A virtual fist bump here to Jenifer Fox, whose session at the conference was a breath of fresh air. Jennifer is head of school at The Clariden School of Southlake, and author of Your Child’s Strengths: a Guide for Parents and Teachers. In her session, Jenifer painted a fiery, revolutionary vision of children learning the skills and content they need to know and have experience with by engaging in real problems and projects with real impact on their community. Go Jenifer!

I have been convinced for a long time that the needed revolution in learning is not more efficiency in the current dominant pedagogy, but rather a move toward the real. This conference only reinforced my feelings on that subject. The revolution is Real.

Socrates was wrong?

I don’t believe that necessarily, but read on and you’ll see why I wrote it (on top of shooting for a subject line controversial enough to increase the open rate of my post

I attended a workshop this summer at the Right Question Institute in Boston. We spent two days working hands-on with the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a process developed over the last 20 years to help people improve their question-asking skills. The technique was originally developed during work with parents from low income schools when parents said they were not getting involved in their children’s schooling because they did not know what questions to ask the teachers. The technique was then adopted by the medical community for use in patient advocacy development, and has more recently been moving into the education arena.

This short video, entitled “Did Socrates Get it Wrong?”, is a TEDx talk given by one of the developers of the method. It provides a nice overview of the technique, suggesting that perhaps as teachers we have taken on too much of the question-asking load from our students – that getting the students to improve their questions-asking skills is an important goal.

“Socrates was wrong” is in the form of a statement in the subject line above because that mimics the form of a Question Focus Statement, or a statement that is used in the technique to prompt questions. The Question Focus Statement does not need to be true, and sometimes might intentionally be false. The goal is to use a QFocus Statement that will generate the best questions in a particular area of interest.

Here are the steps involved in the Question Formulation Technique:

Produce Your Questions
• Ask as many questions as you can.
• Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions.
• Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
• Change any statement into a question.

Improve Your Questions
• Categorize the questions as closed or open-ended.
• Name the advantages and disadvantages of each type of question.
• Change questions from one type to another.

Prioritize the Questions
• Choose your three most important questions.
• Why did you choose these three as the most important?

I began using the technique last year to mixed results, only to find that I was executing it improperly. The mistakes I made were:

1. I used a QFocus Statement that contained my own bias in the form of the answer that I hoped all my students would come to
2. And fatally, that I based a very long unit on this statement. QFocus Statements should begin as very short-term commitments until one has begun to get a good feeling for what types of questions they will elicit.

At the workshop I was able to speak with teachers of subjects across the spectrum who use the technique in their classes to establish prior knowledge at the beginning of a unit, gauge progress at mid-points formatively for use in adjusting lesson trajectory to best fit areas of interest, and summatively as a means of assessing what has been learned and understood.

This workshop was one of the few I’ve attended that used the espoused methodology and pedagogy during the teaching of it, which was very refreshing.

I recommend the technique and the workshop!

Technology will become an obvious extension of teaching when our century-plus old model of education shifts its paradigm to be about learning instead of sorting and conditioning; when schools put learning first and college hoop jumping gets retrofitted in, instead of other way around (at least until colleges get on board with using more meaningful metrics for admission).

Joel Rose does a nice job addressing this issue in his recent Atlantic article, How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System:

‎”…our collective charge in K-12 innovation today should go beyond merely designing and producing new tools. Rather, our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do.”

If you replace “classroom” with “learning” in Rose’s quote, I think it’s spot on. I say that because the new model may in fact preclude the idea of the classroom in any sense of how we currently know it.

And what will these new learning models look like? Here is a quote from MacArthur Foundation Director Connie Yowell on the foundation’s shift in focus from traditional school reform to learning:

“A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are a node on a young person’s network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.

A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. A new system of learning must be peer-based and organized around learners’ interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.”

It’s about networks, it’s peer and inquiry driven, and here is a key point: we can’t build it and then hand it to the kids; they have to co-create it with us.

In closing, I offer a small example below of the power of this technology to network, to facilitate iteration of ideas between peers, and to catalyze inquiry. Thanks to the wonderful Kat Haber whom I met in Doha, Qatar (and thanks TEDx) and with whom I share a connection to many others around the world on this and many other subjects. Exchanges like the one below, involving multiple people in many cases, have helped me iterate my thinking on the points above in ways that could not have been possible in such a quick time without today’s technology.

Here’s hoping for faster iteration and evolution in education.

1) A local graduate school (I will withhold the name) has a team looking into whether tuition-driven universities will even exist in the near future, and how to evolve fast enough to stay relevant

2) Take it with a grain of salt since this article is from MIT news, but this is actually creating a pretty big stir.
“MIT and Harvard launch a ‘revolution in education’”

3) Offering scholarships in exchange for a stake in student start-ups (Clarkson University)
http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/25/pf/college/tuition-business/index.htm

Flash in the pan or the beginning of a big shift….?

From my own viewpoint I will say that I think any school of any level not looking hard at how to become nimble enough to iterate and evolve quickly in response to our changing environment – in all aspects – risks becoming irrelevant.

My crystal ball leaves me to think that in the not-too-distant future an obviously superior paradigm of education will break through, and the exodus from the current system to the new system will mimic the flow from MySpace to Facebook in scope and timeline.

“What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wise and diverse sample of spare parts – mechanical or conceptual – and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations – by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges – will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”

So what specifically is it about schools that limit their ability to innovate? Please share with the rest of the class…..

