Author: sylviamartinez

Sylvia Libow Martinez is an education change agent, writer, speaker, consultant, engineer, maker, and mom.
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WoW 2.0 podcast online

Wow2! The Women of the Web discussion last night definitely deserved a double-WOW. Lots of great questions and conversation about GenYES and student empowerment, Seymour Papert, technology integration, project-based learning with technology, and more. The hour flew by, and reading the chat log today it looks like the backchannel was just as informative! Lots of great links and questions.

Here’s the podcast link on the WOW 2.0 website.

Many thanks to Sharon Peters, Dr. Cheri Toledo and Cheryl Oakes for being gracious hosts and expert interviewers. And good thoughts out to Jen Wagner who had to instead attend a funeral for a colleague.

Sylvia

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60 Minutes sells out Millennials

I finally got around to watching the 60 Minutes segment about the Millenial generation coming into to workplace, The Age of the Millenials.

Here’s how CBS describes the story, “They are young adults and have been coddled by their parents to the point of being ill prepared for a demanding workplace. Morley Safer reports on the generation called “Millenials.”

No bias or editorializing there, eh?

The piece was even worse. It was not just biased, but a con job. There was not even the slightest attempt at fairness or getting a story right. Every single person interviewed was a consultant who makes money teaching companies how to attract and retain these employees. And how do these people sell their services? By whipping up stories about how different and scary this new generation is. 60 Minutes swallowed this hook, line and sinker. There was not one sociologist, psychologist, business owner, or historian interviewed.

Morley Safer, a respected journalist, did not question one outrageous comment or preposterous claim. Anecdotes were accepted as facts, and there was not one shred of research or evidence presented.

You’ll have to watch the piece for yourself to see it all, but these consultants generalized all youth as lazy and spoiled, and blamed permissive parenting, Mr. Rogers, and a culture of rewarding every youthful accomplishment no matter how trivial. So how do these consultants advise companies to handle young employees? By lavishly rewarding them, avoiding criticism, and doing away with the whole “boss” concept. Ironic, eh?

Then they showed videos of employees receiving certificates and rewards for doing a good job. Truly, 60 Minutes portrayed employee incentives as if this was a major innovation. Apparently these people have missed out on something commonly done for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Ancient warriors got extra booty if they were on the winning side. There were probably consultants to Crusader kings advising how to motivate slacker knights to bring home better holy relics. Even I remember my insurance agent father bringing home a catalog of “prizes” for top sales. We got our first color TV that way. This is not new, people!

So there’s the story. This isn’t about a new generation, it’s about consultants cashing in by exploiting companies with a new scare story. Wow, thanks 60 Minutes — way to smear a whole generation with non-existent reporting and free air-time for  consultants!

Sylvia

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CASTLE Advisory Board Here I Come!

The Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) is the nation’s only center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators. CASTLE helps  university educational leadership programs prepare technology-savvy school leaders and provide numerous resources for K-12 administrators and the faculty that prepare them.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been named to the newly formed CASTLE Advisory Board.  I’m really looking forward to working with this diverse, accomplished group of people to assist with the important job of helping K-12 school administrators understand the role of technology in improving student achievement and creating relevant, engaging experiences for tomorrow’s global citizens.

Sylvia

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Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit – part 2

The other day I wrote about the Ed in 08 event I attended in Washington DC last week. Although it was a nice event, I really didn’t get what I expected out of it. I expected more details about their platform.

The Ed in 08 campaign is a plan to get the presidential candidates to talk more about education and create more urgency in American politics for improving education. Their three policy pillars are:

  • Higher standards
  • More effective teachers
  • More time and support for learning

Uh huh, sure – who isn’t for these. But what exactly do these phrases mean? There are a thousand interpretations, and a thousand more implementation ideas.

  • It matters a great deal if “higher standards” means “more tests” or “national standards” or “punishing children”. In the printout of the 25 slide PowerPoint they handed out, there is only one bullet point that addresses this, “The next president must lead a national effort to create more common, rigorous standards that are benchmarked to the world’s best performing countries.”
  • It matters a great deal if “more effective teachers” means “blowing up schools of education” as one speaker put it, or merit pay, which is another idea that sounds good but always ends up badly, or some other secret agenda. You can’t just wave a magic wand and pretend that effective teachers will appear out of nowhere.
  • It matters a great deal if “more time” means more of the same, or if there is some coherent plan to make something different happen in that extra time.

