If there was one part of your personal learning practice that you wanted to focus on today, what would it be? What questions would you seek to answer?

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a perfect question in terms of trying to get some sense of the personal learning lives from the teachers who were participating. But in the context of a discussion we’d been having about the passion-based learning opportunities that the Web now affords, I was hoping to learn what they wanted to think more deeply about when it came to their own interests and their own learning. Unfortunately, most of what I got back (on the first go round at least; I asked them to do it again) was about how to use the tools in the classroom, and very little about what they wanted to learn about learining around their own passions with others who share them.

I know that over the years, I’ve thought about and written about this quite a bit here and elsewhere, this idea that teachers need to see themselves as learners first. In our PLP cohorts, Sheryl and I are constantly working to get teachers to be selfish about the learning at the outset, to not see the experience as simply a way to learn tools that they can then bring into their classrooms. (We didn’t call it “Powerful Tools Practice” for a reason.) And I usually end most of my presentations with that plea as well, most times only to get asked a question about how to overcome the difficulties of making this work in the classroom. It’s always a struggle.

Anyway, it’s interesting to review some of these responses that did attempt to reach beyond tools:

• How to take the learning practices that I’ve been taught by senior teachers, as I am a new teacher, and make them work in concert with the needs of my students when in the face of so much negative energy from my coworkers?
• We are dealing with numerous “tools” that help us find, sort and use information in a directed manner. Is there a “best” approach to pulling these together to enable us to better deal with and share these in one place.
• Interested in gathering ideas about how to motivate groups of teacher to value the importance of developing their own PLN. Often educators understand the idea of developing a PLN but they are not consistent about maintaining it. The shift from sit n’ git to planning a goal and following a custom path seems foreign.
• I really like having ammunition for the folks who say learning 2.0 is eeeeviiiil, that the state of education is going to pot and literacy is at an all time low.

Obviously, these reflect a lot of the messiness that exists right now around technology and the Web in learning practice. (That’s why I picked them.) But it still leaves me wondering why it’s so hard to get educators in particular to be selfish about this stuff. Maybe it’s not in our DNA?

But I have to tell you, David Brooks’ column in the Times today literally sent a chill down my spine when I read the following paragraph:

The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.

Ok, there is just so much wrong with that sentiment that it’s hard to know where to start. How about the “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this” part. Why is that, do you think? Could it be that there might be, oh, I don’t know, a few dozen factors that impact a student’s performance on tests that have nothing to do with the teacher? And where exactly is this “barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay”?

But if you’re a teacher and you read the part where teachers whose kids don’t get good test scores “need to be identified and counseled,” I can’t imagine how you could be feeling very good about your profession right now. Forget the relationships you build with those kids. Forget the love you give many of them that they may not be getting at home. Forget the way you try to help them navigate the complexity of their lives or their families or their relationships. Your kids don’t measure up on the test, you will be “identified” and “counseled.”

Whoa.

It’s a bit ironic that on the same page a day before, Thomas Friedman was espousing the idea that to fix the economy we have to fix the education system, and to fix the education system, we have to do more than focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. We also have to consider “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.” Not that Friedman isn’t at times as much asea about education as Brooks, but seriously, is there a test for that? ‘Cause if there isn’t, and I’m a teacher trying to win the “race to the top,” how am I supposed to get my raise?

Is it me, or are we just sinking deeper into this dark, confined educational pit where every national conversation about “reform” lacks the “creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” that we’re supposed to be teaching to and modeling for our kids?

Mercy.

Tom Hoffman has been bugging many of us to blog about the English Language Arts Standards that are being written by Core Standards group as an attempt to provide some national standardization for ELA (and Mathematics skills), standards which are open for comment for another five days or so, and ones that it appears will ultimately lead to the creation of a national assessment. Forty-eight states are participating in this effort, and Tom created a  must-read FAQ on the initiative and has been doing some really thoughtful analysis in the past few weeks about what all of it means. I’m sorry to say that the whole process has been flying under my radar of late (as have many of the important conversations going on out there.) I’ll admit to a certain sense of “whatever” about these standards; there’s little doubt at this point they will be adopted pretty much as is, and they reflect even more a continuing, frustrating retrenchment of traditional thinking about education that seems to be permeating the conversation right now. When we hear that our kids’ performance on the Math NAEP is essentially flat, and the Secretary of Education’s response is that the results “underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement,” and that those “reforms” include “opening more charter schools and linking teacher pay to performance,” you know that the way we assess kids isn’t going to change any time soon. At the end of the day, it still feels like the battle for sanity when it comes to the future of education won’t be won until there are enough people who understand that many of the traditional standards and assessments that “worked” for us won’t work for our kids. In other words, no time soon.

