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Several of my great enthusiasms come together in the the video above and below from the School at Columbia and their outstanding, superb Tools-at-Schools project.   Don Buckley, the School’s Director of Innovation, seems a prime driver here.   For me, watching the videos is a wonderful learning experience; I was able to learn more about the design process (so crucial to innovation),  visualize quality PBL in action, and at the same time gain new understanding of how school furniture can be updated to better enhance innovative learning environments.

Several elements stand out:

1. The program gives students real-world tasks connected to their own experience and relevant to their lives, tasks to which they themselves can bring their own expertise.

2. Process, process, process.  This project unfolds over 8 whole months.

3.   Experts play a role in every professional project, and they can and should play a role in student PBL as well: it is really exciting the way the students here have the opportunity to interact with expert furniture makers and designers.

4.  This is hard work– PBL should demand of students with no apologies hard work, including significant research, analysis, and writing.

5.  Forming “Big Ideas,” in good Grant Wiggins fashion,  guides the thinking and keeps a focus on the goals.

A big idea is thus a way of seeing better and working smarter, not just a vague notion or another piece of knowledge. It is more like a lens for looking than another object seen; more like a theme than the details of a narrative; more like an active strategy in your favorite sport or reading than a specific skill. It is a theory, not a detail. If an idea is “big” it helps us make sense of things.

6.  Producing a product shapes the journey and provides a motivating destination.

The project received some nice press as well, written up on the Huffington Post:

The program, called “Tools at Schools,” is an example of what Buckley calls “Education 3.0.” In this imagining, Education 1.0 is the traditional model, where a teacher stands at the front of the class and teaches at the students. In Education 2.0, the teacher and students hold a conversation together. In Education 3.0, the outside world (a design firm, perhaps) is brought into the classroom.

“If we’re serious about putting kids out into the 21st century workplace, this is the stuff they need,” Buckley said.

and shown on NBC news:

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The five videos below take viewers through the five steps of the process following the top introductory stage: Research, Mockup, 3D, Modeling, Launch.  Enjoy and Learn:

Jobs is not an exact contemporary, being about 12 years older than I am, but he is near enough to make the book that much more connected to my own experience.  I found the book vastly more fascinating when its narrative timeline intersected with my own personal experiences with Jobs’s products: experimenting with an Apple II in the early ‘80s, excitedly acquiring my own Macintosh in 1984, thrilling to my iPhone in 2008.

Isaacson doesn’t hold back on the negatives: this is not a hagiography.   As fascinating as the book is, it does not lead you to like Jobs as a person, and it leads you only to a very qualified degree of admiration for him as a leader, even as you are (or I was) astounded by his accomplishment.

Of course I was taken aback, even appalled, by his ferocious cruelty toward nearly everyone around him.    Isaascson similarly is repelled, and makes clear in his conclusion that it was unnecessary and at times detrimental to his success.    But—is it possible there is something to learn from here? Is it possible that we could all benefit from being a little bit less determined to spare people’s feelings? Isaacson:

The nasty edge of his personality was not necessary.  It hindered him more than it helped him.  But it did, at times, serve a purpose.  Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.  Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.

I think of some of the cooking competition TV shows I like so much, such as Next Food Network Star and Top Chef,  and one of the things I appreciate most about these shows is the skillfulness by which they give strong, direct, frank, honest, cutting, criticism, and, even more, the way most contestants take that criticism and use it to make themselves stronger. How I aspire to grow in this way.   There is no way to excuse Jobs’ intemperance, his obnoxious, petulant, horrifying belittlement and withering dismissal, but that is not to say there is no value to derive or nothing to learn from observing this aspect of his management style.

My own world-view could not be more different from what Isaacson frequently describes as Jobs’ Manichaeism,  a dualism by which it seems everything Jobs encountered either “sucked” or was “awesome.”

This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world.  Colleagues referred to it as the hero/s…head dichotomy.   You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either ‘the best thing ever’ or it was sh…y, brain-dead, inedible.

For me and in my efforts to lead and innovate, the world is a set of shaded greys, not ever black and white, and the work of innovation is that of trial and error, sorting our way through to what works better and where we can find breakthroughs that make a difference.    Mine is more is the “Google-Beta” model, and it is a far cry from Jobsian perfection, of instantaneous and conclusive judgment and perfectionism.

But as Isaacson explains it, this either/or worldview was a byproduct, not a necessary or inevitable byproduct to be sure, of something enormously admirable:  Jobs’ phenomenal focus and relentless passion.   He cared so deeply, and believed so strongly that we can make things which are excellent and we must “make a dent in the world” that, in his way of pursuing his passion and making a difference, this intensity was the result.    Would that we all cared as much as Jobs.

Explained and, if not justified, supported in a very similar way in the Jobs model of seamless, vertical integration of hardward, software, and peripherals, the famously “closed” system.   Like so many of my educational compatriots, I am sure, I am philosophically vastly more inclined to the values of a Microsoft or Google “open” system, and this divide goes back to the very founding of Apple when Woz wanted to give his circuit boards away and make available many slots and ports in the Apple II.   Isaacson appropriately quotes Cory Doctorow:

Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Philosophically, the Doctorow position is my own.  But do I use an iPhone with enthusiasm? Yes.   Jobs believed, and I don’t think he has to be right, but he believed he could and would vastly user experience with his closed system, and even if he doesn’t have to be right, he may have been correct enough for the time being that we can’t entirely dismiss the position.     Isaacson:

In a world filled with junky devices, inscrutable error messages, and annoying interfaces, Apple’s approach led to astonishing products marked by beguiling user experiences.  Using an Apple product could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens of Kyoto that Jobs loved, and neither experience was created by worshipping at the altar of openness or by letting a thousand flowers bloom.   Sometimes it’s nice to be in the hands of a control freak.

Isaacson heaps praise upon Jobs’ “Laser focus” and appreciation for simplicity:

Jobs’ intensity was also evident in his ability to focus.  He would set priorities, and his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions… He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products.  He made devices simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.

What inspires me most of all about Jobs is his intuitive power to draw upon a wide array of intellectual resources, to break down conceptual barriers and merge, meld, combine, synthesize.   Issacson:

He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future… Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details.  Jobs did both, relentlessly.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally.  Instead he was a genius.  His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, at times magical… Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

More than anyone else, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors… He built a company… that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

Isaacson allows us also to hear from Jobs first-hand as he articulates his ideals and values regarding innovative leadership.

There is a strong temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat.  That’s crazy.  Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.  You run into someone, you ask what they are doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you are cooking up all sorts of ideas.  If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation.  So we designed a building  to make people get out of their office and mingle in the central atrium.

You would think that the CEO of Disney would be curious how Pixar was [being so successful.]  But during that 20 year relationship, he visited Pixar for a total of two and a half hours, only to give little congratulatory speeches.   He was never curious.  I was amazed. Curiosity is very important.

Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.  People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.  That’s why I never rely on market research.  Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

There’s something magical about [that intersection of the humanities and science.] There’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate.  The Beatles were the same way.  They kept evolving, moving, refining, their art.   That’s what I’ve always tried to do– keep moving.

What drove me?  I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders we stand on.  And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and add something to the flow.  We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to the flow.   That’s what has driven me.

Of enormous interest throughout the Isaacson Jobs is the relationship between Jobs and Gates: their rivalry, animosity, and yet, almost bizarrely, their friendship and collaboration.    Among the most poignant moments comes very late in the book when Gates comes to the Jobs home near the very end, and they discussed, among other things, education.

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the class-room time for discussions and problem-solving.

They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools– far less on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law.

Perhaps among the many ways we have to honor the Jobs legacy, and, to quote him, “show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to the flow,”  is to carry his work forward in developing “schools in the future” by educational leadership and innovation:  innovative leadership marked by Jobsian passion, relentless focus, intensity, honesty and directness, curiosity,  concern with providing an excellence of user (student) experience, and integration of the humanities and sciences. 

Let’s make a dent in the world.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs:  ”If you’re not updating your curriculum, you are saying that nothing is changing.”

“Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of school administrators who responded to a recent survey said 1:1 computing classrooms where teachers act as a coach for students are the future of education.” (T.H.E Journal)

“Innovative teaching supports students’ development of the skills that will help them thrive in future life and work.” (ITL Research)

One of the most exciting books of the year for those of us seeking to become ever more effective as innovative school-leaders and leaders of innovative schools, and, even more importantly, seeking to facilitate our students’ development of more innovative mindsets, is the new book from Clayton Christensen (et.al), The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

(Bill Ferriter has written brilliantly about this book here, here, and here).

The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at

• Associating,
• Questioning,
• Observing,
• Networking,
• Experimenting. 

It is my aim to write more about these five traits, particularly for teaching and learning, but here I want to focus upon school leadership and the book’s concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, to draw and offer 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders: What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School:

1.  Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can’t delegate innovation:     

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”  Steve Jobs.

Christensen:

“In the most innovative companies, senior executives didn’t just delegate innovation; their own hands were deep in the innovation process… Their focus was innovation, so they actively engaged in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting, which had a powerful imprinting effect on their organization and team.

Because innovators excelled at the innovator’s DNA skills, they valued them in others, so much so that others within the organization felt that reaching the top required personal innovation capability.   This expectation helped foster an innovation focus throughout the company.

 If top executives want innovation, they need to stop pointing fingers at someone else and take a hard look at themselves.

2.  Make your practice of “active innovation” visible, such that “everyone sees or hears about it.”  It is not just that we practice innovation ourselves, but that we find ways to demonstrate it publicly to model it for our communities and inspire those with whom we work.   Whether it is in faculty meetings,  student assemblies, or online via blogging and social media, find the way to showcase your innovation leadership.

3.  Create complementary teams in school leadership, balancing innovation/discover strengths at the top with delivery skills very nearby.  ”Delivery skills” include analyzing, planning, detail oriented implementing, and self-disciplined.”

4 . Building on the ideas of networking and cross fertilization, take initiative as Principal to observe closely what other schools are doing, from across many educational sectors: K-12 and post-secondary; private, public, charter; etc.    (p. 202)   My own most powerful learning and innovative-mind developing activity has been visiting other schools, shadowing students, and blogging my observations.

5.  ”Arrange for employee swaps” with other schools and organizations.  This is something I have almost never heard of in education, but what a great idea!    Swap elementary and high school teachers for a week, swap admins and teachers inside the same school or better with schools with sharply different methodologies or philosophies.   At my school we are embarking on teacher swaps with our two new “sister” schools in Hermosillo, Mexico, and believe the result will be greater innovation in both schools.

6.   Ask Why?  Use this method as school-leader with your team and with your constituencies:  ”When confronted with a problem, ask yourself why at least five times to unravel causal chains and spark ideas for innovative solutions.”

7.   When hiring, seek people who “had invented something, held deep expertise in a particular knowledge area, and demonstrated a passion to change the world through excellent products and services.”    ”Clearly if companies want innovative ideas from employees, they should screen for innovation potential in the hiring process.”

8.  Remember that ”innovators want to work with and for other innovators.”   With each innovation hire, and each positive step modeling and positively reinforcing innovation, you are turning the flywheel in your school for increased momentum towards becoming an innovation hub.

9.  Embed innovation as an “explicit, consistent element of performance reviews.”  Ask every teacher every year in self-evaluation and performance review to identify and reflect upon their innovative practices, risks taken, and lessons learned.  Hold everyone accountable for the practice of innovation.

10.  ”Develop formal and informal processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges.”   We need to help our fine people share more than they do at present in our schools; we need to lift them up out of classroom silos and into collaborative exchanges.   Is there more we can do to help teachers and administrators have lunch together?  Can we set up online sharing networks for people to contribute to from across the organization?   Are we doing enough to generate PLC’s?  ”It’s totally possible for you to be sitting by someone who has been working in an area that you were not interested in.  And then suddenly a discussion with that person may trigger some new ideas for both of you.”

11.  Network externally.   Our silos are not only within our schools, but our schools themselves are too often silos, isolated from strong networks.   “Over the last few years, companies have increasingly looked outside their own walls for new ideas.”  One example I have seen of highlighting this kind of external networking comes from New York’s Riverdale Country School, which has a web-page celebrating all its many external organization connections, a page they are regularly seeking to add to and strengthen.   To quote: “Riverdale is a great school, but great institutions are measured by their collaboration with other great organizations.”

12.  Practice Beta testing and Prototyping.  It is not enough to come up with ideas; as Principals we have to put them in place and see what happens. The book quotes leading innovators:   “How do I do this now?”  ”Screw it. Let’s do it.”    As at Google, “Institutionalize experiments by using “beta” labels to release products early and often for public trials, allowing Google to quickly get direct customer feedback.  It pursues innovation by having hundreds of small teams prusuae and pilot new projects simultaneously.”   My favorite word in educational leadership is “pilot.”   I regularly attach it to experiments underway, letting people know there is room here for multiple iterations, and if it doesn’t end up being effective, we’ll take it down and try another approach.

13.  Build many small, diverse teams for projects.   At Google, “engineers typically work in teams of only three to six people. ‘We try to keep it small.  You just don’t get productivity out of large groups.’  The result is an empowered, flexible organization with small teams pursuing hundreds of projects, an approach that Schmidt claims ‘lets a thousand flowers bloom.’”   Remember Margaret Mead:  ”Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

14.  Communicate and reinforce that Innovation is everyone’s job.   It is fascinating to me to read and realize that “the Think Different campaign at Apple “targeted Apple’s employees as much as its customers.”  Steve Jobs explained: “The whole purpose of the Think Different campaign was that people had forgotten what Apple stood for, including its employees.”  What are we doing to convey effectively that “innovation is everyone’s job?”

15.  Make innovation an explicit core value of your school: ”Companies incorporate innovation, creativity,and curiosity into their core values, in word and deed.”   At my current school, we embedded the importance of “innovation” in our mission and our slogan: “Creating Leaders and Innovators.”

