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I saw this posting this morning in an Education Week email update.  “Really?” I thought.  It’s that explicit?  How is an educator supposed to attend this webinar and not feel like they are being pitched to the whole time to buy Lenovo’s computers? Will Lenovo list fairly what its computers can and can’t do so education technology leaders can make an informed decision? Check it out:

Powered by ScribeFire.

I was in the hospital with my new son one night a few weeks when I saw that one of the authors of Disrupting Class, Michael Horn, replied to my previous blog posting.  My son is three weeks today; his father finally has a chance to reply to Horn.  Horn wrote a comment to my posting that begins:

While I appreciated the kudos, a “good catch” does not adequately respond to my point.  Even Horn’s later series of rebuttals do nothing more than dodge the core of the critique.  At the heart of the posting is the concern that the authors of Disrupting Class knowingly misrepresent and dismiss research and scholarship in the field of education.  As a result, the Disruption Theory they create is inherently groundless.  Though it is compelling–no one would argue that the book has had great effects on education policy and reform–it neglects to seriously consider what is going on in actual schools with actual students, and it doesn’t consider what experts in education have to say about those realities.

I agree with Horn that much of educational research doesn’t prove causal relationships (if you do X students will ace their exams).  But that doesn’t mean you disregard it completely.  The weakness of Disrupting Class’s stance toward educational research is that it finds value only in the answers to questions, not the questions themselves.  What questions would have been raised in their book if the authors had seriously considered educational research? What questions, then, would policy-makers and educational leadership have asked?  Questions, after all, are far more disruptive. 

Here’s an example.  One of the gaps I point out is that the authors make “the hasty assumption that adolescents’ use of technology means they can simply learn from it.”  Horn replied to this critique (which was the third in a list) that “we pointedly don’t rely on point #3 that you cite. Others write about this, but we ourselves don’t hinge our argument on this point.”  I’m sorry, but Horn and his colleagues pointedly do rely on students’ use of technology to learn.  If you remove students-using-technology-to-learn from Disrupting Class there is no book.  Who uses the online courses they speak of?  How do the authors imagine students sharing content they create?  And let’s not ignore the fact that not all students learn well in online courses; not all students have any interest or natural skill in posting materials for classmates to learn from. 

If the authors had consulted–just as one example–Donald Leu’s study in which he compares students’ offline and online literacy skills they might have disclaimed that research shows students’ offline and online literacy abilities have no direct relationship.  Great online readers might be shoddy offline readers.  And vice versa.  If they had considered even just studies that compare students online and offline lives, they might have explored certain realities of applying their theory to a school system: not all students are digitally literate; students’ social digital literacies don’t simply apply to online schoolwork; not all traditionally successful students’ talents translate to the online world; not all students even have equitable access to online worlds and therefore to those crucial online skills. 

The above response, I might add, says nothing about the authors’ disregard for the roles of teachers in student-learning.  While they do compliment educators for their hard work, they don’t seriously consider what it means, for instance, to disrupt teacher education using their framework.  Nor do they consider the setbacks and advances being made in the professional development of educators.  Their solution is to take a master teacher like Jaime Escalante and broadcast him to as many students as possible.  I wonder what kind of relationship Escalante would form with his students in such a scenario.  After all, wasn’t it his ability to connect with his classes that made his success possible? 

In sum, we need a real series of exchanges in which the educational research community dialogues with the authors of Disrupting Class.  Ideally, there would be a think tank in which some organization (a university, consulting group, a city) would invite the book’s authors and an array of educational scholars to the same table to talk about ways to ground so influential a book.  The authors of the book might dismiss educational research, but researchers are also quick to categorically dismiss the book.  Disrupting Class has been incredibly influential and is shaping education reform around the world.  Scholars who ignore that simple truth are too tangled in their own academic robes to see that real principals, teachers, students, and parents are and will be affected by this book.  Time to disrobe, if need be, and to seriously consider what it means to disrupt.

NB: There are other critiques of the book as well. One especially thoughtful review is by John Sener.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan held a town meeting in which he demonstrates the problems with words like “creative” and “innovation” in conversations about policy.  It always seems to stumble:

“We need to be much more creative and innovative in how we do things,” Duncan said. For instance, students today use cell phones and PDAs on a regular basis, he said, so coming up with creative ways to deliver content and curriculum involving technologies that students like to use is one way to grab students’ attention.

With all due respect to Secretary Duncan and eSchool News, is there not some incongruity between the ideas of creativity and innovation when used to talk about delivering content.  What about the notion of learning as something more than content to be delivered, banked, deposited, dropped off, absorbed, etc.? What about the idea of students constructing knowledge together?  which, is something new technologies lend themselves to quite well.

