Listen: We Need a Community

It’s a funny thing about social media. Sometimes, it can be kind of social.

That’s fantastic. It’s great for democracy. It’s a monumental shift in how information is managed. It changes the structure of power.

Everyone has the means to widely disseminate ideas. Everyone has the ability to engage in the conversation. Everyone can reach a global audience.

The gatekeepers are gone. No one is determining which ideas are good enough for wide distribution. No one is controlling the message.

The problem, though, is now that everyone has a voice, some people are choosing to use it. That, in itse

lf, is good. But we’ve lost much of the civility of engaging in the community. Somewhere along the way, everyone started talking and stopped listening.

A year or so ago, a social news experiment called Patch started to catch on. The idea was to fill the local news vacuum in small communities. Local editors were recruited to attend city council and school board meetings. They wrote of short pieces of a hyper-local nature. Readers were encouraged to participate. There were lots of open-ended questions and prompts for discussion. Residents could share their news as well. The editor curated the content, and through the comments, the whole community could participate.

Originally, Patch had a policy that required people to use their real names. They wanted you to participate, but they also wanted you to be accountable for your words. So users with anonymous handles were politely asked to add their names to their profiles. As time went on, this became harder and harder to enforce. At some point last summer, a policy change allowed people to be anonymous on Patch. Since they couldn’t enforce the rules, they changed them. Participation soared. Advertising revenue (I’m assuming) went up. All was good.

But the level of discourse took a nose dive. No longer hindered by their reputations, users migrated to extremes. The comments quickly devolved into pointless vitriol and personal attacks. I stopped commenting. Then, I stopped reading. It turns out that the allure of the anonymous megaphone is strong enough to overcome any sense of civic responsibility to the community.

We see that in other places as well. In January, I attended my third EduCon conference in Philadelphia. This is a co

nference of conversations, centered on getting smart people in the same place at the same time to discuss big issues in education. While the sessions are carefully planned by the facilitators, they involve an enormous degree of interactivity. There are no audience members. Everyone is a participant.

This year, for the first time, I saw participants with megaphones. Rather than respecting the norms of the community and participating in civil discourse around the topics of the sessions, a very small minority brought their own agendas, and attempted to steer every conversation toward their theses. Pearson is evil. Common Core will destroy American education. The Internet is full of predators and too dangerous for children to use. Fine. Bring your arguments. Let’s have a conversation. But it got to the point where nearly every session devolved into soapboxing by the same people on the same topics. That’s not respecting the community.

And now, this brings us to EdCamp. In a few weeks, we’re hosting this opportunity for anyone interested in education to come together to discuss the topics that are important to them. The attendees will determine the schedule for the day. You’ve probably already heard all about it. If you need more info or want to come, check out the web site.

But I’m worried about conversations being hijacked. EdCamp is a community of convenience. It’s not a place where the same group of people has been interacting and has formed a community with standards of behavior. Maybe it will become that some day, but right now, it’s just a diverse bunch of people. There’s already some evidence that a vocal minority is bringing megaphones to EdCamps with the goal of preaching their own personal Gospels.

We’re doing a few things to try to give everyone a voice. The web site is featuring a series of Participant Perspectives, highlighting people who are coming to EdCamp and giving some background about who they are and why they’re attending. The goal is to raise the level of discourse, and to highlight the diversity of the attendees. There are also some posts that go into more detail on what an unconference is, how the day will be structured, and what people can expect when they come. The idea is to build some expectations among the attendees, who are ultimately the only ones who can ensure that everyone has a voice. Finally, we’re not going to build the session schedule ahead of time. Over the last year or so, several EdCamps have opened the board a day or two in advance, so people can start scheduling sessions. This just encourages people to bring their leftover presentations from other conferences. While we may solicit ideas for topics ahead of time, nothing is going on the schedule until the day of the event.

All of this involves listening more than talking. The most important part of the conversation is not what you’re saying, but how you’re reacting to the things that others are saying. Sometimes, it’s easy to lose the conversation skills when there are so many megaphones around.

I hope that the education community can reach a level of civility and discourse that’s not being modeled in the wider society. I’m sure we’re up to the task. But we have to start by listening.