16.  “Give more time for innovation.”  ”Innovative leaders know that innovation doesn’t just happen but requires a significant time commitment… budget more human and financial resources to innovation activities.”  One of our greatest opportunities as school leaders is also one of our most challenging, but let’s not yield in the face of the difficulty: Find, carve out, insist upon more time for collaboration, more time for shared reflective practice, and more time for innovation.

17.  Create “a safe space for others to innovate.”  Encourage questions, especially tough ones, and watch and listen.  Encourage everybody to ask why on a daily basis.  ”Researchers call this psychological safety in which team members willingly express opinions, take risks, run experiments, and acknowledge mistakes without punishment.”

18.  Model your risktaking and your learning from failure. Principals can make more visible their risks, their failures, and their learning from failure, to better model these practices.    ”The most essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fall.   For innovators and innovative companies alike mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of.   They are an expected cost of doing business.   ‘You do enough new things and you’re going to bet wrong,’ says Jeff Bezos.”

Our students are waiting for 21st century learning, and our world is awaiting graduates who can succeed and flourish in fast-changing times.   None of this is to say that everything must change, hardly.   There are many, oh-so-many thing we do that should never change.  I was charmed recently by Nancy Flanagan’s piece in EdWeek Teacher, Time Traveling Teacher, when she wrote:

But I’m wondering if there isn’t a kind of timeless core in formal education–and if change isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, in classroom-based learning. That core would begin with the relationship between teachers and students.

Of course we must preserve and perpetuate this core, but at the same time it has never been more important to, as Collins writes, stimulate progress.  Christensen’s Innovator’s DNA is a fine resource for thinking about practical and inspirational steps we can all take as school-leaders to advance educational innovation within our schools.

Now You See It comes from an exciting intellect, a scholar and an academic, a sparkling enthusiast and vigorous advocate for the “new learning” modes that my blog here promotes and celebrates.   Davidson’s focus is the university, and as a Vice Provost at Duke she led that university forward in meaningful and important ways; now at HASTAC she is clearly one of the nation’s most important educational thinkers and innovators in her work seeking to transform learning to modes that are contemporary, relevant, engaging, and preparatory for students.

So why I am so disappointed in the book?  As I’ve reflected about it, I think my main sadness is that in her advocacy for students being online and networked, and in her defense against what we all can recognize has been at times a loud and emphatic backlash against the problems of multi-tasking and digital distraction, she seems to work so hard to defend her turf that she allows for no compromise, no middle path, no synthesis, and the extremism of her position and/or rhetoric undermine her very argument and what are our shared goals.

There are terrific elements in the book.   She relates exciting educational innovations that she helped to pioneer at Duke; I am very inspired by the way she implemented the iPod experiment with undergrads at Duke, a “calculated exercise in disruption, distraction, and difference,” and the great advances in creativity, collaboration, and communication that unfolded as a result.

Her discussion of the value of students writing online speaks compellingly to me:

Having my students blog was a no-brainer; their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better that in the traditional term papers they wrote for class… Research indicates that at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is judged by teachers.

Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant, and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers… [Stanford research finds] students becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent, not less, as feared.

She shares interestingly, if a bit pridefully (“it wasn’t just a class; it was a different way of seeing: we’d seen a transformation not just in the classroom but in all of us”) about her own curricular innovation in teaching a course entitled “This is Your Brain on the Internet,” a course I’d love to take.

She has her eye on rethinking assessment (“if you measure narrowly, you see results just as narrowly, our educational vision has shrunk to the tiny bubble of a multiple choice exam”), asking good questions about whether we are effectively measuring student learning, giving students useful feedback with assessment, and whether are unfortunately undermining our educational goals with inappropriate testing and measurement.

She implores readers to be wary on jumping a bandwagon of multi-tasking and online learning criticism, and like her,  I am wary of this bandwagon of naysayers and pessimists.   There is incredible value and power in networked learning, in managing multiple and diverse information streams, in being connected and in making connections across wide sources of information and insights of wisdom, and she articulately and passionately reminds us of this and warns us not to overlook it in a judgmental dismissal of “multi-tasking.”

The upshot is that there is nothing, intrinsically, biologically, harmful about multitasking….Our widespread worries about multitasking create the problem; they don’t name it.  It’s the gorilla experiment again: Focus only on the horrors of multitasking and that’s all you see…

During boundless, wandering thinking, we open ourselves to possibilities for innovative solutions that, in more focused thinking, we might prematurely preclude as unrealistic… What if we thought of new digital ways of thinking not as multi-tasking but as multi-inspiring, as potentially creative disruption of usual thought patterns? 

I similarly value her perception that we all will learn more and think more creatively and powerfully if we tap into, regularly, online learning networks.

Is the form of learning and knowledge making we are instilling in our children useful to their future?  The Internet it here to stay.  Are we teaching them in a way that will prepare them for a world of learning and for human relationships in which they interweave their interests into the vast, decentralized, yet entirely interconnected content online?   The answer more often that not is no.

I believe that many kids today are doing a better job preparing themselves for their futures than we have done providing them with the institutions to help them. 

But that doesn’t mean that distraction is a good thing. Like Davidson,  I’d like to reclaim the positive value of the term “multi-tasking,” because after all walking and chewing gum, or singing and dancing, or thinking and reading, are all examples of valuable multi-tasking.   But distraction?   Davidson goes too far for me when she seeks to persuade readers of the value of distraction:

In the end, distraction is one of the best tools for innovation we have at our disposal– for changing out of the pattern of attention and beginning the process of learning new patterns.

The book’s central and guiding metaphor comes from the well-known video of college students passing basketballs, used in experiments by scientists of attention in which they ask participants to count the number of passes made in a 90 second period.

If you haven’t seen it before, or heard about it, do take the time now to watch, paying close attention and counting the number of times balls are passed.

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The reporting from the widely conducted research is that all-too-frequently, when participants are asked afterwards about the video, they report seeing nothing strange or surprising: they don’t see the gorilla.

Did you?  And if you didn’t, what do you think about the fact that you didn’t?   Is it a serious problem that you didn’t see the gorilla?   Does it mean you suffer an attention blindness crisis?  Does it suggest your powers of concentration are too strong?   No?  I don’t think so either.  But Davidson, if I read her correctly, does so think.

This becomes Davidson’s thesis: in a 20th century paradigm of “attention,” we don’t see the gorilla, and that is a problem bordering on a crisis; in our increasingly information saturated environments, it is ever more imperative that we all see the gorilla.  The metaphor even extends to her book cover (go look at it again).

What she is calling for is a 21st century, internet era, paradigm of attention, one in which we have the kind of wider-ranging attention mode in which we see the balls being passed and we see the gorilla, and her response to every critic of multi-tasking and divided attention seems to be that any such criticsm is bound up in an antiquated concept of focused attention necessary in 20th century workplaces and universities but now detrimental in our fast-moving, fast-changing times.

Her message comes on very strong in her conclusion:

For well over a hundred years, our culture’s story line has been about focused, measurable productivity… sorting our day into the “on” times for our attentive labor and the “off” times for our leisure.

The old idea of the brain mirrored, supported, and justified a certain ideal of human labor.  Attention is, definitionally, the concentration of the mind on a single thought, object, or task… Mindwandering, not focus, may turn out to be good for the brain and beneficial for the ideas it generates…

Incongruity, disruption, and disorientation may well turn out to be the most inspiring, creative, and productive forces one can add to the workplace…  In a diverse, interconnected, and changing world, being distracted from our business as usual may not be a downside but the key to success.

I just can’t accept the idea that we don’t want for ourselves and for our students times of focus, of concentration, of freedom from distraction, of deeper thinking and strong attention.  

It brings to mind my frustration with the essay by William Deresiewicz arguing against social media and for isolation as essential for leadership, scholarship, and creativity.   In responding to that, I made the case contra Deresiewicz that it is enormously valuable to network, to multi-task, to “surf,” in order to create, think and innovate.  But with Davidson, the argument is the inverse; we do need to focus and concentrate in addition to networking and multi-tasking.

Davidson is right that we’d be wrong to narrow our attention all the time, to concentrate too much of the time to the exclusion of welcoming new information.   But some of the time, we need to focus. Some of the time, our purpose and goal is not to be open to seeing the gorilla; rather, some of the time, our purpose and goal is to count the basketball passes, darn it.

Davidson does, partially, acknowledge this in a problematic, mixed message paragraph in the conclusion.

In most of life, our attention is continuous and partial until we’re so forcefully grabbed by something that we shut out everything else.   Those blissful episodes of concentrated, undistracted, continuous absorption are delicious– and dangerous.

That’s when we miss the gorilla– and everything else.   The lesson of attention blindness is that sole, concentrated, direct, centralized attention to one task– the ideal of twentieth century productivity– is efficient for the task on which you are concentrating but it shuts out the other things we also need to be seeing.

This breaks my heart.   Professor Davidson, for whom I have such great admiration, comes so close here to taking the position that I think is the “just-right” synthesis or golden mean.  Concentration, undistracted, continuous absorption is indeed delicious– and powerful and essential for the best thinking and the best problem-solving and the best creativity– when balanced with other times of wonderfully rich “mind-wandering” and information “surfing.”

As she says, “centralized attention” is indeed “efficient for the task on which you are concentrating,” and efficient task-management is something we should all want for ourselves and our students– so long as we work in tandem to ensure we and they have many an opportunity to “see” what otherwise we might be shutting out.

But (and I know I am often guilty of the same, so my only defense is to say it takes one to know one), I can only infer and conclude she let her enthusiasms get the better of her and let her rhetoric soar beyond reasonable bounds.  Perhaps this is, and I think I hope it is, purely rhetorical excess– deeply problematic and damaging rhetorical excess– and that it is all it is.  Because if this is a position she holds sincerely and firmly, I have to say, not from the authority of a brain-science scholar but rather only a common sense educator, I think she is entirely mistaken.

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I had already drafted most of the above when I encountered this morning the New York Times Book Review review of Professor Davidson’s book.   To my reading, my thoughts and those of the far-more-credentialed reviewer, Professor Christopher Chabris, author of The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, are strikingly parallel.   Let me share a few key sentences from his review:

Her book “Now You See It” celebrates the brain as a lean, mean, adaptive multitasking machine that — with proper care and feeding — can do much more than our hidebound institutions demand of it.

Davidson’s book is subtitled “How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” but there is almost no brain science in the book at all, and attention is invoked mainly as a metaphor.

Davidson is so taken with the [unseen gorilla study and the inattentional blindness] phenomenon that she proclaims it “the fundamental structuring principle of the brain.” Inattentional blindness (as it is properly called) is an important and counterintuitive fact about how perception works, but even I don’t think it can carry half as much weight as Davidson loads upon it.

It’s a shame Davidson decided to wrap her ideas in neurobabble, since she has some interesting first-person reports to make on schools and businesses that have adopted innovative practices like complex simulation and strategy games.

In one classroom she visits, the students organize themselves into teams and compete to design and build bridges out of Popsicle sticks, developing management plans, doing experiments on structural strength and making financial decisions along the way. Indeed, Davidson is such a good storyteller, and her characters are so well drawn, it’s easy to overlook the lack of hard evidence in favor of the intriguing ideas she advocates.

Let me conclude by agreeing wholeheartedly with the above paragraphs.   Now You See It  is in many, many ways a wonderful book about educational innovation and “intriguing ideas.”  I crave the opportunity to pull those sections out and see a different book emerge, about the powerfully engaging and critically important ways learning can realign itself with the internet age.

I am especially taken with chapters three and four, including her rich examples of classroom re-invention in “Project Classroom Makeover” and her important discussion about “How We Measure.” But the central and pervasive unseen gorilla organizing metaphor and the argument for distraction haunt the book and weaken its effect and value considerably.

[cross-posted from Connected Principals]

“Dad, there’s your favorite word again,” my son calls out, a tad cynically, when we are driving to  school listening to NPR and a reporter uses the word  innovation.   I am aware that my son, and others, believe this word has become too much of a buzz-word and perhaps a fad,  too often so broadly defined that it becomes generic, empty in content, and devoid of true significance.

But, I refuse to be deterred.

Like Tom Friedman in the New York Times, President Obama, and many others, I think the word and the concept capture and describe something both wonderful and incredibly important in our world today– and in fact, more important than ever before in our fast-changing times.   Educational innovation, and, more importantly, educating students to be innovative, are the intertwined twin concepts I spend the most time trying to learn about more deeply, understand better, write about more often, and implement more effectively.

Looking back, I recognize now that the slogan change made in my first months (2009) at my school, St. Gregory, by the Board of Trustees and myself,  came too soon and too abruptly, without enough preparation and inclusion, and I regret the rushed process.  But, nevertheless,  I love the phrase which adorns our website, brochures,  and advertisements and which looms large on the walls of our major meeting areas: Creating Leaders and Innovators.

Creating Leaders and Innovators stood proudly tall in foot-large letters high up on our gymnasium wall in 2010 when Tony Wagner, Ph.D., visited our school and spoke beneath this banner to an audience of nearly 500 about the educational change our fast-changing world demands and how we can bring about this change.

So it should be no surprise that I am greatly enthusiastic about Dr. Wagner’s forthcoming book, (April, 2012),Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. I think every 21st century educator who seeks to strengthen our national and global future by teaching our students to be more creative and successful problem-solvers should put this book on the very top of their must-read list for 2012.

Last week, I had the good fortune to participate in a webinar organized by Edleader21, the fine “Professional Learning Community for 21st century educational leaders,” with Dr. Wagner, and I received his permission to share this “preview” of his forthcoming book’s exciting insights and lessons.  (These are my notes recapitulating his remarks, not a verbatim transcript.)

Wagner, in introducing his topic, made reference to the new book from Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us, and shared Friedman’s view in that book that in the future there will be only two categories of successful people, creative creators and creative supporters.

Wagner explained that for his book research, he interviewed a set of what he called especially accomplished and highly innovative 20-somethings, scores of them, asking them for their influences and inspirations,  and he then interviewed their teachers and parents. Quoting him:

In doing so, I found a stunning pattern I did not expect—every one of these super-innovators can identify a teacher who inspired them and helped set them on their course, but these teachers were always outliers, out of the norm, eccentrics, distinctly different from most of the other teachers.  Just as importantly, these outlier teachers had a set of qualities strongly in common with each other.

