January 26, 2012 Leave a Comment

EduCon Conversation

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Philadelphia for EduCon 2.4 (can it possibly be the fifth?), the best professional development event I attend each year. It’s a small conference but a fully-packed weekend of great conversations and a chance to connect with many members of my PLN, hosted at a truly innovative school.

This year I’ll be part of a panel session with Tim, Tom, Jeff, and Martha* called Building Bridges: Communities of Practice from K-16, in which we’ll be discussing how to improve communication and collaboration between those of us working in K12 schools and our higher education colleagues.

If you’re attending EduCon, please join us Saturday afternoon at 3. If you can’t be in Philly, watch for many ways to participate in both our session and the conference in general, starting by following the #educon hashtag on Twitter. You can also directly be a part of our session by adding your ideas, stories, and comments to our Google Docs page.

And on the topic of conversation starters, Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, opened an opinion piece in the New York Times with this interesting observation.

A PARADOX of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society’s cutting edge.

So, is that influence on the high school curriculum a good thing? Are colleges really the source for “newest thinking” or do high schools have some something to contribute? Do public schools exist only to be a farm club for universities?

Anyway, it’s going to be a good discussion and great weekend. Hope you can be part of it.

*Tim, Tim, Tom, Jeff, and Martha: the least feared law firm in the state of Virginia. :-)

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January 26, 2012 Leave a Comment

Flawed Logic

In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama addressed education reform, including this statement about teachers.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

In the Post’s Answer Sheet blog, a veteran educator points out a huge logical flaw in what the President had to say.

The second problem is a glaring contradiction, a logical flaw that is huge even though it has been overlooked by almost every journalist apparently too polite to challenge the administration on it. If you do not wish teachers to teach to the test, if you want them to be passionate and creative, then how can you insist that their performance be measured by the use of test scores?

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot tell teachers to be creative, you cannot pretend you are “flexible,” when you mandate the use of test scores for teacher and principal evaluations, and continue to use them as the basis by which schools are condemned as failures. [emphasis mine]

I suspect the President, and many other education reform “leaders”, will continue to miss the disconnect between what they say and what they do.

They will produce even more lofty speech about the importance of teachers, while still demonizing the profession and implementing policies that marginalize the practice of teaching.

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January 25, 2012 Leave a Comment

Data Weary

In the past few weeks, I’ve been involved in a lot of conversations about data here in the overly-large school district. Actually, all the data-this and data-that discussions have been ongoing for a long time, although it really seems to get annoying enough to write about around this time in the school year.

The fundamental concept, of course, is that if we collect enough data on students, we can manipulate it and unlock the secret to bumping up their test scores so that the school won’t get toss into the dreaded “needs improvement” (aka failing) category. In the end, the data is really all about keeping schools and districts out of the local papers, and only marginally about student learning.

Our administration talks a good game about “21st century skills”, the 4Cs (communications, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking), higher level thinking, and all the rest. But the reality of what actually happens in schools is all focused on the annual rounds of standardized tests: practice, remediation, and an over-emphasis on a very narrow band of topics and skills.

Of course, we are not the only education organization wallowing in the healing magic of numbers. It’s happening at all levels.

Last week, right up the road in DC, an organization with big time support from Bill Gates called the Data Quality Campaign sponsored something called the National Data Summit. A centerpiece of this event was a panel discussion featuring two of the major national advocates for gathering more data (aka more testing), Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former head of the DC public schools, Michelle Rhee. Both have failed to produce evidence that this approach actually improves learning but that hasn’t stopped them from pushing it anyway.

As you might expect, missing from the agenda of this meeting, and pretty much any other high profile education reform event, were the voices of teachers, or anyone currently working in schools with actual students.

In fact, one retired DC math teacher who registered and attended the National Data Summit was thrown out of the hotel for providing a counter argument to the theme of the day. This in spite of the fact he offered to stop distributing a leaflet discussing “data quality and information about some of the speakers” when approached by security.

Ok, so I understand that this was the Data Quality Campaign’s dog and pony show, not a debate, although ejecting someone for providing an counter opinion does seem rather harsh.

However, this little scenario illustrates the point that many of our national “leaders” don’t really want to hear opposing voices or, heaven forbid, evidence that in anyway challenges their assumptions on how to improve American education. They are convinced that standardized testing (along with charter schools, merit pay, eliminating teacher tenure, and the rest) is the solution, with little or no proof that all this extra data is either valid or useful.

