Generation YES Blog

I just got an email from the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. MIT OpenCourseWare puts the entire MIT curriculum online, free of charge. The materials are excellent, and it’s been hailed as one of the top resources of its kind and an example of why “free is the future.”

The email explains all this, and goes on to explain that their publishing and review cycle costs money. It costs money to check the copyrights and get permissions. It costs money to videotape professors, edit the video, and post it online. Bandwidth and servers are not free.

“In total, it costs about $4 million each year to support OCW.”

The email continues with some examples of how courses are helping people around the globe in worthy projects. But guess what comes next…

MIT is committed to keeping OCW open and free to all, everywhere. You know the value of OCW to yourself and how the materials offer a greater value to humankind. And now you know the cost. Your contribution of $25, $50, $100 –– or whatever amount is right for you –– directly supports the production and distribution of high quality MIT course materials.

Please invest in yourself and your world. Click here to make your donation now.

Now really, people…
The MIT 2007 Financial Report shows an endowment of $9 billion dollars (yes, that’s 9,000 million dollars). In 2007, they took in cash gifts of over $330 million dollars. They really need my $25?

Honestly, it seems tacky. They decided to put their resources out there and generate a lot of publicity about being the wave of the future. Now they are looking for someone else (namely me) to help foot the bill?

But no, not just me. According to Wired Magazine back in 2002, “The William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations ponied up a total of $11 million for the first two-year phase. (MIT kicked in another $1 million.) Those organizations are likely to continue supporting the initiative, which is expected to require an additional $20 million or so before the rest of the courses are posted by the end of 2006.”

So they asked for money, so what?
I HATE complaining about this, because the MIT materials ARE truly excellent. People around the world can learn from the top lecturers in the field. Every high school educator and interested student should check out the Highlights for High School section of the MIT OpenCourseWare site. There are fabulous multimedia resources, really innovative courses like furniture making and international development, and terrific support materials.

I applaud MIT for finding a way to make all this available AND creating a quality product. The problem isn’t the materials, or even MIT asking for money. (I’m slightly peeved by them asking ME for money, but hey, at least they are being honest about the need to fund their project.)

Free costs money
The problem is that the rest of the world is pretending that because there is no cost to use courseware resources, there is no cost to create these resources.

This particular “free” cost $20 million dollars (probably more!) to get started, and now needs $4 million a year to keep going. Doing some admittedly rough math based on the 1,800 courses online gives food for thought. Each course cost $11,000 to put online, and needs an additional $2,000 per year to keep it up there.

What does this say about the real viability of open courseware in general?

I have to say I’m still struggling with this concept. In this case, MIT is trying to figure out how to expand their influence to become a world-wide leader in education. They obviously made a conscious decision to spend a lot of money to preserve the integrity of their brand by delivering top quality (and therefore expensive) resources. Now they will start to find out what access to this market really means.

In Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (Wired Magazine 2/25/08), Chris Anderson says, “Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.” With OpenCourseWare, MIT is trying to expand its market beyond a few thousand students, a few company research partners, and past the usual academic boundaries to the entire world. It’s an interesting gamble.

In contrast, many other free open courseware and open content libraries sacrifice quality to lower their initial costs. They rely on users to contribute and edit content, but without a guiding editorial hand, the quality will be variable and the coverage sketchy. The tension between these approaches is yet to be resolved.

What an interesting world we live in!

Sylvia

Scott McLeod’s recent post at Dangerously Irrelevant, My not-so-friendly library, boring teachers, and other marketing interactions, talks about the negative impact of the draconian, punitive language his public library uses, and points to marketing expert Seth Godin, who “…reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron / stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.”

It made me think about the messages that schools send out about technology.

Scott goes on to say:

Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities.

So, here’s my question - what message does your technology AUP send home?

The AUP, short for Acceptable Use Policy, is typically part of the packet that goes home with students every fall. Parents know the drill. You fish through emergency cards in triplicate, imponderable policies that need your signature on every page, the new dress code, the skateboarding rules, offers for SAT prep and parenting classes, PTA dues, and who knows what else. You sign the pages, sign the checks, and hope that you’ve filled it all out right and that you never have to do it again (until next year.)

