All posts in education

Barriers and Contradictions

Posted April 8th, 2013 by Bill

Last weekend, we ran another open content authoring session at Lewis Elementary in Portland, OR; we'll have more details on the event in a post laster this week. During this session, we talked with several educators about ways to work around the organizational barriers they face. I'm going to list out a couple here; frequently, when we talk about the things that are absent from school learning environment, the conversation stops at blockages of YouTube and other social media sites. Really, though, there are barriers that are far more basic and pervasive than that.

Students Can't Save HTML Files

We spoke with an educator working within PPS who had set up a lesson where students were learning about the web, including some basic HTML and css. The lesson went fine until it came time for students to save their work; they were blocked from saving html files.

SSH is blocked

We have worked in schools, and worked with teachers in schools, where SSH is blocked. For anyone working in web development, SSH is a central tool to doing out work. Blocking SSH is akin to teaching carpentry without hammer and saws.

Districts Claim Ownership Over Teacher Intellectual Property

The way some district contracts are written, districts claim ownership over any work that is done during school hours, over a school network, or on a school-provided machine. So, if a teacher does planning during the school day, even if she is creating something entirely new that is her creation, the district position is that they - the district - own that work.

Why Should We Care?

In the current political climate of educational reform, teachers are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Teachers and schools have a lot of rhetoric directed at them about how they need to embrace "21st century learning" and teach web literacies and develop knowledge workers, all while meeting more time consuming reporting mandated by the unfunded mandates of NCLB, and having their performance measured by standardized tests that often don't examine what learning looks like.

And in the face of all this, there are district-level policies that directly interfere with a teachers ability to work. When a district claims ownership over creative work done during the work day, the district creates an enormous disincentive to work with peers during school time, as any result of the collaboration would be owned by the district and not the creators. This flies directly in the face of what networked, connected teaching should be, as it is predicated on sharing our work with others. Fortunately, as we discussed in our authoring event, incorporating openly licensed materials into our work makes district claims of ownership a moot point, as the district can still claim ownership but the license allows for free and universal reuse.

What is incredibly heartening is talking with teachers, and hearing the creativity, thought, and caring that they put into their work. There are some amazing educators working to help our kids learn, and it's great to see.

What is disheartening is to see the artificial, policy-driven barriers put in their way. Here in Oregon, we are hearing a lot of talk about improving our educational system. And some of these things actually sound okay. And please don't get me wrong: high level change is part of the solution too. But we also need to remove the unnecessary barriers to teachers doing their best work. The notion that a district owns a teacher's work needs to be addressed legislatively, and through contracts. If a district thinks that they are going to get rich from owning and selling content, they should go talk to their local newspaper - the one that went out of business three years ago.

Image Credit: "Contradiction" taken by sweetenough, published under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

Cereal and Success

Posted February 27th, 2013 by Bill

Over the last couple weeks, This American Life has had a couple of amazing episodes looking at Harper High School in Chicago.

This excerpt from the second episode - where a hungry kid gets some food - stuck with me. Ben Calhoun is the journalist reporting the story, and Marcel Smith is a staff member at Harper.

Ben Calhoun: ...I spend a couple mornings with a staff member named Marcel Smith. Marcel works on a program that tries to rescue kids who are failing out. Harper has a lot of initiatives like that. There's mentoring programs and enrichment programs, all boosted by turnaround.

So on paper, that's what Marcel does. But if you walk around with him, you see what Sanders sees, all the little things that would never be considered part of his job. The day I was with him, in the morning, Marcel came across a young man standing in the hallway.

Marcel Smith: What's going on, son? How you feeling?

Ben Calhoun: The kid was keeping a straight face. But he was clearly upset. It turned out he'd been asked to leave his class. As Marcel turned to deal with him, he asked me to turn off the recorder, so I did.

They talked for a minute. Marcel took the kid to his office, sat him down, told him to wait. And we walked away. He didn't want to use the student's name. But he explained what was going on.

Marcel Smith: Apparently, the students were given an incentive for being on time. And it was food.

Ben Calhoun: Cookies. It was cookies. And this student, along with everyone who'd gotten to class on time that day, was allowed to go up and take a cookie. But this particular student was dealing with a difficult and maybe dangerous situation at his house. So he hadn't gone home the night before. And because of that, he hadn't eaten.

So when he went up to take his cookie, he took two. The teacher told them to put one back. Not wanting to reveal his situation to the rest of the class, he didn't say anything. He just refused.

He told Marcel he was just so hungry. That's why he'd been kicked out. Marcel had a box of cereal in his office. And I walked with him as he zipped down to the cafeteria. They were out of regular milk.

