AssortedStuff

In his discussion of Diane Ravitch’s new book, Jay Mathews inserts several declarative statements of what he believes to be truth, including the assertion that I must be nuts.

And by his definition, I am.

Many education reforms have gone badly in the last 20 years, but there never has been a golden age of school improvement. No Child Left Behind had many flaws, but it left us better off than than we were before, with more attention to low-income and learning disabled children, and some gains in lower grades, particularly in math. We bumble along, doing our best, hoping that our next idea will produce big gains but knowing that all we can expect is to be a bit better than before.

If the best that billions of dollars and the establishment of a test-score-obsessive, standardized education system can produce is “more attention” and “some gains” (as measured by those same tests, of course), that is not “better off”.

Narrowing the curriculum studied by almost all students in public schools to little more than reading and math drills is more than a “flaw”.

Forcing schools to treat all students exactly the same by expecting them to learn at exactly the same rate is not “doing our best”.

There are some crazies out there who disagree with this and say an education revolution is possible. They know who they are. They don’t include the weary legislators and White House aides who put together No Child Left Behind, making the compromises that are necessary in the democratic society that Ravitch celebrates throughout her book.

I guess I must be one of those crazies, because when I take a good look around it’s not difficult to understand that not only is an education revolution possible, it’s happening.

Just not in schools.

In fact, a revolution in the way people learn and develop and communicate and collaborate and grow is happening almost everywhere else EXCEPT in our schools.

However, the reason that those legislators and aides who put together NCLB didn’t think a revolution was possible is because they didn’t want one in the first place.

NCLB and those other school reform efforts of the last 20 years Mathews declares to have “gone badly” were all designed to craft a better status quo (often in the form of charters and voucher farms) instead of taking an honest look at how and why teaching and learning needed to change and then creating schools that work for the kids, not the adults running them.

So, yes, call me crazy if you like. I do believe there needs to be an education revolution.

And it needs to happen in less than another 20 years of bumbling along.

2 comments diane ravitch, jay mathews, nclb, reform, schools

From the TEDxNYED event this past Saturday in New York, one of my favorite big thinkers, Lawrence Lessig with an excellent presentation on openness and the remixing of culture.

Although the theme of this great set of talks was supposed to be education, even in the broadest sense Lessig never really makes the connection.

So, it’s up to you. Every educator needs to understand how our intellectual property laws are making unwitting criminals out of our most creative students.

No comments copyright, fair use, lawrence lessig, remix, ted conference

As often happens, one of Seth Godin’s daily posts this week left me with things to think about days after as well as to connect to other little pieces.

His title is “It’s easier to teach compliance than initiative” and, unlike most of his entries, he’s not talking about business.

Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It’s difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it’s a huge pain in the neck to do reliably.

Schools like teaching compliance. They’re pretty good at it.

Looking around the schools I visit – look around your school – I have to admit he’s not far from wrong.

That concept of compliance vs. initiative also ties into in a new book I’m currently reading, Daniel Pink’s Drive in which he investigates the research behind what motivates people.

In it he presents plenty of evidence that the reward/penalty philosophy at the core of compliance is not nearly as effective at motivating people to perform better as we assume it is.

That people, including many of those in our classrooms, are far more inspired to succeed when they are interested and involved in the outcome, when they have a personal stake in what they are doing.

The kind of approach you might use when teaching initiative.

Initiative, however, isn’t on the test and compliance is.

And, as Godin notes, we’re good at teaching that, even if our kids are less and less motivated to learn it.

2 comments compliance, daniel pink, motivation, seth godin

When Amazon released the Kindle a couple of years ago, it generated lots of talk about it (or something like it) being the future of educational printed materials.

Since then, some colleges have been testing the use of the Kindle DX, the larger, more book-sized version, to replace analog textbooks for some of their classes.

One of those schools, Princeton, just released some data about their pilot and most of those participating found the results to be somewhat disappointing.

But in spite of the cost savings, some students and professors said they found the technology limiting.

The Kindle, a handheld, electronic device manufactured by amazon.com, allows users to store, read, highlight and annotate books and other documents using its display screen.

Notice what’s missing from that list? There’s no way for students and faculty to edit or add to the content on their devices so that other members of the community can see it.

In other words, there’s nothing new about these textbooks other than the format by which the information is delivered. Same old material, still controlled by the publisher, with no options for students to interact with it.

Of course, based on the comments of some of the teachers involved, interactivity really wasn’t an issue anyway.

Wilson School professor Stan Katz, who taught WWS 325 this fall, said he also found the device ill-suited for his course.

“I found it disappointing for use in class because I emphasize close work with the text, and that ideally requires students to mark up the text quite a bit,” Katz said. “Though it doesn’t prevent highlighting, the annotation function is difficult to use, and the keyboard is very small,” he added.

But Wilson School professor Daniel Kurtzer, who taught WWS 555A, said he found the Kindle conducive to the format of his class because it consisted of “very traditional reading.”