The Common Core ELA standards narrow the definition of what kids should know, and they do nothing to take into account the changing nature of reading and writing that this moment brings us. While the National Council Teachers of English espouses all sorts of new definitions for literate readers and writers in the 21st Century, very little of that shows up in any clear way in the proposed national standards. One look at the reading standards and you can’t help but be left with the impression that the authors have never “read” anything much beyond words on paper and that the idea of “remix” and even links are outside of their experience. There is nothing here about how reading and writing in online and digital spaces changes the interaction, nothing about the social interactions that readers and writers will have around texts that are changing rapidly and substantially. (Yet, it appears that NCTE hasn’t made much of a push against the initiative.) To that point, a really interesting “debate” in the New York Times appeared a couple of days ago “Does the Brain Look Like E-Books?” including this observation by Alan Liu, the chairman of English at U. C. Santa Barbara on how all of this is shifting:

My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

The debate is a lively one, and the comments are worth reading through as well, but regardless of how you view the current landscape from a reading and writing literacy standpoint, it’s hard to see how the core standards being proposed come even close to capturing the complexity of the moment and, more importantly, reflect the flexibility needed to understand the moment. I doubt there was any of that much discussed.

Even more importantly, Chris Lehmann captures the reason why we should all feel unsettled by this, regardless of how we think about reading and writing:

This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

In all of this, the thing that most frustrates me both in the talk about national standards and national assessments and the whole “Race to the Top” bunk that is coming out of the administration is just a total lack of vision, this sense that nothing has fundamentally changed, that this is the same old classroom with the same old expectations and the same old ways of proving them that we’ve had forever. I’m not saying we don’t need assessments, but there’s a lot of required learning right now that few if any standards are addressing.

Frankly, I couldn’t help thinking that if I was a student in this district, I think I would actually beg NOT to get a computer. Between the filters and the restrictions, I had a hard time imagining what I would be able to use them for in ways that would actually stimulate my learning. I’d rather take my chances with my phone and my computer at home. (About 90% of students in this district had access from home.)

But the other part that struck me was what this policy said about the curriculum in that district. I wondered aloud to some administrators and teachers later if the stiff policies spoke volumes about what they weren’t teaching in their classrooms K-12 as their students went through the system. I mean wouldn’t it seem that if kids were taught throughout the curriculum about the ethical and appropriate use of computers and the Internet that much more of that policy could be spent going over what students could actually do with the computer rather than the “don’t dos” that were listed? At that point, we’d probably have to change the name to an “Admirable Use Policy” or something, but imagine if students walked in on the first day of class, picked up that policy and read things like:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

Etc. (Add your own below.)

Now, obviously, that would mean that the curriculum would be preparing students to do that all along, But I’m thinking that if I was a student and I read those “dos”  on the first day of school, I’d be itching to get to class.

(Photo by Checlap.)

It would seem to me that there should be no better place for my children to watch that speech (or any other, for that matter) than in a place where ideas are encouraged, where critical thinking about those ideas is a natural part of the conversation, and where appropriate response and debate can flourish. Where the adults in the room lead my kids to dig deeper, to validate facts, and consider the many levels of context in which every speech and every debate takes place. Where the discussion around it is such that it lays to rest the concern that many seem to have about this particular speech in general, that in some way the President will be able to “indoctrinate” our kids into some socialist mindset. If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. That, however, is not the message we are sending.

