The Future of Technology?

Microsoft released a video earlier this month entitled Productivity Future Vision - it is 6 minutes long but worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0

Placed 5-10 years in the future, much of the video looks quite fanciful. However, many have pointed out that 10 years ago there was no YouTube, no Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Docs, no Skype, Facebook or MySpace, and certainly no iPhone, iPad, or Android tablets. Think how we might have viewed a video chat on a wifi tablet to an iPhone in 2001 - conducted by two Form II students.

An earlier "vision" video from 2009 begins with some interesting ideas about international collaboration in the classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5X2PxtvMsU

Wireless, always connected, built for collaboration, and touch surface interfaces both large and small dominate these visions of the future.

Five characteristics of an effective 21st-century educator

Just in time for the start of the new school year, eSchoolNews has a list, generated by their readers, of the five most important characteristic for 21st Century educators: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/09/09/five-characteristics-of-an-effective-21st-century-educator/

1. Anticipates the future.
2. Is a lifelong learner.
3. Fosters relationships.
4. Can teach and assess all levels of learners.
5. Is able to discern effective vs. non-effective technology.

It's good that there are no software-specific goals here: laundry lists of "Knows PowerPoint"- or "Knows Twitter"-type of goals are extremely short sighted.

Perhaps it's related to #2, but I would add something about the ability to find, assess, and use information. As the role of the classroom teacher includes more and more individualized instruction, and as the world's knowledge-base continues to grow at a rapid pace, this will become more important. One of our teachers recently described guiding a student through an independent study, and how the student was finding and referencing the latest research and publications in the subject area. Much of this information did not exist when the teacher was completing his PhD, so this was really a new area for both the student and the teacher.

Dean of Faculty Kevin Mattingly places emphasis on making Lawrenceville a place where teachers can learn. This may be the most important characteristic for a 21st Century educator.

Report has good blended learning advice

An August, 2011 report from the management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group titled Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education calls for the creation of a "closed loop instructional system" to best employ technology in education.
The report focuses a great deal on the economics of edtech, but also offers these steps:

• Establish educational objectives focused on twenty-first century skills
• Develop relevant curriculum offerings by using opensource content (provided by higher education institutions, among others)
• Deliver [some] instruction virtually
• Embed frequent [formative] assessments with real-time, continuous feedback
• Provide appropriate intervention with immediacy and customization (based on the assessments)
• Track outcomes through data-management systems

The full report can be read here: http://www.bcg.com/expertise_impact/PublicationDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-81207

New report questions students' grasp of technology

We've mentioned the concept of a "digital native" before - a student who has grown up immersed in technology in all different forms. For many, there is a tendency to think that because they are "natives," our students really understand technology and put it to good use.
A new report that questions this assumption was released this week by the Education Development Center (http://www.edc.org/) and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (http://www.edviewpoints.org/). The report, titled Integrating Technology with Student-Centered Learning, covers a number of topics, including the use of technology to individualize education (a theme in the book Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen), but also draws the conclusion that many students are underprepared to utilize technology in their post-high school experience. One telling statistic: 43 percent of the surveyed students felt unprepared to use technology in their college and work lives.
Better used, the report concludes, there are three very important roles for educational technology in today's schools:

• Help diagnose and address individual learning needs.
• Develop the skills essential for life in a 21st century global society.
• Provide a more active learning experience, including transferring some responsibility for learning to the student.

The full report is available here: http://www.nmefdn.org/uploads/Integrating%20Tech%20with%20SCL.pdf

State Educational Technology Directors Report Released

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) in the professional group for public school technology leaders in all 50 states. Earlier this month they released their 8th annual report on educational technology trends, subtitled State Leaders Leveraging Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning. A quick synopsis is here: http://www.setda.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=6&name=DLFE-1313.pdf

They have 4 primary areas of focus in the report, with links to examples of innovative programs around the country:

• Preparing All Students for College and 21st Century Careers
• Developing and Scaling Innovative Learning Models (including online and blended learning)
• Supporting Educator Effectiveness (including Professional Learning Communities/Communities of Practice and Technology Coaches/Mentors)
• Building a 21st Century Infrastructure for Equity, Innovation, and Improvement (including data system interoperability)

The full report is here: http://www.setda.org/web/guest/2011nationaltrends

Thoughts About Tomorrow's Tech & Today's Skills

After Saturday's session at Alumni Weekend, an alum sent me this post from Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine (I've been a subscriber since issue 1.03) and author of the New Rules for the New Economy: http://www.kk.org/kk/

Some great ideas here about considering technological skills as a continuum, and not a specific program or device to be mastered. But in particular his statement that "You will be newbie forever" speaks to the need for life-long learning skills. Some of his points:

