Skills

A Lack of Critical Thinking

Sep 24

I’m a bit frustrated and discouraged at the general lack of critical thinking taking place in educational technology today.

I’ll give you a couple examples, and I’m sure some people will take the opportunity to disagree with me. Which is good. Because it will provide evidence both for and against why I’m frustrated.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about netbooks lately. Many people have responded to this post I wrote a while back, and I still think it’s an important conversation to have. Because some people are way too caught up in a device that costs way too much to do way too little for our students. Let me break this down.

First of all, people who have responded or written back about this topic saying my focus is too device-centric are wrong and didn’t take the time to read what I said at the outset of the article above. Our goals for our students are to empower them to learn how to learn. We want them immersed in experiences that will afford them the opportunity to develop their skills of critical thinking, problem solving, written and oral communication, collaboration, and creativity. The coined “21st century skills.” And, of course, we want them to continue building a solid foundation of general knowledge. That’s what we want. Now, how do we get there?

When I talk about a netbook running Linux, many people lose their minds. Because it’s not an Apple device. We are getting our HP 1103 for $267. That’s a total cost. We are running ubermix with over 50 applications. The software is rock solid. If something happens to the software on the device, it has a quick restore function that allows us to restore the machine to its original state in less than 20 seconds, while still keeping all the student files. It has full access to the web, and by full access I mean it runs everything like Flash and a completely native and full Google Apps experience that requires no work arounds. It has full access to all cloud services we utilize with students. It has a web cam. It has the LibreOffice suite, along with a wide variety of other applications for a wide variety of uses. It runs Audacity for students to create podcasts. It has a light-weight video editor. You can save and share files from a USB key. It has Scratch to help kids learn problem solving and programming. It has over 6 hours of battery life, and it wakes immediately from sleep. It presents a real, immersive means to address all the 21st century skills we are aiming at.

But, it’s not an Apple. Which some people just can’t stand. I’ve had the same conversations over and over on this, and I just don’t get it. Because people are convinced that spending at least $500 for an iPad, plus the cost of apps, to have a machine that actually does less overall, is the right thing to do. And I know there are many free apps out there, but many of the valuable apps teachers want to use with students come at a cost. Again, let’s review the purpose of why we are selecting a device. Look at that list above. Yes, an iPad can do many of those things, but the netbook can address those skills just as well, and I’d say better, than an iPad can. And, the students are in complete control of the device. They have full admin rights. They aren’t restricted to the experience that we (or Apple) are dictating for them. The netbook is still a better writing experience both for the speed and accuracy of typing and the experience of moving between applications when composing. If the solution to the speed and accuracy issue is to buy the keyboard for the iPad, you can add another $70 to your cost.

So, let’s think critically, and let’s focus on students in grades 3-8 for the exercise. Because as stated above, I do think the iPad is a wonderful device for primary age students, but the netbook is the stronger option for grades 3-8.

You can have a device for $267 that does more to accomplish the goals above, is easier to manage, is easier to maintain, is cheaper to own, and allows students to entirely experiment and learn how to operate. Or, you can have a device for twice the cost that is the opposite. Now before you melt down entirely, yes, I do think the iPad is a compelling device. It’s just not the right tool for the total cost, experience, and goals as set out above.

Let me give another example. MacBooks. I’ve had the same conversation as the one above, only substitute the MacBook for the iPad. At a cost of around $800 for the unit, plus the cost of software licensing, and possibly Apple Care, we’ll assume an average cost of $900. In fact, that is the figure that Jeff Mao states is the price that Maine paid for their MacBooks in a recent refresh of their 1:1. That means for the price of one MacBook, you can get 3.3 netbooks. Let’s discuss.

One quick point of clarification. I think Apple makes incredible hardware. I would rather have my iPhone than any other phone on the market right now. My MacBook Pro is an amazing machine that I love using for video and photo work. I say that to negate the “you’re just an Apple hater” argument. That’s not what this conversation is about. It’s about thinking deeply about what we’re making available to our students and how we are being fiscally responsible in our process.

