Surreal

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Pure Loyalty, a service in NYC for high school students who are not allowed to have their electronic devices in school. They park a truck outside the school, lock up the phones and iPods, and then return them at the end of the day.


Is there a better example of the problem with the way schools look at technology? Now BYOD doesn't really work, and a kid texting from a "dumb phone" is probably better off leaving the phone at home.


But isn't there something vaguely Brazil about schools telling students: "You have very powerful, pocket-sized computers. DO NOT bring them to school!"


If you had told me in 1997 about the capabilities of an iPod Touch, I would have been amazed. If you then told me that I would have to pay money to keep from bringing it into school, I would've been confused.


(Via Kottke)

Steve Jobs: "Technology Cannot Fix Education"

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Steve Jobs, in 1996:



"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent."



Digital textbooks are shiny and new, but not a panacea.

Textbooks are dead. Long live textbooks.

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Predictably, the non-education tech press is focusing on iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author. I still think that iTunes U is the bigger deal for education in the long-term, but somebody outside of the classroom may not recognize that. Interactive textbooks, while certainly an improvement, are still mostly presuming the same model of education that's persisted for 100 years. The importance of iBooks Author is that teachers now have the same tools (for free) that the textbook publishers have. It will be interesting to see what tech-savvy teachers do with that. I would imagine we will soon see content that is a "textbook" in name only.

Apple's Education Announcement

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Apple's NYC event just ended, and it covered essentially what was predicted. To wit:


Textbooks


Interactive textbooks are cool, but not new. Inkling has had a great app for a while now, but lacked publisher support. If the major textbook publishers are really behind Apple's initiative, that's huge. It could definitely help tilt schools currently on the fence about a 1:1 iPad deployment. The pricing of those textbooks ($14.99) is also pretty significant. For a private school like mine, asking students to buy an iPad and some $14.99 textbooks would end up saving parents a lot of money. The iBook authoring tool looks great too, and anything that makes it easier for teachers to create custom lessons is a positive.


iTunes U


As Fraser Spiers has said repeatedly, you need technology, pedagogy, and curriculum. Longterm, iTunes U could be a huge step toward integrating those three. The interactive textbooks don't mean much by themselves, but combined with the iTunes U app, teachers can really move to a curriculum and pedagogy that are entirely new. Even at the high school level, it is now possible to easily offer a course that is entirely digital, without expensive expensive hardware or software. All that's needed is a student with an iPad (and a teacher with a Mac to create the content).


What now?


There is often a very conflicted response to these types of announcements. The tech bloggers have never been a teacher, and are quick to praise any new technology as "saving" the broken education system. As evidenced by the lack of change over the last 100 years, that is rarely how it works out.


Among education technology people, most either rush to proclaim, "All our problems have been fixed!" or list the reasons why nothing will change. Of course the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Any teacher who has been waiting for Apple to "save" or "fix" education is part of the problem. The tools are there, and have been for a while. Today's announcements just made those tools even better.


The challenge for me? I can think of 100 ways I could use these new tools. But my administration has 101 reasons why it won't work. Guess who will win?

Urban Nostalgia

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I recently returned from a four-day trip to my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri. Most of my family has moved away, but it's always nice to visit my grandmother and to eat some St. Louis-specific meals. Having lived in Denver for three years now, the differences between the two cities felt even more striking than when I last visited two years ago.


The architecture of the homes in the two cities is a very visible point of distinction, and one that speaks to some of the underlying differences. Obviously, St. Louis is a much older city, and like in many other old river cities (Cincinnati, for example), there are a lot of old brick buildings. Driving through St. Louis and it's near suburbs (within I-270, at least), even the newest housing developments are often at least 30 years old. In the city itself, of course, many homes were built a hundred years ago. Driving down a residential block, you see small ranch homes, tall row houses, and towering estates, often on the same block. While the older neighborhoods of Denver have similar aesthetics, you see a lot less brick and lot more communities of cookie-cutter houses–two-story homes with three-car garages and small yards. Of course, having grown up in a house built in 1957, and then also lived in a home built in 1920, some of the "charm" of an older house is overwhelmed by the quotidian reality of old wiring and older plumbing. Still, driving down a street in the Tower Grove neighborhood of St. Louis or Old Town Florissant is very different from Highlands Ranch or even southeast Denver.


