Education Innovation

Essential Education: Linchpin

Crowdsourcing Collaboration in Education

I have advocated that technology and other key drivers have created an environment in which individual Professional Learning Communities can be networked with, not only other Professional Learning Communities, but useful individuals such as specialists, district personnel, researchers, etc. I call this model the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. The essence of the PNLC is that the "who" of potential members and collaborators is increased exponentially because of individual members networking through collaborative technology platforms, the "what."

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative makes use of what network researchers call a “small world network.” Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius, explains that small world networks consist of, "many densely connected small groups with less strong connections."

However, on the extreme end of the collaboration capabilities created through the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing enabled through converged network technology will allow members of a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to reach beyond the table and beyond the walls, and even beyond a network... and into the "crowd."

Definition: Professional Networked Learning Collaborative

Educators working together in the ongoing purpose of increasing student learning and achievement while sharing physical space, virtual space, or both simultaneously.

No longer is the work of educational teams limited to face-to-face around the table collaboration. No longer is specialization or the knowledge base limited to who is physically sitting in the meeting. No longer is email viewed as the technology of choice for collaboration. No longer are teams limited by geography. No longer should great ideas remain trapped inside particular grade levels, departments, or schools. Technology has allowed us to change all that. Technology has created a new reality.

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative seeks to leverage this new reality.

Individual educators used to operate under this model.

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Educators understood the value of collaboration, and so the Professional Learning Community arose.

But technology has changed that world. The 21st Century educator now operates under this model.

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Technology Enabled Collaboration
How is that technology has changed collaboration so greatly? First, technology enables different types of relationships. Virtual relationships are now possible and have become commonplace outside of educational settings. Networks of all sorts (Facbebook, Ning, Twitter, etc.) webcams, Skype, etc. have changed the very definition of presence. Second, technology has changed who is part of the team. Team members can now be virtual. Members no longer tied to geographic limitation can provide input, ideas, and collaborate in real-time for any location on the globe. The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative enabled through technology expands the borders of membership to include specialist, consultants, district staff, etc as part of the team.

From Community to Network
The person is the portal to the network. The person is an autonomous communication and collaboration node. Each member can potentially leverage not only their network, but also the network of others who are in their network. This principle is known as Metcalfe’s Law. The number of potential connections between nodes grows more quickly than the number of nodes. The total value of the network where each node can reach every other node in the network grows with the square of the number of nodes. In other words, when PNLC members connect their networks, it creates more value than the sum of networks independently.

The essence of the PNLC is that the “who” of potential members and collaborators is increased exponentially because of individual members networking through collaborative technology platforms, the “what.”

As sociologist Barry Wellman said, "Each person operates his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders, support, sociability, and a sense of belonging."

So, just at the individual educator has become networked, so too must the Professional Learning Community. And when a PLC becomes networked, it becomes something different. The PLC becomes the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative.

PNLC members will fluidly move between the physical and virtual networks to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas, data, strategies, and information. Each member being a portal or node to their individual network makes the PNLC exponentially stronger, knowledgeable, and wise.

But the capabilities exist to reach beyond individual networks and into the "crowd." Crowdsourcing is simply increasing the number of potential contributions to the PNLC.

In a recent post, Hutch Carpenter of Cloud Ave. blog explains the differences between typical collaboration and the crowdsourced collaboration

The table below describes the differences between traditional collaboration and crowdsourced collaboration:

Enterprise 2.0 strategic consultant Oscar Berg describes this phenomenon as "collective collaboration":

"The point here is merely that by improving collective collaboration, collaboration that goes beyond ones closest team(s), an enterprise can increase the sum of all contributions to the common good."

It's the social learning enterprise.

The team at Internet Time Alliance explain that the social learning enterprise allows for us to harness the power of the "wirearchy." The social learning enterprise is a core concept and driver of the need to move from PLC to PNLC. They state that 90% of the knowledge we need to do our work is not in our heads. If this is so then PNLC model is able to leverage the power of the network to find the best source of knowledge through high levels of cognitive diversity. Now imagine taking it to the crowd.

Hutch explores the differences between typical collaboration and crowdsourced collaboration...Teams form on common interest + Internally motivated participation

"With the crowdsourcing approach, participation is predicated on you actually having an interest in a given idea. Not that you are tasked to bring a particular set of skills to a project that you may or may not care about."

