I'll be keynoting the Northeast Ohio Regional Technology Conference at the University of Akron, in Akron, on Friday, March 16, 2012.  I've presented in Akron on several occasions and I've always had good presenations there so I'm looking to continue my string.  The keynote focuses on learning spaces, and is a favorite of mine, entitled "Habits and Habitats: Retninking Learning Spaces for the 21st Century, which I've updated with new ideas.  I'll also be doing a new workshop in the afternoon for school leaders entitled "Leaders and Learning Spaces," which presents a combination of learning space principles and design thinking to help leaders make changes in the spaces where learning occurs.  

I'll be in Austin on February 8 and 9 doing two presentations at the 2012 TCEA Conference.  TCEA is undoubtably one of my favorite conferences as is Austin one of my favorite towns – you really can't beat the two together if you are interested in technology, learning, great food, and great Texas hospitality.  I'll be doing a session on rethinking how we approach technology entitled "Overcoming Technology Yah Buts" as well as a session on developing social media guidelines for schools, appropriately titled "Developing Social Media Guidelines."  Support materials are almost finished for both presentations and can be seen on my presentation site, or by clicking on the hyperlinks in this post.  I hope to see you there.

A book filled with text. And pictures. Textbooks are a leftover from an era when information was analog, scarce, and proprietary. 

Sometimes textbooks even have math problems, and sometimes these are story problems, which still strike fear into the heart of every person who ever attended school.  I'm still not sure today how to solve this: If a train left Cleveland heading west at a rate of 72 miles per hour, and a car left Detroit traveling southeast at 63 miles per hour, they would intersect….(shudder).

Anyway, one of the hottest things out there right now are digital textbooks.  If your district is not discussing these, my guess is that they will be shortly.

Most of the discussion around digital texts focuses on cost savings to the district, and/or parents, and reducing the textbook mass most kids lug around through the hallways each day.

I've not seen a conversation that focuses on how they will impact learning.

That should be the first conversation.

As you know, moving a textbook from paper to digital allows for the producer (textbook company) and user (teacher/student) to take advantage of the affordance of the digital world.  Animations, simulations, video, hyperlinks, annotation, reading together, writing notes…etc.   I would imagine that a digital textbook would also update itself just like software does, with updates streaming down from the cloud.  

I've seen several presentations by textbook companies on their new digital textbooks, and I'm not encouraged.  There's not a whole lot of what I just described.  Frankly, I don't believe textbook publishers understand the role that digital technologies can play in learning, and how people use them to connect to learn – in fact, I know they don't after seeing their products and listening to their sales pitches.

To me, digital textbooks, as they exist now, are simply a new way to do an old thing.

Let's begin with the name.  What if they were called something other than digital textbooks, something that went beyond the comfort zone of education, something that suggested new capabilities, purpose and use?  The name should be anything but "text book."  And words matter, right?

Changing the name also means changing the design, away from the traditional linear, sequential trip through content.  The user interface design on the examples I've seen are cumbersome at best.  But instead of user interface design, what if the producers of these resources focused on learner interface design? Maybe it would like like this:

What if the "textbook" (we'll call it that for now) was saavy enought to make recommendations on resources for learners, much in the same way Amazon and any of a number of other digital tools make suggestions for me right now? What if these resources were based on my pathway through the content, my interests, my passions, or even questions I might pose about ideas presented in the resource?  What if the book connected me with other learners based on my profile or interests, regardless of location, like Twitter does with their recommendations for new people to follow?  Why must my learning be limited to those I share a physical space with?

What if learners could ask the textbook to connect ideas, people, resources, websites, social media, really anything digital, in a way that ifttt.com does with their "If this happens, then do this?"statements?  If I do this, then the textbook does that.  For example, if I selected an online resource from a list provided to me by the textbook based on a question I posed to the textbook, then I could "program" the textbook to automatically post the resource to my Diigo account, and then share it with my network of learners, perhaps via Twitter, along with the tags I select.  I want an intelligent agent as my "textbook," not just a digital version of a static collection of ink on paper.