Another feature (bug?) of cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati is the diversity of neighborhoods. Not just the traditional ethnic enclaves like "The Hill" in St. Louis, but the distinctions between Clayton, Tower Grove, and University City. Growing up in St. Louis pre-GPS, I could usually tell in what direction I was driving based on the changes in neighborhood. Not just going from "nice" neighborhoods to poorer ones, but the way the businesses and homes would change from north to south, or from east to west. I realize that I probably have not lived in Denver long enough to see some of these same variations, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that this phenomenon is more obvious in the Midwest than in Denver.


Walking and driving through the St. Louis area last month, even parts that I wasn't really familiar with growing up, it all felt like St. Louis. There was no time when I could have convinced myself that I was actually in Denver. Maybe it was the humidity. Maybe it was the architecture. But I felt the same way living in Cincinnati or western Massachusetts. Maybe it's all just a factor of Denver's relatively young status as a major city. Or perhaps it's the itinerant nature of Denver's population through the years, that it's difficult to have a Denver-specific culture when so much of the population is new to the area.


As much as St. Louis will always be my "hometown," even though my parents moved away six years ago, there is also a certain sadness that the city evokes when I return. Those gorgeous brick buildings are often in areas hit hard by crime and poverty. The decline of North St. Louis and North County is also the story of much of the Midwest, the story of urban decay, of "white flight." The story of St. Louis is also the story of the auto industry, of McDonnell-Douglas and Anheuser-Busch, Boeing and In-Bev. It is the story of Catholic immigrants, of assimilation and segregation.


When you talk to a native Midwesterner about their hometown, whether it be Cincinnati, Memphis, or St. Louis, invariably it turns to the past. Statistics about when St. Louis was the third-largest city in the country, or when Cincinnati was the hub for trade in the Midwest. In those descriptions of past greatness, there is certainly nostalgia, that "pain from an old wound" so eloquently described by Don Draper. There's also a feeling that we do not want our cities, our hometowns to be mortal. We want them to be preserved exactly as we remember them, because as these great American cities decay, they take with them a piece of us, those who lived there, and also a piece of American history.

The "Education bubble", Business Majors, and the Failures of Higher Education

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There's an article from TechCrunch that's been going around for a while now on Peter Theil's description of a "Higher Education Bubble." it's been all over the Internet, and so you may have read it by now, but if not, go take a moment to peruse it. His premise–which I am very much simplifying, so please go read the article–is essentially that a college education has become overvalued, and that it is taboo to even question its value. From the article:



Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”



Thei's solution to this problem has also been getting a lot of press.


The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.


It's an interesting idea, to be sure. What intrigues me though is this implication that having a degree may be seen as useful to society, but that nothing valuable actually happens at a college or university. When I was in graduate school at a large public university in New England, I was walking to class with a professor for whom I was a TA, and we were gently mocking the writing capabilities of our students, in the way that educators do, to maintain their sanity. One comment of his has remained with me: "I swear, within 10 years, somebody is going to graduate from this institution and then promptly sue us, because they are functionally illiterate, completely unemployable, and tens of thousands of dollars in debt." Granting him some leeway for hyperbole, his point stands. Depending on one's major, it is entirely possible to survive on a diet of giant lecture classes, piecing together barely-legible assignments, and graduate.


Of course, as a proud proponent of a liberal arts education, I knew that could never happen within my field of study. Every hIstory or classics professor I knew had at least a modicum of integrity and rigor in their courses. I knew that my professor was really talking about those business majors, the vocational students of the 21st century.


And I was right.


David Glenn, in The Chronicle of Higher Education (via The Quick and the Ed), writes that business majors work less than their peers in other fields.



Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.



Granted, these studies are certainly challenged by others, but I think you would be hard-pressed to talk to anybody in college right now who couldn't provide at least anecdotal evidence to back that up. The one business course I took as an undergraduate contained by far the least amount of professor engagement and interaction, particularly as compared to my history and classics courses.


Considering that business is by far the most popular major in America, it is fair to highlight them as symptomatic of these larger problems. If, as the article states, the benefits of a business major are the internships and the networking that is facilitated, how is $50,00/year to attend college possibly justified?