In education, that means people who are experts at data analysis, not necessarily teachers, could provide insight into statistical trends found in student data. Experts in Art, technology, etc, could provide valuable ideas for teachers without themselves actually being teachers. All it takes is some imagination to see the possibilities. If, as Peter Steiner said, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is true, then in the crowd, nobody cares if your a credentialed expert. All that matters is that you are motivated and knowledgeable.

Hutch continues..

"You will find others who share your interest, and there's no reason these have to be the people in your department. Indeed, for the interests of the organization, it's better to get people that don't usually work together collaborating on an idea."

Crowdsourcing can reach useful outsiders in any field, industry, domain, sector, etc. outside of education.

Hutch also points out that crowdsourcing offers us the possibility of finding people who are enthused with helping educators and creating new connections that traditional teacher collaboration would not allow.

As Hutch says, "Crowdsourced collaboration creates new opportunities, and traditional collaboration executes on them. Crowdsourcing is the new collaboration."

And the new model capable of bringing crowdsourcing to education is the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative.

Gever Tulley's Tinkering School

eXperience and eXpectations- Education's X-Problems

In my previous post, Problem X: eXploring and eXposing Problems In Education

I explored what frog designer Adam Richardson calls X-problems. In this post I go deeper into exploring the differences between wicked problems and X-problems.

Why is public education facing more than just wicked problems, but X-problems?

For public schools these X-problems might be a question of experience and expectation.

Adam Richardson, in his new book Innovation X, identified several factors that differentiate X-problems from wicked problems and as you will see they point to issues of experience and expectation in public schools.

More and Better Competition: The presence of competition, and competitors that are getting better and more diverse.

“The major element missing from the traditional definition of wicked problems is competition.”

Does public education have competition?

Private Schools

On-line virtual schools

Home School

“Certainly wicked problem address the issue of competition of stakeholders, but primarily stakeholders who have a common interest and will mutually benefit for the solution.”

The competition that public education is facing is expanding in number and diversity.

Private schools, on-line virtual schools, and home schools have no common interest with public schools. They compete for students and parent support alike. They attempt to differentiate themselves through the experience they provide and expectations they meet.

Public schools are teaching based institutions. That’s what they provide. Students are seeking learning and learning is not confined within the walls of public schools. Learning is becoming somewhat akin to the “cloud” of computing. As more and more great teaching goes online, students will be able to access more content, great content, in virtual and physical space. The learning cloud is going to provide fierce competition to public schools, especially at the secondary level. That is competition.

So the X-problem for public school is what do they do about it?

More Demanding Customers: The need to satisfy more demanding customers and provide superior customer experiences.

“The more informed our customers are and the higher their expectations, the better we will be positioned to demonstrate our differentiation.” 

The public is the customer and private, on-line, and home schools are steadily eroding the monopoly that public schools have long held. We as a nation of discriminating consumers are no longer content with things that just work, we demand more. We demand design.

“These differentiation and expectation trends often translate into increased demand for aesthetic qualities of using a product, not just its raw functionality. As Daniel Pink has put it, ‘For business, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique and meaningful.”

Who wants to send their student to a boring sterile institutionalized buildings, surrounded with fences, lacking any aesthetic beauty, with an crumbling physical infrastructure, out-dated technology and equipment, cramped spaces, etc?

“The term customer experience refers to the qualitative experience of using a new product: how easy it is to use, the emotions that are evoked by it both during and after use, the self-image that the customers feel they are projecting, and of course who well the product satisfies their needs and desires. The customer experience should be considered.”

When the public thinks of public schools do they think?

“…how a product does its job is now as important as what is does.”

Public schools are facing challenges on many fronts, but one of the ones that most education leaders and managers are ignoring is the “how.” It’s not going to be enough to just teach curriculum to students, society is going to demand more than just functional competency.

Nordstrom’s is more than just a department store. Apple desktops and laptops are more that just computers. Disneyland is more than just a few rides. They provide an experience. Does public education provide and experience? Yes, but is it the experience that society demands of them? It’s all about the experience.

Customer Expectations Are Resetting: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“Customers no longer judge based on solely on comparison with direct competitors; they use standards set elsewhere: my satisfaction with a new dishwasher may be blunted by comparison to the ease of use of my iPod, for example.”