And likely, very traditional teaching.

However, to me the how digital books are being used at Princeton wasn’t the worst part of this story.

Students in WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, who were given Kindles, printed an average of 762 pages, compared to the roughly 1,373 pages printed in past years, a 55 percent difference in paper use.

Kindle owners in WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East printed an average of 962 pages, while those without the e-readers printed an average of 1,826 pages, a 53 percent difference.

Why is anyone with an electronic book printing pages from their digital materials at all?

Maybe a few sheets, but 962 pages is likely very close to the size of the original analog college textbook those students used to pay a small fortune for (and are probably still paying for the Kindle version).

So anyway, the bottom line in all this is that teachers and students at Princeton are using a portable, connected digital device in almost exactly the same way they used the also-portable, unconnected analog versions it replaced.

Why bother?

3 comments college, kindle, media, textbooks

There’s a good reason why most educators don’t understand US copyright law, especially the Fair Use provisions.

Current fair use law is hazy by design; instead of laying out specific use cases, the law relies on the famous “four factors” about the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount borrowed, and the effect on the value of the original work. This can be maddening in many situations, because it is impossible to know in advance if a particular use qualifies.

Clarifying and strengthening fair use is one of the five major goals of Public Knowledge’s proposed Copyright Reform Act.

The current law provides for seven purposes in which fair use applies: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.”

Among other changes, PK suggests adding three other areas: “incidental uses, non-consumptive uses, and personal, non-commercial uses.”

Incidental uses “involve capturing copyrighted works, where the copyrighted work is not the primary focus of the use—for example, capturing music playing over radio when filming a family moment.” Incidental use is hugely important to documentary filmmakers, for instance, who routinely capture copyrighted photographs hanging on walls or copyrighted shows playing on televisions in the backgrounds of their shots.

The second category, non-consumptive uses, “do not directly trade on the underlying creative and expressive purpose of the work being used.” In other words, a non-consumptive use might take the complete text of the novel, make a copy of it, but use it only as the input for a lexicographical analysis of style, not to produce a free e-book.

But it is the third proposal that might prove most controversial. “Personal and noncommercial uses” are said to “have little chance of harming copyright holders. At the same time, they are ubiquitous: every day we timeshift television shows via TiVo, create mix CDs for the car and iPod playlists to the gym, backup up our computer hard drives, and read books to her children before bed.”

Considering all the confusion over what the law allows us to do with media under fair use, not to mention the increasing number of law suits largely designed to intimidate average people from exercising their rights, these extensions and clarifications only make sense.

Unfortunately, big media companies will probably fight it with every dime they can find.

2 comments copyright, fair use, public knowledge

As someone who’s more interested in the process of television production than in the programs themselves, this is a fascinating peek behind the wizard’s curtain.

Green screen effects are not just for alien worlds and strange environments.

No comments green screen, special effects, television

Evidentially, there’s a big fight going on at the New York Times over how much to charge for the new digital edition being prepared to launch when the iPad goes on sale next month.

The people currently in charge of the paper version want to charge $20 – $30 a month.

Why so much? Because they’re said to be afraid people will cancel the print paper if they can get the same thing on their iPad. Nevermind that iPad distribution comes with none of the paper or delivery costs associated with print, or that there’s already a free electronic edition available to subscribers who cancel.

On the other side are the folks running the Times’ online edition who are pushing a price of $10 a month, still much higher than the current web site (free), which owners plan to pull behind a pay wall in 2011 regardless of the iPad.

Realistically, anyone at the Times who believes they can persuade a meaningful number of subscribers (that is, enough to save the business) to give them $30 a month for a digital version of their paper is crazy.

I’m not sure they’ll be able to find enough readers, especially outside the New York metro area, willing to pay $10.

The bottom line is that the owners of the Times (and other distributors of data) are selling a package of not-particularly-unique information to which they attach their particular brand.

And they need to seriously consider if that package is one that consumers will pay to have delivered, digitally or otherwise, on a regular schedule.

So, what would you pay for regular access to a brand-name digital information package (aka newspapers and magazines)?

I suspect the owners of those packages have a much higher opinion of their brands than do most of the people formerly known as customers.

3 comments brand name, ipad, media, new york times, newspapers

Well, this is the week of our big move. By Wednesday afternoon, my little group and our colleagues in the same building, must be packed up and ready for the movers.

As I’ve mentioned before, most of our department, along with large chunks of two others in our overly-large school district, are being moved from various locations to a single building in another part of the county.

From a 50’s era former elementary school with a leaky roof to a generic cube farm elsewhere in the county, formerly occupied by a dot com survivor.

While I’m actually looking forward to the new environment and the opportunities/challenges the altered working relationship will bring, the process of actually packing up all the crap in my current space has been interesting.

As I was going through the stuff in my current cube, I realized there isn’t much to move.

So little that I’m almost tempted to just trash everything that is there and start over in the new location.

