Tradition

I think sometimes we use words assuming they mean one thing when they actually mean another. Much like accountability, I think "tradition" is sometimes one of those words.

When schools use the word "tradition" they usually mean it in the sense of school pride, a kind of institutional memory of the things the school has done well and wants to continue to do well. But I worry that - in practice - our use of tradition ends up meaning something quite different from that.

Here's how Merriam-Webster defines tradition:

1. a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)
   
   b: a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable
   
2. the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction
   
3. cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions
   
4. characteristic manner, method, or style

While there's nothing here that particularly conflicts with how schools define tradition, there's also much here that the school-ey definition ignores. Words like "inherited", "customary", "cultural continuity",  and "customs" all share a common element: they are accepted without thought. It doesn't matter whether the idea is good, bad, or in-between, because it's "tradition" it's what we do. Too often tradition ends up being - in practice - translated into "because we've always done it this way."

I know that folks who like using the word tradition would protest that that's not what they mean. What they mean is all the "good" traditions that we have, all the things we're proud of and that we think define us. But the problem is that tradition is more than that. If there are certain traditions that we are referring to, we should be specific and enumerate them, because otherwise we are endorsing all the traditions that we have.

For example, my school is (justifiably) proud of our relationship with the Arapaho Nation. Since 1993, we have had on-going dialogue and interaction with the Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, including taking a busload of our students up to the reservation, and a large contingent of Arapaho coming to our school for an assembly and to visit our classes. But we should also acknowledge that our "tradition" includes the 29 years prior to that when we didn't have the relationship, when our mascot was a caricature of an Indian (Native American) that we found out from the Arapaho in 1993 was actually closer to a Pawnee, and which (in addition to it being offensive in and of itself), we used in offensive ways (like putting it on the floor of the gym, offensive chants, etc.). What if in 1993 we had argued that "tradition" supported keeping our original mascot? (Which is the argument that many others are currently making, from high schools across the country to the professional football team in Washington D.C.)

To be clear, we have many great traditions at my school and we have done many things well in the past. But that was the past; we should be asking ourselves what we should be doing for our students today, and tomorrow, and for what the world is going to look like when they are our age. As John Dewey famously said,

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.

That doesn't mean we just "throw everything out" or that we "don't respect our traditions". But it does mean that we can't blithely use the word tradition to unthinkingly continue on the way we've been going. It brings to mind the song from Fiddler on the Roof:

Hodel, oh Hodel, have I made a match for you.
He's handsome! He's young! All right, he's 62.
But he's a nice man, a good catch. True? True!
I promise you'll be happy. And even if you're not,
There's more to life than that. Don't ask me what!
(italics mine)

Don't ask me what. Don't question. Don't think about it for yourself. Don't spend the time to figure out what you truly value. Just do it because it's tradition.

We can do better.

Stranger Than Fiction

On November 27, 2006, I posted this which said, among other things,

In September of 2015, Google and Apple announce the first shipping quantum computer, the Imagine . . . 

Then later in the presentation,

In April of 2019, Google and Apple announce the EyeMagine, a new version of the Imagine that utilizes a display that is projected onto the user’s retina, eliminating the need for an external display. The EyeMagine is the size of a deck of cards and wirelessly transmits data to the retinal projector mounted on eyeglass frames. The image size is controlled by the user, but can simulate up to a 56 inch display. Most users typically use it as a heads-up display supplement to “real reality”, providing a variety of information about whatever environment they are interacting with.

Last week the New York Times posted this,

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

And this week Wired reports,

On Tuesday, IBM revealed that physicists at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York have made significant advances in the creation of “superconducting qubits,” one of several research fields that could eventually lead to a quantum computer that’s exponentially more powerful than today’s classical computers.

According to Matthias Steffen — who oversees Big Blue’s experimental quantum computing group — he and his team have improved the performance of superconducting qubits by a factor of two to four. “What this means is that we can really start thinking about much larger systems,” he tells Wired, “putting several of these quantum bits together and performing much larger error correction.”

David DiVincenzo — a professor at the Jülich Research Center‘s Institute of Quantum Information in western Germany and a former colleague if Steffen — agrees that IBM’s new research is more than just a milestone. “These metrics have now — for the first time — attained the levels necessary to begin scaling up quantum computation to greater complexity,” he says. “I think that we will soon see whole quantum computing modules, rather than just two- or three-qubit experiments.”

Huh. As I said in that post,

I think this is a case of where the truth will end up being stranger than fiction.

Of course, I also had Google purchasing a controlling stake in Apple in 2013, which is clearly silly. Now that Apple has almost $100 billion in cash and a $500 billion market cap, perhaps they should consider buying Google . . .(Mr. Cook, feel free to call me for advice).

