The Learning Studio

The School of Medicine at the University of Virginia has created a room called "The Learning Studio."

Photo Credit: Norm Shafer (original source)

[I]t coalesced into an unusual, functionally innovate design, one built around a new pedagogy.

Shades of the Collaboratory at Rutgers. You see, UVA figured something out:

Most universities continue to follow a blueprint introduced in 1910, which called for two years of in-depth study of the basic sciences followed by two years of clinical experience. A cookie-cutter approach, it means that students spend two years sitting through long lectures and regurgitating facts on tests, followed by the shock treatment in their third year of suddenly dealing with patients in a hospital ward.

�It�s become pretty clear in the last couple of decades that this is probably not the best way to learn something as complex as medicine,� says Randolph Canterbury, the medical school�s senior associate dean for education. �The idea that physicians ought to learn the facts of all these various disciplines�anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and so forth�to the depth that we once thought they should doesn�t make much sense.�

About half of all medical knowledge becomes obsolete every five years. Every 15 years, the world�s body of scientific literature doubles. The pace of change has only accelerated. �The half-life of what I learned in medical school was much longer than what it is today,� adds Canterbury, a professor of psychiatric medicine and internal medicine.

Huh. Who knew? Oh yeah.

So what happens in that Learning Studio?

. . . In teams of eight, the students debate a patient case: Walt Z., a 55-year-old chemist, comes into your clinic complaining of intermittent chest pain. As his doctor, you�ve arranged for an exercise stress test. But Walt Z. is an informed consumer of health care, and he has lots of questions about the test�s accuracy in diagnosing blockage in coronary arteries. Five large media screens hanging throughout the room delineate his medical details and a series of multiple choice questions.

Gone is the traditional 50-minute lecture. (Also gone is paper, for the most part.) The students have completed the assigned reading beforehand and, because they�ve absorbed the facts on their own, class time serves another purpose. Self-assessment tests at the start of class measure how well they understand the material. Then it�s time to do a test case, to reinforce their critical thinking and push their knowledge and skills to another level.

. . . In this �flattened classroom,� as it�s been described, the traditional top-down educational approach is reconfigured and the responsibility for learning shifts to the student.

Interesting. What about accountability?

Problem solving by teams mirrors the reality of health care today. �The traditional approach has been one patient, one doctor,� says Waggoner-Fountain. �Now, it�s one patient, one doctor and a team, in part because medicine has gotten more sophisticated and patient expectations are different.�

Studies also show that individual grades improve when working within a team. The first-year students have embraced it. Not isolated in auditorium seats bolted to the floor, they can easily move and mingle because everything is in the round.

�Working in a team reinforces what you learn in class,� says Chelsea Becker (Med �14). �We all have different backgrounds and everyone knows something different.� Science majors don�t hold dominion; the class comprises more than 60 different majors, from astrochemistry to art.

�It allows us to teach each other,� adds Tom Jenkins (Med �14), who estimates he�s collaborated with just about every person in the class at this point. �I think that helps with retention.�

I could go on, but it would be better if you just go read the article. Okay, just one more quote:

Every team experience was singular. �We have the sense that education should be standardized and everyone should have the same experience, but that�s not really the case for us,� says Littlewood. �The new Carnegie report talks about having standardized outcomes for individualized experiences, and I think there�s no better example than over here.�

So, let's sum up. Teaching like it's 1910 doesn't make much sense (teacher-centered, lecture-oriented, fact-recall, paper-based, standardized instruction.) Ahh, so glad all the current education reform in K-12 matches up with this vision. They have to be college-ready, ya know.

No One Right Way

(I apologize in advance if this comes off as more rant-y than usual � if that�s even possible. This is very much thinking out loud, so take it for what it�s worth. It's certainly not intended to be directed at anyone, the people I mention are all helping me think through this. And, of course, I very well may be completely wrong. On to the post.)

As happens every so often, I was involved in a briefly intense Twitter discussion yesterday where I followed my usual habit of pushing (provoking?) hard just to explore my own (and others�) thinking. This one, however, I felt sort of deserved a follow-up, so here�s my attempt to summarize my current draft thinking.

The genesis of the discussion was a tweet by Will Richardson:

 I pushed back a little with:

And away we went with lots of other folks chiming in along the way.

I understand the basic criticisms of calling these 21st century skills, namely that we�re ten plus years into the 21st century already and that many (most? all?) of these skills were important before the 21st century. And I also understand Will�s basic premise that, as crucial skills, these shouldn�t be taught in isolation in a separate course, but should be embedded � and modeled � in all of our classrooms.

But here�s the thing. I think there�s no one right way. I think in our passionate desire to effect the changes we think our students need, we sometimes fall into the same trap as many of the so-called reformers that we daily deride. Would it be so horrible to have a 55-minute-(or whatever)-a-day course called �21st Century Literacy Skills� taught by someone who�s pretty immersed in this arena? (For those of you who have heard Will passionately speak about these literacies, would you be averse if he was available to teach that to your students?). And, yes, these ideas should be talked about, explored, and modeled in all classrooms in addition to that one course, but if a school decided to dedicate time for that course, would it be so bad? (As Chris Lehmann has often said, if you value something let me see where it lives in your schedule. I think a case could be made that having a course in every kid�s schedule dedicated to this would show that you very much value it. Although it�s not the only way.)

But I also think it�s okay if a school decides that, no, these should be embedded in all of our courses and we�re not going to teach a separate, pull-out course specifically about these skills. There�s not one right way to do this and, if we insist there is, then we take away something I think is vital to making this whole school thing work: flexibility and personalization. (I think perhaps the only good thing I said at EduCon was that all education is global, but it�s also local.) The teachers in the classrooms with their kids, with their very individual students, with specific backgrounds and learning conditions, and very specific wants, needs and passions, need to be able to address those needs as they see fit, without folks criticizing that that's "so 2005." (And, yes, I�m as guilty of that as anyone. Mea culpa.)