The 5 fundamental constants of the outliers: (paraphrased).

1.  They presided over a classroom culture not of individual achievement, but instead collaboration.  It is remarkable the extent to which we find again and again that innovation is deeply rooted in the power of collaboration, and we must resist the myth that inventors are creative by being solitary, uniquely creative, individual geniuses.

2.  Their teaching practice was one not of specialization but instead entirely multi-disciplinary—that is the norm of teachers who cultivate innovative mindsets among our students.  The classrooms where they were wide-ranging, covering many topics and subjects, without regard for narrow disciplines or boundaries.

3.  They asked of their students, and practiced with them not risk avoidance but trial and error—try something, fail, try something different.  At the core and essence of innovation is the ability to learn from failure, and you have to facilitate an environment where students have to take risks

4.  They promoted the value not of consuming,  but creating.   Their classrooms were places where students worked hard, and were serious about producing genuine, concrete, meaningful product.

5.  They employed not extrinsic, but intrinsic motivation with their students.

Tony added that his research among these young “super-innovators” found that their parents actively encouraged wider types of play: play that was outside and out of doors; play that was widely varied and creative; play that was not limited to screens; and play that allowed students many opportunities first to find and then to pursue their pursue their passion, passions they found by play and discovery.  He explained that this is an important process for innovators: “Play to passion to purpose.”

Again, as above, I should reiterate that how eager I am to see the book, and how much inspiration and information I think we will find in it.   This is just a sneak peek which I hope will whet your appetite as it has mine.

Let me make four initial comments upon these exciting and important findings and how we as school-leaders and principals should respond:

1.  It seems to me that every school-leader who cares about cultivating innovative mindsets and creating innovators should take Wagner’s counsel and check our leadership carefully: are we aware of who the “outliers” are on our faculties? Do we have enough of them?  Are we recruiting them, and are we protecting them?  Are there enough opportunities for them to “break-out” and innovate?

2.  We should ask about our students: do they have enough opportunities to take risks, and learn from failure and by trial and error?  Are we asking them often enough, and pushing them vigorously enough, to generate and produce real product, to create rather than consume?

3.  Collaboration is essential: Dr. Wagner emphasized this repeatedly in his presentation, and certainly Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, agrees.   But how do we distinguish, and help students distinguish, between quality and mediocre collaboration, and how do we help them develop the skills of effective collaboration that stimulates and supports innovation?

The recent and important book Academically Adrift provides research findings that students are more successful demonstrating the thinking skills evaluated on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (the CLA, the exact counterpart and analogue to the secondary school critical thinking assessment, the CWRA) when they study alone than when they study collaboratively.   These findings don’t dictate to me that we should abandon collaborative learning environments, but that we need to work harder to help them be effective and powerful learning experiences for our students.

4.  Schools will always need to review the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and seek to find the best and ideal blend; Tony’s important research here again underscores that we should be wary of the extrinsic and promote as best we are able the intrinsic.   A recent Atlantic magazine article by Lori Gottlieb, How to Land Your Child in Therapy, seemed to suggest that schools should not hesitate to award and reward highly accomplished students, because it is useful for the other students to realize their limitations early and not be deprived important life lessons of disappointment.  But it is the award recipients, we can see from many research studies, who can be deprived their own sense of intrinsic motivation when we grant them awards and shower them with praise: my concerns and hesitations about the culture of “award-giving” in schools is based more on what awards do to the winners than what they do to the losers.

My thanks go to Tony Wagner and to EdLeader21 for the fine webinar.   Readers can expect to find more here about this new book after its publication.

Related posts:

• Innovation in Schooling: Taking Inspiration from Where Good Ideas Come From
• Copy, Transform, Combine: Innovation as Remixing
• Innovative Schools, Innovative Students: Keynote slides and specific applications for schools
• Imagination and Initiative: Harvard’s and Hiam’s Advice for Educating for innovation
• Racing to Somewhere and Away from Academically Adrift: Hard Work and High School

Watch and enjoy.

We all are working to promote more innovative school cultures, and, more importantly, to facilitate our students’ development of more innovative mindsets.   But I fear that too often we see innovation as an extraordinarily complex or sophisticated concept.  In thinking this, we set the bar so high that we lose confidence in our ability to reach it, and hence, stop trying quite so hard.

Instead, we should continue to recognize how elemental and elementary innovation is: it is an art of copying, transforming, and combining, as Kirby Ferguson explains in this very charming, colorful, fun and informative video.    Innovation isn’t epiphany, it is effort, experiment, and practice.    It is copying with intentionally allowed mutations; it is experimenting with the possibilities mutations make available; it is refusing to stop at any limit or boundary but instead continuing to ask what next, what more, what else?

More about Kirby Ferguson’s fascinating project is available here.

The accompanying online article can be found here.

From that article, by Arizona Public Media reporter  Luis Carrión :

St. Gregory College Preparatory School will begin the new school year with an oversized addition: one of the largest solar arrays in any Tucson school, producing 140 kilowatts of energy. The project consists of more than 600 locally produced solar panels that will offset St. Gregory’s energy bill by a minimum of $1,000 a month.

Jonathan Martin, head of St. Gregory, says the project will not only offset dependency on the grid, it will also provide students with valuable opportunities to learn about an important sustainable energy source.

Young people care about the environment, Martin notes, and they are passionate about making changes that will benefit the planet and future generations.

“But they need more firsthand, concrete, tangible examples of how to make the change in the direction that they care about,” he says.

Martin says the school will develop math, science, and economic curricula around the various components of the installation.

“Our math instructor is already working with students on calculating carbon footprints,” he says. “Teaching our students to be responsible stewards of the planet is important, and this project allows us a firsthand look at some of the most advanced technology available.”

Joe Herrick works for Solar H2O and Electric, the company installing the locally manufactured solar panels. He says the school will lease the equipment from the Tucson company for 20 years at a fixed rate, with an expected savings of at least $220,000, making the project both economically and environmentally sound.

On August 1st I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to deliver the Keynote at the CRADLE conference in Singapore.

The presentation contained a mix of material contained in “Schooling at the Speed of Thought” and some of the articles in this blog, especially the Transformation Phase article. Here’s the key points:

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Singapore was one of the first countries in the world to have a national strategy to roll out ICT to all schools. Key challenges addressed in this initiative are to:

• Prepare students to meet the challenges of the 21st Century
• Bring about improved learning and increased engagement through the use of ICT
• Enable more self-directed learning

In summary, the challenge is to make schooling in Singapore even more effective through the use of ICT.

To address this, we need to ask three key questions:

1. How can software accelerate the learning process?

Computers in learning are increasingly being used as tools for creativity rather than as machines to deliver the curriculum. So, with a proliferation of new hardware and software developments, what new creative options are there for learning? How can software help to personalise the learning experience and open up completely new learning opportunities?

2. How can software be used to make better decisions?

How can schooling information and data be leveraged to get maximum impact from precious resources; what do we mean by “intelligent intervention” and why it is so important; how can we empower all stakeholders with information; and how do we drive alignment and performance towards strategic goals?

3. How can Cloud Computing be exploited to cheaply deliver massive-scale, high-quality learning solutions?

We don’t normally expect a school to generate its own electricity - but we have expected our education institutions to be experts at running their own “IT Power Stations”. How can Cloud Computing change this?

With the advent of Cloud Computing, also comes the realistic prospect of providing anytime anywhere learning for all. So how can massive, cheap, and highly available computing services be combined with a range of access technologies and high quality learning content to open up learning opportunities to all citizens of Singapore – and especially those who are in the greatest need of it?

Conclusion

With highly developed infrastructure, talent and innovation, Singapore is in a great position to exploit technology even further. The concluding part of this presentation asked what world-leading innovations and software solutions can be leveraged in Singapore and how we can architect “anytime anywhere learning for all?

For a copy of the presentation please go to: http://bit.ly/pRZUMJ

Thanks to my colleages in Singapore – Horng Shya Chua; Jason Trump; Gerald Tan; Puay San Ng; Eugenia Lim, Lee Boon Keng and the staff and students at Crescent Girls’ School. Thanks also to all those who attended the CRADLE event.

This is a 140 Kw project, entailing more than 600 panels on six of our major buildings which we have undertaken in a partnership with a Tucson company, Solar H20.   This is an all-Tucson project: the partner utility company is Tucson Electric Power (TEP); the solar panels are manufactured not in China or overseas but right here in Tucson (though by a German company, Solon), and even the racks are manufactured here in town.

Yesterday, I was interviewed by KUAT, Arizona Public Media, for a television news report they are preparing for their weekly television “newsmagazine” show, Arizona Illustrated, about this project. It is my hope and intent to be able to share that news report here soon.

I was asked two main questions, and I thought I would do my best to share and replicate my answers here (in fairness, these written answers are a bit expanded).

Q: Why is St. Gregory undertaking this project? 

A: It has been a high priority of my leadership to embark on alternative energy support for our school, and to not go solar in this Southern Arizona sun seems foolish.   Rick Belding, our business manager, and I had been discussing and seeking opportunities to make this go, (including multiple conversations with Tucson’s Solar energy project manager, Bruce Tunze), when we were approached by a new company, Solar H20, which was ready to seize on certain incentives available from both our local utility, TEP, and the federal government.  After a very thorough review of the contract by Rick Belding, we were ready to commit.

This is a win-win-win project.  It is a win for the school financially: we calculate we will save at least $1000 a month, and because our rate is capped, if energy prices rise (and doesn’t it seem likely they will?), we will save even more.   It is a win for the utility, which needs these alternative energy credits, and for the local construction and manufacturing companies which will generate the equivalent of several work-years in jobs right her in our hometown, a town suffering problematic underemployment in the recession.  The planet will “win” by the dramatic reduction in our carbon footprint, a number I don’t have yet but which our mathematics students will be calculating thoroughly this fall.

Most importantly, perhaps, for us as an educational institution, we believe our students will “win.” Our educational mission and priorities include ensuring our students develop their character, and particularly so in taking responsibility for their community and planet.   We also have a commitment to see our students develop the mindset and practice of innovation, and to skillfully employ current technologies to creatively and effectively solve problems.   With this solar energy initiative, we as a school and an institution are modelling the qualities and virtues we expect our students to develop, and indeed, we would be failing them if we were not ourselves taking the initiative and making the effort to model these practices.   It is a great value to our educational mission to practice what we preach.

Q:  How will St. Gregory use this new solar installation as a part of the educational program for students?

We expect our teachers and students will use the new solar installation in a wide variety of ways.   Our math classes intend (as above) to calculate the carbon footprint reduction achieved by this new installation, and to create algorithms to consider how that footprint will rise or fall depending on other variables and other energy saving and alternative energy initiatives we undertake as a school community.

Our middle school physical sciences class will study and learn more about how solar energy is generated and transferred with transformers and capacitors.  Our environmental systems class will conduct a lengthy solar unit, considering the solar energy pros and cons, costs and benefits, and having first hand example will illuminate this greatly.  They  expect also to scrutinize closely the solar panel monitors as they display the flux of energy being generated on a daily basis, and seek to determine what factors, such as the panel angles, the length of the day, and the angle of the sun, change the solar energy generation and how.

Finally, and most importantly and excitingly, our Design/Build Technology Innovation students will study very closely the mechanics, electronics, and physics of the installation and take lessons and inspiration for the various alternative energy construction projects they are themselves constructing.  [I hope and expect to write more this fall to share some of these student learning activities as they happen].

—–

Before I conclude, I should say a word in praise and appreciate to the amazingly hard working construction crew that is installing this project; they are working atop our roofs each and every day in the summer Southern Arizona sun, everyday 100 degrees plus.  Thank you, thank you.

This is the fourth and final article on the phases of transformation that schooling systems go through. The first was “Taking the First Steps”, and this phase is characterized by access. The second, Taking the Next Steps – The ‘Enhanced’ Phase, is where technology is used to enhance existing processes. The third -“The Strategic Phase” – is characterized by using technology to meet strategic goals and help determine what those goals should be.

Feedback that readers have kindly sent me had prompted me to adjust the overall maturity framework so each of the main characteristics of each phase now look like this:

Four Stages of Schooling System Maturity

Whilst the three preceding phases were about applying technology to schools as they currently are, the Transformed Phase is about fundamentally changing the nature of schooling itself.

Using ICT to transform schooling allows us to ask questions such as “where is school”, “how do we deliver personalised and engaging learning experiences”, and “how can we develop highly effective and efficient schooling systems”?

Whilst transformation will mean many different things to many different people, there are three main ingredients to a transformed schooling system.

The first is providing anytime, anywhere learning for all citizens. The second is providing highly personalised experiences to all learners. The third is about building a culture of high performance throughout the entire schooling system.

Anytime Anywhere Learning For All

The first principle in transforming schooling is to redefine its “customer” base. At present, schooling reaches learners between the ages of 5 to 18, within narrowly defined geographic boundaries, and for around 18% of the year only. Now, there is a significant opportunity to deliver learning services to entire populations at relatively low costs. This is because the cost of digital content and software only marginally increases with the number of users, and because the cost of delivering e-learning services at massive scale through Cloud computing is increasingly cheap and getting cheaper.

To date we have thought about learning in the physical sense of going to a place called a school. Going forward, schools will facilitate learning less as a physical experience and more as one that can take place across different locations. Increasingly, we can expect the process of schooling to become less dependent on learners regularly attending a single campus over a long period of time.

Schooling will spread out of the physical confines of the school campus, and into ‘found space’ such as offices; high street locations; apartments; and even the homes of children.

The youngest learners need somewhere near their own home where they can physically go to access learning facilities; to learn with other groups of learners and access richer materials than those which they have in their own home. Older learners need learning spaces to interact with their tutors, counsellors and learning managers, but also need to learn in environments that are appropriate to their learning tasks. For example, a specialist science learning module – say optics, for example – may well be based in a traditional (campus) school laboratory, but equally there could be a company in the local community specialising in optics that would be willing for students to learn at their facilities.