The technology AUP is in there too. It’s likely the only thing a parent will see all year long that has to do with computers and technology at the school.

So does your AUP:

• focus on punishment, or opportunity?
• contain only legalese or is easy to read and understand?
• communicate a vision of students as would-be hackers and criminals, or your vision of students as active participants in the 21st century?
• portray students as potential victims of predators and bullies, or show parents how and why students are safely learning how to navigate this brave new world?
• hint that computers are an afterthought and a “reward” that can be taken away as punishment, or explain why computers are essential tools in every classroom?

The AUP could be an opportunity to involve parents in your vision of technology, it could be a way to communicate the passion and importance of building a learning community that values 21st century thinking, and it could be a way to help parents understand that despite “To Catch a Predator”, your school is thoughtfully using technology to benefit their child.

So, which message is going home this fall?

Sylvia

Back when Halo 3 released, I wrote a blog post about how the massive sales of this product would dwarf any kind of educational video game sales. I didn’t even tackle whether video games in schools are a good idea or might help students learn academic subjects. But that doesn’t matter. No matter what you believe, it’s an idea whose time will never come.

In short, simple math and economics points out the predictable failure of creating top quality educational video games for the classroom that can compete in this market.

Here were my points:

• In one week, more people bought a copy of Halo 3 than there are teachers in the United States.
• Every public school in the U.S. would have to purchase 100 copies of a game to match the sales of Halo 3.
• Back then, Halo 3 was reported to have cost $30 million dollars just to develop the game.

Now let’s pretend you are a video game company…
Let’s say you believe that video games can revolutionize education. You know the market is small, so you run the numbers. As an advocate, you are insanely optimistic about your chances to sell an educational video game to schools in the United States. To make the most of your chances to make a sale, let’s pretend you could design it so that it covers all subjects and grade levels, and correlates to content standards of all 50 states. You do your best to make sure that it is fun to play no matter if you are 5 years old or 18. Even knowing that 2% is a pretty good market penetration, you might gamble that you could get 10% of all schools in the US to purchase your game. And maybe you’d decide that your game is so educational that they will pay $100 for it, double or triple what normal games sell for. And hey, you won’t need to pay a sales force or buy advertising for your game because it’s so good that it will sell itself!

What do you get? Even with these wild claims and ridiculously optimistic estimates, the BEST you could do is generate sales of about a million dollars, not even enough to pay the production costs of one mediocre game.

Now here comes Grand Theft Auto 4 to blow those numbers even further out of the water. According to Wired News (GTAIV Budget Tops Gaming Records), “Grand Theft Auto IV’s meticulously designed, nuanced world required almost 1,000 people to craft, and final costs for the production were around $100 million…” That’s at least three times as much as Halo 3 and doesn’t even count the cost of marketing and sales.

So the next time someone says, “hey, I hear kids like the video games, why don’t they make an educational one” look them straight in the eye and ask them what they are smoking.

Sylvia

Congratulations to Hill City Elementary School/Longfellow Middle School for winning the Kansas in the World Award for Excellence in International Education 2008!

Longfellow Middle School and teacher Scott Parker have been part of the GenYES program for ten years, starting when GenYES was a federal Technology Innovation Challenge grant. At Longfellow, GenYES students help teachers throughout the school integrate technology in their classrooms, and in TechYES, 7th and 8th grade students do projects to gain a technology literacy certification. Students worked on Rural Symposium projects and tied them into international studies through the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN). See the student projects here.

Longfellow GenYES students have also been at the forefront of working with Liberian students who are part of the new Liberia Renaissance School of which GenYES founder, Dr. Dennis Harper is a board member. Their Liberia projects are on the LREC/LMS website here.

In addition, many of the TechYES/GenYES students are involved in the “Schools Fantasy League” program based on England’s Premier League soccer. This project is designed for schools to take part in an exciting, engaging activity that promotes collaboration, learning and cross-curricular connections. Longfellow Middle School is recognized as a “Champion School” as the first USA school to be involved in the program.

Congratulations to the Longfellow students and Scott Parker! This is a well-deserved award indeed.

