If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow. John Dewey

Welcome to the material for our technology night.

Instructions:
The material below is the required watching (what a cool concept, eh) for our class meeting on Oct. 16. That material can be watched at any time, but if nothing else you can use the time we would have been in class to complete the materials below. My guess is that the material will take you somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours. The material is organized into 4 sections: 1) Globalization, 2) Innovation, 3) Web 2.0 and 4) Twenty-First Century Schooling. In each section, there is a written lead in and perhaps a blog post or two to read. This introduction is followed by a few videos that should help to illustrate my points and also put forth new ideas. It really doesn't matter to me which order you do them in, but be sure to come back to Twenty-First Century Schooling at the end as I want you to be thinking about what all this means for education at the end of this. As you are going through this material, be thinking about what specific improvements could be made to schools as at the end, I will be asking for some feedback on that question. I have also started a general discussion/reaction thread at the bottom for your other thoughts, so be sure to post some reactions in those threads. Okay, let's get started.


Globalization

So, you have heard this term before, right? We all have some vague sense of what this means, but we have probably never stopped to try to gauge it. Just how global is this globalization thing? Most of our lives revolve around issues and people within a 20 mile radius of us, right? We are not chatting away all day with folks on other continents, right?

Well, first we need to realize that globalization is nothing new. The world has been slowly globalizing for millinia. Alexander the Great was an expert in globalization, for instance, as were a multitude of other people and societies, some long forgotten. So, this is not something that just started. What is different these days is the pace of globalization. The pace of globalization has been picking up rapidly during the past couple hundred years as the West entered the industrial age and started to produce surplus labor and goods. These surpluses were translated into activities that were meant to expand markets and supply chains rapidly ... the age of exploration was born. After you explore, if you want to keep your presence there you need to colonize. Thus, a global arms race was born in Europe in the middle of the last millennium. The British were especially apt in this race (even though they started slow) and were the first to establish a global empire (pictured). You still hear the phrase "the sun never sets on the British Empire" and it is something the British are especially fond of. One byproduct of this global arms race was the exportation of language. Thus, 7 of the 15 largest languages by number of speakers are European based. This may not sound like a lot, but look at that map. How many Englands do you think could fit inside China? How many Portugals?

Alright, let's fast forward to the twentieth century. From Columbus' time to the Lincolns globalization was continuing, but at a somewhat steady rate as technology advances were steady, but not substantial. But, within the 20th Century things would start to change a lot more quickly. The inventions started to build and build and build and build. What used to take weeks, took days, and now takes hours all within the span of a single century (see the Innovation section below). In 1900, a president could send a message across the Atlantic one letter at a time with a code Samuel Morse invented ... in 2008, anyone can have unlimited conversations instantaneously with video for free. That's a dramatic change and that is what is fueling globalization.

The day I understood Globalization was a fall day in 2002. I was just starting law school and my wife and I had bought a new home. That night I had planned on buying $500 worth of lumber to build a patio in our backyard when my wife called on the phone, crying; she had lost her accounting job in Saint Louis. She had lost it to an accountant in ... India. The accounting firms in the U.S. have become so good at outsourcing that now they are advising others how to do the same. Needless to say, the patio was never built. Something that would have been unthinkable to my parent's generation just happened to me and my family. Globalization is not something distant or foreign ... its personal, its real.

We could go on and on about Globalization, but I'll spare you. If you want to get a real sense of it, pick up Tom Friedman's seminal work on the topic, The World is Flat (although The Lexus and the Olive Tree is pretty good as well and more directly addresses globalization issues). Anyway, to get a good sense of globalization and what it can mean for schools, watch the following video produced by an educator in Denver and a professor in Minnesota (that never met in person).

Did You Know 2.0

Innovations in Information

What is driving globalization is innovation. And we are talking some pretty serious innovation here. Let's pick up where we left off earlier with 1900. Here are a series of inventions that had major impacts on how we communicate and how we interact with the world just in the past 110 years. This list is culled from this bigger list:

1901: First radio transmission across Atlantic
1903: Wright Brothers fly the first airplane.
1908: First Model T rolls off assembly line.
1910: Edison creates a talking motion picture.
1916: Radios that receive multiple signals invented.
1926: Liquid Fueled Rockets
1927: A television as we know it is created.
1930: Jet Engine
1932: Polaroid Photography
1935: Tape Recorder using magnetic recording
1937: Photocopier
1939: Sikorsky creates the first modern helicopter
1941: Software controlled computers.
1945: Atomic Bomb
1947: AT&T create the idea for mobile phones
1955: Fiber-optics
1958: Lasers
1959: Microchip
1962: First Videogame
1967: Calculators
1968: RAM
1972: Wordprocessing
1978: Spreadsheets
1979: Cellphones
1981: Personal Computers (IBM)
1990: World Wide Web (www)