All of this speaks to the ever narrowing role we as a society have assigned to our schools. And that is truly something to fear. School is the place kids go to learn the stuff they need to pass all of the tests, not the place that they go to engage the diversity and complexity and beauty of the world. If we cannot offer our students wide ranging opportunities to examine the world from many sides and teach them how to do that with rigor and respect, then we subvert the very idea of school.

I keep thinking of how much could be taught in this moment: oratory, research skills, statistics (drop-out rates, etc.), history, media, analysis, debate, composition, social justice, and on and on and on.

I keep thinking of those teachers out there right now who have had a level of confidence and professionalism stripped away by school districts who have ceded to parents wishes to avoid rather than to trust them to teach.

I keep thinking about what kids are learning by the way their schools are reacting, what it says to them about what school is and its value in their lives.

I keep thinking what this says about a public school system that has “educated” the people at the front of all of the screaming and yelling.

My kids both start school on Wednesday, so our schools have avoided all of this. Still, I hope they play the president’s message, regardless of whether it’s a motivational speech to work hard and pursue a love of learning or whether it’s a paean to Stalin, and then engage my kids in conversation about its merits, its flaws and its omissions. And better yet, I hope they take a step back and look at this “controversy” in the context of media analysis, information literacy, political dialogue and debate. Talk about a teachable moment.

But without that, any way you look at it, this is not a great moment for schools.

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. As I’ve suggested here before, there is a lot of “tinkering around the edges” going on, but not much that I can see happening in terms of really rethinking the role of schools in learning. In large measure, the schools I visited assess their effectiveness by making AYP, the scores their kids get on AP tests, percentage of graduates going on to colleges, and the merit scholars they produce. In and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with those measures. But I’ve been struggling to see examples of what learning looks like in those schools, examples of engaged kids, asking and answering their own questions, creating, cooperating or maybe even collaborating with other learners young and old, and doing all of it in ways that the rest of the world can learn from it. I’ve heard very few stories of learning that sound any different from the stories we’ve been telling for a very long time now. There are some, like the teacher I met today outside of Buffalo who has been collaborating with another teacher in Scotland the last couple of years as their students study literature together through a wiki, or another teacher outside of Pittsburgh who has her students using Twitter to ask questions and connect around science. But these are still ripples; there are few waves.

I wonder if that’s an accurate portrayal…obviously, eight schools does not a trend make. But I’m betting these schools are not dissimilar from most others at this point. And I’m still left wondering what it will take for evidence of more widespread, systemic shifting to bubble up.

What I’m most hopeful for, however, is that their stories about school will change. Last year, far too much of the reporting about their days started with “I got a ___ on my ___ test!” or “Yes, I’ve got homework” (said in the same voice as one might say “Yes, I’ve got ringworm.”) School was something that rarely sparked a conversation about learning. Usually, it was a topic to be avoided or ignored. I hope to hear more excitement this year, more passion about learning, more thinking and doing. To that end, I’ve been coming up with a mental list of the types of questions I’m hoping they might answer:

What did you make today that was meaningful?

What did you learn about the world?

Who are you working with?

What surprised you?

What did your teachers make with you?

What did you teach others?

What unanswered questions are you struggling with?

How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?

What’s something your teachers learned today?

What did you share with the world?

What do you want to know more about?

What did you love about today?

What made you laugh?

I think their answers to those questions (and others that I’m hoping you might add below) would tell me more about what they learned than any test or quiz or worksheet that they brought home for me to sign. And here’s the deal; I expect them to be talking answers to these types of questions every day. As a parent, I think I have every right to expect that my kids are immersed in spaces where learning is loved and enjoyed and shared every single day. Classrooms where they are engaged in meaningful work that makes them think, a majority of time doing stuff that can’t be measured by some impersoanl state test. (I can give them software to do much of that.) Where the adults that surround them are models for that learning work themselves. Is that too much to ask?

New schools, new opportunities, renewed expectations. We’ll see how it goes…

“Blackmail.”

What do you think the key words are in this lead?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called on legislators Thursday to adopt sweeping education reforms that would dramatically reshape California’s public education system and qualify the state for competitive federal school funding.

Um, yeah, that would be those last eight words, which in just about any guise spells the “B” word.