What if I could plug my social media resources and network into my new digital resource?  Why can't I take advantage of those?  Why should I allow a publisher to limit how I interact?

You know what, what if we just used the largest digital textbook ever invented, the World Wide Web?  

Seriously, how long would it take you to compile enough resources to replace your current textbook, at the level you use it?

Before I go further, let's step back a bit.  How many of the school districts engaged in going digital or thinking about going digital actually studied how textbooks were currently being used in learning, and to what extent?  Shouldn't this be done first?  And if textbooks weren't found to be a critcial component of the learning experience, why bother with going to a digital version?  What's to be gained other than cost savings and a reduction in sore backs?  Perhaps some schools would say that's enough benefit.

If a school district went digital, would the learning experience become more contemporary?  Would textbooks become a critical component of learning if they were digital?  Not necessairly, in both cases. What if the resource contained undeniable benefit, and this was obvious to all?  Would they become an essential component of the learning experience?  Perhaps…but I still have my doubts.

If your school or district decides to go digital, you also have to address the device question.  And it's a critical question.

If you expect digital textbooks to be a key factor in the learning experience, then you have to be in a 1:1 situation.  Everyone has to have the same device, with the same capability; to be fair to teachers, the teachers have to know what every kid walks into class with, and the school community has to build understanding together about the progress and impacts of the implementation..  If you don't have a 1:1, you'll have kids with devices without digital textbook capability (e.g. flip phone), which means that you 'll have some kids with digital textbooks and some without – completely unacceptable if you are concerned about about the role the digital textbook plays in learning.  

And if you still believe BYOD is the answer, imagine this scenario:  you've got some kids with digital textbooks and some kids without, and the kids that have digtal textbooks, have them on multiple types of devices…

Nice. That's a recipe for success.

But if you are in cost-recovery mode, and just trying to provide some savings, then a BYOD situation might make sense, at least at first glance.  OK, those kids that have a device can use digital, but if you don't, you go paper.  Now you've just intentionally introduced an inequity, and that's problematic, big time. Imagine the kid that doesn't have the device looking at those that do and wondering now if he's now outgunned and consequently outmatched.  Is that what you want? We have enough have and have nots in education.

You're also asking teachers to manage two different resources intended for the same purpose, and now one has a different look, feel, and capability.  

Good luck.  They'll ask for their paper textbooks back, guaranteed.

They'll also resent technology.  Even more.

In many ways, I believe the emergence, development and excitement around digital textbook paralells what we've seen with other "replacement" technologies, such as digital projectors and interactive whiteboards.  Whiteboards replaced chalkboards, digital projectors replaced overhead projectors, and now digital textbooks replace paper textbooks. 

A new way to do an old thing. When does something completely new arrive? 

But all is not lost.  There are some bright spots on the horizon.

Life on Earth, a 59 chapter book on Biology, produced by the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, will be free to anyone.  It will be designed from the ground up as a digital textbook unlike the many digital textbooks that are simply digital conversions of their paper parent.

Biobook is a Gates Foundation funded iPad Web-enabled biology textbook that enables teachers to select content from a national database of biology chapters written and contributed by educators themselves. Here is what is intriguing: 

• the "book" is build on the Moodle platform, which is widely distributed already, and available as an open source application. 
• the "book" encourages leaners to set their own course through biological principles, to "seek different learning paths," with content organization based on a tree metaphor of Root, Branch, and Leaf.  Learners can take their own branch, and follow down to a specific content idea, or leaf.
• an emphasis on socialy annotating the text.
• a progress map provided to students that provides them with an understanding of their progress, the class progress, and a suggested progress.
• an official book will be curated based on analytics provided by students. (Ferenstein 2011)

It will be interesting to see how these two efforts develop.

Now, if we could just do something about that train and car…

"It was the beginning and end of imagination, all at the same time."  From the movie Seabiscuit.

—–

Literature Cited:

Ferenstein, Gregory. "BioBook, A Gates-Funded IPad Textbook, Would Create A Free Database For Customized Learning | Fast Company." FastCompany.com – Where Ideas and People Meet | Fast Company. 30 Oct. 2011. Web. 26 Dec. 2011. <http://www.fastcompany.com/1791871/biobook>.