As they say, the devil is in the details, and anyone who has lived and worked in the virtuous-sounding “No Child Left Behind” era knows that slogans and empty platitudes aren’t policy. Judging from the examples most often used at the Blogger Summit, what they are talking about is KIPP Academy. If that’s what they mean, they should just come out and say it.

I don’t understand how Ed in 08 expects people to get on this invisible bandwagon. If they are calling for national standards, or a national test, let’s hear it. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of empty words.

Sylvia

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Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit

Ed in 08Last week I had a last minute opportunity to be in Washington DC for a day. It happened to be a day that Ed in 08 was having a Blogger Summit “…to discuss how the Internet is changing the discourse of education reform, and how those changes are affecting the 2008 presidential election.”

Before this event, I’d read a little about Ed in 08 – it seemed to me to be a lot of money to promote very little. They use a lot of vague words — “strong” schools, the need for “reform” without explaining what that means, “fixing” schools, and lots of scary statistics about kids, jobs and the economy.

What is Ed in 08?
Ed in 08 is a campaign run by an organization called “Strong American Schools” as an advocacy effort aimed at elevating discussion during the presidential election about the need for education reform. According to their site, “Strong American Schools is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, have provided grant funding for Strong American Schools. Our budget is estimated to be up to $60 million.”

Newt Gingrich
I was interested to hear Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as the lunch keynote. I’d heard him speak before, and even though his politics run more conservative than mine, he is a good speaker, and has interesting ideas that don’t come out of the usual political mill.

He actually seems to have spoken to teachers and children and thought about the consequences of policies. It was refreshing to hear a conservative who does more than spout scary statistics, “get tough” rhetoric and vague feel-good slogans. He talked about how top-down mandated curriculum stops creativity and relevance in the classroom. He made some good observations about the need for authentic assessment. Although there were some silly parts about how anyone involved with education can’t be part of the solution, his speech was the highlight of the day for me.

Ed in 08 – Missing in Action
What I did expect was to hear more about the Ed in 08 agenda, but that didn’t happen. The organizers seemed to have been so concerned that the audience would hate a hard sell that they decided to have no sell at all. They also seemed to have forgotten that if their aim was to get education bloggers talking and writing about Ed in 08, they needed to give us something to write about.

What I would have liked is to have a panel where the ideas were really discussed. If they really believe that teacher merit pay works to improve schools, where is the plan, the support, the research, or anything substantive? How would you solve the problems of what to base it on and how do you stop people from gaming the system? And more importantly, teachers consistently report that money is not a motivating factor in their career choice. Why is merit pay even being discussed as a solution? Is this just another rich-guy sound bite?

If they were worried about being fair and balanced, they could have brought in people on both sides of the issue and had a real discussion.

But instead, there was a string of panel discussions and presentations, none of them about Ed in 08. The oddest one was a panel of journalist bloggers who talked about blogging. I guess we were then supposed to blog about the bloggers blogging.

Less Talk About More Time, Please
The lamest speaker was an author who has written a book about how schools need a longer school day. His speech was about how he’s written a book about how schools need a longer school day. It needs to be longer because children will learn more. In their longer day. Because we need more time. To do more things. In a longer day. (This went on for quite a while, but you get the picture.)

There was precious little detail about what exactly happened during the extra time, but plenty of scary facts and statistics about how far behind American schools are and how dumb American children are. It’s amazing how much time there is for research meant to scare and how little time there is for research that supports the foregone conclusions.

Then, he showed a video and lo and behold, teachers and students talked about projects, hand-on learning, teachers discussing student work, teachers planning together, and administrators talking about all the fabulous things they do in their schools. Huh? Where did that come from!

Apparently, all that’s needed to improve schools is a couple of extra minutes, and then, lo and behold, everyone starts doing everything differently. 42 minutes – you get test prep, 43 minutes and **ding** everyone turns into a constructivist. I just found it completely naïve to assert that schools that can’t find the time during a normal school day to even attempt hands-on project-based learning, or can’t arrange for teachers to talk about lesson planning for 5 minutes will suddenly start doing these things for no other reason than there’s more time.

Teacher Bloggers in the Trenches
Anyway, a good part of the day was a a “teacher/bloggers in the trenches” panel. They talked about what their blogging has meant to them, their students, and the community, and showed how complex the subject of education is. There were no simple answers or feel-good slogans coming from these teachers. It was a terrific discussion that actually belied much of the rhetoric about kids that had gone before. By the way, please check out these great blogs (those that still exist!)