I also think that much of the angst over the �21st Century Skills� label is misplaced. While I agree with folks who say that many of these skills were important pre-21st century, I disagree with some of their conclusions. First, I think that while many of these skills (collaboration and communication immediately come to mind) were very nice to have in the 20th century, I think you could often get by without them. I would suggest that for most of the professional jobs that many folks aspire to these are now necessary and prerequisite skills, not just �nice-to-have� skills.

Moving beyond employment, I also think they are necessary skills to be effective citizens in the 21st century. As the Twitter discussion unfolded, Zac Chase, Laura Deisley and I broke off into a side discussion around being an informed voter in the 21st century. Zac pushed back suggesting that really today isn�t all that different in terms of being a voter, saying that sure there are a lot more people talking about stuff, but in the end are they really saying anything that�s changing the process? (More from Zac around these ideas). Laura and I, representing the � ahem � older crowd, suggested that based on our experience, we feel it really is different. That the wealth of information available about candidates and issues, the various forms of media used to convey that information, and the ability to interact socially and at a distance around them makes being a voter/citizen much, much different today.

This is different, and it requires different skills.

And while I understand and partially agree with the argument that �Hey, we�re eleven years into the 21st century, shouldn�t we already be teaching these skills and let�s just get on with it instead of talking about them like they�re new,� I also think that some are overlooking one pretty important point: we still have eighty-nine more years left in the 21st century. I think too many folks hear �21st Century Skills� and think of a fixed, standard set of skills that are settled and clearly defined. But I think they�re still evolving, and will continue to evolve (transform?) in ways that are really hard to imagine at this point. Is it so bad to use a label that forces us to look forward? (Did educators in 1911 know what the next eight-nine years were going to bring? Would it have been bad for them to be talking about 20th Century Skills?)

That was one of the essential ideas of the presentation that shall not be named � that we live in exponential times. If Kurzweil is right in his prediction that by mid-century a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capability of the human race, then life is going to be radically different, and our brains have literally not evolved in such a way for us to truly understand that. Our brains do a pretty good job of projecting things out linearly, but we suck at exponential (which is a really important point that Kurzweil makes several times).

Here�s the example that I use with my Algebra class to demonstrate this. Take a standard piece of Xerox paper and fold it in half. Then fold it in half again. And again. And again. How many times do you have to fold it in half until the thickness equals the distance from the Earth to the Moon? (Yes, understanding you couldn�t physically fold it in half that many times, but assuming you could.) Go ahead, take a gut-level, intuitive guess of how many times. Answer below.

Richard Miller, chair of the English Department at Rutgers, says that

We're living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history

 and that

We are no longer grounded in the printing press; what you see before us is the networked world.

The networked world is different than the world in the previous centuries. Yes, we�ve always had networks. The cavemen had learning networks. They knew who to go to learn about hunting, and who was the expert on gathering, and who to learn from about how to defend the tribe. And our networks evolved and expanded over time, and include our extended families, and our neighborhoods, and our places of employment, and often a professional community. And they includes books, and 20th century media like radio and television. But I still don�t think that compares to the potential (realized by some, not by others) of our learning networks today. I have teachers on six continents that I learn from every day. Many of whom I�ve never met face-to-face.

This is different, and it requires different skills.

Miller goes on to say,

To compose, and compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression, at written expression, you have to also excel in the use and manipulation of images. That's what it means to compose . . . All of our students, regardless of discipline, regardless of major, can come together and work on this central activity of multimedia composition. That�s writing in the 21st century. It�s multiply authored, it�s multiply produced.

I think that if you agree that multimedia composition is a �central activity� of communication in our current time, then that requires some things to change.He also says,

We do not have a pedagogy on hand to teach the kind of writing [composing?] I'm describing. It needs to be invented.

Invented certainly suggests there�s something new here.

Jason Ohler defines literacy as �being able to consume and produce in the media forms of the day.� Is anyone going to argue that the �media forms� of today are not significantly different than media forms previously? Or that our ability to not only consume, but produce them, is not significantly different? Different not only in form, but in ubiquity, presence, function, and impact? As the National Council for the Social Studies says,

We live in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex sound arrangements, and multiple media formats.

This is different, and it requires different skills.

The National Council of Teachers of English says,

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies are . . . multiple, dynamic and malleable.

21st Century Skills, however you define them, are not static. They are �multiple, dynamic and malleable.� If folks want to use "21st Century Skills" as a catch-all label, I think that�s fine. If folks don�t want to use that label as a catch-all, then that�s fine as well. I think we need to move beyond arguing about the label, beyond saying there�s one right way to do this. If �literacies� is an accurate description, then it�s a core set of skills that all students (people) need to have, and I suspect having a course dedicated to it and/or embedding it in all classrooms are both better approaches than dismissing them because of the label.

Today is different, and it does require different skills. So what�s so wrong with having different approaches to help students learn those skills? There's no one right way.

Oh yeah. 42. Forty-two folds for the thickness of the paper to equal the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Most folks� intuitive guesses are five or more orders of magnitude off. We suck at exponential. If we�re so bad at imagining that, then what else do we lack the capacity to imagine?

What Should Students Know and Be Able To Do?

(Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.)

I'm a teacher. A parent. A citizen. Those are the lenses I view teaching and learning, educators and students, education and school through. That doesn't make me an expert, and I don't have all the answers, but I think I have some good questions, so let's get started with one of those questions.

This is the question that educators are constantly asking themselves.

What should students know and be able to do?

It gets back to an old argument in education, the argument about which is more important -- content or skills. Like most teachers I've talked with, I think that's a false dichotomy. I want both. I want students to know some content and have the skills to be able to use their knowledge. I don't want them to just "cover" the material, I want them to uncover their own understanding, and to think critically about the content.