Marcel Smith: Ladies? Ladies, how y'all doing? Can I get two chocolate milks, please? Thank you.

Ben Calhoun: Back in Marcel's office, the student sat quietly, staring down, and ate a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios and chocolate milk. Then he got up, politely washed the bowl and spoon, said thank you to Marcel, and the two went back to his classroom. You see situations like this all the time at Harper, situations that could so easily unravel.

And without thinking anything of it, they get addressed because someone is there and makes the effort to figure out what's going on. It's stuff that'll never show up in a school budget. But it can be the difference between a kid going back to class or getting suspended.

And it's these small, quiet successes - like getting a kid some food so he can go back to class - these are the things that adequate staffing makes possible. This is one of the ways that success in schools, and successful schools, get started.

Staffing matters, in large part because as a teacher you can't predict when you will be needed. Relationships can't be built without time, and without the time to spend with students when there is nothing wrong you will not be able to be as effective during times of stress.

And when I read about DC allowing Rocketship Education to open eight new schools against a backdrop of three existing charter schools failing, I think of the fragmented learning experience of the students within those schools. It's also worth noting that a central piece of RocketShip's model involves students spending a significant amount of time in front of a screen taking computerized adaptive tests, with limited staff contact.

According to Brian Jones, the outgoing chairman of DC's charter board:

Part of the genius of the charter model is it does allow for a certain innovative churn, where you close low performers and thereby create space for new innovators to come in and try new models

Unfortunately, "innovative churn" - here celebrated as "genius" - sounds a lot like anticipated failure. Innovative churn means closing schools that some kids likely see as an extension of their home. The low performers here are the people selling innovation that fails kids, and leaves kids taking the brunt of the consequences. I'm not going to hold my breath that these low performers will ever be held accountable.

Education and the Startup Culture

Posted August 30th, 2012 by Bill

This is a follow-up to some ideas I posted yesterday.

Start up culture is about many things, but a core piece revolves around getting outside funding to support growth for a business that, at its inception, has no source of revenue. There are exceptions, of course - and these exceptions are generally companies like GitHub that were bootstrapped and take advantage of what Tom Preston-Warner calls "the infinite runway." Success at a startup is generally equated with getting funding for an idea, and then, depending on the goals of the founders, either having an IPO or getting bought out.

And this is where many educational ventures get it wrong. They approach it from a "let's build a widget" place - these are things that investors understand. For example, adaptive testing is a widget that a lot of people are building - and this makes sense, given the amount of foundation and government money that is getting poured into using standardized assessments as a means of determining "excellence." But, from an educational place, many people who actually work with kids know how much even the best testing instrument will miss - so in the case of the new great testing widget, it doesn't matter how great it is, because the product isn't meeting an actual need, it's meeting a manufactured need (aka, a need that a policymaker, lobbyist, or marketing professional brought into existence).

And this creates another collision point as startups careen into education: many people building educational products fail to understand why, where, or how their product fits into the process of learning. Some of this can be chalked up to unfamiliarity, and some of it can be chalked up to hubris, but there are a lot of funded startups building products that only look good on a pitch - when they get shoehorned into a classroom, they stand out like a substitute teacher trying to get kids excited about phonics.

In short, awful ideas get funded all the time. Ideas that make sense in a meeting, or within the offices of corporate reform minded investment funds, often don't work well in the classroom. Getting funded means that the pitch was good, but it doesn't guarantee that the product will do much.

And to emphasize, a lot of startups are doing great things. But the reasons that people get excited about startups - usually money, and/or a product that promises "disruption" - are the wrong reasons.

Using Drupal In Education Unconference in Portland - Save the Date

Posted August 18th, 2012 by Bill

At DrupalCon Denver, we had an extremely successful Education Unconference and we're planning to do it again in Portland. The planning for this event is in the very early stages; we have nailed down a date - Monday, May 20, 2013 - and are in the process of securing a venue. The event will take place in Portland, Oregon, and as soon as we finalize the location, we will update the announcement page with details. One thing to note at the outset, though, is that we want to make this event an opportunity for people familiar with Drupal and people familiar with education to come together and discuss common issues. If you work in either one of these areas, please come - we all have a lot to learn from one another, and with one another.

Based on discussions in Denver (and within the Drupal community over the years), several general areas of interest continue to emerge. Some likely topics could include:

Large scale deployments, and how to balance the needs of individuals/units within an organization against maintaining a reasonably standardized platform;
Responsive web design;
Strategies for mobile web applications;
Ensuring accessibility within web sites;
Supporting communities of practice;
Drupal as a traditional LMS;
Using Drupal to support informal and inquiry-driven learning.