Picture several years from now combining the current versions of the eyeMAGINE, Google Goggles, Siri, Wolfram Alpha and quantum computing. We better get started writing the school policies to ban these things, 'cuz we sure wouldn't want our students to have these capabilities . . .

Yep, stranger than fiction.

Google Goggles: Why Didn’t I Think of That?

So, Google Goggles is now in beta in Google Labs and available on Android phones.

Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

Here’s a little video explanation.



As the Tech Crunch article mentions, it’s somewhat similar to ShopSavvy. I’ve used the ShopSavvy demo video in my last couple of presentations, replacing another video I had been using of an iPhone app called Bionic Eye. That made me think of an earlier post of mine where I said:

This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it’s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app – or something like it – connects you to all the available information about whatever you’re looking at.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it’s mounted on your eyeglasses, it’s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only “effectively” because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it’s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it’s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn't have changed my major.

Seriously, though, the truth is ending up stranger than fiction . . .

We Have the Technology

When I was growing up I liked watching the Six Million Dollar Man on television. Looking back, it was a pretty hokey show, but I really liked it at the time. In the opening for the show, there’s a line that says, “We have the technology.” I thought of that – for pretty obvious reasons if you’re familiar with the show - when viewing the video for the Bionic Eye iPhone application.



This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it’s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app – or something like it – connects you to all the available information about whatever you’re looking at.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it’s mounted on your eyeglasses, it’s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only “effectively” because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it’s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it’s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

I know that scenario is frightening to a lot of folks, and certainly there are going to be more and more privacy/ethical issues we are going to have to figure out as a society. But, for the moment, let’s focus on the incredibly positive side of this – what kind of learning apps can be built on this platform? What will we be able to do as teachers and students that we can barely even conceive of today, but will be commonplace in the very near future? What happens when the sum total of the world’s knowledge – updated in real time - is available in a portable heads-up display?

Just imagine the possibilities. How many years is it going to be before we see something of this sophistication? I don’t know. My guess is more than three and less than thirty. So you’ve got to ask the question, does your school/district want to be ahead of the curve in figuring out best practices, or behind it?

Singularity University

Today's Did You Know?/2020 Vision combo sighting of the day - Singularity University.

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.

With Ray Kurzweil himself and Peter Diamandis (co-founder of Space Adventures and the CEO of the X Prize Foundation) on board, with support from Google and NASA, it combines both a graduate program and three and ten-day executive programs. These two quotes from the video stood out for me:

Every University needs a chief visionary.

I would add that every K-12 district and school needs one as well.

The most key thing you'll get is this global network. By coming to SU you are going to get connected with the top thinkers in this community.

Nice, but I would like to see them add an educator track, and hear how they are going to work with K-12 schools. Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Diamandis, I'm volunteering (along with my PLN) to help with that. Seriously, please contact me. I think we could use our global network of educators to help get you connected to K-12 teachers and students.

2020 Vision Sighting of the Day

I found this story via a tweet by Jackie Ballarini:

A one-eyed San Francisco artist wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam - and tech experts say it's possible.

. . . Mobile computing expert Roy Want told the Daily News the technology exists.

"It is possible to build a wireless camera with the dimensions of the eyeball," said Want, a senior principal engineer at Intel. "You can find spy cams or nanny cams designed to fit into inconspicuous places in the home."

Want said the camera, which would be encased in Vlach's prosthesis to avoid moisture, could link wirelessly to a smart phone.

The smart phone could send power to the camera wirelessly and relay the camera's video feed by cell phone network to another person, a TV studio or a computer.

In a world where eye cams are common, they might serve as a kind of computerized backup to people's memories, Want said.

"You'd never need to forget anything again," he said. "You'd never lose anything. You could ask it, 'Where was the last time I saw my keys?'"

Sounds like an early version of the EyeMagine to me . . .

Thomas Friedman is Stealing My Ideas

Kidding. But in his latest Op-Ed piece he posits Steve Jobs going to GM and creating the iCar. If you think back to 2020 Vision, I had Apple teaming up with Google, creating the iMagine (and then the EyeMagine), and Google purchasing Ford and creating an electric car with wireless mesh capabilities. I decided to call that car the gCar, not the iCar as Friedman suggests, but I still want royalties.

And, looking back, do you remember who I had as President in 2018? As I said in that post, "I think this is a case of where the truth will end up being stranger than fiction." Umm, yep, I think that was an understatement.

