Do We Really Even Still Need the Question Mark?

       Well, wasn’t that title just a little bit of irony?! But then, I just love such things. There’s a lot hiding behind the question, of course, and it involves the wonderful world of online discourse.

       It is always with some trepidation that I do what I’m about to do, ‘cause I’m painfully aware that a young perspective will be somewhat different than my own (which goes along with the fact that I am not, in fact, a young person). But I began this blog as an examination of the implications of new technologies for human behavior and communication, and that tradition will continue here.
       One of the first communications technologies with which I became acquainted was the LISTSERV, an email-based discussion list which provided archives and a feed to the old BitNet for bulletin board-style display. I’ve written about them here before, and have observed that all online communications platforms are a great deal more alike than they are different. But there has been a slow but profound shift in the style of discourse.
       I will now engage in some very unscientific data gathering. EDTECH, a LISTSERV I used to moderate, still maintains archives going back to 1989. It took a few years for it to pick up steam and become popular, so I picked an arbitrary month: January, 1995. Of the 48 posts that day, 9 originated threads. 2 of those were announcements, the remaining 7 were questions. All of the other 39 were in responses to questions by others. Hence, only 2 of the 48 posts were not associated with someone asking a question of the collected wisdom of the EDTECH list community. And that was just one day.
       For contrast, I fired up my Twitter account and searched the #EDTECH hashtag. Of the 23 recent tweets, two contained questions, but they were both rhetorical, answered later in the same tweet. None actually asked questions. All were announcements or links to resources elsewhere. There were also none on my Facebook feed, although I did not attempt to narrow that by any subject search.
       So here’s the question I’m really asking: What has happened? Maybe people didn’t know very much back in 1995. Or maybe people didn’t know as much about technology in 1995. A lot has happened since then, for sure, but I’m not buying that as an explanation for a behavior change. It’s a little like saying that it was a lot easier to teach US History in 1995, ‘cause there’s been nearly 20 years more history since then.
       Perhaps my study is flawed because the sample is of two radically different populations. Perhaps. The membership of the LISTSERV back in 1995 would have been probably equally divided between K-12 practitioners and higher-ed teacher educators and observes. That pretty much matches the few names I could pick out of the #EDTECH tweet list – I most certainly don’t know them all, hence the “unscientific” nature of my study. Probably the most significant aspect of the LISTSERV population is that these were all early adopters – members of a small group of people engaging in online discussion before it was common, But would that make them less or more likely to ask questions?
       Maybe a much more likely explanation is that the LISTSERV was set up by someone specifically interested in providing a place to ask questions. In contrast, Twitter and Facebook are specifically set up to encourage the declarative – Twitter’s tweet composer specifically asks “What’s happening?” Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” Both seem to encourage the participant to answer those questions, rather than posing questions of her own. But in any case, my sense is that something has fundamentally changed about the nature of online discourse. And my contention is that it isn’t positive.

       All of the education technology observers I know are all about the deeper end of the learning pool – problem/project-based learning, Socratic method, critical thinking, student-driven learning – lots of implied question-asking in those learning paradigms. But when we look at these same people in the open arena of online discourse, things are quite different. Everybody wants to be a leader using the declarative, and no one wants to be a follower asking the question.
       Well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, our society has relegated the question mark to secondary status. If we really want to know something, we ask Google or Bing, though we call that a "search," not a question. (It's a little easier to see now, isn't it, why "Ask Jeeves" died as a search engine trade mark!) A search engine will not notice, or care, that we don’t already know the answer. Of course, we'll have lost that very basic of human behaviors, asking for help.
         And we don’t even have to use a question mark.

The Paradox of Student-Centered Instruction

William M. Jones

       My dad had a couple of firm observations he would make from time to time. He was a college professor cum university administrator, a true intellectual with a lot of experience negotiating human space. He always used to say, “You know you've had a good idea when you hear it coming out of the mouth of someone else.” He inevitably followed it up with “…and when that happens, you should smile, nod, and agree that it’s a great idea. Nothing more.”
        One could no better define a lot of what is being promoted in education reform today.
       This essay will be unusual for this space on a couple of levels.

