The health benefits of low hanging fruit.

I have a confession to make. When it comes to cell phones and driving I am not always the best role model. I have an eighty minute commute to and from work and most of that time is spent on a rural highway. When driving conditions are good I often, even though when I bought my current phone I said I wouldn't...tweet. I know, I know, it is bad for me, it's not safe, I need to pay attention to the road, etc. etc.

One of the other dangers of tweeting from my phone is the limitation it puts on my ability to communicate. I run the risk of posting something or getting into a conversation that really requires a longer format to make myself understood by others. I ran into this problem today with this tweet:

@garystager @djakes I'm thinking sometimes eating the low-hanging fruit is good for you.less than a minute ago via Mobile Webanderscj
anderscj

to which Jakes replied:

@anderscj Not sure what you mean.less than a minute ago via webDavid Jakes
djakes

I believe I owe David an Gary an explanation.

"Low hanging fruit" is a reference to a part of Gary Stager's talk from Tuesday with Steve Hargadon on his Future of Education series. In that talk Stager describes the "edtech" stuff regarding Web 2.0 as "low hanging fruit" and calls for educators to go beyond that and discover how technology can truly have a transformational impact on learning and schools (Gary, I am with you on this). He then announced his new project, The Daily Papert, which attempts to draw attention to some of the fruit higher up on the tree.

In the car on my way home I began to reflect on Gary's talk and started to think back to two blog posts I read this week: David Jakes' post Change Change and Deven Black's post The Worst Words in Education, and to the State of the Union Address Obama gave on Tuesday.

In his post, Black does a wonderful job of describing the problem we have with our nation's current mindset regarding education and how it is harmful for children. That same mindset we all heard Tuesday night immediately following Stager's talk when the president spent a considerable portion of his state of the union speech on education. The wrong-headed conception of education as something that is competitive and that, as Gary pointed out, it is "a scarce resource" was clearly on display. This view of education and schooling is clear from the namesake of programs like Race to the Top and from the following statements given Tuesday:

If we want to win the future—if we want innovation to produce jobs in America—then we also have to win the race to educate our kids. #SOTUless than a minute ago via HootSuiteBarack Obama
BarackObama

and

"We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated but the winner of the science fair"less than a minute ago via TweetDeckAndy Carvin
acarvin

And as Heidi from New Jersey pointed out from the speech,

this is all particularly important and relevant bc reformers cite models of military as models for education. Teachers are "Nation builders"less than a minute ago via webheidi
towittertoo

All of which beautifully describes the situation we are up against that David Jakes responds/reacts to in his post. That which creates conditions and mandates that "are real and you have to respond." In that post Jakes also explains:

If you face these initiatives, you don’t really worry about Facebook, you don’t worry about social media, you don’t worry about the “conversation,” and you certainly could care less about a disjointed, abstract set of tweets on a Tuesday night in Twitter, all centered around a hashtag.

You don’t even have time for listening to presentations from a “reform” conference. That’s on a Saturday, and I think I’ll spend it with my family, thank you very much. I already know about social bookmarking.

Both Jakes and Stager are addressing the same issue albeit in rather different ways. And both are classifying things like the Reform Symposium and the #edchat conversations that happen as "low hanging fruit." I too have felt this frustration as I believe anyone who has had a deeper experience with how technology can change the nature of learning both for themselves and for their students. I even wrote about it last summer: #edchat You Ain't Got No Pancake Mix!

Today Gary announced his new project, The Daily Papert, and solicited people to send him their favorite Seymour Papert quotes. While not necessarily my favorite, one that has stuck with me because I believe it addresses this issue perfectly comes from chapter 3 of The Children's Machine:

"From an administrator's point of view, it made more sense to put the computers together in one room--misleadingly named "computer lab"--under the control of a specialized computer teacher. Now all the children could come together and study computers for an hour a week. By an inexorable logic the next step was to introduce a curriculum for the computer. Thus, little by little, the subversive features of the computer were eroded away."

That erosion has so fully damaged our school system that today even the "low hanging fruit" has a subversive effect. At the end of the day, after being exhausted and beaten down by the mandates and initiatives forced upon teachers that Jakes and Black describe, the low hanging fruit is often all there is energy left to reach. I know we should strive for more and we absolutely should set higher expectations than just learning about the latest web 2.0 tool but low hanging fruit is still fruit and fruit is still good for you. And, eating the low-hanging fruit will likely make people hungry for what is a little harder to reach.

So, while driving and away from access to a more dynamic way of expressing my thoughts, this is what was going through my head when I posted that tweet about low-hanging fruit.

Maybe the problem is we call it School

@mcleod @willrich45 @djakes

Last year I was involved in a huge school reform project. The idea was to start a new charter school that was sponsored by our local ISD. We were going to call the school Wasioja Valley School. Wasioja Valley School would be a blended online-F2F school where a classroom or two would be leased in ours and neighboring district high schools. The school would exist as a school spread across many schools. The classrooms would be real places but the school itself would be virtual comprised of digitally connected classrooms. The education our charter school would offer would be project-based and learner-centered following the Edvisions model. I wrote the charter grant, assembled a team of educators from our neighboring school districts, I spoke at countless school board meetings, I got district superintendents and school board members involved. I also got people from outside our district involved who had experience starting charter schools and who had experience with they type of pedagogy this school was to employ. Everything seemed like it was falling into place. It was very exciting.