Admission is free of charge; just register here! The event will follow an unconference format, so if there is something you want to talk about, propose a topic, find some like-minded individuals, and let the conversation start.

As with the Denver unconference, we have similar high-level goals:

Facilitate connections between people working in the education space who would not have the opportunity to interact within the larger venue of DrupalCon;
Generate conversations among people working in different areas of education; in this way, K12 folks could talk to Higher Ed, people working in Libraries could talk to other stakeholders, etc - while there are many differences in what we do, there are also similarities, and it would be good to see some opportunities for collaboration materialize;
Set the stage for more focused BoFs at DrupalCon - rather than spend the first BoF of DrupalCon figuring out who wants to talk about what, we could lay the groundwork at the unconference for ongoing conversations throughout DrupalCon;
Discuss development methodologies and best practices that are making our lives easier, and more productive;
Demonstrate and discuss example sites, and talk about how we built great sites that help people learn more effectively;
Your idea here: https://2013.drupalpdx.org/forum/education-unconference-planning

So, mark May 20, 2013, on your calendars. The second Using Drupal in Education Unconference is on! We look forward to seeing you there.

Drupal Presentation Notes, and the Role of Open Source in Mainstream Ed Tech

Posted June 28th, 2012 by Bill

For the last few days, I was down in San Diego, California for the 2012 ISTE conference. I was down there running a session for people to learn about Drupal. I have added the notes I used for my presentation into the handbook in the Tutorials section.

During the conference, I wandered onto the vendor floor to touch base with some friends who were working in different booths. Once I recovered from the shock of a bright orange gimp-man shilling hardware, I was struck by the overwhelming lack of any open source representation. Aside from a single Moodle vendor, I didn't see any open source representation.

This paucity is all the more striking because of the amazing, innovative work I see happening within education using open source tools. On a very regular basis, I see schools using a range of open source tools to support curriculum mapping, online classes, collaborative projects, community outreach, professional development, portfolios - and in these cases, schools aren't paying exorbitant fees to vendors, or losing control of the work performed by teachers and students, or ceding flexibility for convenience. They are just working - intelligently, intentionally, making mindful progress towards articulated goals, and using open source tools to support and extend that work.

But this narrative seemed largely missing at ISTE - possibly, this is due to the company I keep, as I tend to gravitate more toward people who are doing the day to day work in the classroom. But from visiting the vendor floor, the story of educational technology - at least this year - seemed to be one of convenience and speed over vision and ongoing effort. Technology, at least the vision of it being articulated and sold on the vendor floor - is the panacea. It is the thing that makes the difficult easy, and makes all of us smarter.

Open source has a role to play in articulating a different narrative about education - a narrative that values individual effort within a community that is loosely united toward a common goal. The development model within open source communities (and this model has been in place and thriving well before the days of Web 2.0-ifying everything) has always supported (in general terms) peer to peer learning and support. The absence of open source companies in the larger mainstream educational technology world is a loss for both open source and educational technology.

For an additional perspective on the state of data control and access to data, Audrey Watters has a piece over at Hack Education on how vendors responded to questions about data portability and apis. She was aided on the quest by Kin Lane, who knows a thing or three about APIs.

Portland Education Hackfest

Posted June 2nd, 2012 by Bill

On Saturday, June 2, the team at FunnyMonkey participated in Hack for Portland Schools. The event was designed to brainstorm and, if possible, build, tools that help foster connections between schools and their surrounding communities. Research within Portland shows that nearly 85% of people living in Portland do not have a child in the school system. Despite this, however, many of these people have a strong interest in contributing to their schools.

However, despite the desire of people to help schools, and despite some areas where schools say that they would like community support, there are still ummet needs. These unmet needs are exacerbated now more than ever, as public education has seen several successive years of funding cuts.

Our app aims to facilitate connections between schools, the professionals within schools, the students learning alongside these professionals, and people outside schools who are in a position to help.

It's also worth noting that the toolkit we are building can be used equally well by a school, a school district, or a non-profit organization bringing goods and services to schools and communities.

Our app lowers multiple barriers in connecting schools/organizations and volunteers:

It allows schools/organizations to define and publicize the areas where they want help;
It helps volunteers identify the areas where their expertise or resources will do the most good;
It eliminates the need for a third party to hold onto information for a school, and for a school or district to be dependent on a third party system;
It creates a mobile-friendly signups that work on any modern mobile device.