Photo credit: The Infatuated on Flickr.

The Semi-Permanent Internet

This week’s Spark included a piece on data longevity. These days, we’re posting a LOT of content online. Every minute, 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. In that same minute, the Internet gains 700,000 Facebook posts, 100,000 tweets, and 571 new web sites. Much of that is stuff we care a lot about. Nearly every photo I’ve taken in the last five years is on Flickr. All my videos worth watching are on YouTube or Vimeo. I’ve documented my personal and professional life on Twitter in 6,200 140-character pieces. And this blog now holds about 200,000 well-reasoned words that I’ve managed to string together over the last seven or eight years. And that’s not counting the private and semi-private stuff I have in Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, Delicious, and a handful of tools I’ve probably forgotten about.

All of those services are free. The only one I pay for is Flickr, and, to be honest, I probably don’t use it enough to need the pro account anymore. At a moment’s notice, or without notice, any of them could shut down, and take my data with them.

So we really should worry, at least a little bit, about where our data is and how it’s stored, and how to recover it if one of these companies goes belly-up. And don’t think it hasn’t happened before. Take a look at Google Reader, for example, which is shutting down this summer. Or what happened when Ning changed their terms of service a few years ago and teachers had to find another way to host online communities for their students. The Spark story points out that Posterous is discontinuing its blogging service this month, and all of its sites will go away unless its users migrate their content to some other service.

There’s no reason to believe that this won’t eventually happen to all of the online tools I’m using now. Business models change. Services evolve. We move from one thing to another pretty quickly. I never had a Geocities web page, but if I did it would have disappeared when Yahoo turned out the lights in 2009. And speaking of Yahoo, at some point I’ll probably lose access to my Yahoo mail account when they finally pull the plug. So the state of the Internet is a bit more ephemeral than we’d all like to think.

Spark guest Meg Ambrose commented on public service announcements that warn kids about what they post online. She’s very critical of that approach, indicating that the information we post online is much less permanent than we’d like to think. She claims that only 10-15% of content posted online lasts more than a year, and that we need to be less concerned with the permanence of our digital output that we are.

I disagree.

I started using the Internet in October, 1989. For the first year or so, almost everything I posted online was in forums hosted at my university. They were never really on the Internet, per se. They were only available within the institution. But sometime in 1990, I discovered Usenet. For those with less gray hair than I have, Usenet was a global distributed discussion forum. It had thousands of newsgroups on every conceivable topic, and participants from all over the world could interact in these forums. I was active in a handful of newsgroups in the early 90′s. While I knew that I was posting things in a public forum, I did not think about the possibility that those messages would still be online, easily accessible, and completely searchable 20 years later. The software I used to post those messages is no longer maintained. The server I posted them on and the terminal I wrote them on were decommissioned long ago. Most Internet providers no longer even support the Usenet protocol or carry a Usenet feed. Essentially, the entire class of services is gone. But the messages are still there. If you care about what I had to say regarding Lou Marini in the newsgroup alt.cult-movies on February 25, 1991, just ask Google. It helps if you know what my email address was in 1991, but you don’t really need it.

Or maybe you want to see the first web page I ever made. Actually, I can’t find that anywhere. But the first web site I made for a class I was teaching is in the Internet Archive. That was in the late 90′s. Want to see the student projects my 8th graders posted online in the spring of 1997? Those are still online too. Lots of the links are broken, and some of the images don’t load, and the pages are NOT where we originally posted them. But they’re still online. Someone has preserved them.

Let’s get back to the 21st century. Sure, many of the things I post online now won’t be there in a year or 5 years or 20 years. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be gone. Once I post something online, I give up control of it. It’s going to be archived somewhere. It’s going to be copied. It’s going to show up in other places. To think that I can magically go back and erase something I’ve posted on the Internet is foolish. To think that the Internet itself is going to purge it is crazy.

Obviously, the permanence of the Internet hasn’t scared me away. I’m putting more things online than ever before. But I’m always aware that everything I post will eventually be public (even if I don’t intend it to be). And everything I post is “out there” forever. It’s not up to me to decide what gets kept and what goes away.

