Who's the Teacher? You're the Teacher.

Watch this TED talk from TED founder Chris Anderson. Go ahead, I'll wait.




I'm not going to say too much about this other than I'm just going to pull a few quotes from this to ponder.

Crowd accelerated innovation.
(Or, perhaps Crowd Accelerated Innovation, deserving of capital letters?)

It's the crowd, that shines the light, and fuels the desire . . .This is a model that pretty much any organization could use to nurture its own cycle of crowd accelerated innovation . . . Invite the crowd, let in the light, and dial up the desire.
(Schools? Education? Individuals? Learning?)

You have to show your stuff to the world . . . Radical openness.
(Radical. Openness. Is there anything more unlike what most schools/classrooms look like today? And do we think programs like Race to the Top are going to make things more open, more collaborative? Or less?)

We’re a social species. We spark off one another.
(Oy. Back to the drawing board for my Algebra class. I have to do better.)

We watch 80 million hours of YouTube every day . .. Cisco predicts that in 4 years, more than 90% of the web will be video.
(And more video has been uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than has been broadcast by ABC, NBC and CBS combined since ABC started broadcasting . . . in 1948.)

It’s in that non-verbal portion, there’s some serious magic.
(I like to think my writing is sometimes good, and I don't think anyone is saying that writing is going away, but he has a point.)

Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face to face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution . . . This is the connective tissue of the human super-organism in action.
(I have to think about the idea of "connective tissue" a little bit more, but shades of Clay Shirky here - both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.)

Print scaled. The world’s ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide. . . But now, in the blink of the eye, the game has changed again. . . . what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can do for face to face communication . . . that primal medium which your brain is exquisitely wired for just went global. (Wow. Shades of both Shirky and Steven Johnson here.)

For the first time in human history talented students don’t have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. (I, of course, don't love that line, but I get the point. I would say it more like, "For the first time in human history talented learners don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy circumstances," but, yeah, okay. Also see Disrupting Class.)

Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. ('Nuff said.)

Create A Movement

This TED Talk by Seth Godin is worth 17 minutes of your time. After you watch it, some thoughts are below the embed.



Here are a few semi-random thoughts that were generated by this talk. I’m not saying that he’s necessarily right about everything, but he raises some interesting questions that are worth thinking about.

What do I do for a living? Seems like a simple question, but – as Seth Godin points out – perhaps it’s not. I used to answer, “I’m a math teacher” or “I teach math.” Over time that shifted to “I teach students math” and then simply “I teach students.” But I find myself agreeing with him that perhaps that’s too “narrow” of a definition of what we in education try to do: we try to change everything.

Every day we should at least try to step on that light bulb, clearly indicating that there was “before,” and now there’s “after;” that at this moment in time we changed something in our students’ lives. If we don’t aspire to that, if we accept a too-narrow definition of what we do for a living, then we relegate ourselves to mediocrity.

Godin says that the way we make change is by leading, and that leading is simply helping to connect people and ideas. And, at this moment in time, we are at a tipping point (dare I say a moment of “shift”), because the technology allows us to connect in ways that previously were unimaginable or impractical (see Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody). And we can find others that are interested in and passionate about the same things, not by forcing them, but because we want to be connected. We need to be connecting as educators and, just as importantly, we need to be helping our students connect.

He goes on to say that we need to find folks that are disconnected, but already have a yearning; people who are just waiting for someone to lead them. (Sound like anyone you know?) We need to be heretics, who look at the status quo and say, “I can’t abide it.” (What’s wrong with the status quo? Unless you don’t see any need in the world, any disaffection, any hurt or disconnectedness, then we must try to improve on the status quo.) Is this in your curriculum? Perhaps not in so many words, but it should be, so I’m asking you to add it. Right now.

Godin then says there are three questions to ask yourself if you’re trying to lead something. If educators are leaders, then we need to ask ourselves these same questions.

1. Who are you upsetting? If you’re not upsetting anyone, then you’re not changing the status quo. (Note that this is not upsetting people just to upset them, but rather with a purpose, with a goal, with an important change in mind that’s necessary to improve things for someone. Editor’s note: I’ve got this one nailed. Unfortunately, I don’t think it stands on its own.)
   
