Archive - February, 2008

Bang for the Public Buck

February 28, 2008 in educational technology, web 2.0 with 3 Comments

Like all massive disasters, this has to take place in New York City.  ARIS, the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, is New York City’s web-based portal for NYC school teachers and students.  It is a case study that unfortunately typifies the experience of public education in technology.  While I generally encourage educational institutions to move towards technology, I can’t help but abhor the incompetence in how they go about it. 

First, those that sit on the school board have no idea what it costs to build a web application and thus the district is bound to get completely ripped off.  ARIS was built for the NYC public schools for a sum of $80 million dollars.  That’s a lot of money for IT infrastructure, even on a per student basis. 

Second, due to the giant pain of the “sales cycle” in education, all but the most cumbersome businesses wouldn’t even touch the market with a ten foot pole.  The company contracted to build ARIS was none other than IBM, and the result was precisely what one might expect: it’s down a lot, it’s painfully slow, it’s ugly, and few people use it outside of top-down mandates.   

This amidst enormous budget cuts – of course educators and administrators are angry  

Public Education is not taking cues from the rest of the world.  If it was, they would let young (cheap) technologists have at it.  Almost all the good web technology came out a few people sitting in their room tinkering, and within a year or two they created something useful, fast, and sometimes even pretty. 

Innovation almost never comes from the institutional players; it comes from small teams of people that pop up out of nowhere with something groundbreaking.  If education wants any piece of that action, they need to learn to skip the big money and the big companies and make room for all the little players out there trying to make products that make a difference to teachers and students.

Recommendation: Every district should set up a small committee with discretionary funds that can purchase or license technology on a whim with the specific objective of moving fast with smaller amounts of money. 

Apple is the Sleeping Giant

February 27, 2008 in educational technology with 1 Comment

Little did we know, Apple has great resources for teaching that are completely under the radar.  Sure, we all know about I Tunes U.  But did we know about Apple Learning Interchange?  It blows Yahoo! Teachers out of the water in terms of content sharing. 

iTunes U is also very silently moving towards being the most effective content delivery tool on the planet for educators and academics trying to broadcast to either the whole world or just their students.  The best part – its subsidized by the movie industry.  Genius.  More than soon, teachers will be able to whip up a multimedia podcast using Podcast Producer, load it to a server, and share it with students at the click of a few buttons.  If it’s good, other instructors will find it as well. 

Content Knowledge is Dead

February 22, 2008 in Uncategorized with 11 Comments

I heard Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” on the radio the other day using meaningless statistics about teenagers (and adults) ignorant of basic bits of content knowledge. Sure, it’s a little offensive that people can’t point out Iraq on a map when we’ve talked about it for six years. But, I think calling alarm to content ignorance is missing the whole point. In fact, it’s the problem.

The emphasis on content knowledge IS the problem. Students have always thought content knowledge was irrelevant a la Mark Twain. Why? Because we forget. Because there is no point other than that the teacher makes us. Because, especially nowadays, I can just go look it up when I need it.

We don’t need content emphasis revival. For example, I can’t identify the President of Australia. I just made a request for that information and got it in less than 8 seconds (PM John Howard followed by Kevin Rudd), 7.9 of those seconds were filled with me going to my browser and carelessly misspelling the word Australia. In technology, we worry a lot about how fast our servers respond to requests. There is a more than significant portion of the world’s smartest people trying to get bits of information in front of everyone’s face, upon their request, faster than ever before. Let me make a bold statement that the educational community will not internalize for another 50 years: Content Knowledge is Dead.

Yet, states everywhere are mandating a mind numbing sequence of content standards in what some call the accountability movement. Politicians hear alarms going off, like 80% of 16 year olds believe the War of 1812 was in 1898; their reaction is to demand that teachers teach every bit of content that anyone might think is important for any reason. One problem – teaching all of that is impossible. Another problem – even if you succeeded the students would forget most of it.

So, if content knowledge is irrelevant, why does everyone think education is so important? Because the side effect of schooling is that a minority of students along the way manage to develop an internal schema for information discovery, processing, communication, application and evaluation. A minority of those students manage to pick up some processes and methodologies for taking creations and delivering them to entities that might pay for them. And, who knows, they might pick up some useful tips on filing their taxes and voting.

My point is that if content knowledge is dead, the emphasis should be on teaching those side effects that have come to be called Procedural Knowledge. When students can generate questions and identify problems at point A and make end products using standard (or innovative) procedures that contribute value to others at point B, and they know all the steps in between for the core disciplines, students will be little content knowledge processing machines and all the more inspired while they are doing it. Who knows? They might even remember how long the Hundred Years War lasted.

Get Your Fetus Ready For College.

February 18, 2008 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

 I made this post at CollegeRedi

 I found the No Excuses University Network, which is a set of schools at the K-8 levels determined to help students get ready for college.  That’s right, there are elementary schools that are a part of this.  This stems from the culture that’s been created in the wake of the reports like “College Readiness Begins in Middle School,” by the ACT. 