Obviously,  states are under the gun financially. And so when the Obama administration dangles $100 billion out there for education, it knows it can use it to get whatever “reforms” it wants. Don’t have teacher merit pay? No money. Not supporting charter schools? Step away from the window.

It’s not that I necessarily disagree with everything the administration is proposing. It’s the way they’re trying to get it done.

And it’s their hubris.

But in an interview Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised Schwarzenegger’s moves as “courageous” and said they could transform the state into a national model for reform.

Courageous? You’re kidding me, right? Courageous? Try “helpless.”

I expected better.

(Update: If you want to really be inspired about the future of education, listen to Chris’s presentation to the FCC yesterday instead.)

While I love what Chris Lehmann is doing at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the problem with the SLA story has always been that it’s hard to replicate. Chris is a visionary who was given the chance to build a school pretty much from the ground up, and I think just about everyone would agree that he has done an absolutely amazing job of it. If I could take SLA and clone it, I would. But that’s not possible. So, the tougher question has always been how do schools that have been around for 50 or 100 years begin to undertake the real shifts and real changes that are required if they are to move systemically to a point where inquiry-based, student-centered, socially and globally networked learning becomes just the way they do their business? In all honesty, I haven’t seen many schools that have fundamentally set out to redefine what they do in the classroom in light of the affordances and opportunities that social technologies create for learning. (If you know of any who have a plan to fundamentally redefine what they do, please let me know.) There is a great deal of “tinkering on the edges” when it comes to technology, districts that hope that if they incrementally add enough technology into the mix that somehow that equals change. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve seen that have a whiteboard in every room yet have absolutely nothing different happening from a curriculum perspective. Old wine, new bottles.

That fundamental redefinition is hard. It takes an awareness on the part of leaders that the world is indeed changing and that current assessment regimes and requirements are becoming less and less relevant to the learning goals of the organization. It takes a vision to imagine what the change might look like, not to paint it with hard lines but to at least have the basic brushstrokes down. It takes a culture that celebrates learning not just among students but among teachers and front office personnel and administrators alike, what Phillip Schlechty calls a “learning organization.” It takes leadership that while admitting its own discomfort and uncertainty with these shifts is prescient and humble enough to know that the only way to deal with those uncertainties is to meet them full on and to support the messiness that will no doubt occur as the organization works through them. It takes time, years of time, maybe decades to effect these types of changes. It takes money and infrastructure. And I think, most importantly, it takes a plan that’s developed collaboratively with every constituency at the table, one that is constantly worked and reworked and adjusted in the process, but one that makes that long-term investment time well spent instead of time spinning wheels. And it takes more, even, than that.

I’m seeing a lot of that happening at Hunterdon Central, my old school. And you can take this perspective for what it’s worth since I feel like I played some small part in this process five years ago when we formulated a long-ish term plan for technology that started with piloting a teacher/classroom model for technology when I was there to today, when they are piloting a student 1-1 model (netbooks) for technology this fall. My good friend and former co-conspirator Rob Mancabelli is guiding the work, and he’s had amazing success in bringing teachers, supervisors, upper administration, community, students and others into a really “big” conversation about what teaching and learning looks like today, how global and collaborative and transparent it is, and what the implications are for the curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms. This is not tinkering on the edges; this, instead, is a deeply collaborative and reflective process for a small cohort of 30 or so teachers whose kids this fall will all have technology and a ubiquitous connection in hand, a process that encourages them to be creative, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to pursue their own personal learning as well. All of it as a first building block for the systemic, culture change that is hopefully to come in the next few years.

Tuesday, I had the chance to spend a few hours with a part of this group, and I came away just totally energized by the experience. The main reason? Lisa Brady, the superintendent. The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. And on Tuesday, now as the school year begins to loom large, Rob asked Lisa to address the group and make sure they understood their efforts would be supported. Lisa started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed.” I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the first graph gives you the gist:

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally–our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

I hadn’t expected to try to capture any of what Lisa said next, but as she talked to the teachers, I started writing some of it down. And I started imaging what it would be like if every superintendent walked into a meeting of teachers who are engaged in reaching beyond their comfort zones and learning something new and said things like:

My question to you is how willing are you to be disturbed?…We have to be willing to examine our practice, to be disturbed about what we think we know about teaching and learning…We don’t really know what we’re doing; we’re teachers, we’re supposed to know, but we don’t know everything…I’m as unsure about all of this as you are unsure, but I believe we are doing the right thing. It is of critical importance to this organization, of critical importance to our kids…Your classrooms are learning labs; we want you be exploring, looking, analyzing…You are fully supported in this work; don’t be afraid of what you are doing…at this school, we don’t change easily, but we change well.