Take the examples I mentioned in the section above. Society is not just going to measure public school against public school or public school against private school, etc. Society is going to start measuring public school against the customer experience of a Nordstrom’s, or the encompassing emotional and sensory experience of a Disneyland. Society is not just going to compare the technology in school, but how that technology experience compares to the design and ease of use provided by the iPod and iTunes.

Systems, Not Products: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“What often goes unrecognized is that every product is part of a system.”

Everything at our public school is a product, but is also part of a system. The problem for public schools is that the products are not being integrated to produce an excellent system. Different text, different standards, Curriculum covers things not on the test. The test assesses things not in the curriculum. New technology doesn’t work with old technology. They myriad of differences in policies, procedure, rules, regulations, organizations, etc. make it difficult teacher, student, and parent alike to navigate through all these differences.

Society is looking for results, but results with an experience. The system that has developed around public education provides varying results and virtually ignores experience. We are ignoring the “how” of what we do. 

“Developing complex integrated systems is the new order, and it forces pieces of a company to come together and collaborate in ways that organizational silos had not previously required or even allowed.”

When a teacher, principal, or other school employees says to parent, “That’s just not the way it works.” Or “I can’t do that because we are not allowed.” or “I know it doesn’t make sense, but that is just the reality.” we demonstrating to the parent, to society, that our system won’t work for them. We are not able to provide the experience they seek or meet their expectations.

So what do we do?

Emergent Clarity: Clarity about the problem emerges slowly, as with wicked problems, but iterative approaches to solving them are necessary, in contrast to the one-shot deal of wicked problems.

In other words we need a lot of ideas, we need to try them, and we need to build on the ones that work and abandon those that don’t. Continually arguing about the one idea to solve it all is not going to move us forward. Government is usually lacking in ideas and loathe to abandon ideas that are not effective. Tweaking the edges is not going to solve the problems of public education.

The sooner public education begins the prototyping new models and methods, the sooner we can learn more about the very definition of the problem we face. Each prototype offers clarity and insight about the very nature of the problem. Without making attempts to solve public educations problems we are limiting our understanding of just what the problem is.

Clarity will emerge. The questions of experience and expectation can be answered.

Problem X: eXploring and eXposing Problems In Education

Albert Einstein famously said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

When it comes to the problems of education, there has been a lot of great thinking done by a lot of great people. Ask a thousand educators, students, parents, researchers, business people, or politicians what the problems of education are in America today and you are bound to get a thousand different answers. Ask these same people how to solve these problems and you will get a thousand different solutions.

 

The problem of education in America today is not just a simple problem, or even a complex problem, but a wicked problem. But it’s more than a wicked problem… it is an X-problem.

 

 

 

Adam Richardson of frog design coined the term X-problem in his new book Innovation X.

 

Adam explains that most organizations or systems face 4 types of problems.

Simple Problems: These are problems for which both the problem and solution are easily defined.

 

Which budget should be used to purchase supplemental materials? Which grade level will require an additional teacher next year? Who is going to teach the new section of Latin? Which classrooms need instructional aides?

 

Complex Problems: Here the problem is known, but the solution is not.

 

How can we get students to complete their homework? Which technology is best to introduce into an elementary classroom? Which curriculum will best meet the needs of our students who are two years below grade level? How do we create a system that allows for student input? What is the most effective assessment of reading comprehension for English Learners?  How can we increase teacher collaboration and trust?

 

Wicked Problems: The challenge here is that neither the problem nor the solution is known. How can you define a good solution when cannot even state what the problem is?

I previously discussed wicked problems here [Wicked Problems Need Designed Solutions].

 

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

 

Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing."

 

There is no definitive statement of the problem, and each solution reveals new aspects of the problem.

 

How do we fix public education? What is the problem? Which part is broken?

 

Take the issue of technology. Is technology essential in education? Do we need more technology in school? How much technology is enough in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure it? How do we pay for it?

 

Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught? If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and bad creativity? Is creativity in school even a problem?

 

Or how about the questions of making students go to school longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

 

Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain? How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge? What is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution?

 

As you try to answer these questions more questions arise. It really gets...wicked.

 

None of these “problems” can be explicitly stated as a problem statement, because, they may or may not even be problems. It all depends on your perspective.

 

Since there is no definitive problem, there is no definitive solution.

 

Can’t fix it if we can’t point out exactly what it is we need to fix.

