Bill's blog

December 10th was an interesting day for reports on apps for learning.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center released a report on the ways in which technology can be used to foster and support improved reading skills among children. The report covers a fair amount of ground, and is worth reading in its entirety. Part of the report included a scan of apps and web sites focused on supporting literacy. From the report:

Digital products aimed at building literacy skills in young children are a significant segment of the market. Yet many of these products may not be providing the educational benefit they claim. Few apps and e-books have information in their descriptions that point to any effectiveness studies to back them up, and most only focus on very basic literacy skills that would not be useful for children who are beginning to learn skills like grammar and storytelling.

Also on December 10th, the FTC released its second report on privacy concerns with children's apps, and this report indicates that people selling apps to kids are still collecting data from kids, and that they are still doing it without informing parents.

Staff examined hundreds of apps for children and looked at disclosures and links on each app’s promotion page in the app store, on the app developer’s website, and within the app. According to the report, “most apps failed to provide any information about the data collected through the app, let alone the type of data collected, the purpose of the collection, and who would obtain access to the data. Even more troubling, the results showed that many of the apps shared certain information with third parties – such as device ID, geolocation, or phone number – without disclosing that fact to parents. Further, a number of apps contained interactive features – such as advertising, the ability to make in-app purchases, and links to social media – without disclosing these features to parents prior to download.”

From the first report, we see that apps designed to support literacy are doing a mediocre job of it. From the second report, we see that the manufacturers of these mediocre learning apps are doing a great job harvesting information without informing their users, or their user's parents. So, even if the kid using the app is having a mediocre learning experience, the manufacturer of the app is still able to use your demographic data to sell ads, and/or raise additional VC money, and/or sell your user data outright.

If your kid is attending a school that is rolling out an iPad program, it's worth asking if they have done a privacy audit on the apps they are using. Ask for the process they have used, and for examples of privacy policies that they found incompatible with the rights of their learners. Ask to see a documented process or rubric that they use to evaluate privacy of apps that they will use in their programs.

If you are rolling out a 1:1 program, what do your privacy audits look like? What steps do you take to ensure that the privacy of your learners is respected? How do you communicate about this to teachers, students, and families?

As adults, we can make decisions about how we want to protect (or not protect) our privacy. But we shouldn't require kids and their families to expose themselves to marketers as a precondition to learning. Additionally, given that some of the more popular apps don't promote higher level thinking, if we are going to sell out privacy as a means to learning via apps, we should at least ensure that we get something worthwhile in exchange for our privacy.

Photo Credit: Lextech, via Nowhere Else

Common Core is getting a lot of buzz of late, but one element that has received scant attention is starting to draw notice: by grade 12, fully 70% of all reading should be nonfiction.

Moreover, the guiding force behind this increased emphasis on nonfiction has a simple origin - the need to prepare students for the NAEP:

The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades. The (Common Core) Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can meet the requirements of college and career readiness.

For those of you playing along, the switch there was impressively fast. The first sentence clearly states, "The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades."

The transformation occurs in the second sentence. An accurate sentence would read: "The (Common Core) Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can earn higher scores on the NAEP." That sentence, however, would be too honest. The actual phrasing used on the Common Core web site attempts to create an equivalency between success on the NAEP and college and career readiness. However, that claim is not supported by the NAEP, who state clearly:

The achievement levels should continue to be interpreted and used with caution.

In other words, the Common Core Standards require that fiction be de-emphasized in an effort to align with a standardized test whose results should be interpreted and used with caution. Or: we are cutting fiction from the curriculum as part of an unproven thought experiment.

David Coleman, a key player in the development of the Common Core standards (and now the head of the College Board), is more blunt about it. At a presentation titled Bringing the Common Core to Life he weighs in on the personal narrative, fiction's ugly cousin:

(A)s you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you're saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me. It is rare in a working environment that someone says, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

Watch the video here, and read a transcription with some commentary. Comments quoted above start at around 7:45.

Taking things through to their logical conclusion, we need to de-emphasize literature because the bosses supervising the jobs of the future probably won't ask students to write about how they feel.

There is a lot to be said about the shaky foundation used to launch a de-emphasis on literature in our schools, but it's also worth taking a step back and looking at what is happening around the country. In Montana, it looks like we'll be seeing a bill that requires public schools to teach intelligent design alongside evolution. In Tennessee, teachers can now address intelligent design in their classrooms. In Louisiana, schools that get public money study creationism alongside evolution.

