The Case for the Private Cloud

What is a cloud?
       "Geek-speakers" really struggle to keep the vocabulary fresh, the edge bleeding (if you will). This time, the metaphor is a little short of perfect. In science, a cloud is a visible mass of lighter-than-air water droplets. In technology, a cloud is a collection of computer applications delivered over a network as services. So a cloud is a network, and visible water droplets are software applications. It's a stretch. Some of the wretched excesses of that fluffy dark thing hanging over your afternoon golf game might be, metaphorically, more accurate than we'd like. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
       Of course, 40 years ago, virtually all applications were delivered over networks, since the computers were room-sized. You connected using a dumb terminal (little more than a display and a keyboard -- see at left) to a mainframe computer somewhere else, to run a program. But sitting neatly between mainframe computing and cloud computing is the age of the microcomputer (still underway, in point of fact), which had, at its beginning, two relevant characteristics: 1) it was mostly about purchasing and managing objects (hardware, software, peripherals), and 2) networks were useful, but not necessary, to do work. (Remember sharing your Internet connection with your telephone? OK, probably not, but I do! The handset modem at right was how I connected to the university mainframe at my first teaching position.) These days, connecting things together has become the driving force in computing. We can blame the "mother of all networks," the Internet, for bringing us back around full circle. Since the geek-speakers have the memory of a gnat, it's all new, and it needs a new word. It's a cloud.
        But, of course, that isn't to imply that nothing is actually new. Before the Internet, networks were small, for lots of reasons (some were good reasons, and we'll look at that in a bit). So, the new part of the "cloud" concept is that applications can be really made available globally, over the entire Internet, to anyone. From a business perspective, the result has the same impact as Napster had on the music industry, the e-book has on print -- it's no longer about delivering or selling objects, it's about delivering or selling capabilities. From a software perspective, that means we use Office 360 or Google Docs to word process, rather than purchasing a stand-alone copy of some software to run on our very own computer.

Why should I care?

        Well, the Internet did happen for some very good reasons. When the tools of productivity move online, it makes information sharing, collaborating and group learning a lot easier, hence "cloud computing" is often associated with social networking and online learning management. From blogs to Facebook, people aren't just writing online, they're connecting, sharing, and constructing together. That's probably the most obvious advantage.
        Another is very much in evidence in the age of smart phones. Since the computing work is actually done "on the cloud" (that is, somewhere else), the device used to access such a service can actually be quite cheap and simple. It takes a reasonably powerful computer to run Microsoft Office 2010. In contrast, you can word-process "on the cloud" from your smart phone.
        Then there's software cost. As Google and others have shown, there really is no need to sell such services, so a lot of companies provide their services for "free," making a profit through selling ad space, or other marketing tools such as data harvested from the users of the service. The software isn't really free -- it's just being underwritten by thousands of advertisers. To further sweeten the pot, upgrades and bug fixes don't have dissemination issues. There's nothing to download since the software lives one place -- no one even notices the fix is in.

OK, well, so what's a "Private Cloud?"

        A "private cloud" is essentially the same idea as a public cloud, except that the folks using the service are part of a closed collection of people. Unlike the private networks of 40 years ago, "closed" doesn't mean disconnected. The convergence of the Internet and the private network means that we can define "closed" or "private" virtually, through a central list of access credentials, without giving up the "anytime, any place" of public, Internet-based computing. Although a private cloud usually lives physically inside a district wide area network, it's still available to that same collection of people, no matter whether they're sitting in their home school, or half a world away.

Why a Private Cloud?

       Private clouds exist for a variety of reasons, but privacy, as you might guess, is a big one. Private clouds are used by private companies or organizations with resource and business interests to protect, or organizations serving a unique population such as children.
        An organization wanting to run a private cloud has to contract with (i.e. pay for) a service, or purchase hardware to run them within their own network. It usually needs paying someone to maintain the services, and support the people who use them. Some of those costs would exist anyway (after all, supporting teachers in the use of any tool, private or public, requires staff time), but running online software yourself does add something to the equation. To reduce costs, many private clouds run open source services or other free software. The private services my district uses include Moodle (online learning management), Mahara (social networking and ePortfolios), SharePoint (professional workflow), Wordpress (blogging and interactive writing), and Umbraco (public website support).
        On the public cloud, we could have replaced Moodle with Edmodo, Mahara with Facebook, SharePoint with Google Docs, and Umbraco with any of a bunch of free or inexpensive web hosting services. Some of the reasons we've resisted would have been familiar with the old mainframe folks -- privacy, central management, support, consistency of service, and network security. But since we're in the business of supporting teachers and student learning, I'll use that perspective to flesh out some of these, and other, advantages.
        It is amazing how many thorny questions teachers ask us about the public cloud which don't even need to get asked when the cloud is private, like...

