Digital Divide!

"It is one thing to have mobile phones...
and another thing to know how to use them."

- Villy Wang, BAYCAT

Last night I attended the first public event of Community Technology Network, "Digital Opportunities: Is Access a Game Changer?" in the Mission in San Francisco. I was drawn to the the question of how to close the digital divide, and how the Bay Area tech community perceives the issue. What I liked, is CTN is not focusing on the global digital divide, but on local access to the internet and digital literacy. To address this issue was a great panel that included:

Laura Efurd, Vice President and Chief Community Investment Officer of Zero Divide,
Pankaj Kedia, Director of Global Ecosytem Programs for Mobile Internet at Intel
Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep and founder of Craigslist
Villy Wang, President & CEO of BAYCAT

The discussion was moderated by Kami Griffiths, Executive Director of CTN and Training and Outreach Manager at TechSoup. Here's a snapshot of what I learned:

Federal Stimulus Money

The Director of Technology for the City of San Francisco, publicized that SF was the recipient of $8 million of stimulus funds to support seniors, youth and the disabled to gain access to broad band internet networks. Laura Efurd explained it is part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, BTop Grant, $7.2 billion from the federal stimulus funds for digital access, of which $350 million is focused on technological adoption. While the stimulus money is here over the next 2-3 years there will be well resourced efforts to get more people on-line, but once the federal money runs dry there is still going to be a need to help marginalized communities gain access. I wonder how much of that stimulus money is aimed at supporting internet access in schools?

Smart Phones

Pankaj Kedia from Intel was interesting. He has a very positivist perspective on the benign impact of technology. He marveled at the cost diminishing cost of access to computers and gushed over the penetration of mobile phones to nearly every market on the globe. In India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, he remarked how 1 out of 13 have access to a PC and 1 out of 15 have access to the internet. There are 350 million toilets in India, and now 600 million cell phones. 1 out of 2 people in India has a cell phone, and I guess sanitation is a problem. Personally, I think sanitation is more important than cell phone access, but I assume people are sharing. A true technologist, he described the revolution in computer science that has put a computer on every desk and now a computer into every hand. In five years he says a PC will be as smart as the human brain, and in ten years a cell phone as smart as you. What will happen when a computer or a phone is as smart as, or smarter than you?

Human Capacity

I appreciate that most of the conversation was about how to build the human capacity of Bay Area residents. Villy Wang stressed that it is one thing to have mobile phones, and another thing to know how to use them. Her focus at BAYCAT is to give the Bayview community a voice in the new digital landscape. Her organizations focuses on educating, empowering, employing, and "entertaining" youth. Kids may be turned off to formal schooling, or may have financial or family stresses that bring them down. There are so many ways to get caught up in the streets. But if young people can begin to tell their stories, and learn digital skills like film editing, animation, and music production it can be a connection to get them back on track. She stressed that for kids challenged by the current system, especially kids with disabilities, they are really going to be opened up with access to technology. She encouraged all of us to push our envelopes beyond our immediate circles, to reach out to communities we are not a part of and support their efforts by consuming their media. I like the message!

Digital Divide

Craig Newman has become a consumer advocate and democratic philanthropist on the web. He is supporting a bunch of startups, and his basic effort is to give people access to technolgy so they can find a job. He sees the future as wireless broadband, smartphones and tablets. He admitted that we are always going to have a digital divide, because we have such inequitities in society. Kids who grow up with laptops and access to the internet at home, perhaps parents who work in the IT field, and all of the other experiential advantages that come with an upper middle class lifestyle are always going to be ahead of kids who connect with a school or community center computer a few hours a week.


There are plenty of kids in East Oakland or the Bronx who don't have cell phones, and no computers at home. Our schools do not have functioning computers for every student, or the technology staff to maintain them. Educators are not trained well on how to integrate technology into the class. How many teachers do you know that use Skype, wikis, film production, or blogs to produce knowledge and connect with a wider world? The world is changing and the challenge remains the same, to build the human capacity of developing communities, at home and abroad, so more people can live healthy and socially connected lives. It's not about the tool, but the capacity to do something useful with the tool for your family and community.


As access to the internet and digital literacy become more immersive experiences, essential to our professional lives and maintaining connections with our social networks, this divide has the potential to entrench winners and losers, slowing social mobility.

Competing With China!

Students From Blair International Baccalaureate H.S. in Pasadena with Beijing 181 students in a cultural exchange. Pasadena, CA January, 2008

The talk of U.S. exceptionalism is waning in the early hours of the 21st Century. Certain political stripes hold onto it dearly, the neo-cons launched two wars to defend it, but for most the sobering acknowledgement of a more competitive post-colonial, post-Cold War world are here. A G-8 dominated by the U.S. has been enlarged to a G-20 of more independently minded nation states. The backdrop to this story is that the world’s fastest growing developing economies, the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China are set to overtake the developed areas of the world (U.S., E.U. and Japan) by 2050.

GDP and profitability of Bric countries will overtake developed areas by 2050

Long-term GDP forecasts for Bric countries show that tomorrow's giants, China and India, seem set to take first and third place on a GDP basis by 2050 (with the US in second place), shifting the centre of gravity of the global economy.

