Education Innovation

How To Read A Book : 21st Century Book Club

In 1972 Motimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren asked the question, “How do you read a book.”  They answered the question in their classic book, How To Read a Book.

They described 4 levels of reading..
Level 1-Elementary
Level 2- Inspectional
Level 3-Analytical
Level 4- Synoptical

Then, Seth Godin asked how to read a business book.

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action--that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

These are great, but what about reading a book together with a group of your peers. And, how about reading a book with your peers are scattered all over the country. And how about being able to share you ideas, ask question, post comments, add picture, or post a video.

This is the new way to read a book, the 21st Century version of a book club.

I am part of just such a group. I joined Scott McLeod’s 2008 CASTLE book club. We are reading Influencer and using Lefora to host the forum. We also have a wiki that the club members can utilize as well. I love the collaboration and idea sharing that is possible. Thanks to Scott and CASTLE for showing us all, “How To Read a Book.”

Recommended Reading:
Influencer blog

Dangerously Irrelevant blog

Tillabooks: Will's Book Blog

The Games People Play at Work

Bill Cawley Speaks

South of the Border, Down Mexico Way: Edtech Lessons from Mexico

South of the Border (down Mexico way) Chris Isakk's Baja Sessions

Last week I traveled to Mexico. My first stop was beautiful Cabo San Lucas.

While In Cabo, I traveled via Jeep into the hills above the city. We traveled the dirt roads back into the hills where more cows and goats than people lived.

After traveling many miles, we stopped in a dusty little village and visited a school. It is a boarding school and the students live there almost 11 months out of the year. They are provided room, board, and learning free of charge. This particular school was for students from Kindergarten through 8th grade.

So, imagine my surprise, when out in the middle of nowhere, in tiny dusty little village, in school where times seems to have stood still, I walked into this classroom and found a Smart Board.

Yep, technology has come even to this sleepy little corner of Mexico. The director of the school explained that the Smart Board is used during instruction and is hooked up to a satellite connection so that instructors in Mexico City can be beamed into this classroom to instruct students.

And I ask, why aren't we doing more of this in the United States. Technology could allow us to bring instruction to students where they are at. It just takes an open mind, some creative use of technology, and an innovative school or district. So what are we waiting for.

Companies like EduFire or schools like Florida's Virtual School are a great start. This school is proof. The technology works and learning happens.

I like the motto of the Florida Virtual School..."Any time, any place, any path, any pace."

That is the future of education. Distance is dead!

Catalytic Questions:

What is preventing education from embracing these technologies and models?

In what way could we better leverage technology to bridge time, space, and pace?

What benefits could you imagine to schools and students if expert instructors could be beamed into the classroom?

How might we begin the exploration of better use of these technologies?

In what ways are concepts the like the Florida Virtual school or EduFire changing the role of the teacher and the brick and mortar school?

What role will creativity and innovation play in these issues? 

Recommended Reading:

Why Aren't We Already Doing This?

Daniel Pink: A Whole New Mind Interview

From eSchool News...

" Author Daniel Pink discusses what it will take for students to succeed in an outsourced and automated world--and how schools should change their approach to education accordingly."

The Four Forces of Change: Rising Expectations

“The point is that what we are satisfied with today, we will not be satisfied with tomorrow.”

The fourth force of change impacting on you and your schools, as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip, is Rising Expectations.

This force of change, “results from the other three and in turn feeds back into them: rising expectations for faster, better, cheaper products, for more varied options, and for greater transparency and flexibility in response to customer needs and wants.”

Americans always expect things to get better. It is one of our most admirable traits. Good enough is never good enough. We push for better.

The forces of rising expectations have not spared education. Each year we expect to see test scores going up. Each year we expect to see more technology in the classroom. Each year we expect to see teacher quality improve. We have created standards, testing, and other accountability measures to meet the force of rising expectations.

When we look at history, there are things that came into being that today, we consider a necessity. Air conditioning, automobiles, cell phones, computers, and the like are all now part of what we consider a necessity. What in education today, will become an absolute necessity tomorrow? Remember, the Internet is still fairly new, but I doubt we would say we could live without it.

