David S. Bill IV

Disrupting Education

by David Bill on May 13, 2009

Lately a lot of people have been talking about disrupting industries. If we want to seriously consider how we can disrupt our current educational model, we need to listen.

We need to listen to the likes of Clay Christensen who wrote a book about it, MIT’s New Media Literacies has developed strategy guides to support it, David Wiley and the State of Utah who are opening up classes that will enable it, Mike Wesch who is using new media to reconsider how we address course content, and Bill Farren who is developing an online course around it.

In my last few posts I have been writing about changes that can be made to alter our educational landscape. At the core of these changes is transitioning to a model based upon participatory learning:

This is an open classroom. An open classroom is based upon the idea of participatory learning; connections between students and experts around the world as well as dynamic content, that is readily available to all, drives student inquiry.

Access

The power of this participation starts in the access to information. With resources like iTunesU, Academic Earth, Courseware, Diigo, Google News, blogs via an RSS Reader, and Wikipedia, our students can find more information and sources on a topic than any teacher can provide in a lecture. This access not only promotes inquiry, as students must find reliable sources and learn digital literacy skills, but it creates the potential to open a class to communities outside the four walls of a classroom.

Connection

We are social beings that want to learn. When students can connect and participate with others while learning, they become intrinsically motivated. If learning happens by students working together to draw conclusions or provide feedback, students interest increases. With technologies like Ning, Skype, Wordpress, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikis, students are able to collaborate with their peers around the world, discuss issues with leading experts in order to develop their own ideas. When learning can reach beyond the four walls of a classroom and there is meaning to the content as well as the personal connection to the outside world, a school can be transformed into a place where students want to learn.

Meaning

Today’s technology creates opportunities to bring the masses together while making an impact. In a world where transformative technologies are at tips of our fingers, it is all the more important to make learning meaningful. When a class can work with a village in Africa to learn how AIDS has been decimating the population, students do not want to simply write an essay about the disease, they want to do something about it. Our students are constantly connected and we can use these technologies to help make a positive impact. It is this potential, the ability to bring meaning into learning, that can truly disrupt our current model of education. When the wold is faced with countless problems, it is the fact that our students can help make a difference that will make learning meaningful.

Getting There

The technology is there, the need is there, what lacks is an understanding from educators. It is our job, as those who get these ideas, to forget about giving presentations on Twitter. Rather, talk about making our classrooms meaningful and why our students should connect to the world. If we want to disrupt education, we must explain why before how. We must open their eyes to a new approach to teaching, helping them to see this transformation. The next time you speak to a peer or present to a group, do not focus on the technology, spend your time talking about an issue important to you and how your students can use technology can make a difference.

Photo Credit: Courosa
Alec Courosa is also on Twitter: @courosa

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Education 3.0

by David Bill on May 11, 2009

No matter matter how much money a school throws at technology, it is all for naught if the use and approach is outdated. The folks over at Education Futures have been writing about this very thing in a series called Designing Education 3.0. There they discuss:

These posts hightlight the fact that as technology becomes more ubiquitous in schools, it is imperative that we address how that technology is used. Far too many times I have seen SMARTBoards unused, teachers “using” technology by giving lectures with PowerPoint presentations, or my favorite, simply showing a YouTube clip with no follow up.

This Education 1.0 approach will not work. Teachers complain about having to learn about new technologies and I don’t blame them. Used in a Education 1.0 model, these technologies are just updated chalkboards, overhead projectors, and film clips.

Instead of wasting our time, money, and energy on simply introducing the latest technologies, we need to spend our professional development time helping teachers understand how and why we must move to a Education 3.0 model. If we continue to teach using outdated models, not only will our students lose interest but they will be left behind. The following chart from Education Futures outlines this idea:

As I have written before, time is precious. There is never enough of it. If we can spend that time helping teachers understand this shift and how they can use technology in order to support the idea of Education 3.0, not only will our teaching improve but our students will be more engaged.

Here is some evidence that supports what I have just mentioned. Demetri Orlando published a great Digital 1:1 Laptop Classroom Rubric. Take a look, this would be a useful tool in helping teachers begin to develop a more Education 3.0 classroom.

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A Model For Learning

by David Bill on May 3, 2009

For the past several weeks I have been mulling over the idea of participation, transparency, and connectivism. All ideas that I believe are the corner stones to the next big shift in education. Several people have been influential in helping me reach this point. I have been reading work from the likes of Henry Jenkins from Project New Media Literacies, Mike Wesch from Kansas State, David Wiley from BYU, and George Siemens and Stephen Downes from Canada.

