Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard University and the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, has a new book out focused on education. It’s called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns [amazon].

The book predicts that by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught online. This change will occur because new public and private organizations that start by adopting new technologies and methods to serve “nonconsumers” - people that the current system does not serve well - will eventually gain more market share in the Learning Economy.

For more information, check out this review from Education Week (sorry, you’ll need to create a free login to view the complete article).

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of
all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

- Maker Faire website

Maker Faire was attended by kids of all ages this weekend. And this year, for the first time since it began in 2006, Maker Faire offered a sneak preview to 500 teachers, students, and homeschool families during Education Day on Friday [my preview post].

Maker Faire embodies a few Map trends besides Do-It-Yourself. The homegrown, grassroots aspect of many of the projects point to both A New Localism and Distributed Innovation. One of the themes of Maker Faire is that if you can’t open it up and change it, it’s not yours - there’s a definite preference for open-source software and the ability to open everything up for tinkering and modification, suggesting Open Economy Principles and Deep Personalization.

And the Unbundled Education, Visible Community Learning, Kinetic Learning in Context, and Personalized Learning Plans opportunities at Maker Faire are endless! This event is all about participation and exploration and self-discovery of physical, tangible, eye-opening experiences.

I took a video camera to Education Day and went back for more fun and learning on Saturday. Here are a few videos and photos of events and exhibits:

In this video, kids play with a walking, talking robot that really loves their attentions:

This quick video shows an example of one of the homemade costumes on display by attendees:

In these two videos, several hundred spectators gathered to watch a pair of labcoated Makers drop a whole bunch of Mentos candies into a whole bunch of 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke to create a beautiful and messy display of physics in action. Part I includes the introduction and explanation, and Part II is the demonstration.

Part I:

Part II:

Every corner of the San Mateo fairgrounds held some new, weird, clever surprise - from the steampunk tractor and house on wheels to power tool drag races to robot wars to giant tesla coils and homemade musical instruments. And everywhere I looked, kids were running, skating, pedaling, and motoring from one wonder to the next.

Unfortunately, the same kids (and adults) that eagerly spent their weekend engaged in experiential learning are the same kids that are bored at school studying some of the same topics. With money channeled towards satisfying standardized experiences, few schools are able to provide learning experiences that are personalized, creative, engaging, and interactive.

The founders of Maker Faire recognize this problem. From the press release:

With budget cuts hitting schools nationwide, classes like shop, art and home economics are sadly disappearing,” lamented Maker Faire founder Dale Dougherty. “As a result, today’s students are less capable of working with their hands. These hands-on skills are absolutely vital to engineers, scientists, mechanics, chefs, and hundreds of other essential professions.”

Maker Faire combines the best elements of science fairs and live demonstrations, and invites spectators to get hands-on and become Makers - creators and shapers of their world and of their learning. These are the children that will flourish in a future of VUCA Communities and Extreme Diversity, and successful in the future that no child passed through our industrial press of education can hope to match.

As one high school student asked, “This is so much fun. Why can’t we do this kind of stuff every day?”

Hang in there, kid. You can do this kind of stuff every day - but you’ll have to wait until after you take that test and get out of class. Or until Maker Faire 2009.

I attended Maker Faire Education Day today! I’ll post more about this event on Monday, with more images and photos of students engaged in messy, loud, hands-on learning. For now, here’s an interview I shot with Sherry Huss, Director of Maker Faire:

Maker Faire 2008 Bay Area is this weekend, and comes to Austin, Texas in October. It’s fun for all ages.

This blog post from Will Richardson is quite interesting and sums up how I’ve been feeling lately:

I’ve always maintained, and still do, that the bulk of my learning these days comes in the conversation, that the publishing piece, the putting myself out there in a blog post (or video, or stream or whatever) is only the first step and, in reality, is not where I learn the most. I learn when my thoughts get pushed, when I read what others have written about other ideas on their own blogs, when I engage in the conversations about those ideas. And these “conversations” are different; they are not synchronous (though they are getting moreso), they are not linear, and as just the short sampling of link above conveys, there is a lot of complexity in the distributed nature of how we “talk” in this realm. In fact I think that might be the biggest frustration that newcomers to these tools experience. It’s random, seemingly aimless, and requires a whole bunch of other skills to navigate effectively.