My bias, however, is that too often in schools we err too much on the side of content. I once heard Cris Tovani, a wonderful reading teacher in Colorado, say,

Yeah, as a teacher I can cover my curriculum. I can get to that finish line. But often when I get to that finish line and look around, I'm all by myself.

That's even more true today, when we live in a rapidly changing, information abundant world. We live in exponential times. There's just too much content out there. As Eric Hoffer said,

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

He said that more than thirty years ago, and I think most of us would agree that the pace of change has only increased since then.

Schools were designed for an age when information was scarce, when students came to school because that's where the information was. It was in the textbook, it was in the teacher's head, and -- if they were lucky and had a good library -- it was in the additional resources the school library provided. But now, now we live in an information abundant world. I don't hear many people complaining that they don't have enough information (although they may complain about the quality of that information), yet schools are still designed around the concept that this is where you go to get information. That needs to change.

Which leads, I think, to an even more basic question. A question I think that, despite all the education reform lately, we haven't really talked much about.

What's the purpose of school? Is the primary purpose of school to meet the needs of society, or to meet the needs of the students?

There's a strong argument to be made that since society is investing so many resources into educating the young, that schools should be designed to meet the needs of society. After all, if schools don't meet the needs of society, why should society support them? This is the argument that is currently in fashion.

But I'd like to suggest an alternative, that the primary purpose of school should be to meet the needs of the individual. That if we meet the individual needs of students, we will ultimately meet the needs of all students. And if we truly meet the needs of all students, we will then meet the needs of society. I think this has always been the case, but it's even more important in a rapidly changing, information abundant world, a world where society doesn't even know what its needs are going to be in five years, much less in thirteen (for K-12 education) or longer (if you include post-secondary education).

This is a problem for many of the current school reform discussions because, despite the rhetoric about leaving no child behind and racing to the top, they rely on a standardized view of success, a one size fits all approach. I think individual students are different, and to ignore that fact is to deny the evidence that is all around us, at least if you ever met more than one kid.

No, I'm not talking about lowering expectations. I think we can have high standards without being standardized. Standardized curricula create standardized minds. Standardized minds create collateral debt obligations and credit default swaps. You know all those folks on Wall Street aced their standardized tests. They were the best and the brightest, the success stories from our schools, at least by our current definition of success in schools. Yet clearly there must be more to success than just those test scores.

So, I would suggest we need to slightly modify the question we ask ourselves as educators. Instead, perhaps we should be asking,

What should this student know and be able to do?

I think the addition of just one word might just make all the difference.

Dear MLA and APA

Two questions.

1. How often (not counting grad school) have you actually followed a written citation, found the source material, and then read it?
   
   Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition. New York: Modern Language Association, 2007. Print.
   
   
2. How often have you clicked on a link to learn more?
   

 

Welcome Huffington Post Readers

If you�re visiting this blog for the first time due to this article, welcome. I feel like I should have something profound to say, but it�s the end of May. And in my high school, that means finals week, projects, grades, graduation, scheduling and some reimaging of laptops and netbooks, so I�m fresh out of anything profound.

Actually, even if it wasn�t the end of May, it would be unlikely that you�d find much profound on this blog. But, if you�re interested in what goes on here, here are some links to some of the interesting stuff we�ve talked about over the last few years. Pick one and drill down into some of the posts if you�d like.

The Best (?) of The Fischbowl 2009
The Best (?) of The Fischbowl 2008
The Best (?) of The Fischbowl 2007
The Best (?) of The Fischbowl 2006

Thanks for stopping by. And, if you have a question to ask, you're welcome to ask it here as well. I have a feeling I'm not going to end up in the top five, so you might be better off asking it here.

Sometimes This Stuff Still Amazes Me

Just a quick post to note that I still find my own personal networked world to be pretty fascinating and amazing. Yesterday I was talking with my wife about a homework assignment Abby had in math where she needed to gather some data. So I threw together a quick Google Form, posted on my blog, and tweeted it out.

Very quickly the responses started coming in, mostly from Twitter I suspect because I doubt that many folks had seen the post at that point. (Next time I may add a question about where they found out about the survey just to confirm that.) About a day later we now have 299 responses (as of this writing) from 43 states and 18 countries (counting the U.S.). (You can see the results embedded in that post.)

Now this particular survey and this particular post are nothing earth-shattering, but it again reminds me of how different the world is from when I was growing up; how easy it is to connect with others around the world, and certainly how easy it is to gather data via Google Forms, a blog and Twitter. While I certainly still need to do a lot of thinking about how best to utilize this capability in meaningful ways, I think we all as educators need to be constantly asking ourselves the question, "What can we do now (that is relevant and meaningful for students) that we couldn't do before?"

Abby playing guitar for Grandma via Skype.

Blogging for The Huffington Post: I�m Gonna Need Your Help

In the next week or so, The Huffington Post is going to add some new "blog topic" pages within their existing Technology section. One of those topic pages is going to be "Tech + Education," and I've been asked to be a contributing blogger to that section.

(Update 12-16-09: They've decided to delay the Tech + Education section until January 11th, 2010, so that it doesn't get lost in the holidays. This is perfect, as it gives me almost four more weeks to lose sleep over this.)

(Update 1-19-10: Now pushed back to January 25th.)

(Update 1-26-10: Now pushed back to February 8th.)

(Update 2-11-10: Now pushed back to March 1st. No really, it's going to be March 1st. Maybe.)

(Update 3-9-10: "Before the end of March . . .")

This was not an easy decision for me for a variety of reasons. The Huffington Post is a different space than this blog, and that brings with it both some good things and some not so good things. One of my concerns is that the conversations on that blog can get both off-topic and somewhat uncivil at times. Not only do I not have a very thick skin, but I'm not particularly interested in contributing to something that generates a lot of noise but doesn't actually move the conversation forward.