Today I went to a conference at MIT hosted by Project New Media Literacies. The focus of the conference was on participatory culture in education. As the day went on I began to piece together some things.

Our students participate. They want to be involved. They are connected, ALL the time. If we ignore that fact we will lose our students. Henry Jenkins alluded to this fact in his 2006 white paper on participatory culture. It is vitally important that our students create, circulate, connect, and collaborate. Research by Project New Media Literacies highlights this point. But not only will this participatory model be useful in engaging our students, it is an opportunity to teach ethical behavior when working with digital media.

If schools follow a participatory model, using open education resources to examine real issues through our curriculum, while using a framework that promotes collaboration and discussion, we can change the game.

The idea is based upon what I heard today and have read from Mike Wesch, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, as well as countless others.

This is what I have in mind for a grade 6 through 12 school:

The Framework

All course content is free using Open Education Reources (OER) available via online resources. All disciplines would frame their course curriculum around the free materials. This would not only cut costs for a school but also lend itself to opening the class to the online community.

Individual courses, their syllabi and resources would be housed on a Course Management System (CMS) like Moodle, Wikispaces, or EduCommons. Having the platform online would allow the class to include participants from around the world.

All student work would be created and managed via a blog based e-portfolio. This system would be build off of Wordpress Mu. Every student would have a blog. This would be their home for all written work, digital media, and presentations. It is an opportunity to not only record a student’s work but have their voice be a part of a larger conversation. The work would be separated by tag and each class would have a site where the aggregated feeds for the class appropriate posts and comments as well as all relevant information would be posted.

Here is the Google Doc of the proposal I created.

The Participation

Create

If students create online content, whether written or media, that is a part of a larger conversation, the work takes on a new meaning. Students who can express their ideas and produce something concrete that they can publish, will be more more engaged.

Connect

If there is anything I have learned in the past few days, it is that to make a model like this work, it MUST connect to our students. There must be relevance and it must mean something. Whether it is a Biology class creating HIV/AIDS PSAs for a local AIDS center or working to develop tutorials on algorithms for a village school in Ghana, if curriculum can not only teach content but connect students to something bigger, it will make an impact.

Collaborate

At the heart of this model is collaboration. When the curriculum is designed to have students work with experts outside the classroom, community organizations, or other classes around the world, the learning becomes real. When a student’s blog entry on civil rights gets comments from a community leader who the class had been working with, the connections becomes real, the work meaningful. These collaborations can take place in many forms: Second Life, Skype, Elluminate, uStream, on a wiki, or Google Doc, or in real life. No matter the venue, what makes the work engaging and relevant is the collaborations and relationships that stem from creation of the content.

Circulate

The blog becomes a platform for the circulation of student created content. It a means to promote not only writing but all digital content created by a student would be available online. Here, the e-portfolio plays a role. Now all of the work that a student produces over four years is housed online on one site. The ability for a student to simply send a URL to a friend, family member, or potential college and show their work speaks to the true nature of the platform. Their works is now accessible to the world.

This model does not only support the ideas of transparency, participation, and connectivism, but it teaches another important lesson: digital citizenship. Using a platform like this, digital literacy and the ethical use of digital content becomes interwoven into each class. Students will become aware of fair use and copyright not because they read a case study but because all their work is online.

I borrowed a lot of ideas from people much smarter than me who have been proving this model in higher education but I believe this is an idea that could work in a grade 6-12 environment.

This is a very rough outline of what I am envisioning but to be true to the idea of participation, please leave your comments and criticisms. They will be extremely helpful as I improve this model.

Photo Credit: Today Is A Good Day

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Writing Tool Belt 2.0

by David Bill on April 24, 2009

This is a cross-posting for a piece I did for edSocialMedia.com

No matter what new tool a carpenter may have at his disposal, he still must master the skills needed to build a house. Those tools may change the way he does his job but he still must learn the basic skills of carpentry.

Learning in the 21st century is no different. Our students must learn many of the same skills they had to learn prior to the digital age.

No matter the tool, our students must master how to write. But wait, isn’t this a site that supports technology? Yes. While our students must master skills that were taught with pen and paper, if we are to reach our students in 2009 we must update our tool belt.