I recently attended a live demo  of MBS Direct’s Direct Digital solution, in which I and several colleagues (teachers and techies) got to Q&A a top developer on the current product and where it is headed. The verdict in a nutshell? Overall all pretty impressed, but watch out for those DRM agreements!
(View a recorded demo here: Blue “WEBINARS” button, then choose the third pre-recorded option – “Direct Digital: Your Content, Your Reader, Any Device”)

I dutifully report here what we discovered.

Pros:

• Runs in browser (last two versions of major players), so no program to install
• Can download to computer (still runs in browser), and will sync notes and annotations with online version when connected again
• iPhone/iPad app available (Android app in next month or two, which will also allow Kindle Fire play)
• Can add notes and annotations (highlights) inline (and search them)
• Can scan text and easily see where notes were added
• You can create “bookshelves” (also known as folders) for your digital content (presumably by subject and the like)
• Image text is searchable
• Reported cost of books is 40% less than print version
• Resources are available inline to support the content of the books (videos, etc.), and teachers can add their own resources to a book before it is “published”. Possibility might exist for teachers to keep adding resources even after publication.
• LTI Single Signon Integration into learning management systems (like Moodle). Can link to books and it will carry individual credentials so that the book the student lands on is theirs, with their notes, etc.

Cons:

• DRM! Varies by publisher, but in many cases you do not own the book!  (Though you can keep your notes….)
• Social not ready yet (though promised soon)
• Lack of clarity on how corrections are made (if a book needs correction, is it automatic?)

Would love to see:

• Way for students to share notes, discussion, etc.
• Way for teachers to control sharing permissions by student and text
• Way for teachers to see notes of all students to gauge understanding
• Integration of quizzes for understanding, etc.

Anyone using this product that would like to share their experience?

In Michael Hiltzik’s recent piece in the L.A. Times, Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?, an important question is raised (the Times answers this question for us in the HTML page title of the Web version of the article: “Hyping classroom technology helps tech firms, not students”). I totally agree and disagree at the same time. Let me ‘splain.

I agree in that much of what tech firms are trying to sell to our schools is not going to help much (as it is designed to fit into the defunct mode of education we retain where school is walled off from the real world, in which the few “good” schools strive for relevant when we should be striving for real). Yes, much of what they are pushing is out of self-interest, and our major investment at this time should be to create well-designed learning with highly skilled and capable teachers (I prefer “learning coach”, but that is another post…).

However!

…..Learning with technology is now as crucial as learning with books was when they first came on the scene: what we can do with technology is much more powerful that what we can do without it.

No, tech does not equate to better learning of traditional content, and pedagogy and skilled teachers are much more important. However, tech does equate to getting experience using tech to do things better and faster, and allows for the learning and practice of skills you cannot get without using tech (think mega collaboration across time and space; gathering, processing, and communicating information in ways that you cannot do without tech–all skills that are very important in today’s world. But…and it’s a big but….you do not get those skills just having the tech in hand (or do you?…See work by Sugat Mitra). Optimal learning and skill development require (and maybe even more so) highly skilled and creative teachers and pedagogy–to the point that teachers are not teachers any more but simply more skilled learners guiding the younger ones through the learning process. Will eTexts (insert keyword for SEO: iPads) help with those skills, and how we learn the content? If the eTexts integrate tools that facilitate social learning, sharing, content creation (by students), reflection, etc. Not there yet, IMHO…..

Stepping off soapbox now….

1. Textbooks transliterated for reading in eReaders. Basically, the benefit here is that students can stop carrying around those insanely heavy backpacks. Downsides include lack of ability to notate or highlight, or clumsy ways of doing these things.
2. eTexts have rich media, ability to notate, some social/sharing component, and include a mechanism for backing up texts and associated meta-data.
3. All of the above, but platform independent.

From the demo in link above, it looks like rich media and notating are fairly well developed, but I’m waiting to see what social components there are, if any, and how easily they back up meta-data. I’m also a bit turned off by Apple’s continued monopolism (see a discussion here about the controls on content development for the iBook).

MBS Direct has supposedly finally ironed out their web-based reader, and I will report back here after I have been able to test that (in the next couple of weeks).  My problem with web-based readers is that, although they are platform independent, they require an internet connection when you want to access content (barring an “offline” mode which they may have or might develop).

Please comment below with thoughts on where eTexts are heading, what you are using, what you would like to see…

Until recently, it seems we had a pretty clear dualistic environment: we had public schools and we had private schools. Not too many years ago now, private schools (with the help of their marketing friends) realized (perhaps rightly so) the negative connotations in the “private” moniker, and opted for the much more approachable term “independent”, which is descriptive of a much more positive aspect of private schools: their independence from much of the state control and regulation their public counterparts are subject to. (Incidentally, the public have not bought into this naming convention, and still search almost exclusively for “private schools” on the Internet).

But now with Charter schools we have a sort of hybrid that threatens to muddy the waters even further. Charter schools also champion their independence (albeit not quite as loosely granted as that of private schools), and yet they are also public (meaning they charge no tuition).

So are charter schools “independent” schools? If they are following the advice of their marketing friends, they will certainly play up that angle. Ironically, if they want to enjoy the benefits of their association with independence in the Internet search world, they would need to get found for searches of “private school”, a term not even private schools want to put on their Web pages.

Good luck everybody!