In this model, there is still room for the traditional “Campus School”, but as a social, intellectual and resource hub – a place for those specialist learning facilities which might not be available in the local community such as laboratories, workshops, libraries, art studios and gymnasia. The Campus School is also a place from which to organise and manage learning and produce learning content.

The Campus School of the future will be a community resource; it will be open for 52 weeks a year, 7 days a week from 7.30 am (with breakfast clubs, computer clubs, gym facilities etc.), and will stay open until 10.00 pm (with after school clubs, homework clubs, sports facilities, cyber cafes etc). Its pupils will be aged 1 to 100. The four walls of a classroom/school will be replaced with online classrooms/schools/homes, ensuring access to technology and information for all.

Many university towns reflect this approach, where university learning facilities are embedded in the local community. Schooling is catching up. In “First Steps” we’ve already seen the ‘Kiosk’ model in India, where learning is simply put out onto the street to be consumed by self-organising groups of children. On the other side of the world, in New Zealand, Discovery Learning has schooling facilities deeply embedded in the community with locations in shopping malls and central business districts. Here, “school” isn’t a building and children are given “trust licences” to learn where they need to in the local community.

In this model, there is a vast spectrum of types of learning spaces, from traditional classrooms to cyber cafes, each type able to facilitate different levels of collaboration and self-directed learning.

Learning Spaces (C/O lookred)

New types of learning spaces will facilitate a much wider spectrum of learning methods too:

Technology Enabled Learning Styles. C/O lookred

Where Is School?

“Anytime Anywhere Learning for All” means exactly that. Every citizen, anywhere, able to access organised learning.  Not everyone will need to, or be able to, attend school in order to receive schooling services, which poses the question “where is school?” In the transformed schooling model, schooling is embedded deeply into the local community in the following way.

Anytime Anywhere Learning for All

1. Community Learning Spaces

Community Learning Spaces are places in which formal, organised schooling takes place for school age learners, that are not within the walls of the traditional Campus School. These spaces are, in effect, “franchises” of the Campus School, and firmly embedded into the Campus School’s systems. Learners in Community Learning Spaces have managed internet access, and plug their personal learning devices straight into e-Learning Service. Even the youngest children can learn with ICT – e.g. games based learning, immersive environments, interactive whiteboards and programmable toys. Learning to write with a Tablet PC helps young children to acquire basic skills long before they can type or use a mouse.

Learners are registered as members of the Connected Learning Community and the process of data collection begins. Managed learning pathways and dynamic timetables ensure that students work on the tasks that are most appropriate for their stage of learning. A spectrum of creativity, productivity and learning tools ensure that the optimal blend of computer and teacher mediated learning takes place. The ICT infrastructure comprises wireless network, workstations, display, scanners. Infrastructure and Core Sofware Services mean that computers joining the wireless network are managed via a Virtual Private Network. Users and devices are authenticated, and policies – especially security and filtering policies – are imposed.

Teachers, assistants and other responsible adults – connected to peers and experts through the technology – directly support the learning process. Learners progress through the curriculum as quickly as their learning performance permits, and move to different learning spaces when appropriate. Staff and learners alike access the Connected Learning Community portal to get information, content and tools. Learners can see their assignments, feedback, learning materials and web links from a single site, and populate an e-portfolio with their work. Community Learning Spaces are extensions of
the Campus School, and both staff and learners will spend some time at there.

2. Campus School

The Campus School acts as a central point for organising, managing and creating Anytime Anywhere Learning in the community. The Campus School in effect “franchises” learning operations in Community Learning Spaces, so ICT is used to drive alignment; manage performance; and ensure high quality, paperless administrative processes. Live communications ensure that expertise within and beyond the Campus School can be “piped” into the Community Learning Spaces (CLS) on demand.

The IT Infrastructure of the CLSs are supplied as a service from the Campus School.

Learners – of all ages – visit the Campus School to use specialist facilities and IT equipment that are unavailable in the Community Learning Spaces. Whilst learners bring their personal learning devices into the campus, the site has a proliferation of multi-touch interactive displays and these enable learners to access a vast array of information and content from anywhere on the site.

In the Schooling Enterprise Architecture model, Campus Schools are branch sites from the Local Education Authority hubs and as such receive the full range of Schooling Enterprise Services for Student Relationship Management, intelligent intervention, performance management, planning, operations and administration.

A master database of resources – people, spaces, equipment and content – enables the Campus School to dynamically timetable learners so their precise learning needs can be met immediately. Predictive analysis of learning pathways enables the system to book or purchase resources well in advance.

Underpinning the IT infrastructure at the school and its “franchises” is a set of Core Software Services including Security, Identity, Comms & Collab, System Management and Directory services. Services are either delivered through on-premises servers or relayed from data centres, private and public clouds “upstream” at LEA and/or MoE levels.

3. Local Education Authority

As a Hub in the Schooling Enterprise Architecture, the Local Education Authority’s main role is to deliver Schooling Enterprise Services to Campus Schools. Their managerial functions, facilitated by ICT, are to drive accountability, alignment and performance.

Another key role is to run large scale access programmes. Using aggregated buying power and regional connections the LEA is in an ideal position to acquire devices, infrastructure components and support for the best price-to-quality ratio. As a Hub for the MoE, LEAs should be able to ‘enforce’ MoE mandates on standards, quality and Service Level Agreements.

The LEA can also be an aggregation point for data held on children by different authorities – health, social care, the police and education – to be aggregated to give a secure ‘big picture’ on children,
particularly those who may be at risk.

4. Workplace

Anytime anywhere learning for all means delivering learning experiences to all, including those in work. Online vocational courses are available through the Connected Learning Community portal. Workplaces offer valuable learning opportunities to learners of all ages, especially where specialised equipment is beyond the financial reach of the Campus School. The workplace can also be used to house Community Learning Spaces. Being part of the Connected Learning Community Portal; local businesses can have direct dialogue with – and receive relevant learning services from – their local Campus School, FE College and University to better meet the learning needs of their organisations.

5. University

Universities offer a rich extension to the Campus School learning community by offering online access to lectures, experts and learning resources. Within the Anytime anywhere learning model, Higher Education is made available to students who are ready to take learning modules offered by the University – virtually or otherwise.

6. Off-Site Learning Environments

With community-wide Wi-Fi coverage, homes, cyber cafés, hospitals, and recreation areas can all be turned into learning environments.

Personalised Learning

Transformed schooling organises the learning around the individual, not the other way around.

Learning, by definition, is personal—no one else can learn for you. People learn different things at different speeds and in different ways. When students walk into a learning space, they bring very different sets of attributes, abilities, knowledge, skills, understandings and attitudes with them.

Over recent years, the concept of personalising learning has gained considerable ground.

From a technical perspective, personalising learning is about:

• Delivering an extended range of opportunities to learn – individually and collaboratively
• Delivering content that addresses precise learning needs
• Managing learning pathways

Extending Opportunities to Learn

The wider and deeper the choice of content, the more personalised the learning experience can be. When providing learning to an entire community, the type of learning experience consumed will range from informal learning to structured and accredited courses.

Extended Learning Opportunities for All

With a wide and deep supply of learning content, learners can have a wide choice of learning experiences, modalities, pathways and assessments. For example, being able to pick from a menu of languages to learn is a more personalised experience than just having one to choose from. To be able to choose what level to study a language at – from beginner to advanced – again adds to the degree of personalisation.

Personalised learning is not about learning in isolation, however.  It is quite the opposite in, fact.  Learning is a social activity and personalising the learning experience is to do with providing opportunities to collaborate as well as to learn independently. A learning task that has been personalised for somebody could involve them working in a team, and part of the assessment could be how well they have managed to collaborate with other people. Therefore, another technical requirement here is to provide Communication and Collaboration tools – the more sophisticated these tools, the
greater the possible degree of personalisation.

Addressing Precise Learning Needs

Learners learn in completely different ways, and at different rates depending on prior knowledge and their learning styles. Therefore personalised learning systems need to deliver content so that different learning styles are addressed and different learning speeds are catered for. For example, in learning about the skeleton of dinosaurs, one learner might learn best by listening to a recording, another through looking at pictures, another by using a Tablet PC to kinaesthetically piece together the bones with a stylus.

From a technical point this means that content needs to be packaged so that learners can access it through multiple learning modes. Increasingly there will be automated agents that scour the internet and deliver content that precisely matches learning needs.

The relative length of time that it takes a learner to acquire the expected learning in each module shouldn’t matter as the e-learning services will adjust the personal learning pathway that the learner takes accordingly.

Managing Personal Learning Pathways

The extent to which a learning task has been personalised is a function of the extent to which that individual’s prior knowledge, skills, preferred learning styles, and attitudes have been taken into account when assigning the task.

In this model, learners are constantly assessed as they move through the learning programme, and the pathways that they take continuously evolve as they work their way through. This relies on feedback loops and systems which can dynamically adapt to the twists and turns of the learning process, and set challenging learning goals and tasks. This is essentially about using “business logic” which in turn uses data to decide what students need to learn next and manage the learning process.

Setting the learning task automatically is something that intelligent tutoring systems and learning management systems such as “Success Maker” have been doing for many years. However, if completing the learning task needs more than just a computer, managing the process dynamically becomes complicated.

This is where dynamic timetabling comes in. Dynamic timetabling starts with the premise that learning should be organised on a ‘performance’ as opposed to a ‘time’ basis (see Schooling at the Speed of Thought for more details). The core idea is that dynamic timetabling matches the optimal learning experience for a learner to the resources needed to deliver it. For example, if the learner has  mastered the concept of soil erosion in Geography, the next task may be to apply that learning in a practical experiment. This involves working with others who are at the same learning stage, using equipment, a physical space and teacher/assistant supervision. Ideally, the dynamic timetabling system will have predicted when these resources will be needed, organised them ahead of schedule and matched the learner to what they need to complete the next task.

Dynamic Timetabling

Today, this can be at least partially accomplished through resource scheduling within CRM.

Once the learning task is completed, a record of achievement builds in the learner’s e-portfolio.

Culture of Performance

In the Transformed Phase the entire schooling system is working at optimum efficiency and effectiveness – what Joey Fitts and Bruno Aziza (Driving Business Performance, 2008) call a “Culture of Performance”. To get to this stage schooling systems will have gone through the following stages:

• First Steps: Increasing visibility
• Enhanced: Moving beyond gut feel, and planning for success
• Strategic: Executing on strategy

A culture of performance is goal orientated; results are measured and members of the Connected Learning Community are competitive in a constructive way. A culture of performance is
about transparency, predictability, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions. With capabilities to monitor, analyse, and plan, performance orientated organisations can create a culture where information is a prized asset, aligned execution is the norm, and accountability is embedded.

From a learner’s perspective, this is about friction-free administration regarding courses, options and assessments. It’s about micro payments, and cashless vending, and not having to repeatedly enter the same basic data for silo’d administrative processes. It’s also about the seamless escalations of issues – such as requests for special support.

From a teacher’s perspective this is about doing the lowest possible levels of administrative tasks, confident in the knowledge that the system is dealing with the administrative mechanics of running the schooling operations. For those administrative tasks that teacher have to do, reporting, administration, productivity and communication & collaboration tools ensure that the tasks are efficiently executed and add real value to the organisation.

Administrators and managers get the benefit of using processes that have been integrated. For example, when new staff join the organisation, background checks, basic data collection, terms and conditions, salary and on-boarding systems all work together as a single function, crossing organisational boundaries automatically. When strategy is set at the highest organisational level, this cascades down automatically into the objective setting process, ensuring organisational alignment. Performance management tools linked to in-depth data about learner performance ensure that teaching staff are rewarded fairly. Business intelligence is available to provide deep insights into operations to ensure that resources are being used to maximum effect.

Bringing it All Together

The key difference between a transformed schooling system and any of the other phases is the degree to which the entire system is architected around the student.

Learner at the Centre

The Transformed schooling system will integrate a spectrum of services and processes, many which would have been in silos before the transformation process, around the student. The result of this is that the student experiences a range of highly individualised services, delivered by a high performance, highly connected, lean, efficient and cost effective schooling system.

Getting to Transformed schooling is a long journey. In most countries there will be significant inertia from legacy systems. Paradoxically, one of the drivers for transformation is diminishing budgets. In the United States, for example, there is a strong surge towards anytime anywhere, personalised learning for all - delivered from outside the formal schooling system, driven by collapsing schooling budgets and widespread dissatisfaction with the current system.

Ultimately, the point of investing in transforming a schooling system is to get an order-of-magnitude improvement in return on education budget investment, and this cannot be done in isolation. The whole enterprise of transforming schooling needs to be organised within the framework of a Schooling Enterprise Architecture, as described in detail in Schooling at the Speed of Thought.

Schooling Enterprise Architecture

Focusing on the “IT Platform Architecture”, the Transformed phase has 5 interconnected layers:

Tranformed phase - five layer Schooling Enterprise Technology Architecture

And finally, across each layer are the following key technology levers:

Schooling Enterprise Technical Concept Architecture - Transformation Phase

This is the last in this series of articles on the phases through which schooling systems evolve, but watch this space for related articles. All comments, feedback, questions and suggestions for articles will be very welcomed.

Thanks to Matthew Woodruff and Chris Poole from lookred for contributions to this article.

A question that I get asked constantly is “how do we implement change in ordinary ‘factory schooling’ buildings”? Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the Cornwallis Academy in Kent in the UK where they are part way through transforming out of the factory schooling model into something much more effective.

Whilst, clearly, there are significant differences between schooling systems in the UK and in other parts of the world, there are many lessons from Cornwallis that are applicable in most countries.

Cornwallis Academy is a large mixed secondary school with 1600 students and is part of a consortium of schools called Future Schools Trust, headed by Chris Gerry.

Results in Cornwallis have improved 16% since 2008 – but the ambitions of Chris, David Simons (Cornwallis’ Principal) and the staff go way beyond getting good academic qualifications. The aim of Cornwallis Academy is for their students to grow up to be happy, fulfilled citizens who can support themselves and contribute to society.