But again, I'm one of those annoying people that won't shut up about the value of a liberal arts education, so what do I know? I am in debt from six total years spent studying dead people and dead languages.

Fraser Speirs: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Educational Technology"

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The entire post is worth a read, as most of Speirs' posts are, but here's the money quote:


Put simply, if you're in the business of making discrete hardware for the classroom you are in very serious trouble. Your business is about to be replaced by a $5 download from the App Store and the rest of your company's existence will be about trying to sell a refresh to your existing installed base.

I also love this bit:


Interactive Whiteboards are the next great Zombie Technology. The installed base is now so massive in schools that, like Internet Explorer 6, they will have a long, slow, lingering death.

 

Vocabulary

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Entire industries, including this blog, are centered around "technology in education."


I hate that phrase. Specifically, the use of the word "technology."


"Technology" is just stuff. In my classroom, some of the technology I have includes: a Fujitsu TabletPC, a SmartBoard, a dry-erase board, a plethora of dry-erase markers, books, paper, pens etc.. When I was in grade school, the technology consisted of a chalkboard and chalk, and again, books and paper. When Vergil was in school his technology was a stylus, wax tablets, and maybe some papyrus.


The vocabulary we use matters. When educators talk about the need for "technology in the classroom," most people translate that as, "We need more stuff." What they really mean, the smart ones, is that they want new tools to facilitate new ways of learning. I'm not trying to be pedantic here, and it's probably fine to use "technology" as shorthand, but I think this is indicative of many of the issues facing education. When educators are stuff-focused, they ignore the real needs.

Technology Manifesto

It is 2011. That's ten-plus years into the 21st century, and still the discussion of "21st Century Education" is in its formative phase. A quick Google search returns about 649,000 results, and you will find almost that many different opinions. From the futurists shouting that we will soon all be cyborgs (yes, I've actually seen presentations like that) to the more traditional educators trying to simply figure out how to use computers in the classroom, there is a sense that things are changing (or should be changing).


These changes, which I think feel more sudden to many educators than they actually are, are a cause of anxiety. Schools are throwing money at the problem, buying hardware simply for the sake of saying that they have hardware. Teachers are scared that their entire careers have not prepared them for the way that students actually learn, and frightened that their lack of technological skills (whether perceived or real) will have negative consequences for their career. Students (at least mine) don't really understand what is going on around them, all they know is that email is for old people and the computers at school are slow and useless.


This problem of updating our system of education is complex, hence the myriad opinions on the topic. It is because of that complexity that so many schools focus on buying hardware. Changing hundreds of years of pedagogical practice is difficult. As a teacher, I can admit that it's unsettling to be told that I am doing everything wrong, that I need to change my methods to adequately prepare my students for the future. It is much easier to purchase some interactive whiteboards and throw laptops in front of the students than to really address the issues. Not that this is entirely bad, of course. Students do in fact need 21st century tools if they are going to learn 21st century skills. The difficulty seems to be in straddling the line between abstract theories about the future of education and the hardware decisions that need to be made at the ground-level. When making those hardware decisions, it is easy to become myopic and focused on what brand of laptops to purchase, losing sight of the bigger picture.


Here is what schools should focus on:



  • Fast, reliable, always-available Internet access for teachers and students

  • The ability for students to immediately research any question or problem posed by the teacher

  • The ability for the teacher to immediately share items with students (webpages, presentations, etc.)

  • The ability for students to create projects in class.

  • The ability for students to immediately share items they have created with their classmates and teachers

  • The ability for teachers and students to communicate and collaborate with each other in real-time, both in and out of the classroom

  • Fast, reliable hardware with which to accomplish the above.


Notice the list contains infrastructure requirements first, abilities second, and hardware third. Those abilities, accomplished at the intersection of infrastructure, software, and hardware are the key. I listed the hardware last because it is in many ways the least significant detail, yet the one that gets the most attention from administration. It's not that the hardware does not matter. But the hardware only matters to the extent that it helps to accomplish the above. Whether it's Windows, OS X, or iOS on those devices is inconsequential if it enables the students and teachers to accomplish these goals.1


The futurists may be correct that everything about education needs to change in the near future, but small, tangible steps are going to bring that change. It is important that those steps are taken thoughtfully.


 


 



  1. Of course, I have my own views on what hardware is ideal, but I'll save that discussion for later posts. ↑