If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult tomorrow have not been invented yet. Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of specific technologies, but mastery of the technium as a whole -- how technology in general works. I like to think of this ability to deal with any type of new technology as techno-literacy. To be at ease with the flux of technology in modern-day life you'll need to speak the language of the technium, and to master the the following principles:

• Anything you buy, you must maintain. Each tool you use requires time to learn how to use, to install, to upgrade, or to fix. A purchase is just the beginning. You can expect to devote as much energy/money/time in maintaining a technology as you did in acquiring it.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. Therefore acquire at the last possible moment. 
• You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).
• Often learning a new tool requires unlearning the old one. The habits of using a land line phone don't work in email or cell phone. The habits of email don't work in twitter. The habits of twitter won't work in what is next.
• Take sabbaticals. Once a week let go of your tools. Once a year leave it behind. Once in your life step back completely. You'll return with renewed enthusiasm and perspective.
• Tools are metaphors that shape how you think. What embedded assumptions does the new tool make? Does it assume right-handedness, or literacy, or a password, or a place to throw it away? Where the defaults are set can reflect a tool's bias.
• What do you give up? This one has taken me a long time to learn. The only way to take up a new technology is to reduce an old one in my life already. Twitter must come at the expense of something else I was doing -- even if it just daydreaming.
• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• The risks of a new technology must be compared to the risks of the old technology, or no technology. The risks of a new dental MRI must be compared to the risks of an x-ray, and the risks of dental x-rays must be compared to the risks of no x-ray and cavities. 
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one yourself, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. To evaluate don't think, try.
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

The Future of the Textbook

This is something that we've mentioned before, but here are three good videos showing different options for the 21st Century textbook:

IDEO, the famed design company offers three ideas about how textbooks could change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLSdzGDxqVU

Inkling has a number of "books" out now, and in March received funding from McGraw-Hill and Pearsons, two of the largest textbook publishers, as well as a number of venture capital companies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKYyd4Ne5uQ

Push Pop Press garnered a lot of buzz after this presentation at TED, and just released their version of Our Choice by Al Gore: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html

What Year are we Preparing our students for?

An excellent and thought provoking question posed at TEDxNYED last month by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Executive Director of the Curriculum Mapping Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsUgj9_ltN8

TED talks are short by design, this one is about 16 minutes long and worth watching. Some of her statements:

• Most schools are preparing kids for 1991.
• We have a new type of learner, we need a new type of classroom.
• We can do dumb things with a Smartboard.
• We need new forms of school.

She argues for "upgrades," strategic replacements of "dated content, skills, and assessments." But the perquisite will be the development of rubrics for assessing blogs, podcasts, wikis, and other digital media.

Unplugging from Tech - What Happens?

Amherst College did a brief "unplug" earlier this month, urging their students to take a least a little time away from their constant immersion in media: https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2011/03/node/305293

Similary, there was a "World Unplugged" study involving 1,000 students in ten countries on five continents:   http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/

Some interesting results from their study:

• A clear majority in every country admitted outright failure in their efforts to go unplugged for just 24 hours.
• Media "addiction" may not be a clinically diagnosed afflication, but students reported cravings, anxiety and depression duirng this period.
• Being tethered to digital technology 24/7 is not just a habit, it is essential to the way they construct and manage their friendships and social lives. For many of them, going without media for 24 hours "ripped back the curtain on their hidden loneliness."
• Mobile phones function both as this generation’s Swiss Army knife AND its security blanket. Students wrote that mobile phones are at the literal center of their lives: going without made it seem like they had "lost part of themselves."
• Across the world, students depend on personally programmed music to actively regulate their moods.
• Students chose from a variety of communications mediums based on their audiance: Facebook and texting to communicate with friends, email for their professors and jobs.

Perhaps most imprtantly, many students admitted that they were not really aware of how much time they actually spent on to social networking, and how poorly they actually were able to multi-task. If nothing else, such self-awareness is probably the most important gain from an experiment such as this.

More Mobile on Campus

EduCause is the international professional association for IT in higher education. The focus of the latest edition of the Educause Quarterly is on mobile computing and its impact(s) on colleges: http://educause.informz.net/educause/archives/archive_1404284.html

We expect a growing demand for mobile support in every area, from our applications to our infrastructure.

Three steps we have taken recently to address these demands are:

• Our switch to Gmail for students, which has very strong support for a wide range of mobile devices;
• Doubling of campus bandwidth (not without remaining issues) to better support the growing number of mobile devices and their "always on" nature;
• Expansion of our wireless network coverage to all floors in the Circle and Crescent houses this summer. (The 5th Form houses were done last summer. All Houses have had wireless on the first floor common areas for several years, as have all floors in academic buildings.)

As one of the authors writes, "Individuals have had access to 'portable learning devices' since the advent of the printing press; we call them books." But there are many who believe that the growing power and ubiquity of network-enabled smartphones will probably bring the greatest technological changes since the general availability of the Internet - if we use them correctly, not just as content delivery devices. As others have said, "this changes everything." How will it change Lawrenceville?