        Although the presence of education technology has lent a great deal of support to some of the ideas I’ll address, the presence of technology tools is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for them. Hence this isn't about that. In addition, I will not attempt to plunge head-long to a conclusion, an answer to a question. Instead (Socrates would be proud!) I will merely ask the question, and hope that by posing it we can make some progress towards answering it.
        My dad’s remarks have two serious underlying assumptions which reveal two different, even conflicting, ideals in human behavior …

“…a good idea…coming out of the mouth of someone else…” Humans are almost desperate to own what they do and say. If an idea is good, it’s remembered, but our pride and focus often removes our ability to remember the source. When this happens in industry, it’s called advertising. After all, every company wants to be the inventor of their product, no matter how derivative it is. If it happens in academia, it’s called “published.” Although there are new ideas coming from academic research, such research is often the rephrasing and re-branding of a small variation on a preexisting idea.
        If it happens in schools, it’s called student-centered learning.
       That might sound cynical, but the research is out there – student-centered learning really does work. If you get students to own what they learn, they are motivated, engaged, and proud of their success. They will do better in school, and they will do better in life after they leave school, because their relationship with learning and success is an internal one, not dependent on the presence of celebrating teachers, grades, and other external motivators.

“….you should smile, nod…Nothing more…” My dad knew all too well that the best chance a good idea would become a program or policy required leveraging the enthusiasm and engagement of the person who just promoted it. Attempting to correct their mistaken ownership would simply cut off the engagement and enthusiasm, and, by extension, the idea itself. (As an aside, one could argue that that which we affectionately call “politics” is simply the process of inducing others to have and promote the ideas we hold as important to our own interests. That explains a lot these days!)

       To be a good teacher is to be a celebrator of a student’s ideas and work. After all, if a student is going to own her ideas, a teacher will have to step aside and allow that to happen. My dad proved that it worked in academic politics, over and over again. To encourage people to succeed, one should provide them the ability to create, and be celebrated in their creations as the owner, which, often, is quite different from true ownership, since most ideas owe a lot (sometimes everything) to previous work by someone else. There is a fundamental humility in the act of being a good teacher/mentor – the ability to set aside ones’ ownership of information, and one’s ownership of the learning or development process.
       So, we've defined a good teacher. The question I have is, if “fundamental humility” is the method by which we can induce others to succeed, it would seem to be a great human characteristic in general. (In fact, I could have spent volumes just on that issue alone.) So, how does one induce a “fundamental humility” in the mind of a student on the one hand, and celebrate their ideas as original ones they own on the other? From a somewhat narrower perspective, is this new education reform movement doomed to fail to produce the characteristics of a good teacher?
       I will admit to deliberately ignoring a few things in this discussion. Our students do learn a great deal from watching what we as teachers do (rather than what we manage to get them to do). And, of course, a “hunger for learning and information” has, built-in, a certain humble assumption – that one doesn't already know everything already. But I watch the rise of arrogance and self-centeredness in everything from politics to reality television, and I wonder whether there might be an inherent paradox at work here, a duality of messages.
        For us in educational technology, student ownership of the learning process is, one could argue, a logical partner to the presence and use of student-owned devices and information pipelines in the classroom. One-to-one computing and “Bring your own device” support encourage such an approach. So how can we have our proverbial cake and eat it too – have students engaged in owning the learning process, but with the selfless sense that, in fact, one’s place in the world of knowledge and learning is humble, connected, and dependent?
        There are several confounding issues which color this debate.

• The nature of technology adoption. People on the “front lines” of technology adoption are often very proud, even arrogant, of the choices they've made – the tools they've selected, the skills they've learned, and the implied behavior changes they have embraced. As has been shown over and over again in history, early adopters tend to become policy wonks and gatekeepers, maintaining their prime location at the head of the curve, and often forgetting the primary goals of the pursuit in the process.
• A teacher’s self-image. It might very well be that a humble, supportive facilitator isn't what the overwhelming majority of teachers signed on to be. If we bring access of external information and experiences to students (with it the change in instructional practice that implies), we may ignore or deliberately subvert a personal vision with which a teacher entered the profession. (This is, of course, separate from whether they should change – after all, reform movements often sort as much as they change, causing some potential teachers to leave or avoid the profession. Can we be sure we won’t simply create a teacher void, or a large number of unhappy teachers?)
• Process vs. information. Owning the process of knowledge construction can be viewed as quite separate from owning the information used therein, and the resultant product. Is this the hair we’re asking teachers and tech-driven tech reformers to split?
• Real vs. constructed engagement. Many of the advocates of information-access-driven education reform feel that this increases authenticity – students are able to use and interact with information sources and players who are actually doing what the students are learning. It’s the same for project-based learning, a movement sharing a great deal with the sorts of ideas we are discussing here. But the overwhelming majority of the learning goals of PK-12 instruction cannot, and should not, be truly authentic. After all, most students cannot write novels or symphonies, nor can they be empowered to do dangerous chemistry or physics experiences. Teachers routinely provide constructed (but safe) sandboxes for such experiences. What happens to student autonomy and ownership then? 

