Bill's blog

Over at Edsurge, there is a post up now titled "Incentivizing Innovation In Education; or A Role For For Profits in Education." The original title of the post was "Incentivizing Innovation in Education; or, How I Kicked Anthony Cody’s Ass Six Ways to Sunday" but the current version has an updated title and an updated editor's note. I captured a screenshot of the original via google's cache; here is a screenshot with the updated title for people to compare the difference. The edited version up now makes no mention of the earlier version, or why any edits were necessary, although it is discussed in comments.

The post on Edsurge is instructive, as it provides insight into one view of how people are trying to profit from the educational market. There are many things to disagree with; for reasons of time, I limited myself to the second paragraph, as it contains some common misconceptions, and common techniques used to spread those misconceptions. This paragraph is quoted below, with commentary inline.

Some bloggers are quick to point to the evils of the “profit motive” and the dangers of politics pushing technology for technology’s sake; but those same bloggers are often quick to praise new apps that they find particularly creative and helpful.

No. Making a profit isn't evil. Politics pushing technology for technology's sake is just stupid, and while the edtech space is rife with stupidity, stupidity is banal. The problem here is that you have companies that lobby for policy that feeds their profit. You have educators in positions with decision making authority feeding from the same trough. And, these companies have great marketing that perpetuates the narrative that these companies are acting in the benefits of children, instead of in the interest of their profit motive. It's disingenuous in a fairly sophisticated way, and that's a problem.

As to bloggers who fetishize apps without reflecting on their actual value, see the line above about the edtech world being rife with stupidity. It's an occupational hazard.

I say, you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have high-quality digital tools without the profit motive

Yes, you can. The price of Apache, that runs a good percentage of the web, is pretty darn good. Ditto for PHP, Javascript, Ruby, etc, etc,etc. Open source developers have been providing some high quality software meeting a variety of needs for over a decade.

And please don't misunderstand. There is nothing wrong with the profit motive. But the profit motive isn't the only thing that inspires greatness, just as profit isn't the only thing that defines success. If we limit ourselves at the outset to such an artifically narrow definition, we will miss and overlook opportunities.

(heck, you certainly can’t have that computer without the profit motive, and I imagine even the most ardent haters of private sector in the classroom would agree that a computer is a useful educational tool).

See Raspberry Pi.

This excerpt also combines a straw man with a false equivalency. Just about everyone supports the intelligent use of computers in the classroom. Attempting to equate liking computers in the classroom with tethering ourselves to a love of the profit motive is a stretch.

Additionally, calling people who disagree with you "ardent haters" is dishonest. Smart people can - and should - disagree. When a writer resorts to shrill hyperbole, it's designed to paint people who disagree with you into a corner. Techniques like this might allow you to score rhetorical points with those who aren't paying attention, but over time, keeping score is less important than an open approach to solving problems - and, an open approach doesn't discard valuable insight because of disagreements with the source.

Instead, what you need is the profit motive coupled with a truly transparent market filled with a multitude of options. Does this market exist yet in today’s educational landscape? Nope. But the way to get there is to promote the symbiotic relationship of schools and entrepreneurs, not to detract from it.

I agree that the market doesn't exist yet - in large part, because the "transparency" the author described gets buried under marketing copy and, in some cases, patents. But this piece also commits a common rhetorical crime: attempting to use a real scientific relationship (in this case, symbiosis) as a stand in for a lesser business relationship. These types of comparisons attempt to create a level of legitimacy that doesn't exist: schools and the market don't have a symbiotic relationship. The reality is, businesses need schools more than schools need businesses. If we put a good teacher and some good questions in the right environment, effective learning can happen, with minimal expense.

The piece is worth a full read, and although I disagree with much of it, I also believe that the author does sincerely care about making things that help more people learn better. But, success looks different for different people in different places, and the lens of competition - through which many VC funded companies view education - can often lead to decisions that sacrifice long term gains for short term profits.

Last night, Daniel Scibienski shared a graphic he created about using git to share lessons. This sparked a discussion about the merits of git to share lessons, and about whether curriculum is part of the solution, or a problem that needs to be eliminated. There's a fair amount of context that surrounds these questions; in this post, I'll dig into some of the gray areas that often get in the way of a complete discussion of these ideas.

Actual curriculum compared to the curriculum needed for the business plans

We need to separate actual curriculum from the current models of distributing curriculum, and the ways in which people are advocating curriculum should be used. Companies like Pearson lobby heavily on issues related to education policy; not surprisingly, when laws get written that shape what education should look like, Pearson has both a textbook and an assessment package ready to meet that "need." This is a polical and economic reality that needs to be addressed; blaming curriculum for this issue obscures the root causes of the problem.

