Science & Education

Chinese Silver Grace Flickr Photo by Autan

I just learned, from the ThinkQuest website, why we have such a difficult time appropriately funding education.  No surprises here, but it’s a Chinese proverb that I was not aware of.

“If you are thinking a year ahead – plant seeds;
If you are thinking 10 years ahead – plant a tree;
If you are thinking 100 years ahead – educate the people “

When was the last time anyone you know was thinking a hundred years ahead?  When was the last time you saw somebody do something a hundred years in mind? 

I can think of no one more in need of thinking ahead than teachers — and those who empower teachers.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan testifying before the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor

Some how, the outreach folks with the House Committee on Education & Labor have found me and have been forwarding information related to the issues they are considering.  Yesterday, they sent the following web links related to Secretary Duncan’s testimony before the committee.  I have only watched Chairman Honorable George Miller’s opening remarks, but plan to sneak in as much of the rest today and tomorrow.  Well, that and finish preparing for tomorrow morning’s virtual keynote for the Webheads.

• The hearing page with written testimony – I actually couldn’t find the full testimony here.  So if you see it, please comment.
• Flickr Photos
• Videos:
  • Chairman Miller’s Opening Statement
  • Sec. Duncan’s Entire Opening Statement
  • Sec. Duncan’s statement on seclusion and restraint
  • Sec. Duncan’s answers regarding FFEL and DL¹

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1. Kruger, Mike. “Sec Duncan’s testimony in front of Ed & Labor Cmte.” E-mail to David Warlick. E-mail.20 May 2009.

Flickr Photo by Matteo Penzo

I’m still at Oracle, but they’ve given us a break.  So I opened up my RSS Reader and the first thing in the list is the WIRED Gadget Lab article, a Building Guide: How to Choose an eBook Reader.  I won’t be buying one anytime soon, but I know that they have increased in popularity over the last many months.  As the article opens…

E-books are the ‘it’ gadget of the year. But picking an e-book reader is more difficult than choosing a brand of cereal or a bottle of shampoo. Every other week, a new reader is gussied up in the factories of Taiwan, ready to make its debut. At last count, we estimated at least 12 different e-book readers on the market or close to release.

A matrix for comparison is also linked from the article.

So if this is something you’ve been lusting for, this Gadget Lab report may be helpful.

A little more sleep and a little less cramming may be in store for students next year if lawmakers decide to get rid of some standardized tests.

Flickr Photo by Lauren Brown

That’s the opening line of a 27 May Raleigh News & Observer story, Student Testing Might be Reduced.  Our new governor, Beverly Perdue, recently proposed that the legislature “dump” all state tests that are not required for high school graduation or by federal law.

According to the article, the NC Senate proposes that five high school subject area tests would go — Algebra II, geometry, chemistry, physics, and physical science.  These are subjects that are not required for graduation.  U.S. History stays, since all NC high school students are required to take that subject (not world history, an issue of recent discusson with some Canadian educator friends).

I’m sorry that U.S. History will continue to be tested.  I suspect that it is one of the main reasons that my daughter decided not to become a history teacher.  She wanted to teach history, not prepare teenagers for a test.  She said that they were not the same thing.

Also to be “dumped” is our state’s Computer Skills Test.  To my knowledge, North Carolina was the first state to mandate testing of computer skills and to tie high school graduation to the passage of that test. 

I never liked the test.  I like to say that it was when the state announced the required computer skills test that I left the agency.  But it was purely coincidence. 

There are two reasons why I disliked the test. 

1. Middle school computers became monopolized by efforts to prepare students for the test, rather than making authentic use of the technology for learning.
2. Though they did a descent job with the test itself, including both knowledge and performance skills, I suspect that most technologists employed in Research Triangle Park, just north of Raleigh, would have failed the test.  Solving problems with computers is about inventing solutions, not memorizing them.

The plus side of the test was that school boards and superintendents bought a lot of computers for their middles schools and kept buying them.  My hope is that we are reaching a tipping point where learning in our schools in the 21st century is best and most reasonably done with networked, digital, and abundant content.

Read the article for more on the debate.  But Angela Quick, the deputy academic officer for the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is quoted as saying,

In an era when students will be competing with people around the world for jobs in science, technology and engineering, it makes sense to know how much students have learned about those subjectsuty chief academic officer of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is quoted as saying.