I was speaking with a teacher recently at a school where she has been using netbooks with students in class.  It was a planning meeting.  As we started to discuss the possibility of using Google Maps for part of the project, the teacher expressed that she’d love to–but she didn’t trust most of her students to stay online in class. 

Is this a technology or a pedagogy issue? 

I watched this video by a company that allows the teacher to control the computers in the classroom and, well, I wasn’t irate or indignant. I was torn.  Are student computer monitoring systems the best way to help students focus on computers?  Isn’t the real lesson here that schools need to teach into students’ behaviors and help them make better decisions? 

These questions make me think about the digital v. non-digital debate.  I think of Lisa Nielsen’s recent posting about embracing digital books in schools is a case in point.  She endorses the use of digital tools saying that

Until educators see the value of conducting our reading and writing digitally, I believe our students will continue to drown in the paper. I am not promoting that we go out and purchase kindles or other eReaders for our schools either. The real opportunity is to embrace the technology our students already have access to and harness the power of the fourth screen to engage in their reading, writing, and thinking 21st century style.

I agree that digital means of reading and writing are necessary, but I would add that a hybrid model is far more likely to be embraced by non-technophilic teachers.

On an other end of the spectrum are those who vilify digital learning by building a paper castle: I give you Emory English professor, Mark Bauerlein. His idea that students aren’t necessarily learning better–nor are they smarter–because they can whiz around various web sites or occasionally organize themselves into productive social action.  Don Tapscott’s glorification of the Net Generation, as he calls it, is, for Bauerlein, absurd.

Where do we draw the line–or how do we better understand the line–between technology itself and actual learning?  How do we understand the role of teachers in wireless classrooms?  Fortunately the answer to those questions is easy: just buy software to let teachers control the kids.

There are few things better than a great speaker.  As my wife and I watch West Wing cover-to-cover I reminded of this: President Bartlet is now running for re-election and when he speaks (with or without a speech) he dazzles crowds.  Our current president isn’t so bad himself.

More than that, I’m struck by how new media is bringing the oldest form of communication–speaking–into a new space.  Professor Joshua Kim wrote a piece recently about the need to have Google help organize great talks by university faculty:

Here’s the idea. Google buy or partner with a lecture capture vendor – there are plenty to choose from. Make available the lecture capture equipment, cameras, software and training on campuses – free of charge. Maybe wire a few rooms or classrooms with presentation capture appliances. In exchange for the equipment and the software campuses agree to record and publish as many talks as possible to the Talks@Google and YouTube/EDU sites. Of course, campuses could also put their talks on their own institution’s channel.

Of course iTunes U has begun doing this already.  But iTunes’ lectures aren’t searchable the way Youtube videos are.  (At least, not yet.)  What is it about great speakers or lectures that still captivates us?  Might we be wise to reconsider the lecturing for secondary education?  Part preacher, part performer, part pedagogue?

(I’m indebted to Meredith, a colleague from NCTE, who listed me as a great speaker at the conference in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago.  I’m no Jed Bartlet, but I did make a web site for the talk.)

A new survey reports that online learning courses are growing quickly and does a state-by-state comparison.  Ed Week notes that

Most of the 26 states that have online programs have seen significant growth in enrollments in recent years, with a dozen of them reporting jumps of 25 percent or more since 2007.

The full report is more thorough than others I’ve seen, providing background context and sample survey questions (though my quick read of it didn’t find all the questions).  It’s also worth noting that the report is underwritten in part by Blackboard, a world leader in online learning. 

Great session with Troy Hicks and Bud the Teacher. See tweets for more.

This morning I presented on re-reading as a way to engage disengaged readers.  We had a fantastic gathering of ~150 participants.  You can access the site I created for the talk here.  It was especially helpful to me as a professional to be in a room with colleagues and share ideas and experiences.  What’s more, prior to the talk, I tweeted quick pleas for people to come.  I was wonderfully rewarded by several members of the audience tweeting during the session.  See what they said @tomliamlynch.  I’ve signed up for several new blogs and look forward to Day 2.

This piece in Digital Directions explores how schools should decide whether to use netbooks or laptops.  It takes the discussion simply cost differences, which, it seems, is often the primary factor for principals. 

This piece from the NY Times makes a terse argument for the use of iTunes U to share courses with others, even if it seems counter-intutive to traditional university business practices.  Make learning free; make learning easy to access; make learning portable.  Here’s the argument, in brief:

Other universities say that limited resources, copyright concerns or the reluctance of old-fashioned professors are keeping them from recording and uploading lectures. But Mr. Bean challenges his peers around the world who are not participating in iTunes U at all, or who are making lectures available only to registered students who sign in with a password.

