21st Century Learning (it) Magazine

An article I wrote for (it) Magazine...

http://www.itmagazine.net/make-(it)-happen/call-to-action-issues/21st-century-learning/

The HEART of (it):

The Digital Age is here, yet students in the United States
are at risk of being left behind by the slow pace of
technology adoption in schools.

21st Century Learning seeks to harness the potential of
technology to better prepare students for the real world.

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Contributed By Alfredo Mathew


 

The movement to promote digital learning innovations in K-16 education is focused on increasing engagement, collaboration, and personalization for an interdependent world.

The most powerful socializing experience in the United States are our schools. The school experience is deeply tied into what it means to be an American, and the quality of this experience for our most vulnerable citizens will determine our prospects for the future. Today, more than at any time in its roughly 200-year history, the way we learn, from whom, and toward what end is being transformed. This is because the disrupting innovations of digital learning are coinciding with a reorganizing of the post-WWII world, forcing the U.S. to reconsider its relationship to learning and schooling in a rapidly changing world.

21st Century Learning is the new paradigm that is reshaping higher education, and in small pockets innovating K-12 education around the country. Loosely defined, it is a movement to promote increased collaboration, real-world problem solving and personalization through the application of web-based technology platforms. From the personal computer to the mobile phone, the information revolution of the past three decades has reshaped the way we communicate with one another. Yet, our education system has been slow to respond to these changes. The movement to promote 21st Century Learning is an attempt to harness the potential of new digital learning technologies to engage and better prepare our youth to navigate a more competitive, interdependent, and information rich world.

I am not a technologist. I am an urban educator who has taught in the public schools of New York and California for the past 12 years. I consider myself a progressive educator with roots in the Small School movement in the Bronx, who currently teaches at a charter school in Oakland. I know reading and direct experience are the most powerful learning experiences for young people. I also know consistent relationships with a diverse network of caring adults are the key to any child's healthy development over a lifetime. I am embracing digital learning, because I recognize that the challenges we face at closing the achievement gap between racial groups and addressing entrenched poverty and cultural isolation are not possible through the current system of schooling. Despite the common critique of low-quality teachers as the cause of low achievement in our schools, I believe the structure of segregated mass schooling perpetuates inequity. Our best hope is to shed the skeleton of schools for the more personalized approach offered by digital technologies and new ways of organizing our limited time and resources to support young people.

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The SCOPE of (it):
The United States is the world leader in educational investment, yet ranks only 23rd in science, 17th in reading and 31st in math among 65 different countries. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) is a national organization that seeks to harness the power of technology to help solve this gap.

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THE PROBLEM
Our schools are being asked to educate all young people to the same high standards for the first time in our nation's history. The 2001 No Child Left Behind mandate laid down the challenge to close the achievement gap and prepare today's increasingly diverse youth to replace the retiring baby boom generation. By most measures, the current system is not meeting those increased demands.

The United States is the world leader in educational investment, but nations that spend far less are outperforming our students.1 On the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized international exam of 15 year olds in 65 countries,

1) the U.S. ranks 23rd in Science,
2) 17th in Reading, and
3) 31st in Math2

Within the U.S. the achievement gap between racial groups is a stumbling block to economic development in an increasingly diverse nation. Currently only 12 percent of African-American fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, and only 12 percent of African-American eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 38 and 44 percent respectively for their European-American counterparts.3 For Latino students, the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., students earned 11% of associate degrees and 7% of bachelor's degrees from degree-granting institutions in 2005-2006.4 The Obama administration has set a target of closing the achievement gap and increasing the number of Americans with at least 2 years of college from 41% to 60% by 2020.5

It is clear that the federal government is setting high standards, and benchmarks for success. What is unclear is how institutions designed for a different era are going to produce radically better results. Unless we close the achievement gap between racial groups in the U.S. we will not maintain the educated workforce necessary for an information economy in a global marketplace. Furthermore, education and social mobility are a civil rights issue. Brown V. Board of Education catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement in 1954, because access to education is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. In 2011 we are still unable to more fully integrate all our citizens into the American Dream. We cannot continue to defer the Dream for so many of our youth who will make up an increasing percentage of our population.

STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS
The transformation of what schooling looks and feels like has no center, but the federal government is increasingly calling for reform. Public education is constitutionally the prerogative of local government, but the patchwork local approach has lead to concern over the lack of a coherent vision for the nation at a time of increasing globalization and international competition. The vision for how to achieve these bold goals is set forth in the National Education Technology Plan (NETP, November, 2010), which calls for the leveraging of technology to reshape learning environments. The focus is shifting from school-based reforms to learner-centered reforms, which take advantage of 24/7/365 learning made possible by digital technology. The vision of top policy-makers, business leaders, and technologists calls for revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering of the nation's K-16 education system.

"The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions."6

The NETP calls for increasing online and blended learning environments, continuous improvement through data driven feedback loops, and rethinking basic assumptions about learning such as 'seat time' and student motivation.

The digital divide that exists between the young today, and those of us who grew up in a different era, is vast. Digital technology engages young people in a way text and lectures cannot compete with. From a teacher's vantage point, it fundamentally alters who, how, where, when, and why people learn, and our roles in the learning process. We do not know yet know how to harness this new platform to promote learning across the K-16 spectrum, but technology will reshape the learning environment whether institutions are willing or not.