Blinders.

From Google:  define blinders:  

1.  A pair of small leather screens attached to a horse's bridle to prevent it seeing sideways and behind.

2.  Something that prevents someone from gaining a full understanding of a situation.

Evidently, blinders, or blinkers as they are called as well, are designed to keep a horse from looking backward, as well as towards the side.  It's believed that they may help the horse stay on target, moving forward without being distracted.

But I like the second definition better.

Consider your typical school. How many in the organization are truly aware of the forces that are shaping education today?  How many are aware of the learning opportunities available to people outside of traditional school?  How many live in an isolated world still shaped by "What We've Alway's Done" and with a view that looks forward, but down the same path, and without the benefit of peripheral vision, and the potential opportunities afforded by a wider range of exposure to new ideas and new ways of thinking?

How many in education today wear blinders?

Worse, how many in education today are comfortable wearing blinders?

Take your school.  How many are aware of the Open Courseware movment, that has reached over 100 million people in a decade? How many saw today that MIT announced a new endeavor called MITx?  OK, to be fair, it was just released today.  But take a look at the learning environment they are trying to create-would most see that as something to follow, to learn about, to participate in, to understand?  Or is that just something happening at MIT, and well, it's MIT. 

Take your school.  How many are aware of, and could explain the significance, of the Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford?  Or the online high schools at George Washington University, at Stanford, or the Insight School of Washington. Or, for that matter, the rise of K-12 blended learning?

More importantly, do they care to understand?  Are they challenged by what they don't know, and how it impacts what they do, their profession?  

Take your school.  How many could explain the principles of learning within a massive open online course (MOOC)? Could they take the foundations of a MOOC course and adapt them for their classroom?  

Would they at least try?

Take your school.  How many could intelligently explain the impact of No Child Left Behind and AYP?  Response to Intervention?  Race to the Top?

Or, is it a belief that understanding all of that is someone else's issue, and if we wait long enough, it will go away anyway.  It has in the past…

How many could explain "flipping the classroom?"  That's been out there for a while.  My guess is not that many.

More importantly, if they didn't know what that entails, would they at least be curious enough to explore the practice?  Perhaps even try it? Take the initiative to try?

Or, with a sly smile, and a dismissive wave, explain that they know what works, and they know what's important for kids.  After all, they've been doing it for years.

For your school, and for you, are your efforts to improve constrained by a narrow focus on the immediate, and what's directly in front of you?  

Or do you have the capacity for a more wholistic vision, one in which disruptive opportunities and concepts, in the periphery and perhaps not yet in the "mainstream", challenge your intellect and potentially inform practice and action?

Or, are you wearing blinders?

image from istockphoto.com

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

What If? | The Upshot

Creating a new story requires rethinking, but more importantly, the willingness to rethink, dream, and look for new possibilities.  Creating a new story requires that the author or authors of that new story cast aside the destructive Yah But mentality, and ask "What If?"

Education has always sought to change the story of the learners that have walked through the doors of schools.  That’s what schools have always done, opened doors when none were open. It’s the fundamental essence of education-to change the pathway of a person’s life.

But to continue with that mission, education itself needs to experience its own fundamental purpose, and develop a new path, a more relevant, open, responsive, and creative path, a new map for what we do and for those we serve. 

We need to create a new story.

And education itself has to compose that story, and not allow others to compose it for them.

It is not a time to be timid, it is not a time to withdraw, and it’s not a time to hide behind what we have always done.  It is a time to be bold, to make big plans, and tell our own story.  It is a time for reframing our thinking, and that begins with two simple words,

What If…

Over time, and with much hard work, we can turn What If to What Is. 

That can be our new story.

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

 What If? | The Lesson

What if the lesson wasn’t the lesson?

When I taught biology, part of the curriculum was to teach kids about cell division, a process known as mitosis. 

Do you remember the process of mitosis?  That’s an important question.  If you don’t why not?  If you do, why?