Is the conversation moving from more centralized platforms, such as blogs and forums, to a decentralized pseudo-realtime mode? Are we losing the quality of thought that goes into a paper or a blog post in favor of less contextual snippets and links?

The Map of Future Forces Affecting Education suggests that Long-Tail economics, in the form of consolidation and commoditization, will likely reduce and refine the social networking media and tools into more mature and accessible platforms. It also suggests that Extreme Diversity will require networks to allow Deep Personalization to be truly topical and useful.

The immature precursors to whatever comes next are here:

• centralized social networks like Facebook, which offer everything in one place but suffer from identity issues
• micronets like Ning, which just got a nice treatment by Educause
• blogs, which take quite a bit of dedicated attention to maintain and read
• and microblogs like twitter, which is growing in popularity but is suffering from a signal-to-noise issue right now because it’s all one big melting pot of conversations

So, as a futurist, I’ll make a forecast: soon, we will see a proliferation of highly customizable social networks that offer multiple forms of collaboration and co-creation, with real-time communication and a definite sense of identity based upon affinity.

Some will be open, some will be closed; some will rely more on the depth of thought that goes into a paper or a book or even a blog post and resemble research teams or business meetings, others will be entirely composed of real-time updates and resemble smart mobs; all will adapt to the needs of its unique set of users.

And every participants’ identity in his or her communities - because this is really just the development of the right tool (the online, mobile social network) to support a set of practices and relationships - community - will be ephemeral or persistent as needed. This is the natural result of today’s highly Media-Savvy Youth coming of age.

So, are we losing depth in favor of immediacy? No, we are just seeing the seeds of a new, dynamic, and richer form of community. Right now, it’s in its infancy and distributed across disconnected tools. Soon, it will become part of the underlying infrastructure and we won’t even think about it.

In other words, the shifts and struggles and snags in the conversation will no longer be a topic of conversation.

Smart Mobs reports that the Brooklyn Museum is experimenting with crowdsourcing by requesting photo submissions online and asking the public to vote on which photos make it into the exhibit, which will be displayed this summer.

Three weeks ago, I was in New York for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). AERA is the largest gathering of academics in the field of education. Many members of foundations and other nonprofits attend as well.

My primary reason in attending was to connect with organizations and individuals interested in two main interests of the Foundation: social media’s applications to teaching and learning, and student voice / student empowerment.

Since my conversion to twitter a few months ago, I’ve tried to do my part by posting real-time updates of events and meetings to other people using it. It’s also an interactive way to take notes because people can respond! So I’ve included a few posts from my “twitterstream” for you.

Session 28.024. Learning, Meaning, and Civic Engagement in the Digital Age: The MacArthur Digital Media Initiative
Tuesday, March 25th, 12:25pm to 1:55pm

Chair:

• Constance Yowell, JD and CT MacArthur Foundation

Participants:

• Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Howard E Gardner, Harvard University
• James Paul Gee, Arizona State University
• Nichole D Pinkard, University of Chicago

This was MacArthur’s first sponsored panel. It was star-studded, and many notables were in the audience. Henry Jenkins and Howard Gardner got into a few friendly debates over issues of access and equity, which all agreed were amplified by technology (or lack of technology). One memorable moment came when Nichole Pinkard showed an example of a student-created rap video; many of the academics in the audience looked truly mystified.

tweets:

#aera topic of discussion: the concept of the nation-state is breaking down; our digital natives are crossing borders regularly 09:34 AM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

#aera nichole pinkard is playing homemade hiphop from the iremix project to a room of academics. visible confusion. 09:50 AM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

#aera henry jenkins: we don’t need adults looking over students’ shoulders, we need them watching their backs. zing. 10:05 AM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

#aera jim gee wants to use serious games to teach complex systems. this will motivate civic participation. 10:15 AM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

#aera howard gardner reminds us that howard dean was made and broken by new media 10:53 AM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