The main drivers for change at Cornwallis were:

• Developing a work model for students and staff that is representative of the world outside the school
• Building a team model to share good teaching practice rather than the traditional model of the ’lonely ‘artisan’ teacher’ 
• Developing a wider skill set such as social and 21st century skills that are relevant in modern world

These were all built around a relationship driven culture where pupils are part of the learning experience - not just recipients with the teachers in total command of the learning.

‘Attainment’ (i.e. learning performance) and ‘Wellbeing’ are the two main agendas that are used to ensure that students are successful.

• The ‘Attainment’ agenda aims for 100% pass rate in examinations
• The ‘Wellbeing’ agenda focuses on emotional intelligence and risk reduction, and recognises that social development helps drive academic success 

An economic model underpins management decisions across the Future Schools Trust consortium. In other words, managing costs and maximising effectiveness of spend are the key management drivers. Through the lense of economics, management at Cornwallis pull three main levers simultaneously:

People

A key aim is to develop more creative teachers through a more modern work environment that breaks the link with traditional approaches and attitudes.

Teachers are required to work in small groups and have choices about how they manage their work.

The school’s management can provide detailed guidance to teachers within this environment if they need to.

They are designing systems that feedback information on performance to both pupils and teachers, and compare performance with averages. Exposing the data in an open way provides “nudges” to performance. There is a focus on improving lesson quality and continuously collecting data on how well pupils are learning.

The school runs a 6 weekly reporting schedule that includes reporting on the development of “soft skills”.  Teaching teams are continuously collecting and reporting lesson data.

Space

Much work has been done to remodel learning spaces within existing buildings and within constrained budgets. Much of this has involved knocking down walls to create bigger spaces and painting – low-budget activities. The aims were to:

• Impact mood positively
• Foster group work
• Provide more space than conventional classrooms
• Allow some choice of work space
• Embed technology

The Future Schools Trust has pioneered a new kind of learning space called the “Learning Plaza” – a large space created from knocking down walls between traditional classrooms, or using an existing large space such as an assembly hall.

This space was once four separate classrooms. Knocking down walls forces a transformation at relatively low cost.

According to Gerald Haigh,  a UK Education Journalist, “if we believe that transformation involves providing children with a wide range of learning opportunities, among which sitting still and listening to the teacher is one of the least important, then the concept of the ‘Learning Plaza’ immediately looks like an entirely logical solution.

There, children can consult more than one teacher. Teachers can consult each other. Children can work in groups—of any size from two to ninety—or independently, and with their technology to hand.

The figures show that the children who use the Learning Plazas are less likely to be absent from school, and much less likely to be excluded for misbehaviour”.

The Learning Plaza concept – large open spaces, and lots of technology, give staff and students room for creativity and collaboration

A key Change Management principle is “Test Bed Areas”, and through trialling Learning Plazas concept they found that it is 20% cheaper to build schools based on the plaza concept – for a start, there is less brick and mortar going into a new-build school using this approach.

Technology

At Cornwallis, they are not afraid to take the best ideas from the world of business, so they make great use of “Business Intelligence” – BI. This allows them to operate a model driven by measurement.  

Working closely with Microsoft partner lookred, they pioneered the use of CRM (SRM) and predictive analytics to manage student relationships.     

22 different risk areas are identified, and each student has an individual risk profile relating to likely success both at school and beyond. This enables teaching staff to make data-driven interventions, and manage risk. The system is ‘intelligent’ – over time it ‘learns’ which approaches have been most successful. The interventions are informed by the consortium’s work with Yale University on ‘life space’ which looks at how children make life choices and how they might influence these.

Underpinning this, Management Information Systems provide real-time information on how the school is performing.

Technology is used extensively in teaching and learning, with most of the curriculum online now and the intent to have it all online by the start of the 2011-2012 school year. Students and staff have ubiquitous access to devices, and Cornwallis was one of the first schools in the UK to make extensive use of Tablet PCs. The school also runs a “Connected Learning Community” through a Learning Gateway (SharePoint) portal, which provides all stakeholders a unified platform for communication and collaboration.

Students and staff make extensive use of technology, including a Learning Gateway portal

This smart use of technology leads to potential savings across a range of public sector services including welfare, health and law enforcement.

Looking to the Future

“Breaking the mould” – where there once were classrooms, there’s now a well used informal learning space, complete with coffee shop

Cornwallis will be moving into a new building in September 2011, with all the advantages of having first trialled new approaches successfully.

In recognition of the lessons that can be learned from the Cornwallis experience, this summer they will host 180 leaders from China who will be there to learn how to bring about transformational change at scale.

Key Lessons from Cornwallis

1. Economics underpins everything. Financial autonomy is essential.
2. Leadership training is crucial. You can have all the physical assets you like, but without clear goals and solid management nothing will happen.
3. Create momentum, and advance on all three fronts – people, space and technology – aggressively and in parallel.
4. Invest in Test Bed Areas – don’t implement wide scale reform without first trialling it. Start with transforming the model for a single year group.
5. Focus on the end-user experience. It’s all about building engaging learning experiences around the student, not forcing students to fit the factory model.  

Conclusions

The result of the new approaches at Cornwallis is that learning has speeded up, to the point that the “key stages” – the time taken to progress from one segment of the UK National Curriculum to the next – can be accelerated. The staff at Cornwallis believe that their students could complete Key Stage 3 in 2 years instead of 3; external examinations (GCSE) in 1 year instead of 2; and even university courses in Year 13.  

Whilst I’m totally inspired by what I saw at Cornwallis, I think there is one crucial  piece missing from the jigsaw puzzle – a full shift from a time-based to a performance-based model. This approach is brilliantly articulated by Richard DeLorenzo from the Reinventing Schools Coalition in his book “Delivering on the Promise, and underpins the approach taken by Kunskapsskolan schools. To do this at scale will require “dynamic timetabling”, something that a number of organisations are keen to develop.

Saying that, Cornwallis offer a solid, practical and well thought through model for anyone wishing to make transformational change within hard resource and environmental constraints. What’s more, they generously share their “secret sauce” for the benefit of the wider community.

A Principal for whom I once worked told me that the best way to eat an elephant is “one chunk at a time”. Cornwallis has shown that it’s better to eat 3 chunks  – people, spaces and technology – simultaneously.

Thanks to Chris Gerry; David Simons; Claire Thompson; the staff and students at Cornwallis; Chris Poole and Matthew Woodruff of lookred; Andrew Wild of Manchester City Council; and to my Russian and CEE colleagues, Igor Balandin; Anton Shulzhenko; Alexander Pavlov and Teo Milev, who prompted the visit.

Above are the 49 slides from my keynote presentation to the NCAIS Innovate (North Carolina Association of Independent Schools) and the VAIS Tech (Virginia Association of Independent Schools) conferences.

After an introduction on the topic of why innovate, and an argument that independent schools are not innovative enough, the presentation shares seven conceptual approaches by which schools can better facilitate innovative mindsets among educators and students both.  Although the presentation draws on many sources, Steven B. Johnson’s recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation is especially influential.

Time limitations made it impossible to spend as much time as I would have liked to discuss specific, concrete as it were, applications of each of the seven concepts, but the slides below offer suggestions for each.   I’d be delighted, of course, if readers were to offer their own suggested specific applications of these concepts to school cultures.

Click more to view the three videos shared  in the presentation. 

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This morning at all-school meeting, I shared this video with our students and school community.   It was particularly fitting to do so today, I explained to the assembly.  The video features author Steven Johnson explaining the incredibly important value of on-line networking in the development of better thinking and “good ideas.”

Appropriate it was, today, because we had visiting our campus three educators from out-of-town, two from Phoenix and one from Atlanta. They were here at our school to share and develop further their own “good ideas,” and all three had come to us, in one way or another, via communications along on-line networks such as Twitter and blogging.

I encouraged our students, after the video’s conclusion, to reflect upon the ways in which they were using online networking in ways beyond the merely social: were they using it, or could they be using it more effectively (and safely, of course), to communicate with others who shared their passions and hobbies and with whom they could share their own “good ideas,” and through this intellectual networking, better develop new “good ideas.”

How lucky am I to be able to send my children to an excellent state school on the outskirts of London? Apart from having an Olympic Gold medalist, a Turner Prize winning artist, and a BBC newsreader amongst its alumni, West Hatch High School has now acquired an international reputation for its work in ICT. The school has just become a “Microsoft Innovative School” – partly due to the technical excellence of IT Manager, Alan Richards, and the smart investments in ICT made by Headteacher Frances Howarth and the Board of Governors.

Despite being able to offer IT Academy courses to the community for many years, it wasn’t until 2008 and with the arrival of Alan, that West Hatch started to optimise its infrastructure. Until then West Hatch’s 1300 students and staff had no guarantee of their network’s reliability, which meant it was underused. As Alan says: “Teachers will try things two or three times, but after that, if a lesson’s wrecked, they won’t risk it again.”

Alan joined the school with a track record of moving schools from failing ICT systems to state of the art facilities. His starting point was to rebuild the whole school network with new fibre-optic and network cabling and a managed wireless solution. The next step was to replace 24 servers of varying ages, and it was at this point that the decision to virtualise was made.

What is Virtualisation?

A school network will usually have one server for each major IT service function, such as the Management Information System (MIS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), accounts, printing, and library systems etc. When a system is virtualised, these physical servers are replaced with virtual servers that are housed in clusters on a smaller number of physical servers. This has significant benefits in terms of savings, efficiency and reliability. The number of physical servers needed to effectively run the West Hatch’s network shrank from 24 to 9, and virtualisation increased efficiency of the network whilst saving $18,000 a year in hardware, maintenance and electricity.

Virtualisation provides the system with the ability to deal seamlessly with the failure of a server by automatically moving all its services to another - the rest of the school wouldn’t even know it’s happened. “Our staff have confidence in the use of ICT now. They know they can go into a classroom, turn on the computer, and have the applications they need for their lesson up and running in seconds,”

The key technology that enabled this to happen is Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and Alan and the team also used Microsoft Network Monitor in and beyond the pilot phase to ensure effective resource planning. Server technology is predominantly Windows Server 2008. A detailed case study is available here - West Hatch_Virtualisation_Case_Study. West Hatch uses Application Virtualisation, as well as Hardware (or physical) Virtualisation described above. For a detailed description from Alan on how he virtualised applications using Microsoft App-V click here.

Towards the Paperless School

With a solid network foundation in place, the next challenge for Alan was to build a portal. Having been the first school in Europe to deploy Windows 7 across its network, West Hatch was also the first school in the UK to build a portal on SharePoint 2010. This has enabled students, staff, parents and the wider community to benefit from a wealth of information and learning resources.

But the SharePoint 2010 sites goes way beyond just providing information. It is now being used to reduce printing and postage costs. It is estimated that 1.5 million sheets of paper are used per year at West Hatch – the paper, toner, photocopier rental and staffing costs associated with this paper “blizzard” are phenomenal.

A major step forward for Alan was converting Academic Review day from a paper-intensive activity to a paper-less activity. Academic review is when all students and parents attended interviews with teacher. Prior to the use of SharePoint, this process involved completion of paper forms. Now forms are managed electronically and copies of agreed academic targets are emailed to the students and parents. 

Alan has a passion for providing every student with the facilities they need to achieve the best they can. Best of all, Alan openly shares his knowledge in his wonderful blog – Education Technology Now. Needless to say, Alan’s presentation this year at BETT on using ICT to save money whilst raising standards was a big hit!

An Innovative School

In February 2011, West Hatch announced that they had been accepted into the Microsoft Innovative School network. Benefitting from:

• Access to virtual and in-person training from Microsoft and renowned education experts from around the world
• Support for professional development
• Access to the global Innovative Schools community 

And finally, I can’t resist it – here’s a picture from my daughter – a Yr 10 student in West Hatch. Produced on OneNote on a Tablet PC, this was synchronised between my computer and her computer using the automatic synchronisation between OneNote and SkyDrive.

I had never considered air conditioning such an important classroom technology until I visited Escola Municipal Engenheiro Gastão Rangel in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The sweltering heat, sparseness of the facilities, 30 teachers between 1000 students and overcrowded classrooms make this a brutal and challenging environment to teach and learn in. Within these tough conditions, however, are clear signs of deep and meaningful progress.

On the stage of the small assembly hall of the school stands Rafael Parente – a rare example of an Education Technology visionary who can actually “walk the talk”. Rafael works as Deputy Chancellor in charge of strategic projects in Rio’s Municipal Department of Education, where he developed Educopedia – a portal for lessons and content. Educopedia has 32 digital lessons for each curriculum area – one lesson for each week of the year – and provides opportunities for teacher-lead and independent learning. The Rio MoE are now in the midst of acquiring 100k netbooks for students’ use, and projectors, speakers and Wi-Fi connections in more than 400 classrooms so that Educopedia’s lessons can be projected by teachers.

The first phase of the Educopedia project took place with a large group of pilot schools between September and December 2010, and the feedback was very positive. The task for Rafael now is to win over the teachers in all of Rio’s schools. This means visiting as many schools as he possibly can to directly persuade the teachers to use Educopedia in their lessons. As in most Brazilian public schools, air conditioning, electricity, security and connectivity are all high priorities, so Rafael’s task is far from easy.  

What’s happening in Rio is indicative of what is happening across Brazil. There are an increasing number of pockets of innovation across the country, fueled by a growing acceptance for the need to modernize, and sustained support for ICT from the Federal and State Governments.

Brazil’s schooling system has benefited from sustained Government education reform over the past 15 years. According to “Achieving World Class Education in Brazil”, published by the World Bank in December 2010, the 2009 PISA results show substantial progress in education in Brazil. For example, since 2000 students have effectively gained a full academic year of Maths mastery. A key contributory factor to this progress is the increased use of data. A comprehensive index of school performance called IDEB (Indice de Desenvolvimento da Educacao Basica) is now used across the country. With an IDEB score for all but the smallest of Brazil’s 175,000 primary and secondary schools, 5,000-plus municipal school systems, 26 state systems and the federal district systems – every single segment of the Brazilian education system can benchmark how well its students are learning and how efficiently its school or school system is performing. Few other large federal countries in the world have achieved this.

