Sitting in Timeout

Looks like Steve Jobs threw a hand grenade into the discussion at the Texas Public Education Reform Foundation’s Statewide Summit. From eSchool News:

According to Jobs, no amount of technology can hope to improve schools, until principals and superintendents have the ability to make personnel decisions independent of union oversight. If schools really want to perform like businesses, Jobs said, the first step is for administrators to start acting more like CEOs, and less like bureaucrats.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them (sic) that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked. “I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Aware that his remarks were likely to cause a stir among many in the audience, Jobs later said: “Apple just lost some business in this state, I’m sure.”

Thing is, he’s partially right. Steve Jobs doesn’t seem like a school voucher branding, union killing, conservative who’s trying to dismantle the public education system. I say he’s partially right because unions tend to gum up the works in terms of creating change where efficiency is needed in a system like our public schools. But unions also protect their teachers who are wide open to visceral attacks from bureaucrats and the public at large. Something wrong with our kids? Blame the teachers.

If we spent less time crapping on teachers and more time on providing a work environment that the supremely talented wanted to spend their time in, unions wouldn’t have the level of perceived control that they do now. What freshly graduated kid wants to slog away at a low paying gig while being the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with our kids?

At the same time, teachers need to stick their neck out and put some real thought into their craft. They are far too isolated in their classrooms and as a result, no best practices get shared and their instruction suffers greatly. If you drink the research kool-aid, great instruction is the single most effective strategy to students learning a thing or two.

Seth Godin asks the question -

…now that a professor can boil down complex topics to vivid videos, why aren’t tens of thousands of professors scrambling to do this?

The reason more people aren’t scrambling to do this is because

1. There is no demand within the institution to present the material in this fashion.
2. This is damn good and obviously took time,effort and true passion for the subject matter to present it in such a polished fashion.

This video encapsulates everything Will and Dave are preaching about what Web 2.0 can do for the classroom. Everything that they have been blogging about can be boiled down to this video. That is real teaching.

Dave asks the question…

What happens when the the field you are studying in college changes so dramatically in less than four years that you find yourself with a degree that is completely useless?

What’s the point of college in a world that changing that fast?

Sorry, but the topics covered in a classic education in school should be fairly timeless. Unless you are going to some technical university to get a specific certification, I don’t see how the fundamentals of philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, etc. become obsolete. In fact, even computer science fundamentals are quite enduring. The database driving this very blog is based on a relational algebra which was fully codified in 1970.

Then there are those who think universities teach us “how to learn”. When colleges start teaching students “how to learn” then they are likely to enjoy the mediocrity of our K-12 institutions. Teaching another human being “how to learn” is like a fish teaching its offspring how to swim. We already know how to learn as we already know how to take in breath. The point of college is to expose the mind to ideas with the expectation that students will contribute to the overall body of knowledge. If K-12 gets that radical, well, we might be on to something.

Just sayin’.

Eric Sink provides a great post for us geeks who are working to serve a larger market outside our personal communities. We learned this the hard way as we set out to provide educators a “Web 2.0″ish environment for developing curriculum. Our early users got excited about the demo. In practice, however, much of our time was spent orienting end users (teachers) to fundamentals of browsers and using the Internet as a tool for creating content. Point is, we saw huuuuuge opportunity to use a bunch of the new technologies to help classrooms. But our assumptions came from inside our boundaries, not our users’ communities. A lesson well learned. Thanks, Ian, for making me aware of this post.

Will’s post describes the disruptive nature of technology in other disciplines such as music, journalism and politics and how these are creating a “perfect storm” for K-12 schooling. I have to disagree. Sure, the Internet provides a platform that allows us to access information at will from almost anywhere. But are these technologies really changing the way we behave?

Will brings up politics and that is a good example. I will agree that there was a “perfect storm” that mowed down the prevailing political power during the November 2006 elections. But that storm brewed as a result of example after example of poor governing that ultimately pissed off the majority of Americans. Sure, these examples were chronicled and debated in web blogs but this would have happened without the Internet thanks to TV, radio, and print media. The majority of us still don’t vote, the power in our county coalesces into two political parties, and money still controls the agenda. No amount of blogging will change that. In fact, much of journalism today trends toward punditry as entertainment. That being said, the Web can “break” stories much faster and get the storm spinning.