Curriculum as a starting point, or curriculum as The One True Path

Viewing curriculum as a fixed, unchangeable entity that must be blindly followed is an unnecessarily narrow view. This view is common among some of the current corporate educational reform set; in general terms, people claim that using a common curriculum aligned to a common set of standards will address issues of equal access to a quality education. In reality, these boxed approaches help ensure a stagnant middle, and curriculum aligned to standards helps keep people tethered to a pedagogical approach targeted toward a lowest common denominator.

Curriculum as the gateway to the test

This is really a combination of the business needs of companies selling curriculum and assessments, and the legislated need to have curriculum that aligns with the Common Core standards in case students don't do well on the standardized test. If students don't do well on the standardized assessments that are acting as a proxy for measuring learning, there will be finger pointing and blame. If a school or district has been creative in how they approached curricular decisions, that choice will be seen as questionable (as opposed to questioning whether the standardized test is actually measuring things of value). Due to these external pressures, schools and districts have an incentive - born from a desire to minimize risk - to make conservative choices around curriculum.

Git as a lesson sharing tool

Git is awesome. It's an amazing tool for managing the code created by groups of developers, and it is incredibly useful for managing changes committed by groups of people over time. Additionally, Git is great at merging in changes from forks.

Github - for non-developers, probably the most visible public face of git - deserves a lot of credit for helping people see the power of adding a more visibly social element to coding. Github also deserves a lot of the credit for making the types of collaboration that occur among distributed development teams comprehensible and accessible to non-developer types.

But git as a lesson sharing tool works best as a metaphor than as an actual tool. Part of this is visual - even the best GUIs for git are daunting to less technical people - and part of this gets down to the actual features needed for sharing lessons.

When writing and managing code, having some tools to track and merge changes in is incredibly useful. However, when working with curriculum, we need to stop thinking of the curriculum as a fixed entity. When we free ourselves of that limitation, and view curriculum as a starting point that is never finished, then the need for use, re-use, continual editing, and easy distribution trump the need for automated revision merges. From a practical place, the ability to easily remix, modify, and redistribute mitigates the need for automated merging of changes back into the original piece of curriculum. Forking is a feature, and in a world where curriculum is not a box, we can make use of the ability to spread variety when the situation demands it.

But in the world of sharing curriculum, git works better as a model of sharing than as the tool that powers the sharing.

Can we just call them "plans"?

Maybe the terms "curriculum" and "lesson plan" have become too loaded in the current educational climate; maybe the damage has been done to the point where these terms are irretrievable.

There are some serious issues with how curriculum is distributed and created that make some incarnations of it unpalateable, and actually disruptive to types of learning that are not rote. But, done well, an open ended plan can provide structure that supports learners as they discover, and this type of curriculum will always be relevant. As we talk about what works, and what doesn't, we should focus on the habits that are effective - we need to think more about the verbs, and less about the labels.

Image Credit: The lesson pictured above is from Pamela Kennedy.

On April 3, 2010, Apple's iPad 1 started selling to the public. On September 19, 2012, iOS6 became available for download.

The kicker? iOS6 won't run on the iPad 1.

While the hardware of the iPad 1 is still plenty functional, the lack of even any basic security updates for web browsers and email programs (let alone any of the installed apps on these devices) make the iPad 1 obsolete after two years. From both an environmental place and a budgetary place, this enforced obsolescence is both wasteful and unnecessary.

So, for those of you who were wondering if iPads in schools were on a 2 year or a 3 year replacement cycle, you now have your answer. And for those of you planning on saving money on textbooks on iPads, make sure to update your spreadsheets with the cost of the new device.

Apple has created a system that strongly pushes device churn every 24 months. As schools evaluate the pros and cons of iPad programs, I hope that they take a look at the costs of device churn, and how that churn costs countless person hours in training, updating devices, dealing with bugs in Apple's configuration and management systems, and - most importantly - requires that programs take place within Apple's ecosystem, on hardware that a school purchases but Apple controls.

This is what happens when we cede control to a company that has a strong financial interest in creating the conditions that require us to buy new hardware. If Apple continued to support security releases for older versions of iOS, this would be less of an issue. But, given the closed nature of Apple's software distribution system for the iPad people with older devices are stuck.