To teach kids mitosis, I would lecture for two class periods, they’d memorize the steps, and take a multiple choice test.  They’d do well, and then they would forget about mitosis

What if there was a different way for students to learn mitosis?

Looking back, I’d do this, as I had eight internet capable computers in my classroom.

I’d give them the authentic scenario of cancer.   Normally, when cells divide, they stop.  When things go wrong, they keep dividing.  Sometime this contributes to cancer.  Understanding cell division is part of understanding cancer.

Then I’d give them a simple but powerful question.  How does a cell go from one to two?  What’s the plan?

Then I would give them access to visual media.

Images from Google.

From Flickr

From Youtube.

Animations.

Simulations.

And then I ask them to turn off all the sound. Visual interpretation only.  Raw materials for understanding, choose what you want.  Play the understanding as much as you want.  Rewind.  Play again.  Develop your answer.  Collaboratively.  And develop media to explain your solution.  Share that, and have a more expansive group of learners evaluate and offer course corrections if necessary. 

I’d do a similar thing if I was a history teacher helping students understand the importance of the assassination of President John F Kennedy

I’d show them how to locate Creative Commons imagery in Flickr.

I’d show them how to use Google Streetview to take a trip to Dealey Plaza.

I’d show them how they could see Dealey Plaza in real time.

I’d ask them to investigate actual footage of the event on YouTube, first with Walter Chronkite, and then with Abraham Zapruder.

Then I would show them how to merge their ideas, and the content online to assemble their understanding in a wiki platform.

Then I’d show them how to build content in Google Earth, so when they  needed to demonstrate understanding that had a geographical context, they could do it there.

What if education could a new story of learning by asking great questions, providing access to multiple types of learning resources, and expecting students to be an active participant in their learning?

The other option is to do what we’ve always done.

How well is that working for us?

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

 What If:  The Classroom

Is the notion of a classroom an absolute in education?  What if the classroom wasn’t the classroom?

At least as we think of it today…

Are there new ways of addressing where students learn?  Is that all we can offer students? (Picture of typical classroom).

With all the new technologies at our disposal, are there new what if ways of transitioning this space to something more expansive and more contemporary?

What if we rethought classrooms, and schools, as learning spaces, where technology was not integrated but just part of the fabric of what learning is?

What if learning extended beyond the physical brick and mortar experiences?  (Enter:  picture of kids using computers on wireless bus).

For example, what if buses were wireless, and gave kids access to classes?

What if classes were developed for buses?

What if schools looked toward locations other than school to understand how learning occurred?

What if schools recognized the value of third places as valid locations of learning?

And what if we rethought our learning spaces, what if they were colorful, resource rich, filled with adult mentors, and truly enabled students to explore their passions, like YouMedia in Chicago, Illinois.

What if digital spaces took their rightful place alongside our traditional physical spaces as learning locations?

What if digital spaces where not just for posting assignments, calendar events, and documents but were for connecting learners?

What if digital spaces were more than just places for kids who were absent from class to get make up work?

What if digital spaces helped tell a new learning story, what if these spaces helped students tell their story, what if these spaces took advantages of the affordances of social media to shift a classroom to a learning space?

And what would happen if learning opportunities afforded by digital spaces were open for enrollment across the globe, such as this MOOC course, which represents a Massive Open Online Course?

What if you had choice of what resources you wanted to learn with, with people who had the same interests as you, and you could learn anytime, and finish the course with new understandings but with also a new network of people to continue to learn with?

What would happen, and what would learning look like, if 160 thousand people signed up for a course, with content available in 40 languages?

What if mainstream K-12 education fails to realize the potential of this type of learning?

They’ll be replaced.

Here is the online high school from George Washington University.

Here is the online high school from Stanford University.

What if thinking can help schools see the opportunities for developing new venues for learning, and make learning that is independent of time space and place a reality?

How would you begin developing that story?

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

 What If? Telling your Story…

This presentation is about changing the story…and that can begin with telling stories.

Today’s technology connects us with the capability to take the stories of our lives and tell them with a variety of different media to make the story come alive, in a brand new way…

We can also use technology to tell those stories to people we have never met, nor will probably ever meet, at least face to face.

