What I am sensing, though, is that more schools and districts seem to “get” that the Web is affording some new opportunities for learning, and that they are willing to seriously consider what the impacts are for their schools. The problem is, and this is just my take on it, that most still see it as a conversation about technology as opposed to a conversation about change.
Source: Opening Day(s)
In the 2008 national Campus Computing Project (CCP) survey, 42% of schools reported that they had already migrated or were about to migrate to an outsourced student e-mail service. Another 28% said they were considering switching. CCP founding director Kenneth Green says many of today’s first-year students like to use the Web-based e-mail they grew accustomed to in high school, just as many stick to an existing cell phone number rather than get a new dorm number.
I wonder what these numbers are like at the K12 level.
What next? Giving away office suites? Web pages? Where will teachers get their clip art?
Web site filters in schools have had tremendous success in keeping one group of people from freely searching online. Unfortunately, that group is teachers.
via Justin Reich in the Washington Post.
Just for the sake of argument, might the reason for our marginalization be that librarians and tech enthusiasts have always had their own agenda/mission and worked toward accomplishing it rather than working toward the goals their schools felt important?
via On separate missions – Home – Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog
“Your value as a business is now in losing control and watching people surprise you.” Jeff Jarvis on This Week in Tech.
Dean Shareski asks, “Could this apply to our schools?”
Source: Hugh MacLeod
Update: This morning John C. Dvorak was the keynote speaker at a conference of K12 technology folks here in Wisconsin. He spent 90 minutes reviewing technologies and trends in the industry, inserting his own style (which, btw, I absolutely love).
In the Q&A session afterward, I asked a simple question. “You have reviewed a number of trends and tools. Give us three people we should being attention to.”
He was remarkably at a loss for an answer. Eventually, he mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams, and Kevin Rose. After 90 minutes of dissing on Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, the three people he mentions are the founders of these services.
I’m not sure whether to be excited about figuring Dvorak out through this exercise or frustrated that 200 K12 IT folks will go back and use this as evidence to continue shutting down social media in their schools.
(Web 1.0 is about connecting things. Web 2.0 is about connecting people.)
Welcome the new Chief Information Officer of the United States.
Mr. Kundra also said that he would push the government to embrace cloud computing — having work done on large servers rather than on desktop PCs. He acknowledged that there are privacy and security issues with some cloud-computing efforts, particularly when the computers are not all operated by the government. But he said that should not stop the government from taking advantage of the speed and efficiency such systems offer.
K12 schools concerned about privacy, security, etc. of their 300 computers are now “on notice” in my world.
Source: NYTimes Bits
Photo: Hamed Saber
You want to make the most of the stimulus? Invest it in getting teachers and students connected, and in professional development that goes far, far beyond the one-day Powerpoint workshops many are mired in to something that focuses on how learning changes in a networked world. One that helps teachers see the world differently and helps them re-envision their classroom practice.
I like when Will gets excited.
So, you want to use the education piece of the stimulus to boost the economy? By all means, keep your brain in the box. But if you really want to use that money to improve learning, use it to help the teachers in the schools understand how to help the kids in the classrooms become the readers and writers and mathematicians and scientists that will flourish in a networked world.
Well said.
Dear Wisconsin,
The Science Leadership Academy is looking for faculty to continue to develop and implement a rigorous, inquiry-driven, project-based curriculum. In addition, all teachers at SLA have an advisory class where they work with the same students for four years. SLA is a national model for “School 2.0,” a reform movement that seeks to harness the tools of technology, tied to a progressive pedagogy, to re-imagine what high schools can be. As such, SLA is a 1:1 laptop school that uses multiple resources — web-based and traditional — to create meaning and understanding.
More info available at SLA: Call For Teachers – Practical Theory.
He’s talking to school administrators now.
If Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen is right, half of all instruction will take place online within the next 10 years–and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers.
Click through to AASA hears what’s about to disrupt schools for the rest of the article. My apologies from eSchool News and their ridiculous requirement to register for the final 2/3 of the article.
I think I’ve put this out there before.
This 2008/2009 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words).
Preview and download your own copy here.
It’s a learning project. It’s not a social networking project. It’s not a Web 2.0 project. It’s not an online community or a virtual world. Teachers need to experience and learn online learning. It’s built through a collaborative model of online learning and teaching. We aren’t building virtual schools or training more teachers. Leave that to others. This new collaborative model becomes the network around the network.
…and while the network is more powerful than the node, we need the nodes like flowers need sun.
Grow.
This seminar description came into my inbox from iNACOL (International Association for K12 Online Learning) yesterday.
This session is designed to provide the iNACOL community with an overview of the NCAA and the process by which prospective student-athletes become academically eligible to participate in intercollegiate athletics. This session will also address the process that takes place in order for schools/programs to register their courses with the NCAA Eligibility Center.
It excites me to see data points on the path towards online learning that indicate we are thinking beyond “credit recovery”.
Fans of the ijohnpederson Home Game™ recognize this rant as the only thing of significance I’ve contributed to the blogosphere. Today I’m taking it into the real world for a bit of feedback and conversation at Educon 2.1.
As always, props the those that wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto. Mine is not much more than an exercise in find/replace/remix, but it’s helped immensely to frame and inspire my thinking.
Three simple questions for the exercise…
Which thesis grabs your attention?
Which phrase strikes you?
Which word brings this together for you?
Onward…
1. Learning is conversation.
2. Learning consists of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
4. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
5. In networked learning, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
6. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
7. As a result, learners are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in networked learning changes people fundamentally.
8. People in networked learning have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from traditional media.
9. There are no secrets. The networked learners know more than schools do about their own learning. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
10. Schools struggle to speak the same voice as this new networked conversation. To their intended audiences, schools sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
11. Schools can now communicate with their learners directly.
12. Schools attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their learners care about.
13. Schools need to talk to learners with whom they hope to create relationships.
14. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep learning at bay.
