Mar 07

Is Bill Gates still relevant?

I’m sitting here at SXSWedu. The closing keynote, featuring Bill Gates, has just ended. The lines to get in were ridiculous and the staff were forced to open the doors more than 20 minutes early just to diffuse the bulging crowd. He was introduced to a standing ovation and took the stage.

Waiting for the keynote to begin, I reflected on my thoughts about Gates and his relationship to technology. I’ll admit at the front that my view of the man is colored by my early edtech involvement with Microsoft. Those mostly negative experiences, combined with my preference toward Apple and/or open source technologies has made me less of a fan than the multitudes surrounding me in the Austin Convention Center this morning.

The first thing I noticed is that Bill is starting to look a little old. Just my take, anyway. And, yeah, so am too so no harm, no foul.

Then he started his talk.

It didn’t take long for the realization to hit me that he must not have been told educators were in the crowd today. Maybe he thought it was investors? The unwashed masses of today’s general public? I’m not sure. Because, frankly, I didn’t hear any ideas or great wisdom from on high that I expected to hear from the Sage of Redmond.20130307-121726.jpg

His talk was a rehash of educational technology up to this point, it seemed. His foundation is doing some impressive work but we didn’t really hear much about it. He talked about K-12 as if we’re this great, untapped market of potential for some innovator who can come in and just own it. Hello? Really? The sense I got from the talk was that it was just his standard foundation pitch to investors. I was hoping to hear some way forward, some key insights from his lofty perch. I didn’t hear any.

He favored charter schools at several points during the speech, bringing up the CEO of Summit, a charter, during the Jay Leno portion of the talk. I realize some charters are doing amazing work, but to blindly label them as the way of the future does a great disservice to the work being done in public schools and discussed at length during SXSWedu.

I think the thing that bugged me the most was the lack of audience questions. A hallowed tradition at SXSWedu is the audience interaction. It’s expected of panelists. They obviously caved to Gates’ apparent unwillingness to field any. Clearly, there would have been many, many questions. Probably most of them would have been unrelated to the talk. I’m sure those are uncomfortable for the man but to deny the tradition simply felt like the conference had been bullied.

The twitter reaction to the speech was interesting. I think the entrepreneurial part of the audience was in a swooning mood. They came to adore their hero and they got what they wanted. The educators I follow were distinctly annoyed. It was refreshing to know I wasn’t alone. The dog and pony show that was on stage today felt distinctly like a scripted, we-will-discuss-this-but-not-this kind of thing. Seriously, how can you have a discussion about modern educational technology and not mention the iPad? Yes, I realize it’s not in Bill’s interest to discuss a technology he’s not monetized but it’s completely unrealistic. To be fair, he didn’t mention Microsoft either but you could sense that the effort to keep the conversation platform-agnostic was a painful exercise. He was able to do it but his CEOs were less able.

So, to answer the question posed in the headline, I believe Bill has lost his touch. Clearly, billions of dollars buys you relevance, so he will always be part of the discussion but such a voice commands a platform. Too bad it was wasted this morning.

Mar 06

What’s different now?

I’m sitting in the opening session of South By Southwest edu (SXSWedu) in Austin, listening to a discussion about the direction of education, based on a summary of the Horizon Report.

I keep coming back to the question:

What’s changed in today’s kids that is different from when I went to school?

The “sage on the stage” model worked fine for my generation and those before me. We learned when the teachers and professors lectured. Believe me, I’m not advocating for that old model. I’m just wondering how kids today are wired so differently.

Here’s a theory that I’ll toss out and I invite your feedback:

Visual media is not prone to causing critical thinking. Kids today have grown up watching tv and screens of various devices. We’ve cut off their ability to process and critique at the same time. That’s why the higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy is so underused in today’s educational model.

Just a thought. Yours?

Feb 29

My bold school

On February 21, I had the privilege of attending a dinner hosted by Houston A+ Challenge, featuring Will Richardson. Will is a well-respected educator and speaker and I was quite interested to hear his take on the current situation in educational technology.

He didn’t disappoint. Will talked about five realities that affect education in America today and we were to have table discussion after.