The reaction from the front pages of the New York Times is a renewed emphasis on education reform. The results from Shanghai’s latest PISA exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, are intimidating for a nation like ours, which is struggling to engage its young people in formal education. Arne Duncan is calling it a “wake up call”, and other former government officials refer to this as a Sputnik moment.

The knowledge that our educational system is being outperformed in comparison to other developed economies is well known. Thomas Friedman in his Flat Earth rants is calling for a Teach For America West Point academy to train the best and the brightest to teach in our nation’s schools. He is echoing the refrain from the new generation of education reformers that since the early 1990’s have pushed for data driven reforms, teacher accountability, and school choice.

The challenge to educate all of America’s children to high standards is important enough to be the one of the few issues in contemporary politics that crosses political lines. Although it is anathema to ideologies from either side, Obama Democrats and a new breed of mayors are joining with hedge fund managers and Republican governors to embrace the market and implement innovation in an industry that has been resistant to change. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberger’s $100 million parachute of aid to the city of Newark is the most recent public example. Democrats for Education Reform and The Manhattan Institute are on the same side.

"Rather than expecting new funding from Washington or from the cash-strapped state government, Booker has turned to private foundations and charities for help in enacting his agenda." Steven Malanga, The Next Wave of Urban Reform: Mayors Cory Booker and Dave Bing fight to Save two of America’s Most Distressing Cities, City Journal

For the progressive educators who have worked tirelessly to make a bad system more humane, those committed to the Civil Rights agenda of making public education a true source of social mobility, pace of privatization in the system is scary. Stan Karp, from Rethinking Schools, sees the rush to fund unproven and un-scaleable innovations as dangerous to the public good. They have created an entire website to dispel the myths of the Michelle Rhee, Harlem Children Zone, and the No Excuse for Poverty model.

“The larger goal is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.” Stan Karp, Superhero School Reform Heading Your Way, November 29^th, 2010

"There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye." Jonathan Alter, A Case of Senioritis, Newsweek, November 28th, 2010

The battle over education reform is big business! The Unions are big, the Gates Foundation is big, Rupert Murdock is big, but our children’s future is bigger! Fighting to hold onto the industrial model of education that has served our nation’s children so poorly does not make sense to me. Embracing innovation and redesigning the role of the educator and the learner for 21^st Century learning is paramount.

We need to be careful to have a real conversation about what this change is going to be and who is going to drive it. Private foundations are pushing the agenda, but who are they accountable to? Data driven reform is reshaping how we teach, but what are these exams really assessing? In the end, can we beat China at their own game?

A 259-page Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the latest Pisa results notes that throughout its history, China has been organized around competitive examinations. “Schools work their students long hours every day, and the work weeks extend into the weekends,” it said.

Top Test Scores From China Stun Educators, New York Times, December 7th, 2010

According to many Middle class parents, probably not… http://www.racetonowhere.com/

Or can we develop an education system that is adaptable enough, supportive enough, and honest enough to do what we have never been able to do… connect our poorest citizens to the people and resource rich environments around them and stop viewing the competition of nation states as a zero sum game. A rising tide lifts all ships and the increasing prosperity of a developing world is not a threat, but a goal we should all responsibly work towards!

The End of Poverty!

"Currently the international-development community is having a love affair with the mobile phone…disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux."
- "Can Technology End Poverty" by Kentaro Toyama, Boston Review November/December 2010

I love the idea that technology can not only produce incredible gains of productivity and prosperity, but that with ubiquitous application it will eradicate extreme poverty and lead to global harmony... I just don't buy it! In Jeffrey Sachs' 2005 book, The End of Poverty, he devotes the first two chapters to painting A Global Family Portrait and The Spread of Economic Prosperity. In graphs and a brief overview he explains how over the past 200 years the world shifted from all regions supporting a relatively equal living standard, to incredible inequities of global winners and losers. The industrial revolution lead to the United States enjoying a twenty-five fold increase in living standards between 1820-1998 (from $1,200 to $30,000), while sub-sahara Africa has increased three fold (from $400 to $1,300). His thesis simplistically stated is,

"I believe the single most important reason why prosperity spread, and why it continues to spread, is the transmission of technologies and the ideas underlying them... The beauty of ideas is that they can be used over and over again, without ever being depleted." (41)

This belief in the benign power of modern technology is fueling a global movement for self-organized learning. The concept children can teach themselves using the web is a powerful idea that is being taken seriously for both the developing world and here in the U.S.

My attention has been peeked recently by University for the People, "the world’s first tuition free online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education." A non-profit founded in 2009, they currently have 500 students from over 100 countries. The idea is pretty incredible, to offer people anywhere in the world access to a free education, as long as they have an internet connection, English fluency, and are self-motivated.

Professor Sugata Mitra from Newcastle University, is in the process of developing (SOLE), a Self Organized Learning Environment, based on his research dropping technology off in India, Cambodia and other parts of the developing world. He's the guy who in 1999 put a computer terminal in a Dehli slum and recorded the effect. His belief is that young people can learn to solve problems collaboratively without direct instruction or facilitation from adults. A professor at Newcastle University in England he is sure to grow in popularity as technological autonomy is the zeitgeist.

The democratic possibilities of learning technology is most popularly championed by One Laptop Per Child. Through the development of a cheap, durable portable computer, the XO, it has reached over 1.85 million people around the world. The educational impact and feasibility of programs such as this are attempting to reach the over 1 billion children without access to universal primary education.