However, Brazil still trails the OECD PISA average so there are no grounds for complacency. In order to sustain progress, Brazil needs to modernize further still – and with 50m in education, modernizing Brazil’s schooling system represents one of the biggest education challenges on the planet.

Taking a direct and comprehensive approach to modernising Brazilian public schools is Planeta Educacao – the education arm of Vitae Futurekids. With 900 staff and headquarters in Sao Paulo, Planeta Educacao recognizes the interconnectedness of everything in schooling systems. Roberta Bento, Vice President, Planeta Educação is a passionate believer in Brazil’s public schools – “Our programmes comprise a series of effective actions that involve students, directors, technicians, teachers and parents, promoting real changes in education. Our goal is the improvement in the performance of the student”. To that end, Planeta Educacao supply a total and integrated set of schooling services – infrastructure, technology (including products such as Office for Kids), programs and learning systems.

Other challenges that Brazil face are extreme distances and difficult-to-reach towns and villages. However, the Roberto Marinho Foundation – partners in the Educopedia project – has educated more than five million young people through high quality courses delivered through a combination of the television network, excellent books and trained teachers. Through the Telecurso project teachers were able to use satellite technology to interact with classrooms in the Amazon Forest.

In Pernambuco - in the north-east of the country - a network of schools called Procentro initiated in 2001 by Marcos Magalhães, president of electronics firm, Philips do Brasil, is proving that Public Private Partnerships can work in Brazil. Procentro has an annual dropout rate of 2%, much lower than the 17%  average for Pernambuco’s regular state schools. Click here for details.  

To underline the growing importance of ICT in the Brazilian Schooling System, Brazil has developed its own version of BETT. This year, Interdidatica will attract approximately 15k people to its tradeshow and 2.5k paying customers to its forum.

This year the theme of Interdidatica is “Innovation” – totally appropriate in a country with a strong tradition of engineering and innovation, e.g. aerospace giant Embraer. According to the World Bank, literally thousands of creative new programs and policies are being tried out at this moment across Brazil by dynamic, results-oriented secretaries of education. Few other countries in the world have the scale, scope and creativity of policy action that can be seen today in Brazil.

An inspiring example of innovation is Nave in Rio – a new high tech high school built out of a PPP between a Oi Futuro Fnd the State Government of Rio, aiming to prepare young people for careers in digital, entertainment and creative industries.

Not surprisingly, Brazil has a growing Education Technology Industry and a spectrum of innovative companies serve a growing education market. Gestar, for example, a Sao Paulo firm who developed the concept of “SRM” – Student Relationship Management built on CRM.

Then there is Grupo Positivo, the tenth largest computer manufacturer in the world who focus on education. They produce education software; run education portals; provide teacher training and educational and technical support for partner schools. Positivo even has its own university near its headquarters in Curitiba.

A significant success story coming out of Brazil is CDI – the Centre for Digital Inclusion founded by Rodrigo Baggio.  Brazil’s first campaign for donated computers was founded by Baggio, who then opened the first “Information Technology and Citizens Rights School” (ITCRS) in Dona Marta, a slum area in Rio De Janeiro. From these beginnings CDI grew to provide access to ICT to 1.3 million people 13 countries.

Right at the heart of ICT innovation in Brazil and with a string of successful implementations is Microsoft Brazil’s Education team, lead by Emilio Munaro. Working with all the major players, and innovative customers such as Instituto Ayrton Senna, SENAC, SENAI, SESC, Anhanguera, FIA, USP, Porto Seguro, Colégio São Luis, Microsoft is pushing the boundaries of using technology for maximum effectiveness in education helping deliver increasingly personalized learning services.

A concern raised by the World Bank in Achieving World Class Education in Brazil is that education spending is outpacing results. Brazil spends more on education than Mexico, Chile, India and Indonesia, which have similar demographic profiles. This means that there is a lot of scope for increased effectiveness from spending, and ICT, of  course, can play a major role in this.

With the advent of Cloud computing, the prospect of providing anytime anywhere learning for all is becoming realistic. It’s now time to consider how massive, cheap, and highly available computing services can be combined with a range of access technologies and high quality learning content, to open up learning opportunities for those in Brazil who are in the greatest need of it. Proof that access to ICT works for the poorest in society comes from some of CDIs case studies. With the prospect of the 2016 Olympics and the World Cup going to Rio; the discovery of oil off the coast of Brazil; a booming economy; and determined and innovative people pushing hard; there is every reason to believe that the next decade will see Brazil make significant progress towards achieving world class education for all.

Russia has a long and proud tradition of World-class Maths, Science, Engineering and Computing education. So it’s not surprising that Russia was one of original innovators in implementing Computers and Computer Science into schools. “Computational Mathematics & Programming”, for example, was certified at national level as far back as 1961. For an interesting perspective on the development of the curriculum in a Russian school, click here.

Under the 1985 National Computer Literacy Program, Computer Science was included in the school curricula as a compulsory subject, alongside Mathematics, Physics and other Scientific disciplines. Schools were also supplied with computer facilities. The Computers for rural school initiative (2002-2003) ensured that each rural school in the country had a minimum of three computers in the building. Taking this to the next level, Intel partnered with Volnoe Delo to further provide access to technology across all regions in Russia.

The Internet for every school (2006-2008) program further improved access to Information Technology across all of Russia, and today every school in the country has access to ICT devices and the Internet. ICT literacy is also now compulsory in all teaching training courses. To support this the World Bank implemented their largest free-standing ICT/education project – the eLearning Support Project. This enabling 60,ooo teachers to be trained through 42 different training programs; 1100 distance learning courses; and digital learning resources made availalbe in 14 subjects.

Schools now make good use of a range of software including Microsoft, Adobe, and also “home grown” software from firms like ABBYY and 1C. As part of the Digital Education Resources Program (2008-2010), a number of free digital education resources are made available for students on a variety of school subjects.  

Leading the way in the use of ICT in Russia are a number of Innovative Schools. Given Russia’s track record in computer science, we can expect to see plenty of innovation coming out of the country in years to come.

We know too that innovation happens in clusters, it happens in open societies which value and affirm innovation and create communities of inquiry, experimentation, and practice.   Let’s help our schools be such places.

Two articles I encountered just today offer valuable insight into what I like to think of as the Ed2In project.

The first came from Harvard University’s Gazette, in an article entitled Innovate/Create: Innovation, Creativity power fresh thinking at Harvard.   What is the formula, simplified?  ”Harvard’s combination of questing minds, passionate spirits, and intellectual seekers tackling society’s toughest problems fosters a creativity that has produced a stream of innovations.”

The Harvard article asserts that “As counterintuitive as it may seem, innovation can be taught.”   Confusingly, the very next paragraph backflips in saying that children, being naturally creative, don’t need to be taught.  But let’s set that aside.   Their suggestions:

• A new emphasis on design-based teaching, Murray said, will give students hands-on experience that teaches in ways that lectures and readings cannot.
• introductory computer science course that not only teaches basic computer programming, but it forces students to program on their own, with sometimes transformative results.
• science teaching should be reformed. Much traditional instruction requires students to memorize facts and solve problems, but Mazur believes that problem solving taught in school is unlike problem solving in the real world.
• classes have to take students out of their comfort zones, Mazur said. He encourages his graduate students to try new approaches without worrying about results — at least at first.

I also encountered today a very much better article in a less distinguished publication, an industry newsletter entitled eSchool news. To its credit, however, eSchool news recruited a distinguished thinker on innovation for its article “How and Why to Teach Innovation in our Schools,” U. Mass professor Alexander Hiam.    The piece is very good, and I fear it may be overlooked: it deserves attention.

Hiam argues for a Five I approach to facilitating the learning of innovation: “Imagination, Inquiry, Invention, Implementation, and Initiative (the latter being a foundational trait that enables the other four).”

Specific suggestions:

Imagination:  Hiam fears that classrooms which demand attention upon the teacher’s priority, always, replace daydreaming with discipline.   Surely there is a place for discipline and focus– students have a great deal to learn, and we need to maximize their opportunity to do so.   But we should do so without creating environments so constricted that imaginative thinking withers.   Block scheduling is a small gesture in this direction, allowing both modes within a single class period; educators can practice zig-zag time plotting where students are asked to focus then wonder in alternatation.

Imagination also requires contrast and combination.

Imagination needs fuel, and the best fuel comes from bridging between apparently diverse or unrelated ideas, skill-sets, or objects… We need to stimulate imagination by encouraging students to master, say, an instrument plus a science, or any other such combination of skills. (And that, by the way, is I believe the strongest argument for why we must bring the arts back into our schools.)

Let’s be sure our schools are places of diverse learning environments where students are broadened, not narrowed, in their interests, and we seek to mash-up disciplines for this “bridging” which builds imagination.

Inquiry: Too great an emphasis on multiple choice testing and textbook/workbook curricula can narrow a student’s mindset to the single right answer rather than the many right questions.

Research and exploration are essential innovative behaviors. Students need to ask their own questions and then poke around in pursuit of possible answers.

Hence the problem with AP Science courses– they offer so little opportunity for or expectation of independent and creative research, privileging instead “canned” labs.  Fortunately, the AP is changing; we need messy studios and laboratories.   Hiam’s piece suggests it is fairly easy to incorporate more inquiry, but I wish he gave more examples and more examination of this important topic; he leaves me hanging.

Invention:

Invention must be woven into the learning routine. “Can you think of a better way to do this math problem?” and “Can you apply what we’ve just learned about how the ancient Egyptians moved stones to build pyramids in some modern-day invention of your own?” These are two examples of invention challenges that students should be tackling in their weekly learning routine. Most are not.

I am thrilled about our new invention class, Design-Build Innovation, but as Hiam correctly points out, invention must be embedded into every subject.   What stops it?  More than anything else, it is not the lack of interest in the teacher, but the sense of pressure to cover the curricular breadth– there just isn’t time.   Hiam, to me, misses an important point: we need to narrow the breadth of what we seek to “cover,” in order to allow for this kind of depth.

Implementation: To continue with my enthusiasm about our new class, our students are required to do more than dream a new idea, they need to build it.    Innovation is a practice, and what we learn best we learn by doing.

Innovation is creativity, applied. At least, that’s a simple working definition of it, and it reminds us that a good idea doesn’t amount to anything unless it is translated into action. Students get remarkably little practice at implementing ideas. Implementation should be linked to some of the inventing students do (see above) so as to give them hands-on experience in the challenges of making ideas work. Usually ideas don’t work the first time you try. It takes refining the plan, learning from errors, and persisting. These skills, like imagining, inquiring, and inventing, are learned. Or not.

Initiative: Hiam hits his stride here, pushing harder to argue for reinventing school environments so that we prize student initiative rather than compliance.

Initiative may be the hardest of the Five I’s to teach, because it runs against the current of centralized classroom control. Students sit in desks and work on the same learning tasks, while the teacher runs activities from the front of the classroom.

Think of the classroom as a miniature society, and apply the widely-accepted finding that “inventiveness is more likely to occur if a society is less hierarchical since bureaucracy reduces creative activity.”

We must move against bureaucracy; we should seek  non-hierarchical and individualist classrooms.  ”Activity based learning” (or what I would have labeled PBL) and research projects are recommended.

Inventive behavior is more common among people who, as adults, exhibit high agency (sometimes called self-efficacy), which means they feel in control of things and able to make a difference. People have maximum agency when they grow up doing difficult things, sometimes successfully but always with support and encouragement from those who believe they can succeed.

I concur with a movement against a tightly controlled classroom environment, and believe we must give more responsibility and more accountability to our students to inculcate their initiative.  But I do wonder about the use of individualistic here: surely there is evidence that innovation is not the work of lonely genius but the lively energy created by minds working together.    I’d hate to draw from Hiam that initiative runs counter to collaboration; both Steven B. Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation and Chris Anderson in his Crowd Accelerated Innovation argue otherwise.

Nevertheless, the five I’s are something to work with, something to share with our colleagues and ask ourselves what we can do more to promote.

[Numbers 11-14 have been added since the previous publication.]

Technology and innovation are accelerating rapidly outside education, but not rapidly enough inside education.  To quote NAIS President Pat Basset, Schools which are not schools of the future will not be schools in the future.

Like others, I am fascinated by pieces  forecasting the coming changes in schooling, and I am inspired by their example to offer my own.

Two that have been particularly intellectually intriguing and influential to me are  Tom Vander Ark’s Ed Reformer post,  The Pivot to Digital Learning: 40 Predictions, and Shelly Blake-Pollock’s post, 21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.

I should add too that my thinking is greatly informed by the Christensen and Horn’s Disrupting Class,  US DOE’s Karen Cator’s NETP: National Education Technology Plan, the writings of Michael B. Horn, and the Digital Learning Now initiatives.

This particular list is intended to present fifteen ways schools can continue to be  relevant, compelling, attractive, and effective to both students and parents in the coming years.  

This post, more than most, is an ongoing work in progress, a post I might be choosing to update annually as my understanding and thinking evolves, and as the rate of educational change accelerates.

If bricks and mortars schools want to stay vital and viable, we need to recognize the choices kids and families have, and move to transform our learning environments to meet and beat the alternatives.

Teenagers themselves seem to be ever-more in the decision-making drivers’s seat; if we wish to enroll students into our schools, we need to recognize this and design around this (whether or not we think this is altogether wise).

As we know each day ever more clearly, technology’s influence is only going to accelerate, and kids are only going to have more and more choices– most particularly, high school kids are going to have widely available and swiftly increasingly quality options in on-line, “virtual” academies. Ten, twenty, or thirty percent or more will defect from conventional schools in the next few years, and to avoid becoming ghost-schools, today’s brick and mortar schoolhouses must evolve to meet the new competitive pressure.