15. Smart learners will find schools who speak their own language.
16. To speak with a human voice, schools must share the concerns of their communities.
17. But first, they must belong to a community.
18. Human communities are based on discourse. Human speech about human concerns.
19. The community of discourse is the learning.
20. Schools that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
21. As with networked learning, people are also talking to each other directly inside the school‚ and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
22. Such networked conversations are taking place today. But only when the conditions are right.
23. A healthy network organizes teachers in many meanings of the word.
24. Schools depend heavily on open networks to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.
25. When school networks are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of learning.
26. There are three conversations going on. One inside the school. One among the parents. One among the students.
27. These three conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.
28. Smart schools will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
29. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now perceive schools as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
30. This is suicidal. Parents and students want to talk to schools.
31. Sadly, the part of the school a networked parent wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false‚ and often is.
32. Parents do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations.
33. We want access to your school information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites with eye candy but lacking any substance.
34. We’re also the people who make your schools go. We want to talk to you directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.
35. As learners, as parents, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and PTA groups to introduce us to each other?
36. As learners, as parents, we wonder why you’re not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
37. Your tired notions of “parents aren’t involved” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections.
38. We like this new education system much better. In fact, we are creating it.
39. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door.
40. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
41. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something.
42. We have better things to do than worry about whether you’ll change in time to get our business. Education is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?
43. We have real power and we know it. If you don’t quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.
44. Our allegiance is to ourselves‚ our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Schools that have no part in this world also have no future.
45. To traditional schools, networked learners may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. However have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
46. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
Here’s the Wordle created from the session descriptions for Educon 2.1. Powerful.
Yours truly is presenting “The Networked Learning Manifesto: Welcoming Parents into the Conversation”. I’m so completely out of my league in comparison to the other presenters, but I trust that the attendees will be gentle.
Our own networked learning is enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge to emerge. While celebrating Web 2.0 tools around these parts will get you ridiculed, it was the developers of these tools that brought us the idea that the aggregate of these tools constituted a “conversation”. Participating in this “conversation” over time changes individuals fundamentally. Can it change systems? Many of the sharpest nodes on our learning network are speaking from the perspective of parents grappling with reforming our schools. In 2005 I took The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of how social media moves markets, and mashed it into a message about how I saw Web 2.0 influencing education. It’s admittedly the only useful thing I’ve contributed outside a few lolcats and snarky Twitter memes. This session will pull this Networked Learning Manifesto out and smack it around among friends. See what roads it leads us down.
Via Will Richardson » So What is the Future of Schools?…
Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference.
Noted.
Via 2008-2009 Wikipedia Selection for schools…
This 2008/9 Wikipedia DVD Selection is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. It has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fitted on a DVD with good size images) and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words). Articles were chosen from a list ranked by importance and quality generated by project members. This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed.
I’m attempting to channel Darren Draper, statistical genius, here with this little exercise. Of course, +87 ijohnpederson Home Game™ points to anybody else who can chip in.
Below is a link to a Google Spreadsheet. Each figure is the enrollment of a school. I want these to show up on some cool graph that may (does it?) show up on some sort of “bell curve”. The horizontal axis has the schools (small on left, big on right), the vertical axis is the number of schools (few at bottom, many at top). The curve will show me the “average enrollment” at the middle/high point of the curve. The statistical “standard deviation” stuff will go out 2 steps left and right, banding the school enrollments into like groups.
In other words, I think I know enough to know what I want, but not enough to know how the heck to do it.
Take a shot at it for yourself.
A little piece released in eSchool News on a study released by SETDA (the State Educational Technology Director’s Association) aka “the state level ed tech folks that all play with each other”.
To provide a technology-rich learning environment for the next 2-3 years, SETDA recommends an external connection to the internet service provider of 10 megabits per second (Mbps) for every 1,000 students and staff members, and internal wide-area network connections between schools of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members.
Over the next 5-7 years, the group recommends an external internet connection of 100 Mpbs for every 1,000 students and staff members and internal wide-area network connections of at least 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) per 1,000 students and staff members.
…via Related Top News – SETDA urges schools to boost bandwidth
If you’re creative, if you can think independantly, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you now more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case.
From gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: how to be creative
I was sold on my new job when, in the interview, they wanted me to talk about my failures. And they told me about theirs.
This trend of various nodes on the network (Jones, Utech, Jakes, Laufenberg) moving to new and exciting pastures continues for me. On May 1, 2008 (omg, that’s less than a month!) I’ll be headed to Madison, WI and start work for an outfit called WiscNet. These are the folks that provide and manage big fat Internet pipes to many of the universities, colleges, libraries, and K12 schools throughout Wisconsin. Those of you that work with boxes and wires can relax, I won’t be touching that stuff. I get to keep my educational hat on and am tasked with something near and dear to all of us.
“Develop the network around the network.”
How cool is that? “Networked learning” is not only some crazy addiction hobby, there are actually people that will pay other people to make it happen. Really. “Hey John. We have big fat Internet pipes. Go give them a good educational reason to use them. Be creative.”
A few big highlights that come with the new gig…
1) Internet2. I know what this means in conceptual form. Now I get to experience it close up.
2) I’m technically some sort of academic breed within the University of Wisconsin Madison. This scratches that itch I’ve always had to experience a bit of educational technology at the higher education level.
3) I’m moving from that local/regional perspective to a state/national sphere. I get to disrupt on a much broader level.
I look forward to take you all along on this journey. Thanks for propping me up throughout the process. I owe a significant karma debt to all of you who have been my teachers all along.