And these are just the hard technology innovations (we'll talk about the soft technology innovations in the next section). These hardware improvements are substantial. To go from this ... to this in less than 100 years is the kind of thing that fundamentally alters the world. Of course, all the things in that list above are all tangible things ... things we can visualize easily. But, the pace of innovation in non-tangible hardware areas is perhaps even more dramatic. The following video is a great explanation of how innovation operates in today's world. We invent something, and then we exponentially improve it. That word "exponentially," I don't use that lightly.

Understanding Exponential Growth and how that Affects Technology

*note 1: It gets better after the first 5 min. - the guy is a little dry but the ideas are very powerful
** note 2: as I am sure Sarah could tell us, straight lines on logarithmic graphs are exponential (i.e. it is like the curved line you are used to seeing with exponential growth).
*** note 3: If you liked this, he has some "Mindblowing Books."

The point that I think needs stressing from that video is not any one particular technology. Yes, sequencing the human genome is great. Yes, doubling computing capacity frequently is helpful. (Yes, nanotechnology and virtual reality sort of scare me too). But those are just markers in the larger phenomenon that is occurring here. The most important exponential curve is technology itself. Our pace of human innovation is an exponential curve. With some certainty we know that we will create more, faster in the future, just as we have created more, faster than in the past.

One particular class of innovations, though, I want to spend a little more time on, and that is innovations in Information. When history looks back at us, I think the thing they are going to remember is not our splitting the atom, not our DNA sequencing, and not even whatever the heck comes out of CERN (although "the Grid" is pretty important). What we are going to be remembered for in my eyes is the Information Revolution, much as our predecessors were remembered for the Industrial Revolution. What we have done with information is no less significant than what they did with machines. Explaining the conversion is sort of simple, but extremely profound. In essence, the difference is paper. We have relied on paper for thousands of years and before that we relied on other substances such as stone on a wall. The point is that we could record things, but that we could only record them in a tangible location. Thus, in order to re-access this information, we had to be in the right tangible location (and understand how to use it - this is very funny). We could create more tangible locations, and Gutenberg was really helpful in that regard, but we couldn't leave the paper behind.

Now we can.

We have fundamentally changed the way information works to the point that has become what we are known for ... we are living in the "Information Age," pushed by "Information Technology" since the "Information Revolution." So, what is this "Information Revolution." I'll let Michael Wesch, one of the great thinkers of our day and the source of several of the videos on this page, explain:

Information R/evolution

By all accounts the revolution is just beginning, but it has already fundamentally altered how we communicate as humans and as educators. Do you know any schools these days that don't use e-mail? When is the last time you wrote out a paper long-hand? You literally cannot get a diploma or high school degree in this country anymore without understanding and heavily utilizing digital information. We are less than 30 years into the information revolution and already it has fundamentally altered society ... and there is no going back.



Web 2.0


One particular aspect of the Information Revolution that bears a closer examination is the Web. The Web is really, really new. As in, when I was born, it was born (literally) and it really didn't take off and become a functioning member of society until I was in high school when Netscape was popular (remember that icon). The Web and I (and you) are growing together.

The Web in its initial form was a fairly boring place. At the beginning it was all just scientists sharing information at projects going on at CERN and Fermilab and other places where egg-heads hang out. It was more like an intranet than an internet as there was really no easy way to move around. You had to know what you were looking for before you could find it, and even when you did, you had to know how to bring up the information. This changed when Netscape Navigator was born (little history factoid here ... Netscape was created at the University of Illinois under a grant created by the Gore Bill, which is why Al Gore supposedly said he created the Internet - which might have lost him the presidency to one Mr. George W. Bush).

Anyway, in its early stages the Web was useful, but not fun. In the 1990's companies slowly got on board with static websites that provided information about themselves, but not much else. Some schools even started to create webpages during this period. No one really knew what the Web was useful for yet, but they knew it was important and they didn't want to be left on the outside looking in. There were a couple problems with Web 1.0, though, that limited its capabilities. First, it was written in a fairly complicated language, HTML. HTML language itself is really not all that complicated, but the complicated part was explaining to people why it was useful to spend time learning it ... so no one bothered but a few nerds, which is why they could charge a whole lot of money. Second, it was static. It was static because no one was really talking to each other. The conversations on the Web were one-way conversations. The company told you about themselves and that was it.

