Like food, we all consume information. If we treated information like food then we may realize that…
1. Some of us need to go on a diet. We are consuming too much information.
2. Some of us need to add more variety. We are consuming too much from the same.
3. Some of us need to get off the junk food. We are consuming way to much junk.
4. All of us need to ensure we are getting the essential information we need each day.
If it changes how knowledge is created
If it changes how knowledge is shared
If it changes how knowledge is evaluated
If it changes how knowledge is understood
If it changes how people connect
If it changes how people communicate
If it changes what people can do for themselves
Then it will change preaching and learning.
Back in 2002 in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Howard Rheingold predicted that, “The ‘killer apps’ of tomorrow’s mobile infocom industry won’t be hardware devices or software program but social practices. The most far reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that the infrastructure makes possible.”
The prediction, as we now know, was spot dead on. (Nothing new for Howard) The technology has transformed our relationships, how we are able to collaborate, how we now define communities, and what kinds of work we are able to do.
This get to the very heart of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative (PNLC) No longer is the work of educational teams limited to face-to-face over the table collaboration. No longer is email viewed as the technology of choice for collaboration. No longer are teams limited by geography.
The true difference in the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative does not lie in the technology. First, the 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, 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 Learning Community succeeded because it viewed its membership of the grade level/subject matter and the school. The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative enabled through technology expands the ring of membership to include specialist, consultants, district staff, etc as part of the team.
Further, each member of the PNLC will have his or her own developed Personal Learning Network from which to draw on. As each PNLC member’s PLN network overlaps with other team members it becomes much different from the local context of a community. It Overlapping Personal Learning Networks form a collaborative that is a normal functioning part of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. We have moved from face-to-face community of physical space to the technology enabled virtual and physical space collaborative.
Third, the very enterprise of the typical grade level or subject matter team will be different as technology enables networks to allows for new levels of data analysis, planning, lesson design, etc. The reality is that what grade levels or subject matter teams will be able to do compared with what they do right will not just more or better… it will be different.
Finally, the PNLC model it not going to be limited to the technology that currently exists for two reasons.
First, the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is what I call a “Change is Normal Organization”(CiNO). It is designed to change and adapt. The values of the PNLC of ICE3:Imagination, Innovation, Inquiry, Collaboration, Creativity, Curiosity, Exploration, Experimentation, and Entrepreneurship ensure the PNLC will change.
Second, the technology that we now use to collaborate virtually or network on is going to change. But, the hardware we use to access these platforms is going to move off of the desktop or laptop on to our phones. I describe this as the 4th Way. As Howard Rheingold so presciently foretold in 2002, “These devices will help people coordinate actions with others around the world—and, perhaps more importantly, with people nearby. Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power, new ways to organize their interactions and exchanges just in time and just in place.”
He asks, “How will human behavior shift when the appliances we hold in our hands, carry in our pockets, or wear in our clothing become supercomputers that talk to each other through a wireless mega-Internet?”
Howard provides an answer. He says, “They will enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.”
The PNLC is not just better…it’s totally different. It's the "killer app."
Satisfice:
A virus that results from the combination of satisfying and sufficing. Known to
frequently infect educators who are being asked to develop ideas and plans of
action for schools and school districts.
It
is a deadly virus that infects grade level, department, PLC, school leadership,
and district decision and planning meetings. The virus does not harm the host
educator, but rather kills potential creative innovative ideas that might arise
from the host by creating an urge to hastily accept the first idea or decision that satisfies the members and suffices as an acceptable outcome.
Matthew
May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something
missing explains the virus.
“In 1957, economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon published a book called Models of Man. In it, he examined the default human decision-making process in which we tend to go with the fist option that offers an acceptable payoff. Simon said that by nature we ‘satisfice’—his term, combining satisfy and suffice. In other words, we have a tendency to settle for ‘good enough,’ opting for whatever seems to expeditiously meet the minimum requirement needed to move us closer to achieving a given goal. We then stop looking for other ways, including the best way, to solve the problem. We rationalize that the optimal solution is too difficult, not worth the effort involved, or simply unnecessary.”
“We mistakenly pose the question “What should we do?” before asking “What is possible?” We want a solution, but we don’t have the patience to wait for the optimal one, favoring implementation over incubation. We throw some resources at the problem and move on, or tweak a previous solution and fit it to the current situation. We fail to look more holistically at the challenge. The result is we simply don’t see the best, most elegant solution.”
While
the prognosis may seem grim, there is a cure, a miracle cure that can save
thousands of educators from falling victim to satisfice.
