All posts in Social Learning

In many of the conversations around changing the current educational system, the rhetoric and approaches borrow heavily from the corporate world. In many cases, processes and strategies that have been used with inconclusive outcomes in corporate America are touted as solutions that will fix the problems that plague education: a short list includes merit pay (which worked really well among hedge fund managers), performance management, corporate-style layoffs as a means to eliminate "underperformers," and streamlining the means to outsource school management to for-profit companies.

Instability creates opportunity, and the current state of public education is nothing if not unstable. As a result, businesses are getting increasingly interested. Where business goes, marketing is not far behind, which invariably nets us a new buzzword: the edupreneur. The narrative around the edupreneur combines the mythology of the entrepeneur as a financial cowboy, an individual with the grit to take chances, bend the rules, and buck authority; with the equally potent mythology of the socially conscious company - a business venture with the ethics to, occasionally, put principles above profits.

I came across an example of this type of edupreneurial venture recently in the form of an interview with the founders of Notehall, a company that serves as a marketplace for students that want to sell their class notes. It's remarkable only because it is such a common example of what passes for an idea in the space where people actually believe the world of education is bereft of any creative or generative thought.

The blog post that contains the interview starts with a video of the company founders on a show called Sharktank (as an aside, I had no idea this show existed, and I'm a little upset to have had my bubble burst). The video is included here for your viewing pleasure:

The actual interview that follows is the standard breathless prattle that most of these things are; basically, PR talking points masquerading as actual conversation. But one line really stands out:

Question: What do you think education entrepreneurs need at this moment in the industry to be successful? Marketing? A good idea? A network?

Response: Mentorship/Network. A good team with an average idea will eventually discover a successful business if the right hands are helping guide them and see opportunities.

In a world where solutions are valued primarily for their ability to enrich a select few, and secondarily for their ability to benefit an undefined many, this philosophy defines what people consider innovative. In other words, a "good" innovation allows a company to find an unexploited niche and profit from it - the quality of the innovation is defined by the size of the profit.

To be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong from profiting from your work. And, if you have an idea, a dream, a vision, or a talent that you want to expand into a company, by all means, follow the dream. But bring your A game. Don't delude yourself that the educational world needs another mediocre idea with glossy marketing copy. If people want that, they can trawl the vendor floor at ISTE. But classrooms deserve better.

However, when a company gets too invested in a single solution - or worse yet, a single technological intervention - to a complex problem, much money can be wasted.

This problem can be compounded in companies heavily funded by venture capital money. An interview in FastCompany between Anya Kamenetz and Phoenix Wang alludes to the financial pressures at play; this quotation is from the second page:

There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there's a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.

At the same time, private and institutional investors are really interested in emerging products, but they're constrained by institutional purchasing. VCs need big exits, so they end up taking less risk.

You generally will not find much argument about the need for learning being a lifelong need. None of us ever reach a point where we can afford to stop learning, growing, or expanding.

However, the needs of people interested in profiting off the process of our learning are completely dissimilar: they want the biggest return possible, over the shortest time period. This cultural disconnect helps explain why the ideas of the business world clash with the ethos of the education world.

And, as the international financial markets still attempt to recover from the greed and excesses of the banking industry, maybe we have it backwards: perhaps education should step in and help protect these poor business folks from their own lack of understanding about the world in which we live.

For a good portion of 2008, I have been writing a book on using Drupal in Education. It has been a pretty incredible process, filled with rewards and challenges I didn’t envision at the outset.

Among the challenges: I began writing the book when Drupal 6 core was still in active development, and the contributed modules featured in the book did not yet exist in their D6 versions. As a consequence, I ended up writing two books to create one; the first version using Drupal 5 to help frame the scope of the book, and the second, final, version updated to reflect the improvements and changed processes in Drupal 6.

Among the rewards: a chance to see Drupal through fresh eyes. I’ve been working with Drupal for nearly four years now; writing a book targeted for people new to Drupal, and/or with a limited technical background, provided me the opportunity to slow down and examine procedures we had come to take for granted – things like adding a new content type, or adding a view. CCK and Views are critical to building a site within Drupal; we haven’t rolled a site out in the last couple years without these modules. The process of documenting their use helped me see the barriers that new users face when trying to learn these modules for the first time.

And while we are on the subject of Views, one of the other rewards of writing the book was being able to focus on the improvements between Views 1 and Views 2. The conversations and the development of Views 2 have been ongoing for over a year, and the work and effort has resulted in a tool that is more powerful while being easier to use. The ease of use of Views 2 in Drupal 6 shifts how we can develop, as Views 2 eliminates even more problems that used to require custom development.

The other realization I had throughout the course of writing the book centers around how we approach training in general, and Drupal-based training in particular. In discussions of training and usability, one main challenge revolves around identifying your audience: who are you training? What are their skillsets? What do they need to know to work effectively?

Most Drupal sites have at least three primary types of users: people who read content in the site; people who create content in the site; and people who maintain the structure of the site. There can (and usually are) overlaps between these roles, and some larger sites also have additional roles: for example, people who only add video content, or administrators who only edit/moderate content. And this is where things start to get interesting from both a training perspective and a book-writing perspective. Administrative tasks -- things like creating a new content type, building a navigational structure, configuring user profiles, configuring groups, etc -- are mostly strategies designed to meet needs. These strategies, once built into a site, provide a structure that people can use to do their work. The better these strategies have been executed, the easier it is to work within a site, and the more usable the site is for all stakeholders.

Which is all a long way of saying: site admins need to learn how to solve problems with Drupal. Other types of users shouldn't have to care. They are coming to the site to do work, and they shouldn't need to be bothered with *how* the site runs. From a training perspective, this results in multiple trainings around a single site

And with that said, the more we can simplify managing Drupal for site admins, the better. On more complex sites, we are already creating custom interfaces to make site administration easier, or less "drupal-ly."

Really, I'm still digesting the lessons (I think/hope) I have learned regarding Drupal, training, and usability. I'm going to be optimistic and assume that these thoughts will become more coherent, and if/when they do I'll share them here.

In the meantime, now that the heavy lifting involved in getting the book out is behind me, I'm looking forward to devoting more attention to other projects. In the upcoming weeks, we'll be doing some (much needed/long overdue) work with DrupalEd, and doing some more work with RSS Import (along these lines, but with an eye toward making this happen). We have some code that we have developed on some ongoing projects we need to release out, including some Drupal 6 code that can be used to create an amazingly flexible and simple online portfolio application. We're also still in the pipeline for the Knight-Drupal Initiative; as progress occurs I'll update this space.