Web 2.0 solved both of those problems and in the process it taught the rest of us what the Web was useful for. First, it solved the HTML problem by creating editors, such as the one I am using to write this page. The HTML is not gone, it is just that the editor translates what I type onto the screen into HTML when I click "save." I don't need to know HTML, the computer knows it for me and does the translation; just as one would translate French to Russian it translates my screen within the editor to HTML. Second, now that everyone didn't need to know complicated codes, people could start to talk to each other. And they did ... a lot ... about super crazy things you wouldn't think anyone would want to talk about. And, now that people were using this thing, they really were not all that satisfied with just text. They wanted video. And pictures. And maps. And encyclopedias. And they wanted to buy stuff. And sell stuff. And share stuff. They wanted to talk about baseball, and politics, and and even love. And they wanted to do it all locally. They wanted to do and share whatever they could do and share offline and companies began to develop to meet each of those needs.

So, while all this was going on, the Web began to explode, as you can imagine. Pre Web 2.0 you can't really imagine there to be a need for information about nose hair trimmers. Now, Google pulls up 200,000 hits on nose hair trimmers, including 760 pictures of nose hair trimmers. That's a crazy amount of information, but that's what happened ... and all within less than a decade.

So, we had to figure out a couple of things. First, we had to figure out how we could get all these people contributing to the web. The editors were a helpful invention, but without a structure to place them in, they didn't really serve a purpose. So, we started creating lots of ways for people to contribute. In Plain English (click on any of the following and get a video explanation) we created: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, Podcasting, Photosharing, Twitter, and lots more. And then we needed ways to deal with all this information. We needed ways to make it easier to read and organize and find and make it work together and make it work for us ...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Then, once everyone started participating in the conversation and helping to do the work of organizing, finding, sharing, etc ... we started to work together, a lot. Instead of just one person writing, sharing, organizing ... we started to work in groups to do all that stuff. Its more fun, it gets more done, and it starts to create a sort of community and communities allow for reputations and respect and other things people naturally want. And, people were willing to work together to get these things. No one is paid to edit wikipedia, but a community exists nonetheless that regulates it. It is just not regulated with dollars. It is regulated with responsibility.

We Think

Twenty-First Century Education


So, what's this all mean? What does it mean for you personally? What does it mean for your own kids? What does it mean for parents? And, since we are all paid by local communities to take care of their futures ... what does it mean for them? How does it impact the community's children in school? What are we supposed to be doing for those kids.

Well, let's start with the easy part. We have seen massive changes to our society in the recent past. We have not seen the same kinds of changes at schools. (If you're Mr. Winkle, I guess that is a good thing).

Maybe to understand how we can help our students, we need to know our students a little better. Let's take a couple of looks at students today, both higher ed and K-12.

A Vision of Students Today (Higher Ed)




A Vision of K-12 Students Today

So, our students are asking for more. Isn't it at least a little embarrassing that education has accepted as a general principle that our students will know more about technology than our teachers? Why do we accept that? We have accepted that things are moving so fast that we simply cannot keep up and that students who grow up with it will naturally be better at it than we are. That's either one of the dumbest or scariest thing I have ever heard! Technology may seem like it is moving fast, but wait until a decade from now (remember we are dealing with exponential growth here).

So, teachers have to do better ... and they can.

A Brave New World-Wide-Web.

But, ultimately, we are facing more systemic challenges than just encouraging teachers to blog. If we are having to redesign information ... don't you think we might have to redesign schools? Information is our stock and trade, is it not? And if information is fundamentally different, maybe we need to be fundamentally different too.

But here, I don't have the answers. There is no instructional video for remolding the education system. Everyone is so busy catching up that no one is thinking ahead ... yet, anyway.

Your challenge as school leaders is to come up with answers for your school in the near term and help all of us solve the more systemic challenges in the long term. We need to be asking questions like whether standardized testing is going to help kids in the 21st Century. We need to ask whether it is feasible to put a laptop in every child's hands. We need to ask whether it would be beneficial to consider P-16 (or P-20) structures. There are lots of questions and it would be nice if we could have a decent discussion about those questions this week in the forum at the bottom of the page.

In the meantime, though, let me leave you with this. While there might be lots of questions and the whole thing might be a little scary, I would posit that there are already a lot of things we know we could do better. Take creativity, for instance. We know we could do better there and that would help drive innovation and personal development and lots of other beneficial stuff. Why don't we have schools that foster more creativity? Perhaps we have not had it explained to us like this before (you will enjoy this one) ...

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow. John Dewey