• “Who is that…really?” In a private cloud, you know who everybody is, since the account was created and assigned to a specific person inside the organization. At any time, if you stop being confident that you know who an account represents, anyone with rights to your network can turn off the account. That greatly simplifies privacy and enforcement. Public cloud tools are based on a personal account model, making the question above (and the enforcement problems it implies) much more difficult.
• “Did you see THAT?” Inappropriate stuff online is always a problem, and a public cloud tool will always struggle with the problem of inappropriate content. In addition, most public cloud tools carry ads, and ads mean that your students are being targeted for commercial purposes. Often the things being sold aren’t appropriate for their age. A private cloud has none of these problems.
• “Can I use this for free for the life of my instructional needs? …this year? …this week?” Ning (social network tool), Jaycut (video editing), Glogster (collaboration tool), even the New York Times started out being free public cloud tools, and are now charging for their services. This is a tried-and-true business model, which works fine in the private sector where all of the players are private citizens. But for teachers serving public school students, waking up one morning and finding your tool has suddenly changed to a pay-for-services model means a change of instructional practice, often even lost activities and resources representing a time investment. On a private cloud, teachers don't have to worry about things suddenly disappearing or costing money.
• “Should I ‘friend’ my students?” Most teachers are strongly advised against “friending” students on Facebook, for good reasons. Some states have even attempted to outlaw it! In contrast, on the private cloud, where all the people are known, the answer is clearly yes — it’s like asking “Should I speak to my students?”
• “I can’t find…” Most teachers are not sophisticated computer users, hence a lot of technical support can be just helping someone retrieve an accidentally-deleted or overwritten file, or locating something that got lost or corrupted. On the public cloud (especially the free one), you’re pretty much on your own — if you accidentally delete something, or misplace it, there usually is no tech support safety net.
• “May I do this?” The public cloud must, by Federal law, restrict who can use it, and how. Because of that, most tools with social networking components require specific parent permissions for students under 13 (Edmodo sets that age at 18). Hence, a teacher of young students has to specifically acquire and manage parent permissions to use such tools, or run the risk of breaking the law (or, even worse, the wishes of a student’s very concerned parents, the reason the laws exist in the first place). In contrast, the private cloud is covered by a school’s Acceptable Use Policy contract.
• “CAN I do this?” There is really no substitute for asking this question of the people who install, implement, and support the cloud tools you use. You will find that, even without the power of the public cloud, the answer is usually “Yes!” In addition, with a private cloud, decisions about changes and upgrades are made with you, the teacher, in mind — no business model, no board of directors, no collection of advertisers, no shareholders, no IT staff with their own schedule and interests. In my district, many of the decisions about our cloud tools are actually made by interested teachers in regularly-scheduled focus group meetings.

        This does not mean that the public cloud doesn’t have anything to offer teachers and their student learning goals. With massive budgets and huge IT staff, many big public cloud players have the ability to innovate and expand. For some teachers, a private cloud will never be quite as snappy, attractive, and extensive as the tools they find and use “out there.” But before they do, we tell them to read the list of questions above, and make sure they understand them all. But even more importantly, we ask then to ask themselves what they want their students to do and learn. In almost all cases, the private cloud has answers that work.
        Metaphorically, a cloud is ill-defined, hard to contain and predict, and often all wet. Bringing your cloud "indoors" requires effort and some expense, but it makes it a lot easier for most teachers and students to use it comfortably.

Are you (dis)connected?