It was really powerful stuff, the superintendent of schools encouraging teachers to take risks, to think differently, to be okay with not knowing, and to know that it’s a process, that it’s not going to happen overnight.  And this is the same type of message Lisa plans to deliver to the full faculty on the first day of school. (The Wheatley piece is being sent to all staff this week.) Already, Central has decided to end the practice of monthly full faculty meetings this year and instead engage in professional conversations around the question “What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century?” Since May, all of the supervisors have voluntarily been meeting on a regular basis to study and discuss the shifts around an inquiry/problem based curriculum delivered in networked learning environments. And the teachers in the cohort are archiving and communicating on a Ning site specifically for the work.

Now I know there are some caveats here and not all of this is replicable either. For the last two years, 99% of teachers at Central (3,200 students 9-12, btw) have had their own Tablet PC (for personal and professional use) with wireless connection to an LCD and wireless Internet in every classroom, part of the teacher model that Rob and I started before I left. I would defy anyone to show me a school that has a better customer service oriented technology support plan for teachers and classrooms to make sure everything works. The school has made a fairly substantial financial commitment to the work (with the support of the community…budgets pass). And, 99% of kids in the district have Internet access at home.

But despite all of that, what interests me more is the stuff that they’re doing that just about any school could do right now: have the conversations, begin to build a culture around change, encourage learning on the part of every segment in the school, and create a long term vision and plan that attempts at least to account for whatever deficiencies or roadblocks currently exist. I see so many schools (SO many) where huge sums of money are spent on technology without any thought of professional learning or thinking about what changes. It’s all haphazard, unplanned, unsupported. I talk to so many teachers who just roll their eyes at the newest initiative because a) they haven’t had a voice in the process and b) because they know the next initiative is right around the corner. There’s no thread that binds all of it together, that congeals into a fundamentally different vision of teaching and learning. As Chris often says (channeling Roger Schank) “Technology is not additive; it’s transformative.” But that transformation doesn’t come on its own. It comes only when the ground for transformation has been well plowed. Whether we have the budgets or the technology in hand right now, there is little externally, at least, that’s preventing these conversations to start, assuming we have real leaders who are willing to be disturbed at the helm.

I’m hoping to follow this story pretty closely this year, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. Would love to hear your take on what Central is doing and on other attempts at moving old schools systemically into new places of learning.

(Photo “Do Not Disturb” by Sue)

Serious.

I don’t want to make this another post about how bad the general reputation of teachers is in some places, nor do I want to make it about how much filtering is going on under the guise of “we can’t trust the teachers.” Nor do I particularly want this to turn into a State of the Web in Education type post. But as school districts around the country start gearing up for the new year, there doesn’t appear to be much of a shift in terms of the perception that teachers can’t make good decisions about using the Web, and, more importantly, that teachers should be supported as learners themselves in the classroom.

Case in point: Chicago. Read the comments the Alexander Russo’s post “No Social Media for CPS Teachers” and you’ll get a sense of how much fun it is to be a teacher there under the new district guidelines regarding teacher and student technology use. In the post, he quotes one teacher as saying

The message to me is strong and clear - innovative, tech savvy teachers should look elsewhere for employment...I guess this means that the interactive website I’ve spent this summer designing for my students with open-source WordPress is off limits. I can’t share video we create on our own. I can’t ask them to compare and contrast two of our own videos, or one of our videos with someone else’s, or two videos from elsewhere. I can’t solicit student responses on core content. I can’t post accessible calendar information. I can’t post a contact form for students who forget or lose my e-mail address but know the website we’ll use on a weekly basis. I can’t host interactive Flash tools that my students use on a regular basis.