The Huffington Post is also generally considered to have a political bias, and � while I realize everything has a political aspect to it � I don�t want what I write about (and what we�ve all been talking about these last few years) to be viewed as being on one political "side" or the other. I'm not very much interested in "sides," I'm more interested in solutions. I know it's na�ve, but I don't view any of this stuff through a political lens, I just want to write about and think about and talk about learning. And students. And teachers. And technology. And how best to do this thing we call school. And I want it to make a difference.

So I thought about this for a while, went back and forth with myself, and finally decided to give this a shot for a couple of reasons. First, it's an opportunity to take this conversation to a wider and different audience than typically reads this blog. We've all talked about "preaching to the choir" and the "echo chamber," and how we need to engage with folks that typically are not present in our spaces, and this is an opportunity to do that. I've written more than once about teachers and students being willing to take some risks in their teaching and learning, so I guess I better walk the walk and take a risk myself.

Second, and this is the main reason for this post, I'm counting on a secret weapon to help me out with this.

You.

(Stop looking around, I'm talking to you.) I figure if I can bring all of you with me, then I have a much better shot at making this work.

So, here's the deal. Whenever I post to The Huffington Post I'm going to cross-post here, and I'm going to both ask and count on all of you to get involved in the conversation there as well as here. Now, I'm not asking you to always agree with me (although, you know, it would be nice if you occasionally did). What I'm asking is that you bring your perspective as thoughtful people that have been thinking and writing and commenting and struggling with these issues for a while now into a space where many of the folks reading and commenting are coming at this from a different perspective. That doesn't mean their perspective is wrong or that we can't learn from it, it simply means that we need your perspective as well. If you'll join me there, then maybe, just maybe, we can do some good.

What do you say?

Google Goggles: Why Didn�t I Think of That?

So, Google Goggles is now in beta in Google Labs and available on Android phones.

Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search � by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

Here�s a little video explanation.



As the Tech Crunch article mentions, it�s somewhat similar to ShopSavvy. I�ve used the ShopSavvy demo video in my last couple of presentations, replacing another video I had been using of an iPhone app called Bionic Eye. That made me think of an earlier post of mine where I said:

This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it�s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it�s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app � or something like it � connects you to all the available information about whatever you�re looking at.

It doesn�t really matter whether it�s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it�s mounted on your eyeglasses, it�s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only �effectively� because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it�s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it�s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn't have changed my major.

Seriously, though, the truth is ending up stranger than fiction . . .

We Have the Technology

When I was growing up I liked watching the Six Million Dollar Man on television. Looking back, it was a pretty hokey show, but I really liked it at the time. In the opening for the show, there�s a line that says, �We have the technology.� I thought of that � for pretty obvious reasons if you�re familiar with the show - when viewing the video for the Bionic Eye iPhone application.



This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it�s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it�s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app � or something like it � connects you to all the available information about whatever you�re looking at.

It doesn�t really matter whether it�s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it�s mounted on your eyeglasses, it�s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only �effectively� because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it�s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it�s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

I know that scenario is frightening to a lot of folks, and certainly there are going to be more and more privacy/ethical issues we are going to have to figure out as a society. But, for the moment, let�s focus on the incredibly positive side of this � what kind of learning apps can be built on this platform? What will we be able to do as teachers and students that we can barely even conceive of today, but will be commonplace in the very near future? What happens when the sum total of the world�s knowledge � updated in real time - is available in a portable heads-up display?

Just imagine the possibilities. How many years is it going to be before we see something of this sophistication? I don�t know. My guess is more than three and less than thirty. So you�ve got to ask the question, does your school/district want to be ahead of the curve in figuring out best practices, or behind it?

Did You Know? 4.0: The Economist Media Convergence Remix

The Economist Magazine is hosting their third annual Media Convergence Forum in New York City on October 20th and 21st. Earlier this year they asked if they could remix Did You Know?/Shift Happens with a media convergence theme and use it for their conference. Scott McLeod and I said sure, they got XPLANE to create the presentation, and the result is farther down in this post. Unfortunately, I won�t be able to attend the Forum, as I�m already missing school a few days this fall and I just couldn�t justify missing a couple more (it was very kind of The Economist to invite Scott and me), but it looks like an interesting event.

A few anticipatory FAQ's about this version.

1. It�s the first one that I�ve been part of that does not have a specific education focus (although I certainly think the media convergence ideas discussed in the video have great relevance for education). The idea behind the original (and subsequent) presentations was to start/continue/advance the conversation around certain ideas, so I see this hopefully doing the same thing around media convergence (and, selfishly, it will hopefully get some of the folks attending The Economist�s Media Convergence Forum to perhaps focus on some of the education ideas in the previous DYK�s). And, given the Creative Commons license on the previous versions, folks are not limited to remixes that only talk about education.
   
   
2. They decided to designate it version 4.0 even though there have been only two previous �official� versions. But the Sony/BMG remix that is currently the hot version is typically referred to as version 3.0, so who are we to argue with the wisdom of the crowd?
   
   
3. I should not get much, if any, credit for this one. I sent along a fair amount of statistics for their consideration, and certainly provided some feedback along the way, but otherwise didn�t have nearly as much to do with this version. Laura Bestler, Scott McLeod�s graduate assistant, did most of the research for this one, and of course XPLANE did all the graphical work. (I should, however, still get most or all of the blame if you don�t like it, since I started this whole mess.)
   
   
4. Like the previous versions, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, so you�re welcome to use/modify as you see fit, as long as you follow the terms of that license.