Session 33.012. The Future of Learning: New Paradigms for the 21st Century (Presidential Session)
Tuesday, March 25th, 4:05pm to 5:35pm

Chair:

• Constance Yowell, JD and CT MacArthur Foundation

Participants:

• Mizuko (Mimi) Ito
• Marshall S Smith, WF Hewlett Foundation
• Diana Rhoten, NSF (replacing Daniel Atkins, NSF)

Discussant:

• John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC

This was the second session sponsored by MacArthur. It was in the largest room and was packed; audience members were jammed into the doorway, probably to see Mimi Ito and John Seely Brown.

tweets:

#aera mimi: 2 big things right now: new tools that youth have already adopted into ecology, and public sharing 01:14 PM March 25, 2008 from Snitter

#aera mimi polls audience: who knows what an rpg is? very few hands. i think we’re in trouble here. 01:20 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera next up, marshall smith of hewlett foundation on open educational resources 01:25 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera diana rhoten up next on virtual environments 01:42 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera diana: with early adoption comes a mix of hysteria and hope 01:46 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera lots of hype, lots of hope, lots of doubt about efficacy of virtual worlds for impact on learning 01:50 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera virtual environments are no exception 01:46 PM March 25, 2008 from web

#aera jsb closes with herb simon quote: it’s not what you know, it’s how you know it 02:10 PM March 25, 2008 from web

Session 39.022. Digital Literacies and the Future of Schools
Wednesday, March 26th, 10:35am to 12:05pm

Chair:

• Richard R Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Participants:

• Erica Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison
• Allan M Collins, Northwestern University
• Katie Salen, Parsons School of Design
• Lauren B Resnick, University of Pittsburgh
• Louis M Gomez, Northwestern University
• Anthony S Bryk, Stanford University

Discussant:

• Richard R Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison

All of the speakers for this session were interesting, but the most exciting was Katie Salen, who is launching a new gaming for learning program at Parsons The New School of Design. Many of the consequences for education hinted at by our Map – disconnect between school and students, lack of integration of technology, bored students, aging model – were discussed. The projects presented all attempt to educate students in basic digital literacy and then scaffold on top of that knowledge.

tweets:

#aera halverson opens by holding up an iphone, praising it, and saying that it’s banned from most schools 07:39 AM March 26, 2008 from Snitter

#aera school is becoming less important as venue for learning; industrial rev led to universal schooling, knowledge rev leads to lifelong 07:46 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera seeds of new system: home schooling, workplace, distance, adult, tv/video, virtual environments, tech certifications, internet cafes 07:48 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera halverson names three imperatives: customization, interaction, learner control. calls for new horace mann to step up and be visionary 07:54 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera giving henry jenkins’ def of particip cultures. low barriers to entry, support built in, informal mentorship, valued contributions 07:57 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera now showing a screenshot of gamestar mechanic. it’s come a long way since i last played with it. 08:21 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera next up: someone who does not introduce herself and does not show slides. 08:42 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera that must mean she knows what she’s talking about 08:42 AM March 26, 2008 from web

#aera wish you all were here. resnick is pretty funny. but nothing i can really repeat here. habermas, dewey, democracy… 08:54 AM March 26, 2008 from web

Session 53.014. Girls and Information Technology: Innovative Approaches to Narrowing the Gender Gap
Thursday, March 27th, 10:35am to 12:05pm

Chair:

• Jill Denner, Education, Training, and Research Associates

Participants:

• Deborah Muscella, Simmons College
• Zakiyyah Kareem and Audrey Warren, Girlstart
• Melissa J Koch, William R Penuel, Torie Gorges, SRI International
• Karen A Peterson and Karen J Manuel, Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
• Steven Bean and Jacob Martinez, ETR Associates

Discussant:

• Cornelia Brunner, Education Development Center / Center for Children and Technology

I attended this session with KWF VP of Education Strategy Monica Martinez. It was a good source of some interesting student / gaming organizations: BuildIT (which marries IT fluency with STEM,) GirlStart (a computer club for girls,) TechReach (an alignment of school, community, local business, and mentors for at-risk girls,) and the Girl Game Company (a gaming company managed by high school girls that build games for girls). The somewhat weak conclusion was that these projects work because they are interesting to girls.