   
2. Who are you connecting? (Think outside your classroom walls for a moment here. Nothing wrong with connecting inside your classroom, but some of those students have yearnings that don’t match up with others in their classroom, so help them find their tribe.)
   
   
3. Who are you leading? (Don’t limit this to the students in your classroom, or the adults in your building/department; leading is not limited by proximity or geography anymore. Also some folks will protest that they don’t want to lead or that’s not in their job description. I say it should be, and I’d ask you to add it now.)

Godin concludes by asking his audience to create a movement, to find their tribe. So, what are you waiting for?

The Invention of Air, PLNs, and School Transformation

I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air. It’s the story of Joseph Priestley’s scientific discoveries, religious and political thoughts, and his influence on the founding thinkers of the United States. But it’s also a history of his Personal Learning Network (starting with “The Club of Honest Whigs,” which included Benjamin Franklin and Richard Price), and, combined with Richard Florida’s work, has me thinking again about the optimal conditions for learning at our point in history.

Consider this quote from page 51:

Ideas are situated in another kind of environment as well: the information network. Theoretically, it is possible to imagine good ideas happening in a vacuum . . . But most important ideas enter the pantheon because they circulate. And the flow is two-way: the ideas happen in the first place because they are triggered by other people’s ideas. The whole notion of intellectual circulation or flow is embedded in the word “influence” itself (“to flow into,” influere in the original Latin). Good ideas influence, and are themselves influenced by, other ideas. Different societies at different moments in history have varying patterns of circulation: compare the cloistered, stagnant information pools of the European Dark Ages to the hyperlinked, open-sourced connectivity of the Internet.

This describes nicely how I think about my Personal Learning Network, and how social and professional networking in general can help circulate, discuss, and refine ideas. Ideally, this would also describe schools; places that were not defined as much by prescribed curricula, but by a climate of intellectual curiosity and a culture of ideas, where good ideas influere other good ideas.

He continues on page 52:

The idea of proprietary secrets, of withholding information for personal gain, was unimaginable in that group. . . .But Priestley was a compulsive sharer, and the emphasis on openness and general circulation is as consistent a theme as any in his work. . . No doubt Priestley saw farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants, but he had another crucial asset: he had a reliable postal service that let him share his ideas with giants.

The label “compulsive sharer” describes quite a few of the folks in my PLN, and tools such as blogs, delicious, Twitter, rss feeds and Skype help enable that compulsive sharing. Priestley’s aversion to proprietary secrets also seems to apply to the folks in my PLN, where the ethos is “the more you share, the more you learn” – and the more we all benefit. I think Priestley would also appreciate Creative Commons. But I wonder how many of our schools – and the educational processes we have in place - really encourage compulsive sharing, either in-person or virtually?

Johnson continues on page 53:

The open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of the Club of Honest Wigs, and of eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture in general. With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R & D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society.

. . .You can’t underestimate the impact that the Club of Honest Whigs had on Priestley’s subsequent streak, precisely because he was able to plug in to an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated. Not just because there were learned men of science sitting around the table – more formal institutions like the Royal Society supplied comparable gatherings – but also because the coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.

Again, sounds like PLNs, and specifically tools like Twitter – “conversations freely roaming” and a “network of relationships and collaborations.” And I wonder if our current education system might be “languishing amid archaic traditions.”

Later he returns to the idea of compulsive sharing and documenting not only the product, but the process (page 63-64):

Part of this compulsive sharing no doubt comes from the fact that one of Priestley’s great skills as a scientist was his inventiveness with tools. He was a hacker, not a theoretician, and so it made sense to showcase his technical innovations alongside the scientific ideas they generated. But there was a higher purpose that drove Priestley to document his techniques in such meticulous detail: the information network. Priestley’s whole model of progress was built on the premise that ideas had to move, to circulate, for them to turn into better ideas. . . . It was a sensibility he shared with Franklin:

These thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ‘till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.

This resonates for me in relation to my own blogging, where I often think of blogging as “rough draft thinking”, or “thinking in progress,” and where I count on commenters and linkers to help me refine my own thinking. I believe one of the big hurdles for getting folks in my building to blog professionally is their fear of not having a polished piece of writing, or of being not completely correct about something. (These are both things I’ve obviously overcome!) But that seems to fly in the face of how so many of the scientists and philosophers that we revere in this country did their own thinking and sharing and, with the amazing ability we have to share today, it saddens me to see how few of us are really taking advantage of this capability (both professionally and with our students).