Indeed, based simply on my observations, collecting more data and wallowing in the analysis of it, is making things worse. It swallows up valuable teaching time and bores the kids. And too many people are accepting the numbers without questioning whether they are valid in the first place.

But the worst consequence of our data driven obsession is that it validates the status quo, locking in place our 1950′s model of school, along with the only-slightly-changed curriculum from the same era.

And as a result, it obscures the need to have a serious discussion about how to change (I say radically alter) that model so we can help kids acquire the knowledge and skills they will actually need when they finish their time in school.

Now, in that hypothetical 21st century everyone talks about.

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January 23, 2012 Leave a Comment

Redesigning Teach

Studio 360 is a fun, interesting public radio program produced at WNYC in New York and focusing on the arts and popular culture.

Occasionally they hire graphic design firms to re-imagine the imagery for a part of that culture. This time around they decided to redesign teaching, or at least the graphic representation of teaching, and the results are bright, interesting, modern and, at least for me, extremely compelling.

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Although you can quibble with the use of school-bus yellow (and some did in the program’s comment section), this work is still many steps up from any illustration using the nth variation on an Apple. Take a look at all the results and, especially if you’re interested in the creative process of design, listen to the discussion with the designers.

I couldn’t find any indication that they are releasing this work under a Creative Commons license but I certainly hope so.

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January 22, 2012 Leave a Comment

Split Decision

Unless you’re part of the ed-tech community, you might have missed the news from Apple’s product announcement last Thursday. After all, they didn’t have any new devices with i stuck in front of the name1, so most of the popular media didn’t cover it.

But since the event was focused on publishing and electronic books, I was very curious what they would have. The rumor sites had the company bringing a “revolution” to the textbook industry (is that even possible?).

Although not revolutionary, they did have some very good stuff to show, with lots of potential.  And there were also a few disturbing pieces and more than a few questions, especially regarding distribution. If you have time, watch the full presentation on Apple’s site.

Anyway, I’ve had a few days to play with everything and read reactions from parts of my network so consider this post a rambling collection of first impressions.

First the good stuff. The core of the announcement was the release of a major new software tool for creating ebooks called iBooks Author. Watching the demo, my first thought was that the interface was very similar to Pages and Keynote, Apple’s word processor and presentation software that blows away Office when it comes to power and ease of use. Not to mention being much less expensive.

Even better, Author is free and was available that same day2 so I was able to play with the software for a couple of hours this weekend. Not a long time to evaluate a piece of complex software but I’m already sold on the potential for easily building applications (it’s hard to call them books) that seamlessly combine text with images, audio, video, and interactive elements.

Of course creating any worthwhile multimedia project requires a lot of planning and what I was able to put together from disconnected pieces of media found on my computer is not worth publishing. However, the process was dirt simple, offering plenty of layout options. This is a potentially powerful application that I’d really love to get into the hands of some creative students with time to work.

Ok, that’s the good news of Author. The problems start once the project is ready for distribution.

The software allows you to send the final book directly to an iPad but other than that the only real option appears to be uploading it to the Apple iBookstore. There’s no requirement to charge for your work but if you do, the license agreement on the software says you can only sell it through Apple, who gets 30%.

While the EULA seems pretty restrictive (check this post for far more details), it actually makes sense from Apple’s perspective. They view these “books” in the same way as they do apps for their iOS devices. They give away the tools necessary to create apps but lock them into the Apple distribution system. They’re doing the same for the books created with Author.

It’s no wonder the big publishers like Pearson were on that stage in support of their new textbook model. They see an opportunity to continue the traditional school market for their materials, one that doesn’t allow for resales.

However, I think there are several larger problems than locking the documents created by one piece of software to one particular set of devices.

Start with the need for an open format for publishing interactive media.  Most reports say that Apple is using ePub3, a free and open ebook publishing format, but with some non standard markup code that would prevent the documents from opening in other epub readers.

But then there’s the whole concept of “textbook”, which was the primary motivator behind Apple’s presentation on Thursday. Do we really want to lock schools and teachers into more materials over which they have no control? And pay the big publishers far too much for the privilege?

In advance of Apple’s event, some people were writing about how the company was going to “disrupt” the textbook industry the same way they did with music. There are lots of reasons why it won’t happen soon3, although I think iBooks Author is a good start.

1 Anyone else getting tired of i-everything?

2 I know it’s only available on the Mac. I don’t care. Someone else can complain about it being restricted on one platform.

3 I won’t go so far as David Thornburg to say that Apple wants to kill education, but he does make some good points in his post.

 

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