Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I had a conversation with Dr. Chris Dede today following his COSN keynote, and asked several questions.

The first concerned the $100 laptop project. He is doubtful that the project can deliver laptop power at that price point. For this reason he is focusing on handheld mobile devices, since they are already close to ubiquitous, have the marketshare of the consumer market already pushing the price point down, and have such great power already. It is true that the power in the average cell phone today is greater than the power of the computers used by NASA in the 1960s to take humans to the moon and back. Chris thinks the interface and especially screen issues which are limitations with handheld devices will be resolved sometime by smart folks doing things like adding a projector to the back of the cell phone.

I also asked Chris about any work he was doing about student creation of media, because his last comment about wanting to empower people to not merely be entertained by technology, but use technology to transform their world, really struck a chord with me. This reminded me of things Marco Torres has expressed previously, about his personal beliefs concerning educational technology. Marco, like Chris, is on the board of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, and Chris shares this view of technology’s important role to empower people to share their voice and change their world. (This is certainly my view as well.) He referenced Seymour Papert’s work on student creation of media, but highlighted the shortcoming that remains: Where it is not possible today to introduce a program in schools which is a replacement curriculum for content area curriculum that involves student creation of media.

This took us to my final question, which regarded something Chris mentioned as “second generation standards.” I agree with Chris, that in 2009 we are going to have a political change in the US executive branch– at least in person, if not in party. So that new person is going to want to have their new “thing” with regard to educational policy. Chris suggested part of our role could be to have some good things lined up that we could suggest this person integrates with their vision for educational reform. This has some merit.

Chris suggests we should push the idea of “second generation standards” for education. I think this is an idea worth exploring in depth. I am reminded of David Berliner’s presentation a few months ago at Texas Tech, titled “High Stakes Testing is the Enemy.” Dr. Berliner is a big advocate of REDUCING the number of educational standards that are legislatively mandated, and I agree with this perspective.

In my opinion, the two most important changes we need in education involve:
1- AUTONOMY: Greater instructional autonomy for teachers and greater hiring/firing autonomy for principals and superintendents
2- TIME: Fewer instructional standards and mandates so teachers can take time to engage with their students in authentically educative learning activities.

So this is a topic I’ll likely take up more in the weeks and months to come. What should our “second generation educational standards” include? I am reminded of Daniel Pink’s book,“A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” in which he talks about how right brained thinkers will be increasingly dominant in our new conceptual age. The challenge is, I think, determining what sorts of educational standards could best encourage teachers to embrace pedagogies / teaching methods that support the “senses” articulated by Pink in his book. That would be a great topic for a day’s professional development!

As a final reflection, I am struck by how the real bottom line for our students and our future is the teachers. How do we convince, cajole, and encourage teachers to teach differently and teach better? Chris is paying teachers a stipend to participate in his “River City” project. That is likely a successful strategy.

I am thinking that instead of just buying more technology for low socio-economic schools—we need to pay teachers MORE to teach DIFFERENTLY in those schools. I am reading Jonathan Kozal’s “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America” now—what we see happening broadly in our lowest performing, poorest schools is NOT the solution we need. We don’t need teachers to exclusively use didactic, traditional teaching methods with heavy-handed discipline to essentially prepare kids for prison. Now I am NOT saying that is what is happening in all our schools, of course it is not. But read Kozal’s book—the reality in many urban school settings is horrific, and is not something middle and upper class America would likely tolerate if it was imposed on their children by the government.

Great session with Chris Dede today! I just regret I don’t have an iPod or anything else that I can record with to make a podcast—this would have been a great session to record if he’d given permission and I’d had the requisite technology! I’ll be working on remeding this “personal technology deficiency” soon! I have my eye on the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 (pricey but high quality at around $500), the EDIROL R-09 (also high quality and but around $400) or a video iPod $370 for 60 GB) with a Belkin TuneTalk mic ($70). I think I’ll likely go with the iPod option, but the other choices look tempting too, especially with their 24 bit audio quality!

On this day..

• Director of Technology and Education Outreach: Oklahoma Heritage Association! - 2008
• Nuggets from NECC (2) - 2007
• From "Hand it In" to "Publish it": Re-envisioning our Classrooms by Will Richardson - 2007
• Way Beyond Webquests by Gary Stager - 2007
• I'm on Twitter! - 2007
• Project Poster: Great tool for staff development - 2006
• Open Source Discourse: ETH Lecture Communicator - 2006
• Expectations for technology folks - 2006
• Hot Technologies for K-12 Schools - 2006
• Chris Dede on NeoMillennial Learning Styles - 2006

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under 1:1, disruptive-technology, literacy, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.