What I Learned at Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit
At the end of the day, I have to say that I know nothing new about Ed in 08 that I can share with you. But so it’s not a complete waste of time, here’s what I learned:

  • The Palomar Hotel in Washington DC is really nice.
  • The food was much better than most education events. Thanks, Gates and Broad Foundation.
  • Newt Gingrich is not just another right wing crackpot and I’ll pay more attention to what he has to say from now on.
  • Alexeander Russo of This Week in Education is a really big guy, much larger in life than his blog profile photo. Here’s what he said about me in his blog, “They’re [sic] a woman here Sylvia Martinez with her laptop pointed towards the podium — she’s ustreaming the event (live streaming video). Very cool.” I guess that’s my 15 minutes of fame 🙂

More about the Ed in 08 agenda tomorrow…

Sylvia

P.S. I’m 0 for 2 this week with ustream.tv, a combination of pilot error and lack of a good mic/camera. Apparently there are good videos of the Ed in 08 events that will be posted soon. The Gingrich speech is worth listening to.

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The cost of free courseware

I just got an email from the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. MIT OpenCourseWare puts the entire MIT curriculum online, free of charge. The materials are excellent, and it’s been hailed as one of the top resources of its kind and an example of why “free is the future.”

The email explains all this, and goes on to explain that their publishing and review cycle costs money. It costs money to check the copyrights and get permissions. It costs money to videotape professors, edit the video, and post it online. Bandwidth and servers are not free.

“In total, it costs about $4 million each year to support OCW.”

The email continues with some examples of how courses are helping people around the globe in worthy projects. But guess what comes next…

MIT is committed to keeping OCW open and free to all, everywhere. You know the value of OCW to yourself and how the materials offer a greater value to humankind. And now you know the cost. Your contribution of $25, $50, $100 –– or whatever amount is right for you –– directly supports the production and distribution of high quality MIT course materials.

Please invest in yourself and your world. Click here to make your donation now.

Now really, people…
The MIT 2007 Financial Report shows an endowment of $9 billion dollars (yes, that’s 9,000 million dollars). In 2007, they took in cash gifts of over $330 million dollars. They really need my $25?

Honestly, it seems tacky. They decided to put their resources out there and generate a lot of publicity about being the wave of the future. Now they are looking for someone else (namely me) to help foot the bill?

But no, not just me. According to Wired Magazine back in 2002, “The William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations ponied up a total of $11 million for the first two-year phase. (MIT kicked in another $1 million.) Those organizations are likely to continue supporting the initiative, which is expected to require an additional $20 million or so before the rest of the courses are posted by the end of 2006.”

So they asked for money, so what?
I HATE complaining about this, because the MIT materials ARE truly excellent. People around the world can learn from the top lecturers in the field. Every high school educator and interested student should check out the Highlights for High School section of the MIT OpenCourseWare site. There are fabulous multimedia resources, really innovative courses like furniture making and international development, and terrific support materials.

I applaud MIT for finding a way to make all this available AND creating a quality product. The problem isn’t the materials, or even MIT asking for money. (I’m slightly peeved by them asking ME for money, but hey, at least they are being honest about the need to fund their project.)

Free costs money
The problem is that the rest of the world is pretending that because there is no cost to use courseware resources, there is no cost to create these resources.

This particular “free” cost $20 million dollars (probably more!) to get started, and now needs $4 million a year to keep going. Doing some admittedly rough math based on the 1,800 courses online gives food for thought. Each course cost $11,000 to put online, and needs an additional $2,000 per year to keep it up there.

What does this say about the real viability of open courseware in general?

I have to say I’m still struggling with this concept. In this case, MIT is trying to figure out how to expand their influence to become a world-wide leader in education. They obviously made a conscious decision to spend a lot of money to preserve the integrity of their brand by delivering top quality (and therefore expensive) resources. Now they will start to find out what access to this market really means.

In Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (Wired Magazine 2/25/08), Chris Anderson says, “Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.” With OpenCourseWare, MIT is trying to expand its market beyond a few thousand students, a few company research partners, and past the usual academic boundaries to the entire world. It’s an interesting gamble.