You combine these ITC4D, Information and Communications Technology for Development, innovations with the revolution taking place in the education market here in the U.S., and you see just how disruptive the impact of digital learning is on our education system.

The most public example of this movement here in the U.S. is Chancellor Klein's decision to leave the New York City Department of Education to work for Rupert Murdock's new educational technology division. Murdock in one fell swoop bought influence into the nation's largest public school system with 1.1 million students. Klein had mixed success with the Small School movement and increasing efficiency with data driven report cards, but his most lasting legacy may be his investment in the School of One model. Together with the $360 million purchase of 90% of Wireless Generation, the tech platform behind the city's Aris school data port, Murdock is poised to be an immediate player in the personalized online learning revolution.

This rose colored world of autonomous learning is attractive. It promises to close the digital divide and offer learning anytime, anywhere... a transformation of learning through the proliferation of hardware and its ubiquitous application. Kentaro Toyama, from the University of Berkeley's School of Information, critiques this assessment in a forum on Can Technology End Poverty for the Boston Review. I liked it because it questions the frenzy to embrace technological innovations. Here's what I see missing in this debate on the glorification of technology to promote universal education:

The Social Context of Poverty

Kids with schools and access to technology choose not to pursue education! The U.S. has a 70% high school graduation rate and a 30% college graduation rate. For low income communities only 25% of those who start college graduate within six years. Why? It's not lack of access to information, but a lack of understanding of how to navigate the system and support systems to overcome obstacles along the way. Yes, kids love video games, you tube videos and texting their friends, but how many know how to translate their geeking out and entertainment into real value for others. Young people still need adults to role model positive behaviors, to provide a safe haven in an often dangerous indifferent world, and to inspire them to dream a bigger world. Our current factory model of education is broke, but automating the assembly line isn't the solution. Free the workers (ie. teachers) and products (ie. students) from the one size fits all approach, but you need to offer an alternative, more adaptable, and people rich learning environment to take its place.

The reason poor kids struggle with learning is because poverty is stressful and it delays intellectual development. Take a middle class or wealthy child at birth from the global elite and put them in the South Bronx, East Oakland, Southern Sudan, or New Dehli. The struggle to make ends meet, to be emotionally and physically ready to learn, and to understand how to apply knowledge to solving real world problems is not easy. Access to information alone will not solve the resource and experience gap which is at the heart of global inequity.

Content Knowledge & Human Networks

Content knowledge in isolation is not valuable. We learn best in community and for a social purpose. The grammar translation method used in most American high schools to teach foreign language is ineffective, but an immersion experience in a foreign country works. Why? Because relationships with native speakers, the innate desire to communicate, and real world applications of knowledge foster intrinsic motivation and deep learning. The social context of learning counts. Software programs that drill content or skills through games may be engaging, but unless you are connecting with native language speakers from around the world through Skype you are not reaching the potential of the technological tool. Technological tools are only as powerful as the human networks willing to connect with learners on the other side.

Credibility
The value of a college degree is not just a summation of the skills and content knowledge acquired through years of study, but the relationships and credibility a degree confers on the individual. Graduating from an Ivy League school puts you in contact with a certain social class which opens opportunities. Anya Kemenetz, in her book on higher education DIY U (Do It Yourself University) does a fine job describing how a university education became a part of the American dream, and how the proliferation of higher education has not had the intended effect. Private university tuition has skyrocketed, predatory for-profit colleges have loaded the poor with student debt they cannot default on, and public education has buckled under a dwindling tax base. Community college is not a true stepping stone to a B.A. degree and many public state schools like the U.C. system and S.U.N.Y. are raising fees and serving a more priviledged student population.

In order for virtual learning communities to be valuable and allow their graduates to find work and access in the real world these learning communities need to be validated. Our current higher education system uses high costs and selectivity to develop brand scarsity. In a world where a college degree is free and open to everyone, how are employers going to evaluate new hires. What is the value of a college degree when everyone has one? How can virtual learners translate their learning communities into strong social networks that translate into social capital and mobility? In a world where college grads are already driving taxis and waiting tables, what will we do with millions more?

Conclusion:
I know that we are looking at a watershed moment in education, where the rules of the game are about to change. Today we are told that teacher quality is the most important factor in student achievement and at the same time that the internet will do the teaching for us. It cannot be both. We are building the technological platforms, but are we building the human capital to make them work?

Feast on Education!

Yesterday morning I attended a cool event put on by Feast, a salon on Education at Soho House in the meatpacking district off 14th street in Manhattan. The room was filled with investors and innovators eager to learn more about the new tech market in education. Presentations were made by Diana Rhoten of Startl, Brian Fitzgerald of Newton, and one of the founders of Feast, upstart Michael Karnjanaprak who is launching Skillshare, a technology platform to learn anything from anyone. The event speakers were interviewed by Amanda Fairbanks of Good magazine.

Here are the lessons I took from the day:

1) Education is a hot topic. It's not just Waiting for Superman hype. The business and tech communities are turning to the education industry as one of the last unbreached frontiers of industrial America. Centralized institutions are becoming decentralized, spiders are becoming star fish, as often happens through the disruptive influence of innovations. The publishing, media, entertainment and business worlds have already been transformed. Education, however, the institution of schools, is so byzantine and stratified, so rigid and complex, that the internet has barely made a dent in how children formally learn and how educational resources are allocated. The system is so huge, the rituals so entrenched, and until recently the educational outcomes so ignored, that there has been no real focus on transforming the system... that is until now.