I used the wrong word in my Twitter post afterward. I said “disappointed” when I should have said “disheartened.” My tablemates were friendly and cordial but seemed to me to evince the “yeah but” mentality of the current decision-makers. It was frustrating. Will made a statement that struck home for me. He said, “there’s old school, then there’s bold school” (or words to that effect).

Responding to my tweet, and raising me a “yes and…”, my friend and colleague Michelle Bourgeois asked a simple question:

“What’s your bold school thinking look like?”

Clearly, the 140-character limit of Twitter wouldn’t suffice to answer this, so here goes…

I think often about how I, and others of my generation, was educated. Then I contrast that memory with what I know to be the reality in the vast majority of schools in this country today and I’m understanding something of the problem Will described. When I graduated high school, I was ready to enter college. Today’s students, for the most part, are not.

Nothing about my education was out of the ordinary. I went to school, did my homework, paid attention in class and got the credit. I did have the advantage of being educated in a private school until seventh grade but, after that, it was all public education. My wife, however, went to high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico and enjoyed a remarkable high school experience in her gifted and talented program, so it’s her experience I am drawn to to shape my thinking about what education needs to look like.

I was enrolled in the gifted program at the beginning of my fourth
grade year. In fourth and fifth grade I went to my gifted classroom
for three quarters of the time, and to my “regular” classroom for the
remaining quarter. My “regular” classes were traditional, rote
learning and very boring for me, and I just endured them until it was
time to go to my gifted class. In gifted class we worked on many group
and individual projects and there was a huge emphasis on collaboration
and demonstration. We gave oral reports on topics ranging from foreign
cultures to family history to animal and plant studies. We were
encouraged to give presentations using creative methods–I remember
hand-illustrating a short film strip for my presentation on greek
myths, and learning how to make a French cake for my presentation on
France. We explored a variety of different careers, including
archeology and film making, and we had a lot of guest speakers and
went on some amazing hands-on field trips. We also did a lot of logic
puzzles and word games that were designed to increase our critical
thinking skills and to introduce us to deductive reasoning.

In middle school the gifted education curriculum was presented during
the language arts and literature blocks. If we showed the aptitude for
it, we were also enrolled in enriched math and science classes, which
were taught separately from the gifted curriculum. There were 13 of us
in the program, and we had the same teacher all three years–Mary
Mendlesohn. We all hated her when we had her because she was
incredibly strict, but we all thanked her later because she taught us
so many skills that we used well into our college careers. Like our
elementary school gifted class, the curriculum was stimulating,
challenging, and always interesting. Our focus all three years was in
four major areas: improving our reading comprehension (we all went
into the program at well above a high school reading level), shaping
our writing styles, increasing our vocabulary, and sharpening our
critical thinking skills. She used the old-school method of teaching
grammar with parts of speech, parts of sentence, phrases, clauses and
diagrams. The majority of our projects were collaborative in nature,
the majority of our tests were essay exams, and, also like elementary
school, there was a strong emphasis on oral reports and presentations.
We read college-level books, and at the end of our three years she
told us that she would have been comfortable giving us a college-level
writing assignment.

In high school the gifted curriculum was primarily converted to
Advanced Placement classes in English and Math, enriched science and
language classes, and a separate class in the ninth grade devoted
strictly to gifted curriculum similar to the curriculum in elementary
and middle school. In English, the emphasis was on reading
comprehension and writing. We gave oral book reports, and were again
encouraged to give them using creative methods. All of our tests were
essay exams, and we were expected to know the material and be able to
analyze it clearly and comprehensively in a short period of time. We
were expected to make and defend arguments for or against certain
principals, and to be able to clearly explain our thoughts and ideas
from start to finish. Our writing skills were sharply honed, and our
teachers expected and received the highest quality in every sentence
we wrote. For math we started with Algebra I our Freshman year, then
went on to Geometry as Sophomores, then Algebra II/Trig as Juniors.
Some of the students in our class had taken Algebra I in eighth
grade–those students started with Geometry, then went on to Algebra
II their Sophomore year, and had a full year of Trigonometry their
Junior year. All of us were funneled into AP Calculus our Senior year.
In all of our math classes we were expected to show our work, and we
were expected to show that we understood not only how to do the rote
calculation, but also the principal behind it. In all of our classes
we were encouraged to collaborate and to help each other work out
problems. For example, in Calculus, if we had a problem that were were
not able to solve, we wrote the problem on the board when we came in
to class. If we saw a problem on the board that we had solved, we got
extra credit if we showed the solution to the class on the board. The
theory was that to teach someone else was to truly master a subject,
and it certainly had merit: there were about 30 students in that
program, and all of us passed the AP English and AP Calculus exams our
Senior year, most of us with a four or above on a five-point scale. I
don’t know of anyone in the class who did NOT go to college, and many
of us have gone on to pursue graduate and doctoral degrees as well.