Further into the book, on pages 73 and 74, Johnson takes up information networks:

The true shape of an idea forming looks much more like this:
That network shape is one of the reasons why external information networks (the coffeehouse, the Internet) are so crucial to the process of innovation, because those networks so often supply new connections that the solo inventor wouldn’t have stumbled across on his or her own. But the long life span of the hunch suggests another crucial dimension here: it is not just the inventor’s social network that matters, but the specific way in which the inventor networks with his own past selves, his or her ability to keep old ideas and associations alive in the mind.

To me, this describes tagging and the digital archiving (and sharing) of thoughts, so that not only can you learn from others, but you can go back and reflect on and learn from your own “past self.” I believe we miss so much, and our students miss so much, because we view so much of what we do as transitory, and not worth keeping or revisiting. What is it about self-reflection (again, both professionally and with/by our students) that worries us so?

Toward the end of the book, on pages 204-206, Johnson makes the connection again to modern information networks:

More important, though, the values that Priestley brought to his intellectual explorations have never been more essential than they are today. The necessity of open information networks – like ones he cultivated with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society, and with the popular tone of his scientific publications – has become a defining creed of the Internet age. . . . An idea that flows through society does not grow less useful as it circulates; most of the time, the opposite occurs: the idea improves, as its circulation attracts the “attention of the Ingenious,” as Franklin put it. Jefferson saw the same phenomenon, and interpreted it as yet another part of nature’s rational system: “That ideas should freely spread from one another over the globe,” he wrote in an 1813 letter discussing a patent dispute, “for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

, , , Building a coherent theory of the modern world without a thorough understanding of [the Internet] would have struck Priestley as a scandal of the first order.

This speaks to me so much of our often misguided Internet filter policies, the idea that by restricting the flow of ideas we are somehow protecting our students. And, again, it reinforces the concept of openness, and the sharing of student and teacher work, and that through this sharing, this cross-pollinating of ideas, we progress and improve not only as teachers and students, but as a society (see Mark Pesce’s Capture Everything, Share Everything, Open Everything, Only Connect)

He brings it home at the end of the book on pages 213-215:

The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Franklin and that is the radical’s belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. . . . You could no longer put stock in “the education of our ancestors,” as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change meant embracing the possibility that everything would have to be reinvented. . . .One thing is clear: to see the world in this way – to disconnect the timeless insights of science and faith from the transitory world of politics; to give up the sublime view of progress; to rely on the old institutions and not conjure up new ones – is to betray the core and connected values that Priestley shared with the American founders . . . How can such a dramatically expanded vista not make us think that the world is still ripe for radical change, for new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life? And how could it not also be cause for hope?

I think this is one of the huge struggles we’re facing as we try not so much to reform education, but to transform it. Schools as we know them are comfortable, and safe. But if “progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past” and we should “no longer put stock in ‘the education of our ancestors,’” then we will have to face the uncomfortable and deal with disruptive innovation.

We are going to have to seize on the current crisis to make transformative change and conjure up new institutions – or least new learning paradigms. One of our core values must be to seize these "new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life," to be compulsive sharers and utilize these tools and our learning networks to transform our schools, our communities and our world.

Will that be difficult? Sure, but it’s necessary and it’s time. And, while perhaps difficult, “how could it not also be cause for hope?”

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.

It Is What We Make of It

This is going to be a somewhat eclectic post, with no real insight or conclusion from me (yes, I know, I know), but I think that there are some connections here that perhaps somebody (or even my future self) can make. There also could be nothing at all here, but I think the links are interesting in and of themselves even if there is no real connection or higher meaning.

Thanks to an email from one of my school board members, I ran across this article at the Washington Post:

The 44-year-old North Bethesda resident desperately wants a restaurant here that caters to the raw food diet, which prescribes only fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and sprouts, none of which have been heated above 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Over the past year, she has dedicated as many as 10 hours each month to attending meetings, sharing her ideas on a community Web site and creating raw food treats such as oat-hemp balls to persuade others of the virtues of raw food.

