Work With Hope

This week the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place in Las Vegas.  While I was unable to attend (despite my begging!), I have been able to follow the progress, as virtually no tech blogger or podcaster has talked about anything else.

Though not specifically targeted toward education, this show can reflect changing realities of our lives, and these trends will change our future students.  So school planners need to keep fingers on the CES pulse (to be fair, CES doesn’t always hit the mark, last year the most heralded device was the Palm Pre, a lovely idea that was DOA by the time it rolled out).

So the cliffnotes version of CES this year had two main themes, 3D and Tablet machines.

I’ll deal briefly with 3D.  I don’t see this as having any effect on classroom instruction for years.  Although the potential of interacting with virtual realities is intriguing, widespread availability of these tools for schools seems at least a decade away.  3D television, whether it catches on or not (and I don’t think it will), seems to be an entertainment gimmick, not an educational frontier.

The tablet, however, is a tool indirectly gunning for the educational market.  There really is nothing new to this device.  Earlier prototypes  have existed for over a decade, most famously the Apple Newton, and products that have come to market have been near universal failures.  These newer tablets (I am speaking of the products I have seen and not the rumored Apple tablet which may be made of pixie dust and the dreams of little children) are smaller, lighter, and more powerful.  They seem to be a great possibility for school use joining ebooks and netbooks as solutions for content delivery.  So why am I not smiling?

There is a pattern in the history of tech development and adoption that when you have two or more products competing for the same space, this can delay rather than speed the adoption of either.  A perfect example of this is high definition video players.  The HD and BlueRay formats battled for more than a year before BlueRay finally emerged as dominant.  Yet looking sales during this time showed people staying away from the purchase of either format.  In fact, by the time that a single format emerged, much of the public had convinced itself that they didn’t want it, and online streaming video (even in high definition) had more time to catch up.  Though current BlueRay sales are better, they still lag behind the sales of conventional DVDs.  Two products competing for the same space slowed progress.

In the same way I see upcoming battles in the “second device” space.  Netbooks, e-readers, tablets (and smartphones) are probably not replacements for a desktop or a full laptop, but they have amazing functionality as a flexible mobile platform.  Unfortunately, most people won’t want to purchase or carry more than one.  Each will have advocates and critics, and schools will be fearful of moving in a dead-end direction.

I’d be interested if you see a similar challenge, or if I am making problems where there are none.

BTW, we are going full-speed ahead with out netbook plan…tablets be damned!

Before I start this post, I’m noticing on the TV that car holiday commercials go on longer past Christmas than ads for any other product…hmmm,

But to the point.  This morning I was listening to a podcast talking about privacy settings in Facebook in light of last month’s mass reset debacle.  As I thought about this, it occurred to me that this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be sharing with students.  Instead of ignoring their life in social networks and pretending it doesn’t exist, we need to be encouraging of good habits and providing real guidance (not hysteria) about risks.

But how to do this?  If I were a classroom teacher, I could talk to my classes, but as an administrator, I have more limited access to students.  Much of this stuff doesn’t obviously fit into the curriculum of a specific subject, and though I know many of the teachers at my school talk about it, it isn’t organized and it doesn’t reach all the students.

But what if we produced a short weekly segment to be shown as part of the daily student telecast?  I picture this as a blend of news, demonstrations of tools, and common sense security and privacy tips.  I’d like to get a team of students to collaborate with me and to do most of the actual presentations.

These clips could then be posted on the school blog for parents to see and to encourage reasonable discussion and Q&A.

Is anyone else doing something like this?  I would love your ideas and comments.

Like many of those whom I read and admire, I spend much of my time moving between excitement and frustration and terror.  As I read the ideas and plans of the wonderful digital education community, I’m always seeing new possibilities as the digital vision becomes more and more a reality.  Yet facing the realities of my school and myself, I’m frustrated by the long distances and enormous hurdles between today and tomorrow.  Likewise I am sometimes overwhelmed by fear of unintended and misintended consequences.  After all, when children and their future are the laboratory, a disastrous experiment can not be wiped up and washed down a drain.

That being said, I still wonder whether we are serving them with the current curricular skills taught in schools.  Too much of the subject matter and accompanying skills seem to be designed to serve the needs of our generation, and again I worry whether we teach the world we learned because this is how we understand education.  We teach them how to make buggy whips because that’s what we learned because we’ll always need buggy whips.