Then, when the time finally came for our school board to officially vote to sponsor this charter school our board chair offered it up for a vote and no one seconded the motion. There it was, no further action could be taken. The only statement regarding it from another board member was something along the lines of, "I am nervous about what this might do for our school."

To pour salt on the wound, a year later I find out that the district has to make $156k in one time budget cuts because of a funding shift by the state government. If they had approved the charter school it would have brought $650k into the three district consortium through federal and state grants (that would have been $216k per district) which would have more than covered this deficit. To help the district cover this temporary budget problem I have now taken an 18 month leave of absence to work for another school (I probably would have had to do this anyway).

So, what was the problem? Wasioja Valley School seemed to be the kind of reform our schools need. It would have addressed the unique needs of learners not served well by our traditional model of education while helping to support the system already in place that does work well for a great many students.

Three things I came across this week seem to answer this for me. First, there is this story shared on a post by Will Richardson (and I am sorry for reprinting the whole thing, don't usually make a habit of it but felt justified in this case):

Recently a school administrator shared a story that reminded me why I need to spend more time talking to more people outside of the echo chamber.

She said that a group of parents had requested a meeting to discuss the methods of a particular teacher and his use of technology. It seemed this teacher had decided to forgo the textbook and have students write their own on a wiki, that he published a great deal of his students’ work online, that he taught them and encouraged them to use Skype to interview people who they had researched and identified as valuable voices in their learning, and that he shared all of his lectures and classwork online for anyone, not just the students in his class, could access them and use them under a Creative Commons license.

When the administrator got the phone call from the parent who wanted to set up the meeting, she asked for some sense of what the problem was. The reply?

“Our students don’t need to be a part of a classroom experiment with all this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with real textbooks and real tests.”

Sigh.

Then, there is this video by a former UNL student who beautifully explains the problems Wasioja Valley School was trying to address:



Finally, I think my answer might be in this TEDxTalk by Scott McLeod:



In that video he mentions that everyone has a preconceived notion of what school is and that we need to educate the public about what school needs to become. Perhaps the problem was we called our reform effort Wasioja Valley School. Had we called it something else I wonder if we would have had a better chance. Perhaps Wasioja Valley Academy would have been a better choice. We did have discussions about it and in the end the problem largely had to do with the fact that this model of education did not fit well with the conceptions people had of what school was supposed to be.

So, now the new question I am struggling with is, "Is it OK to let schools fail?" Is it ok to let our schools become dangerously irrelevant? Perhaps all our collective school reform efforts are in vain. Perhaps we are barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps the common concept of what school is is so ingrained into the public conscious that changing it is near impossible. It takes a long time to redefine a term, do the changes in the world our reform efforts are trying to address require a redefinition faster than it can happen? Perhaps our energy is better spent constructing the next thing, the thing we replace our irrelevant schools with. Perhaps the answer is not school at all but something else entirely. What should we call it? What does it look like? In different speech Dr. McLeod gave to the NEA this winter he said that in our efforts to transform schools into 21st century learning environments that there can be no sacred cows. Perhaps we need to consider "school" in that list. But then, we get into the same argument regarding the word "school" as David Jakes does here with the word "teacher."

Assessment in Web 2.0 Learning Environments

There is an interesting conversation that has started between the writers at Techlearning blog about how we should assess student work when they are using web 2.0 tools. David Jakes raises some interesting questions in his post (that follows a conversation that occured in Dean Shareski's ustream session last night). I tried to post the following comment on that blog tonight but every time I tried it returned as an error. Frustrated I am posting it here:

Jake's Question:
How do you assess contribution in a networked classroom?

Ok, so what does it look like? What's new, what's different, what's the same? Your ideas?

My Comment:
I must say that this question still requires some distillation. If you are talking about the mechanics of how to do assessment in these networked environments the answer is RSS subscriptions. I try to encourage teachers in my school to utilize web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs and the one overwhelming concern is how do I manage this information overload and how do I know when someone posts? The answer is to aggregate responses into a single reader so you are notified when someone posts among various places.

The flip side of this question, and the side that is most important and I assume is what is really being asked here has to do with how we define the rubric. I think it is dangerous for us to assume there is one or could ever be one set rubric for assessing contribution in a networked environment or any other learning environment. This is going to depend highly on what it is you want students to achieve academically. Ultimately, whether we use pen and paper or web 2.0 tools, we have to assess the learning according to the desired outcomes as they relate to the content. Otherwise we are just teaching students how to use the tools. Why do I need to learn this? When will I ever need to know this? These questions will flourish if we approach web 2.0 tools as an end and not simply a means. It is like teaching students how to build a house but giving them new tools to do it. In the end, whether they have hammers, handsaws, and screwdrivers, or power drills, table saws, and air hammers the house still needs to be measured by the same standards and benchmarks.