Another state education official said,

The tests help standardize the statewide curriculum and make sure students are taught the same material no matter where they go to school.

I have no real objection to either of these statements except for what I have often say.  In a time of rapid change, the value that we bring to our endeavors will not come so much from what we know that is the same as other people.  It will come from what we know and how we think that is different.  We have to ensure that all students graduate with a common context for their world and their future.  But it is just as important that our graduates are able to resourcefully make themselves experts, and be able to adapt and innovate.

Since I could’t seem to be able to upload any of my photos, this is something from Flickr contributed by Dusk Cao

“Lunch Time at Games for Change Festival” This is the photo I was not able to upload yesterday at the conference.

I am at the Games for Change conference (festival) in New York.  I’m not sure if I’m uptown or downtown.  It’s on 12th street, just east of 5th avenue, at The New School of Design.  It’s a small/compact conference with lots of people who care.  Games for Learning is about designing and using video games as a force for social change.  It’s an area that I know little about, except conceptually, since I don’t really play video games.  I’m here to learn, and the opening keynote certainly offered lots of opportunities for that.

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, has writing extensively about social change, apparently focusing most recently on Darfur.  He made some interesting points about communication, that Toothpaste companies do a better job of selling ideas than most humanitarians.  He said that large numbers simply do not do the job, that the human brain isn’t wired to handle large numbers.  As we evolved, we were seldom surrounded by anything exceeding a dozen in quantity.  “Six people starving is a tragedy.  A million people starving is a statistic.”

He told about a middle school in the Bronx, where the plight of Darfur had become an integral part of the culture of the school — because of the video game, Darfur is Dying.  Incidentally, two of the developers of the game were in the audience.  He said that they school sent him an invitation to come and speak by sending him to a web page URL: dearmrkristof.com.

He said that the struggle that defined the 19th century was irradicating slavery.  Of the 20th century, it was defeating totalitarianism.  He suggests that gender inequity in the developing world will define the 21st century.

The next session was about Pew’s recent report on teenagers, video games, and civic involvement.  Joseph Kahne listed five myths about video games:

• Video games are violent.  There are violent video games, but teenagers, in truth, are playing all kinds of video games.
• Many boys play only violent games. In truth, most youth play many genres of games, especially boys.
  
• Game Play isolates you. 65% reported that they play in the presence of others and 27% reported that they play online, collaboratively with others.
• The Game defines the experience.  Not true.  Many games offer huge opportunities for differentiation of the game experience.  My son got bored with Halo in a couple of weeks.  So he and his friends started inventing their own games to play in the Halo environment.
• There is a huge digital divide when it comes to different groups’ video game play.  Again, nearly 100% of teens play video games across all demongraphics.

What I found interesting was the notion that the digital divide is more about the divide between classrooms that are making authentic, productive, empowering use of digital technologies, and classrooms that are using it to drill and kill (my wording).

The second speaker of that session was Ian Rowe, who works for the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.  He is currently focused on college completion.  He reported that only 70% of U.S. teens finish high school.  But only 50% of entering college students graduate with a degree.  Part of the problem is that only half of the graduating high school students are prepared for college (1/3 of all high school students).

It’s time to bring this entry to a close, except to share one thing that Jim Gee said in a later session on assessment and video games.  He said, “Looking at the choices that people make in solving problems is a good predictor of knowledge they have gained. But measuring knowledge does not predict problem solving ability.”

Choice vs Knowledge

Teachers in South Georgia learning about the potentials of using GPS technology in Education. Flickr Photo by Judy Baxter

I’m home again, and being Saturday, I’m taking walks and just geeking out.  I’ve made it a ways through my aggregator, popping in and out of things that I would normally write about.  But, today, I just feel too lazy.  This one broke through my mode filter.  Published yesterday (May 29), eSchool News reports in Gates Foundation: Teachers Trump Class Size that,

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent billions of dollars exploring the idea that smaller high schools might result in higher graduation rates and better test scores. Instead, it found the key to better education is not necessarily smaller schools but more effective teachers.¹

Some issue is made of the fact that the B&MG foundation spent so much money to find out what most of us already knew.  As L.A. Unified’s chief of staff, Jim Morris, is quoted in the article, “Every teacher matters…”

I think that the new CEO of B&MG, Jeff Raikes, makes a good point.  We can’t really expect business to willing try things and fail.  It’s not in their short term interest.  And in the political environment of the past few decades, U.S. tax payers won’t stand for public dollars going into experiementing with education.  Who’s left?