One thing Greenspan hasn't had to contribute is cash, a key element in getting new restaurants up and running. That's because the model for Elements is unlike any other Washington restaurant, and, as far as the founders can say, unlike any other restaurant in the world. If it successfully opens, Elements will be the first "crowdsourced" restaurant, conceived and developed by an open community of experts and interested parties.

So a group of like-minded folks use technology to come together to try to achieve a goal.

. . . "Most businesses are started because you have a great idea, and you take it out to the public to see if they like it," says Linda Welch, 49, the Washington businesswoman who launched and is funding the Elements project. "This is the opposite. We're finding out what people want and doing it."

They gather information from their stakeholders (and, in fact, are stakeholders themselves), to try to develop a product that meets the stakeholders’ needs.

. . . "It's the community. What's rewarding is coming together to create a place in the city that's beneficial to the community and yourself and your friends."

To paraphrase: It’s about the community, stupid.

. . . Characteristically, the group is optimistic. "It's not crazy to do if you have an established, loyal customer base," Takemoto says. "What's crazy is to open a business from scratch."

Again, to paraphrase: What’s crazy is not to use these tools and this ability to organize.

This seems to tie in well with Clay Shirky’s ideas about group forming and group action. It also reminds me a bit of this “group action to make a difference” video that I ran across at Dean Shareski’s blog. As Dean says,

This is the type of thing that illustrates the ability to be proactive . . . I’m looking forward to seeing passionate, connected teachers leading students in group formation that changes our world.

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

As Dean says in the comments to that post, “We only need a few motivated people to lead and the ease of organization can make it happen.”

It also reminds me of James Surowiecki’s keynote at NECC, which is only available for viewing by ISTE members, but everyone can view an excerpt.

Under the right conditions, groups of people can be remarkably intelligent.

So we should be figuring out – and providing – those conditions. What might those conditions be?

You need some method of aggregation.

You need a diverse group of people.

You need independent thinking. You want people to rely on their own information, their own intuition, their own knowledge. You want people to bring something to the table other than what everyone else around them is bringing to the table.

Hmm, sounds like a well-developed, diverse, and active Personal Learning Network.

Finally, it seems to connect for me (somehow, not quite sure how yet) to this presentation by Michael Wesch at the Library of Congress. Wesch, in relation to the YouTube community, talks about ideas including “user generated filtering” and “user generated organization,” and how as “media change, human relations change.” Towards the end he states, “It is not just what you make of it, it is what we make of it.” (He's now posted the full text of his poem, inspired by Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.)




So, how does this tie all together? As I stated at the top, I’m not sure I know. But I think it’s something along the lines of:

Technology is changing us. Us, the human race. It’s changing how we form communities and interact. It’s empowering individuals, yet in a powerfully group-oriented, networked way (“networked individualism” - sounds like an oxymoron, but I'm not sure it is). As educators, we need to delve into the “ridiculously easy group formation,” pull from the wisdom of our diverse stakeholders, and help discover and provide the conditions necessary for our students to leverage the power of aggregation. It truly can be what we make of it, if only we choose to try.

Or something like that.

Or not at all like that.

Like I said, I’m not sure how these all connect, I just have this strong feeling that they do. And if we can tease out those connections, it can have some powerful implications for the way we teach and learn.

What do you make of it?

Should We Be Teaching This in "Social Studies?"

(I’m still not feeling like I have much to add to the conversation at the moment, so instead I’ll just share some half-baked musings - yes, even more half-baked than usual. I write this even though I understand that many schools already have too much they are supposed to "cover" in Social Studies, and with full knowledge that my own school had budget cuts that impacted the number of teachers we have teaching Social Studies. I still think these are important questions to ask.)

For some reason I got to thinking about the term "Social Studies" the other day. Like many high schools, my school doesn’t have a History Department anymore, it has a Social Studies Department. We still teach a full complement of history courses, but we also teach Psychology, Sociology, Government, Cultural Geography, Economics, Law and other courses. So as I was thinking about this I decided that perhaps I should put my broadband connection to work and look up the definition of “social studies.” Here are three that are similar, yet still offer some interesting takes on the matter (in each case, emphasis added by me so that I can talk more about it below):

1. Social Studies: A group of instructional programs that describes the substantive portions of behavior, past and present activities, interactions, and organizations of people associated together for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes.
   – National Center for Education Statistics
   
2. Social studies is a term used to describe the broad study of the various fields which involve past and current human behavior and interactions. Rather than focus on any one topic in depth, social studies provides a broad overview of human society past and present.
   -Wikipedia
   
3. Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence . . . The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.
   - National Council for the Social Studies

Past and present activities.