2) Learning anytime, anywhere is what everyone wants. Diana Rhoten spoke about the adaptive capabilities of computers to really personalize learning, and Brian Fitzgerald of Newton expressed his companies interest in creating a tech portal to facilitate differentiated instruction. Rather than having a classroom of 30 kids all working on the same skill at the same time, each learner can use technology to have a personalized, differentiated experience, facilitated by a teacher, who is more of a coach, than the sole knowledge authority learners must acquiesce to. This is where the digital learning space wants to head... There are no examples of truly personalized learning spaces, that are authentic, socially constructed, and easy to use; but that is the challenge for folks to create... something that delivers on user center design principles and works with real learners.

3) Michael K. made a beautiful and funny presentation on deschooling society. He talked about the Wire, season 4, and his own boredom at the University of Virginia as a starting point for getting interested in education reform. His thesis is that spiraling costs of higher education, artificially supported by Federal student loan subsidies are creating a trillion dollar student loan debt, surpassing personal credit card debt, and the bubbles going to burst. You can watch just about any lecture on any topic from the brightest minds in the world online at places like Academic Earth. If you know how to learn and you are not afraid to create your own future, you do not need college. None of us should have to pay for schooling... at least not a giant fee for four years from one institution. Learning should be more autonomous and interest driven. Access to the internet is all we need!

4) Lastly, there is a whole bunch of money ready to be thrown into digital learning. Foundations and venture capitalists are not investing in traditional schooling or youth development programs, but if disruptive technology is attached, and it can transform the way learning looks and feels, there are tremendous financial resources at the ready. The problem is there are not enough good innovations, 'shovel ready' projects. We have demand, but no supply. And as Diana Rhoten warns, if too many mediocre or poorly designed learning products get funded and they flop, the market will dry up and schools will remain unchanged. We cannot have another tech bubble burst in education. The system needs transformation... we finally have a wide cross section of business and technology interested in shifting from entertainment to learning. The products can go belly up, but the demand for innovations that level the playing field and make learning powerful and engaging will not.

Here are my thoughts for the Feast Salon community:

1) The education market is not new, it's always been here. High school dropouts have been around since the institutions developed, not just since the Gates Foundation started addressing the problem. A Nation at Risk, the seminal report in 1983 brought the discussion of educational outcomes to a national audience, but the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education is the more famous demarcation. The case was not just about ending segregation, it was about creating a more just and equal society. We need to remember that education is a civil rights issue and our schools have become increasingly resegregated.

Education is the cornerstone of a democratic society, and inherent to conceptions of social mobility in a meritocracy. Learning is a human right. As entrepreneurs enter the education field they need to understand the context of educational history. The education of vast segments of the U.S. population have never been a concern of the powers that be. That we now recognize the imperative to educate all American's is a wonderful thing. Frederick Douglass would be thrilled. Equity and access to new digital learning technologies is essential to closing the experiential and achievement gap. We need to be careful technology does not further polarize our global society.

2) Deschooling Society is not a new concept. The progressive education movement was born with John Dewey and the rise of public schools following the Ellis Island immigration waves. Ivan Illich wrote his book of this title back in 1971. His idea was to invest the resources wasted on schooling in other benefits for the social good like transportation and meeting people's basic needs. Without a conception of the internet, he envisioned people posting their interests in some crazy bulletin board system, that allowed people to create their own learning communities. The web is making his dream of decentralized education a reality. Illich was influenced by Brazilain political and educational theorist Paolo Friere who is the father of critical pedagogy. He himself was influenced by Liberation theology and Latin America's historical argument with itself, over class and identity. For me Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience is the manifesto for self-determination. What makes today exciting, is we actually possess a tool, in the internet, to make these visionary ideals a pragmatic reality.

3) "Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean its going to solve your problem."- M.C. The internet by itself is not going to solve the problem. Everyone is trying to create the killer app, the game changing device, but education is not a software or hardware problem. Education is a habit of mind and the heart. We now have a powerful learning tool that we barely understand how to harness, but it will be transformative. The key is not to get as stuck on the tool as we did on the school. It is not about the institution of schooling, just as it is not about the handheld device. The moderator asked Brian Fitzgerald what the limits of technology are, and I would say it is that a smart phone cannot love you back.

On Maslow's hierarchy of needs the top of the triangle is all about social connection. If technology is just giving us an adaptive, human like software app to learn with, but is not facilitating real human connections, it is not developing our capacity to love and learn in community. Ultimately, we all need to stretch our minds and our hearts. This is the bottom line, which together with the profit margin, social entrepreneurs need to focus on.

4) Lastly, the reason not to just blow up schools or shut down universities is because we need to bridge social capital. Schools do it poorly, because they isolate young people from the rest of society, but the reason why kids show up at all is to see their friends. Schools are a powerful social experience. In a fractured world, segregated by race and class, they have the potential to be hubs of interconnectivity where one can encounter and interact with a wider world.