Apple sells hardware, and they require that we use their hardware within an increasingly closed system. However, the notion that a perfectly good piece of hardware should be discarded every 24 months to accomodate the business needs of the manufacturer is absurd.

Schools and other learning organizations using Apple hardware need to remember that we are not just observers or consumers here. We can demand better, and demand more, and articulate a rationale against the hype cycle that would like us to believe that newer is better.

More importantly, we can't demand that our students be makers and creators when what we model is passive, unsustainable consumption of the means of production. As a teacher, how can you encourage students to take ownership of their work when their ability to access that work is tethered to a device over which they have limited control.

Maybe we could all protest down at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, provided we used an Android device to access google maps to get there: http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/ Or, reverting to iOS5 is another option. But, for the schools who have gone all in with iPad programs, it's hard to talk about these programs in anything but glowing terms, precisely because they cost so much money. And, for schools that are already neck-deep in iPad rollouts, do what you can to make your teacher professional development and curriculum technology-agnostic - this way, when the next thing comes along, your staff and students will be more nimble, and will have the skills and mindset to apply principles that help them learn, regardless of the technology they have in hand.

In Texas, a sophomore girl was spanked by her male vice principal. This is an awful event, and something that no one should have to go through as part of their schooling.

The girl - Taylor Santos - agreed to the beating rather than have an additional day of in-school suspension, and the girl's mother - Anna Jorgensen - agreed to it as well. Both mother and daughter thought that the beating would be administered by a woman.

When the mother saw the aftermath of the beating, and learned that it had been administered by a man, her feelings changed.

"I knew school policy was females swatted females, and males swatted males. If Taylor wanted that, I said that would be fine," Jorgenson told WFAA, adding that she was horrified when she saw the results of the spanking and learned of who did the swatting. "It looked almost like it had been burned and blistered, it was so bad," Jorgensen said of her daughter's behind.

And, of course, the cynic in me thinks that the only reason we are hearing about this is because the student is a white girl, and the person who beat her is an adult male. Visually, the power differential here is compelling, and it makes for television that fuels a sense of collective outrage. Unfortunately, kids get beat in schools frequently. We know that males, African-American students, Native American students, and students with disabilities are more likely to be beaten in school than other students. But we don't hear about this, and even congressional testimony doesn't seem to change things.

I want a television news story when any kid gets hit in school. I want to know their name, the person who hit them, the school they attend - all of it. I want this information publicly available and discoverable on the internet via search, so we can attach names and faces and identities and human stories to the statistics. I want people to be able to see the people who are hit in our schools under the guise of discipline, because I cannot believe that we would allow this to continue if more people knew more specifics.

It should never have happened to Taylor Santos, and it should never happen to anyone else.

Image Credit: The photo in this blog post is a still from the video posted on the WFAA web site.

The biggest gift of the iPad to the education space has nothing to do with the iPad, and everything to do with the mediocre tools to manage a fleet of iPads.

Over the last several weeks, as schools have returned to session, there have been a slew of discussions about how to best control the apps on iPads, how to provision student accounts (even though the App store appears to actively prevent mass account creation), how to prevent student work from being wiped out, replacement cycles, and other edge cases as personal devices get shoehorned into an institutional management process.

The stories have been pretty incredible - one school built a Filemaker database (which, even as I say it, feels like a contradiction in terms) to manage redemption codes for apps purchased through the Volume Purchasing Program, and then distributed through the Configurator. Using this custom built system, an app could be requested by a teacher, and it only required around an hour of an IT person's time to push the app to the iPad. One hour to install an app is what success looked like.

Other stories included the Volume Purchasing Program failing unpredictably and intermittently - some of the nicer things said about the Volume Purchasing Program included statements pointing out that you could generally get it to work if you only used Safari, and cleared your cache before every attempted use of the program. This type of flexibility exemplifies the ease of use that Apple is known for.

Some schools do not make an effort to exert centralized control over the devices, and in these situations, the management headaches are often supplanted by fears from teachers and parents that the iPads will be used "inappropriately" for "non-educational" things. It's worth remembering that before technology, students were always perfectly focused, and could never be distracted from doing exactly what the teacher felt was important.

All kidding aside, because centralized control of the devices really aren't possible, more schools have become more open to less control. It's a shift that smartphones started (and that educational experts have been talking about for at least the last 100 years) but the shift definitely gained more mainstream acceptance with iPad adoption.

And people are seeing that great things happen when learners are granted autonomy. And when the iPads are gone, hopefully the autonomy will remain.