Teaching is going to be impacted by the force of rising expectation too. The basic price of entry for a teacher will be to have obtained a bachelor’s degree, completed observation hours, completed student teaching, completed a teaching program, and maybe some volunteer work in or substitute work in the classroom. But, rising expectations will drive up the bar. If everybody has completed the same basic requisite, the question might become, “How will you add value to this school? What else do you bring to the table?”

Standards, technology, assessments, data management systems, interventions, and Professional Learning Communities will soon become necessities that we won’t be able to imagine education without. But, times will change as they always do, and rising expectations will create new necessities.

As been famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Peter Drucker

How You Think Is Everything: Think Creative

From Busayo Akanro

"Why do people hate intentional creativity? Why must things be done in one particular way or another? Who makes the rules? Who sets the boundaries? Life itself imposes no limitations on us. After all, even though the law of gravity is fundamental, it can be broken through once one understands the principles of aerodynamics. Even then, the law of gravity doesn’t have as much relevance as it does on earth outside the earth.

"Who says everything that goes up must come down?  Someone who lives in space would give you a strong argument because what he knows is that you can throw something up and it will never come down in your life time. It would keep going on and on since the force of gravity is six times weaker there than on earth. So I guess that will help someone like me who has always wanted to be superman. You can be superman once you are on the moon.

"Take a look at this: A survey was done to discover the creativity level of individuals at various ages. After all the testing, the statistics indicated that 2 percent of the men and women who were in their forties were highly creative. As they looked at younger people, the results emerged that 2% of the 35-yr-olds were highly creative; 2% of the 30-yr-olds were highly creative. This went on down to each age group until they reached the 7-yr-old children. 10% of them were highly creative. However, further study showed that 90% of the 5-yr-olds were highly creative.  

"Between the ages of 5 and 7, 80% of us who are highly creative develop an image, a picture, an attitude that we are not creative, and we begin to deny that particular part of our God-given equipment. Pablo Picasso the great artist said “Every Child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

I agree. Those of is in education need to keep the "artist" alive. We need to be intentional about helping our students be innovative and creative.

Microsoft Putting Windows On $100 Laptops

From Fortune Magazine...

(Fortune) -- Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced Thursday that the Windows operating system would soon be available on the so-called XO, also known as the "$100 laptop." In interviews, executives made it clear that this could be a catalytic shift in perception and market success for the innovative but up-to-now aberrant laptop intended for the poor children of the world.

The Windows version of the XO will go on sale by September. Like the regular, Linux-based version, it will at first actually cost closer to $200, because the project has not yet achieved the volumes that could drive costs down.

Making Windows available on the XO could make it far more palatable for developing-world governments to make the huge investment necessary to purchase large numbers of XOs for their children. "It's a very big deal," said OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte in an interview.

Read the rest of the article..

The Age of Relationships: What Will You Have To Learn? What Will You Have To Unlearn?

Nobody reads my blog. Well, that is not entirely true, but most never leave a comment. On his great blog The Thinking Stick, Jeff Utecht posted about why people don’t leave comments on the blogs they read (Where are the comments?)

I of course, left a comment.

Jeff, your previous post about participating in Web 2.0 and the accompanying diagram provide some meaningful ideas.

As Gary Hayes said, “… that participation in society, politics, online social networks etc: is not either on or off it is a continuum of degrees of influence.”

Many more people fall on the continuum of consumer as opposed to commenter.

Having not have grown up with the ability to comment instantly on what we read, view, or hear, we are simply not used to doing it. In school, we never got to comment on or share what other student wrote or created. We simply created and that was it. Hand your work in, the teacher will make comments, not you.

Maybe we are just selfish. A comment signifies you have more insight than I. Your ideas are somehow more worthy than mine. Why should I help you?

Maybe we are just lazy!

But this got me thinking about something I read in Peter Sheahan’s book Flip. Peter believes that we are leaving the age of the knowledge worker and entering the age of relationships.