So, thinking deeply, the netbook allows students to do 90% of what a MacBook can do. At 1/3 the price. That’s important. Because it demonstrates that 90% of the time students would have more machine than they need. So, if we can accomplish the goals stated above 90% of the time with a $267 device, why would we do otherwise? The most immediate response to that question is multimedia work. I agree with that. Video work, in particular, is a much better experience on a MacBook. And, I absolutely want our students to be creating using video. So, we provide two carts of MacBooks at our elementary buildings and six carts of MacBooks at our middle school that teachers can check out when they want to do heavier multimedia projects. We do this understanding that kids aren’t spending the majority of their time on the devices creating videos. If they are, something is wrong with your curriculum.

Let’s break this down a bit further. For our middle school, we have approximately 1,060 students. Equipping each student with a MacBook would be $954,000. Equipping each student with a netbook is $283,020. That’s a difference of $670,980. Is the 10% of what a netbook can’t do worth $670,980? As mentioned, we have six carts of MacBooks at our middle school that are available for projects. These carts were purchased prior to our 1:1 implementation, but even if they hadn’t been, we could have purchased them, with the carts, for $172,000. That would still leave us $498,980. That is a significant figure.

So, people who are telling me that a MacBook is still the right device for this scenario, I really need to see some critical thought in a rationale that justifies that difference. Because we can accomplish all the goals at a fraction of the cost by using a 1:1 netbook and several checkout carts of MacBooks.

And just because this is already a silly-long post. Let’s hit one more example. Device control.

A tech director shared recently that they force all the schools in their district to lock down their student computers to the degree that students can’t change the desktop background or modify the location of any applications. He said they do this because it liberates the teacher. And that’s all backward. Because we want to liberate the students. We give our students full admin control of their netbooks to actually learn how the device works. We encourage them to experiment and get creative and find out what makes the thing work. If they mess it up, we have the quick 20 second restore to get them back up and running. Isn’t that the kind of inquiry we’ve been seeking for our students? Don’t we want them to have ownership over the device? We talk a lot about problem solving and innovation, yet we lock down one of the best conduits to authentically learn these kinds of skills? I don’t get that at all.

So, that’s where I’m at. I know many people are doing great things with iPads and MacBooks and even full laptops running Windows, but I’d argue you could do all those great things at a fraction of the cost with a system that will be more effective and allow students more freedom in their learning.

And, I would imagine, a couple of you might disagree.

Airplanes and Education

Mar 06

A couple things ran through my mind today as I flew into San Antonio for the 2010 ASCD conference. Both related to education.

On the trip, I started reading 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the name. I don’t necessarily like it, but I do get it. While these skills have absolutely been a requisite part of our society and learning for many centuries, and they aren’t unto themselves new skills by any means, there is a new context in which we should be engaging them. I agree with that. Emphatically.

It seems over the past decade, our education system has temporarily lost the use of its mind. We went from focusing on a more complete education of our youth to a finite focus on basic skills. And we ramped up the testing and the accountability for those very specific skills, and we left many important things behind as a result. Now the focus of many instructional programs is on test preparation. And the majority of those skills apply very narrowly to the experience of taking a standardized test and can then be discarded by students once they are done with that two week window. We do this at the cost of creativity, innovation, collaboration, problem solving, and other important lessons students should be learning about being a part of a democracy.

Frankly, it’s tough to watch.

And the watching led me to my second thought. Airplanes.

What is it that airplanes are designed to do? Really designed as their most core function? Fly. Take hundreds of people up thousands of feet in the air and fly them over the earth at mind numbing speed. Transport us across the country in a matter of hours rather than months. They are truly amazing, and though that word has been prone to overuse in our society, in this context I believe it is a perfect descriptor.

But what must an airplane also be able to do as a necessary utilitarian function? Drive. On the ground. I was struck with this thought as I looked out the window when taxiing at the airport. The comedy of it. Looking out and seeing these incredibly elegant flying marvels of science lumbering around the holding grounds. All that ingenious design and the power of jet propulsion being used to move along the ground at the speed you or I could match on our bicycle.

And that’s when I realized what we’ve been doing this past decade. We’ve taken the airplanes and tried to make them cars. We’ve told our students the most important part of what they learn is the utilitarian function of powering down all their potential to crawl around the ground. There’s a reason we don’t use airplanes to commute to work on our highways. The basic functioning of driving on the ground is such a minute part of what makes an airplane so powerful.