Personal Learning Networks

A lot has been said recently about the idea of Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs. Wikipedia has a good explanation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Learning_Networks

One of the key elements that the Powerful Learning Practice program (http://plpnetwork.com/) that several Lawrenceville teachers and administrators took part in was about the importance of and tools used in the creation of a PLN. We all had experiences where even our nascent PLN became a source of high quality information and guidance on a variety of subjects during this process.

It can be argued that PLNs are nothing new. 20 years ago, the depth and breadth of your Rolodex often indicated the strength of your PLN. Today's tools just make it easier to connect with colleagues and experts from around the world.

Now, Facebook is entering the PLN world by allowing you to ask questions of your friends, and friends of friends, through their new Questions tool: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150110059982131
Given the huge amount of time that our students (and teenagers in general) spend on Facebook, this might be a good way to have them develop PLNs.

However, for this to truly be useful, it means that adults, experts, educators, etc. need to be on Facebook and "visible" enough to be found in the questioning process.

-->Are there ways that you use a PLN in your work or for hobbies that could be transferred to how we educate students here?

Want to try a PLN or learn more? Educational technologist David Warlick has some good information and links on his site: http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.TheArtAmpTechniqueOfCultivatingYourPersonalLearningNetwork

More on eBooks

Two interesting data points recently about eBooks in schools.

UK trade publishers surveyed by Publishing Technology predict that 2012 will be the year that eBook revenue surpasses the "tipping point" for physical book revenue: http://blog.publishingtechnology.com/blogs/uk-trade-publishers-predict-2012-revenue-tipping-point-e-books/
Interesting, on the textbook side, they state "one in four UK academic publishers were already seeing 10% of their total book revenue coming from e-books in 2011, with double that predicting this would be the case in 2012".

Last week, Henrico County (VA) Public Schools uperintendent Patrick Russo said "We made a commitment pretty much we are not buying more textbooks." The district has had a 1:1 laptop program for approximately 10 years, and currently supplies laptops to over 25,000 high school and middle school students and almost 4,000 teachers through the county.

EdWeek's Technology Counts 2010 Released

Education Week has released their 14th annual report on the state of educational technology: http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/tc/2011/digital/Education_Week_Technology_Counts_2011.pdf

While once simply a tally of hardware and Internet connections, the report now explains why technology matters in education and points to trends and trend setters.

One of the major themes this year is the use of technology to provide a more personalized learning experience for each student. Interestingly, it is one of the advertisements that sums up the need to technology in this area:

To teach exactly what every student needs each day, you'd need an insomniac, genius sidekick.

While it is possible to differentiate the instruction for each and every student using traditional methods, proper use of technology can help, not only with the instruction, but with the assessment that leads to that instruction.

What do students want from online learning?

We've been thinking about what role an online experience would have in a Lawrenceville education. We turned to SpeakUp, a group which surveys over 2.2 million students, parents and educators annually to get their thoughts about technology in education: http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/

In last year's survey, they asked students about what they wanted from an online learning experience:

Click to enlarge

The dark green line represents students who have taken an online class; the lighter green line is students who want online learning as a must have in their "ultimate" school.

The report infers that students value online learning because it gives them more control over their learning experience: "today’s students are increasingly taking their educational destiny into their own hands by seeking out learning opportunities outside of school and leveraging technology tools and applications to customize the learning process to meet their specific needs".

National Education Technology Plan

Called "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," the US plan was released 2010. It lists goals and recommendations for the following areas:

• Learning
• Assessment
• Teaching
• Infrastructure
• Productivity

While one of the primary goals of this plan is college preparedness and increased college enrollment, there are some sections applicable to Lawrenceville:

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

The full plan, as well as an executive summary, is available here: http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

Digital Textbooks

But digital textbooks must be more than just the same words, but on a screen instead of paper.
E.O. Wilson and the MIT Media lab are working on a great science text which shows some of the possibilities: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/wilson-free-biology-textbook

IDEO the design company has some great ideas here, especially about the social sharing aspect offered by digital texts: http://vimeo.com/15142335

The Inkling app on iPad is also showing great potential: http://www.inkling.com/

How does having a textbook which quizzes your students and adaptively provides different content to each student based on their response change the way we teach?

2011 Horizon Report Released

Each year since 2004, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) have released a "Horizon Report" which describes areas of emerging technology that their advisory board believes will have significant impact on education and creative expression over the next one to five years.