Finally, an observation. In a recent email Scott McLeod wrote, �It�s amazing, the legs this thing still has.� I would have to agree. The various versions have been viewed well over 20 millions times (my guess is that with downloaded versions and audience showings it�s probably closer to 30 million times, but 20 million would be the safe number). It�s been shown to audiences large and small, educational and corporate and everything in between. It's been shown to the leaders of our national defense and to incoming congressmen. It�s been shown by university presidents and kindergarten teachers, televangelists and politicians, folks just trying to make a buck and those trying to save the world. And this week it even made an appearance in Nancy Gibb�s essay in Time Magazine.

What does it all mean? (Well, besides the self-referential and now self-serving answer of �Shift Happens.�) I think the fact that a simple little PowerPoint (some folks would say simplistic and they would be right � it was meant to be the start of a conversation, not the entire conversation) can be viewed by so many folks and start so many conversations means that we live in a fundamentally different world than the one I (and most of you reading this) grew up in.

I know some folks would dispute that, and that�s an interesting conversation in and of itself, but if you buy that � if you buy that on so many levels the world is a fundamentally different place � then it just begs us to ask the question of whether schools have similarly transformed from when we grew up. If your answer to that question is no, as I think it probably is for a large majority of you, and if you see a problem with that, then what should we do? What is my responsibility, and your responsibility, for making the changes we believe are necessary? What are you willing to step up and do?

Here�s the presentation. Source files will be uploaded to the wiki shortly.

The Possibility of More

Jeff Krause is an excellent Language Arts teacher in my school who is trying to get even better. Who can resist a post that starts with this sentence?

As with all crazy ideas, it occurred at approximately 3 a.m. � the time when you can convince yourself that just about anything will work.

Jeff has three posts about something he's trying in his American Literature class that are worth your time (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

Thought for the Day 5-30-09

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.

Seth Godin, Tribes, p. 132.

Why Should Your District Continue?

Ben Grey had an interesting post recently where he asked:

Why should your district continue to use and pursue technology?

I think it's the wrong question, albeit asked for the right reasons and it certainly is generating some interesting discussion. So I left a comment on Ben�s post and suggested two different questions that I think are more interesting (to me, at least, we�ll see if they are to you).

First question:

Why learn?

I think a discussion around this question might ultimately help with what Ben was trying to get at.

The second question, and really the reason I decided to post this on my blog, simply removes the last five words from his question.

Why should your district continue?

I think this is a much more interesting question, and one that I�m not asking lightly. I think we need to go back to first principles - or perhaps first �principals� :-)

Why do we exist as an institution?

I�d like you to pretend for a moment that you live in an alternate reality, one where right now, for the first time, someone is proposing universal schooling for all children between the ages of five and eighteen. Now, pitch me your proposal for your school district (or, for folks not in a school district, for your institution). Justify your existence. Tell me what your mission is, and why your institution (as constructed in our current reality) is the best solution to achieve that mission.

If you were starting your school right now, from scratch, would you? Or would your solution look very different?

I think your answer is very important. Don�t you?

Things Just Changed. Again.

Do you teach math? Science? Geography? Economics? Health? Business? Language Arts?

Wait, let me start over.

Do you teach?

Wait, let me start over again.

Are you alive, and curious?

Okay, that�s better. I think this is worth 13 minutes of your time. Go watch it, then come back.

I believe Wolfram Alpha is supposed to go live tomorrow. It�s obviously still very, very new (will they change its name to Wolfram Beta later? That will mess up the URL�s. Kidding.) It will be interesting to see what kinds of searches lend themselves to this more computational approach and what kinds don�t, but I still think this is another big step in how humans find, access, digest and repurpose information. Designed to �compute answers to your specific questions,� this once again should make us examine what we are doing in our classrooms, and how we should best prepare our students to be successful in an age with this much computational firepower.

What facts (discrete pieces of information?) do we need to know in order to develop deep understandings of important concepts, and what facts can we just google or wolfram (or will the verb be alpha)? What previously unknown relationships might be teased out of the data by the Wolfrom Alpha algorithms, or what will humans looking at this data in new and unique ways discover? What new questions will we learn to ask, or will we learn to ask old questions in new ways? (You can also view a much longer talk by Stephen Wolfram at the Berkman Center. No, I have not watched it all yet.)

Also note that Google is evolving as well. Joyce Valenza has a good summary post over at School Library Journal that discusses the new features. I also thought this quote she shared from a Google presenter was interesting,

If users can�t spell, it�s our problem. If they don�t know how to form the syntax, it�s our problem. If there�s not enough content, it�s our problem.

Hmm. I wonder whose problem it is if our students don�t know how to question, ask/search, find, evaluate, synthesize, repurpose, remix, and solve problems using tools like Google and Wolfrom Alpha?

Disconnect(Ed)

The Invention of Air, PLNs, and School Transformation

I just finished reading Steven Johnson�s The Invention of Air. It�s the story of Joseph Priestley�s scientific discoveries, religious and political thoughts, and his influence on the founding thinkers of the United States. But it�s also a history of his Personal Learning Network (starting with �The Club of Honest Whigs,� which included Benjamin Franklin and Richard Price), and, combined with Richard Florida�s work, has me thinking again about the optimal conditions for learning at our point in history.

Consider this quote from page 51:

Ideas are situated in another kind of environment as well: the information network. Theoretically, it is possible to imagine good ideas happening in a vacuum . . . But most important ideas enter the pantheon because they circulate. And the flow is two-way: the ideas happen in the first place because they are triggered by other people�s ideas. The whole notion of intellectual circulation or flow is embedded in the word �influence� itself (�to flow into,� influere in the original Latin). Good ideas influence, and are themselves influenced by, other ideas. Different societies at different moments in history have varying patterns of circulation: compare the cloistered, stagnant information pools of the European Dark Ages to the hyperlinked, open-sourced connectivity of the Internet.

This describes nicely how I think about my Personal Learning Network, and how social and professional networking in general can help circulate, discuss, and refine ideas. Ideally, this would also describe schools; places that were not defined as much by prescribed curricula, but by a climate of intellectual curiosity and a culture of ideas, where good ideas influere other good ideas.