Our students need to understand this, just like I needed to understand this 20 years ago.

Image source: Dolescum on Flickr.

Blended Learning

I’ve been talking about online learning for over twenty years, ever since I realized the power of online discussion forums in which anyone could participate from anywhere in the world. I did research studies in the 1990s on the effect of anonymity in the quality of online discussions among middle school students. I have been a curator of online professional learning networks longer than we’ve known what those networks are. But the online learning that the politicians and  school leaders are talking about now is very different. Whether it’s blended learning or online learning or flipped classrooms, the idea is generally the same: use technology to disseminate academic content to students.

That’s an efficient way to use technology to make sure students are mastering the content standards. It makes teaching a science. Start with the list of things we want our students to know. Assess the students to see what they already know. Focus instruction on the gap between what they know and what we want them to know. Re-assess and repeat. Most of this can be automated. It can serve each student at his or her own individual level. It can customize instruction like never before. And it can do it very inexpensively, when compared to labor-intensive interventions.

Khan Academy does this well. So does Knewton and Brainscape and Cerego and countless other adaptive applications. And so do the so-called xMOOCs like Coursera and Udacity, which seem to be getting an enormous amount of press lately, despite their complete redefinition of what a MOOC actually is. All of these programs / companies / approaches make it easier to deliver content to students, and to ensure that the students have adequately mastered that content.

Indeed, this approach has made the online charter schools possible. My daughter is finishing her second year in an online charter. It’s almost entirely automated, with students completing reading and LMS assignments, taking assessments, and then continuing on with more content. By the end of the year, a student who has completed the prescribed coursework is sufficiently prepared to pass the achievement tests, and we can successfully conclude that sufficient learning has taken place.

Unfortunately, that’s not all we need to be doing in our schools. Our students already have all of the answers to all of the questions on the test. It’s in that little black slab of plastic and glass they carry around with them. In an era of information abundance, the simple recall of information does not make one educated. It’s much more imporant that our students can take that information, combine it with other resources, improve on it, and use it to solve real problems. It’s critical that our students are able to work together with people from different cultures, collaborating both in online and face-to-face environments. The only hope for the long-term success for our country is for our students to innovation and creatively apply the knowledge they have to develop new technologies and new solutions to problems we haven’t yet identified.

Technology can certainly help with that. We use collaborative tools and communication tools to connect with and work together with people from all over the world. We all have the means to distribute our work globally in a variety of media. We have access to enormous volumes of data that can be analyzed in new ways. We can embrace the true vision of MOOCs, now referred to as cMOOCs, which emphasize participation in a community of learners rather than interaction with content.

Maybe there’s room for both approaches. If we automate the distribution of knowledge, we can increase the efficiency with which we prepare students to take the tests. Then, we’ll have more time to focus on the more important — but harder to measure — needs of next generation learners.

Photo credit: Queensu on Flickr.

Places to People

One of the trends right now in educational technology is a move toward individual computing devices for each learner. Whether you go with a 1:1 program, a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model, or a hybrid approach with several different solutions, it’s clear that we are moving to a world where computers are assigned to people, not places. This personalization of technology is a trend we could have predicted: the same thing happened with the telephone just a few years ago. But I didn’t expect this to come so quickly. There are no longer discussions about whether every student having a device is beneficial  There’s no debate about computers in classrooms versus computers in labs versus computers in students’ hands. The conversations now are about managing 1:1 programs, supporting BYOD initiatives, extending wireless infrastructure to support multiple devices per student, and the changing pedagogy that comes with ubiquitous access to technology.

From my perspective, the decision of whether to go with a 1:1 program or a BYOD approach is a difficult question. I remember the early days of graphing calculators, when we told the kids to go out and buy a graphing calculator and bring it to class. They brought their Casios and Sharps and TIs and HPs in to school to improve their learning of algebra and pre-calculus. It took the whole class period to figure out how to do the most basic things, because everyone had a different calculator with a different interface. It wasn’t until we standardized on TI hardware that they became really useful devices for learning math.