It is important to create subway cars for learning. The NYC subway is the greatest untapped marketplace for ideas in America, and possibly the world. Its the only place I know of where wall street hedge fund managers, store owners from Nigeria, NYU university students from Iowa, Dominican teenagers from Washington Heights, musicians from Juliard, and any conceivable variation of the human experience rub shoulders on a daily basis. True, most of the time, we're fighting for space or trying to ignore our environment becuase its just too much stimulation, but people are fascinating to one another. If only we could find a way to communicate.

Collaboration, real world problem solving, and cross-cultural competency are the keys to learning in the 21st Century. The internet and software programs cannot do this alone. It is going to take courage, flexibility, and a deep understanding of the interdependent nature of living systems to transform learning. We need to transform schools into porous hubs that are safe places for youth to learn to navigate an immersive information society. It is going to take caring adults, hip to the transformations of digital learning, to pave the way.

Deschooling Society!

“The Time/Place Edge represents the destruction of the old view of education happening within the four walls of the classroom, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., with some homework thrown in after school. Repeat for 180 days, 31 weeks. Take three months off for the summer. Repeat. That’s the old but persistent view of when and where learning happens. But when the world’s learning resources are always “on,” 24/7/365, the institution of “school” is gradually shifting to enable learning, “anytime, anywhere.”

- Education Nation by Milton Chen, p139

As a society we have confused learning with schooling and schooling with a very narrow definition of learning. Young people are forced to into passive roles and are instructed in discrete courses turning to math at 8am, history at 9am, English at 10am, etc... with each teacher offering them a different instructional style, assessment model, and level of engagement. As an educator, you teach the same lesson 5 times a day, or depending on your preps, three different lessons multiple times a week. For the most part, professional educators work in isolation, because there is little time built into the work week for collaboration and your colleagues each come to the classroom with their own philosophies of learning and personal experience.

School is one size fits all, but in reality we are each different shapes. We take what we can from formal instruction, but learn most through the social interactions, side conversations, bird walks, and hands on experiences we are drawn to. Our best teachers are the ones we choose from our peer group's, family, people we are casually exposed to (aka social network), books we read, movies we watch and music we listen to. We learn the things that really interest us, the stuff we need to get by or get out from where we are, and life has no grades.

I am an educator who never liked school, but always loved learning. I struggled fitting into a system I did not really believe in, but knew that if you want to have an impact you need to go where the kids are. I've participated in the Small School movement in NYC and gotten a taste of the International Baccalaureate model and the non-profit youth development world. Education reforms from the progressive to the conservative abound, but unless we fundamentally alter the one to many learning model of schools, and the way we reward kids for what they do outside of school (ie. family and community resources, homework, summer enrichment), we are never going to have an equitable educational system.



How do you transform learning to be more personalized, learner centered and real? I have spent a fair amount of time grappling with this question in the wilderness, meaning with kids and a small network of educators. I now see a whole cultural shift has taken place since I got involved in education in the mid-1990s. This shift has been brought about by the new cache for smart people to solve problems of equity and poverty. Education is no longer the isolated Cuban economy of the Cold War, the place for draft dodgers and do-gooders. No longer a profession of martyr's waiting to retire on our pensions, we are the home to market driven innovation, or at least have the potential to be. The influx of Teach For America data driven reforms, the Gates Foundation, and spotlighting 21st Century Learning are all changing the field. While many of my liberal friends want to keep education in the boxed-in world we grew up with, and the business class dismisses teachers as the problems, it is really the synergy of business, technology and educational entrepreneurs that are going to transform the system. Mobile digital media and new technological social innovations cannot be built by programmers and MBAs alone. It is going to take buy-in from educators to de-school society. (The kids are already there!)

Startl: November Design Boost!

"In an age when more youth are dropping out of school at alarming rates, yet research is consistently showing the high levels of engagement youth are exhibiting in various media platforms, it is incumbent upon educators to take notice and indeed redirect teaching methods to meet the needs and interests of students."

Design for Learning in the 21st Century, p 13

Last night I attended the Startl technology boost at the Hub Soma in San Francisco. Statrl, is an educational innovation incubator, distinct from the Race to the Top Department of Ed approach, in that they are working from the outside in, focused on the edge of innovation and not institutionalizing transformation. They are looking for ideas, new tech products, hybrid teams of educators/business/technology entrepreneurs that have the capacity to turn big ideas into pragmatic solutions. They have the support of non-profit foundations like Gates, Hewlett, Pearson and MacArthur and for-profit partners like IDEO, and DreamIt Ventures. This is the cutting edge and they have the money, or can at least create the space to bring entrepreneurs and funding together. Here's what I saw and what I didn't see at their November Design Boost.

The 10 mobile learning products in the competition crossed the spectrum from math, literacy, language, and the environment. There were some really cool innovations like Coursebook's use of "duration" to help learners filter for web content in a chosen interest area, and Motion Math's use of tilting, wii style total physical response for math games. Voxy focused on super sexy high interest media for language learning and Bygone has a concept to make history immersive by tagging stories to city blocks. Each is in its development phase, and is going to grow and change as long as they can drill down on their concept and find the support to keep going. Most of the teams came from university's (Stanford, NYU, UC Irvine), or established non-profits. A couple were for-profit start-ups.