Google Gets the Flu

Google is using its search trend results to help the CDC fight the flu:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

Bottom line? The CDC has more and better data, but it's delayed data - Google is up to date. Want to see where flu is on the rise right now? Go to Google Flu Trends and take a look at the individual state data. Here's today's take on Colorado:


I think we will see more and more of this - Google (and others) being able to tease meaningful and helpful information out of the humongous data streams. They'll be able to pick up on trends, make hypothesis, and then follow up on the data to test those hypothesis and come to conclusions that humans would either never come up with, or would come up with much later. (Again, this reminds me a little of the data mining inferred in 2020 Vision.)

The Next Election

Yes, I know that many folks are glad that this one is finally over (especially getting rid of the campaign ads), but I wanted to reflect briefly on one thing. I teach in a high school with students typically aged 14 to 18. Probably a hundred and fifty or so of our seniors were eligible to vote this year, and I imagine many of them did. But a thought occurred to me this morning – all of our current high school students will be eligible to vote in the next presidential election.

Think about that for just a minute. All of our approximately 2,150 students at Arapahoe – most of whom have never voted – will be eligible to vote in the 2012 elections. And all of the other 17.5 million students currently in U.S. high schools will also be eligible to vote in 2012. Which brings us to the money question (or two or three).

What are we doing to prepare these students to be engaged, intelligent, informed, and competent voters in a world that is very, very, very, very different than the one we grew up in?

How are we preparing them to be successful citizens in a publish-then-filter world?

Are we transforming our classrooms to reflect real-time, instantaneous access to factual and political information?

And I could keep going but, mercifully, I’ll stop now. But if you teach high school, or you have a student that attends high school, or you pay taxes to support high schools, or you care about democracy, I’d like you to consider one thing.

What are you going to do to make sure those 17.5 million students are prepared to be successful participants in our democracy?

Image Citation: Colorado Presidential Ballot, originally uploaded by Chris&Rhiannon.

Political Debates 2.0

I ran across a couple of interesting posts from ReadWriteWeb that show the changing nature of politics in a read/write, searchable, always-connected world.

First, this points to a post on the Google blog that includes a real-time graph of search terms during the vice-presidential debate.

Many people were simply interested in understanding the meaning of particular terms. Governor Palin called Senator McCain a "maverick" several times, sending many viewers to Google to query definition of maverick, what is a maverick, and define:maverick.

When Biden mentioned that the "theocracy controls the security apparatus" in Iran, users searched for the meaning of theocracy — as they did when he spoke of the windfall profits tax.

Go read the post as they go on to discuss problems with spelling (nuclear, Ahmadinejad, and McClellan/McKiernan), searching for historical references, and checking on which Article of the Constitution actually talks about the executive branch.

Google also has a new post up on last night’s town hall Presidential Debate:

Similar to last Thursday, people sought to understand the meaning of several words mentioned in the debate: morass, commodity, junket, cynicism, and cronyism to name a few. In the chart below you can see four of the most popular queries during the debate. People were quite interested in both Meg Whitman and Warren Buffett, who were mentioned as potential candidates for the Secretary of Treasury, but the biggest rising query was Senator McCain's paraphrasing of Theodore Roosevelt's motto. Both candidates spoke against genocide while discussing the role of the United States as a peacekeeper, and as we saw in the vice presidential debate, nuclear energy and weapons were prominent topics.

They go on to talk about differences in searches from swing states, which reminds me a little bit of one of the things I was thinking about when I created 2020 Vision (Google having access to so much disparate data and the ability to possibly bring it together in unique ways to discover new “truths” – could be used for good or evil, I know). I think both of these are fascinating examples of how our ability to access information in real-time can make substantive changes in the way we do almost everything.

The second post on ReadWriteWeb had to do with CurrentTV and Twitter’s collaborative broadcast of the first presidential debate.

In 1960 seventy million people watched Kennedy and Nixon engage in the first Presidential debate ever broadcast live on TV.

And not a single viewer could post a comment.

These days things are different. Tonight, far fewer people probably watched the Current.tv and Twitter collaborative broadcast of Obama v. McCain - but scores of them participated, 140 characters at a time. It worked very well. You can get some idea from the 1 minute of video embedded below.

I agree that things are definitely different, but I think I would have trouble watching, listening and reading the tweets. It’s that old multitasking thing again, but some folks can probably do it much better than I can. But whether I like it or not, things are definitely changing. I could see a debate in the near future when the “spinners” from each campaign are doing live text commentary overlaid on top of the video.