Writing is essential to a students success. But we are now in an connected world and how we teach our student to write is just as important as what we teach our students to write. I read Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century” and it only validates this fact. She states that,

“we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate”

Today, social media plays a vital role in developing these ideas. Whether you like it or not, how we write is shifting. The media as well as our students are interacting and writing online. As more and more people live in an connected world, the way they communicate is evolving. Pew Research Center states that “1 in 5 online adults 18 to 24 have … used Twitter“. If we ignore that fact and try to teach in an unconnected world our students will lose interest.

Yancy goes on to say,

“21st century writing marks a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composer not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extra curricular social co-apprenticeship.”

Writing has never been more important but we must recognize this cultural shift. Educators must develop a new tool belt that supports the interaction and connectivity that our students now thrive upon. Our students text, comment, and tweet. Our job is to use the tools that they are familiar with to create an environment that develops the literacy skills Yancy mentions while building upon our students’ communal interactions via social media.

In our connected world where everyone is just a click away, social media tools like Twitter, Blogs and Facebook will be essential in order to develop the writing skills our students need while keeping it relevant.

Photo Credit: Robyn00

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A Response To The Textbook Debate

by David Bill on April 20, 2009

This is a cross post from a comment I wrote on Kevin Levin’s blog. He had written a response to my earlier post about textbooks and the role of the Internet. Enjoy.

The Internet will only become a larger part of our lives, whether you like it or not. Our responsibility as educators, notice I say educators not teachers, is to prepare our students, we’d all agree on that. But, if we introduce the skills (no matter the discipline) we want students to learn with traditional methods, our students will lose interest. They are growing up in a world of constant connectivity. Say what you will about this, that’s the way it is. The idea behind my post in response to “Joe’s Non-Netbook” was to highlight the fact that learning without a textbook and the skills we want them to learn go hand in hand.

If we as educators determine the core skills that we want our students to master, we can use any number of resources, we are not tied to the textbook.

As for history, we are trying to engage our students in a scholarly dialog. If we present them with multimedia (video, maps, art, charts etc.) as well as several text websites that are dedicated to a certain topic but have slight differences, the class can then determine those differences on their own not having to rely upon a textbook to tell them. As for the scholarly perspective, you can post two JSTOR articles from different historians and have the students debate the arguments and then write analytical responses on their blogs about the core differences in the two articles.

Textbook or no textbook, the skills we want our students to learn are still the same: be able to think and write like a historian. If we want to do justice to our students and keep them interested, we must acknowledge that our students consume information differently. If we completely ignore that fact we are doing them a disservice. While the top 10% of the class can understand the argument by simply reading a textbook, we are missing out on the 90% who need audio or visuals that are NOT available in a textbook. Yes, this approach will take some extra time and planning to post all the resources on-line ahead of time but the benefit for the entire class is well worth the effort.

As for other disciplines like math. Yes, math is different but that doesn’t mean that students can only learn from a textbook. Dan Meyer, a math teacher in California proves this very convincingly. Here are two examples of what he does with his class: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=213 and http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=440

To sum up, textbooks not only cost a great deal of money but they cost our students’ potential to learn. With a different approach to how we educate our students and using the plethora of multimedia and text resources available on-line, we are not only saving money but doing a great deal of good in helping to keep our students interested and wanting to learn the skills we are “teaching”.

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Students Can Transform Educational Technology

by David Bill on April 9, 2009

Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation YES, recently penned the blog entry Successful, sustainable strategies for technology integration and tech support in a tough economy. This entry was very timely because our school, like most schools, is trying to cut costs. Some see technology has a financial burden during a recession rather than an opportunity to save some money and create a student centered environment. Martinez’s post argues for the later.

Even though students are 92% of the population at the school, and are 100% of the reason for wanting to improve education, their voice goes unheard.

The idea behind making technology integration and support successful in a school is to incorporate the students into the process. She outlines the following reasons for including students:

Technology literacy for all - Creating an expectation that modern technology will be used for academics, schoolwork, communication, community outreach, and teaching. A key success factor is teaching students how to support their peers as mentors and leaders.

Student tech teams - The 21st century version of the old A/V club, this strategy expands the definition of tech support from fixing broken things to also include just-in-time support of teachers as they use new technology. This digital generation is ready, willing and able to help improve education, we just need to show them how.

Professional development 24/7 - The old idea that teachers would go off to one workshop or a conference and immediately start using technology has been proven wrong. Truly integrated technology use requires a bigger change than that, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Teachers require more support in their classrooms that they can count on when they need it. Students can help provide teachers with this constancy and supportive community.