So just as we are coming to grips with the fact that we live in a flat world and knowledge workers is the area the education should be focused on developing, we come to find that even the knowledge itself is a commodity that can be outsourced overseas. In it’s place it the ability to create and trust and build relationships that will be the competitive advantage and need we should begin preparing our students for.

Peter says, “Being a knowledge worker is not going to offer competitive advantage in and of itself…In the years ahead, two things will count the most. The first is your ability to unlearn the things that are losing relevance, to flip yourself free of old scripts, and to learn the things that are gaining relevance. The second is whether people come to know and trust you as they struggle to bring their own learning forwards. That is do you really care about and respect them?”

So I ask what things are our students learning today that they will have to unlearn to be successful in the flat world of tomorrow?

Also, what sorts of skills and experiences must we provide for our students so that they are able to build relationships?

What are the tools of the relationship era? Blogs, wikis, podcasts, Twitter, Skype, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Earth, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and many other Web 2.0 technologies are certainly all examples of tools of the relationship age. How many teachers or principals are “literate” in these tools and technologies?  How many of our students are? 

Are we asking the right questions? What is literacy in the relationship era? What does educated look like in the relationship era? What will our students need to be able to do?

Peter says, “If you are betting instead on a lifetime of learning and unlearning, and of leveraging relationships with valued customers and clients, you should be confident of your ability to make your way.”

So, coming back to Jeff’s post. Wouldn’t posting comments on blogs we love or find interesting be a useful skill in the relationship era?

But then again I could be wrong. How else could we are still banning cell phones, blogs, and YouTube from our schools. So where is the real job preparation happening. In the school from 8 to 3, or in the Web 2.0 technology rich lives of our students outside of the classroom.

Speaking of Web 2.0, take a look at this YouTube video.

The Four Forces of Change: Increasing Complexity

“Increasing compression of time and space produces increasing complexity.” Increasing Complexity is the second of the four forces of change impacting on us, as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip.

There are six factors driving increasing complexity.

1. Rapidly interconnecting networks of ideas and people.

“Did you know, for example, that 20 to 25 percent of daily searches on Google are unique? We are generating content—opinions, survey results, perspectives, ideas, or just pointless garbage—so fast at any one time more than one quarter of the World Wide Web is brand new.”

We are going to have to develop standards and practices to teach our students how to navigate through all this information, make informed and appropriate choices, and judge content for usefulness, bias, authority, etc. We will certainly do our students a disservice and our country a disservice if we don’t provide our students with the skills and knowledge to navigate through this environment. It is not a skill most of us needed as we grew up. One trip to the library or flipping through the World Book Encyclopedia was enough.

Times have changed and we need to adapt to ensure we are meeting our students’ needs.
According to Time magazine, the world produced 161 exabytes. That equals 161 billion gigabytes. Imagine that. In other words, the world produced three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written in one year. Understanding how to type a search into Google is not providing our students with the tools they need to succeed in the future.

2. Disruptive technology—innovations in product and process almost always have unintended consequences that challenge our ability to adapt, and reward those with flexibility to flip into new modes of acting and thinking.

Cell phones with built in cameras and texting capabilities are nice features, but of course our students use them to cheat. That is the law of unintended consequences. Social Web 2.0 technology is a wonderful tool that connects students, but then we fight against cyber-bulling and Internet stalkers. As technology is rapidly developed and adopted by our students, we are going to face the challenge of adapting to the consequences they bring to our schools and classrooms.

3. Explosion of choice—in a globalizing economy, no one has a monopoly on any product or service for long, and the consumer’s biggest problem is often choosing among apparently identical offerings.

Teachers and administrators are faced with increasing choices in curriculum, teaching materials, educational software, and technology. Being able to sort through all these choices requires an enormous amount of time, energy, and use of resources. Teachers and administrators are being asked to be savvy enough to make informed and fiscally sound decisions in an environment where the amount of choices is growing daily. 

4. Increasing intangible desires of the market—rising affluence shifts the business imperative from supplying customer needs to meeting customer desires for emotional fulfillment, no matter how mundane the product or service.

The increasing  desire for school choice and schools that specialize in the arts, science, or technology is all a part of fulfilling customer needs. This will only increase in the future.