Given the developments that are transpiring on local level, it looks like the line between fiction and nonfiction is becoming increasingly blurred. Fortunately, I'm pretty confident that some of the large companies invited to help create the the Common Core Standards have some products that will help.

But all kidding aside, people who make the incorrect assumption that the requisite critical thinking skills can't be taught or acquired through literature are missing the point. Education isn't linear. The pace of education isn't even, not for a class, and certainly not for individual people. Literature, taught well, lays the foundation for people asking hard questions, and for people uncovering difficult truths. And for those who have the hubris to declare that they have the knowledge and the foresight to identify the knowledge needed for the careers of the future, when many of those careers don't exist yet, I ask you: what were the must-read nonfiction texts of Shakespeare's time? How have they held up? Around the same time that Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby, Hesse was writing Siddhartha, and Joyce was writing Ulysses, what nonfiction works were being written that have even close to a comparable impact in the present day? I say this not to belittle nonfiction, as nonfiction is an essential piece of our literary world. However, the reason that some fiction and poetry stands up over time more than nonfiction is because literature exposes truths that have proven useful over time and across cultures. The idea that college and career readiness requires us to abandon this foundation shows a lack of understanding of both the lessons available through literature and the skills required to excel as a professional.

Image Credit: "Rotten to the Core" taken by Don Shall, published under an Attribution NonCommercial No Derivatives license.

NOTE on January 26, 2013: someone left a great comment about the comparison of fiction and non-fiction. While doing spam cleanup, I accidentally deleted it. Ugh. My apologies to the person who took the time to comment. END NOTE

Right now, there is an open source tablet (the PengPod) crowdsourcing contributions on Indiegogo. The fundraising period ends on December 2. Stop reading this post, right now, and get over there and contribute. Then, come back here and I'll tell you why.

Okay. Nice work.

Here's why: we need leading edge devices running open source code in schools. If we are serious about teaching students how to work creatively, and how to use technology as part of that work, they need to understand the malleable nature of the technology we use. The devices we work with every day all embody a series of deliberate choices. When we use a closed device like an iPad, our ability to tinker with these choices is limited to non-existent - unless, of course, you want to blow up your warranty.

With a device like a PengPod, you can give students a tool that can both be used for traditional classwork, and used a central component of a project-based computer curriculum. The source code of Pengpod is freely available on Github, which means that people can access it for free, and that in the process of accessing it, they have the opportunity to learn Git, and, more importantly, how to work productively within a larger community. On a side note, how many computer science courses within K12 teach students how to use version control? If you are, awesome, and if not, well, get rolling and start doing it. Given that a history of code contributions and publicly accessible work are key factors in landing jobs these days (as well as just an essential and transferrable skill) we are doing people a disservice by not teaching them the core skills that will help them develop their skills both inside and outside of class.

Right now, the EdTech world feels pretty app-happy. This (hopefully temporary) myopia can blind us to some of the real potential that we can unleash within our students. The problem with the app-centric mentality is that, even when we are using a closed device like an iPad for creative work, the bounds of creativity are limited by the functionality provided within the app. The message is clear: be creative in the corner, but don't mess with anything outside the corner, because that's too complicated. Kids deserve more, and they deserve to have their vision of the possible uncluttered by arbitrary limits. Let's get open source tools in the hands of kids; let's give them the tools to explore them, and let's see what happens.

You (yes, you!) are invited to a full day of open content creation, curation, remixing, and distribution with a group of content, technology, and open learning geeks.

The event will be held Thursday, January 24th, from 10 to 4, in the library of Science Leadership Academy, the day before Educon begins. The event is free; please sign up to give us a sense of who will be coming. While the event is free, we are also asking participants to make a donation to Science Leadership Academy's Home and School Association. SLA's generosity in allowing us to use this space is pretty awesome.

As is probably obvious from the title of this post, we've been struggling with what to call this day, largely because the process of creating open content is part hackfest, part content authoring, part content curation, part old-fashioned work day. We'll be combining these elements, covering how to use Creative Commons licenses, and how to prepare and distribute resources in reusable formats. At the end of the day, we should all have sets of resources we can use and share whenever we want, and connections with people who want to continue to do this work.

