’re not there yet.

Guy Kawasaki in the video on the Art of the Start speaks about passion and a desire to save the world as key ingredients for a start-up company’s success. Guy claims these ingredients were keys to Apple’s success. I wonder if Apple remembers that history? It sure didn’t seem as if they did in the learning environments we experienced last week. They said the right things. Now they need to learn how to walk the talk. Keep the focus on Claiming What We Imagine for our students!

Some Questions

1. Do we know how to build passion and a desire to save the world into the way we educate children?
2. Would it help students learn?
3. Can Apple help us answer the questions?
4. What would an AppleCon 2.0 look like or are corporations and the conversations we had at EduCon 2.0 antithetical?
5. What would the world be like if Apple and Microsoft found the passion to learn from the lessons of EduCon 2.0? Could they help to “save the world?”