The areas of emerging technology they cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

In addition, the report cites four key trends:

1. The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
2. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
3. The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2011.pdf

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

They succinctly propose a "Framework for 21st Century Learning" - fuse the 3Rs (traditional subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, history, and others) and the 4Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration and creativity) to best prepare our students for their future (and not our past):

http://www.p21.org/

Lawrenceville does many of these things already and does them well. Our challenge is in the "fusing" - as many commenters here have pointed out, we don't want in any way to take away from the areas where we already excel.

So, how can we best bring some of these new skills and dispositions into our school without taking away from what we do well?

The Technology Gap in Education

ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), has an interesting post today titled "The Technology Gap in Education": http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol6/609-fioriello.aspx

The author asserts:

Technology has a place in the education of everyone, from the very earliest learners to adults. But for it to be used most effectively, the gap between teachers and students, and the gap among teachers themselves, must be closed.

She then offers 4 steps to bridge that gap:

1. Students and Teachers Must Work Together
2. Take Advantage of the Lessons Students Have to Offer
3. Digital Learning Opportunities Increase Student Engagement
4. Join the Social Media World of Today's Students

Educon 2.3

EduCon is an annual gathering of educators focused on the future of education: http://educon23.org/

They have an interesting set of axioms:

Guiding Principles of EduCon

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5. Learning can — and must — be networked

"Blended" Learning

The phrase "Blended Learning" has come to represent an instructional approach which mixes face-to-face teaching with an online component. Michael B. Horn, one of the co-authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), has a good article and white paper about the increase in blended learning offerings here: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publications/the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/

In Disrupting Class, the authors project that by 2019, 50 percent of all high school courses will be delivered online. This pattern of growth is characteristic of a disruptive innovation—an innovation that transforms a sector characterized by products or services that are complicated, expensive, inaccessible, and centralized into one with products or services that are simple, affordable, accessible, convenient, and often customizable. Think personal computers, the iPod and mp3s, Southwest Airlines, and TurboTax. At the beginning of any disruptive innovation, the new technology takes root in areas of nonconsumption—where the alternative is nothing at all, so the simple, new innovation is infinitely better. More users adopt it as the disruptive innovation predictably improves.
...
In classic disruptive fashion, online learning is expanding beyond distance learning. Educators and entrepreneurs are increasingly creating blended-learning environments—where rather than doing the online learning at a distance, students learn online in an adult-supervised school environment for at least part of the time. At the outset, this occurred in areas of nonconsumption, such as credit-recovery labs and dropout-recovery schools. A small but growing number of schools, however, are now starting to introduce blended learning into their core programming for mainstream students.

10 Trends for Global Education in 2011

The Green Banana blog wrote a nice list of the top 10 issues for education: http://greenbananablog.org/2011/01/10-trends-for-global-education-in-2011/

Are these important for Lawrenceville? In what ways?

1. Ubiquitous – The Internet has brought us a host of online education choices including everything from unscrupulous diploma mills to a myriad of so-called learning games as well as apps for nearly every subject, platform, and device. This trend will continue. The challenge to identify quality amidst the quantity will grow.
2. Social – Face it, we are social creatures and the only things we learn well in isolation are survival techniques (and even then, we wish we had some others to help us). The Internet’s social layer is solidly in place so expect to see education delivered more broadly on the social grid.
3. Mobile – The mobile generation will expect mobile access to all matters beyond mere communication and game-playing. Devices are personal links to best practices and apps will be developed to meet the ever-increasing demand.
4. Pushed – Traditional supply-side education will continue to lose ground to demand-side education where location-aware apps push just-in-time learning. Instructional design should take advantage of push technology.
5. Personalized – Learning will be personalized more and more in the way of both eportfolio content creation as well as learner-specific and contextually relevant assessment. Department of Education initiatives include plans to aggregate student achievement from cradle to grave and this data will empower apps to deliver personalized learning experiences.
6. Media rich – Whether we agree with it or not, future literacy will demand our reading of symbols that go beyond mere letters on a page. The digital landscape requires a broader skill set than previous generations learned.
7. Computer free – Web 1.0 was platform and software specific. Web 2.0 has been rather device centric. However, technology has a way of becoming invisible with wide-scale adoption. Expect the same in the education arena. The Internet of things will include more than kitchen appliances. The tools of the education trade will integrate smart technologies to seamlessly deliver interactive experiences previously relegated to traditional face-to-face settings.
8. Relevant – Thanks to gps chips, technology will afford customized delivery of learning opportunities contextually relevant to the learner.
9. Augmented – Emerging technological innovations are adding ways for learners to interact with subject matter in ways previously unavailable. Virtual field trips enable learners to transcend time and space barriers. Virtual technologies allow learner avatars to transcend identity barriers.
10. Layered – Just as the social layer has been added to the globally networked world, and just as a game layer is being constructed as I write this, watch for an education layer to be integrated where Like and Comment buttons may be accompanied by a Learn This button (Similar to Apture’s Learn More plugin but more developed).