We know a few things about what makes innovation and entrepreneurship successful. One important facet is to “get out of the box”. Bringing in novel ideas, especially those that question rather than concede, create opportunities for getting creative juices flowing. This often involves bringing together minds from often disparate places. Crossing disciplines and careers. Non-intentional networking needs to occur.

The convergence of technologies may create new structures to make this happen, and Twine could be one of the leaders. What we need is a way for ideas and interest to become digitized, then linked, and opportunities for discourse to be embedded in the structures. Then for the owners of the ideas to see the links, the other owners, and have the ability to continue the discourse.

It’s a complicated process, something that humans can accomplish on a small scale. But for it to work across organizations and wide physical boundaries, involving greater numbers of people and ideas, we really need machines.

I’d like to see how Twine evolves. In fact, I’d like to see what happens when you add it to a school that embraces cross-discipline project-based learning. Students could be given the opportunity to share their projects and interests, and allow Twine to facilitate the connections to students with similar interests.

Facebook has the potential to network, but it is intentional. Twine could facilitate non-intentional networking.

Here’s some news for you: our economy (as you know it), our culture (as you know it), and our values (as you know many of them) are being destroyed by a new global, connected ecosystem, as Weinberger calls it. Just face it. The world is changing at a pace largely suitable for those under the age of twenty. But economy, culture, and values do not just disappear. They will be replaced, and it is the responsibility of those over twenty to understand the processes of change in order to skillfully help shape the new world economy, culture, and the formation of new values.

Reject the change, and you will be run over. But those who do understand change know: listen to your dissenters. Dave Weinberger knows this well.

Wesley Fryer was kind enough to podcast the talk and post it to his blog. I’ve posted the Powerpoint at Slideshare here. Here are some of the concepts I’ve been working through:

1. I believe technology can greatly assist learning by scaffolding learning at different levels. Kids, as much as NCLB would like to have you believe, do not all learn at the same level. I brought this up by going back to the Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve. It’s not that I like what the book concludes, but I do see statistical facts for what they are. And to force a common testing paradigm on kids across all intelligence levels is simply criminal. As mentioned in a previous post, kids with high intelligence need the opportunities to excel, and kids with low intelligence need proper scaffolding and support the the smarter kids can offer. In the adult world, we work together as a community, finding a place for everyone at all levels (at least we should). We collaborate in order to bring out the strengths in everyone. And we don’t compare each through test taking (except the few weirdos who get into Mensa . I never even got to the considerations of multiple intelligences, such as the very important topic of how Emotional Intelligence factors into learning. More posts on how technology can help in that arena later.

2. Engagement is key. Kids today have found technology engages and they are going to great lengths to get their hands on it. During a visit to EA Games in California a couple of years ago, A question was asked about the increasing incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and computer gaming. The response from one gaming programmer: “We don’t really see that as an issue. A kid will sit and concentrate on a game for 17 hours in a week.” Technology has tremendous power to engage students. A wonderful report recently released by the National School Boards Association (I will post in further detail later) makes a fundamental shift in U.S. education thinking about online social networking: this is not something to be ignored. Kids are using it, learning from it, and schools need to be thinking of ways to engage students with it. Online social networking tools can be summed up in one word: participation. Participation through creative activities online. Students are engaged when they participate and technology makes it happen.

3. How do we move away from our current paradigm of teaching that increasingly ignores differences in how students learn and fails to keep up with emerging technologies that are capturing the undivided attention of kids today? Change must take place in our schools. Change is not an easy process in educational reform, but the K20 Center has found a way that can move a school in the right direction. Development of Professional Learning Communities has found student achievement increases as well as reforms in teaching practice. This is a school-wide cultural change that brings action research into the classrooms, leading to adoption of new pedagogies. But here’s the icing on the cake: technology makes a wonderful catalyst for change. The year-long work of the K20 Center in schools, using technology as a catalyst for change, has proven to be highly effective. And all this without adding content or pushing for more test preparation.

I only take issue with one aspect of the OK-ACTS program: the technology going into the schools has one wonders to engage students, but it has been primarily by taking existing curriculum and presenting it in new and engaging ways. Instead of a lecture, the teachers are making Powerpoint presentations and showing them on Smartboards. They are getting feedback using student response systems. This is not across the board. Some teachers are increasing student participation in the learning process by having the students create the Powerpoints, but it still fails to engage them at their level.

I’m working on it. But I need to find more research on how creativity can raise student achievement. Yuck. I hate having to revert to finding methods that increase test scores, but until NLCB leaves the learning alone, I’ll work with the system. Kudos to Marco Torres for bucking the system. I wish it were so easy for the majority of teachers.

A popular catch phrase in higher education, Service Learning resonates well with Mr. Stengel’s ideas for a national service plan. I first heard of Service Learning through initiatives begun at our own K20 Center*. A web search shortly thereafter on the topic lead me to this excellent paper, Filling in the Moat around the Ivory Tower, by Vachel W. Miller and David K. Scott (Scott was a previous Vice Chancellor of University of Massachusetts Amherst). The authors write about the creation of an integrative university and the necessity for creation of social capitol. They make two fundamental points about social capital and Service Learning. First, the authors bring the power of service learning in creating a sense of community:

Social capital refers to the level of reciprocity and voluntary associations between individuals in a community…Social capital accrues as a result of engagement, and service learning increases the potential of relationships to form between students and the larger world.