Much of what you notice about her experience is how similar it is to the way constructivist classrooms are envisioned today. Any educator worth their salt knows we need our children working in the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and you saw several examples in Stacey’s experience, above. Students need to be creating, discussing, sharing and synthesizing words, concepts, creating projects, working in the world of photos, audio and video. Moreover, they need to be contributing to the world’s knowledge base, not just consuming it! I know how a student’s eyes light up when they realize that the podcast they created was listened to by someone from a foreign country. Suddenly, the lessons of the four walls immediately surrounding them are expanded to a much larger world. They get it. And the learning becomes authentic. All because someone noticed.

In the past twenty years, American education has shied away from these ideals toward one of consumption and rote memorization. We’re already paying for that decision and we’ve lost at least one generation of students to it. Before we lose another, we need to build the school system that will once again serve our students in the way we’ve long expected.

We need to get away, too, from the idea that every student must go to college. Higher education is a fantastic path, but it’s not today’s HS graduates’ only one. Our students are falling behing their peers in other countries and it’s showing up in some startling places. I spend a lot of time programming and learning about it online. It was a heavy realization, years ago, that the vast majority of truly innovative coding creations are coming from overseas; not America. If you examine the nationality of the programmers on a site such as phpclasses.org, you’ll find that most are not American. WordPress theme creators? Mostly overseas. While these examples aren’t necessarily representative of all aspects, it brings some sobering realizations into stark focus: Our kids will increasingly have trouble competing in a global marketplace.

So my bold school looks like Stacey’s.

  • It’s cross-curricular. It’s widely known that music teachers can help teach students math. There are so many ways that a cross-curricular approach can improve schools, it’s hardly worth noting here.
  • It’s multi-path. By “multi-path,” I mean that there’s no one linear approach through the material. Today’s schools don’t differ significantly from a factory in that the processes that exist today are linear and regimented. A multi-path school is free to devise the appropriate processes to guide students along.
  • It’s interest-driven. When I need to learn a new skill, I give myself a project in which to learn the skills. That’s how I learned to program years ago and it’s how I learned web design. It’s how most of us learn. Why not apply it to schools? Yes, project-based learning has been around for a long time.
  • It’s mastery-based. Students learn at different speeds. We need to move beyond the notion that all students in the same grade have to be the same age. Sure, there are socialization factors involved, but I’d argue that the collaborative processes in place at a bold school would nullify most of the negative impacts of differing ages in the same classroom. If a student is moving along at a level justifying it, why not adjust the curriculum to the student instead of holding him or her back?
  • It’s technology-infused. I ask adult educators all the time: “When you need an answer, how do you find it?” Almost without exception, the answer is “I Google it.” Let’s face it, if the answer to a test question is to be found by a web search, then kids don’t need to memorize it. You might question the role of technology in your own life, but it will be an immutable fact of your children’s lives. The bold school will have a rich set of online resources, activities and mechanisms to support a 24/7 culture of learning. Digital textbooks and online educational environments are already here but they will need to become an integral part of the educational process, not just an afterthought.

You might notice that I’ve not said a lot about assessment. I assure you, it’s taken a significant amount of self-control to get to this point! Say what you will about assessments (and I have plenty to say on the subject!), a product of the bold school I describe above will handle any standardized assessment you throw at them with ease.

I wish we were closer to being able to implement bold school thinking in America. We’re not. As long as legislators who have never been in a school since they graduated continue to shackle them with burdensome rules and lawyers attack every innovative initiative, we are doomed to continue our downward spiral.