Organizations of people associated together for [various] purposes.

Human society past and present.

Informed and reasoned decisions for the public good . . . in an interdependent world.

And then I wondered, how many "Social" Studies Departments in high schools around the world are teaching a course on the socially revolutionary and transformative age that we find ourselves in? (Or even at least discussing it in an existing course.) As Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody, group forming is ridiculously easy and we are still in the very early stages of a change that rivals the development of the “Print Culture” that arose in the centuries following the invention of the printing press. Aren’t the societal changes we’re seeing as the result of technology and the Internet specifically, as well as other flat-world factors, the essence of what "social studies" is about?

Now, I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t teach history or all those other courses – there’s tremendous value in those as well. But does it strike anyone else as odd that my school – and I imagine most schools – aren’t teaching this stuff? Can’t the case be made that these changes are at least as important for our students to learn about, immerse themselves in, understand and begin to figure out the impact of as it is to learn about other great themes in history? Isn’t today’s "networked society" one of the greatest transformations ever in how we define and understand "social" and "society?" If so, then shouldn’t Social Studies Departments everywhere be scrambling to include this in their curriculum?

GE, Social Networking, and Collaboration

Just a quick post to point out an article in the 7-21-08 issue of Fortune Magazine (not online yet). It has an interview with Gary Reiner, CIO of General Electric, and there were two quotes that I thought were particularly interesting.

We’ve gone out of our way to call it professional networking rather than social networking. We’ve been building a professional networking capability that allows everybody to put in the organization directory the skills that they bring to bear. It’s very searchable, so if someone is looking for a particular skill, they can go to that site. That gets about 25 million hits a day so it really is becoming sort of a heartbeat of the company. (p. 78)

I found that quote interesting for two reasons. First, it seems obvious that whether you call it social networking or professional networking, this is a skill and a habit of mind our students are going to need in their professional futures. I think it’s going to be harder and harder for schools to simply block all access to anything that smacks of social networking, both for the educational uses and the preparation for its use in students’ future careers.

Second, I found it interesting in light of some of the ideas in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. I’m just starting to re-read it and digest it more thoroughly, but I wonder about the capacity we all now have to create similar professional networks without the necessity of the organization. GE is using this to tap into the skills and potential of all its employees, but that doesn’t depend on GE being in the equation anymore. Individuals (or even software algorithms) can now make those connections without the overhead of the institutional dilemma.

The second quote that intrigued me was this one.

Over the next five years there will be distinct change in the man-machine interface. We’ve all grown up with keyboards and mice, but I’d be surprised if five years from now we didn’t all interact with our computers via multitouch gestures . . .

Another big change is going to be OLED, organic light-emitting diodes, which are extremely thin screens that will start out as TV’s but will quickly become available as computers. They have better resolution than either LCD or plasma, and they’re so thin that you’ll be able to roll them up or fold them up and carry them. This will happen within the next five or six years: You’ll be carrying around the screen, you roll it out, and it’s got multitouch capability, and that’s all you’ll need.

Something that has already grown dramatically but will continue to grow even more and ultimately become core to enterprises, as well as consumers, is what’s known as cloud computing – having all the applications centrally located. If you ask what percent of the documents you create are just for you, it’s almost zero. Almost every document you create is for collaboration in one way, shape, or form. So why not start by building it on the web and providing permissions to people that you expect to view it and edit it and leverage it? (p. 78)

That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone who should know what they’re talking about go on record that multitouch and roll-out OLED screens will be mainstream in only five to six years. If accurate, that has a host of implications for what schools are doing now and will have a tremendous impact before any student currently in elementary school graduates from high school.

The emphasis on web-based applications and collaboration is not surprising to me, but I guess it’s surprising that he’s so open and forthright about it. It’s a given for him, and therefore for GE, so that also has many implications for schools – and, again, our filtering policies. If arguably the most successful company on the planet thinks that everything they create is for collaboration in one way, shape or form, why is it still so difficult for schools to incorporate that into our thinking (and policies)?