Tim
Hurson, author of one of my all time favorite books, Think Better: An Innovator's Guide To Productive Thinking calls this “The Miracle of the Third Third.”
“Studies have shown that in Osborn’s kind of good brainstorming, the first third of the session tends to produce mundane, every-one-has thought-of-them-before ideas.”
“Generally the second third of a good brainstorming session produces ideas that begin to stretch boundaries.”
“The third third is where the diamonds lie. These are the potential breakthrough ideas that often lead to innovative solutions. These are the unexpected connections. Whereas bad brainstorming tends to stop at the first reasonable idea and judge all others out of existence, good brainstorming encourages the generation of long lists of ideas by separating creative thinking and critical thinking.”
In other words, education has for too long been suffering from the satisfice virus and ignoring the cure. The cure is great ideas. Creative ideas. Innovative ideas. The satisfice virus has confused our brains into accepting the first idea that seems to move the agenda along. And all of education has paid the price.
“Bad brainstorming is binary; ideas are either good or bad. Good brainstorming is full of maybes. In bad brainstorming, we never get to the third third. In good brainstorming getting to the third third is the point”
Imagine
the impact for students, teachers, parents, schools, school districts, and
communities if more educators used “The Miracle of the Third Third” in their
planning and decision making meetings to defeat the satisfice virus. You might
not believe in miracles now, but just wait until you feel the healing effects
of the third third in your next planning or decision-making meeting.
Greg Mortenson failed in his attempt to climb K2, the second highest mountain on earth. Yet a lesson was gained from that experience that we can all learn from. With K2 in sight, he began building schools that would change the lives of hundreds of children and his own.
K2 8611-M
Originally uploaded by Karrar Haidri
Within sight of a great failure, at the base of your greatest disappointment you might find your greatest success, your calling, your purpose, and the most meaningful accomplishments of your life.
We and our students should never forget that.
Do your assumptions about what education should be leave you with a lack of alternatives?
One of the reasons why many people, including myself, love books like Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, or The Economic Naturalist is that is takes our assumptions about the world around us and stands them on their head. When what we assumed about our world is discovered to be incorrect, we must develop alternatives in our thinking and our approach to the world around us.
We have created a model of education based on our assumptions about what education is. So let's consider our educational model.
As part of the book The Organization Of The Future, James O’ Toole contributed an essay titled “Free To Choose: How American Managers Can Create Globally Competitive Workplaces” In his essay he describes 3 “Emerging Employer Models.” He describes them as follows:
Low-Cost Companies
Global-Competitor Companies
High-Involvement Companies
O’ Toole advocates for the High-Involvement Company as the model of the future.
According to James O’ Toole,
the most successful companies now and of the future will be those that
choose to address the deepest needs of their employees.
• Financial resources and security
• Meaningful work that offers the opportunity for human development
• Supportive social relationships
So, to which model would the current system of education belong?
Does the current education model meet the 3 deepest needs of it's employees?
Is education, as a governmental organization, so unique that none of the models described above apply? Is it a hybrid of one, two, or all of them?
It is our assumptions about what education is, where and when learning and teaching takes place, and how education, school districts, and school sites should be organized that control the current organizational face of education. We have built what we assumed is the best organization and model for delivery of instruction to a population.
What, however, if those
assumptions are wrong?
Have you ever considered the fact that the assumptions you make about what education is and what is should be are wrong?
As O’Toole puts it, “Remember,
it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to
decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was
assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed
while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full
benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated
blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught
managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC
Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be
closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved
otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in
a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered
alternatives.”
Are there alternatives to our current model?
Does education have alternatives? Are
educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will teachers, union
leaders, parents, and politicians allow for different assumptions to be pursued? William A. Foster said, “Quality
is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention,
sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it
represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Is what we have built the "wise choice of many alternatives", or is it simply what we have ended up with?
Archibald MacLeish once said, "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice." Wil education and those in it ever have the freedom to develop and create alternatives to the current model. Will we be free to pursue the The High-Involvement Company or the Global-Competitor Company, as described by O' Toole, or a hybrid of the two, or even something not yet discovered?
As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”
Robert Alan Black Ph.D. lists 32 Traits of Creative People.
I wonder if these might not make an interesting framework for a report card. Call it the report of the future, or Report Card 2.0.
Imagine the curriculum that would have to be created to generate evidence of the student's proficiency of these 32 traits. Imagine the learning opportunities that students would need to be afforded to measure their proficiency in these traits.
It could completely change education in some very important and fundamental ways.
Creator and Developer of E.I--EducatationInnovation
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