In a BYOD environment, the school has little control over the capabilities of the student device. Can it access Google Apps? Does it work with Flash? What about Java? Can we install apps on it? Can we print? What is the least common denominator, the basic set of things that every student’s device can handle? These challenges make the technology get in the way of instruction. They keep the technology from being invisible. Many schools with BYOD programs in place report that not much has changed in the classroom. Teachers may turn to the devices as an add-on, but they are not an integral part of teaching and learning, because the technology gets in the way.

At the same time, a BYOD approach can force a change in pedagogy because it changes the role of “teacher” and “student” like no 1:1 program can. Traditionally, the teacher was THE authority in the classroom. She was the keeper of all knowledge, and the knower of all things. She used the textbook as the final word on the subject she was teaching, and there was no need to go beyond that resource. We don’t live in that world anymore, but the argument can be made that a 1:1 program perpetuates the model of the school being in control. The school selects and provides the resource. The school supports the technology. The school tells the students what to do with the technology, and what can’t be done with it. It’s very clean. It’s very efficient. But it doesn’t really prepare the students for life in an information-rich society.

Ultimately, PARCC testing will probably make this decision for us. In an environment where computers are allocated to people rather than places, we don’t need computer labs and banks of computers in classrooms. If every student already has a device, we don’t have to have rooms full of devices, too. But in a practical sense, we are going to need a lot of computers to administer the PARCC tests. If we go with a 1:1 program, the school owns and manages the computers, and those computers can be used for testing. If we go BYOD, though, the school does not own the devices. We cannot install software on them. We cannot force the students to let us lock them out of basic functions on the device as required for the tests. So if we move to BYOD, we have to maintain the infrastructure of labs just to facilitate testing. It seems much more reasonable to just go with 1:1 and save the redundancy, and that’s probably the direction we will head.

Photo credit: Clemson University Libraries on Flickr.

Culture of Caring

I’ve had the great fortune over the last few days to engage in several conversations about ideal schools. One of the wonderful things about Educon is the serendipitous mingling that happens. Even though the sessions go through a proposal and approval process, and are meticulously planned by the facilitators, there’s always an element of unpredictability when they can go off EdCamp-like in any direction.

So the idea of what makes a great school came up quite a few times. We talked of the challenges of testing and common core and unfunded mandates and professional development. We discussed the need for next generation skills, life-long learning, authentic assessment, and a greater focus on inquiry. Some conversations were polite discussions. Others were lively debates. A few times, they devolved into mean-spirited attacks. We’re all passionate about our beliefs, and we all want the best for our children.

But every conversation came down to the same thing: education is about relationships.

It’s about relationships between students and parents. Students and schools. Principals and teachers. Students and students. Teachers and everyone. Every Science Leadership Academy student I’ve ever spoken to describes the school as a family. They feel like they’re an important part of the whole. When they’re not there, they’re missed. When they screw up, they let the community down. When they succeed, everyone celebrates.

The teachers and parents and administrators feel the same way. When I arrived and signed in at the conference, I couldn’t find my name tag on the registration table. I looked through the whole table. No name tag. The parent volunteer was very apologetic, and solved the problem quickly. I took a sharpie and wrote my name on a blank name tag. No big deal.

But that wasn’t good enough. A couple hours later, Diana saw me. “I know I printed a name tag for you.”

“I’m not worried about it.”

“You need a name tag.” She dropped everything, and grabbed her laptop. She had a few things to do. There were 500 people on their way to the school for a 3-day conference. She was a co-chair and had a thousand details to take care of. But right now, my name tag was at the top of the list. She printed. I felt fussed-over.  She got the paper cutter out to make sure the cut lines were straight. I chatted. She explained that it’s not about the name tag. “We screwed up. If you don’t have a name tag, there may be 50 other people who don’t have them.” There weren’t. She later found my name tag stuck to the bottom of one of the others. But she didn’t want to let me down. I was part of the community. She lives in a culture of caring. And it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t even work at the school anymore. She’s family. You can’t resign from that.

The culture of caring is what gets my daughter’s drama teacher involved when she’s slacking off in language arts. It’s what prompts a phone call or a text when a student has been out for a few days. It’s what gets teachers to show up at sporting events and school plays and (God help us) dances when there are lots of other things that they could be doing. And it’s what gets a couple hundred students to give up their weekends to come to school to help a bunch of teachers become better teachers.