With more and more options, parents are going to be choosier as consumers, and students are going to have a increasing power to vote with their feet.

How should we continue to be relevant and effective in the changing environment?

1. Become more accountable by using the right kind of data:  Scrutiny by our parent “consumers” is not going to decline in the coming years, and educators who might wish that parents not approach school choices as consumers are only going to be disappointed.  We live in an age of information availability and data-driven decision-making.

I believe that our role and responsibility as educational leaders, to remain relevant in the coming educational transformation, is not to refuse data/accountability, but to choose and use the right and best data for the right and best accountability.   Standardized testing will have to be a part of it, but we can use better testing than what is mostly used today, like the MAP and CWRA.

We can also use school climate/student engagement surveys and alumni tracking to provide data broader than testing, and we can and should publish our student work in dynamic and attractive digital portfolios (such as these at High Tech High) for the most authentic and best kind of  accountability: our student work.

And perhaps it goes without saying, but let’s say it: none of the following techniques will offer value if we are not succeeding in our goal of excellent academic accomplishment in the ways we carefully choose to measure, share, and demonstrate them.

2. Ensure safe, welcoming, connected and caring school communities.    Schools could be warehouses and factories for children who could become lost in a crowd only when they were monopolies in their communities, but tomorrow, students who don’t feel safe at their schools or connected to their school community won’t come– they will choose another option or they will stay home and connect on-line.  I like Vander Ark’s recognition, borrowing from Dan Pink (what he called in A Whole New Mind the significance of “high concept/high touch”) that successful schools in the coming years will be “Blended high-tech/high-touchschool models.”   A learning community is a place that values and affirms every student, ensures they have voice, and treats them with dignity and honesty.

As David Brooks wrote recently, One of [a successful student's] key skills in school is his ability to bond with teachers. We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love.

3. Engage meaningfully.  Students who don’t see the point of learning at school today won’t choose to learn at school tomorrow.  They can learn elsewhere in ways that offer them far more choice.    If Ferris Bueller wanted to learn history, his options were Ben Stein’s history lecture or reading an encyclopedia or textbook; today and even more so tomorrow, he can go online and learn through interactive gaming, youtube, and the like.    I think that upper middle class schools have a lot to learn from the inner city schools which work to combat drop-outs; schools like New Tech Network and the excellent CART: Center for Advanced Research & Technology in Fresno have built engaging project based learning which have reduced drop-out rates from 50% to 5%.

Schools which haven’t had drop-out problems before will see them soon, as students “drop-out” by transferring to other learning options (be they charter or virtual), and we can correct our drop-out problem by learning from the anti-dropout experts at those schools: give students something meaningful to do, make, create, fix, solve each and every day, and they will come back for more.

As Vander Ark http://edreformer.com/2010/11/the-pivot-to-digital-learning-40-predictions/, in the coming years “Science will confirm the obvious about how many boys learn, and a couple of school developers will produce active learning models with playlists, projects, and expeditions.”

The results of such engagement learning must be outstanding: there is no cop-out here.   New Tech Network employs only PBL because of its active learning, but they use standardized tests and the CWRA to ensure their students are really, really learning.

4.  Affirm Socializing:   We all know why kids say they come to school above  all else: to see their friends.   That is what they “hire” school for, as Michael Horn writes; chatting and laughing with friends is what students love to do.   Schools should actively welcome and affirm this in their buildings and on their campuses.   Class-time can be, in a more open, active, collaborative ,project-based environment, far more social than it often has been before.  Schools can also affirm students socializing in the length of breaks they provide during lunch and between periods, and in the cultures they affirm via architecture and norms.

We might think that student time is best spent in class, focussing exclusively on school-work, but if we don’t honor their deep and innately human need for social experiences, we will only drive them out of our schools to other options.   I hate to say it, but if facebook and other social media is an integral part of their social lives, forbidding it from their lives for six to ten hours a day only increases a student’s motivation to redirect their education to venues which tolerates their social desires.

5.  Welcome digital tools. Students see the world all around them, and they see it is a world where every professional employs digital tools such as laptops and mobile devices in their everyday work.   Surely it must be frustrating to students to come to preparatory school, schools intending to prepare them for entry into the professional world, and be disallowed these very same tools.  When workplace tools were pencils, pens, typewriters and paper, so too were the tools of school; computers should be as much a part of students learning today and tomorrow as pencils and papers were yesterday.   Students should use digital tools on tests and on projects in the school setting as much as they will be required to do so in their work setting, if we are to prepare them effectively. As I’ve written elsewhere, in schools of the future, students learn by doing, vigorously, digitally.

As Blake-Pollock writes, “Because computing is going mobile and over the next decade we’re going to see the full fury of individualized computing via handhelds come to the fore.”

6. Open the networks. Nothing is more important for the future of our society, Tom Friedman and President Obama agree, than that our youth become innovators, able to problem solve the way out of our societal challenges with creativity and ingenuity.   But how do we educate innovators?   Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, and Chris Anderson, curator of TED, agree and argue compellingly for the absolutely essential social aspects of innovative culture, and so we can see that the innovative mindsets will best be cultivated by ensuring our students can be digitally networked.  Networked, we stimulate each other, inform each other, motivate each other; we discover what’s new and we add to it, challenging someone else to do the same.

Watching youtube and posting video to facebook so that our peers can be informed and inspired and challenged to keep up and advance the creative instinct is what will empower our youth today to be tomorrow’s innovators.  Stifling and squashing the primary way information is exchanged among people under forty is not the way to keep education relevant and effective: open the networks.

7. Employ video: Chris Anderson, of TED, says that watching video takes us back to storytelling around the campfire, where the storyteller is backlit with a flickering flame.   It is ingrained in our genes to appreciate it.   By video, our students can learn from the very best minds of the entire world, whether via TED, MIT’s network, Khan Academy, or the very swiftly increasing number of other such sites.

By watching video students can learn far more at home during homework than they every could by reading a textbook, and indeed, if they can watch their teacher’s lectures on video at home they can come to school ready to confront and tackle difficult challenges.

But it isn’t just watching video that will make learning relevant and effective; it is by making video.  Our students must still learn to write and speak, but for learning to be effective in preparing for their future, they must learn to craft video.  Digital video communication must join writing and speaking as the trinity of communication essentials.  The concept of video communication can be expanded just a bit to include additional visual communication: data visualization is going to be a hugely important communication tool (as in this video, 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes), and our students should be learning it in school.

8.  Include Gaming. We know students, many of them, love video games; we know that the US military, some medical practices, and many corporations are using gaming to learn.    If students love it and it is good enough for adults, why can’t digital gaming have a role in our schools?  I don’t like gaming, and I am not suggesting we impose it on all, but as James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky,  Jane McGonigal,  Jesse Schell and the fine scholars at Epistemic Games are effectively demonstrating, gaming can contribute to intellectual development.  The schools which best determine how to use gaming effectively will have a significant leg up in the coming competition for students– both because their learning environments will be more learning, and I believe, more effective.

As Vander Ark writes,

The instant feedback from content-embedded assessment, especially learning games, simulations, virtual environments, and MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), will be widely used in formal and informal learning and will build persistence and time on task.

Learning games, both individual and massively multiplayer online (MMO), will become part of every student’s extended day learning.

9.  Provide Digitally Adaptive Skill Development. I don’t want computers to replace teachers; I swear I don’t.   See number 2 above: our teachers must become more important rather than less in the way they connect with and care for students.   My argument is here is that if we are to compete with on-line academies that will lure our students away from us, we ought to integrate into our teachers’ classrooms the best tools available for student learning.    Basic skill development is essential, and we can use digital tools to enhance their learning while a teacher serves as inspiration, coach, mentor, motivator and counselor at every step.   We can use computer adaptive testing to get much more immediate and much more detailed assessment of students’ learning needs and differentiate accordingly; as Vander Ark writes, “Adaptive content will result in more time on task (in some cases, two times the productive learning time over the course of a year), and better targeted learning experiences will boost achievement.”

Note that while what we are familiar with in this way has been very much restricted to multiple choice and fill in the blank type tools, the new tools will allow far more authentic assessment, whereby students can received valuable feedback on constructed response tasks responding to real-world situated performance tasks  that feel meaningful and significant to students.

As Blake-Pollock writes, “In ten years, the teacher who hasn’t yet figured out how to use tech to personalize learning will be the teacher out of a job.”

10. Use On-Line, Open Source Textbooks.   Static, dead-tree textbooks are increasingly archaic already, and if we want student to learn in the form in which they will need to continue to learn throughout their lives, we should use the kind of on-line learning compendia that the new “textbooks” will offer.  The OER, Open Educational Resources, Commons is coming and coming fast, and it cannot come too soon (I love their motto: Learning is Sharing).  What a resource for our educators to “curate” textbooks to suit their curricula, teaching styles, and students’ learning requirements, and what a way for our educators to take back the creative autonomy to design curriculum as professional rather than to defer the curriculum design to nameless faceless textbook “writers.”  Vander Ark is enthusiastic: “[Soon] a state and a handful of urban districts will stop buying print textbooks in 2011 and will shift to customizable digital texts and open education resources. ” Blake-Pollock writes

Books were nice. In ten years’ time, all reading will be via digital means. And yes, I know, you like the ‘feel’ of paper. Well, in ten years’ time you’ll hardly tell the difference as ‘paper’ itself becomes digitized.

11.  Insist our Students Conduct Ethical Inquiry and Reflection.  The world is only becoming more complicated and more nuanced all the time; for just one small matter, we are entering an age of complicated matters of intellectual property:  sharing and collaboration vs. plagiarism and cheating.  I have written about proper mindfulness requiring us to be “against actually,” and I am so taken with David Brooks argument for an education of uncertainty.

The concept of character education only serves us well if we accept it as an expression of ethical inquiry, reflection, and analysis: we have to problematize very question and think deeper to understand the multiple perspectives and chart our course of right and respectful action.  The more we can expose our students to look beyond the surface and explore multiple and unintended consequences, the more they will be prepared to be ethical citizens.  This can’t happen in a values or character class alone; these kind of questions and inquiries must occur across the curriculum and in every subject area.

12. Build the Digital Footprint. This is both a warning and an opportunity; we must warn our students to guard their digital footprints actively, not letting their names be tied to ill-considered actions or expressions.  But more than that, we should assist them in securing personal urls and in establishing blogs and portolios by which they can build up a digital footrprint that will wow colleges and impress employers.  Students who don’t learn to do this at school, and who aren’t provided the opportunity, will both be considerably set back compared to peers who do, and will seek schooling settings, perhaps virtual ones, where they can.

13. Employ Design Thinking.  I write often about problem-solving, but  frequently overlooked is the importance of problem identifying, and I don’t delve deeply enough into the problem-solving process.  How handy then that I have been trained just this past weekend in design thinking, the process associated with Stanford Design School and IDEO.  Discovery >Define > Brainstorm> Prototype >Test. Many schools are working hard to instill this mental discipline in our students, such as Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School (GA), which has built and staffed an entire Center for Design Thinking for its students.  Design thinking better prepares students, and it engages them in rewarding active problem-solving.

14. Enable Student Service and Social Entrepreneurship. Students care about the world and their community, they always have, but too often our school cultures inhibit them from connections and service.  Community service requirements are good, but not nearly enough; many great schools have long recognized that students need to be facilitated and enabled to do service that matters in ways other than requiring it.  Exeter has an amazing program of students traveling to India to do service; they spend the first week there studying social issues and identifying social problems to address before going to work to make a difference.   Schools were students believe they are making a difference are schools to which students will keep coming back.

15. Support our Educators in Becoming Growth-Mindset, Networked, Online Learners and Creators. This last should be first: For our educators to be teachers in the digital age they should be learners in the digital age. The power of the online PLN, professional learning networks, for our teachers to network, collaborate, share and learn is infinite.   The notion of a teacher alone in a classroom of students, door close, left to his or her on devices, is a 20th century dinosaur; today’s teachers to teach the digital generation can and should seize the opportunity that educational nings, wikie, twitter groups, blogs, and all the other powerful collaborative tools of the Web 2.0 to be informed and inspired in their teaching journey.  As Blake-Pollock writes:  ”With the power of a PLN in their backpockets, teachers will rise up to replace peripatetic professional development gurus as the source of schoolwide prof dev programs.”

Some, or perhaps many, schools will choose not to pursue these initiatives, and the good news for them is that in the breadth of diversity that the new age of education is permitting, some of those that choose to refuse will indeed survive, even flourish.   As the transformation occurs, their will be opportunities for schools to position themselves as the anti-NewSchool, and, in pockets, some anti-NewSchools might appeal to a significant enough minority of the population to sustain themselves.

For the majority of schools, however, choosing to refuse this agenda is choosing to become obsolete: neither relevant to the educational options selectors (both parents and students) will select,  nor effective in preparing students for success in our transformational era.

Perhaps my greatest professional passion these days is promoting innovative schools cultures, and particularly ones which facilitate our students in becoming innovators.   So I am especially taken with a new article in Wired Magazine (January 2011), by TED founder Chris Anderson, on “How Crowd Accelerated Innovation Can Change the World.”

As Anderson says: “This is big.” I think it may not be saying too much that the ideas contained within are genuinely transformative to how we think about innovation at present and  in the coming years.

In the piece, which is terrific and highly recommended, Anderson focusses especially on the value of on-line video in promoting this powerful new phenomenon, Crowd Accelerated Innovation (CAI henceforward), but CAI is facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies generally, and video particularly and especially.  Below I discuss CAI and reflect upon its implications for education.

The passion and enthusiasm demonstrated here for the opportunity the Web 2.0 offers us to change the world, profoundly, for the better, is reminiscent of  two others from whom I have taken so much inspiration of late, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson.

——

What is Crowd Accelerated Innovation?

New global communities [are] granting their members both the means and the motivation to step up their skills and broaden their imaginations. It is unleashing an unprecedented wave of innovation in thousands of different disciplines. In short, it is boosting the net sum of global talent. It is helping the world get smarter.

