Disrupting Education

Lately a lot of people have been talking about disrupting industries.  If we want to seriously consider how we can disrupt our current educational model, we need to listen.

We need to listen to the likes of Clay Christensen who wrote a book about it, MIT's New Media Literacies has developed strategy guides to support it, David Wiley and the State of Utah who are opening up classes that will enable it, Mike Wesch who is using new media to reconsider how we address course content, and Bill Farren who is developing an online course around it.

In my last few posts I have been writing about changes that can be made to alter our educational landscape.  At the core of these changes is transitioning to a model based upon participatory learning:



This is an open classroom.  An open classroom is based upon the idea of participatory learning; connections between students and experts around the world as well as dynamic content, that is readily available to all, drives student inquiry.

Access

The power of this participation starts in the access to information.  With resources like iTunesU, Academic Earth, Courseware, Diigo, Google News, blogs via an RSS Reader, and Wikipedia, our students can find more information and sources on a topic than any teacher can provide in a lecture.  This access not only promotes inquiry, as students must find reliable sources and learn digital literacy skills, but it creates the potential to open a class to communities outside the four walls of a classroom.

Connection

We are social beings that want to learn.  When students can connect and participate with others while learning, they become intrinsically motivated.  If learning happens by students working together to draw conclusions or provide feedback, students interest increases.  With technologies like Ning, Skype, Wordpress, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikis, students are able to collaborate with their peers around the world, discuss issues with leading experts in order to develop their own ideas.  When learning can reach beyond the four walls of a classroom and there is meaning to the content as well as the personal connection to the outside world, a school can be transformed into a place where students want to learn.

Meaning

Today's technology creates opportunities to bring the masses together while making an impact.  In a world where transformative technologies are at tips of our fingers, it is all the more important to make learning meaningful.   When a class can work with a village in Africa to learn how AIDS has been decimating the population, students do not want to simply write an essay about the disease, they want to do something about it.  Our students are constantly connected and we can use these technologies to help make a positive impact.  It is this potential, the ability to bring meaning into learning, that can truly disrupt our current model of education.  When the wold is faced with countless problems, it is the fact that our students can help make a difference that will make learning meaningful.

Getting There

The technology is there, the need is there, what lacks is an understanding from educators.  It is our job, as those who get these ideas, to forget about giving presentations on Twitter.  Rather, talk about making our classrooms meaningful and why our students should connect to the world.  If we want to disrupt education, we must explain why before how.  We must open their eyes to a new approach to teaching, helping them to see this transformation.  The next time you speak to a peer or present to a group, do not focus on the technology, spend your time talking about an issue important to you and how your students can use technology can make a difference.

Photo Credit: Courosa
Alec Courosa is also on Twitter: @courosa

Education 3.0

No matter matter how much money a school throws at technology, it is all for naught if the use and approach is outdated.  The folks over at Education Futures have been writing about this very thing in a series called Designing Education 3.0.  There they discuss:

• The Role of Schools in Education 3.0
  


• The Role of Technology in Education 3.0


• The Role of Teachers in Education 3.0

These posts hightlight the fact that as technology becomes more ubiquitous in schools, it is imperative that we address how that technology is used.  Far too many times I have seen SMARTBoards unused, teachers "using" technology by giving lectures with PowerPoint presentations, or my favorite, simply showing a YouTube clip with no follow up.

This Education 1.0 approach will not work.  Teachers complain about having to learn about new technologies and I don't blame them.  Used in a Education 1.0 model, these technologies are just updated chalkboards, overhead projectors, and film clips.

Instead of wasting our time, money, and energy on simply introducing the latest technologies, we need to spend our professional development time helping teachers understand how and why we must move to a Education 3.0 model.  If we continue to teach using outdated models, not only will our students lose interest but they will be left behind.  The following chart from Education Futures outlines this idea:

As I have written before, time is precious.  There is never enough of it.  If we can spend that time helping teachers understand this shift and how they can use technology in order to support the idea of Education 3.0, not only will our teaching improve but our students will be more engaged.

Here is some evidence that supports what I have just mentioned.  Demetri Orlando published a great Digital 1:1 Laptop Classroom Rubric.  Take a look, this would be a useful tool in helping teachers begin to develop a more Education 3.0 classroom.

A Model For Learning

For the past several weeks I have been mulling over the idea of participation, transparency, and connectivism. All ideas that I believe are the corner stones to the next big shift in education. Several people have been influential in helping me reach this point. I have been reading work from the likes of Henry Jenkins from Project New Media Literacies, Mike Wesch from Kansas State, David Wiley from BYU, and George Siemens and Stephen Downes from Canada.

Today I went to a conference at MIT hosted by Project New Media Literacies. The focus of the conference was on participatory culture in education. As the day went on I began to piece together some things.