He continues on page 52:

The idea of proprietary secrets, of withholding information for personal gain, was unimaginable in that group. . . .But Priestley was a compulsive sharer, and the emphasis on openness and general circulation is as consistent a theme as any in his work. . . No doubt Priestley saw farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants, but he had another crucial asset: he had a reliable postal service that let him share his ideas with giants.

The label �compulsive sharer� describes quite a few of the folks in my PLN, and tools such as blogs, delicious, Twitter, rss feeds and Skype help enable that compulsive sharing. Priestley�s aversion to proprietary secrets also seems to apply to the folks in my PLN, where the ethos is �the more you share, the more you learn� � and the more we all benefit. I think Priestley would also appreciate Creative Commons. But I wonder how many of our schools � and the educational processes we have in place - really encourage compulsive sharing, either in-person or virtually?

Johnson continues on page 53:

The open circulation of ideas was practically the founding credo of the Club of Honest Wigs, and of eighteenth-century coffeehouse culture in general. With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R & D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society.

. . .You can�t underestimate the impact that the Club of Honest Whigs had on Priestley�s subsequent streak, precisely because he was able to plug in to an existing network of relationships and collaborations that the coffeehouse environment facilitated. Not just because there were learned men of science sitting around the table � more formal institutions like the Royal Society supplied comparable gatherings � but also because the coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.

Again, sounds like PLNs, and specifically tools like Twitter � �conversations freely roaming� and a �network of relationships and collaborations.� And I wonder if our current education system might be �languishing amid archaic traditions.�

Later he returns to the idea of compulsive sharing and documenting not only the product, but the process (page 63-64):

Part of this compulsive sharing no doubt comes from the fact that one of Priestley�s great skills as a scientist was his inventiveness with tools. He was a hacker, not a theoretician, and so it made sense to showcase his technical innovations alongside the scientific ideas they generated. But there was a higher purpose that drove Priestley to document his techniques in such meticulous detail: the information network. Priestley�s whole model of progress was built on the premise that ideas had to move, to circulate, for them to turn into better ideas. . . . It was a sensibility he shared with Franklin:

These thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, �till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.

This resonates for me in relation to my own blogging, where I often think of blogging as �rough draft thinking�, or �thinking in progress,� and where I count on commenters and linkers to help me refine my own thinking. I believe one of the big hurdles for getting folks in my building to blog professionally is their fear of not having a polished piece of writing, or of being not completely correct about something. (These are both things I�ve obviously overcome!) But that seems to fly in the face of how so many of the scientists and philosophers that we revere in this country did their own thinking and sharing and, with the amazing ability we have to share today, it saddens me to see how few of us are really taking advantage of this capability (both professionally and with our students).

Further into the book, on pages 73 and 74, Johnson takes up information networks:

The true shape of an idea forming looks much more like this:
That network shape is one of the reasons why external information networks (the coffeehouse, the Internet) are so crucial to the process of innovation, because those networks so often supply new connections that the solo inventor wouldn�t have stumbled across on his or her own. But the long life span of the hunch suggests another crucial dimension here: it is not just the inventor�s social network that matters, but the specific way in which the inventor networks with his own past selves, his or her ability to keep old ideas and associations alive in the mind.

To me, this describes tagging and the digital archiving (and sharing) of thoughts, so that not only can you learn from others, but you can go back and reflect on and learn from your own �past self.� I believe we miss so much, and our students miss so much, because we view so much of what we do as transitory, and not worth keeping or revisiting. What is it about self-reflection (again, both professionally and with/by our students) that worries us so?

Toward the end of the book, on pages 204-206, Johnson makes the connection again to modern information networks:

More important, though, the values that Priestley brought to his intellectual explorations have never been more essential than they are today. The necessity of open information networks � like ones he cultivated with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society, and with the popular tone of his scientific publications � has become a defining creed of the Internet age. . . . An idea that flows through society does not grow less useful as it circulates; most of the time, the opposite occurs: the idea improves, as its circulation attracts the �attention of the Ingenious,� as Franklin put it. Jefferson saw the same phenomenon, and interpreted it as yet another part of nature�s rational system: �That ideas should freely spread from one another over the globe,� he wrote in an 1813 letter discussing a patent dispute, �for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.�

, , , Building a coherent theory of the modern world without a thorough understanding of [the Internet] would have struck Priestley as a scandal of the first order.

This speaks to me so much of our often misguided Internet filter policies, the idea that by restricting the flow of ideas we are somehow protecting our students. And, again, it reinforces the concept of openness, and the sharing of student and teacher work, and that through this sharing, this cross-pollinating of ideas, we progress and improve not only as teachers and students, but as a society (see Mark Pesce�s Capture Everything, Share Everything, Open Everything, Only Connect)

He brings it home at the end of the book on pages 213-215:

The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Franklin and that is the radical�s belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. . . . You could no longer put stock in �the education of our ancestors,� as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change meant embracing the possibility that everything would have to be reinvented. . . .One thing is clear: to see the world in this way � to disconnect the timeless insights of science and faith from the transitory world of politics; to give up the sublime view of progress; to rely on the old institutions and not conjure up new ones � is to betray the core and connected values that Priestley shared with the American founders . . . How can such a dramatically expanded vista not make us think that the world is still ripe for radical change, for new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life? And how could it not also be cause for hope?

I think this is one of the huge struggles we�re facing as we try not so much to reform education, but to transform it. Schools as we know them are comfortable, and safe. But if �progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past� and we should �no longer put stock in �the education of our ancestors,�� then we will have to face the uncomfortable and deal with disruptive innovation.

We are going to have to seize on the current crisis to make transformative change and conjure up new institutions � or least new learning paradigms. One of our core values must be to seize these "new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life," to be compulsive sharers and utilize these tools and our learning networks to transform our schools, our communities and our world.