“There are still a lot of universities in the world that define the value of their experience as somehow locking up their content and only giving people access to the content when they enroll in the program,” Mr. Bean said. “The courage comes from taking the next leap of faith. Universities no longer define themselves by their content but the overall experience: the concept, the student support, the tutoring and mentoring, the teaching and learning they get and the quality of the assessment.”

If only students could just play games and learn, all our problem would be solved. 

I mean that with a wink an a smile, of course.

Still, this piece in Ed Week this morning caught my eye.  It’s about various game-based learning sites that help students learn about financial literacy.  This seems to be becoming all the rage: Quest to Learn opened a few months ago, which is a NYC school in partnership with NYU’s Institute of Play–the whole model blurs lines of traditional learning and is built on various gaming theories.  Florida Virtual School has a course that gets a lot of press in which students learn about history by playing a role-playing game.  Even NYC’s School of One, written up as one of Time Magazine’s 50 greatest inventions of the year, sought to automate and differentiate learning by creating daily “playlists” for students. 

It’s worth considering voices like that of the UK’s David Buckingham.  In contrast to the ra-ra cheers of James Paul Gee and Marc Prensky, Buckingham notes that the scholars in greatest support of game-based learning don’t really scrutinize it.  They just give it the old homecoming cheer and dance. 

Quite a lucrative game of their own, you might say.

Next Monday I’m presenting at an all day session at NCTE on publishing student work.  This page has some online resources.  If others have ideas, send them along!

Last week I tweeted whether or not anyone knew about a Google meeting devoted to education.  Thanks to Lucy Gray, now there’s a video summary (over an hour and a half) and also her own narrative.  The full video is below:

The feds want to hear from others about what Web 2.0 learning could look like. 

[...] even though today’s Web 2.0 tools can spread information broadly and quickly and foster collaboration on such projects, the effort has apparently been slow in attracting recommendations from educators and ed-tech experts that could help guide its development, some people in the field say.

“The new plan is a critical component to moving education forward in the digital age,” said Donald G. Knezek, the executive director of the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, based in Washington. “The draft is shaping up to have all the right placeholders focused on learning and effective and competent teaching.

“But the important thing now is to put the meat on those placeholders,” he said, “so they have got to have educators and sophisticated education leadership to get their ideas in there.”

I would point their attention to what we’re doing right here in NYC and the iZone (formerly known as 21C).

The US Chamber of Commerce has just released a report card, called “Leaders and Laggards,” giving each state an assessment for its use of “educational innovation”.  There are many things worth noting.  Here are two: 1) the report comes at a time when–all too conveniently–the mad rush has begun for Race to the Top funds has begun; and 20 the report seems to rely on fairly traditional understandings of assessing the impact of innovation.  Education Week notes,

What researchers were not doing was measuring “nifty, faddish experiments,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Instead, the analysis was meant to examine whether a state has created a “flexible, performance-oriented culture,” he said.

Nifty? Faddish?  Now that has the ring of innovation.

If you’ve ever wanted to integrate personal learning networks into your teaching, this site is a great place to start. The more work I’m doing with the NYC DoE and innovative approaches to teaching the more I revisit implementations of PLNs in schools. 

A recent study of nearly 83,000 teachers, principals, and librarians has recently come out, a joint effort of Edweb.net, MCH Discover, and MMS Education.  Access the full study here. 

The study goes further than many others to probe into the differences between professional and functional uses of social networking.  These kinds of questions expose certain incongruities in the profession.  For instance, this chart (p. 18):

From Wordles for Blog

What’s of greatest interest for me is the leap from connecting with friends and family to using social networking sites in professional environments. It suggests that social networks are just that: social. In addition, the use of professional sites can be considered paltry when compared to social sites.

In an education technology conference in Denver a few days ago, several high profile presenters bemoaned the way in which academic scholarship is copyright protected.  In short,

Stanford law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig told the gathering of campus technology chiefs Nov. 5 that restrictive copyright laws are “destructive of science and education,” because academia has adopted a copyright model that largely mimics that of the entertainment industry.

Lessig is also the founder of Creative Commons, an online movement to make the sharing of content more free and legal.  I read this thinking: the tighter the restrictions on the exchanging of ideas, the slower our collective understanding will grow.  With invaluable, but bloated, companies like Lexis-Nexus putting the choke hold on scholarship.