5. Increased sophistication of technology, systems, and processes—complexity begets complexity.

For example, many schools purchase educational software that becomes obsolete in just a few years or is not functional on quickly aging computers.  The effectiveness of the technology becomes more difficult to measure as we struggle to integrate it into our literacy plans while managing all of the technical issues.  Should you go web-base or buy a server? What is the long-term service agreement? What about software updates? Is this something teachers or administrators should be forced to spend time working through?

6. Legislation—whether it’s financial transparency, safety, the environment, or human rights, the world’s governments are regulating it.

No Child Left Behind, Quality Education Investment Act, High Priority Schools Grant Program, etc, etc. Need I say more? We have binders full of legislation monitoring everything we do. Make a mistake, and have it printed in the papers or posted on the web for the world to see.

As you can see, we in education are facing the same extreme forces that businesses and organizations around the world face. The challenge will be to adapt quickly and successfully. It is going to take some creative and innovative thinking, because what we have done so far, will not take us past where we need to go. One thing is for sure, it's going to get more complex.

The Four Forces of Change: Compression of Time and Space

The forces of change are acting on us. We may not sense it or we may feel it intensely, but change is coming. The forces of change are acting everyday to influence what we do and how we do it.

Peter Sheahan has identified The Four Forces of Change in his new book Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head—and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings.

The Four Forces of Change, according to Peter Sheahan, are:
1.    Increasing compression of time and space
2.    Increasing complexity
3.    Increasing transparency and complexity
4.    Increasing expectations on the part of everyone for everything.

Let’s take a look at the first of the four forces, Increasing compression of time and space.

Sheahan writes, “Human beings have always been impatient. Today we expect things to happen faster than ever before. And not just a little bit faster, but over the last few years a lot faster. The quicker something can be something can be done, the quicker we expect it to happen…”

Education is certainly not immune. Think about the compression of time. How many emails do you get a day? People who expect a response the same day sent most of those messages. Data can be pulled up in an instant with databases such as Edusoft or Data Director. New education programs are created yearly and teachers are expected to learn them and put them into place quickly. Requests for information are made frequently and the expectation is that they be returned quickly.

“In summary, increased affluence and rapidly developing  communications technology are compressing  our expectation around time. If the late twentieth century was about doing more with less, then the twenty-first century will be about doing more with less, faster!”

No teacher would argue that the increasing demands of high stakes testing and legislation such as NCLB is driving them to get more teaching squeezed into the same amount of days. Education is going to have to adapt to the compression of time as we asked to do more in the same space of time.

Technology in education is subject to the forces of compressing time. Technology is being developed faster than ever, being adopted by society quicker than ever, which means educators will be expected to integrate new technologies into their classrooms and curriculum sooner than ever.

The compression of space will impact education as well. As the world gets “smaller” we are going to have more opportunities to interact with people from all over the world, whether in person or through technology. This may create more opportunities for our students to learn from those who are live in or have direct knowledge about the subjects our students are learning. Imagine learning about the pyramids of Egypt from the scholars who there everyday or learning about life in Egypt from the people who live there. Virtual field trips and collaboration across the world via technology are a result of compressed space and distance.

As we get “closer” to those we share the planet with, we may view our educational standards in comparison to other countries. Eventually, we will be in competition with many more people for the knowledge work that is so highly sought after. The compression of distance may require that we examine our educational standards in light of what others around the world are doing and what a world where distance and time are compressed. Tom Peters summed it up best when he said, “Distance is dead.”

The "World" Ahead

How would you like to connect with a billion people on the Internet? If Intel has it's way that is exactly what will happen. They are creating a digital revolution in the farthest most remote parts of our planet. Intel plans on donating $1 Billion dollars over the next five years to connect people through the Internet through their World Ahead Program. Just a little more proof that technology is connecting all of us in way never before imagined. Soon, our students will be able to talk with and even work on projects with students from parts of the world who have never had access to the Internet. If you don't think technology is important for learning, the rest of the world disagrees.

Take a look at this .

Rob Jacobs