tweets:

#aera girls often feel that they are consumers of tech but not empowered to create it 07:53 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

#aera BuildIT marries IT fluency with STEM education. 08:08 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

#aera girls participating in Girl Game Company are employees with roles and get paid in virtual currency called clams. 08:37 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

#aera key seems to be in designing learning experiences that actually interest girls. that’s a bit obvious. 08:49 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

Session 55.047. From Practice to Practice: What Novice Teachers and Teacher Educators Can Learn From One Another.
Thursday, March 27th, 12:25pm to 1:55pm

Chair:

• Thomas C Hatch, Teachers College

Participants:

• Pamela L Grossman, Stanford University
• Christa M Compton, Stanford University
• Emily Venson, School of the Future
• Travis Bristol, Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice

Discussant:

• Magdalene Lampert, University of Michigan

This was a very interesting session. A group of teacher educators at various schools of education all tried to emulate the work of one star teacher, Yvonne Divans Hutchinson in Los Angeles, as a means of training new teachers. Hutchinson teaches literature and literary theory to primarily African-American and Latino students, using techniques that engage learners in the context of their own lives. The teacher educators discovered that Hutchinson is very difficult to emulate, but her work is great material for potential teachers to discuss and study.

tweets:

#aera persistent theme: all tried to teach hutchinson’s methods; her high school kids outperfomed teachers in training at stanford, tc. 10:01 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

#aera interesting point from audience member: teacher prof dev in schools is usually not connected with teacher education in higher ed 10:41 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

#aera why does every question from audience come with a lengthy personal background? oh yeah, because i’m at an academic conference. 10:47 AM March 27, 2008 from twhirl

Session 64.012. Contexts of Power: The Role of Youth-Led Action, Research, Evaluation, and Planning in Generating Social Change in Schools
Friday, March 28th, 8:15am to 9:45am

Chair:

• Jennifer M Gong, Youth in Focus

Participants:

• Jann Murrary-Garcia, University of California - Davis
• Dana Wright, Harvard University
• Jesus Sanchez and Lucia Kimble, Youth in Focus
• Patrick Lee, Stupski Foundation

Discussant:

• Pedro A Noguera

[note: presenters also included a whole bunch of students from Oakland Unified School District and Davis High School]

This was the most interesting session I attended; it was entirely focused on student-led efforts to gain power and voice in the (local) education system. And most of the presenting was done by the students themselves. There were two projects represented: a district-wide effort at the Oakland Unified School District called All City Council (ACC,) and a school-wide effort at Davis High School.

tweets:

#aera we just did the hokey pokey. good idea for a wakeup. let the students lead the way. 05:31 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera new student presenting on qualitative results: students perceived that administrators expected diff performance out of diff races 05:50 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera and students gradually come to meet those expectations 05:50 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera now up: students from oakland unified school district, starting with tony robinson. he’s opening in with a poem he wrote. 06:00 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera spoken word called “reflection”. “now i can see. the reflection in my eyes is a reflection of me” 06:01 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera ousd has now institutionalized youth voice into planning cycle, incl research funds 06:14 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera student research closed with funny story about hopping the school fence to avoid truancy officer to get *inside* 06:31 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

#aera robert from surdna foundation just used the term “adultist” to describe most funders and the general public. 06:52 AM March 28, 2008 from twhirl

Technorati Tags: knowledgeworks, future, education, aera, aera2008

While attending the AERA 2008 annual meeting in NYC, I took a side trip to visit GlobalKids.org. While some of the AERA sessions (link coming soon) were more interesting than others, GlobalKids was a inspiring.

GlobalKids is a non-profit after-school program founded in 1989. GK combines international relations, leadership development, and digital media to turn its high school-aged participants into global activists.

GK oversees many related efforts: 15 student-led sites within high schools throughout New York City, which they support through mentorship and training at their headquarters; student-run summits (600 students attended their annual summit last week; they will reach out to 2000 - 3000 more); online leadership programs; work with the Council on Foreign Relations [cfr], and intense work with the High School for Global Citizenship [hsgc]. It also runs a fee-for-service program that develops curricula and programs for schools and organizations.