Of course, if every teacher matters, and every classroom matters, then perhaps that’s where the power to innovate should be placed, in the hands of that teacher — funded by those who have the greatest interest in an educated future — everyone?

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1. Staff, “Gates Foundation: Teachers trump class size .” eSchool News 29 May 2009 Web.30 May 2009. <http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=58946>.

Screen shot from the video

“We’re trying to help our students learn to express themselves in words and images, and moving images in particular,” says Richard Miller, Chair of the Rutgers English Department, in a YouTube’d video presentation, The Future is Now: Presentation to the RU Board of Governors.  He continues,

This is all building towards a larger vision, re-imagining the humanities for the 21st century.  Unquestionably, we are working in a world that is driven by technological advance and improvement, and some people see that as obviating the need for people who excel in spoken expression, the written word, telling stories — for some people that (technology) is the fluff of life.  But actually, that is the backbone of life.  We work in an area that is essentially concerned with the quality of living.

In this presentation, Miller introduces the university’s planned/proposed Center for the New Humanities, and he says that new humanities should be considered a single phrase.

Having mentioned Wikipedia earlier in the presentation, he states that,

At the center of this new humanities is a collective, collaborative kind of composition that is represented by this globe (see left).  But what Wikipedia doesn’t have is what the university has to offer.  That is sustained study and deep understanding.  When you add that to the picture, you get human creativity put at the center of the humanities.  Over the past 10 to 20 years, the humanities somewhat lost its way, becoming overly focused on critique.  The real function of the humaniteis is to engage in the act of creativity, moment by moment, to improve the quality of the world we live in.

You don’t need me to tell you how much Richard Miller is talking about a much MUCH broader world of education than the Department of English at Rutgers University.

We have lost our way.

I discovered this video through a blog entry, (We Can Do This. We Should Do It.) from Carl Fisch, where he mentioned this entry (Videos – The Future of the humanities in the Internet Era) by Scott McLeod.  They both embedded two other presentations by Miller, This Is How We Dream, Parts I & Part II.

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Disrupting Class Flickr Photo by Justin Benttinen

I started Disrupting Class a few weeks ago, but have not been able to get back to it.  However, I ran across this June 2 CNN article, which partly disrupts my own anticipation of federal spending coming to education  — not to mention pointing in some directions that may be difficult for a non-marketplace industry, such as education, to re-orient itself to.

In Commentary: Don’t prop up failing schools, Christensen and Michael Horn say,

There is great danger in the sudden and massive amount of funding — nearly $100 billion — that the federal government is throwing at the nation’s schools. District by district, the budgetary crises into which all schools were plunging created the impetus for long-needed changes.¹

I recommend that you read the article for all of the insights shared, but I’ll list the authors’ four suggested “criteria” for developing programs and grants for states and district education initiatives.  I’m adding my own comments between the lines.

1. Don’t fund technology that simply shoves computers and other technologies into existing classrooms.
   Well I wouldn’t turn down a laptop for every student or a ceiling-mounted projector and interactive smart board.  But anyone who believes that technology alone will save education — will save our children — isn’t really interested in solving the problem.
2. Don’t fund new school buildings that look like the existing ones.
   When speaking at school board conferences, I frequently go to the exhibitor halls and, for sport, ask the architectural firm representatives to describe how school design has changed in the past 20 years.  The only answer that I (rarely) get, beyond, “Nobody ever asked me that before,” is a long spiel about “green” building materials.

   There are some interesting things going on in other countries about learning environment design.  Follow Stephen Heppel’s work.

3. Don’t fund the institutions that are least likely to change.
   This is complicated and I’d like to hear more of what Christensen has to say about it.  But I suspect that the further up the hierarchy we go, the least likely we are to see change — with some dazzling exceptions (Think “The State of Maine” – and I’m not talking about the bear).  The fact is that the entire industry is designed to resist change — and this is not entirely a bad thing.  ..and I’m still not comfortable with completely ditching education as we know it and replacing it with something completely new — at least not yet.
4. Direct more funds for research and development to create student-centric learning software.
   According to the authors, just “..1 percent of the $600 billion in K-12 spending from all levels currently goes toward R&D.”  Assuming that these figures are correct, that’s $6 billion.  That’s not an insignificant sum, and I wonder where it all goes. 