What do you think?

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

       The above is the motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by eBay cofounder Peter Thiel. Their concern is that tech companies have lost interest in the “big questions” being asked by society – poverty, climate change, disease, productivity...big changes that make things better in a profound way – and are, instead, merely happy to rearrange existing content in creative ways, for the sole purpose of making money. In the lead article of this month’s MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin compares our current state of technology advancement to that of 50 years ago, a decade which began with President John F. Kennedy’s charge to NASA, to “…commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth.”

       Kennedy’s challenge was met, but the effort was herculean – at one point the NASA budget was 4% of the total US Government budget. There were hundreds of technology problems being researched to support the lunar mission. But, more to the point, this charge, and the scramble by both public and private organizations to meet it, took place (could take place!) at a time when technology was viewed as a vehicle to make fundamental improvements in how we do the business of being human. It certainly helped that the US economy was on the rise then, but even if that were true now, the interest in funding research and development projects with distant and grand goals seems to be gone… from the political landscape, but also from the interests of entrepreneurs. Hence Founders Fund.

       That, of course, is not to say that Twitter and their social networking brethren aren't valuable. They are. But they provide only incremental change over previous technologies which did similar things. And, as such, they answer a question that no one was actually asking (or has largely been answered already). It’s like the difference between the questions “How can I make a better mousetrap?” and “How can we make personal transportation compatible with the coming massive increases in global wealth and population?” We can already trap mice. A better one might be profitable, but it’ll have only an incremental impact on our lives. In contrast, the second question has two few entrepreneurs asking it, and too few research and development projects addressing the large number of technologies that must be a part of its answer. It might have worked in 1961, but it's not working now.
       So, as an educator who selects and uses technology in the classroom, why should you care?
       There are three lessons we can apply directly in our classrooms.

1. Set the goals first. Often, the way tech innovation gets lost is that entrepreneur selects a technology (social networking connections online, for instance), and then tries to figure out how to make it different enough to be attractive and profitable. In the classroom, that mistake plays out by selecting the technology before the learning goal. If you’re selecting your technology first, you’re just generating self-interest and temporary motivation in students, without actually embedding its use in the greater interests of learning. Even global education technology “answers” like 1-1 laptop programs and universal access to “intelligent classroom” tools can only work if they are paired with real learning questions.
2. Make instruction real. This is closely related to #1 above. As an example, project-based learning is very popular now, and fits well with some of the other goals associated with technology-rich instruction. As anyone with experience in this lesson paradigm will tell you, if the goals (the "guiding questions") of the projects aren't real, engaging, and important, students won't care, and won't learn.
3. Connect across the curriculum Many of the current tech start-ups are often just the same techies, trying to re-invent the same techy answers to the same techy questions. The real innovators out there are connected to real people, real needs and interests, and real goals. As a matter of fact, the best technology start-ups are began by people with arts and humanities degrees, and tech company hirers often specifically target such people. In our world, technology use which provides and leverages connections across disciplines will have the best chance at achieving goal #2 above. It will also serve to connect all of the teachers in your building in the joint pursuit of preparing students for innovative and constructive work after they leave us.

       Thomas Friedman and others have stated that our students (and the economy in which they’ll live) will only survive if they learn how to connect, create, innovate – a truism which transfers to educational practice, and should serve as the mantra for tool selection and technology use in the classroom.

What you can do NOW to get ready for BYOD

[This blog posting is in support of my presentation at TeachMeetKy, WKU/Bowling Green, Friday, Oct.5, 2012]

       A lot of districts are looking at the possibility of supporting student-owned personal devices in the classroom. There are a lot of good reasons...