Using our app, a school/district/organization can create a mobile version of all signup opportunities. So, when people are doing outreach, they can sign up volunteers on the spot, and immediately get them into their database. This eliminates the gap between a person's desire to contribute, and the inertia that must be overcome to actually follow through and contribute. This also allows the organization seeking volunteers to do more focused outreach, as they can communicate with people who have already expressed an interest to contribute to a specific project.

Ideas for future expansion include:

integration with other donor apps via their apis (Kickstarter, Donors Choose, etc);
for organizations serving a broader geographical area, the addition of geographic data to allow for mapping of opportunities;
iCal integration;
in larger install, including more metadata about events to allow for more precise categorization of events
[your idea here] - please share any additional ideas in the comments

This app is currently available on Github - for people who just want to get started, the entire codebase is available for download. It runs within Julio, our distribution for schools and districts. This app also leverages the very awesome Registration module made by ThinkShout.

Solving Problems and Finding Solutions in Education: A Panel Discussion at the Drupal in Education Unconference

Posted February 29th, 2012 by Bill

As part of our preparations for the upcoming Education Unconference taking place on March 19th in Denver we are happy to give an update on the panel discussion.

Register for Drupal in Education Unconference in Denver, CO on Eventbrite

The participants will include:

Jason Hoekstra - Jason is the Technology Solutions Advisor at the US Department of Education. As part of his work in the Department, Jason is working on the Learning Registry, a system to support improved sharing and collaboration among people creating and using online content for learning.
Bud Hunt - Bud is an Instructional Technology Coordinator for the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado. Prior to becoming an Instructional Technologist, Bud taught English. He has been blogging about technology, writing, learning, and learning online since before there was an internet.
Bryan Ollendyke - Bryan works in the e-Learning Institute at Penn State as an Instructional Web Technologist. Bryan has been a leading advocate for Drupal within higher education, and is the main developer of ELMS, a Drupal-based learning and instructional design platform.
Glenn Moses - Glenn is the Director of Blended Learning at Denver Public Schools. Glenn has spent over a decade designing and working in blended learning environments, and helped build the largest blended learning program in the state of Nevada.
Michael Wacker - Michael is the Online Professional Development Coordinator at Denver Public Schools. Michael designs and facilitates online learning spaces for educators to inquire, share, reflect, and connect.

The panel will be moderated by Bill Fitzgerald; Bill worked in K12 education for 16 years prior to starting FunnyMonkey, an open source development shop that works primarily with education and non-profit organizations.

The panel discussion will start by focusing on the professional needs of people working at different levels within different types of educational systems, and what tools have helped them meet those needs.

The Unconference is free, and takes place on March 19th, in Denver, Colorado. See you there!

Drupal in Education Unconference

Posted February 19th, 2012 by Bill

On Monday, March 19th, we are organizing a Drupal in Education unconference in Denver; the event will be held at Del Pueblo School. This meetup will follow an unconference format, so if there is something you want to talk about, propose a topic, find some like-minded individuals, and let the conversation start.

The event is free, and attendance at the event is capped at 150 people. To attend the unconference, please sign up here. If we get more than 150 attendees, we will start a waiting list. Please sign up only if you are certain you will be attending.

I'd like to thank and recognize Michael Wacker and the Denver Public School System for allowing us to hold the conference in their space. Also, Melissa Anderson has provided invaluable organizational work to help get this unconference moving.

Schedule

9:30 to 10: Arrive, brainstorm sessions
10 to 11:30: Session 1
11:30 to 1: Lunch/Ongoing Conversations There are several good food options near Del Pueblo. We are also seeing if we can arrange to have a food cart come to the school to provide another option for people to buy lunch.
1 to 2: Session 2: Panel Discussion (see details below)
2 to 3: Session 3

We have set up a wiki page on groups.drupal.org for session ideas; if there is a subject you want to discuss, put it on the wiki.

Additionally, if there is interest, we can reconvene at a restaurant/bar later in the day. Location TBD.

Panel Info

The panel brings together people working at different levels within educational systems. The panel includes practioners working in K12, Higher Ed, and the US Department of Education. Within the panel discussion, the focus will range from what the needs are (described in a technology-agnostic way) and what technological developments have proven most useful at meeting these needs.

We are still finalizing the participants of the panel; look for a follow-up announcement to be coming within the next couple days!

Getting There

For those people driving, on-site parking is limited.

Once you get to the venue, please enter through the West side Galapago doors. Other doors to the building are generally locked.

Directions from the Convention Center to Del Pueblo;
Public transportation information, including a trip planner;
Taxi and fare information.

Mountain Lion, Closed Systems, Privacy, and Device Churn

Posted February 16th, 2012 by Bill

Some interesting dates from the not-so-distant past:

December, 2009: "Apple has said it rejects 10 percent of submissions for being 'inappropriate,' in some cases because they try to steal personal data".