   I’m not an expert on budgets, so please share what I’m missing.  But in scanning the President’s FY 2010 Budget Request for the U.S. Department of Education, specifically the Detailed Budget Table by Program (PDF), I found that research, development, and dissemination are appropriated $224,196.  If you factor in statistics, the regional educational laboratories, national assessment, research in special education, statewide data systems, and special education studies and evaluations, you’re up to $689,256.  That’s an increase of only 72.081 dollars over 2009.  Looking at Nintendo’s 2008 Annual Financial Report (PDF), that one company spent $370,000 in R&D that single year.

   But that’s just the amount.  The far more interesting question, I think, is, what should that education R&D look  like?  Do we increase funding to universities and research laboratories.  I think we should.  But I think that we should also fund research at a more local level — in actually classrooms.  I think that teachers (and students) can learn a lot about best practice and we can easily disseminate that knowledge around the globe.  Now we’re talking about the potential for change.

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1. Christensen, Clayton M and Michael B. Horn. “Commentary: Don’t Prop Up Failing Schools.” CNN.com 2 Jun 2009 US. Web.4 Jun 2009. .

Flickr Photo by Ikkoskinen

I’d planned to title this entry, “Happy Vacation.”  But it is not about vacation that I want to ask you.  That said, here in Raleigh, the school year ends this week, with thousands of high schoolers graduating and going out into an uncertain but possibility-rich world.

Many of you will pack-up your classrooms and go home.  You will relax your teacher muscles and deal with the everyday issues, independent of the unique and demanding service of teaching.

You’re going to want to forget about the classroom — and you should.  But come July and early August, you will start to plan and re-plan, experiment and re-experiment, and get back into service-mode.  By that time, I HOPE to have something available to make that sort of visioning a little more fun.

For now, just to keep you focused, I want to ask, “When you return to your classroom (or other edu-workplace), what do you wish will be there that wasn’t there this school year?

You can either provide an extended answer here, or a short one on Twitter, hash tagged classwish (#classwish).

When you return to your classroom in August, what do you wish will be there, that wasn’t there this year? Please include #classwish in your answers.

Here is a link to the Twittered replies.

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Yesterday, I asked what you hope/wish will be in your classroom, when you report back to work in August or September — that wasn’t there last year. The responses on Twitter were immediate and continued, with several people recently retweeting (RT) the request for input.

The graph on the left represents the responses, at this moment, based on my interpretations. Some tweets delivered more than one message, for instance, indicating a wish for 1:1, more computers, and netbooks, all in the same tweet. I found it interesting that only 5% of the messages seemed to directly or indirectly reference budget cuts. The rest are wishes I would have expected to see anytime.  It is also noteworthy, the number of tweets that asked for administration and fellow staff who were more willing to try new things — innovate.

From The Next Web blog entry

Anyway, I found my wish this morning, while spending just a few minutes dashing through my RSS reader.

Londoners may soon have something new to look (at) while they travel around the city. A plan has been announced that would allow people to upload their own works of art to a website and have them displayed on the rooftops of bus shelters around the city.¹

It works like this.  You produce photographs, paintings, digital art work, cartoons, whatever, and you upload them to the Bus.Tops web site.  They are viewed by people on the web, who vote for the art of their liking.  The images with the most votes get displayed on the tops of bus stops and down from the ceiling for bus stop patrons.

Now here’s what I wish for.  A school that works like this — where at least part of the goings on of the school is run by the learners.  For instance, you set LCD displays around the school tied into a central low-end computer serving up images.  Encourage students to upload their own art work (or other images that reflect all levels of learning) and allow students and teachers to vote for them.  There would likely need to be some oversight, but that shouldn’t be too hard to incorporate.

The artwork recommended by the most learners gets displayed in a rotating fashion through the school and out, through the school’s web site and perhaps other venues in the community.

What I wish for is schools that are less schooly.²

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1. http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/09/networked-lcd-screens-turn-bus-stops-art-galleries/
2. Schooly is a term used frequently and probably coined by Clay Burell, to represent the traditional business of schooling as opposed to the timely business of learning.