I like where Startl is going with their approach to bringing new ideas to the market. Here is what I thought was missing:


Mobile learning is ultimately about connecting people. Hand held games that get learners interacting with software is okay, but ultimately empty. None of the business start-ups had any people on the other side. The only concept that had a real world social focus was Powershift. Without the social component this platform is not reaching its potential.


Cultural competency is a huge part of 21st Century Learning, and I did not see it in the products or the audience. The middle class, college bound student is doing fine in the current system. The 50% of urban kids who drop out of high school and the entire developing world are the real market for mobile learning. The story lines of most of the products were set for a generic white audience, when learning needs to be much more local and global. Focusing on I-phone Apps and Ted talks, the Western canon of fairy tales or the crazy engagement factor of technology and gaming is cool, but who is the audience for these products?

A social purpose is key to making learning interactive and meaningful. Teaching math or literacy in isolation, without a context, is not engaging. Problem posing education needs to be more than drilling discreet skills. It is about creating solutions to complex problems using interdisciplinary information, real people and real resources.


Implementation plans for how to get products to learners is a huge hurdle. I-tunes and the App store are good for a certain class of folks, but there needs to be another way to reach the masses. Expecting teachers or parents to be hip to the e-revolution, or pay out of pocket for innovations is not reasonable, especially when the digital divide means student access to hand held technology is not ubiquitous. Schools need to work on their tech policies for this revolution to take off, and companies need to continue to bring down the cost of signing on. Knowledge needs to be shared, and innovations institutionalized. If digital mobile technology is made with only the well resourced class in mind we will not close the achievement gap, but exacerbate it.



Digital mobile media is the technological tool that is going to break wide open the factory model of schooling. Young people now have tiny computers in their pockets that can connect them to the wider world. It's being harnessed in affluent pockets around the country, but this social innovation is not reaching the majority of young people or educators. Adopting innovations is not easy, and what's currently being offered does not do the medium justice, but it is only going to get better, especially if more folks join the conversation.

The Right Kind of Networks!

"From this story you can see that economic power in the 21st century is not going to look like economic power in the 20th century. The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power... In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks."

"The Crossroads Nation", David Brooks, New York Times Nov. 8th, 2010

I love the way David Brooks paints these broad strokes of U.S. History. All of these op-ed columnists are so good at condensing truly complex questions into bite sized morsels for us to chew on. I like the way David's mind works, his wide reading, and his politeness. He strikes me as a gentlemen, and in a paper as liberal as the NY Times, a radical centrist. My problem with Mr. Brooks is I have never met any people in the America he writes about. Its a novel with big ideas, but no characters.

I agree with his central thesis, the U.S. does not know who we are as a nation and we do not have a vision for who we will be in the future. We invented the information age, and we are the only truly global nation on the planet. It is only natural we will remain the largest hub in the global economy in the near future, not because we consume all of the world's goods, or because we sell the most weapons, but because we are the home to innovation, the meritocracy that attracts the best and the brightest.

I just don't buy that in an increasingly interconnected world, where learning and work are decentralized, the brain drain will continue unabated. Is a world where the talent leaves Latin America, Africa and Asia for the U.S. a world we want to live in anyway. The economic engine of the United States was fueled by slavery when we had a cotton economy and fueled by cheap immigrant labor during the industrial revolution. The American corporate economy today is dominated by finance and technology, not really labor intensive industries. The jobs of today and tomorrow require a highly educated workforce capable of complex problem solving, interdisciplinary thinking, and cross-cultural collaboration. These skills are the engine of the 21st Century, but the power elite have forgotten we cannot just import tomorrow's work force. The children of previous migration waves, forced and unforced, are still here. An economy based solely on innovation by the elite, without addressing the educational inequity in the U.S. is incredibly narrow and short sighted. An America where the few work and create and the rest of us play with our smart phones sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, and misses the point of network theory.

And in case you think there is not a problem with education check out the results of the National Assessment for Education Progress for Black males:

Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected

by Trip Gabriel, New York Times Nov. 9th, 2010

"Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys."

In this article the solutions to the achievement gap are retraining the parenting of Black families to be more middle class and a No Excuse, Tough Love approach to teaching, aka Harlem Children Zone Waiting For Superman model.

Making Jim Crow work is not a solution to the achievement gap. We have an experience gap, a family and community resource gap, a segregated society with folks on the inside and too many on the outside. We have a global economic network that leaves out billions of human beings. We need systems that link to more nodes (humans) and unleash the untapped potential within our black and brown communities. Skimming off the global top is not a viable strategy for 21st Century America, and it does nothing for the moral and economic impetus to develop our own communities.

Reflections on Exile in My Endles New York

"We are experiencing the decline of the American age. But how does national or imperial decay influence the lifecycle of a world city?"

My Endless New York, By Tony Judt, New York Times Nov. 7th, 2010

Imperial decay as seen through the eyes of the cultural elite, whether it be New York, Paris or London has never been my thing. I love New York, am fascinated by its streets, the faces on the subway, the determination to get where you need to go. Since moving to California, I am removed from its beehive activity, and watch from a place removed. I am of it, always returning to it, but not in it. A world city is a city of exiles, and the true exile experience is not the fashionable streets of Soho, its not an art or a theatre scene, though nothing stimulates creativity like dislocation. The exile is lost, neither here nor there, not American and no longer Ghanaian, or Colombian, or Korean. Not from the South or North alone, but a piece of all places, at home in some, a stranger to others.