Will that be difficult? Sure, but it�s necessary and it�s time. And, while perhaps difficult, �how could it not also be cause for hope?�

I Read the (Rocky Mountain) News Today, Oh Boy

The Rocky Mountain News will be publishing its last edition tomorrow, leaving Denver as a one (major) newspaper town. And, while I�m not predicting this, with the Denver Post having tremendous difficulties as well, it�s not inconceivable to think that 12-18 months down the road Denver could be a zero newspaper town. The demise of The Rocky should presumably help the Post short term, with additional advertisers and subscribers probably coming their way, but that may not be enough to overcome the recession and their current business model.

This is sad in so many ways, not the least of which is that I believe newspapers (not necessarily the format, but the concept) are critical to a democracy. And I felt that The Rocky was doing better than most newspapers at trying to incorporate the web into their operation (obviously not profitably, though). It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out here in Colorado.

In the meantime, this spurs some questions for me. I am not particularly knowledgeable about newspapers or their business model, so I can�t really comment on that. But I wonder what this means for K-12 education, particularly here in Colorado.

What should this mean for how we teach students here in Colorado?

How does this affect where and how they find news information, and how do we as educators help them do that?

Will teachers in Colorado make the connection to their own classroom practice? Both in terms of the way publishing and audience is changing, but also in terms of how the status quo is not guaranteed to continue � and that outdated models can and will be replaced.

And, in light of Kathleen Bates Yancey�s (and the NCTE�s) call for a reexamination of writing in the 21st century, how will all teachers (not just Language Arts teachers) respond?

Perhaps most important, seen historically this 21st century writing marks the beginning of a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extracurricular social co-apprenticeship.

NCTE is calling for teachers and students to embrace writing �authentic texts in informal, collaborative contexts� where there �isn�t a hierarchy of expert-apprentice, but rather a peer co-apprenticeship in which communicative knowledge is freely exchanged.�

Does this describe your classroom?

We have to move beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last.

How are you developing not only print, but digital and network literacy practices in your classroom?

Yancey�s article helps us �understand an increasingly important role for writing: to foster a new kind of citizenship.� In an age when newspapers are failing (at least in a business sense), this is going to be critical not only for our students, but for our democracy.

We need to become serious about helping students becomes citizen composers instead of good test takers.

Are your students on their way to becoming citizen composers?

Your thoughts?

Update 2-27-09: The Rocky has a "Final Edition" video up, I'm embedding it below. Also, John Temple has an article where he tries to explain some of the economics of why Denver can't support two papers.



Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

The Great Reset: A Crisis (in K-12 Education) is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Richard Florida has an interesting article in the March issue of the Atlantic titled �How the Crash Will Reshape America." He talks about how big, international economic crises typically usher in a new economic paradigm, and then speculates on what this economic crises may foretell:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation�similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries�and that, too, favors America�s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

. . . the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs.

I would argue that �our [schools are] in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation,� shifting away from a model that values standardization and conformity toward one that values creativity and differentiation. I would also suggest that �velocity of ideas� and �density of talented and creative people� is what we would ideally hope for in our schools, but I wonder if our schools � as currently structured � allow those talented and creative people to flourish and explore those ideas.

This interview accompanied the article and is what spurred this post. He reiterates his �the world is not flat, it�s spiky� argument, and argues for great urban centers of creativity and economic activity.

But as you mentioned, we have this kind of mythology going around that somehow the rise of new technologies�communication and transport technologies, which shrink the world�will spread out our geography. We always have this kind of romantic notion that technology will free us from the dirty, the pathological, the slum-ridden, the unhealthful city, and that the world will spread itself out.

. . .There are two tendencies in the world economy. There is a great tendency for low-cost, fairly standardized stuff to spread itself out, and that�s where people say, �Oh my God, the world is flat.� But there�s also this counter-tendency for things to concentrate�to take advantage of these forces of agglomeration and human capital. So what I tried to argue is that that second tendency is very important. And now we have all sorts of World Bank reports talking about how productivity and performance are so much higher in urban areas, even in the emerging economies.

What I tried to do in this piece is say, �I don�t think this great crisis�or great �reset,� as I like to call it�will change this trend. In fact, my hunch is that, coming out of this crisis, our geography will end up more concentrated than it was before.�

While I think he perhaps underestimates the power of technology to allow that "agglomeration" and to bring together "human capital" in geographically dispersed locations, his argument for bringing together people in dynamic environments focused on creativity and innovation makes a lot of sense to me (whether they are geographically concentrated or technologically connected). How many of us would describe our school as dynamic environments focused on creativity and innovation?

And then he says:

Well, I am worried, and I think many people are worried, that we would waste public investment on bailing out the industries of the past�on things like automotive bailouts, which promise to simply prop up and breathe life back into industries that certainly show their share of problems in international competition. And that�s why I like to think of this as a �great reset� rather than a crisis. What economic crises do is reset the conditions for technological innovation and consumption and demand.

But rethinking infrastructure changes the institutional rules of the game and the way people and industries organize themselves geographically. What that does is create new patterns of living, new patterns of working, new patterns of consumption, and new demand.

. . . So it�s important to spend money on the right kinds of projects and the right kinds of infrastructure.

. . . If we take as a first principle that we really have to invest in the creativity of each and every individual�and give people the right to express their creative talents in ways that they find interesting and relevant�then I think we will end up with a better future than we otherwise would have had.

The phrase �great reset� really resonated with me, not only in the economic way he was using it but also in terms of K-12 education. He quotes Stanford economist Paul Romer, �A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,� and I think that applies directly to the current situation in K-12 education. The current economic crisis only amplifies and exacerbates the current crisis we are experiencing in our schools, and if we continue to �waste public investment on bailing out [schools] of the past,� then we will indeed be wasting this crisis.