1. Students are already familiar with, and can quickly and easily use, their own technology.
2. Schools/Districts can leverage student-owned devices, getting close to 1-1 computing in the classroom, but without the expense and support problems.
3. Just-in-time access to activities and resources online can transform the classroom.

       My district (Fayette) made the decision to support student personal devices near the end of last year, causing everybody to scurry around, thinking about what that would mean. If your classroom/school/district is contemplating this shift, here is a list of things you can do right now to make that happen successfully.

       This is a wish list -- a collection of talking points to get you thinking about what this means. No district will be able to do them all. 

The Technicals

1. Can we support it?
• Be prepared to help all platforms onto your wifi. It's a very good idea to buy examples of each (Android tablet, Kindle, iPad), and try them. Help teachers/adults get their smart phones online!
• Write the limits of your support of, and liability for, student personal devices into their AUP contract.
2. Secure? CIPA-compliant?
   • Needless to say, it's critical that your students know and use their network login accounts and district-supplied email address.
   • Make sure your system can register and associate devices with login accounts. 
   • Design AD groups to scale student access based on training (“Digital Drivers License”)
3. Will it connect and work?
   • Not just wifi capacity, but bandwidth all the way upstream.
   • “Transparent proxy” eliminates proxy dependency of apps and browsers
   • Encourage the selection of resources (tutorials, videos, etc.) which are “device neutral”

Fears

1. Student Monitoring, and Off-Task Behavior
• Begin the discussion now about the impact of more autonomous student work on lesson plan design. Teacher instructional practice is so huge, it gets its own section below, but be aware that a teacher's desire to leave their instructional practice unchanged in the face of omnipresent  information and content creation tools will result in lots of off-task behavior!
• Leverage a Learning Management System to manage links, and monitor student access to materials and activities. "Google" is an instructional resource, but if you want to use and track specific online tools, an LMS can serve as a first-stop portal, and a method of tracking individual student progress.
2. The Scary "Cloud"
   • Make teacher, school, and district online presences interactive. The cloud is about connections. If leadership and classroom presences don't accept and use input from students, it's unlikely teachers will be interested in doing so. 
   • Have teacher participation in crowdsourced knowledge construction and discussion a part of their professional responsibilities. It should be a quid quo pro -- require it, but acknowledge its importance by awarding professional development credit for it!

Instructional Practice

1. The  disappearing lecture 
• Start the move away from the teacher role of information deliverer (“Sage on the Stage”), and towards facilitation (”Guide on the Side”). 
• Find and leverage online materials, media, and experts. The teacher role becomes more than simply selecting the content. S/he now has the ability to select the resources which deliver it. 
• Examine the "Flipped Classroom" concept, which leverages class time for tutorials, mentoring, and answering questions.
2. Differentiation
   • BYOD supports an increased focus on project-based learning and collaborative learning, which  also supports a better reflection of differentiation strategies.
   • Promote a classroom practice which supports a variety of activities at once, including an increase in student autonomy. Start now to get away from the idea that all students have to be doing the same thing at the same time!
3. Assessment and Accountability
   
   • Increase the use of online and electronic assessments, especially for formative purposes. Online assessments can be accomplished at any time, and can be used as instructional platforms. Electronic ("clicker") assessments can be used to drive the classroom.
   • Add changes in teacher’s instructional practice to teacher accountability processes. Student learning accountable measures are important, but don't get at the kinds of changes needed to drive them in the new environment.

Fairness

1. Access to Devices
• Provide small numbers of student-use classroom computers for projects which require them. This can help to support projects that a student's device might not be able to handle, and provides access for students who might not have support for out-of-class work.
• As much as possible, purchase and make available devices to take home for students who do not have anything they can use there. The goal of BYOD is a 1-1 classroom access paradigm on the cheap. True 1-1 requires support for students who cannot afford hardware themselves. (Accessing online resources might imply the use of textbook funds for delivery devices.)
2. The “Digital Divide” (broadband access outside of school)
   
   • Expand alternative access through ESS/extended school library hours, and community partners such as city libraries and businesses. The goal here is to get all students to learn how to use these new capabilities for learning...wherever they are!
   • Connect to parents through the Acceptable Use Policy process. Make sure they support your interests, and provide the ability for them to participate.