The “larger world” could have referred simply to anything beyond the campus, but the impact of a global market is most often felt in those communities needing the most help. The second point is that Service Learning should come as part of one’s education:

It would be naïve to imagine that students, after years of schooling that disconnects them from community life, would leap into community service after graduation. In order for a service-orientation to become an enduring dimension of learning outcomes in college, we must model community engagement, value community engagement, and provide structured opportunities for community engagement.

Schooling is where is must begin. In creating citizens or education system has the best opportunity to mold a form of community service. Mr. Stengel in the Time magazine article provides one example (#5. Institute a Summer of Service) of middle school graduates beginning community service. I say it can start earlier. I see no reason to involve elementary students in service activities, whether they are providing service to their school community, or neighborhoods. Service Learning should be a part of the spectrum of education. In the same issue, Carolyn Kennedy writes:

In fact, an early investment in service can pay off over a lifetime. The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, a trove of high school-related trend data, found that 42% of young people who volunteered in high school did so again eight years later. And a recent study in the American Educational Research Journal identifies community service during high school as a strong predictor of voting and volunteering in adulthood.

Mr. Stengel’s fourth point, Create an Education Corps, should be embedded into learning from the second grade, at all schools. Students should expect to see teacher volunteers at every grade level, as well as students volunteering to be mentors and tutors for younger grades. I am amazed to see how much my six year old daughter looks up to the kids from second through fifth grade. I would be even more amazed to see the older kids in her classroom helping out. This is leadership development, democratic education, and where participatory culture should be.

The ninth point in the Time article, Start a National Service Academy, is another wonderful idea. The creation of a service academy that would rival West Point in the caliber of its students, yet provide the next generation of leaders solving community problems would be a first for our nation, a concept already in practice in other countries.

It’s time we create the structures in our education system that will lay the foundation for a future national service generation.

*The K20 Center does have a program to foster community leadership, the interdisciplinary Master of Arts degree with an emphasis in Educational and Community Renewal. It is a wonderful program that brings a full breadth of what makes a community and how to discover and tackle its needs. The program includes a required service learning project. The center is also working on service learning initiatives with OU’s College of Enginnering, and is planning initiatives with other colleges. Alas, we do not have a formalized program for K-12.

Here’s what I really like about it:

1. It’s kid classroom friendly. A teacher can create one account with her email, then create separate identities with photos for each kid. Awesome! No need to create separate student accounts!
2. It’s easy to use. The layout is minimal, clean, and intuitive.

Check it out and let me know what you’ve created! Willow and I created this one today. Register and leave her a comment!

The scores of students who had taken economics courses were not necessarily higher than those who had not. On average, students who had taken Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or an honors course in economics scored marginally higher than students who had taken no economics at all, but students who had taken “consumer economics” or business courses scored lower.

In particular, look at the very last comment. How is it that taking “consumer economics” is a detriment to knowledge of economics? Where, in fact, they are learning economics? Parents? Peers? Keeping copies of the Wall Street Journal under their beds?

Parents are a factor:I’m going to take a wild guess at the other source: social participative media and online networks.

Economics forces are heavily tied to media and the internet. Kids are using online communities to share knowledge of products and companies are targeting the online market heavily. These kids are not just passive audiences. They share and communicate about what would be cool to have, compare products, and what it takes to get there hands on products that are easily out of their economic range. Companies quiz teens about market trends and buying patterns.

They are thinking economics. But no one ever calls it “economics” online or in school hallways. This is authentic learning at its best.

To some degree, pulling such activities into the schools is apt to deaden them because school culture generates a different mindset than our recreational life.

I’ve been advocating bringing participatory culture into our education system as an answer to student engagement and learning 21st century skills. The openness of social networking such as MySpace and to some extend, Facebook, is of grave concern to many educators, in particular school administrators that must deal with the legal ramifications of predation and abuse. The fear is a part of school culture. As parents, we expect our schools to lend a certain degree of protection over our children.

So how do we balance protection and participation? We could try to bring in participatory culture and social networking from the broader internet, and filter it, but that has proven to be largely ineffective (see the Wolak, J., Mitchell, K. J., & Finkelhor, D. (2007) study in Pediatrics). Perhaps the solution lies in creating an engaging education participatory subculture.

Imagine if you will, students shifting roles from in-school to out-of-school. But the engagement level remains peaked in both roles. Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to, is maintained not only in recreational participatory out-of-school culture, but also in-school participatory learning culture. The school environment can do this as long as the students are engaged in meaningful, global projects that reach out to a global audience for feedback.

Now imagine how these students will adopt to a workplace in which the expectation is to separate in-work global participatory collaborative culture from out-of-work global recreational participatory culture. To be sure, I have no idea if such productivity skills could transfer, but there have been numerous reports (Gartner being one source) concerned with web surfing and loss of productivity in the workplace.

This is a broad topis for discussion. This will be the first of many post on the topic of participatory culture and schools.