November, 2011: Apple kicks a security researcher out of its developer program for developing a proof of concept that shows how to exploit a security hole. The best part: the researcher had reported the flaw three weeks earlier.

February, 2012: An approved app, available in the App Store, is caught uploading entire address books (aka, stealing personal data), without user consent or knowledge. This app was never pulled from the App store, and an updated (non-address stealing version) is still available.

Apple has done a great job of pairing marketing hype with security through obscurity. Apple has created the appearance of a secure system (trust us! we're the gatekeepers!) but the holes in this system keep reappearing. I'm not saying that other systems are any more or less secure; however, other systems don't attempt to parlay a walled ecosystem into the equivalent of a secure environment. There have been instances of security fixes being delayed as a result of Apple's review process, resulting in users having no alternative to compromised apps, and no knowledge of the compromise.

However, despite these issues, Apple supporters - and especially Apple supporters within education - go to great lengths to describe how satisfied they are with their Apple purchases, and how they are not bothered by the increasingly intertwined way that the Apple ecosystem shuts out alternatives. Concerns about student privacy, and how iTunes accounts are effectively required to use iPads and other Mac products, have died down. People seem to have accepted that school in the 21st century requires paying companies to take over your personal data and usage patterns, and mine them for information.

But really, how many people who have gone deep into Apple could express anything but satisfaction, or even intense excitement? What are the alternatives?

Can you imagine a tech director walking into their boss and saying, "Well, this Apple hardware and software was okay, but with a little hindsight they aren't really necessary for learning, and there are other options that look promising, and might even be cheaper. I'd like to explore some other avenues. Oh, and one last thing: sorry about the several hundred thousand/millions we've spent on that hardware and software, and sorry that a good percentage of our faculty and student creative output is locked into apps that don't work on anything else but Apple stuff."

Of course people that have gone all in with Apple will be delighted with the results. The alternative is admitting that resources were squandered on something that was untested, and proved to be not as awesome as the sales teams/fanboys promised. People who have gone heavily into Apple need for Apple to be the best thing ever, as that reinforces their "vision."

So, when I read about the release of Mountain Lion, and how this is a move to annual release cycles of OS upgrades, and how people will now get the chance to upgrade every year (as opposed to having to upgrade every year), it's a move that makes sense for the direction Apple is heading: toward a fully closed ecosystem where people are pushed into frequent upgrade paths leading to increased device churn.

And learning? No problem. There's got to be an app for that.

But the one thing that doesn't surprise me is the name: Mountain Lion. Mountain lions love sheep.

Image Credit: "Rotten Apple" taken by Vince Wingate, published under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

Free and Open

Posted November 21st, 2011 by Bill

Over at Big Think, Kirsten Winkler has a piece on Khan Academy and Wikipedia that she put out yesterday. In her piece, she sees a similarity between Khan Academy and Wikipedia:

So both, Khan and Wales, are proving that there is “a better way” to deliver true free education on the Internet. And I think this is the really radical part. If you take a look at what the Khan Academy is going to offer for free to educators one could ask why anyone would pay for similar products?

The fact that both Wikipedia and Khan Academy can be accessed without charge is great, but only considering the cost leaves out the real value: both of these resources can be reused, remixed, and redistributed because they are licensed under Creative Commons licenses that support reuse: Khan Academy uses the Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike variant, where Wikipedia uses the Attribution ShareAlike (It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is built on Mediawiki, an open source platform; I'd love to see the codebase of Khan Academy released for reuse under an Open Source license).

This is where the value comes in, and this is why these resources are important for education: licensing that supports reuse and recontextualization supports analysis, synthesis, and change. In short, the content can evolve with the learner, with the lesson, or with the pedagogical need.

Looking at the learning process as a thing that "needs" a business and a business model to support it misses the point entirely, and it's why people from a business background often don't understand education (in business speak, this generally translates as "the educational market is difficult to crack"). Education is a process; it unfolds over time, over iterations, and when it's working best it's never done. Education is different than certification. But businesses break things down to a transaction, a point of sale - that's not a bad thing, at all, until people conflate the business need of a company trying to profit off education with the needs of the learners that educational products need to serve.

This cultural difference - the focus on a limited time horizon, looking for a big exit; versus education that plays out over years - is frequently overlooked. And this cultural difference leads to people remaining focused on "free" as opposed to "reusable and sustainable." Free doesn't offer much as a business model, but reusable and sustainable offer worlds of opportunity.

Image Credit: "Wide open spaces & Dimensions" taken by regev tovim, published under an Attribution-No Derivatives license.