This last point is pivotal. Although BYOD can help schools change to a more connected learning experience, it isn't "free lunch." We still have a responsibility to serve ALL students, regardless of what resources and abilities they bring to the classroom. But even if we can't fully-fund such support, changing to the new learning environment is most important to our students without home access. If we do not support these experiences for them, the result is a reinforcement of the divide between the haves and the have-nots!

The Catch-22 of Technology-Driven Learning

       I have a new tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab. I really like it. It has a lot of the things I’m familiar with, including full file access to the Flash memory. So, if I want to read something using Amazon’s Kindle reader app, it’s as simple as dropping the file into the Kindle folder. Otherwise, its user interface is virtually indistinguishable from the iPad it replaced – another familiarity plus.
       But enough about my toys.
       I’m finding that a smooth transition between technology changes is a very good thing for me. I’ve spent much of the last 20 years trying to keep up with trends and changes, and I must say my taste for it is beginning to wane a bit. That, of course, makes me a little bit more like the overwhelming majority of the teachers I support, which might be a good thing. After all, the technology early adopters tend to look askance at those who can’t (or are unwilling to) keep up, which does bad things on both sides – it tends to foster a distorted sense of power and gatekeeping amongst the early adopters, and a sense of powerlessness and neglect amongst everybody else. There’s a lot of research on this issue. It’s definitely not new, it’s just gotten worse as the pace of change increases.
       They say, of course, that comfort with unfamiliarity is a good thing. I watched a TED Talk by social studies teacher Diana Laufenberg titled “How to learn? From mistakes,” a wonderful collection of instructional vignettes which brings together a lot of the project-based learning ideas my colleagues and I have been promoting for a long time: digital storytelling, collaborative projects, multiple modes of expression, student-driven learning and decision-making. Her point is that, with the shift away from educators and schools as the sole sources of information (any smart phone can provide more information than any teacher), we have to work out a better role for ourselves. And, of course, the above list provides the hints. Underlying it all is this idea that learning actually happens through failure, not success. That is, we grow by engaging in a series of unfamiliar experiences, learning from our mistakes.
       One might say that this is a very good argument for being a technology early adopter, and we should push those who aren’t in that category, to join it.
       But I suspect most people’s ability to negotiate unfamiliarity can be stretched only so far. Hence, learning-through-technology advocates might run the risk of squandering that ability to stretch in the pursuit of tools, rather than ideas. Once again, we’ve run the risk of putting the cart before the horse, technology goals ahead of educational goals, giving fuel to the argument that too much attention to technology tools slows, rather than enhances, learning. This is, of course, why so-called intelligent classroom tools have made such inroads into classroom practice – these tools do not require teachers to change their practice one whit, so they must meet and overcome only one arena of unfamiliarity. But that pretty much misses the implication of access to information, Ms. Laufenberg’s primary point, and mine.
       So how do we beat this rap? Taking a page from intelligent classroom tool integration, the goal is to reduce the amount of unfamiliarity, and we can do that by simply ignoring the tools. Do we need the latest tablet, cloud computing tool, media editor, etc., to implement student-driven, project-based learning? Certainly not. That’s a change that has its own merits, and we can advocate it without running the risk of giving ordinary classroom teachers the Catch 22 of requiring them to embrace new classroom habits only when and if they will use and embrace the tools we have designed to support it.
       But doesn’t that defeat the point? Not necessarily. In most settings, access to tools and technology resources is, for the most part, set by district and school policies rather than integration strategies. Most students already have the exposure and skillset they need to leverage the tools, as long as they have access. Hence, it isn’t necessary for the classroom teacher to have mastered the tools. They only need to allow for their use. That might, of course, be pretty scary too, but it’s a great deal less scary than requiring them to be in charge of teaching to, and providing, the tools themselves.
       Of course, the appropriate use of tools is something that a teacher can’t completely ignore. But the overwhelming majority of these concerns are (or at least should be!) already on their plates. Distracted and off-task behavior, critical thinking and evaluating the credibility of resources, etc. – are all things that scare teachers from allowing tech tool use, but those issues aren’t new, or even radically different, from those needed in an ordinary library.
       It’s time to cut our teachers a little slack. Instead of requiring them to embrace tool use as a metaphor for instructional reform, we should allow them the luxury of addressing the reform directly. I, for one, am willing to do that, knowing full well that, within a few short years, I’ll probably be one of those for whom some slack is required.