If you are a teacher who is developing curriculum or class resources, come and work with us.

If you work at a school that wants to reduce the costs and inflexibility of traditional textbooks, come and work with us.

If you have been interested in learning more about open content, but didn't know where to start, come and work with us.

If you want to make sure that your students can have access to course materials over the web, on an iPad, on a Kindle, or on any mobile device, come work with us.

If you have been creating open content for the last 20 years, and want to keep on doing what you know works, come work with us.

The day will be spent creating and remixing open content; as we have been planning the event, there are four general goals:

• At the end of the day, participants will walk out with resources they can use the next time they are teaching;
• Create and extend connections between teachers who want to do more work with open content in the future;
• Begin to create and curate a library of high quality, easily reusable openly licensed content;
• Plan additional open content remixathons throughout the year; these can be virtual events, face to face events, or any combination thereof.

In the last year, we have seen some great community initiatives around open content. In particular, the work from Finland where a group of math instructors crowdsourced a textbook over a weekend provides a good example to emulate. A key takeaway - and an element that often goes overlooked in coverage of successful crowdsourcing events - is the planning and organization required before the event. This planning helps ensure that when the crowdsourcing begins, people already have a sense of what needs to be done, and who they will be working with. We are glad to help organize and coordinate introductions between people working on similar projects, and if people want to get working before the event, we'd be glad to help coordinate that as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up, and get to Science Leadership Academy on January 24th!

If you have any questions about the event, or how to get involved, please leave them in the comments or email me at bill (at) funnymonkey (dot) com.

Image Credit: "Three Leaves and a Berry" taken by Donnie Nunley, published under an Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license.

While down in Berkeley for BADCamp, I had the chance to go out to lunch with Jeff Graham, Chach Sikes, and Catrina Roallos. We got to talking about ways to help people working in technology (or wanting to expand what they do with technology) learn the requisite skills needed to continue to grow.

We talked about ways of finding community - either within open source projects or in hackfests - and about how the connections there can be key. And we also talked about how learning leading edge development best practice - for both front end and back end developers - really isn't widely available within schools.

One thing Chach brought up in the conversation stuck with me. When she brought it up, she made sure to point out that it was advice that she had been given from several people over time, but the reason it stuck with me is because it's so simple, but it's the kind of thing that can help you no matter your experience level (and really, it can help both within tech and in other disciplines).

The advice Chach gave is this: If you work on soving a problem for more than half an hour and you are still stuck, stop and ask a question.

This is some seriously awesome advice. First, it ensures that a person is making a concerted effort to solve the problem on their own before reaching out. This helps avoid obvious and/or lazy questions. Doing some initial legwork also leads to informed questions; an informed, focused question is a lot easier to answer than a general fishing expedition.

This approach also assumes that you have a community, or at least a place where you can ask the question. If you don't know where to ask questions about your specific project, places like StackExchange or even Quora can be good places to start. But, the thing that's awesome about asking a question is that it implicitly acknowledges that none of us ever needs to work in a vacuum, and that it's okay to not know the answer to everything. And, in situations where you don't know the answer, seeking out smart people is a great idea.

Additionally, setting a time limit helps ensure that you don't get lost down a rabbit hole. If we work on something without success for too long, it's natural and normal to get discouraged, frustrated, or angry, and these states of mind rarely lead to our best work. We all have different thresholds, but setting a time limit helps minimize the chance that we'll lose half a day trying to chase down a solution.

As we continued talking over lunch, it was pretty obvious that experienced developers have work habits that are only tangentially related to technology, but that these habits are a key part to their continued success. Individually, none of these habits are a magic bullet, but taken collectively, each strategy helps create incremental improvement.

And that's how we get better.

Over the next few weeks and months, we are planning on doing some work around helping people learn both the techical skills and the less tangible habits and strategies that allow people to have more options in their lives. Things are in the early stages yet, and we'll be updating here with details as things progress, but as we get started on this path, I wanted to share this out. There are simple things we do - habits that work for us and help us work more effectively - that can be shared and taught, and that will help others. One of the things I love about the advice Chach shared is that it can be put to use pretty much immediately, and it can work anywhere - for Drupal developers, for designers, for sysadmins, or outside technology.

What are some tricks, habits, or strategies that have worked for you?