These policy/professional development movements are based in some reality: students who start thinking about college early as well as have accesses to resources for and encouragement to plan and execute a program of rigorous coursework through late middle and early high school are more likely to get admitted to competitive programs and succeed in them.    

Unfortunately, what’s happened in education has been to turn this into a policy of trumpeting the virtues of college to younger and younger audiences who have no possible way to take on a curriculum that would get them prepared for college.  You can hum college to a fetus all you want, but that’s not going to get them doing full on research projects with multivariate regression.

True college readiness lies not in the planning and the number of AP exams, but in the rigor of the output of the classes they do take, particularly at ages 16 and 17 when the brain has started coping with bodily hormones and the social labyrinth enough to start internalizing process schema for intellectually rigorous work. 

Standards-Based Report Cards

February 15, 2008 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments

The New York Times Opinion Page had a piece (which I seem to have misplaced) describing new report cards featuring state mandated standards from a parents perspective. They found the several page document bewildering, and this is coming from a member of the New York Times Editorial Staff. Imagine how the average mom and pop might feel with a report card that reads:

2.1 Understand negative whole-number exponents. Multiply and divide expressions involving exponents with a common base.

Most of the problems in education come from terrible feedback mechanisms. Teachers don’t have the time to give substantial feedback in person, nor do they have time to write intensive analysis on a per student basis. Parents are completely in the dark, even if they try to follow along (and most don’t even try because the information they get isn’t good enough). And students delude themselves into thinking whatever they want to think about their performance. The need is great for better, real-time, actionable reporting to all stakeholders in a kid’s life. The Truth Will Set You Free, or in this case The Truth Will Give You Power Over Your Students.

Standards based reporting is coming. The question is whether or not it can be presented in a fashion that means something and promotes the action necessary to increase student learning and performance.

Best Practices for Educators Using Facebook

February 7, 2008 in facebook, web 2.0 with 100 Comments

I gave a presentation at Classroom 2.0 Live this past weekend about best practices for educators using facebook. Here’s the presentation, Driving Engagement and Belonging with Facebook, if you want to have a look.

Driving Engagement and Belonging with Facebook

Right click the link above and open it in a different window.  The presentation uses the Courses application on facebook towards the end.

Data Interoperability Framework

February 7, 2008 in educational technology, web 2.0 with 1 Comment

So, in an earlier post I was proposing that schools use their Student Information Systems to make their data readable in XML. It turns out that SIS makers have been working on this, as usual in an overly-complicated, clunky, and proprietary way. But, they seem to have given it some serious thought. There are two standards organizations, one for higher ed, IMS Global, and one for k12, SIF. Of course, this doesn’t mean schools will make this data available to the entrepreneurial cowboys bent on revolutionizing education through AJAX, even though that’s what they should do because that’s the only way to help drive innovation in this industry on a hill.

Classroom 2.0 Live Reflections

February 5, 2008 in web 2.0 with 2 Comments

The most helpful part of Classroom 2.0 Live in San Francisco this past weekend was the lightning rounds and the product demos. The ones who did have an hour, including myself, probably would have been better off staying within fifteen minutes. Here are some products in the order of my personal preference:

1. Diigo (www.diigo.com) is perhaps the most useful site I’ve seen lately, of course elegant in its simplicity. It promotes a better version of social bookmarking with features that enable clipping, quoting, and annotating among much else.

2. Voicethread (www.voicethread.com) allows you to put up work (in the form of media and images) and discuss them in a way very similar to real life discussion and analysis. A really great way to get time to discuss each students work from both the teacher and peers.

3. Ustream (www.ustream.tv) enables live, interactive broadcasting from multiple broadcasters. You could, with a chat room, have a virtual review session with multiple instructors broadcasting and students participating from home.

4. Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com/ ) in case you hadn’t heard of it is a very simple wiki host. Suggested activities include creating lecture summaries and test review sheets. Mandatory perfect grammar on all wikis is a good way to increase

5. Empressr (http://www.empressr.com/ ) is a sweet browser-based multi-media presentation editor. It’s really slick.

6. Vyew (http://vyew.com/) supposedly empowers teams to collaborate on documents and projects, like some sort of massively multiplayer visual editing system. To me it seemed too messy to be practical, but I was told that this is the last frontier in educational technology.

Edmodo(http://www.edmodo.com), Edu20(www.edu20.com ), and my own product Courses on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/courses) are offering totally free versions of Course Management Systems to complement existing tools.

Steve Hargadon, of Classroom 2.0 fame, the evangelist for Ning in educational settings, did a great job putting the event together and had just the right attitude and strength of character to make the event a more than swell experience. He’s modifying the CR2.0 Live concept a little and plans on making a replicable professional development model that can be scaled in the internet sense of the word.