And in the comment thread, there’s this:

I use technology extensively in my curricula. I’m just going to stop using it. In addition to the patent absurdity of the Board’s policy, I’m just not willing to risk my job.

Sad.

But the worst part is captured, I think, in this op-ed piece in the Washington Post by former teacher Sarah Fine. It’s titled “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay.” Aside from talking about the difficulties of teaching in the inner city, she also brings up a more general perception:

There is yet another factor that played a part in my choice, something that I rarely mention. It has to do with the way that some people, mostly nonteachers, talk about the profession. “Why teach?” they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it’s not for the ambitious. “It’s just so nice,” was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: “When I tell people I want to do it, they’re like, ‘Really? You really still want to do that?’ ” Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. “I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them,” she says. “In the world we live in, teaching doesn’t cut it.”

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

I know that’s not a universal impression, but there’s just no question that in many places across this country, teachers are not perceived as learners, as scholars, as leaders. They’re not supported in their own learning, and they’re not trusted to make good decisions about social Web media in the classroom. Without getting into a long drawn out discussion as to why that is, I’m wondering what we can do about it. Do social Web tools provide some opportunities for teachers to participate in ways that might raise the perception of the profession? If not in global ways at least in local ways? Just wondering…

The good news is that shortly I’ll be painting a picture of a district that really does get what it means to treat teachers as learners and support all the messiness that goes around that. Coming soon…I hope.

In an article titled “Today’s Question: Should social media be used in education?” in The Missourian, a Univeristy of Missouri student is quoted as saying:

“I don’t really care. It (social media) probably wouldn’t help. It’s social type stuff — we’re trying to learn,” said Michael Phillip, a 20-year-old junior mechanical engineering major at MU.

I think that’s the way a lot of teachers and parents think about social media as well, frankly. I mean, it’s pretty easy to see the social connections that can be made here, but I still think very few people understand that some profound learning can take place in those connections. And that 20-year olds who supposedly are immersed in social media have no sense that those learning potentials exist. Whose fault is that, exactly?

Just sayin…

“You’re a technoslave!” the guy yelled across the square, and I looked up to see him hurrying along with an angsty expression on his face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my kids wheel around, too, Tucker stopping dead in his tracks. “It’ll ruin your life! Throw it away! Just throw it away!”

And he was gone, zipping around a hedgerow and then disappearing into a bookstore as my wife turned to me smiling and my kids gaped open-mouthed, struggled to figure out how to react. I, of course, just shrugged it off, saying something brilliant like “Yeah, whatever” while brushing him and the idea away with a half sweep of my hand, the one not holding the iPhone, of course.

But as we picked through a tick-infested field adjacent to a Dunkin Donuts parking lot to find our third ammo can cache of the day, the “technoslave” charge turned in my head. Am I a slave to all of this? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? This all on the heels of spending a week with bandwidth (I just typed “badwidth” which would have been appropriate) that maybe reached half a bar on my Verizon stick when the wind was blowing in the right direction and I held my computer at exactly 32 degrees. (Think aluminum foil and tv antenna if you’re old enough.) I think I Tweeted like three times, maybe, and even those were wistful dispatches from nature that felt almost strange in the making. (As in “Why am I Tweeting how nice it is to watch this thunderstorm roll in without all the usual distractions?” Hmmm…) I tried to answer a few e-mails, but I think I just managed to make people angry. And I did get to scan the front page of the New York Times site after the 30-minute or so download most mornings. But that was about it.

Except, of course, for my iPhone, which served us well as we crawled through the claustrophobia-inducing caves and caverns at Lost River Gorge, snapping decent pictures of our trek (though not of the point where I got stuck), or while being strafed by mosquitoes while watching the new Harry Potter movie at the local drive-in letting me sneak an update on the Cubs game. And, when we started finding those caches. In fact, that may have been the highlight of the trip in some ways, the “doing something fun out in nature with the family” aspect of going around trying to find these little hidden treasures while avoiding the eyes of curious “Muggle” onlookers, reading the logs of people who had found them before us and feeling this weird sense of connection to a community of people online AND in real space that we had little sense of before.  Facilitated solely by technology.

Go figure.