Even more interesting and useful, I think, would be delayed text commentary (or even audio or video) overlaid on top of the debate. Where you get some very knowledgeable folks with an historical perspective (and not overly partisan) to give insightful commentary (text, audio, or video) as you view the debate, with links embedded for viewers that want to learn more. What a powerful learning experience that could be, whether you watched the debate live and then watched it again, or perhaps even skip the live debate and just watch the "enhanced" version.

While it would take more time to view the debate that way, I think it has the potential to be much more useful. For me, I’ve always wondered about how valuable the debates really are. I know that’s a somewhat heretical view, but I’m not sure how much being a good debater – particularly the way our current political debates are run – is related to being a good President. It’s such an artificial situation – questions that are unknown in advance and often unrelated to each other, with a limited amount of time to answer them, and without being able to tap into other resources (both information and human resources). Which is why the answers always end up being mostly unsatisfying, playing to sound bites and talking points. I sure hope that’s not how our President operates day to day. (And, yes, the parallels to the artificial situations we have in school are striking, and somewhat depressing.)

When you look at our current presidential candidates, neither one is a particularly good debater. Senator Obama gives a good speech but tends to ramble in a debate. Senator McCain does well in town hall situations, but doesn’t do particularly well in a debate, coming off as too rehearsed and too much of a scold. And, like in pretty much all political debates I’ve seen, they often answer a very different question than the one that was asked. While I think debates can provide some insight into the character of each candidate, I really don’t think that completely parallels how good of a Chief Executive they would be. It’s a setting that will not be repeated as they perform their job duties, yet we continue to act as though the debates are the ultimate test of whether a candidate is prepared to be President. Yes, I want them to be able to function in such a setting, but I don’t think the “best” debater is necessarily going to make the best President.

Sorry for the digression. In any event, I think the read/write/searchable/participatory/real-time/always-connected web has great potential to make citizens much more informed and knowledgeable voters. Just like the ability to access information illustrated by the real-time searching on Google, the ability to connect with others anywhere in the world in real-time (or delayed time, for that matter) can also make substantive changes in the way we do almost everything. And doesn’t that mean schools need to help students learn how to do these things really, really well?

My Question for Senator Obama

As I posted about previously, the DNC is soliciting questions to be addressed at the convention next week. In that post, I suggested that edubloggers - and everyone reading the post - should submit a question. Well, I began to think that after suggesting that, I probably better go ahead and submit my own question, even if I still didn't feel like I had the perfect question. So, here's the video question I submitted:

Not the perfect question, but perhaps a conversation starter.

What question will you submit? Deadline is August 27th.

Is it 2011 Already?

Okay, first Google invests in solar energy. Now Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo. Now, admittedly, I didn't have this happening until 2011, but I still think I deserve to get a small cut from these things. (Let's see, 1/100th of 1% of $44.6 billion is . . . anybody have Steve Ballmer's email address?)

What's next? Hmm, it'll be interesting to see the results from Super Tuesday . . .

Essay About the Future

Ran across this video from Nokia on YouTube (also embedded below) via a tweet by Alec Couros. It reminded me a little bit of both What If? and 2020 Vision. It also makes me wonder which ideas students (or others) have today that we think are "crazy" might turn out to be not so crazy.

AHS Staff, if you try to view this at school, you'll have to use your override. AHS students - you'll have to view this at home.

Can GooglePanels and the GoogleGrid be Far Behind?

Okay, this is a little scary:

According to Google’s news release, the company “is hiring engineers and energy experts to lead its research and development work, which will begin with a significant effort on solar thermal technology, and will also investigate enhanced geothermal systems and other areas. In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects which generate positive returns.”

Umm, it was exactly one year ago today that I posted 2020 Vision. Hmmmm . . .

Three to Think About

Sometimes I run across things one after another that seem connected to me but I’m not always sure about the connection. So, I’m not going to try to connect the dots this time, but just share and let you make any connections you see.

Amazon announced/released their Kindle e-book reader:

"Books have stubbornly resisted digitization," he elaborated. "I think there's a very good reason for that, and that is, the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace."

. . . Kindle tips the scales at a total 10.3 ounces--"That's less than a paperback book," Bezos said--and uses an "electronic ink" technology to mimic paper, not a computer screen.

. . . The battery life, company representatives said, will last several days to a week. A charger can juice up the battery in a matter of two hours.

Notably, Kindle does not require a PC for synchronization or any software to be installed. "Instead of shopping from your PC, you shop directly from the device. The store is on the device, and then the content is wirelessly and seamlessly delivered to the device," Bezos explained.

. . . Bezos also announced that dozens of newspapers, from The New York Times to France's Le Monde, would also be available for the device, as well as magazines and 300 of the most popular blogs, such as BoingBoing and Slashdot. "On Kindle, newspapers are delivered while you sleep, automatically," he said. The publications will receive a cut of the subscription fee revenue, as no advertising will be displayed on them.