Sylvia

There’s been a lot of chatter lately among some edubloggers about their feeling that educators who blog have formed a community akin to an invitation-only cocktail party, that some “elites” deliberately exclude or insult newcomers, and that there should be rules to follow when blogging, Twittering, or participating in the various social networks that support educators as they experiment with new tech tools. I’m not even going to try to link to examples of this, it’s just fuel on the fire.

I’m no expert here, but my spidey sense tells me there’s something else going on. I think it’s “passion fatigue.”

Educators who felt their professional selves rekindled by technology, especially Web 2.0 technology jumped into communicating this passion to others. As time goes on, though, it gets harder to maintain that heightened sense of mission, especially when you just don’t see anything changing around you. Or worse, you start to see the enormity of turning the massive institution called school in any direction, much less the one you want. You start to wonder if your life’s work is all just so much spitting into the wind.

It’s so much easier to pick on little things, point fingers, proclaim rules, and jump into fights you wouldn’t tolerate in real life. It’s the virtual equivalent of library shushing. I’ve done it, I admit it, I’ve poked my nose in where it doesn’t belong and made comments that I shouldn’t have. Maybe I shouldn’t even say this, since someone is going to think that I’m complaining about them. But honestly, I’m not. Blog however you want. Comment however you want. Twitter, don’t Twitter, really, I’m not your mother.

I aspire to be both optimistic and realistic, do my best, and not give in to trivialities. Some days that happens. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” I hope that spirit carries me forward.

Sylvia

In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. One of the reasons I grouped the 6 types in this particular way is that it situates the professional development.

To me, one of the most powerful ideas in learning is the theory of situated learning. This term was first used by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. I first read this book in grad school, and it has colored everything I’ve learned since. Situated learning happens in Communities of Practice, defined by Wenger on his site as, “… groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Community of practice is a term often used when we talk about teacher professional development. But in fact, I think often it is confused with community of interest. Community of practice is where you DO something. Community of interest doesn’t have to be. When we chat with friends and Twitter buddies about teaching and how to do it better, or what tools to use, that’s a community of interest, not a community of practice.

The primary community of practice for most teachers is within the confines of their own classroom. The participants are the teacher and students. Sometimes other people visit, but these visits are few and short. While teachers may participate in other communities in a professional capacity, for most, the classroom is the only setting for their professional practice.

Traditional forms of professional development remove the teacher from their classroom and attempt to create a community of practice made up of teachers and technology experts. This community exists only for the purpose of imparting information from the experts to the teachers. While there is certainly a place for collegial discussion and access to professional improvement, it is not unreasonable that teachers often reject transparent efforts to force them into participation.

Wenger, in discussing designs for learning inside communities of practice, makes the point that they, “…cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute.”

Common recommendations for technology professional development include that teachers be given more time for independent practice without fear of embarrassment, to watch expert practitioners, go to conferences and workshops, or participate in online learning communities.

The problem is, these attempts to fix technology professional development only serve to reinforce the separation between the teacher learning new skills and real change in classroom practice. In a book chapter called Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? Mark Schlager and Judith Fusco look at the use of Tappped-In, an online teacher community, for professional development. They say it “… tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice.” Mark Schlager is director of Tapped In, so this is not just someone who doesn’t like newfangled online PD.

In short, mere discussion about practice does not create a community of practice.

Even if a great workshop excite teachers about new possibilities and tools, the teachers are removed from the successful context and sent back to the classroom to fend for themselves. They are expected to use their new skills without colleagues or experts present. One-on-one coaching that provides in-class mentors is expensive and rarely available. The technology specialist is not always there, and the “teacher-down-the-hall” that many schools depend on for technology help has their own class to teach. Online teacher communities can only take place outside of classroom time, too late for any intervention or advice to be useful. Maybe you can Twitter out a call for help, but that’s too unreliable to count on in crunch time.

So as teachers struggle alone in their classroom with questions, issues, and problems, valuable teachable moments are missed.