Our students participate. They want to be involved. They are connected, ALL the time. If we ignore that fact we will lose our students. Henry Jenkins alluded to this fact in his 2006 white paper on participatory culture. It is vitally important that our students create, circulate, connect, and collaborate. Research by Project New Media Literacies highlights this point. But not only will this participatory model be useful in engaging our students, it is an opportunity to teach ethical behavior when working with digital media.

If schools follow a participatory model, using open education resources to examine real issues through our curriculum, while using a framework that promotes collaboration and discussion, we can change the game.

The idea is based upon what I heard today and have read from Mike Wesch, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, as well as countless others.

This is what I have in mind for a grade 6 through 12 school:

The Framework

All course content is free using Open Education Reources (OER) available via online resources.  All disciplines would frame their course curriculum around the free materials. This would not only cut costs for a school but also lend itself to opening the class to the online community.

Individual courses, their syllabi and resources would be housed on a Course Management System (CMS) like Moodle, Wikispaces, or EduCommons. Having the platform online would allow the class to include participants from around the world.

All student work would be created and managed via a blog based e-portfolio. This system would be build off of Wordpress Mu. Every student would have a blog. This would be their home for all written work, digital media, and presentations. It is an opportunity to not only record a student's work but have their voice be a part of a larger conversation. The work would be separated by tag and each class would have a site where the aggregated feeds for the class appropriate posts and comments as well as all relevant information would be posted.

Here is the Google Doc of the proposal I created.

The Participation

Create

If students create online content, whether written or media, that is a part of a larger conversation, the work takes on a new meaning. Students who can express their ideas and produce something concrete that they can publish, will be more more engaged.

Connect

If there is anything I have learned in the past few days, it is that to make a model like this work, it MUST connect to our students. There must be relevance and it must mean something. Whether it is a Biology class creating HIV/AIDS PSAs for a local AIDS center or working to develop tutorials on algorithms for a village school in Ghana, if curriculum can not only teach content but connect students to something bigger, it will make an impact.

Collaborate

At the heart of this model is collaboration. When the curriculum is designed to have students work with experts outside the classroom, community organizations, or other classes around the world, the learning becomes real. When a student's blog entry on civil rights gets comments from a community leader who the class had been working with, the connections becomes real, the work meaningful. These collaborations can take place in many forms: Second Life, Skype, Elluminate, uStream, on a wiki, or Google Doc, or in real life. No matter the venue, what makes the work engaging and relevant is the collaborations and relationships that stem from creation of the content.

Circulate

The blog becomes a platform for the circulation of student created content. It a means to promote not only writing but all digital content created by a student would be available online. Here, the e-portfolio plays a role. Now all of the work that a student produces over four years is housed online on one site. The ability for a student to simply send a URL to a friend, family member, or potential college and show their work speaks to the true nature of the platform. Their works is now accessible to the world.

This model does not only support the ideas of transparency, participation, and connectivism, but it teaches another important lesson: digital citizenship. Using a platform like this, digital literacy and the ethical use of digital content becomes interwoven into each class. Students will become aware of fair use and copyright not because they read a case study but because all their work is online.

I borrowed a lot of ideas from people much smarter than me who have been proving this model in higher education but I believe this is an idea that could work in a grade 6-12 environment.

This is a very rough outline of what I am envisioning but to be true to the idea of participation, please leave your comments and criticisms. They will be extremely helpful as I improve this model.

Photo Credit: Today Is A Good Day

Writing Tool Belt 2.0

This is a cross-posting for a piece I did for edSocialMedia.com

No matter what new tool a carpenter may have at his disposal, he still must master the skills needed to build a house. Those tools may change the way he does his job but he still must learn the basic skills of carpentry.

Learning in the 21st century is no different.  Our students must learn many of the same skills they had to learn prior to the digital age.

No matter the tool, our students must master how to write. But wait, isn't this a site that supports technology? Yes. While our students must master skills that were taught with pen and paper, if we are to reach our students in 2009 we must update our tool belt.

Writing is essential to a students success. But we are now in an connected world and how we teach our student to write is just as important as what we teach our students to write. I read Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Writing in the 21st Century" and it only validates this fact. She states that,

"we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate"

Today, social media plays a vital role in developing these ideas. Whether you like it or not, how we write is shifting.  The media as well as our students are interacting and writing online.    As more and more people live in an connected world, the way they communicate is evolving.  Pew Research Center states that "1 in 5 online adults 18 to 24 have ... used Twitter".  If we ignore that fact and try to teach in an unconnected world our students will lose interest.

Yancy goes on to say,

"21st century writing marks a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composer not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extra curricular social co-apprenticeship."

Writing has never been more important but we must recognize this cultural shift.  Educators must develop a new tool belt that supports the interaction and connectivity that our students now thrive upon.  Our students text, comment, and tweet.  Our job is to use the tools that they are familiar with to create an environment that develops the literacy skills Yancy mentions while building upon our students' communal interactions via social media.