Edweek reported recently that federal spending is advancing beyond elementary literacy and putting up legislation to focus on adolescent literacy.  I’d like to see Kindles and Nooks brought in to the research realm.  Not to mention more on how re-reading with students can help them confront their histories as readers.

(Thanks to @adlit for the Tweet)

Ben Macintyre wrote a recent piece in the London Times declaring that the information age is killing storytelling.  I’ve written before about this dichotomy–the literary vs. new literacies–and voices like Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein like to pretend that we live in Either/Or times. 

There is a need for other voices in this discussion because the loudest ones–those who write popular books and get spots in international newspapers–are themselves only serving to pry apart the possibility of the coexistence of literature and new literacies. 

A case in point: Macintyre concludes his piece thus:

Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A story, God knows, is still the most powerful way to understand. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word, in the great narrative that is the Bible, was not written as twitter.

That “great narrative” wasn’t written as a tweet… it wasn’t likely that it was written at all initially.  Ancient and biblical scholars like Havelock and McDonald have pointed out that the the Bible–the New Testament in particular–was likely composed by many people over time, and constructed orally.  McDonald goes as far as to say that Acts of the Apostles follows the story-telling framework of Homer’s Iliad and that biblical stories that we like to think  were written by one divinely inspired writer are group compositions that follow a commonly shared scaffold.  Tweeting might be much closer to early composition processes than we think.  It’s a commonly shared scaffolding form, takes pieces from disparate voices, and blends them together over time. 

Storytelling isn’t dying, it’s developing.  And while I do agree that the teaching of literature is in trouble in schools, it’s not because the information age is trumping it.  It’s because the voices carrying on the discussion are boiling the issue down to Us vs. Them, Literati vs. Technorati, Twitters vs. Readers.  It doesn’t help.  Not one tweet.

This article from CNN raises concerns around children using social networks.  What could be piece that raises a dialogue about the complexity, allure, and usefulness of social networks takes on a tone of technophobia.  The image at the top of the article reveals the author’s true intention: rhetoric.  The innocent child (dressed in white, of course) stares unknowingly into laptop like Narcissus perhaps. And a sleepy kitten looks on, unable to protect the child from wilds of the internet.

Please.

A recent article in the NY Times has described the changing face of learning in some schools: video games.  The use of video games has been discussed for years now–thanks, in part, to the popularity of James Gee’s work.  What is new, however, is the way in which game designers are turning their attention to creating educational video games.  This educational slant is in spite of the fact that making video games for schools will be unlikely to generate the revenue of other popular games. Still, schools like NYC’s Quest to Learn (Q2L) are trying to push game-based pedagogy forward. And the teaching world waits. Controllers in hand.

This article discusses how some schools of higher Ed are now handling email addresses for students. It’s worth noting that school system the size of NYC still don’t provide email addresses, though many schools do on their own:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=61503

Arne Duncan’s work in Chicago schools has received criticism recently as the NY Times reports that a University of Chicago study says students benefited little.  While I’m skeptical about how data is gathered and interpreted, it’s worth considering whether the Secretary did or didn’t improve schools in Chicago.  I’m more interested, given Duncan’s recent speech at Teachers College, in his plans to support teacher preparation programs. 

Still, I recently met with a principal of a large public high school yesterday who suggested that New York City’s own system of assessing schools (called the Quality Review) is inherently flawed–favoring small schools, English Language Learners, and special education students.  His is a large school, with English speakers, and most students have no individualized education plan.  The principal is concerned that his school is destined to be marked low.

Questions raised about Duncan in Chicago can well be asked of Klein in New York.

Later today I’m meeting a group of 8th grade students from New Haven who are visiting NYC.  Their stopping at Columbia as part of their trip and my friend asked if I’d present to them.  As I thought about what’s worth presenting on, I quickly came to the question of 21C learning and built a quick Google Sites page to share with them.  Check it out here and feel free to share at will.

Donald J. Leu recently posted this slide show from a presentation he did abroad.  Some of the interesting things to note include the lack of serious new literacies responses by any of the 50 states and the remaining questions comparing online and offline readers.

Edutopia recently posted a piece called “Virtual Learning is an Antidote to School Closure”.  It raises an interesting point about how mixing virtual and actual days of school might be both sound economically and pedagogically sound.  When you add to your reading of this brief piece the meta-analysis put out by the USDOE recently, it suggests strongly that schools employing mixed methods of instruction might have found a path worth pursuing further.

Arne Duncan’s speech yesterday at Teachers College might be seen as many in teacher preparation and graduate schools of education as a rally cry.  The NY Times wrote:

During a speech at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Mr. Duncan said that too often the schools of education were simply seen as a “cash cow” for universities, because they are relatively inexpensive to run and have high enrollment.