Instead, we should be taking this opportunity to �reset� our schools, to �create new patterns of� teaching and learning and �spend our money on the right kind of projects and the rights kinds of infrastructure.� We need to �take as a first principle that we really have to invest in the creativity of each and every [teacher and student] � and give [teachers and students] the right to express their creative talents in ways that they find interesting and relevant.�

From the original article:

The United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes . . . At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience. Can we do it again?

At times of crisis, the eventual �winners� that emerge are those that are bold and seize the crisis to move forward, taking advantage of the altered landscape to achieve their mission in creative, innovative and powerful ways. Unfortunately, at the moment, I�m seeing very little evidence of bold thinking. So, in this time of multiple crises, I would challenge my school district, and all K-12 schools, to not waste this crisis but, instead, reinvent themselves and look forward, not back. If we do, then, like Richard Florida, �I think we will end up with a better future than we otherwise would have had.�

Singularity University

Today's Did You Know?/2020 Vision combo sighting of the day - Singularity University.

Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity�s grand challenges.

With Ray Kurzweil himself and Peter Diamandis (co-founder of Space Adventures and the CEO of the X Prize Foundation) on board, with support from Google and NASA, it combines both a graduate program and three and ten-day executive programs. These two quotes from the video stood out for me:

Every University needs a chief visionary.

I would add that every K-12 district and school needs one as well.

The most key thing you'll get is this global network. By coming to SU you are going to get connected with the top thinkers in this community.

Nice, but I would like to see them add an educator track, and hear how they are going to work with K-12 schools. Mr. Kurzweil and Mr. Diamandis, I'm volunteering (along with my PLN) to help with that. Seriously, please contact me. I think we could use our global network of educators to help get you connected to K-12 teachers and students.

What's the Purpose of School?

While I've certainly blogged about and around this topic before, I've run across a couple of interesting posts in the last few weeks that both address this question directly. I'm going to quote liberally from both posts, because I think it's useful to see them both on the same page.

First, David Warlick wrote after watching - and participating - in our videoconferencing with Daniel Pink:

On several occasions, lately, when working with teachers and administrators at independent schools, I�ve been asked, �What is the purpose of education?� It�s not a question that comes out of public school conversations very often. We already know what education is for. The government told us.

Education is about:

• Covering all the standards
• Improving performance on government tests
• Meeting AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress)
• Producing a competitive workforce

We don�t even ask any more � and even in this season of Change (http://change.gov/), we�re still not asking that question.

Now I generalize when comparing different types of schools, and to be sure, independent schools are also governed by testing, as many of their students attend so that they can get into Harvard, Yale, or Duke (Go Blue Devils). But, again, there is a palpable sense of confidence in the conversations I witness when away from public schools � a willingness to ask tough questions.

I�ve had a ready answer to the question.

�The purpose of education is to appropriately prepare our children for their future.�

There are some implied, but essential questions in that answer:

• What will their future hold? What will they need to know?
• What are appropriate method, materials, environment, activity?
• Who are these children? What is their frame of reference?

Today, I have a new answer. My old one is still good. I�ll continue to use it. But if you ask me, �What is the purpose of education?� today, I�ll say,

"The purpose of education is to make the world a better place!"

What drew me to this answer was Karl Fisch�s teleconferencing activity last week (see A 2.0 Sort�a Day: Part 2). As I thought more about the experience, it occurred to me that this was an almost singularly unique activity � beyond the fact that students were interacting with an internationally renowned writer, exchanging thoughtful insights, and the really cool use of technology.

What struck me in hindsight was that these students were earning respect. They were respected by each other, by their teachers, by the instructional support professionals, and by the internationally renowned figure, Dan Pink. Their engagement in that activity will continue to be respected by people, young and old, who will read the archive of those multidimensional conversations.

Those students were full partners in their learning, and they were entrusted to go beyond just what was expected. They were encouraged to freely extend and develop their own thoughts, skills, and knowledge, building on their own frame of reference, pushing and pulling through conversation, and being responsible for their part of the endeavor.

Then yesterday Seth Godin wrote:

So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:

1. Become an informed citizen
2. Be able to read for pleasure
3. Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
4. Do well on standardized tests
5. Homogenize society, at least a bit
6. Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
7. Give kids something to do while parents work
8. Teach future citizens how to conform
9. Teach future consumers how to desire
10. Build a social fabric
11. Create leaders who help us compete on a world stage
12. Generate future scientists who will advance medicine and technology
13. Learn for the sake of learning
14. Help people become interesting and productive
15. Defang the proletariat
16. Establish a floor below which a typical person is unlikely to fall
17. Find and celebrate prodigies, geniuses and the gifted
18. Make sure kids learn to exercise, eat right and avoid common health problems
19. Teach future citizens to obey authority
20. Teach future employees to do the same
21. Increase appreciation for art and culture
22. Teach creativity and problem solving
23. Minimize public spelling mistakes
24. Increase emotional intelligence
25. Decrease crime by teaching civics and ethics
26. Increase understanding of a life well lived
27. Make sure the sports teams have enough players

Both David and Seth, coming from different backgrounds, have some fairly negative views of what some folks think school is for, as well as some more positive views of what school should be. If you've read my blog for any length of time you most likely know the general trend my thoughts take on this, so I'll spare you my own ranting and raving (for now, anyway). But I thought these were worth posting on the same page as a good starting point for discussion, as Seth suggests:

If you have the email address of the school board or principals, perhaps you'll forward this list to them (and I hope you are in communication with them regardless, since it's a big chunk of your future and your taxes!). Should make an interesting starting point for a discussion.

Please leave a comment or do as Seth suggests and contact a school board member, superintendent, school administrator, teacher, student, parent, state legislator (Colorado), community member, congressperson (Senate, House, or possibly this link for both), or President Obama and ask them for their thoughts, without the spin.

What's the purpose of school?