Each wicked problem is risky because it is unique, and it’s hard to test or simulate solutions ahead of time.

 

There is no way to simulate a new public education system in America, without actually building a new public education system in America. Simulating a school model here or there does not provide solutions or the same experience as a new system of public education. The scale is simply not comparable.

 

There are many stakeholders with different perspectives on the problem and how to resolve it.

 

Teacher, parent, student, administrator, union official, county official, state official, federal official, education researcher, business person, school board member, elected city, county, state, and federal politician, statistician, economist, sociologist, technologist, etc. They all have a different definition of the problem and a different solution.

 

But there is a problem even more difficult to grapple with than the wicked problem. 

It’s called the X-problem. Why X-problems? Adam shares his thinking on why X represents another level of problem. 

 

X is extreme: X-problems are extreme in risk and complexity.

Educating an entire country’s population and building a system that does it in the most effective way is a risky proposition. You can’t build the wrong system. You can’t make a mistake.

 

X is mysterious: Every X-problem revolves around questions that have never been asked before, or challenges that are unprecedented.

 

Solving the “problems” of education and doing so in a way that meets all the needs of all the stakeholders now and in the future is going to create some questions that we have never encountered of thought of.

 

X is a crossroad: A crossroads is a place where things converge together—and diverge outward. At a crossroads one must make a choice among paths, each of which could entail risk or opportunity.

 

Do we take the road of creativity, technology, brain research, etc? Saying yes to certain solutions requires that we say no to others. Which do we choose?

 

X means opportunity: X marks the spot for treasure—the winnings that come from finding the problem and capitalizing on it before others can.

 

In the global competition for knowledgeable, creative, innovative, caring, informed, collaborative, cooperative, and intelligent populace, the country that can figure out which problems to solve and which solutions to choose will have an advantage in the future.

 

See what I mean? This is not easy. It’s not a simple, complex, or even a wicked problem. Education is an X-problem.

 

There are several factors that Adam says differentiate X-problems from wicked problems that I will discuss a coming post. 

It's Never Too Early- Teaching Design Thinking In High School

From the website Good comes this article (Why We Should Teach Design Early) by Rob Stokes,a Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Austin, Texas, on the need to begin teaching design thinking in high school.

What follows is an excerpt from the article...

 

Designers, through training and experience, develop a different lens through which to see the world. They move through spaces, environments, and systems, making observations and developing insights about what works well and what doesn’t. They then use those observations and insights to create innovative solutions for everyday problems. If design is the crossroads of beauty and purpose, design thinking is the intersection of creative and analytical thinking.

But when do we learn how to think like a designer?

In today’s world of standardized tests and performance-based educational funding, students are not evaluated on the way they approach a problem, but whether or not they come up with the right answer.

What happens when there are many right answers, as is often the case with non-linear design solutions? When can we start teaching students how to creatively evaluate their ideas?

Design education typically begins at the college level, but if we wait until then to teach design thinking we are missing critical points in the growth of young minds, whose ability to think creatively is boundless. Teaching high school students to think like designers would help shape the way they look at the world around them and positively affect their future endeavors.

Inspired by these notions, a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design got together and started an initiative called “TeachDesign.” The objective of this initiative is to expose high school students to design methodologies through immersive, real-world projects that have a lasting positive impact on the participating students, school, and community.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/why-we-should-teach-design-early/#ixzz0fl4BQciH
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Design Thinking Picture of What The Education Experience Could Be

Design Thinking is about the human experience. David Kelley shared his mind map of what the K-12 education experience could be through the lens of Design Thinking in this article in Fast Company. 

 

Design Thinking- d.School Bootcamp Bootleg

The d.school at Standford has put to together this collection of the methods, modes and mindsets about Design Thinking into this Bootcamp Bootleg.

Download Bootcampbootleg2009 

 

Brainstorming at the d.school

This video from the Design School (d-school) at Stanford provides a great look at what Brainstorming is and isn't. Useful for all Professional Learning Communities, Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, and school leadership teams.

Design of a Teacher- Dispensable Algorithm or Indispensable Artist?

Is it possible that teaching could be designed so that software could do the same job a teacher does? Can a teacher’s role be broken down into a piece of software code?

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Seth Godin shares the following law in his book Linchpin.

The Law of the Mechanical Turk

"Any project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be accomplished for awfully close to free."

