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I landed my first job teaching late in the winter, about eight months after I graduated college. I was hired by a school district near Boston to tutor a 15 year old kid - a sophomore - who had gotten expelled from school for pulling a knife on another kid. I was his tutor for his core academic subjects - English, History, Algebra, Biology. I learned later that no one expected him to show up, but as I hadn't been let in on that secret yet, I made the time to go and meet with all of his teachers, find out where he had left off in the curriculum, and hopefully (and yes, I recognize how hopelessly naive this sounds) get some insight into what he was like as a student.

Bob's teachers (that's not his name, but that's what we'll call him in this story) were not excited to talk with me. His English, History, and Algebra teachers refused to meet with me, and his Biology teacher met me with some questions of his own.

"Why are you here?" he asked me, as he gave me photocopies of a textbook, along with tests and quizzes. "In the time that we have talked today, I've seen more of you than I've seen of Bob in the last month. What do you really think you'll accomplish here?"

I mumbled something about wanting to make a difference, but really, I hadn't thought about it that much.

But the screwy thing was, Bob showed up, and kept showing up. We met at the Brookline Public Library. We spent two hours each weekday covering the four core subjects; I assigned homework, along with quizzes, tests, papers, and other assignments. And for the most part, he did the work. After I had been stood up by his English teacher, I asked my boss - who worked in the office of Home and Hospital Instruction - if I could have some latitude in book selection. She looked at me funny, and a couple days later gave me a book list. I stopped reading it as soon as I saw that A Clockwork Orange was on there, and the next day, Bob got a library card, checked out the book, and started reading.

And so things went for about a month. On Fridays, I would go down to the district office, hand in my time sheet and Bob's completed and graded work, talk with the receptionist, and then go home.

Then, on a Monday, Bob didn't show up. On Tuesday either. Over the weekend, we had started in on one of the unnaturally warm stretches that can slip into long Northeastern winters - somewhere between three to seven days of sunshine, and warmth that tempts you into thinking that winter is done. I left messages at his house - this was in the dark ages, before cell phones, before texting, before even email was in mainstream use - but had heard nothing back. I figured I had lost Bob to the weather, and maybe for good. On Wednesday, though, he was there - ten minutes late, but there.

"What's up," I asked. "Where were you?"

Bob was always pretty quiet. He was a tall kid - taller than me - and skinny, with the beginnings of a peachfuzz mustache that probably wouldn't require shaving until he was in his twenties. But today, when he spoke, he was quieter than normal, and I had to lean in to hear him. "My friend got shot."

"When?"

"I'm not completely sure," Bob said. "Either Sunday night or Monday morning."

"You okay?" I asked him.

He nodded.

"You involved?" I asked.

He shook his head, no.

"I don't know who did it though. And I don't know if he's okay."

"You want to try and find out?"

Bob looked up. "Yeah. How?"

And that day, I showed Bob how to do basic research within a newspaper - nothing big, but the library had the print versions of the Globe going back two weeks, and we started with the Metro section, and we broke down how the whole paper was organized. The reference librarian also got into the mix, and I let Bob know that reference librarians know how to find out about everything. After around forty-five minutes, Bob found a blurb that gave him information about his friend - he had been shot late Sunday night, had been taken to a hospital, and was in stable condition.

After that day, I continued tutoring Bob for the next few weeks; eventually he was placed in a halfway house for at-risk youth, and I don't know what happened with him after that. On my last week, when I handed in my time sheet, I met with my boss.

"Most of the time, these things don't last more than a week," she told me.

It took me a second to realize that "these things" meant a kid working with a tutor.

"Most kids stop coming, if they even come at all. We do what we can, but once a kid has been expelled, we don't have a lot of options. Seven weeks is probably some kind of record."

I think about Bob, and the kids like him, when I hear about people talking about how "Big Data" will save education, and enable more effective "personalized" learning.