        Making connections is all the buzz -- connecting students to authentic learning, experts, even each other. At this point in history, the technology tools and contexts in which to “connect” are overwhelming in number, and begging for attention. Today, “connect” doesn’t force technology use, but it almost certainly can’t avoid it. And many celebrators of the concept of connection and collaboration are almost indistinguishable from celebrators of the tools they use for such. That is, “Connect!” and “Use this tool!” are, in many advocates’ minds, interchangeable ideas. That has actually produced a couple of interesting disconnects in technology use in education.

The Promise and Practice of Web 2.0: It’s a scary world out there.

        I had just poked into a district office, and the discussion there was about Facebook. It’s a well-worn trail, and in this context the remarks are almost invariably negative, with most of those present saying they never went there, and never would. At the other extreme are the dozens of my professional acquaintances and colleagues who use it to support their professional interests. On their "walls," I am as likely to read about what school they visited or what instructional idea they’ve tried, as I am to hear about their son/daughter’s exploits on the track or court, or the last restaurant they visited. All is thrown in together in a pile.

        Although the world beyond PK-12 education is pretty much firmly entrenched in the idea of online connections in support of professional interests, in the face of Federal child safety legislation and most end user license agreements of known Web 2.0 tools (including Facebook), most teachers are still trying to figure out whether these tools are even legal to use in the classroom, much less safe, or even more important, instructionally valuable. Both the advocates and the detractors of Facebook, like the blind men and the elephant, are grabbing onto different parts of the elephant and declaring its basic character.

        Both are right, and both are wrong. But neither note that we’re trying to evaluate the usefulness of the whole elephant at once by looking at a single aspect of it. Yes, “it” is important, and yes, “it” is unsafe and frivolous...if we’re just talking about Facebook. Of course, what we should be talking about is learning. It’s a disconnect, and neither side has done a particularly good job of addressing why it is one.

The Promise and Practice of Technology in Instruction: Who’s paradigm shift is it anyway?

       Everybody has their pet phrase. “Knowledge construction.” “Collaborative learning.” “Project-based learning.” “Discovery learning.” “Authentic learning.” Almost everybody agrees that the old traditional instructional paradigm of teacher-driven lecture and summative assessment is, if not actually dead, at least seriously outflanked. The charge against it is being led by something as simply-defined as the Kahn Academy (a website dedicated to tutorial videos on school subjects), or as currently trendy and complex as the idea of use of student-owned smart phones and other personal devices in the classroom.

        That, of course, is the implied shift associated with connected technology use. In fact, most teachers view educational technology in terms of “Smart” classroom tools, large digital display, “clickers,” media delivery systems, and laptop carts, all of which are aimed at preserving the teacher’s tenuous grasp on their primacy as a content presenter. To make matters worse, many teachers observe, and recent studies are beginning to show, that direct student control over information delivery (phones, computers, whatever) doesn’t always lead to higher learning outcomes. Students usually lack the personal goals and motivation to attend to that which will improve their learning, if given the choice, so they fall back on their social-driven habits.

       It is clear that the promise and practice of technology-driven shift represents another serious disconnect.

        These disconnects are symptoms of how technology’s role in the classroom tends to get trivialized and distracted by the popularity of a specific platform or tool. A good illustration is the battle over texted communications. Tech advocates and observers are quick to point out that kids text, and they view email as “old people’s communications.” That’s one piece of the elephant. And, for kids, almost all student texts are social. On other side of the elephant, if you go into an actual adult workplace, texting is one of many communications platforms one will have to use to do work, and email often figures prominently in that list.

        But the debate misses the point. Are we supposed to be teaching our students to text, or to communicate? The discussion about paradigm shift shouldn’t be about tool selection, it should be about content and practice. That is our job as educators.

        By the time our students leave us, all of the tools will have changed anyway. But that doesn't remove us from our responsibilities relative to the technologies. We need to actually, meaningfully engage in the behaviors the shift implies. Don't get tied up in the tools, but don't skip them either. They aren't the paradigm, but they do deliver it. It's a delicate balance, but implementing connections in the 21st Century classroom requires that we do so.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

        It's here -- a standard, in amongst all the other writing standards, that specifically addresses what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century...

Writing Standards K-5 - Grade 5 Students: Standard 6.

With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others..