Students as stakeholders - Whenever schools initiate new technology programs, there is typically a call for all stakeholders to be included. Parents, teachers, staff, board members, and members of the community are invited to participate — but rarely students. Even though students are 92% of the population at the school, and are 100% of the reason for wanting to improve education, their voice goes unheard. Students can bring passion and point-of-view to the planning and implementation of major technology initiatives. They can be allies and agents of change, rather than passive objects to be changed.

Students as resource developers - Students can help develop the resources every teacher and student needs to use technology successfully. These resources can be help guides, posters, instructional videos, school websites, or teacher home pages. Students of all types can use their talents to build customized resources for their own school. Artists, actors, and techies can contribute to this process.

How Can We Make This A Reality

We are a laptop 1 to 1 school. If we fully utilize these laptops for everything pertaining to the school, essentially going paperless, we would save a great deal of money. If the students become a primary resource for helping faculty and other students adapt to this shift, you are not only cutting costs but you are promoting student responsibility.
Building upon what I just mentioned. Many of our students know more about technology than even some of our tech savvy faculty. We must utilize this. If we can incorporate students into our tech training and support systems, not only will we be empowering them, but providing the school a cost saving opportunity to expand their staff and make the most of the knowledge available.
With the development of Twitter, chat clients, and on campus support teams, faculty professional development no longer has to be dedicated to one day workshops. Students and the technology department could use Twitter to periodically update the faculty with tips and reminders on how to use their laptops or fix a problem. Something like iChat has to potential to have a help desk on call when school is not in session. Finally, if you have teams of student technology assistants, they could help solve simple problems like “Why won’t the projector turn on?” This support network would bolster the faculty’s confidence when using technology.
Students need to be a part of the conversation. If a school wants to fully utilize our laptops, we must consider the students’ perspective. They will have an understand how the technology is used and can help plan and implement a program as well as prevent issues from happening. We must listen to our students, their voice and contributions are vital to a program’s success.
Finally, students are creators. They have grown up around digital media. We must take advantage of their comfort with this medium and have them help create and publish digital media that can range from tech tutorials to videos for prospective students. Their experience with that medium will promote a student centered environment and save your school some money. Who needs a marketing firm when you have students.

The points Martinez are important. Student participation is necessary. When we involve our students in the integration and support of technology we not only empower them and the community but also cut costs.

Photo Credit: -bartimaeus-

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The Switch

by David Bill on April 4, 2009

As I examine my media habits I realize, like many people, that what and how I consume my information has drastically shifted.

In my previous post, Where do we find the time?, I mentioned the role of the Internet and how it can alter how we utilize our time. After I wrote that post I started to think.

If I have shifted my media consumption habits from passively watching television to actively managing, digesting, and learning from media online shouldn’t I think reconsider what media I pay for?

The reason I mention this is because I have been traveling a great deal lately and unfortunately it has been hard to find access to the Internet when and where I want it. I spend more time trying to find a coffee shop with wireless than I do actually on the Internet.

So, if the media I consume is primarily online and I am not at home as much, why should I pay for a traditional TV and Internet plan?

Since I carry my laptop with me virtually everywhere, wouldn’t it make sense to simply purchase a top of the line wireless Internet card as my means of connection? Everything I watch or read is online, from TV shows on Hulu.com to my favorite contributors on my Google Reader and Twitter.

I spend my time watching, reading and contributing to the web. In this economy, it only makes sense to purchase a plan that fits my needs more appropriately.

By getting rid of my cable and home Internet I can access and contribute to my media anywhere and I will no longer have to search for a coffee shop with wireless. Although a good chai latte will go a long way.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Good-bye Charter Communications.

If you have suggestions on a good wireless card and carrier please lend me your expertise via the comments.

Photo Credit: droïd

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Where Do We Find The Time?

by David Bill on April 3, 2009

Like most technology integrators, the biggest hurdle I have faced as the Director of Academic Technology has been the issue of faculty buy-in.

I consistently hear the “I don’t have enough time” argument. This video of Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody“, presents an interesting perspective in regards to the use of time. Are we really lacking the time or do we need to reallocate our time?

In the following video, “Where do people find the time?”, Shirky argues that investing our time in learning these technologies or spending your extra time on the Internet learning is not useless, rather it is more productive than watching TV and that we should reconsider how we “waste” our time.

So as I look at the impact for educators, my argument for teachers who say they don’t have enough time is this: rather than watching that episode of “American Idol”, go online, develop and learn from a Personal Learning Network. You have the time and this is much more rewarding.