During my visit to the headquarters, I sat with a group of students in the Virtual Video Project, an after-school program. Last year, high school students in this program produced A Child’s War, a tale of two brothers abducted into the child soldier armies of Uganda, told through the medium of Second Life. These students are at the very early stages of this year’s project on racism. They researched the topic online with the guidance of Tabitha Tsai (who participated in a KnowledgeWorks convening in December) and Catherine Mbindyo, GK Trainers. Then they held a discussion about racism in the US and other countries and discussed factors that might be worth exploring in their production. By the end of the session they had developed and narrowed down a list of themes to explore - government policies and legal issues were at the top of the list.

And along the way, they develop both leadership skills and technology skills, through hands-on training embedded in their other activities. Many of the students told me their reasons for coming to the program, which ranged from “by mistake” to “something to do” to “computer skills” but it was clear to me that the technology skills were simply a foundation for the others. The discussion was deep and inclusive, and conducted with sensitivity and a sense of purpose.

The future forecasted by the Map is one of globalization, permeable national / identity boundaries, media-savvy youth, and learning through rich media. The students participating in GlobalKids are creating compelling and artistic media, with very real and authentic projects that actually help people and bring attention to real problems in our world.

What impresses me most about this program is the authenticity and relevance of it - these students are engaging with real topics that affect themselves, and then doing something about them to effect change for others.

I apologize to readers of the KWF blog; I’ve been on the road quite a bit lately and haven’t had time to post much. This week I was in NYC for the American Educational Research Association annual meeting - notes coming soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a low-res photo of this giant billboard I spotted in Times Square:

Click on the photo to get more information about this attack on the power of teachers’ unions.

The Infinite Thinking Machine has a great post on using open source software and the power of web 2.0 to advance digital equity (it’s also a great primer on the topics).

ITM advocates advising students on available commercial, web-based, and free tools that they can use in and out of school; students can also benefit from a list of public sources of high-bandwidth internet access, such as libraries, community centers, and free hotspots.

Technorati Tags: future, education, knowledgeworks, digitaldivide, equity, web2.0, opensource

After the terrific experience I had at Educon, and again at ETech2008, I’ve become a reluctant convert to twitter, a “microblogging” tool.

Microblogging is sort of like blogging, except that instead of posting paragraphs or pages of text and other content on a website, users post very short updates that show up on a phone or a website or on a computer desktop. Typically the frequency for this kind of activity is much higher, and the style is much more casual.

Using twitter in the normal, “passive” mode that I like to use, I can get insight into what some of my favorite people are thinking about, and respond to them if they think I’m worth following as well. During an event like Educon or in a classroom, it makes a great “active” back-channel for communication with other participants.

twitter (and now Pownce, which has more features but hasn’t caught on yet as widely) is one of those services, like facebook, the overhead projector, and the chalkboard, that was not originally designed for learning, but has been adopted and adapted for that purpose. Its API allows developers to create many complementary applications for it, like plugins for other online social media services, and it has a good mobile interface for twittering on the go. It is an early platform for a technology-enabled personal learning network, and represents another step along the path to the day when everyone is connected, all the time, with a finely nuanced social network based upon personal and professional relationships, affinities, and distance.

Imagine a day when learners are able to instantly ask questions and hold discussions with anyone willing to participate. A team of students studying a great work of modern literature could correspond with each other, with the leading experts on the works, with the actors from the stage adaptation, with a professor at a distant university, and perhaps with the author, and they could trade resources and construct meaning together. A field trip to a museum can become a dialog with learners around the world that cannot be there in person. A solo learner at home can have access to the brain power of thousands.

Whether you believe in this vision or not, it’s interesting to note that most schools today discourage or ban the use of social media instead of embracing it and integrating it.

If you’re interested in learning more about how microblogging is being used now, academHacK has a great post about effective use of twitter in and out of the classroom.

Technorati Tags: future, education, knowledgeworks, twitter, pownce, microblogging

Powered by ScribeFire.