But that’s what we’re doing with our students. We’re leaving behind the best part of what they could be doing with their education. Forgive the Lifetime Original feel-good movie of the week payoff at the end here, but I have to. We aren’t letting our kids fly. We’re keeping them grounded and using metrics to measure how well they taxi as airplanes rather than how well they could be flying.

Though I still don’t care much for the name, I really do hope that we will find ways to begin moving our focus, conversations, and effort to the 21st Century Skills approach to learning. Remember that there’s a whole lot more that we could be having our students do.

This quote is listed at the beginning of 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times. Will it every come to pass? I don’t know. But I certainly can hope.

“I’m calling on our nation’s governor’s and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” -President Barack Obama

I think it’s time we start getting education off the ground.

*Cross posted at Tech & Learning Advisor blog.

Thanks to Drewski2112 for the use of the Flickr image.

Communication and Collaboration

Mar 02

This week I had the distinct privilege of presenting two sessions on Communication and Collaboration at District 30 in Illinois with Andy Kohl. Although we had enough material to last us through the day, we tried to cram it all in a 90 minute time slot. Needless to say, we didn’t get to everything.

I think the conversation was outstanding, and I believe we should all take the time to wrestle with these ideas together with other staff members. I’ll share the session notes and presentation here, and please feel free to use anything that will be useful for you. And really, I mean it, go have these conversations with other members of your institution. I think you’ll find it an excellent opportunity for growth and learning for everyone.

Communication and Collaboration

View more presentations from Ben Grey.

Introduce Moodle and backchannel to attendees. Invite them to join in the process, building collaborative notes.

9:30 – 9:50 = Introduce ourselves. Introduce Moodle and Backchannel. Ask teachers to define collaboration. Use Etherpad to have them build this definition together.

9:50 – 10:00 = Review the definition and reflect on the process with them.

- What was different about this experience?
- How could this look different for the classroom?

- Discuss portions of the Panitz article.

Review questions asked in the article.

Students must learn to routinely ask questions such as: “Are we thinking clearly enough? Are we being accurate in what we say? Do we need to be more precise? Are we sticking to the question at issue? Are we dealing with the complexities of the question? Do we need to consider another perspective or point of view? Are our assumptions accurate or are they faulty? Is our purpose fair-minded, or are we only concerned about advancing our own desires? Does our argument seem logical, or is disjointed, lacking cohesion?

In other words, these important standards of thought must be applied to all of the important structures of thought: to its guiding goal or purpose, to the central question, to the information used with respect to the question, to the judgments that are made with the information, to the concepts inherent in the judgments, to the assumptions that underlie the judgments, and to the implications that follow from it.”

10:00 – 10:20 = Roundup of tools which can help provide these learning experiences for kids.

- Moodle
- Wikis + Google Sites
- Google Docs
- Blogging

- Look at the bowdrill video from YouTube. Talk about this as a collaborative experience for this student. Use this as a transition to the topic of communication.

10:20-10:40 = Discuss how communication has both changed and stayed the same. Show “Can This be His Home.” Discuss the result of new mediums and the “four resources model”.

10:40 – 11:00 = Time for teachers to work on a lesson example or retool an existing assignment.

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We only got to the point where we showed “Can This be His Home.” Lots of good stuff in the Four Resource Model. Maybe we’ll get to it next time.

Thanks to American Backroom for the use of the Flickr image.

What is Curriculum?

Jan 17

I have been in education for ten years, and I haven’t thought enough about that question. I’m now in the second week of the course, “Curriculum Theory” in my JHU-ISTE program, and we’ve started wrestling with some tough questions about curriculum.

The first being the title for this post. What is curriculum?

It seems the answer can’t be cleaved from many political influences in most cases. That’s fascinating- that so many will battle so hard over the very definition of something I find could be rather to entirely simple. The more I delve into the topic, the more I find myself forced to simplicity. In my opinion, curriculum is…

All the stuff our students learn.

That’s it. Simple.

Where it gets exponentially complicated starts with the very first step away from the definition. Who gets to pick the stuff the students learn? Much more difficult and political.