“By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom,” he said.

Mr. Duncan said that he had met hundreds of teachers who complained that they did not get enough practical training with classroom behaviors, particularly with poor students.

The next few weeks will say volumes about how seriously educational leaders have taken the charge.  It would be fitting if the first to bolster its attention and support of teacher preparation was Teachers College. We might start by  looking more seriously at what New York State does and doesn’t do to encourage 21st century teaching and learning.  We might then talk seriously about New York City’s own efforts called NYC21C. 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke here today about the need to target teacher preparation programs in an effort to support school reform.  The USDOE’s site wrote the following:

More than half of the nation’s teachers graduate from a school of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 220,000 students graduate from a teacher college every year. In recent years, several alternative certification programs such as High Tech High, The New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs have emerged. But those programs produce fewer than 10,000 new teachers annually.

“To keep America competitive, and to make the American dream of equal educational opportunity a reality, we need to recruit, reward, train, learn from, and honor a new generation of talented teachers,” Duncan said. “But the bar must be raised for successful teacher preparation programs because we ask much more of teachers today than even a decade ago.”

Colleges of education need to make dramatic changes to prepare today’s children to compete in the global economy. Teacher-preparation programs should ensure that new teachers will master the content of the subjects they’ll teach and they will have well-supported field-based experiences embedded throughout their preparation programs. Their ultimate goal should be to create a generation of teachers who are focused on improving student achievement and ready to deliver on that goal.

Perhaps this will also be a rally cry to the Board of Teachers College to do more for its teacher preparation programs: scholarships, research grants, a more serious instructional technology support initiative.  Just to name a few.

I worry about articles like this one from eSchool News.  It makes the case–as many many others have made before–that this is an era of new learning in a globalized age.  We’ve heard this before, including the reference to the falling of the Berlin Wall.  Paragraphs like the following aren’t new:

We can start using technology to let young people communicate and collaborate with their peers around the world. These networks have solved some of the key barriers to internet use in schools, chief among them security issues that worry teachers and parents alike.

We know this already.  I don’t mean to suggest that nothing interesting comes through educational news providers.  But let’s raise the bar and make it interesting, some twist that lifts the readers’ imaginations and lingers. Something new.

A recent NPR piece makes the case that adolescents regard Facebook as the social network for more affluent (and according to one teen, “white”) users.  Myspace is for “trashy” people:

MySpace pages do look busier than Facebook; on MySpace you can customize graphics and music while Facebook is limited to one spare blue-and-white design. The MySpace clutter seems to symbolize something more to these kids. Sixteen-year-old Nico Kurt lays out his view of the MySpace users this way: “It seems trashy to me. The only people who use it are trashy people.”

Later in the piece, danah boyd notes that the same way people divide themselves along class lines in reality, they do so in social networks as well.  As the conversation heats up about this, it’s worth considering this map, which charts the popularity of social networks by country:

Gartner Analyst David Clearley made it clear recently: The future of internet businesses is going to the clouds.  Cnet put it thus:

The general idea–shared computing services accessible over the Internet that can expand or contract on demand–topped Gartner’s list of the 10 top technologies that information technology personnel need to plan for. It’s complicated, poses security risks, and computing technology companies are latching onto the buzzword in droves, but the phenomenon should be taken seriously, said analyst Dave Cearley here at the Gartner Symposium.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to any educator who has begun using Google Apps in his or her school.  The possibilities are virtually limitless (pun completely intended, and worth re-reading if missed). 

Hawaii has set a dangerous precedent here:

At a time when President Barack Obama is pushing for more time in
the classroom, his home state has created the nation’s shortest school
year under a new union contract that closes schools on most Fridays for
the remainder of the academic calendar.

The deal whacks 17 days from the school year for budget-cutting
reasons and has education advocates incensed that Hawaii is drastically
cutting the academic calendar at a time when it already ranks near the
bottom in national educational achievement.

Consider the above quotation with these statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics, which suggests that Hawaii’s record in education technology wasn’t too hot to begin with, and is certainly not poised to improve this year:

Ever curious about how the US compares to other countries in terms of broadband access?  It comes in 13th place.  See the picture below or read the whole study here:

This fantastic NYTimes piece gives voice to several sides of the debate around reading and the influences of e-books.  For instance, Alan Liu of UC, Santa Barbara, writes:

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

Dr. Liu’s is a rich reading for those of us interested in both literature and literacy, and the other perspectives only round out his own.  What I’d love to see is an article like this opinion piece used as the foundation of a e-Books curriculum in schools.