Additionally, Kindle comes with an electronic dictionary and access to Wikipedia. Each device, as News.com reported, also provides the user with a personal Kindle e-mail address so that word-processing files such as Microsoft Word documents, as well as image files, could be sent to the e-book reader.

Livescribe (via Jeff Whipple, and you really need to watch the three demo animations to get the feel for it):

The Livescribe paper-based computing platform – a smartpen, paper, software applications, and development tools – will be available online beginning in Q1 2008. The smartpen will be less than $200. Additional dot paper will be available at prices comparable to standard paper products.

• Listen to your class lecture by just tapping on your handwritten notes.


• View & listen to your notes on your PC and search by keyword.


• Email your written & audio notes to your classmates or study group.


• Translate a word or phrase by simply writing it on paper.


• Download one or more languages to your pen computer.


• Practice your pronunciation by tapping on a word and listening


• Write & send a message directly from your notebook.


• Create & send an animated voice message from your paper.


• Post a message, drawing or animation (with voice) to your blog or Facebook profile.

Google-backed Genetic Testing Launches (and more):

Google Inc-funded 23andMe launched on Monday and began offering a DNA saliva test for $999 per person, which would help users of the online site learn about their genes, inherited traits, family trees, and participate in research.

"The mission of 23andMe is to take the genetic revolution to a new level by offering a secure, Web-based service where individuals can explore, share and better understand their own genetic information," said Linda Avey, who co-founded 23andMe with Anne Wojcicki.

I think the first two obviously have more in common with each other than the third one, but the phrase “individuals can explore, share and better understand” seemed to sum things up nicely for me.

Any thoughts?

Welcome Rocky Mountain News Readers

For those of you visiting the blog for the first time because of this article in the Rocky Mountain News, welcome to the conversation. This blog’s primary purpose is in support of our staff development efforts at Arapahoe High School. To learn more about the purpose of this particular blog, you might read About This Blog or The Beginning.

If you’re more interested in the Did You Know? presentation (original version or version 2.0), then visit this page on the wiki. You can click through the various posts to read through the history of the presentation that took on a life of its own (and much more info available on other pages on the wiki). You might also want to visit Scott McLeod's blog, as Scott played a large role in the spread of the presentation. If you’re interested in 2020 Vision or some of the other presentations, then visit the presentations page to find the presentations and links to the original posts for context. Please keep in mind all of these were intended to be the start of the conversation, not the end of the conversation, and should be viewed in that context.

If you’d like to read some more folks that are trying to figure out what our students need in order to be successful in the 21st century, then check out these bloggers. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Update: One small correction to that article in the Rocky Mountain News. At the height of it I was getting 50 e-mails a day related to the presentation. Right now I'm only getting about 5 to 10 a day.

2020 Vision on DesignShare

(The bottom portion of this post is cross-blogged at DesignShare.)

DesignShare is a virtual collaboration of school design professionals working around the world. They facilitate ideas and resources about best practices and innovation in schools from early childhood through the university level, focusing on the design of learning environments, with their target audience being primarily school architects, designers and planners. Christian Long is the President and CEO, and many of you know him from his think:lab blog.

When I created the 2020 Vision presentation back in November, Christian left a comment and also e-mailed saying that he would be using it with various audiences of school architects, designers and planners. I thought that was pretty cool, and he was nice enough to follow up to say that it went well and that he would probably use it again. Then about the first of January, Christian contacted me and asked if I would be interested in sharing it with the DesignShare audience:

Imagine that you’re talking to a room of 25 diverse school architects who are working with passionate school leaders/board members, all trying to get their arms and minds around the idea of the school of the future. They don’t yet know what they don’t know, and they need a provocative kick in the pants to imagine beyond their own world experiences. They’ve asked you for ideas. A way to future-think. Imagine writing a 2-3 page ‘introduction’ to your video – the context/history, main theme(s), the essential questions, and a bit of background context on the way you are using this to help your own district look forward. Imagine that after reading this introductory piece, they’ll watch your video…and want to learn more.

I said, “Gulp,” but – after a few emails - ultimately agreed (Christian is hard to say no to).

The result is now on DesignShare, as part of a series of articles on the future of school design (including a great article by Chris Lehmann). Christian also kindly gave me permission to post it here on The Fischbowl as well, which I’ll do in a moment.