Innovation has always been a group activity.  Ideas spawn from earlier ideas, bouncing from person to person and being reshaped as they go.  That’s how ideas bump into other ideas, replicate, mutate, and evolve.

So Crowd Accelerated Innovation isn’t new. In one sense, it’s the only kind of innovation there’s ever been. What is new is that the Internet—and specifically online video—has cranked it up to a spectacular degree.

How does CAI work?    It requires three elements: Crowd, Light, and Desire.

• A Crowd of Innovators and People around them, sharing their interests and passions.
• Light, to provide visibility and awareness across the breadth of the crowd.
• Desire, the drive for the compelling power of recognition.

Crowd:  Meaningful innovation is hard to come by, and, Anderson explains, is greatly facilitated by letting a thousand flowers bloom, or, as Tom Friedman reminds us often, tens of thousands of garage tinkerers tinkering.So as more and more people attend to and concern themselves with a problem or issue, the more likely innovation will emerge– and today, via Web 2.0 social networks, there are so many opportunities for so many to be networked, sharing, and stimulating each other.

Scientists, architects, historians, conservationists, musicians … all are linking up globally in a way unimaginable only a few years ago.  Just as significantly, communities have formed that could scarcely have existed before.

You can track innovation online by looking at the moment a community was first able to share its talents digitally. For writers and software programmers, it happened as soon as the Internet connected them.

This is so exciting to read, because it speaks so well for what I believe so many of us in the educational innovation movement are feeling, connected on Twitter and on blogs like Connected Principals, we are finding incredible intellectual energy for progress in our field.

Light:  For Anderson, light is the metaphor for how video takes the power of web 2.0 social networking and expands it exponentially, because video is so illuminating and inspiring in a way text just never will be.

The sharing of ideas in general is often best done through direct speech—we’ve evolved over eons to subconsciously grasp the subtleties of a face-to-face conversation. In all these cases, for remote audiences video is the killer app. Don’t write me. Tell me. Show me.

Desire: Here, the idea is that the power of the web gives innovators and those with the impulse to create, produce, and share the greatest stimulus of all: recognition.   Anderson is acute and honest in his recognition that “active learning is hard work– and in most cases, what drive all that work is the prospect of recognition for what we’ve done.”   “We’re social animals, we like to be stoked.”

I wrote about this in a recent post (Why I Blog: A Principal’s 13 reasons) when I said that among my 13 reasons to blog is to get this kind of recognition (and Anderson makes me feel much better about this motivation).  I feel quite confident that my fellow bloggers will immediately recognize and appreciate Anderson when he says “have you ever checked the viewing figures on a blog post you wrote?”

——-

Implications for Educators Working for Innovative Schools and Innovative Students

There are many implications, but perhaps they can be generalized in two categories.

1. Open Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (and other social, 2.0, and video networks) and encourage their use throughout our schools, for both teachers and students.  If we seek educational innovation among our educators and among our students, we need to support and encourage, not block or discourage them,  to be on-line, networked and networking,  and watching, being inspired by, and contributing to youtube (etc).

Conversely, if we’re opposed to innovation in our schools and students– if we want teachers and kids to conform to norms, to stick to the convention and the straight and narrow, to follow directions and stay in line, to memorize old ideas rather than learn and invent new ones,  then we ought to block social and video networks.   Anderson’s logic is that compelling.    He provides this kind of counter-example:

History shows that when communities fall below a certain critical mass, technological progress slows and may go into reverse. The original Tasmanians, limited by the size of their island, never grew beyond a population of a few thousand. Isolated from other cultures, over the centuries they lost many of the technologies they had arrived with. Without the crowd and contact, the learning died.

(One issue is genuinely challenging, a pragmatic rather than ideological one.   Many schools find the need to block facebook/youtube not because they want to block access, but because pragmatically the bandwidth simply cannot support these streams.   This is a real problem, and I have no easy answers for it.  Schools making this choice should probably publicly state why they are blocking/minimizing this access and keep seeking workarounds.   What also becomes apparent when we confront this challenge is that funding improved broadband should be a high financial priority for schools seeking to enhance their innovative cultures).

2.  We need to teach and learn video-production skills throughout our schools, and by we I mean both adults/educators and kids/students.   We adults need to learn this too (and our kids can teach us: at my school this month we are having a sophomore run a video production workshop for teachers/administrators).

Often when we think about teaching and learning innovation, we think about classes or experiences like computer science and programming, robotics, project-based learning, the creative fine arts, science lab experiences where students design their own labs, and experiences where students seek to new problems needing solution.  Now, none of these activities are backwards steps– none of them are bad ideas.

But Anderson takes us back a step– innovation is as much about a media of  transmission, taking inspiration and sharing solutions.  He provides us a useful quick history of how various communications media revolutions have intensified innovation, such as trade routes circa 3000 BCE and the printing press of the 15th century.

Web-video is our revolutionary such medium, and we deprive our students’ innovative capacity development  if we are not using and teaching the most powerful contemporary  transmission medium.  Innovation is enhanced in any and all fields, Anderson teaches us, by web video, and he provides us a colorful array of how this is happening, giving us examples from dance to cake baking to costume makeup art to Rube Goldberg machine makers and many more.

So it is not that our students shouldn’t be learning innovative practices in arts and sciences, and it isn’t they shouldn’t be learning to write, but if we accept the argument here, they also, perhaps just as much (perhaps more) need to learn to shoot and edit video.   This is hard for me, as a writer, to accept, but I am seeking also to embrace it, using video more and more in my blogging and intending to learn for myself video-making skills.    As Anderson says, and I am repeating it because it so important: Don’t write me. Tell me.  Show me.

(An aside: I encountered Anderson’s argument for CAI first by reading it, in Wired; only later did I watch the Anderson TED video articulating the same ideas.  I find the article more powerful and compelling than the video.  So my argument for Anderson’s argument is not an absolute– there is absolutely a place for many media streams.  But even as we certainly teach kids to write and read, and write and read ourselves, we underestimate the power of web-video at our intellectual and innovative peril.)

Those of us here in the web 2.0 world of social media, blogging and tweeting are  already riding the wave and surfing to higher intellectual and innovative heights by virtue of the power of CAI: Crowd Accelerated Innovation.   I feel so fortunate to be the beneficiary of CAI every single day in my work leading a school.

Some among terrific educators among us are embracing and implementing this already via the exemplary CAI project of TEDx conferences.  I knew before now that TEDx was cool, but I didn’t know why it was so terrific in the way I now understand.  Bravo to them!

If we educators and students seek schools to become better sites of innovation, we must all work to better participate in online creative and collaborative networks and we must all learn to better use video in our efforts.   What an exciting time for us all!

1st and foremost, we’re preparing to head to Capetown South Africa this weekend for the Worldwide Innovative Education Forum. We will have teachers participating and competing in the Innovative Teachers competition. Barry, Ursula and David have been polishing their Virtual Classroom Tours (VCT) for the competition and you can see them HERE. Along with the Innovative Teachers competition there will be a track for the Innovative Schools Programme where our new Pathfinder Schools (Blackrock College, Ashfield Girls HS and St. Mary’s College) will be meeting Head Teachers and teaching staff from around the world. There will be 4 days of workshop activity, networking and collaboration, so their days will be very bust. The entire event will climax with a gala dinner on Friday evening (the 29th) where the winning Innovative Teachers will be announced, so fingers crossed

Next I want to remind the teachers in Northern Ireland to enter in the NI Innovative Teachers Competition. There is still plenty of time before the December 10th closing. I have purposely keep the submission VCT shorter with only 2 slides required. Please take some time and have a look at the great work you’ve been doing using ICT to teach and get your entry in. The winning VCT will be going all-expenses paid to Moscow in March 2011 to compete against teachers from 42 European and Eastern European countries.

It doesn’t slow down on my return. On November 5th there will be a terrific ICT event taking place at dual locations- Ashfield Girls HS in Belfast and the Millennium Forum in Derry/Londonderry. It is part of the BringITon Campaign run by Momentum. Microsoft will be delivering a keynote at each venue. Clare Dillon, Developer and Platform Lead for Microsoft Ireland, will be speaking in Belfast and Mary McHale, Director of International Project Managing Microsoft Ireland, will be speaking in the Millennium Forum.

On the 10th November I will be presenting Microsoft Education software tips and tricks at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition event taking place in Stormont Building the seat of the Northern Ireland assembly.

Then I November 11th I am hosting an event for the CIOs and ICT Teams from Northern Ireland’s Further and Higher Education Colleges (FEs) and Universities (HEs). It is a full day covering Live@Edu, Azure, SharePoint 2010, CRM, Office 2010, OCS and Virtualization.

So make sure you bookmark this site and keep updated.

You can also follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tjinbelfast

As you know, we lauched the Innovative Teachers Competition last month. This year the winners in NI will be going to Moscow in March 2011 to compete!! How’s that for an incentive. Please make sure you tell all of your colleagues to get involved and you can find all of the information on my previous post. Most importantly, you need to join the Partners in Learning Global Network and then join my NI IEF Moscow 2011 Community

Our success in the past 3 years has been outstanding, so let’s make sure we continue to showcase the great work that is being done by teachers in Northern Ireland

Later this month, I will be heading to Capetown, South Africa for the Worldwide Innovative Education Forum (WW IEF)2010. There will be 2 tracks taking place at the same time during the week. The 1st track will be the WW IEF Teachers Awards Competition. Barry Corrigan from Millennium Integrated Primary School in Saintfield, NI and Ursula Hynes and David Walsh from Ratoath College in County Meath will be participating in that event. They will be exhibiting their work and competing against over 200+ teachers from 100+ countries from around the world.

The 2nd track will be for the Microsoft Innovative Schools Programme. There will be 4 schools from Ireland represented at this year’s event. Dunshaughlin Community College is one of the 26 Mentor Schools in the programme and was originally one of the 1st 12 Microsoft Global Schools of the Future. Along with Dunshaughlin, this year Ireland and Northern Ireland were one of the most successful country applicants in the world. We had 3 new schools accepted onto the Pathfinder Programme. They were Ashfield Girls High School in Belfast, St. Mary’s College in Derry/Londonderry and Blackrock College in Dublin. You can see my previous post HERE. There will be 2 representative from each school attending the event where they will be meeting all of the schools currently participating worldwide. There are only 54 Pathfinder Schools in the world and Ireland (that little island ) has 3 of them. Unfortuately, Scoil Naomh Fiachra, Co. Kilkenny is not able to attend this year. Scoil Naomh Fiachra was successful in their Pathfinder submission last year. The 1st school from Ireland to be accepted!

This should be an exciting and enlightening event for all attendees (me included) so make sure you bookmark this site to get all of the upates.

I will also be twittering while I’m there and you can follow me at @tjinbelfast (http://www.twitter.com/tjinbelfast)

• TEP Charter School – Paying teachers a salary of $125,000 and a bonus structure up to $25,000.
• Harlem Children’s Zone – Tackling education on all fronts of the community.
• Rocketship – Offering a hybrid school model where students meet with teachers on block schedules and then have learning lab time with an adaptive learning management system. Lowers cost of operation model.
• School of One – Uses learning algorithm technology to provide customized curriculum for each student.
• MATCH Charter – Established a MATCH Corps program where new teachers go through a residency on their first year of service.
• New Tech Networks – Getting lots of press with the 21st century learning model of collaborative, project-based, and technology-based curriculum.
• Generation Schools – Urban education offering small class sizes, lesser teacher workloads and more professional development. Teachers have staggered-vacations which gives students a 200-day school year.
• Kunskapsskolan – School in Sweden well known for its personalized approach to education.

It reached me on Twitter a discussion by John Merrow about the role of technology in classrooms and how it is feared by many teachers and school principals. Here, I quote him:

“I think technology is a huge threat to a decent education precisely because it allows shortcuts like [the use of plot summaries on line that you can read in 30 seconds].  We know that students everywhere are downloading term papers written by others and submitting them as their own, and now they don’t even have to read the material.  We’re producing students with no deep understanding of our culture and a fundamental contempt for education”.

But what really gets me is that this is only a risk because the school model used in most countries is still based on instruction, rather than building the deep understanding he mentions! I agree that we are producing such students. But it is not the student’s fault or the technology’s fault. Can you tell me of anybody who will spend more time than needed in a task they don’t like? Will you tell me that you do not use the internet to search for needed knowledge to make your tasks easier? In the current educational setting, students are being punished for doing what we all do at our jobs! In fact, some authors argue that sorting out what you need from the numerous search results is a key competence is the Learning Economy.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

It is not my intention to criticize his entire post. In fact, I believe that he gives some insights on how to better use technology in the current setting. Also he offers some good perspectives on the risks schools are running while not investing in understanding technology. But he misses a greater discussion (and for me a more important one) that is about the school model.

What is needed is to review the school model that was built based on the late 19^th century understanding of how we learn. Its aim was to supply the industrial economy with its workers. Our current economy demands creative people with ability to research, solve problems, learn to use new technology, and innovate, which are crucial for people to live fulfilling lives in the new economy. And the learning sciences have already identified the principles that underlie building such abilities: customized learning; availability of diverse knowledge sources; collaborative group learning; and assessment for deeper understanding. From these, at least three can be broadly supported by technology[2].

What must be worked out fast is that the educational sector is one of the least innovatives[3] and that the adoption of technology is being made mostly for incremental change over the same foundation. It’s time to look for some radical new models. Put our minds together in exercises like Google’s initiative on Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age to innovate education. Look for some examples already at work such as the Brazilian Instituto Lumiar who got also Microsoft’s attention as an innovative school.

If we are to discuss the use of technology in education, we might as well discuss how to educate for using technology. Knowledge is available. Perhaps we just need to teach how to find, sort, and make use of it, what makes learning skills more important than knowing. And if my logic makes any sense, it might turn out that I’m not THAT wrong.

[2] and [3] OECD (2008): Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. OECD.

EDIT: I remembered of a video that questions education as we have it that is related to school models and the discussion on this post. I decided to add it because it reinforces my point on the need for school model change.

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