As an Anglo Rican, a mestizo Puerto Rican, who's grandparents arrived in NY in 1927 from a small island conquered by the U.S. after being conquered by Spain, a banana republic in a beautiful sea. NY to me is the African and the Taino, mixed with the Italian, the Irish, the German, and Jew. It is my family born in Spanish Harlem, moved to Union Ave and 161st, and the success of constant movement, from the Bronx to Westchester to whereever the heart and mind and hands can take you. It is the marriage of my father to my mother, the city cat and the country mouse, and the strength it takes to raise a family in this crazy world. It is as the Ric Burns documentary embues so well, a city for reinventing yourself.

I'm less concerned with the tassels and bows of world class city status, the cultural chic who jet set for shopping and parties, or even the intellectuals who once used to crowd City College or take center stage like Baldwin and Mailer. The cultural or intellectual center of an age, the New York centric focus of an early day, is pretty to read about in books but it denies too much lived experience. Our problem is the narrow focus of our humanity, our unwillingness to embrace the complexity of the exile.

I have a problem with Europeans in New York. They love the un-Americaness of the city. They love to shop and buy Manhattan apartments. They feed off of the world culture produced by its inhabitants while only skimming the surface of reality, never having to fear the loss of self. One of the problems with being rich, is you never have to belong to the places you go. You travel without adapting, without embracing, without ever getting lost.

I love the exile, and people who can express it. When I was younger I loved George Orwell's essays, and his "tourism among the dogs". I also loved V.S. Naipul's novels and the cross roads he describes in the West Indies and East Africa. But no one disrobes them quite like Edward W. Said, the Palestinian literary critic when he writes about Orwell:

"In Down and Out he makes a revealing admission about the nature of the worry that plagued him. Once you hit absolute bottom, he says, there comes a sense that "you have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety." Not standing it- "it" being the psycho-moral strain of falling apart completely, losing your identity as defined for you by where you come from and where most of the time you know you can return. Surely the removal of this last option causes the peculiar dread experienced by Winston Smith during his final ordeal in 1984, the more so after having lost the cosy sanctuary he shared with Julia above Mr. Carrington's shop. Just as surely, the off-stage presence of home and the possibility of a phone call for money to Eric Blair's (aka G. Orwell) Aunt Nellie constitute the narrator's bad faith when he was a plongeur in Paris or a tramp in England."

Reflections on Exile, by Edward W. Said "Toursims Among the Dogs" p. 95

Like Thoreau getting a weekly pie from his mother during his solitude at Walden Pond or having his taxes paid by friends after one night of prison, Orwell is too addicted to comfort to know what it is to hit bottom. We live in an age where the prestige of eradicating poverty is moving mountains, but institutions like UC Berkeley ignore East Oakland, 96th Street on the East side still divides the rich from the projects of Harlem, and the privileged are voyeurs but not participants in a faceless world.

Interest Driven Work!

In the 3rd grade I remember learning how to write and multiply through wrote repetition. My memory is as an 8 year old kid, feeling like I was in prison, because I had no control over my own learning. I needed to complete worksheets or practice writing the same sentence over and over again. I drew a line down the page and added dashes to form the "T". I spent most of my time daydreaming or socializing, thinking of kickball or Star Wars. Because I was not as gifted as my older sister or other kids, they wanted to put me in special education. When I was older, I learned the game, and could complete the work without giving it my full attention. But that was only after I decided I would never judge my self-worth from a grade, because the stress I felt from the workload in middle school almost gave me a nervous breakdown. I kept my inner life rich through friendships and books, my family and imagination, bidding my time until I could make my own decisions about where to live, who to work with, and towards what purpose. My formal education was complete by the age of 21, but my real education was just beginning!

Work, the place where most of us spend our time, the activities that give us our status, that stretch or dull our minds and connect us to a wider world needs to be transformed. It should be more flexible, and purposeful, self-directed, and autonomous. Living is about mastery, not seat time. Rigor is about complexity not quantity. Success is not a number.

Everywhere I turn I read the same argument. Daniel Pink and Howard Gardner are writing about the kind of mind we need to be cultivating for the 21st century. People who can synthesize information, who are intrinsically motivated, and work collaboratively on real world problems will have jobs. Those that only know how to follow directions or draw inside the lines will be automated or outsourced.

Assembly lines are great at doing things fast in one direction. But if you need to make adjustments, if you need to think on your feet and adapt, assembly lines snap. We live in a world where the jobs of tomorrow have not been created yet, where we need to find opportunities and create our own value, and so many of our institutions are stuck in the pre-information revolution age, Skinner's behavioral modification model, Ford's factory. Too slow to react, people are stuck doing meaningless tasks, instead of discovering the challenging world around them.

How many people do you know really love what they do? I bet its the same number who get to create our own work day? Institutions are so scared of freedom because in a Hobbsian world people need to be controlled or they will not produce value. But what science is telling us, is what many of us have known all along. Curiosity, a desire for mastery, collaboration is self-organizing and needs no task master.

How do we transform institutions, like schools, so they actually facilitate innovation and collaboration, build off of learner interests and prepare youth for a world with no guarantees?