But first, I wanted to briefly reflect back on how I/we wrote this article. I wrote a rough draft and created a Google Doc, then invited Christian to collaborate. I don’t think he’d ever used Google Docs before, but quickly figured it out and left comments and suggestions on my rough draft. I then went back and revised, he then went back and commented some more, and we repeated that process quite a few times. When it was finally ready for publication, Christian just took the Google Doc and basically pasted it into the DesignShare website (with a little html clean-up, I’m sure).

This is a process that could not have happened even five years ago. First of all, he never would’ve seen the presentation or let me know of his use of it or his interest to publish it on DesignShare. Second, we wouldn’t have been able to collaborate so seamlessly using something like Google Docs (yes, we could’ve emailed, but there’s no comparison). Third, you wouldn’t be reading about it now. And, don’t forget, Christian and I have never met. He’s in Texas (when he’s not traveling around the world) and I’m in Colorado, and we were able to come together, collaborate, and publish ideas that will be shared with school architects/planners/designers around the world, without ever meeting face to face. (I think we may need a new definition of what “meeting somebody” means.)

I still find this just so amazing . . . anyway, here’s a copy of the DesignShare article (very slightly modified to fit the blog better).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Creating a 2020 Vision for School Design”

“The kindergartners that start in the fall of 2007 will graduate in the spring of 2020. As architects of schools, you need to have a 2020 Vision. Your client’s and children’s futures depend upon it.”

by Karl Fisch*****

Note: Like many others who spend time reading various education-oriented blogs, we ran into a most amazing video presentation called “2020 Vision” that was put together by a Colorado (US) based educator named Karl Fisch that truly put into fresh new perspective how kids’/students’ lives are radically transforming before our eyes. His video (and 2 others) were put together to help his own teaching colleagues ‘get it’ when it comes to embracing new technologies to help empower their students for the students’ own futures (not just our pasts). And after only a few months, the videos suddenly went global in a very word-of-mouth viral manner, and they have continued to gain notoriety in all corners of the blogosphere. So we thought we’d ask Karl if he’d write an open-letter to the school design community based on the work he’s done to help his own school community embrace the emerging future of learning. We hope you’ll find the videos challenging and affirming all at once. (”2020 Vision is the 2nd (third one here - K.F.) video you’ll be able to play down below straight from this page).*****

Anticipate the future.

That’s something that the folks that work in schools - and the architects that design them - have to do every single day. In order to truly meet the needs of students, we really have to predict the future. My staff has spent the last year and a half trying to anticipate the future, trying to figure out what we need to do differently to adequately prepare our students to be successful in the 21st century. A century that we feel is going to require different skills, different abilities, different habits of mind than the last century did.

How can we change the way we teach or, more importantly, the way students learn, for them to be happy, successful, and productive citizens of the 21st century?

As part of this process, I developed three presentations for my staff:

• one that looks at the past (“What If?”), via Google Video,
  Google video is no more, so here it is on YouTube:

• one that looks at the present (“Did You Know?” that appears via YouTube, modified with permission by Scott McLeod),
  
  
  
  
• and one that looks at the future (“2020 Vision”; via Google Video version).
  Google Video is no more, so here it is on YouTube:
  
  

The first two were obviously easier to create, but the third one - looking at the future - was tougher because we can’t predict the future - at least not yet. So how could I get my staff to prepare for it? It’s tough to be the one that’s supposed to have the vision and then tell folks that you really don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. But I felt it was important for them to have some kind of plausible vision of the future to think about and discuss. Even if it turns out - as it surely will - to not be totally accurate. As long as I got the general trends right, it would make it much easier for my staff to anticipate what skills and abilities and habits of mind students would need in the future - and therefore we could make the necessary changes now to make that happen. As a result of our ongoing staff development, and helped along by the presentations, my staff is beginning to have a vision of the future. Right now it’s mostly a bunch of individual visions, but we are working together to create a collective vision for our school, our students and our community.

School architects face a similar dilemma.

You are tasked with creating buildings that will serve the needs of educators and students far into the future. But how do you do that when we are in a time of such rapid change? How can you possibly design a building that will meet future needs when those future needs could be so very different from today’s needs? Just like educators, you need a vision of the future. We can’t change the past - it’s already happened. We can’t even change the present - as the moment passes too quickly. The future is the only thing we can change. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Shouldn’t we get started?

The future is a lot like the weather.

Everyone talks about the future but nobody does anything about it. Who can see the future? Nobody can (at least not yet). But what if it’s your job to see the future? What if you are supposed to be the one that has the vision?

Who needs to see the future?

Well, lots of people.