In contrast, many other free open courseware and open content libraries sacrifice quality to lower their initial costs. They rely on users to contribute and edit content, but without a guiding editorial hand, the quality will be variable and the coverage sketchy. The tension between these approaches is yet to be resolved.

What an interesting world we live in!

Sylvia

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What message does your AUP send home?

Scott McLeod’s recent post at Dangerously Irrelevant, My not-so-friendly library, boring teachers, and other marketing interactions, talks about the negative impact of the draconian, punitive language his public library uses, and points to marketing expert Seth Godin, who “…reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron / stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.”

It made me think about the messages that schools send out about technology.

Scott goes on to say:

Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities.

So, here’s my question – what message does your technology AUP send home?

The AUP, short for Acceptable Use Policy, is typically part of the packet that goes home with students every fall. Parents know the drill. You fish through emergency cards in triplicate, imponderable policies that need your signature on every page, the new dress code, the skateboarding rules, offers for SAT prep and parenting classes, PTA dues, and who knows what else. You sign the pages, sign the checks, and hope that you’ve filled it all out right and that you never have to do it again (until next year.)

The technology AUP is in there too. It’s likely the only thing a parent will see all year long that has to do with computers and technology at the school.

So does your AUP:

  • focus on punishment, or opportunity?
  • contain only legalese or is easy to read and understand?
  • communicate a vision of students as would-be hackers and criminals, or your vision of students as active participants in the 21st century?
  • portray students as potential victims of predators and bullies, or show parents how and why students are safely learning how to navigate this brave new world?
  • hint that computers are an afterthought and a “reward” that can be taken away as punishment, or explain why computers are essential tools in every classroom?

The AUP could be an opportunity to involve parents in your vision of technology, it could be a way to communicate the passion and importance of building a learning community that values 21st century thinking, and it could be a way to help parents understand that despite “To Catch a Predator”, your school is thoughtfully using technology to benefit their child.

So, which message is going home this fall?

Sylvia

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Grand Theft Auto 4 and other thoughts about video games in education

Back when Halo 3 released, I wrote a blog post about how the massive sales of this product would dwarf any kind of educational video game sales. I didn’t even tackle whether video games in schools are a good idea or might help students learn academic subjects. But that doesn’t matter. No matter what you believe, it’s an idea whose time will never come.

In short, simple math and economics points out the predictable failure of creating top quality educational video games for the classroom that can compete in this market.

Here were my points:

  • In one week, more people bought a copy of Halo 3 than there are teachers in the United States.
  • Every public school in the U.S. would have to purchase 100 copies of a game to match the sales of Halo 3.
  • Back then, Halo 3 was reported to have cost $30 million dollars just to develop the game.

Now let’s pretend you are a video game company…
Let’s say you believe that video games can revolutionize education. You know the market is small, so you run the numbers. As an advocate, you are insanely optimistic about your chances to sell an educational video game to schools in the United States. To make the most of your chances to make a sale, let’s pretend you could design it so that it covers all subjects and grade levels, and correlates to content standards of all 50 states. You do your best to make sure that it is fun to play no matter if you are 5 years old or 18. Even knowing that 2% is a pretty good market penetration, you might gamble that you could get 10% of all schools in the US to purchase your game. And maybe you’d decide that your game is so educational that they will pay $100 for it, double or triple what normal games sell for. And hey, you won’t need to pay a sales force or buy advertising for your game because it’s so good that it will sell itself!

What do you get? Even with these wild claims and ridiculously optimistic estimates, the BEST you could do is generate sales of about a million dollars, not even enough to pay the production costs of one mediocre game.

Now here comes Grand Theft Auto 4 to blow those numbers even further out of the water. According to Wired News (GTAIV Budget Tops Gaming Records), “Grand Theft Auto IV’s meticulously designed, nuanced world required almost 1,000 people to craft, and final costs for the production were around $100 million…” That’s at least three times as much as Halo 3 and doesn’t even count the cost of marketing and sales.

So the next time someone says, “hey, I hear kids like the video games, why don’t they make an educational one” look them straight in the eye and ask them what they are smoking.

Sylvia

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Passion fatigue

There’s been a lot of chatter lately among some edubloggers about their feeling that educators who blog have formed a community akin to an invitation-only cocktail party, that some “elites” deliberately exclude or insult newcomers, and that there should be rules to follow when blogging, Twittering, or participating in the various social networks that support educators as they experiment with new tech tools. I’m not even going to try to link to examples of this, it’s just fuel on the fire.

