Cathy Davidson’s latest book on education for the 21st century is a big hit.  Here, Tina Barseghian of Mind/Shift interviews Cathy and highlights some of her key recommendations for shaping future learners.

by Tina Barseghian / Mind/Shift / 19 August 2011

When most of us were deciding what to major in at college, the word Google was not a verb. It wasn’t anywhere close to being conceived at all. Neither was Wikipedia or the iPhone or YouTube. We made decisions about our future employment based on what we knew existed at the time. We would become educators, journalists, lawyers, marketing reps, engineers.

Fast forward a couple of decades (or more) and we see that the career landscape has changed so drastically that jobs need new definitions. Social media strategist, app developer, mobile web engineer?

Some of us could ask ourselves if we would have embarked upon our current careers had we predicted how the Internet would revolutionize every part of our lives? It’s hard to say, but when it comes to preparing our kids for what’s ahead, Cathy Davidson has a few ideas. The author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking), who’s also a professor at Duke University, believes that, in light of the fact that “65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet,” we should cast aside our fear of technology, and prepare our school-aged kids with important skills, both in technical ways and other less tangible ways.

To read more…

Image Source: article (official book cover)

This article provides a good example of the tech permissive position on the question of whether to bring tech into the classroom, and particularly social and web technologies.  The educators interviewed–who practice in West Coast Jewish day schools–provide sound perspectives on the kinds of conditions and limits that make this a positive practice; they also given a good sense of the value these technologies bring to their students’ learning, including an often overlooked dimension of tech literacy: ethics.  If teaching technology ethics (especially social media use) to students is of interest, see also this impassioned blog post by Michael Redfearn advocating for it in response to the reactionary commentary on the part social media have played in recent events (“Our youth need education in technology ethics,” TheRecord.com, 13 August 2011).

Using Laptops Offers Lessons in Ethics of Technology

by Ryan E. Smith / JewishJournal.com / 17 August 2011

Big Brother is watching at Milken Community High School. At least, he’s watching your computer.

For two years, the Bel Air school has required every seventh- and ninth-grader to come with a laptop so that it can integrate technology into the classroom. This fall, Milken will install a program, LanSchool, in each computer, which will allow administrators to see what’s taking place on every screen, according to Jason Ablin, head of school.

That means they could know when a student is looking at Facebook instead of their French assignment or when someone’s checking out Lady Gaga instead of Lady Macbeth.

“I can go on my computer at any moment and look at any laptop in the school,” Ablin said.

This software is part of a larger debate taking place on how best to balance the incredible educational power of laptops and tablet devices with worries about their possible misuse and power to distract.

To read more…

Image Source: article (Students at Milken Community High School working on an Apple laptop computer. Photo courtesy Milken Community High School.)

Should the concern over inappropriate relationships between some teachers and students mean that all informal, unmonitored interactions between the majority be banned, either by law (as is now the case in Missouri) or school policy (as is increasingly common throughout the U.S.)?  The coverage of this debate (the article here is no exception) often leaves out a third option that many teachers and schools systems favor as a solution, that of secure and transparent social networks within schools.  These types of networks attempt to create an environment in which administrators and parents in some cases can view online interactions that take place around the classroom even when outside of it.

by Allan Scher Zagier / Yahoo News (Associated Press) / 5 August 2011

As they prepare lesson plans for fall, teachers across Missouri have an extra chore before the new school year begins: purging their Facebook friend lists to comply with a new state law that limits their contact with students on social networks.

The law was proposed after an Associated Press investigation found 87 Missouri teachers had lost their licenses between 2001 and 2005 because of sexual misconduct, some of which involved exchanging explicit online messages with students.

But many teachers are protesting the new restrictions, complaining the law will hurt their ability to keep in touch with students, whether for classroom purposes, personal problems or even emergencies.

To read more…

Image Source: Facebook logo

Stephen Downes, a Senior Research with the National Research Council of Canada, reviews The Edupunk’s Guide by Anya Kamenetz on his personal Half an Hour blog (8 August 2011).

The guide is an e-book distributed for free via web during Summer 2011.  Per the author, “The primary goal is to reach low-income students and potential students to help them find alternative paths to a credential using online and open resources.  The secondary goal is to reach educators and administrators interested in incorporating the latest technology, social media, and collaborative learning into their approaches in order to cut costs while improving learning, socialization, and accreditation both inside and outside the classroom.”  It is the first book to have been sponsored by The Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation, a major player in promoting the transformation of education through innovative applications of digital technologies.

I have now had the chance to read The Edupunks’ Guide and can now form some opinions based on what I’ve seen. And if I were forced to summarize my critique in a nutshell, it would be this. Edupunk, as described by the putative subculture, is the idea of ‘learning by doing it yourself’. The Edupunks’ Guide, however, describes ‘do-it-yourself learning’. The failure to appreciate the difference is a significant weakness of the booklet.