Weather forecasters, farmers, investment managers, CEO’s, politicians – you name it, just about everyone could benefit from some insights into what the future will bring. Weather forecasters would be pretty happy with getting the next three days worth of forecasts right all the time. Extend it out to ten days and they’d be ecstatic. If they could be fairly accurate on temperatures and precipitation for a region for the next year they could retire happy. Farmers match up pretty well with weather forecasters.

Likewise, investment managers and CEO’s have a little bit longer viewpoint, but not by much. Many investment managers focus on quarterly numbers, then building to a 1-year, 3-year and perhaps 5-year return on investment. CEO’s and their corporations also focus on those quarterly numbers and, if the CEO is lucky, he or she makes it to the end of any five year plan. Politicians – at least in the United States – rarely focus on anything longer than the next two to four years, knowing so much will change with every election that they don’t have to focus on anything longer than that.

But what about educators?

K-12 educators may have the toughest job of all.

When a child starts Kindergarten, the school system makes a commitment to educate them for the next thirteen years. Implicit in that commitment is that the student will be prepared to be successful in the world as it exists thirteen years from then. That they are prepared to enter college, the military, or the work force with the knowledge and skills that are deemed necessary at that point in time – thirteen years in the future. As if that isn’t daunting enough, traditional wisdom holds that those thirteen years of education should really prepare students for the rest of their lives, at least until they retire, so sixty plus years out from when they start kindergarten.

This has never been easy, but when the world was changing at a relatively sedate, linear pace, schools could change slowly and still be successful. In a time of rapid change like today, in exponential times, it is next to impossible. When the predicted top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004 (former Secretary of Education Richard Riley); when a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capabilities of the human brain in 2023 (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near - and in this article); when a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capabilities of the entire human race by 2049 (Kurzweil again) – what are educators to do?

So what do we do?

What can teachers and administrators, school board members and taxpayers, school architects and students - do? Nobody can accurately predict the future in a time of such rapid change. Educators instead just focus on making their “quarterly numbers,” getting their students through the next unit or the end of the semester, trying to do well on mandated tests, and generally doing their best and hoping for the best for their students. School architects just focus on the bottom line, on submitting the lowest bid that meets the minimum specs, and then trying to come in on time and on budget - hoping that the price of steel doesn’t go up too much in the interim.

But in a time of rapid change, that’s not going to cut it.

We need to have vision, even if it isn’t one hundred percent accurate. It doesn’t need to be, as the future in a time of rapid change is likely to be much stranger than most predictions. The vision doesn’t even have to get most things right, just enough of the general trends so that educators can start moving – both themselves and their students – in the right directions. Because this isn’t something that can be addressed by incremental improvements. You can’t leap a 20-foot chasm in two 10-foot jumps. We don’t need incremental improvements, but revolutionary ones (Kathy Sierra, for one, talks about this here and here).

That was the impetus behind writing one version of the future.

To give educators – and everyone concerned about education – one possible vision of education in the near future. Maybe by having one possible vision of the future we can get beyond our natural resistance to change.

I ask teachers, “Are you ever going to be 18 again? Are your students ever going to be your age? Should we be preparing students for the world as it was when we were 18, or for the world as it will be when they are our age?” I would think school architects would ask their clients some questions as well (in addition to those). Maybe along the lines of, “What are your core values? What are the three habits of mind you most want your students to leave your school with? Do your current school designs support those values and habits of mind? How could a new school design not only support those values and habits of mind, but actually foster them?”

Instead of throwing up our hands and saying, “Everything’s changing so fast. How can we possibly know what’s going to happen so why even bother,” we get to work envisioning what our students are most likely to need to be successful in the 21st century – and then preparing them accordingly. Because who can see into the future? Teachers can, every time they walk into their classrooms and look into the eyes of their students. But if their classrooms are built for the past, preparing our children for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, then the future looks pretty bleak.

School architects – at least the really good ones - have a very tough job.

They are tasked with building schools that are supposed to serve the needs of students forty to sixty years into the future. For architects that think schools are just buildings - just walls and floors, ceilings and doors - that’s pretty easy. But the problem with school as building, with a lowest-bid mentality, is how do you put a price on inspiration? How do you measure the building’s impact on the learning, the hopes and dreams of the tens of thousands of students that will read what’s on those walls, walk on those floors, stare at those ceilings, and pass through those doors? Do you simply want to shelter, or do you want to inspire, the students of the future?

Albert Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge.

He didn’t mean knowledge wasn’t important, but that it wasn’t sufficient. Schools built today must be designed to not only meet the needs of today’s students, but of multiple future generations of students that will live and learn in a constantly and rapidly changing world. We need to build schools that learn, schools that are flexible enough to adapt to meet the future needs of teachers and students. We need to harness our imaginations now in order to build schools that can inspire future imaginations.