I’m no expert here, but my spidey sense tells me there’s something else going on. I think it’s “passion fatigue.”

Educators who felt their professional selves rekindled by technology, especially Web 2.0 technology jumped into communicating this passion to others. As time goes on, though, it gets harder to maintain that heightened sense of mission, especially when you just don’t see anything changing around you. Or worse, you start to see the enormity of turning the massive institution called school in any direction, much less the one you want. You start to wonder if your life’s work is all just so much spitting into the wind.

It’s so much easier to pick on little things, point fingers, proclaim rules, and jump into fights you wouldn’t tolerate in real life. It’s the virtual equivalent of library shushing. I’ve done it, I admit it, I’ve poked my nose in where it doesn’t belong and made comments that I shouldn’t have. Maybe I shouldn’t even say this, since someone is going to think that I’m complaining about them. But honestly, I’m not. Blog however you want. Comment however you want. Twitter, don’t Twitter, really, I’m not your mother.

I aspire to be both optimistic and realistic, do my best, and not give in to trivialities. Some days that happens. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” I hope that spirit carries me forward.

Sylvia

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Situating professional development

In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. One of the reasons I grouped the 6 types in this particular way is that it situates the professional development.

To me, one of the most powerful ideas in learning is the theory of situated learning. This term was first used by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. I first read this book in grad school, and it has colored everything I’ve learned since. Situated learning happens in Communities of Practice, defined by Wenger on his site as, “… groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Community of practice is a term often used when we talk about teacher professional development. But in fact, I think often it is confused with community of interest. Community of practice is where you DO something. Community of interest doesn’t have to be. When we chat with friends and Twitter buddies about teaching and how to do it better, or what tools to use, that’s a community of interest, not a community of practice.

The primary community of practice for most teachers is within the confines of their own classroom. The participants are the teacher and students. Sometimes other people visit, but these visits are few and short. While teachers may participate in other communities in a professional capacity, for most, the classroom is the only setting for their professional practice.

Traditional forms of professional development remove the teacher from their classroom and attempt to create a community of practice made up of teachers and technology experts. This community exists only for the purpose of imparting information from the experts to the teachers. While there is certainly a place for collegial discussion and access to professional improvement, it is not unreasonable that teachers often reject transparent efforts to force them into participation.

Wenger, in discussing designs for learning inside communities of practice, makes the point that they, “…cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute.”

Common recommendations for technology professional development include that teachers be given more time for independent practice without fear of embarrassment, to watch expert practitioners, go to conferences and workshops, or participate in online learning communities.

The problem is, these attempts to fix technology professional development only serve to reinforce the separation between the teacher learning new skills and real change in classroom practice. In a book chapter called Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? Mark Schlager and Judith Fusco look at the use of Tappped-In, an online teacher community, for professional development. They say it “… tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice.” Mark Schlager is director of Tapped In, so this is not just someone who doesn’t like newfangled online PD.

In short, mere discussion about practice does not create a community of practice.

Even if a great workshop excite teachers about new possibilities and tools, the teachers are removed from the successful context and sent back to the classroom to fend for themselves. They are expected to use their new skills without colleagues or experts present. One-on-one coaching that provides in-class mentors is expensive and rarely available. The technology specialist is not always there, and the “teacher-down-the-hall” that many schools depend on for technology help has their own class to teach. Online teacher communities can only take place outside of classroom time, too late for any intervention or advice to be useful. Maybe you can Twitter out a call for help, but that’s too unreliable to count on in crunch time.

So as teachers struggle alone in their classroom with questions, issues, and problems, valuable teachable moments are missed.

In an interview discussing what changes need to take place in classrooms to allow project-based learning, Seymour Papert says, “What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the kids and with the kids. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Interview on Edutopia site – Seymour Papert: Project-based learning)

So you know where I’m going with this. You have to look at the whole classroom and maximize the chance that teachers will learn alongside students. It has to be the norm, not the exception. By looking to students as co-learners in the effort to use technology, teachers end up learning more themselves. It takes a willingness to take risks in front of students and to model an attitude of openness to new ideas. I think seeing learning with technology happen through the eyes, hands, and screen of their students is the only way teachers will really understand the potential.

Situating professional development in the classroom is, I believe, the only way that technology will really be integrated into every classroom.

Sylvia