[...]

It’s *hard* to learn this way; in fact, it’s *harder* than going to college. The educational system as it is currently structured is intended to offer a set of short cuts – access to qualified practitioners, creation of custom peer networks, guided and scaffolded practice – for a certain price. The system isn’t (as suggested in Kamenetz’s booklet) about imposing sets of restrictions and making things more expensive. It’s about offering the greatest reach in the shortest time. It allows those willing and able to invest themselves full-time to master the basics of a discipline relatively quickly, so they can obtain employment and begin the real learning they will need to undertake in order to become expert.

And this is what Kamenetz simply misunderstands about traditional learning – that the greatest of the ‘bucket of benefits’ isn’t provided by the college at all, but by the student. It is this full-time *immersion* into a discipline that helps someone *become* the sort of person who can, over time, be an expert in that discipline. You can’t just get the ‘benefits’ offered by a college and somehow ‘acquire’ an education without that commitment, without that immersion, without that dedication. Kamenetz’s version of DIY education depicts it as a quick and inexpensive short-cut — the exact opposite of what it actually is.

To read more… For background on the Edupunk branch of the Makers movement, see here.

Image Source: author’s blog

A new study confirms what has long been asserted in debates over NCLB:  that individual state standards for student learning proficiencies differ from those used by NAEP, which determine an average of 10% of state school budgets from “school improvement grants.”  The study provides just one more piece of evidence that NCLB is broken.  But what is the solution?  Is it a reform of NCLB or a new direction altogether?  Should all students across states be held to a national standard, or should such summative testing be replaced with other measures of competency as it develops over time?

by Joy Resmovits / Huffington Post / 10 August 2011

The United States has 50 distinct states, which means there are 50 distinct definitions of “proficient” on standardized tests for students.

For example, an Arkansas fourth-grader could be told he is proficient in reading based on his performance on a state exam. But if he moved across the border to Missouri, he might find that’s no longer true, according to a new report.

“This is a really fundamental, interesting question about accountability reform in education,” Jack Buckley, commissioner of the government organization that produced the report, told reporters on a Tuesday conference call.

The report, written by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, found that the definition of proficiency on standardized tests varies widely among states, making it difficult to assess and compare student performance. The report looked at states’ standards on exams and found that some states set much higher bars for students proficiency in particular subjects.

To read more…

Image Source: article (original source US Department of Education IES NCES)

Interactive technology and choice are among two of the five things students say they want from their education.

by staff reports / eSchool News / 28 July 2011

With so many education stakeholders debating the needs of today’s schools, student voices aren’t always heard when it comes to what they want from their education.

And while it’s important to note what businesses would like to see in their future employees, at the end of the day it really comes down to the students themselves.

We recently asked eSchool News readers: “What’s the one thing you hear most often from students about what they want in school?”

To read more…

Image Source: article

In Digital Learning Now!,  a key document for framing digital learning policy, The Foundation for Excellence in Education (December 2010) assumes that digital tools will give learners a boost in their learning outcomes in addition to saving schools on costs.  Advocates for outsourcing and computerizing evaluation make the same claims in Young’s piece, below, and yet advocates admit there remains a core resistance in the field of higher education.  What will it take to overcome that resistance?  And, even more importantly, whatever the cost burden of quality education, should it be overcome?

by Jeffrey R. Young / The Chronicle of Higher Education / 7 August 2011

The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don’t worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That’s the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.

“They think like assessors, not professors,” says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university’s cadre of graders. “The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don’t know them. They don’t know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students’ work.”

To read more…

Image Source:  Kristin Murphy for The Chronicle (article)

Recent widespread cheating scandals in far-flung districts (Washington DC, Atlanta) among teachers and principals have been taken as a sign by critics of imposed national standardized testing that this method of discerning educational effectiveness is flawed.  This article explores the unfolding of the Atlanta scandal from one teacher’s perspective as a means of getting to the controversy around the method itself.

Cheating Report Confirms Teacher’s Suspicions

by Paul Frisch / CNN / 8 August 2011

Julie Rogers-Martin had started to doubt her teaching skills.

After 30 years in education, working mostly with underprivileged inner-city students, Rogers-Martin felt she had developed a level of competence and professionalism that can only be gained from hard work and experience.

Her superiors at East Lake Elementary School in the Atlanta Public Schools system where she taught for six years seemed to agree. Administrators held her up as a model, praising her classroom management skills and use of technology and showcasing her class to parents and administrators, she says.

But between 2007 and 2009 a strange thing started happening: Some of her colleagues’ students began to outperform her students on the state’s standardized test.