And I wonder what Bob would look like in one of these systems:

The great thing about data is that, with enough points, we begin to have a collection of information against which we can begin to look for patterns, and, hopefully, to ask good questions. But the bad thing about data is that it looks suspiciously like a fact, which leads to good data being put to bad use. Additionally, it can mislead people into thinking that activities that don't produce a data trail are somehow less worthwhile.

The push for more "personalized" learning is occurring against a backdrop where teachers - and teacher's unions - are being blamed for an outsized percentage of what is "broken" with our educational system. But, as we listen to the finely tuned and user tested rhetoric about our broken educational system, it's worth remembering that some of the "reformers" see teachers as little more than personnel expenses. As Chris Lehmann observes, this attitude isn't something that people are going out of their way to hide:

In the spring of 2012, at the opening keynote of Education Innovation Summit, Michael Moe told a room full of education entrepreneurs that over 90% of the many billions of dollars spent on education in the United States was spent on personnel, and the only way to further monetize the education sector, as he called it, was to reduce personnel costs. To the few teachers in the room his point was clear–if you want to use technology to make money and education you have to find a way to reduce the number of teachers. And there are many powerful people who seem to agree with Mr. Moe’s statements.

The quest for personalization addresses the issue Moe raises: it allows for less money to be spent on personnel, therefore allowing companies selling personalized solutions to "monetize the education sector." Translated, this roughly equates to firing teachers in order to hand public dollars to private companies. Part of the impetus for this is buried in the innocuous phrase, "personalized learning."

In today's landscape, sitting in front of a screen using educational games is considered "personalized learning" because the user can choose their path in the game.

Spending hours on computerized adaptive tests is called "personalized learning" because the questions shift based on what you answer right or wrong.

Watching videotaped lectures is called "personalized learning" because the learner can choose to rewind or rewatch the video as many times as they want.

In the hands of a marketer, personalized learning is sold as the answer to our educational problems. With more data, they want us to believe, we can get people the content they need, just when they need it. The unspoken piece to this - and this is the subtext - is that a machine can do it better than a person. We need to be clear: that is not personalized learning. That is algorithmically mediated learning. Coming from a logical place - from a place where actual words mean actual things - it's difficult to make the argument that greater personalized learning needs to occur with fewer persons involved in the process.

I don't know if I made any lasting impact on Bob's life. For the purposes of this blog post, my N is 1, and all I have is a rambling anecdote devoid of anything that even resembles a data point. But, the notion that a person can be improved by well-timed inputs of the "right" data seems simplistic at best. One thing I do know: the day Bob learned how to break down a newspaper to study current events, he was more focused and more engaged than at any time I had seen him. When I think of truly personalized education, this is what I think about: an ongoing flow of action, reaction, conversation - and hopefully growth - that occur when people think about what they want to learn, and how they want to get there.

Image Credit: The image of the boy in the chair is reused from Rocketship’s Learning Labs & The Cost Of Personalization, by Dan Meyer, published under an Attribution license.

Last week, a group of people released a document with the ambitious title of "A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age."

The work was posted in several places (and I'm probably leaving a few out):

• Hack Education, from Audrey Watters;
• The Udacity blog; interestingly, the Udacity blog is the only announcement that makes the claim that the "Bill of Rights" was originally posted on EdSurge;
• Cathy Davidson, on the HASTAC blog;
• edSurge, from Betsy Corcoran;
• Bonnie Stewart, on her working blog;
• Jesse Stommel, at Hybrid Pedagogy.

The document was also posted on GitHub to simplify the process of making changes (and we will talk more about this later).

Out of all the signatories, only Audrey Watters (to the best of my knowledge) posted any type of reflection about the process, and concerns with the document. Her post on what was left out and missed in the document is required reading for anyone looking to understand the larger issues around the idea of a Learner's Bill of Rights. Additionally, to the best of my knowledge, only Audrey disclosed that her travel expenses were paid by Udacity. Some of the other people who wrote about the event mentioned that the event was "convened" by Sebastian Thrun, but that doesn't get specific about who paid for them to get there. Given that some of the other signatories are local to Palo Alto, many probably didn't incur any expense, but there were enough people coming from places that require both air travel and lodging that it would be interesting to know who paid for what.