So, yeah, in many ways, I’m a slave to all of this. And I’m ok with that. I like being reminded how good it is to get away from the network from time to time; the world doesn’t end when the connection runs out. (Gasp!) But the connection is just a part of me now that at times may lead to distraction and a sense of overwhelmedness but on balance, adds a richness to my life that that angsty guy doesn’t get and probably never will.

All of us have been doing a lot of thinking and questioning around the idea of what it would be like if every 5th grade student and above had ubiquitous access in hand, and there’s no question that’s a huge shift. (When I made the slide at right for a part of our kickoff presentation, I was surprised at the reaction it got on Flickr.) If this is really where we hope to get, and I think it should be, the required shifts in educator practice and school culture are significant, as are the implications for professional development. It’s not just about if every student had a computer; it’s about if every teacher had a computer as well. (As opposed to if every teacher had a whiteboard.) Imagine if our students were being taught in systems where technology was just a natural part of the way we created and constructed and connected and learned, that it was how we do our business. Sure, things would be different. There would be distractions. (We’re having an online conversation about “attention literacy” already.) And there would be teachable moments. But don’t we have enough faith that we would learn our way out of those challenges (and others I haven’t mentioned) to come out the other side with a more relevant, effective experience for our kids? One that is more in tune with the way the world seems to be headed?

What I’ve liked about this trip is this sense that I’m getting, here at least, that some people are beginning to think about 1-1 in ways that scale, and that it’s not just about technology for technology’s sake but that there is some real, powerful potential in a world where every student AND every teacher has a computer and access to the sum of human knowledge we’re building online. Those leading this work may not feel all that comfortable with that vision in their own practice yet, but they seem more able to put that aside and and see things from a more long-range perspective. We’ll see how it plays out, but in that regard, at least, it’s been a pretty refreshing visit.

Schools must be transformed from platforms for instruction to platforms for learning, from bureaucracies bent on control to learning organizations aimed at encouraging disciplined inquiry and creativity.

To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter. Here’s a key snip in that case:

As long as any innovations that are introduced can be absorbed by the existing operating systems without violating the limits of the social systems in which they are embedded, change in schools is more a matter of good management than one of leadership. Such changes can, in fact, be introduced through programs and projects and managed quite well by technically competent people who are familiar with the new routines required by the innovations and skilled in communicating to others what they know.

In these cases, while it is sometimes difficult to break old habits, usually after a brief period of resistance, old certanties are abandoned and new certainties are embraced. For example, teachers now routinely use PowerPoint slide shows where once they used overhead projectors and slate boards. The reason this transition was relatively easy to accomplish is that it did not change the role of the teacher. Indeed, PowerPoint makes it easier for teachers to do what they have always done, just as a DVD player is easier to use than a 16 millimeter projector. Moreover, the technical skills required to use a PowerPoint slide show are easily learned and communicated, making the process of diffusion relatively simple.

But when innovations threaten the nature and sources of knowledge to be used or the way power and authority are currently used and distributed–in other words, when they require changes in social systems as well as operating systems–innovation becomes more difficult. This is so because such changes are disruptive in inflexible social systems.

So, from the social media standpoint, the message here is clear. This isn’t about doing what you’ve always done as a teacher or as a school. It challenges those social constructs in the classroom and in the system, and therefore, these shifts are going to be much harder to embrace. Channeling Christensen, he says that existing organizations seldom successfully adopt truly disruptive innovations, and that it’s easier to build something new than to change the old. And if you listened to Scott’s presentation, you get the idea that the time is ripe for those innovative systems to form and flourish in education. (My question is whether commercial interests will be at the heart of those efforts.)

What I really like about this argument so far, however, is that while the thinking is rooted in the affordances of the technologies, Schlechty also makes the case in the context of citizenship in a democracy as well as a moral imperative that we create citizens who “have discovered how to learn independent of teachers and schools.”