       This standard is one of the new Common Core State Standards adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education, now in training for implementation in the fall. It makes succinct what our students already know: that writing for most purposes involves collaboration and connection. And the way in which students connect, collaborate – even write – is online.
       It’s in the Standards, so will it be in instruction? The process of “deconstructing” the standards in preparation for designing lessons is fully underway, and this standard (as of April 1, 2011) has yet even get that far (see KDE's list). But does it need to be? Is the fact that it’s a separate standard mean that, in fact, it needs separate “air time?” In an ideal world, no, if, in fact, it was already uniformly distributed throughout the other standards, and a teacher's practice. That is as it should be. In the world of higher education and professional work, most writing is connected. Nearly all readers are interactively connected to the writing they consume. Even further, a lot of writings (from textbooks to encyclopedias) are now produced collaboratively online, with many authors, and constantly negotiated content changes and additions. The implication is, in the post-secondary world, writing without interactive connection is rare, and so addressing it separately would be like addressing auto repair without electronic diagnostics.

        That’s the world our students already live in, and is most certainly the one they’ll join when they leave us. Although my “research” is anecdotal and incomplete, I’m thinking it isn’t the world most of our teachers live in. That means, if left to their own devices, chances are that most teachers won’t view this standard as that important. Many may not even know what it means. With that knowledge, the standard probably needs to be specifically addressed, and that is the intent of the Common Core Standards as written. But when, and by whom?

        As a tech integration specialist, I’m pretty used to being invited to the party late. A professional development class is being designed, or a unit is being built, and someone has the idea that, maybe, it should have a technology component. (After all, a lot of folks are talking about technology, so we probably ought to include something!) So I'm called. But when that happens, inevitably, I walk into a room in which the big decisions about content and pedagogy have already been made. The results are a lot of clever graphs and images.

        In the digital age, is it really possible to start a discussion about pedagogy without technology? For this argument, I’m setting aside the revolution implied by a lot of technology tool use – knowledge construction, project-based instruction, student-driven learning, the trifecta generally associated with online and connected learning. Let’s just stick with Standard 6 above. We’ll take something really easy – a personal narrative about some incident in a student's life. Traditionally, a teacher would establish a rubric, pass out instructions, collect the results of the assignment, and grade them. If the lesson needs more "real life" connections, that might change the assigned writing topic. And the impact of my coming into the party late might be that the students are asked to read the instructions online, type them up in Word with some nice added clipart, and upload the results into a learning management system. Good, we’ve got technology in.

       Did we cover the standard? Did the student “publish?” Did they “interact with others?” Did they “collaborate?” Obviously not. To truly reflect the standard, we could redesign the lesson, and have students publish their writings as blog entries, providing for online peer comments and suggestions, and then have that feed a collaborative rewriting process through a wiki. This approach (very different from my “upload Word document” example) actually addresses the intent of the standard. But the changes have a profound impact on the original lesson performance expectation, the rubric, work completion, and grading, so adding this standard would require major changes to the original lesson design. The point, of course, is that it is not possible to begin the lesson planning process without having already selected the technologies, and incorporated their implications into how students write, learn, and are graded.

        It’s a standard, but the standard simply asks the same question the students themselves are asking their teachers: If not you, who? If not now, when?

Through Bein' Cool: Devo and Motivation

        Yes, that's Devo, the rock group out of Akron, Ohio, famous for "Whip It" and red flower pots for hats. They released an almost intentionally dorky tune (with a matching low-budget video) on their "New Traditionalists" album called "Through Bein' Cool," with advice to all of the strange and misfit teens of the time...

"...If you live in a small town
You might meet a dozen or two
Young alien types who step out
And dare to declare
We're through bein' cool..."

The band was actually pretty serious about the issue of conformity. Their name, Devo, was an intentional play on "de-evolution." It reflected their concern that humanity had actually begun to regress, citing the intense herd mentality of American society (and teens!) as evidence.

       Devo's interest in the effects of conformity were more artistic and satiric, but there is plenty of research out there showing that, in fact, a lack of personal expression and autonomy actually contributes to a variety of physical and psychological problems. Huffington Post blogger and self-styled "work-life balance/stress management trainer" Joe Robinson cites dozens of articles in his blog entry "Don't Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Problem With Being Cool" (Oct. 13, 2010)...