Returning to the "Bill of Rights," the document contains a curious sentence in the opening paragraph:

"We convened a group of people passionate about learning, about serving today's students, and about using every tool we could imagine to respond better to the needs of students in a global, interactive, digitally connected world."

The leading "We", copied in every announcement, implies that the group convened itself. While I understand the value of using the first person plural to create the impression of community, a more accurate sentence would probably be, "Udacity convened a group of people..."

It was also interesting to read how the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the piece. They open their article with this gem:

A dozen educators met last month in Palo Alto, Calif., to discuss the future of higher education.

This opening is equal parts grandiose and inaccurate - while I understand that the Chronicle needs to make this sound exciting in order to generate pageviews, the hue and cry about the demise of higher ed can lead a skeptical individual like myself to think that people might be - just maybe - stoking fears of a crisis to make things sound more dire, and therefore more interesting. But, more precisely, the folks that wrote the Bill of Rights are not a group of educators. Some are, but a sizeable portion are CEOs and management types who are definitely not educators. Either the Chronicle doesn't understand the difference, or didn't care to be fully accurate.

Ian Bogost posted an interesting critique of the "Bill of Rights" but his piece is interesting both for what he leaves in and for what he leaves out. Here is how he structures his opening:

The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It's been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Note the three links: to the GitHub repo created by Audrey, and to two articles.

Later in the piece, Ian quotes from and links to a piece by Kate Bowles. However, nowhere in the piece does he link to or even mention the existence of Audrey Watter's critique of the document. This is a curious omission, and it makes the document incomplete, especially considering that Audrey's breakdown expresses real and valid concerns about the "Bill of Rights." The omission of any reference to Audrey's critique becomes more glaring when Ian discusses the release of the document on GitHub:

For example, the authors embrace the rhetoric of openness by having published their manifesto on Github, a web-based hosting service that interoperates with a popular software versioning control system. Publishing non-software materials to Github is nothing new, and it's true that version control is sometimes useful for documents beyond source code. But by presenting the "official" version of the "Bill of Rights" on a website widely associated with open-source and open-culture values, its authors gain the credibility and appeal of the appearance of openness, with or without its reality.

Looking at this paragraph in more detail, there are some issues. First, there were multiple versions of this document published, on multiple locations. Arbitrarily namimg one version "official" is problematic. Second, the implicit criticism of this paragraph is that using GitHub for document versioning is a misuse of the site; this is a small deal, but when paired with the charge of openwashing (one of the unpardonable sins within many open source communities) the person who put the document on GitHub is clearly being hung out to dry. Including a link to Audrey's critique of the "Bill of Rights" would have provided a valuable context; without that context, the conversation is incomplete, and arguably inaccurate.

And in thinking about the document, how it was disseminated, and the reaction, here is where I get stuck. There is a lot in Ian's analysis that I agree with, but when we are making critiques, we need to be aware of context within which we are talking. According to Audrey, she began getting hateful emails from male programmers after Ian's post. And this reality drives home the point: when we are making critiques, we have an obligation to be as complete as possible, and to pay careful attention to the contexts surrounding our critique. It's worth remembering that white men, and especially straight white men, get to play on the lowest difficulty setting.

Ian's full piece is on his blog. Despite the observations laid out here, it's a worthwhile read, and I strongly recommend going through it in its entirety.

Full disclosure here: Audrey is a friend of mine, and we had the opportunity to talk this weekend at EduCon. In those conversations, she shared the contents of some of the emails she received from people who felt the need to attack her personally via a private communication. And it's not okay. And to be clear, I'm not a huge fan of the "Bill of Rights." I'm still sorting out my reactions, but when Ian Bogost says "the effort may really amount to a branding exercise, or a way to set the terms of a debate" that feels about right. But regardless of how we feel about the document, the process, the resulting conversation, and who benefits, we have an obligation not to eat our own. I'm leery of the document; by nature I'm suspicious of any group that self-identifies as the "most interesting people" - but, giving voice to concerns requires a complete, open dialogue. Omitting details and losing sight of context doesn't further the conversation.