To read more…

Image Source: article

Many educators and analysts have noted that there is a lot of empty space between adopting the new common standards and testing students to gauge mastery of those standards. Now, we are starting to see efforts to fill that space (think curriculum materials, professional development).

Last night, a set of draft content frameworks landed. Billed as part of the “bridge” between standards and assessments, the frameworks were issued by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of the two big groups of states that have Race to the Top money to design common tests for the new standards in math and English/language arts.

To read more…

Image Source: www.parcconline.org

Unschooling is a movement to personalize children’s education radically.  Children determine what they want to learn, and adults (without required licensure or professional educational backgrounds) serve as guides who provide them with resources for how to go about learning it.  Unschooling may occur within home school or private school settings, the best known of which is the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.

by Jacque Wilson / CNN / 3 August 2011

Six-year-old Karina Ricci doesn’t ever have a typical day. She has no schedule to follow, no lessons to complete.

She spends her time watching TV, doing arts and crafts or practicing the piano. She learned to spell by e-mailing with friends; she uses math concepts while cooking dinner.

Everything she knows has been absorbed “organically,” according to her dad, Dr. Carlo Ricci. She’s not just on summer break — this is her life year round as an at-home unschooler.

To read more…

Image Source: article (site depicted: Sudbury Valley School)

Educational testing expert Bill Tucker provides five additional means to assure digital learning quality to the three presented by Rick Hess in the recent Fordham Institute report.  “Digital learning,” Hess writes, “poses an immense dilemma when it comes to ensuring quality. One of the great advantages of online learning is that it makes ‘unbundling’ school provision possible—that is, it allows children to be served by providers from almost anywhere, in new and more customized ways.  But taking advantage of all the opportunities online learning offers means that there is no longer one conventional ‘school’ to hold accountable…Finding ways to define, monitor, and police quality in this brave new world is one of the central challenges in realizing the potential of digital learning.“  The report and its commentators, such as Tucker, suggest that the discussion of digital learning has shifted from whether or not it is beneficial–and so should be supported given a limited pool of time and money–to how it can be assessed to help create the most beneficial learning experiences.

by Bill Tucker / The Quick & the Ed / 27 July 2011

On Wednesday, the Fordham Institute released “Quality Control in K-12 Digital Learning: Three (Imperfect) Approaches,” the first in a series of six papers exploring critical issues in digital learning. Written by Rick Hess, the paper recognizes the importance of efforts to ensure that new digital learning endeavors meet a high bar for quality. And, it offers a helpful framework, outlining and describing the pros and cons of three different quality control approaches: the regulation of inputs, outcome-based accountability, and market-based mechanisms. Perhaps the best part of the paper is its realistic recognition that there is no magic recipe to ensure quality. We need a blend of strategies and a willingness to adopt better tools as they become available, not only for digital learning, but also for traditional, place-based learning and all of the blended learning options in-between.

To read more…

Image Source: stock.xchng (image by clix)

Recent reports on youth and media have made clear that minority youth are using media heavily, including the new media.  Their use is primarily entertainment / leisure oriented.  The question for educators is how to turn this media play and technology competence to educational ends.

by Sarah Jackson / Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning (MacArthur Foundation)/ 26 July 2011

In an interview at KQED’s MindShift, author S. Craig Watkins says that despite tough economic times, teaching students, especially those in schools in low-income communities to use digital media, is more important now than ever.

“My concern is that as schools are now struggling with budget cuts, digital media and digital literacy is looked [at] as a luxury as opposed to a necessity,” Watkins told MindShift. “I understand the enormous pressure that teachers and administrators are under, especially in the public school system. But we need to build a more compelling narrative that digital literacy is no longer a luxury but a necessity.”

Watkins is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Texas at Austin who has written about the “participation gap” and the ways that black and Latino youth are embracing mobile technology.

To read more:

Image Source: article (photographer: Jeremy Noble)

In this commentary, Paul Tough gets tough on the traditional reform movement, which advocates for changes to education within the existing public school paradigm (such as by rewarding teachers for excellence and reducing class sizes).  He claims the evidence shows traditional reform has not been effective, and that traditional reform advocates have offered excuses instead of results.

by Paul Tough / New York Times / 7 July 2011

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you’d often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: “No excuses.” For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels. Reform-minded school leaders took the opposite approach, insisting that students in the South Bronx should be held to the same standards as kids in Scarsdale. Amazingly enough, those high expectations often paid off, producing test results at some low-income urban schools that would impress parents in any affluent suburb.

Ten years later, you might think that reformers would be feeling triumphant. Spurred in part by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, many states have passed laws reformers have long advocated: allowing for more charter schools, weakening teachers’ tenure protections, compensating teachers in part based on their students’ performance. But in fact, the mood in the reform camp seems increasingly anxious and defensive.

To read more…

Image Source: edinreview.com