In our connected world where everyone is just a click away, social media tools like Twitter, Blogs and Facebook will be essential in order to develop the writing skills our students need while keeping it relevant.

Photo Credit: Robyn00

A Response To The Textbook Debate

This is a cross post from a comment I wrote on Kevin Levin's blog.  He had written a response to my earlier post about textbooks and the role of the Internet.  Enjoy.

The Internet will only become a larger part of our lives, whether you like it or not. Our responsibility as educators, notice I say educators not teachers, is to prepare our students, we’d all agree on that. But, if we introduce the skills (no matter the discipline) we want students to learn with traditional methods, our students will lose interest. They are growing up in a world of constant connectivity. Say what you will about this, that’s the way it is. The idea behind my post in response to “Joe’s Non-Netbook” was to highlight the fact that learning without a textbook and the skills we want them to learn go hand in hand.

If we as educators determine the core skills that we want our students to master, we can use any number of resources, we are not tied to the textbook.

As for history, we are trying to engage our students in a scholarly dialog. If we present them with multimedia (video, maps, art, charts etc.) as well as several text websites that are dedicated to a certain topic but have slight differences, the class can then determine those differences on their own not having to rely upon a textbook to tell them. As for the scholarly perspective, you can post two JSTOR articles from different historians and have the students debate the arguments and then write analytical responses on their blogs about the core differences in the two articles.

Textbook or no textbook, the skills we want our students to learn are still the same: be able to think and write like a historian. If we want to do justice to our students and keep them interested, we must acknowledge that our students consume information differently. If we completely ignore that fact we are doing them a disservice. While the top 10% of the class can understand the argument by simply reading a textbook, we are missing out on the 90% who need audio or visuals that are NOT available in a textbook. Yes, this approach will take some extra time and planning to post all the resources on-line ahead of time but the benefit for the entire class is well worth the effort.

As for other disciplines like math. Yes, math is different but that doesn’t mean that students can only learn from a textbook. Dan Meyer, a math teacher in California proves this very convincingly. Here are two examples of what he does with his class: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=213 and http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=440

To sum up, textbooks not only cost a great deal of money but they cost our students’ potential to learn. With a different approach to how we educate our students and using the plethora of multimedia and text resources available on-line, we are not only saving money but doing a great deal of good in helping to keep our students interested and wanting to learn the skills we are “teaching”.

Scholarly Crowdsourcing: Twitter Does History

Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, my alma mater, tried an experiment yesterday that really made me think about how we can use social media in our classes.

Cohen posted on his blog that he was going to conduct an experiment using his blog and Twitter. He would post an artifact and using a Twitter hashtag, #digdil09, and his Twitter account, @dancohen. Cohen wanted to see if his Twitter and blog followers could determine what the object, shown above, was within one hour.

The post was put up at 3:00pm EST on Thursday and within the hour both @grresearch and @opencontent had found the answer.

The hashtag feed was a true example of what history is all about, investigating a problem through discussion. The "mystery", as Cohen put it, brought random people together virtually in order to solve the question through scholarly discourse using social media.

For me, this experiment again proved that Twitter isn't just for ego maniacs trying to be more popular than a news organization. Rather, this again proves that it can develop our personal learning network (PLN).

This could be an excellent opportunity for students to learn how to do research by not just simply using Google but through discussion and learning from others. With tools like Twitters and blogs, our students can now crowdsource and take advantage of the greater community of knowledge that is not only in the "blogosphere" but also in the "twittersphere".

Solving The Time Issue

A few weeks ago I wrote about the issue of time and technology. I had referred to a speech given by Clay Shirky. His argument stated that we have always had the time to investigate technology but we used that time mindlessly watching sitcoms.

The other day I read a post by Antonio Viva titled, Who Has Time for Social Media? Mr. Viva states that for the vast majority of people

social media is either a term they don’t recognize or a fad they tried and just don’t seem to have the time for.

So this brings me to my question.

What will create the shift to where the majority of people see social media and technology not simply as another thing to do but rather as THE thing that brings their lives together?

The shift is beginning to happen, we see Oprah coming to Twitter. Yes, I am following her. The Boston Globe may close. These are both important indicators. They identify the fact that mainstream media is evolving. The ways we get our information is shifting in response. Despite this, many still fight the idea of technology as a "waste of time".

For technology or social media to take hold, our communities must fully incorporate it. We work and live in communities. If we want to make that shift from seeing technology as just another responsibility, it must become our brand. It must be a ubiquitous part of our community.

When our communities develop strategies that incorporate technology seamlessly into our daily lives, we will find that elusive time that Mr. Viva was looking for.

This takes a very deliberate approach but with the right plan and support, that shift can happen.

Photo Credit: Matt Hamm