In an interview discussing what changes need to take place in classrooms to allow project-based learning, Seymour Papert says, “What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the kids and with the kids. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Interview on Edutopia site - Seymour Papert: Project-based learning)

So you know where I’m going with this. You have to look at the whole classroom and maximize the chance that teachers will learn alongside students. It has to be the norm, not the exception. By looking to students as co-learners in the effort to use technology, teachers end up learning more themselves. It takes a willingness to take risks in front of students and to model an attitude of openness to new ideas. I think seeing learning with technology happen through the eyes, hands, and screen of their students is the only way teachers will really understand the potential.

Situating professional development in the classroom is, I believe, the only way that technology will really be integrated into every classroom.

Sylvia

As some smart person once said, you have to count what matters to make what matters count.

Professional development plans often have “measurable outcomes”, accountability, and other such means to prove that professional development is successful. But very often, the evidence of success is simply “showing up”. You go to a workshop or conference, you get credit. It doesn’t matter if the workshop was boring or if you knit a sweater instead of participating. The measure of success unfortunately has little to do with the intended outcome.

As Mike Maloy pointed out in the comments on my recent post, What is Professional Development?, some of this is a matter of finding better ways to document what’s happening. What is the evidence that any professional development works. In the big picture, you hope that professional development makes a teacher better, and a better teacher will produce better results in the classroom. How do you measure better results in the classroom? Saying there is a certain amount of disagreement here may be the understatement of the century.

What Matters is Your Vision
When we work with schools as part of a grant, there is often an evaluation design that seeks to measure the effectiveness of the grant. When we sit down to talk about what to evaluate, we always advocate that the evaluation actually measures all the outcomes you would like to see. Not just the usual suspects that are easy to measure, like test scores.

What’s your biggest dream? What would like to shout to the clouds when you are finished?

Isn’t the real vision that you hope to see kids more engaged, teachers who feel that they are doing a better job, parents who see that their kids education is more relevant? So why not ask those questions. There’s nothing wrong with combining test scores with a survey that asks questions that go to the heart of the matter. If you don’t ask what you really want to know, the opportunity is lost forever.

It’s often dismissed as “touchy-feely” to include subjective questions and measures, and yet, this is often exactly what we hope happens when we implement a new project. Somehow, affective and subjective have become a dirty words.

Blending PD Models to Produce Measurable Results
In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD into these types: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. The reason I these particular groups is that 1) they situate the PD and 2) illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of each model at creating evidence of success.

Some of the more informal PD types are notoriously bad at creating measurable results, because documenting them undermines the reason they are interesting and easy. Imagine documenting your Twitter interactions, as an extreme example, or counting your Diigo friends and getting a “score” based on friends and how many bookmarks you post. That’s a sure fire way to stop participation!

But sometimes it really makes sense. Blogging, for example, is something that creates “evidence”. As I outlined in the post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, combining the informal practice of blogging with the discipline of action research can give you the best of both.

Say for example that someone blogged every day and gave a “score” for how they felt the day went. For example, a teacher could rate their own feeling of satisfaction that the lesson went well, or how well behaved the class was, or any other item that might be important. A simple scoring system from 1-5 would end up giving you data. After a time, you could extract data from the blog. Maybe you’ll find that scores are always better on Fridays, or worse after a 3 day weekend. To delve deeper, you could try to connect events actually recorded in the blog with the scores. You may notice that every day you go to Starbucks, it’s a better day. You might keep track of greeting the class in a certain way, or using an active whiteboard, or turning up the air conditioning. Just because the criteria is subjective doesn’t mean it can’t be measured.

What matters is counting what YOU think will make a difference, and proving it by measuring what YOU think counts.

Next: Why situating PD is critical

Sylvia

I have been so fortunate this year to see so many cool technology projects from our GenYES and TechYES programs. Recently I was emailed by one of our fabulous new TechYES advisors, Michael Russo from Heim Middle School. Michael had some great examples of what his middle school students are doing for their TechYES projects this spring. Some of his students have joined the blogosphere by creating their own blogs and embraced the power of blogging! His request to me was that his students would like some feedback, and the opportunity to expand their blogging network while learning from other blogging students. Keep in mind these student blogs were not created to discuss school gossip or be destructive in anyway. These students created these blogs to help other students by publishing their music and writing.