Some say that the curriculum we choose is broken down into three parts; the written, the taught, and the tested. Sure that’s part of it, but curriculum is much more than that. It’s ALL the stuff our students learn. That means both the intended and unintended. When we start picking exactly what the stuff is that the students will learn, we begin formulating a construct that students will engage when learning. Obviously, there will be written curriculum that is to be taught and then tested, but there is much more to it than that. Because it’s the bigger construct of the scope of the curriculum that will likely have the greatest impact on a student.

What I mean is, if we set up a curriculum that focuses on finite, rote recitation of facts as a major outcome, we will intend to have students complete our institution’s educational scope and sequence with a specific knowledge base we’ve predetermined. However, what we most likely will not intend for students to learn is how to game our system. This is happening quite often in educational institutions who most value specific, information-based learning outcomes as students figure out how to work the system, or “Do School” as Denise Clark Pope suggests, and their final proficiency may say much more about how they learned to exploit than how they learned to learn what was intended.

Things continue to grow more complicated when we take another step back and look at some of the umbrella questions surrounding curriculum and its inception.

For example, the question was posed in our class last week, “Whose values should be reflected in the content and processes of curriculum?” That question, frankly, is kicking my tail. I’ve thought on it quite a bit, and I still don’t have a good answer for it. I’d like to say mine, but mine probably isn’t yours, so why do I get to decide it’s mine and not yours? I might say the learners, but what if collectively, they decide they don’t much value education in general? Where does that leave us? I could take the cheap way out and say society, but who in the world can say exactly what the values of society are? Like I said, it’s kicking my tail.

Another step back.

Look bigger than just the curriculum. Look at schooling in general. What exactly is the purpose of school? I’ve written about this before, and I still believe in what I wrote in that post. It is all about learning. That is the purpose. However, if learning is the goal, what is the conduit? That, I would have to say, is democracy.

This gets us nowhere easier than previous topics. As Deborah Meier has stated before, democracy is an incredibly difficult process to understand. There are fewer more important revolutions in the history of mankind than the information revolution. That knowledge and learning and information moved from the privileged few to the masses means more for the progress of citizenry than perhaps any other reform. However, learning in a democracy means dealing with difficult issues. The tyranny of the majority. The repression of the minority opinion. The absolute need for empathy. These are not always addressed in the democratic learning institutions where our students are learning.

If we teach in a democratic institution, then what exactly should be taught? What subjects should students learn? Yet another question to which I don’t have the answer. I’d like to say students should learn what is of interest to them, but that if rife with complication. I know if I had been given the opportunity to pick that which I would learn when I was in middle school, none of the subjects would have had any academic value. I can assure you this, though, they would have been interesting.

Should we continue on with the just in case model; giving students a bit of everything just in case they might need it some day? Should we move to the just in time model that delivers knowledge and learning right in the time when it is needed? Do either really offer a true solution?

I can absolutely see the need for students to learn how to communicate dynamically, and it is likely there is a certain level of mathematics and science that is needed to succeed in our world, but other than that, what should we teach? Citizenship, vocational skill, world languages, finance? What about specific classes in project management, collaboration (the real kind, not just cooperative learning), critical thinking, etc.?

Obviously the more I write, the less I seem to know.

One last point before I bring this rambling, stumbling wreck of a post to a close.

What about me? What do I do that makes a difference in the lives of learners today? That, is a very valid question. I’m the Instructional Technology Coordinator for a K-12 district in Illinois. I have held this position for two years now. I’d like to say that in that time, I’ve managed to facilitate great change in the way students interface with learning through technology. For a host of reasons, I simply can’t say that with truth. I face the same challenges many of my colleagues face in this profession. I try to jump many of the same hurdles. I’ve found there are reasons why I never went out for track in school.

I do believe we can engage our students in new and emerging ways. I also believe there’s much we can be doing to better some of the old ways. I will not stop fighting for what I believe is best for our students. And that is, simply, learning. I try to ground the work I do in that bedrock. Many days I fail. That doesn’t mean I will give up the trying. As long as I’m in this position, and as long as I’m affiliated with the work of educating students, I will continue to fight for their learning.

Obviously, this is some kind of fragmented post. But these are the things I’m wrestling with. If you have any thoughts on one, a few, or all of the topics raised, I would greatly appreciate your sage wisdom. Or even more questions. Those seem to be what I can handle best at present.