School architects need the vision to design not just buildings, but learning spaces.

Professional learning environments where teachers and students can learn together as they boldly go into the future. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, although I have some ideas, but I do know that architects need to have a vision of the school building of the future that doesn’t try to meet the needs of the past.

Just like educators, school architects don’t have to get the vision exactly right, but they do need to have one.

We no longer live in an industrial age, so why do we have industrial age classrooms? Is it necessary (or appropriate) to have thirty-six individual desks in neat rows in a room with four walls and a door that we close to keep the rest of the world out? Do we need an assembly line mentality, where a bell rings and widgets (students) move to the next spot on the line? Do we need a system where all the raw materials (students) must be dealt with in the same way or they are tossed off the line as defective (learning disabled)?

Or do we need an environment where students are both respected and nurtured, where they are treated as professional learners, where they are seen as individuals that can contribute to the common good? Where they are viewed not just as passive consumers of information, but as active producers, who add meaning and value to the information. An environment where students are encouraged to interact, not only with others in their classroom, but with others in their community - and in communities around the world. An environment that views students as the ultimate “knowledge workers.” Which environment would you like to learn in?

The kindergartners that start in the fall of 2007 will graduate in the spring of 2020. As architects of schools, you need to have a 2020 Vision. Your client’s and children’s futures depend upon it.

Has "Did You Know?" Gone Viral?

I'm beginning to wonder if the Did You Know? presentation has perhaps gone just a little bit viral. As many of you know, I posted it at the beginning of the school year and it got picked up by various educator blogs in August and September. But in the last few days I'm suddenly getting a whole bunch of emails asking about it, and many of those are from non-educators (a minister, the leader of a political action committee, a retired Naval officer to name a few). I even received a phone call this morning from London (as in England) - the assistant to a CEO of an executive search company.

I'm pretty sure it's not my original presentation, though, I think it's the version that Scott McLeod created that removed the first few slides that were specific to my school (and also improved the look a little bit). Scott says that he's had quite a few contacts regarding this as well. I asked some of the folks that emailed me where they had run across the presentation, and the responses I've received back so far indicate via email. It looks like there might be at least two emails floating around, one with "Did You Know" in the title and one with "Shift Happens" in the title, both of which just contain a link to the Windows Media version that Scott created. If anyone reading this has received an email like that, I'd love to know so we can try to figure out where this is coming from. (Also, if you're stumbling upon this post because of that email, you might be interested in two related presentations - What If? and 2020 Vision.)

Now, I'm not sure it's really "viral" at this point, maybe more like the sniffles, but it's still interesting to observe. Because I posted it in an easily downloadable form, without any kind of tracking statistics, and because it's been remixed and reposted so many places, I really have no idea how many times it's been viewed. But I know it was shown at a whole lot of faculty meetings (K-16), and quite a few conferences, and some Chamber of Commerce's. And apparently now there are emails going around to who knows how many people. So I'm going to estimate that the number of people who've seen it has easily passed the 100,000 mark. Please note that I have nothing to back that up with, just a semi-educated guess - feel free to laugh. (Note to my staff: yes, this will make my already healthy ego even larger. Hard to believe, I know.)

To tie this back to one of the major themes of this blog, it's a different world out there. A world where anyone's ideas can quickly spread if they happen to strike a chord. Where you don't necessarily have to have a large company or a huge public relations effort to make an impact (although that still doesn't hurt). And we need to be preparing our students to participate in such a world, to understand both the positive and the negative sides of that. To help them learn how to live and work in a rapidly changing world, where a fairly simple PowerPoint presentation that I almost didn't even show to my staff has now been seen worldwide.

This is just one of the reasons that I believe our schools need to change. They need to change to reflect this new world, this flatter world, this information-abundant, globally connected, rapidly changing, technology super-charged world that they are going to spend the rest of their lives in. Maybe, just maybe, we need to figure out how to make learning viral.

We'll Need To Rethink . . . Everything?

Via Jeff Utecht.

The main reason for this post is the video below. But as a side note, before tonight I'd never heard of digital ethnography. A very interesting combination, I think.

From the Digital Ethnography Workgroup:

Digital - because digital media provide exciting possibilities for creating, transforming and combining representations.

Ethnography - because the best way to find out how people make meaning is to go among them and carefully examine what they actually do.

Workgroup - because knowledge is the quintessential social product, and science requires co-labor-ation.

The video is only 4:31 - well worth your time. I think it goes along nicely with 2020 Vision (although this is much better - not to mention a lot shorter).