PRINCIPLES REQUIRED FOR SUCCESS
The transformation will not be uniform, but it will share these basic principles:

> Learning Anytime, Anywhere - Mobile technology gives us all access to information and people 24/7/365. Innovations that allow learners to pursue their passions in their own way and at their own pace are key.

> Peer-to-Peer Communication - Influenced by file-sharing technologies like Napster that use the networking capabilities of the internet, P2P communication focuses on collaborative models that connect peers with other learners for projects, and publicly creating knowledge. The old days of writing papers for teachers' eyes only, or in-class presentations that end inside the four walls of the classroom, are being reshaped for the limitless, borderless and instantaneous possibilities of web-based learning. This is a shift from one-to-many, to many-to-many learning opportunities.

> Data-Driven Feedback - In a time of dwindling financial resources for public education and market-driven reforms in the social sector, the use of data to drive instruction and promote accountability will be increasingly important. Currently, we do not have a consensus over how to evaluate teaching and learning. The trend is to increase the transparency of the data we do collect, and to develop new forms of assessment that can drive instruction and the allocation of scarce resources in a meaningful way.

> Personalized Learning Communities - To prepare a workforce for careers in a shifting economy, where many industries are in flux due to the disruptions of technological innovations, the focus of learning needs to shift from mastering a body of knowledge to life-long learning. Learning how to learn and developing a social network of people and resources to achieve self-directed educational goals are the keys to success. This is a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach to a learner-centered design.

> Interdisciplinary Content - The core curriculum of K-12 education needs to expand to include the real-world application of skills such as Global awareness, financial/economic literacy, civic engagement, and health and wellness. The trend is to not study these as isolated disciplines, but as complex problems learners need to solve. Instead of knowledge compartmentalized into distinct silos learning needs to reflect the complexity of the real world.

> Blended Learning - The model of the personal computer and individualized learning is going to need to share space with the social aspects of learning. Online learning will not replace the human touch, but work in concert with face-to-face interactions. Technology is the platform for the exchange of information, but relationships and direct contact with the world are still the most powerful human experiences.

ADDRESSING THE GAPS:
How do we get from here to there?
As we move forward with 21st Century Learning initiatives, it is important we address the gaps that have produced the inequities in the current education system and keep in mind the following:

Social/Emotional well-being is at the heart of learning. Technology can only enhance the human capacities young people already possess. If youth do not have adequate nutrition, caring parents, and their basic needs for safety and community met, they are not going to be ready to learn.

The Digital Divide is a more than just access to the Internet, it has to do with the intensity and purpose of the use. A recent Pew Research Center report says families with incomes over $75,000 are shown to own more technology gear and are more active participants in a range of online activities than lower income families.7 As access to technology 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.

At its heart, 21st Century Learning is about Personalization. Freeing the classroom from textbook and lecture-driven instruction will allow learning to be customized and tap into different learning styles. Personalization needs to be more than shifting to online learning with computer software, but embrace the multiple intelligences and rich experiences learners need to thrive. This will require developing new 21st Century assessments that reflect the real-world skills and competencies learners need to master.

Developing Human Capital is the key to education, regardless of the century. The real power of technology is as a tool to connect people. Digital learning should not replace the human touch, but enhance it. We need to find ways to connect young people to more people, resources, and experiences, not further isolate or disconnect youth from their communities.

Shifting paradigms is never easy, and when it comes to education reform there is no clear example of how digital learning will work for the students currently failing in the traditional system.The current trend of promoting online learning and credit reclamation is inexpensive, but it is not improving the quality of education or the social capital gap at the heart of inequality. Many in the business world see this as an opportunity to privatize education and reduce the power of labor unions and the cost of public entitlement programs at a time of diminishing resources in state budgets. For technologists, it is a simple evolution of artificial intelligence and developing a computer smart enough to be a personal tutor. For these reasons, traditional educators and humanists fear the future of learning. However, I do not see youtube, social networks, and video games replacing the role of parents and educators. Neither the industrial age school nor the Internet can encompass the full extent of our imaginations.

In an age of anxiety over the future, it is easier to look for quick, technological solutions than to embrace the hard conversations over the distribution of resources and social mobility at the heart of the education debate. It is important that the conversation around 21st Century Learning move from the edge of innovation, to the center of the national dialogue around how to promote healthy communities and prepare young people for an increasingly connected world.

SUMMARY
The digital learning revolution is happening, and those institutions and individuals that position themselves to take advantage of the new learning opportunities are going to have an advantage over those who resist these changes. Until now there has been no tool that can be universally applied to personalize learning and extend the reach of individual learners at low cost to the global community. The challenge is not to overly romanticize the impact digital learning will have on our most pressing social problems. We cannot foresee how mobile digital media will remake our most powerful social institutions, but we need to critically embrace the opportunity to use the digital platform to make learning more engaging and relevant. Young people intuitively embrace the new medium. We need to take the leap and do the same.
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1 U.S. Department of Education, 10 Facts About K-12 Education Funding, Washington, D.C., 2005.
2 Sam Dillon, "Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators", New York Times, December 7th, 2010
3 Trip Gabriel, "Proficiency of Black Students is Found to be Far Lower than Expected", New York Times, November 9th, 2010
4 Digest of Education Statistics, 2007, NCES, 2008, Table 274, 272
5 National Education Technology Plan, Executive Summary, November, 2010
6 National Education Technology Plan, Executive Summary, November, 2010
7 Jim Jansen, "The Better-Off Online", Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project, November 24th, 2010


http://www.itmagazine.net/make-(it)-happen/call-to-action-issues/21st-century-learning/

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.