I also recalled a similar move to the current building our group made about ten years ago and how, at that time, I had to move many shelves packed with binders and books, plus lots of drawers full of paper.

This time around, no binders, few books, and little paper. Almost everything I now use is in some kind of digital format and is on my laptop or some node on a network.

Which is why this move is causing little stress, certainly not at the level it is for some of my other colleagues.

Because I’ve learned to make my work space almost anywhere I have a computing device linked to a good wireless connection. Not even sure I care where the printers are.

Bring on the change!

Picture: van by penelopejonze, used under a Creative Commons license

No comments digital, moving, olsd, paper

If you own a product, do you then have the right to give or sell it to someone else? Millions of yard sales every year would seem to say “yes”.

And when it comes to intellectual property-based items (books, for example), the Supreme Court has even given the concept a name: the first sale doctrine.

However, at least one software publisher believes that piece of legality does not apply to their products. That they have the power to restrict an owner’s right to resell them.

Autodesk has appealed, arguing that so long as its license agreements recite the right magic words, it can strip purchasers of any ownership in the CD-ROMs on which software is delivered. If that’s right, then not only don’t you own the software you buy, but any copyright owner can simply recite the magic words and effectively outlaw libraries, used bookstores, and DVD rentals, among other things.

Ah, the magic of the end-user license agreement (EULA) which we’ve all had the pleasure of reading* during a long pause in the software install process. Right? :-)

Anyway, the EFF, which just celebrated their 20th anniversary, is involved in this and many other battles over consumer rights when it comes to digital property.

Unfortunately, most media companies these days, including software publishers, want to move away from the concept of “ownership” when you pay money for their products, whether it’s a physical package or digital download.

An idea that is only reinforced by files locked up with DRM, such as the books you buy for reading on a Kindle (something I hope is missing from Apple’s iPad book reader).

BTW, if you can afford it, contribute a few dollars to the EFF to help them continue defending our rights to own and control the media we pay for, no matter the format.

* I’ve read a few EULAs over the years, mostly so I can help people understand their fair use rights (the one that used to come with the Microsoft Office clip art collection was rather interesting). While I can’t tell you exactly what the EULAs say for any of the commercial software on my current MacBook, I’m pretty sure most read similar to Autodesk’s.

No comments copyright, eff, eula, media, rights

This is a long, rambling post since it draws on several different sources, together with a large mixture of thoughts from last weekend’s EduCon (and I’m not entirely sure I’m making my points :-).

Anyway, let’s start with a post from earlier this week in which Seth Godin asks Who Will Save Us?

He’s discussing ongoing efforts to rescue the publishing industry but it got me thinking about how much has been written around the theme of “saving” public education as well.

And Godin’s warning to media applies equally to us.

If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

Politicians and education “experts” talk a lot about school improvement and reforming the system.

But take a closer look at their ideas makes clear that their overall goal is to maintain the status quo, and make it even quoier if possible.

Evidence of that comes from the article from the Post, also this week, about possible “fixes” to NCLB and especially changes in the adequate yearly progress (AYP) provisions of that law.

Much remains unclear about how Obama would hold schools accountable for results. Experts call it unlikely that the president would seek to junk a results-oriented system that is ingrained in 50 states and the District. In fact, the administration will still rely on those data to compile lists of struggling schools it wants to turn around.

Except that “results-oriented system” doesn’t work. And the administration won’t get rid of it because it’s “ingrained”.

Even worse, that ingrained system, with “results” based entirely on high-stakes standardized testing, has actually made American education worse over the past decade, by obsessively narrowing both the curriculum and teaching methods to focus only the tested topics.

So now we come back to EduCon and specifically to an unscheduled discussion that followed the session I facilitated.

One that boiled down to the idea that the conference gathers together some very smart and dedicated educators for intelligent conversations, but where’s the change to make all these ideas a reality?

Will is asking very much the same thing in his reflections on the weekend.

But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it.

It was a theme that was running around in my head for those three days and one that I heard from others attending, especially those of us who have been part of this event going back to 2007 EduBloggerCon where the idea for EduCon was born.

Ok, what do we do about it? How do we turn lots of good ideas into action?

How do we get our communities to realize that the top down process of teaching and learning no longer works?

That students must take an integral role in both the planning and execution of their own education?

That we need to trust teachers make good decisions for their students and not just follow the script leading to the spring tests?

If you’ve read this far, you probably understand that I have many more questions than answers, and even those need a whole lot more thought.

The ideal would be that this growing EduCon community turns into a grass roots effort to truly change American education one school/district at a time.

Of course, it’s going to take more effort than just getting together once a year to talk and connecting through social media the rest of the time. Maybe the theme of next year’s EduCon needs to be, in the words of the King, a little less talk and a lot more action.

Because it’s frustrating to watch our “leaders” (local, state, national, take your pick) pushing programs to “save” American education when it should be clear that our kids need something better than reinforcing the status quo.

1 comment change, education, educon, reform, school