Yesterday, I wrote this piece after reading an article on Incentivizing Education. The piece on incentivizing education attempts to define the philosophical justification and the absolute need for venture funded companies to profit from the public education system. But please, don't take my word for it. Read the piece yourself.

However, it's hard to take the argument seriously because it is riddled with blatantly obvious errors of fact. Yesterday, I limited myself to the second paragraph, largely for reasons of time, but every section contains assertions that are either demonstrably false, or conclusions drawn from these demonstrably false assertions (and yes, I do feel a little bit like this guy).

I have broken up another paragraph with some inline commentary below.

The single greatest innovation in education in our lifetime has been the opportunity created to leverage computers, tablets, and smartphones as delivery systems with myriad applications

If all we do with smartphones, computers, and tablets is "leverage" them "as delivery systems" we have failed. Education is not an exercise in consumption, and applications are not needed to enable learning. We should absolutely be using these tools, but we need to show how the hardware and the software facilitate creating, communicating, discovering, and distributing. The devices are tools that help us create different types of connections as we actively grow and experiment. Anything that emphasizes passivity over experimentation isn't about learning, it's about selling.

And selling is fine, but don't try and convince us that selling is learning.

A businessperson sees a screen and imagines an endpoint of a delivery system. An educator and a learner sees a doorway. Businesspeople, and especially funders, need to learn to think like educators and learners.

– and none of these devices were developed by schools or philanthropies. They were developed by fiercely competitive, ROI-oriented companies. Without these products, there would be no Open Education Resources.

Even the most superficial research shows that the history of computers is firmly rooted in schools, govermental organizations, philanthropies, as well as businesses.

The Atanasoff-Berry computer was designed and built at Iowa State. ENIAC was financed by the US military and built at the University of Pennsylvania. The NLS was developed with support from the US military and Stanford University (specifically, SRI).

And looking at the current day, how much hardware and software is sold to government, schools, or businesses that are doing contract or grant-funded work for the government? To insist that VC funded companies are the drivers of innovation is to ignore both history, the varied sources in which innovation arises, and the "demand" part of the supply and demand relationship.

Software and hardware have been developed in many ways, in many places. The claim that a "fiercely competitive, ROI-oriented" business is an essential piece of the equation ignores reality.

There would be no learning management systems.

This wouldn't be a bad thing. I love the idea of a world without Blackboard.

There would be no Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia.

Unless Jimmy Wales' parents were cavorting on an early iPad prototype in Cupertino, it's a stretch to say that Jimmy Wales wouldn't exist without modern technology.

But with regards to Mediawiki - the software that runs Wikipedia -it was built using open source tools, by community members, many of who were employed in educational organizations and worked on Mediawiki in their spare time.

A world of knowledge would still be limited to the elite: those pursuing doctorates at schools where former Presidents once resided.

The internet is the democratizing force. Usenet - developed within higher ed and governmental entities - supported peer to peer learning at a large scale in the 1980's. Read up on the history of ARPANET and the role of publicly funded governmental groups in creating it. Read up on ENQUIRE and then take a look at the public money behind it.

Do VC funded companies have a role to play in helping develop new technology? Of course they do, and no one is arguing otherwise. But please, don't confuse a fondness for actual facts with a blanket dislike of the profit motive. One can both like to make a profit and like to know the truth - these things aren't mutually exclusive. VC funded companies and for-profit companies have a role to play, and to pretend that there is widespread resistance to the idea of a business earning a fair profit is dishonest.

There is resistance, however, to blatant falsehoods being peddled as truth in the name of marketing and outreach. If anyone attempts to rewrite history so it better aligns with their marketing copy, they deserve to be called on it. Unfortunately, many EdTech companies create a narrative that has more to do with their business needs than actual reality.

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.