There is tons of great information on the Web today. Information that spreads virally, yes. But our schools are not going to transform because of a so-called perfect storm of easily accessed online materials. That’s not a recipe for brewing the storm. The ingredients are going to come from outside the world of education. They will be in the form of global market pressures that threaten the average American’s ability to consume. Outsourcing is a good example and you only have to talk to a steelworker a textile worker or a programmer to understand that the world is radically different.

What might be an even more combustive ingredient is to threaten American companies ability to innovate due to our struggle to graduate students with fundamental skills in communication, math and science. Combine this with the greased wheels of free trade and hysterical responses to immigration and we will see more innovation outside our country.

My point is, the ingredients for change in our schools is not going to be inherent in the Web technologies themselves. Pressure from outside the schools will create the storm. When someone comes up with a formula by which a school can provide an affordable alternative for parents to send their students to learn, and provides a quality place for an educator who wants to ply her craft to do so, we might see some radical change. This most likely won’t happen until the generational shift in teachers happens when all the boomers retire en-masse. We’re still 5 years out. Time to start planning.

Unfortunately, our proposal for the NECC 2007 conference was declined:

The NECC 2007 Program Committee has completed its review of this year’s
proposal submissions, and we regret to inform you that your proposal(s) were
not accepted for inclusion in this year’s program. Please find the status of
your submission(s) below:

Collaborative Curriculum Development on the Internet (Poster)
Declined

We had intended to show how online curriculum management tools could be used to allow teachers and administrators build a curriculum from the ground up or implement a curriculum more efficiently. We still intend to attend since this year, NECC is in our backyard of Atlanta.

Ah, now I understand. The simplest approach (off the top of my head) would be to parse and rearrange the underlying HTML generated by TiddlyWiki into the XML format required by Timeline to display events. That shouldn’t be a huge deal especially with some nifty XSL transformations (although XPath queries give me a headache).

And TiddlyWiki does cause the brain cells to jostle around when pondered by server side programmers like me.

Tom presents us with an opportunity to create a helpful little application combining Timeline and TiddlyWiki. Not exactly sure what this application would do but, boy, do I appreciate the reference to Timeline. This is exactly what I’ve wanted to build into BetterClassroom to provide administrators a birdseye view of curriculum implementation (lesson plans and learning goals) in their schools. If a school were to use the backwards planning concept and our Learning Goals feature, we could use Timeline to present goal/objective-oriented lesson plans and assessment to a curriculum coach, department chair or administrator.

Not sure what Tom has up his sleeve but that would be a simple way for students or teachers to develop content (TiddlyWiki) and then track it over the course of multiple semesters (Timeline).

Good stuff. Tom, I’d be happy to take a look at what you had in mind. No need for whuffie, just cool software for educators. Back to the BetterClassroom laboratory.

This post contains a wonderful poem on the joy of carpentry. Anything that involves skill or craft is done better when we take our time and eliminate the hope of finishing sooner. I love the idea of that. It homes because lately I have been trying to do too much, too soon. I’ve slowed down my driving and wouldn’t you know, my time to work seems to have gotten faster and my stress level is monumentally lower. The next step is to approach the development of BetterClassroom with the same attitude.

Okay, now we’re cooking! Yep, I am an outsider in that I am not a classroom teacher but this is how we get things done as entrepreneurs. The fact that the administration didn’t hold them back gives me all the more hope that there is some independence being exercised in education today. Even better that this is being done in Camilla, GA. We city-dwelling hotshots should take notice of the innovation coming out of a small town while our city schools which are mired in stifling bureacracy.

The great thing about what Vicki is doing is her mindset. The term “teacherpreneurs” does more to shatter the typical stereotype of a classroom teacher and really punches a hole into the idea that real change is going to come from an administrative decree at the district level (or federal NCLB). There are far too many people looking to cover their rearends (considering the hefty salaries at all levels of adminsitration here in Atlanta, I can’t blame them).

This begs the question - how rare is the teacherpreneur?