"...Being cool is supposed to make us irresistibly confident in our up-to-the-minute blase-ness, but it actually feeds insecurity with the false belief that popularity or a certain image is needed for validation. The research shows that real self-worth comes from internal goals that satisfy values and needs that are actually your own, such as autonomy and growth, the polar opposite of the external approval circuit..."

       A lot of the "research" underlying these ideas comes from the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, an unlikely pair of social scientists from the University of Rochester, described in some detail in Daniel Pink's new book on motivation in business, Drive. The underlying assumption in business is that the motivation to succeed originates from external sources -- pay bonuses and high salaries, or, alternatively, the threat of sanctions or other deterents. In education, we've built an entire superstructure around this concept, from high-stakes testing and school assessment processes, to teacher merit pay and other performance incentives. None of it, say Deci, Ryan and Pink, works. As a matter of fact, this sort of approach is actually counter-productive, reducing creativity, productivity, and personal satisfaction and happiness.

       I truly celebrate the anytime, any place nature of digital social connections, and they have great implications for how and why we learn. But two recent events have caused me to, once again, ponder whether the tech-focused among us really have a handle on things, or are we just trying to be cool like our kids.

Teachers Weigh In

       "...If we were to offer something significant for a prize, incentive, reward, benefit, etc., what would you like? We are thinking something in the category of a tool or resource that would help your organization be more effective..." ...was a posting to a discussion list of a professional organization to which I belong. When cooler heads finally prevailed, the resultant discussion was quite interesting and revealing. But that had to wait for the chorus of "A new iPad!!!" postings to die down.

A Student's Spin.
       A student taking my online course on open-source web applications -- a pretty powerful and tech-savvy junior who has produced marketable software of his own, and participated in our superintendant's student advisery council on technology in the classroom.-- has often mentioned his lack of interest in the use of smart/personal devices like phones and PDAs. "Real learning" he states "takes place with paper and pencil tasks...games and online activities are just a distraction."

The Results?

       Needless to say, these anecdotes have no obvious connection, and they, even together, prove absolutely nothing of substance about learning and motivation. Despite my high school student's observations, I will, as I mentioned, continue to be an advocate for inexpensive and ubiquitous computing devices, and the connections they bring us. Besides, I suspect that our young spokesman probably will be using such tools to learn and work when he's no longer in high school (if he's not already using them now).
       But the contrast to be gained from their juxtaposition, still, could not be more striking. What the adult members of the discussion list (educators, all) were saying was that a very popular device was a great "...prize, incentive, reward, benefit..." In fact, that's not what research, and our example student, are saying. People (including students) owning the learning process, and owning its results, is how that works. If we want to engage and motivate our students, then we can't assume that access to cool devices will do that for us, and "access to tools" does not, in itself, translate into student ownership of the learning process. It must be a pre-existing lesson design piece, a specific pedagogical decision which does not depend on the physical details of the lesson. It can, in fact, be a part of a paper and pencil lesson.
       Students are kids. They're heavily invested in "being cool," and a lot of that motivation is driving their own use patterns for computers, smart phones, and other such devices. That is exactly what caused my student's observation that interactive games and other computer experiences were a waste of time -- what he saw was students taking those opportunities and abusing them to pursue what was interesting to them. Those use patterns are heavily influenced by their own herd mentality, their own sense of "cool." If a teacher selects a tool, or an online experience, for how much s/he perceives it fits the students' interests (instead of selecting it for how it supports an otherwise strong lesson), that is the results. We have a lot to learn from our students, but, as teachers, we'll always get into trouble simply trying to be like them, trying to motivate them by giving them what we think they think is cool.

       To leverage the true power of online computing and other technology tools, we need to put the flower pots on our heads, and join Devo. Learning is way too important to simply be driven by our desire to fit in -- with each other or our students. It must be driven by our students' desire to learn, to advance, to succeed. And Deci and Ryan tells us that's got to come from within.

"...Time to clean some house,

Be a man, or a mouse....

Put the tape on erase,

Rearrange a face,

We always liked Picasso anyway.

We're through bein' cool..."