There is so much skepticism about what students might do when given the opportunity to publish to the web, that we forget how good and empowering it can be to let students learn from each other by using tools like a blog or a podcast. It is so refreshing to read some of the students’ posts and comments on these newly formed blogs and share in their excitement about helping other students using technology.

Michael has done a great thing by challenging these students to use blogging in a productive and powerful way. The students have proven that they too can network and receive constructive criticism to improve their work. The students have asked that people leave comments and feedback regarding their blog so please check them out and leave your thoughts.

One of the students, Jenni, set up her webpage via google pages, and her blog is linked from here:
http://merely7003.googlepages.com/

Another student, Brianna, has set a blog to create a writer’s community:
http://callingallauthorz.edublogs.org/

A third student, Justin, set up his blog to talk about current events:
http://currentlife.edublogs.org/

Keep it up TechYES students, and remember, “The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.” Ray Kroc

MeganE

I’ve done a couple of posts lately about teacher professional development (What’s Professional Development) and how most teacher’s PD “diet” is pretty unbalanced (6 Degrees of Professional Development). I whipped up a quick Google Form to collect some data.

Take the “What’s Your PD Blend?” survey here

This is a real-time view of the data - powered by Google Gadgets.
[update: I had to start the data collection over again after I tested this out on some Twitter volunteers Sunday night. They helpfully pointed out some major inconsistencies in the survey questions.]

Sylvia

In my recent post, What is Professional Development? I proposed six types of professional development that most teachers have access to. Today I’d like to take that a step further and talk about blending these models together to provide teachers a more balanced diet.

Here are the six types I came up with: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research.

If we represent these as a graph, we would probably see a pretty common pattern. Teacher professional development is overwhelmingly done in in-services and workshops. If it was a pie chart, it might look like this.

Not much of a balance here.

For teachers excited by new opportunities with Web 2.0 tools, technology, and probably readers of this blog, it might look a little different. The concept of building a personal learning community, documenting your own teaching in a blog, or building your skills by reading popular blogs about education creates new opportunities for learning — but only in an informal sense.

For lack of a better term, I’ll call it an “edublogger” PD profile. It might look something like this:

And of course, someone who is getting a degree might look completely different for a while.

Now, none of these show much balance. And I think balance could be a really good thing to bring to professional development. Doing things only one way leads to complacency and a lack of perspective.

Bringing balance to professional development
So what might that look like? Just like a balanced diet, I think brainstorming blends of various types of PD is a terrific way to open your mind to new possibilities. Blending these models also provides a way to leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of each type.

Take a look at this:

I’ve shown 4 different blends:

• informal + action research
• classroom embedded + workshop
• classroom embedded + informal
• academic research + workshop

So what do you get when you cross informal PD with action research? One idea might be that if a teacher is seriously blogging to uncover patterns in their professional practice, that’s a worthwhile form of professional development. A strength of informal PD like blogging is the personal passion and commitment people bring to it. A weakness is that it’s hard to measure or plan. But by incorporating some of the discipline of action research, you could come up with a plan that turns blogging into a more objective reflective practice.

classroom embedded + workshop: What does it look like if you move a traditional workshop into a classroom environment, complete with students? Imagine that you give the usual podcasting workshop directly to students, with teachers looking on. What might happen is that these teachers will see that students pick it up quickly, and can create podcasts without much direct instruction on the tools. They will see that their own reluctance to try podcasting is not shared by students, and the roadblocks that they have created in their own heads don’t apply to students.

By pushing the workshop into a live classroom, it solves the problem of teachers creating false complexity out of the technology and being the roadblock to classroom implementation.

classroom embedded + informal: I’ve seen a few examples of teachers video-streaming their class presentations and discussions, announcing them on blogs or Twitter, and random educators just showing up to take part. The connection to the outside world is great for the kids, but what this is doing is providing examples of classroom practice that might otherwise be hidden from view.

By drawing these lines and brainstorming the possibilities, we can find new approaches to a more balanced diet of professional development. And I think that instead of trying to define them all, it’s a better idea for these ideas to grow organically from the people who actually are involved in local professional development planning.

Next: Counting what matters so that what matters will count - how blending models of PD can provide new evidence of success.

Sylvia