Gitanjali's Vision

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power,- that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old worlds die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from thy heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, XXXVII

When the heart most wants to hide, it must find a new way to be itself. When the mind hits against the walls of its thinking, it must find a way to walk through walls. Tagore is a poet and a teacher and a visionary who has no equal in the 20th century, and he was completely unknown to me until I visited India in August of 2009. I had no idea he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was the first non-Westerner to do so, nor that he was a world class thinker in debate with Einstein, Gandhi, and other great writers, scientists, thinkers and feelers of his day. He established a school in his native Bengal at Shantiniketan, where he experimented with an educational philosophy based on direct experience and educated the children of India's political liberation movement. I admire him immensely because of his global vision, his marriage of East and West, his arguments against Gandhi's rejection of modernity, and his ennobling of learning. Together with Rumi, another poet with an expansive embracing of humanity, still relevant today, I am in awe at the beauty of the worlds they reveal with their words and wonder at the stilted legacy handed down to us today.

I never heard of Tagore until I spent time in bookshops in New Dehli, and I did not know anything about India, except the Christ like story of Gandhi and the wonders of the information revolution in Bangalore from the pages of the New York Times. I was never taught anything in school about Asia or Africa except through the lens of contact with Europeans. The language, geography, politics, literature, history, and contributions of billions were left out of my formal education. Cultural nuances that make up one out of six people on the planet were never discussed. I travel, I read, I teach. I love literature and I love history. I've been to 27 countries and speak a handful of languages. But when I arrived in New Dehli, and later arrived in Ghanali village in the Punjab, I was starting from zero.

My friend Christine Yap, had arranged a visit for a group of youth and educators to explorer her husband's homeland, and I jumped at the opportunity to immerse myself in a new culture. I love international travel and global education. I 2006 with Carlos Herrera I founded a non-profit, Education Without Borders Intl., because I believe in experiential, self-directed learning. While in Punjab, and later in Himachal Pradesh and Nepal I soaked up as much as I could. I read Amartya Sen, and learned as some Punjabi and Hindi... Me tori Hindi al Punjabi ati he. Muche chai acha lag ta he. I spent time with my new friends in Sikh temples, on the back of motor cycles, drinking chai, dancing banghara, and discussing culture. A world that no one in my life had every told me was valuable contained 1/6 of the world's population, is the fastest growing economy, one of the oldest centers of human civilization. It had never been on my cultural radar before. And despite the shifting sands of the Global economy, it is still not on the radar of most Americans.

In fact, most of the world is not on the radar of your average U.S. citizen, despite the fact that we are the home to the most cosmopolitan society on the planet. In the Bay Area where I live, or New York City where I was born, there is not a nation not represented, nor a language family not spoken by someone. As a people we are all new to this land, hybrids, and yet we are caught up in the cultural wars of the 19th century, the ethnic ghettos- balkanization- and Americanization response of the early 20th century, and the slick corporate homogenization of post-war America. Everyone is talking about the 21st Century, lamenting the ending of an American golden age, because the free ride of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism is running out and a flat world is catching up. Op-ed columnists bemoan the lack of optimism, economists the lack of consumer confidence, and everyone has someone to blame. I don't think complaining about George Bush or big government, the Harlem Children's Zone or teacher's unions, the Tea Party or the Oscar Grant verdict, or any of the old conversations are going to get us to where we need to be. As my mentor, Steve Jubb says, that's still fighting inside the box. We need to embrace the complexity of our history, of our politics, of our heterogeneous population and see it for the advantage it is. In an age of interdependence, where we recognize that humanity is part of an ecosystem, a living network, the United States is a hub that cannot fail. Diversity is a strength. Global connections are a strength. Life long learning is a necessity.

I visited a state college in Rupnagar, Punjab. In an English class I introduced myself and had a conversation with a handful of students, explaining my interest in their education system. I was curious because I know that in the near future, "China will be the world's largest economy, India the second largest, and the United States the third." A young woman, the daughter of one of the school's professors stood up and corrected me. "No, no, no. INDIA will be number one, China second, and the U.S. third." She left no room for doubt. And based on the growth of e-based business, the hunger of a growing educated class in the developing world, and the quagmire of American politics and institutions, the realignment will happen quicker than we know it. But why should that be scary? Why is permanent U.S. hegemony an ideal in a world where 1 billion are overweight, 1 billion malnourished? Why shouldn't the world's two largest nations, with two of the largest culutral heritages, not have the largest economies 80-90 years after the end of European colonization?

In this blog, the first time I have ever put my thoughts online, I hope to explore issues of complexity. Why is it, an educated fairly worldly person like myself had a stereotypical-romanticized view of India, when it is the home to so much wisdom, knowledge and human experience? Why is it history in the U.S. is so narrowly defined as the European experience? Why, as an educator on the front lines in the Bronx, and Pasadena, completely committed to innovation did I miss the e-learning revolution happening around me, in pockets around the country? Why does innovation travel so slowly in the field of education? Why do business people think educators are incompetent and why do educators think money is bad and the people who have it are greedy? Why do people like simple narratives for complex problems, and how does that keep us from solutions? How can we change from a monolingual nation, with a multicultural population, in a global economy to embrace the Global Capital of the Americas? And by that I mean the human capital that is the birthright of this hemisphere, home to all of the cultures of the world.