In a culture of caring, you don’t need a lot of rules. Respect yourself. Respect the community. Respect the school as a place of learning.

In a culture of caring, teachers aren’t walking out of meetings because they’ve gone longer than the contractually-mandated time. And they don’t get called on the carpet for occasionally arriving a few minutes late on snowy mornings.

In a culture of caring, students aren’t working for grades, and teachers are more focused on relevance than test scores. They don’t want to let each other down. They don’t want to make the school look bad. And most of all, they trust one another to make decisions that will benefit each other. When a teacher says something is important, they emphasize it. And when it’s not important, they let it go.

In a culture of caring, principals trust teachers to do what they do best: teach kids. School boards trust administrators to manage the schools. Governments trust the schools to provide thorough, relevant, worthwhile education for our youth.

It took me a long time to learn how to teach, and I’m not even sure I ever quite got it right. But one of the things I learned early on was that you have to treat the students like people, and not like kids. If you offer a little respect, and treat people reasonably, they’ll usually reciprocate. And then we can get some good work done.

Photo credit: John Flanigan on Flickr.

The Global Citizen

I’m a Partridge Highlander. I live in the Partridge Highlands subdivision, precinct 2-H of ward 2 in the city of Stow. So I guess I’m a Stowite. And since Stow is a city in county Summit in the state of Ohio, that makes me a Summitian (?!) and an Ohioan, though we sometimes call ourselves “Buckeyes.”

Our sworn enemies, here in Partridge Highlands, are the residents of the Quail Hollow allotment over in precinct 2-E. Life over there is… different. Their streets are paved with asphalt, not concrete. The sidewalks are twelve feet from the curb instead of ten. Their Christmas decorations are too gaudy. Their landscaping is too pretentious.

We don’t really have a lot in common. But compared to those crazy people in Hudson or Cuyahoga Falls or Kent, we’re practically brothers. We share common schools, city infrastructures, and services. We use the same post office and library. We shop in the same places.

The same is true if we widen the context. Those crazy people in Hudson and Cuyahoga Falls and Kent are not so crazy after all compared to the Wolverine-loving residents of Michigan, where you have to pay a deposit on soda cans, it’s legal for 12-year-olds to own handguns, and they don’t even have a state rock song.

My community is defined by the terms with which I describe it. Moving beyond geography, I can call myself an educational technologist. But as soon as I do that, I’ve excluded all the people who are interested and actively engaged in education who may not accept technology as the means to achieve academic goals. If I get specific and say I’m a blogger, or a Twitterer, or a Facebooker, I can connect with the people who use those tools, but at the same time, I’m choosing to not connect with those who don’t.

The nice thing is that we have the concept of plurality. I can be more than one thing at a time. So I can be a blogger and (theoretically) a webcaster at the same time. I can be a brewer and a musician. I can be a father and a son. I can be a Partridge Highlander and an Ohioan.

In 2007, my school district adopted a new mission statement as part of its strategic plan:

The mission of the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City School District is to inspire and prepare students to be lifelong learners, to be flexible in approaching opportunities for growth, and to be effective as well as ethical contributors to our global society.

As we work through the revision of the strategic plan this year, some have raised objections to that last phrase. We don’t want our students to be contributors to our global society. We want our children to be Americans first. Why should they contribute to the global society? Why should they be helping the Chinese and the Indians steal American jobs? Why should they be improving living conditions in Africa when so many Americans are living in poverty?

We have a responsibility to our communities. We protect them. We nurture them. We learn from them. We benefit from our participation in them. But when we narrowly define them, we end up with an unhealthy homogeneity. Quail Hollow is not any better or worse than Partridge Highlands, just like Summit County is not any better or worse than Portage. And the more we engage with people from those other communities, the more we can learn from one another and benefit from our common experience.

So, yes. We can be Americans. Our students can be “ethical contributors to our American society.” But that doesn’t mean they’re not global citizens, too. And they’re going to be much better off if we don’t restrict their frame of reference to the United States.

Photo Credit: Enric Archivell on Flickr.