A prime example of this law would be Wikipedia. Seth explains, "Wikepedia took advantage of the law of the Mechanical Turk. Instead of relying on a handful of well-paid people calling themselves professionals, Wikipedia thrives by using loosely coordinated work of millions of knowledgeable people, each happy to contribute a tiny slice of the whole."

"The internet has turned white-collar work into something akin to building a pyramid in Egypt. No one could build the entire thing, but anyone can haul one brick into place."

So how is it that we have arrived at a place in education where instruction can be provided by a computer and an Internet connection?

Roger Martin, author of The Design of Business, would say we have driven the teaching (not all) of students through the "knowledge funnel.”

Mystery-Knowledge Funnel Stage 1: Roger describes this stage as the “mystery.” Ask questions and exploring the mystery. For example, "What should students be able to do or what should they know when they complete school." Or maybe, "What should education look like?"

Heuristic- Knowledge Funnel Stage 2: A heuristic is a general rule of thumb. We create a rule of thumb because it helps us break down our question or our mystery of into a manageable size. As Roger describes it, "It is a way of thinking about the mystery that provides simplified understanding of it and allows those with access to the heuristic to focus their efforts."

In teaching a heuristic might be that we should start by connecting to prior knowledge and then build background knowledge or that we want to have student engaging each other. Another might be that using graphic organizers helps student better organize the information they are working with. Its what we would call best practices. Generally, it is a rule that should be followed in teaching a lesson, etc.

Algorithm-Knowledge Funnel Stage 3- Roger describes stage 3 this way. " As an organization puts its heuristic into operation, studies it more, and thinks about it intensely, it can convert from a general rule of thumb...to a fixed formula. That formula is the algorithm..." We might call it research based. There is validity and reliability to applying the algorithm. We get the result we want each time we apply the formula.

So I am wondering as Educational knowledge is being driven through the knowledge funnel, are we still in the mystery stage, the heuristic stage, or have we arrived at the algorithm stage? The mystery of stage 1 requires the asking of questions and seeking of problems to solve. The general rule of thumb required of the heuristic in stage 2 requires some artistry. The algorithm of stage 3, standardized, codified, honed, and refined to such a point that ultimately anyone could with access to it could deploy it and achieve more less the same results.

As Roger Martin points out, the ultimate destination for the algorithm is computer code. "Once knowledge has been pushed to a logical, arithmetic, or computational procedure, it can be reduced to software."

Isn't this what much of the current developments in educational software is doing. A student responds to the software and the software responds with what is needed next. Over time and with enough opportunities the software is able to move the student through all the required learning tasks it was designed to provide and do so using research based methods to instruct these tasks 

Teaching on the algorithmic level.

Now if teaching can be achieved on the algorithmic level then Seth Godin might say, "It only follows, then, that as you eliminate the skilled worker...then you also save money on wages as build a company that's easy to scale. In other words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable workers."

Teachers viewed as interchangeable. Is this possible? Is this something that software designers and on-line learning researchers would desire?

Online learning is opening the doors for thousands of willing students and willing students to connect and to break down knowledge into smaller pieces. The teacher in the classroom is slowly losing his or her monopoly to an online crowd or teachers who have the knowledge and expertise to teach their subject to thousands of willing students who want to connect and learn at their own choosing.

Is online learning disruptive enough to begin the making the classroom teacher dispensable?

Seth compares the Dispensable Employee vs. Indispensable Employee

Dispensable Employee

"The cause of the suffering is the desire to of organizations to turn employees into replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this commoditization."

"The future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It's easy to buy a cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef book."

Are we in education chefs or cooks?

Artists or house painter?

Composers or players of musical instruments?

Architects or builders?

Movie producers or movie viewers?

The inventor or the factory worker?

Designers or users?

Teachers or computer code?

Do we adjust to the new reality described by Seth and become indispensable?

Indispensable Employee

"The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who's difficult to live without, the person you can build something around."

Design Thinking, which I think is a powerful approach to re-designing education, requires a sense of humanity at its core. Teaching and learning is fundamentally a human experience. Teachers, along with students, provide the human experience that makes the learning experience so powerful. Teachers are indispensable to a well-designed learning experience. My hope is that teachers are never replaced with code.

The design I am looking for is an indispensable teacher, not an algorithm.