Many Americans fear that an inadequate system of education will compromise America’s ability to compete in a global economy [hearing Friedman here]. In fact, they have more to fear from the possibility that young people who graduate will lack the skills and understandings needed to function well as citizens in a democracy. Americans have more to fear from the prospect that the IT revolution will so overwhelm citizens with competing facts and opinions that they will give up their freedom in order to gain some degree of certainty than they have to fear from economic competition around the world. Leaders should be far more concerned that Americans will cease to know enough to preserve freedom and value liberty, equity, and excellence than they are with how well American students compare on international tests. As numerous scholars have shown, authoritarian leaders and charlatans thrive in a world where ordinary citizens are overwhelmed with facts and competing opinions and lack the ideas and tools to discipline thier thinking without appealing to some authority figure for direction and support. [Emphasis mine.]

That resonates with me on so many different levels, on trying to navigate the arguments about global warming, for instance, or in attempting to explain the nuances of the world to my kids who more and more are coming to me with questions inspired by their interactions with online media. The key to this all, to me at least, and a piece that I don’t think Schlechty gets, is that much of that now is dependent on our “network literacy” in terms of building our own personal systems of filters and sources that are balanced and open.

The idea that schools become “learning organizations” is compelling in the way that Schlechty describes the shift.

Schools will be places where intellectual work is designed that cause students to want to be instructed and will become platforms that support students in making wise choices among a wide range of sources of instruction available rather than platforms that control and limit the instruction available to them.

That “vision” started me thinking again about what our expectations are for teacher “learning” and the ways in which we might move toward a culture that celebrates and models and makes transparent learning in every corner. One thing that I constantly hear from Sheryl is the idea that we need to see teachers as leaders and as learners, not just teachers. That’s such a huge shift here, one that we talked a lot about and struggled with in Boot Camp. And it all makes me wonder what the next decade or two will bring.

I think “ceolaf” sums it up pretty well here (and if this isn’t the best kernel then I’m sure he’ll tell me):

I fear that Will would lose sight of the real importance of the lasting lessons for the possibilities of today’s technology. (I think that Will might fear that I am not giving enough credit to what a different world our students live in, and therefore must learn to operate in.)

Assuming that we can can come to some general agreement on what those lessons might be, no doubt we need to question and examine the choices that we make around these technologies in our own practice and in our classrooms when it comes to learning those lessons for ourselves or for our kids. We can’t take those choices lightly, and we have to be able to make those choices from a certain foundation of personal learning with technology in those contexts. It’s one of the reasons that I get continually frustrated with NECC sessions and Tweets and blogs that celebrate tools without giving weight to the considerations that goes into choosing a tool in a pedagogical sense. We need more sessions on “why?’ not “how?”, more thinking about teaching with technology and less of what Gary classicallly described as “Burping with VoiceThread.” (That’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Regardless, I believe that used well, these still nascent Web technologies can help us teach those larger lessons, and do so in a way that engages our students and has more relevance than “old” pen and paper, face to face ways. Not all of the time, but some of it. “ceolaf” pointed to this post by Diane Ravitch titled “The Partnership for 19th Century Skills” which eloquently makes the case that in terms of those big lessons, nothing much has changed.

I for one have heard quite enough about the 21st century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in third grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on. Let me suggest that it is time to be done with this unnecessary conflict about 21st century skills. Let us agree that we need all those forenamed skills, plus lots others, in addition to a deep understanding of history, literature, the arts, geography, civics, the sciences, and foreign languages.

She goes on to list 16 such skills which are definitely worth the time to read, and many of which thoughtful use of technology can enhance. And, I would argue, many to which  social media add a new layer of complexity which we must be able to model and teach. While many if not most of these lessons can be learned without technology, I think transferring those lessons into the contexts of online networks and global, cross-cultural, sometimes anonymous interactions is not necessarily fait accompli with our kids. Self-discipline and idealism and certainly communication (among others) in these environments have additional complexity that compels us to explore the affordances of these technologies (again) for ourselves, for our classrooms and for our kids.

There’s much more here, obviously, in terms of even bigger questions about the roles of schools and teachers and classrooms in a networked learning world. But I agree that here is where we have to start. What is it we most want our kids to know about what it means to be a person of this world, and how do we best convey it in ways that make sense for the times we live in? Everything else flows from that.

What do you think?

(Photo: “Playing Water Games and Learning” by Ivan Makarov.)