What started me thinking about this today was reading a few assignments for high school term papers.  The term paper is one of the sacred cows of the high school experience.  It is generally a miserable experience for students to research and write and for teachers to teach and grade, and there are very few if any life applications for these skills short of research itself.  With these qualifications, one would think that this buggy whip would be well on its way toward extinction, but parents, teachers, and in an odd way students hold to this totemic rite of passage as an educational bootcamp.

I want to be reasonable about this, I’m certain (at least somewhat certain) that at some point in history someone learned something from this experience.  However, the way the research paper is assigned and taught ignores several essential shifts.  Research and note-taking skills are based on a model of information scarcity rather than information ubiquity (and why would anyone write something on paper cards that could be bookmarked and made instantly available?).  Similarly the lengthy paper presenting the totality of others’ ideas (in the student’s own words) besides being a template for plagiarism is also based on an information scarcity model.  finally the paper itself is dissimilar to the bulk of writing done in the professional world.  In an average day I write thousands of words, most of these are emails, some are articles and blogposts, some are responses to other’s blogposts (in fact, I wonder if the paper assignment itself is on it’s deathbed, but that’s another day).

Yet a suggestion that this buggy whip be abandoned is greeted with fear and disdain.  Teachers and parents are fearful that something will be “lost” with the disappearance of this dinosaur.  Some sneer that the rigor of the educational process is being lost.  Some retreat to the last refuge of the educational traditionalist, “They’ll need this for college.”

To all of these objections I want to shout, “Shut up, voices in my head!”   I understand the fear and I feel it.  What if we make these changes and we BREAK A GENERATION OF KIDS?

Still it’s no longer possible for me to embrace the teaching of 20th Century skills.  We need to teach students skills (including research and writing) that they will actually use in the way they will use them.

For example, I wish someone had taught me how to bring a blog post to an effective close, but I never learned this, so I guess I’ll just stop…

I invite your comments.

I’m not particularly inclined to write self-revelatory prose here, but my experience yesterday related directly to the issues I discuss in this website, and the insights I took from it have some broader applications.

Yesterday I was presenting my “Shifting Platforms/Shifting Paradigms” talk at the CLMS/CLHS conference in San Diego. Though I had limited time, I was lucky enough to attend Alan November’s opening keynote before my session time. His talk was exciting and inspirational, and though I worried that a few of his points were similar to mine, I felt that my talk was actually a great (if less expert) companion to his.

I went to my assigned room, set up, and waited…and NO ONE CAME!

Well, it didn’t turn out as badly as that, as I started to pack up with my tail between my legs, a couple of people came in, and we sat down and had a good conversation, roughly following the outline of my original talk (I did skip the small group breakout however).

I’m not posting this as a public licking of wounds (well, maybe just a little bit), nor am I suggesting that the conference attendees should have come to my session.  Rather, I came to a couple of realizations about this new world that I’m attempting to enter.

These may seem completely obvious to those of you who have been attending and speaking at conferences over time, but I write them as advice to myself as much as others.

First, for breakout sessions people want skills more than big ideas.  The “Shifting Platforms…” talk is pretty good, but it was the same type of territory explored in the keynote.  In a brief walkaround I noticed that the largest and most enthusiastic crowd was in a session dedicated to exploring Google Wave (if no one showed up, I was going to go in there myself!).  People need to be inspired and given food for thought, but they want concrete takeaways as well.  Luckily the two new presentations I’m writing have a much more concrete “hot button” angle, so I hope to address this.

Second, people attach to presenters as much as to topics.  Beside the issues with the general topic, people didn’t come because they didn’t know who I am and whether listening to me would be worth their limited time.  In part this is a function of time and experience, but it is also a function of direct networking.  I was not able to get to the conference until immediately before my session.  I might have had more success if I had come the night before and talked to some people about what I was doing.  I can’t forget that this is a people business, and if I make a PowerPoint, they won’t necessarily come.

Humbled by the experience (and who can’t use a bit of humiliation now and then?) I hope I can learn the lessons it brings to me and focus on giving people what they want and not just what I want to do.