Stacey’s gifted program? That awesome program that gave her and her classmates an incredible jumpstart into the world they now inhabit? It was cancelled the following year because of parental complaints about elitism and equity. What a sad commentary about what we as Americans desire for our children.

We owe it to them to do better and it’s going to take bold thinking and bold leadership.

Feb 22

Flashback

This morning on NPR, a story took me deep into the Wayback Machine:

NPR: Olympians Were ‘Superstars’ In ABC Sports Show

I’m old enough to remember “The Superstars” and I recall how intense the competitions were. Listening to Mike Pesca’s story and the interview sound took me back in time.

As the story talked about the story of the first season’s champion, Bob Seagren, a pole vaulter, I remembered meeting him.

It was 1974 (I think; it might have been ’73) and I lived in El Paso, Texas. Back then, it was the hotbed of American track and field. UTEP track teams routinely won NCAA championships and the mostly African athletes could be seen running throughout town in their distinctive orange and white sweats. The track team was an immense source of pride to El Pasoans.

The coach was Wayne Vandenberg. He was a hotshot promoter as well as track coach. In 1974, he organized a track meet at Kidd Field featuring Olympians and a world-class field. It was quite a day and there was even a streaker during the event!

I was in a full-length leg cast, having injured it in a bike accident earlier that year. My folks somehow managed a field pass for me and my dad pushed me and my wheelchair around the infield. As the day progressed, I witnessed a number of amazing performances and got many autographs on the program at my side. I particularly remember Wyomia Tyus coming over to say hi and sign.

At the end of the day, all the events had finished except the pole vault. The two best pole vaulters in the world, Seagren and Sweden’s Kjell Isaksson, were locked in an unrelenting, head-to-head duel. They were the only two remaining competitors and the entire stadium focused on the pole vault pit. Having the field pass let me sit immediately behind the judges at the pole stand, so I had the best seat in the house and I was loving every minute of it.

Jump after jump, each of these guys eliminated the competition until they were at the threshold of the outdoor world record. As I recall it, Seagren asked for a height that was quarter-inch over the world record. When world records come into play, things get crazy. And slow. Before the attempt, the height had to be measured and the wind had to be within a certain window (it was gusty that day). Finally, Seagren had his chance and he made the jump, setting a new world record.

Isaksson asked for another quarter inch and the waiting continued as the judges and wind did their thing and Isaksson claimed the world record for himself.

Sometime during this period, Seagren must have taken notice of the kid in the cast over by the pit. He came over and sat down next to me. He asked me how I’d broken my leg and I told him but, honestly, I have no idea what we said after that. All I remember is that one of the world’s greatest athletes and a personal hero was sitting on the ground, talking to ME!

After a few minutes, he stood up and said, “I guess I’d better go jump.”

At the end of the day, the two jumpers had both cleared the same world record height and finished tied in the meet, each with a share of the record.

Note: my recollections and the official world record history don’t jive. It could be that this was an exhibition or that they weren’t true world records or the details have been jumbled in the fog of a kid’s memory. I’m not sure. Nonetheless, my memories of that day were indelible, however history chooses to record the events I witnessed.

Feb 17

Time for a reset…

It’s funny, the things you take a look at when you need new business cards.

The fabulous place I work allows us a tremendous amount of freedom when it comes to our online presence. They value the colleagues I have acquired in my years of developing a personal learning and communication network and it’s quite appreciated.

As I was filling out the form asking about the info to be a part of the card, it caused me to take a look at my own little corner of the web in a new light. I’ve long realized it was out of date and was in need of a fresh look and feel. My dilemma is that I’m a strong proponent of modern web design in schools and my heart of hearts wants me to have you be visiting a page that I designed. I had an interesting conversation with a teacher in Florida recently who remarked, “No one builds web pages anymore; they use WordPress.” It was a stunning comment and a fair one.

So here it is, a fresh (and boring) WordPress site. I’ll be integrating the radio and podcast stuff (the old URLs still work) into this new site fairly soon. I’m not much of a blogger, as those who are familiar with my other links will be able to attest. Maybe this time will be different. I hope so.