What if schools focused on helping students tell stories, and in new ways?

What story does this tell?  (picture: scantron form)

And what story does this tell, when the storytelling is between two people, and one is responsible for evaluating the story?  Is that all we can offer?  (picture: graded essay)

Instead of grading someone’s story, how will you help students write themselves into existence?

There are numerous ways today, afforded by easily accessible technologies.

What if teachers led the way, with telling their own stories, using the technologies of 2011?

Time gets in the way, doesn’t it?  Interest does too.  Grading, parent phone calls, planning lessons all are potential yah buts.  The pressures of standardized curriculum and assessment contribute as well.  There’s only so much time in the day, right, and they can learn all of this on their own anyway.  After all, their digital natives…

For students, creating stories beyond Facebook means video.

Video is the language of their age.

Being literate today means being able to compose with multiple media.

In my opinion, if you can’t craft a video message, put your words into imagery, and tell your story, you’re on the outside looking in.

And I’m not talking Dylan’s Couch Episode 8 either, where we have a student talking about their history project, although the video has almost 1.4 million views.  Look at the potential audience your students have!

I’m talking about serious messages, such as True America, where a Hispanic student explores immigration from Mexico, with the potential of explaining her views to her peers around the world, to help in providing a different context for understanding the complex country known as America.

Here is what her teacher wrote about the potential for telling a new story.  It’s worth reading.

“Here is a challenge to the young people of our country and those on the other side of the world–to go through the wall that separates the ambassadors and heads of state–to reach into the hearts and minds of peers in foreign lands with the truth as we live it, as we can best convey it–partly in image, partly in sound, but always in our own voice?” (Matt Formato)

So, what if we could help them create new stories, their own personal anthems?

And what if we could help them create a competitive voice, one that could emerge from the massive amounts of content uploaded each day…and be heard.

What if we helped our students tell their stories?

Would that help to change our story?

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

What If? Swipe!

My second “ What if story”  is entitled Swipe, which is an intentional nod towards the motion of a finger across the surface of a tablet, such as an iPad.

When I was a kid, my mother used to read Digger Dan to me when I was about 4.  I couldn’t get enough Digger Dan.  Even when I look at book cover now, I can still recall that steam shovel…

This is a colleague’s   two year old using an iPad to listen to his father read him Toy Story.   He uses his finger to swipe to the next page…at 2 years old.

How has your reading changed over the last three years?  Do you still read paper?  Or has your reading shifted to a digital platform, where you turn digital pages with a swipe of your finger?

What is the new story of reading, and how much of it are we bringing to our students?  And yes, we have that responsibility.

What if we could access what we wanted to read via Project Gutenberg, and then access that content on a smartphone using a QR code?

What if I could change the dimensions of what we read by using Readability?

What if I could digitally store things I wanted to read in my own personal digital library on Diigo?

What if I could mark things I wanted  to read later with Instapaper?

And what if I read not only by myself, but with others with Book Glutton?

What if I read with a geographical content in Google Earth, with Google Lit Trips?

What if I could collect, or aggregate, different authors into one central location by using Google Reader?  What if the content flowed to me, what if that content followed me?

What if I could distill important ideas from what I read, and organize and tag that information into my Evernote account?

What if I could sync that information to my online Evernote account, and make it available in the cloud?

And what if I had mobile access to that information from a mobile Evernote account?  What if the information I read and distilled was available to me anywhere?

What if I took that information and repurposed it into a Posterous blog post?

What if I then distributed that post from Posterous to any number of individuals via social media?

What if I published what I wrote in a book using LuLu?

What if I created my own augmented reality book with Zooburst?

And what if I really used technology to accomplish something absolutely amazing…using technology to sign bedtime stories to deaf children?

Take a Playstation Portable and scan the QR code in the upper left…

And a video appears with a woman who signs the book to the child…

What if we could do all of this?  Well, we can. 

Right now. 

It’s all available.

Yet schools languish in a world entitled “What We’ve Always Done…”

What if educators taught students to leverage these tools?  How would that change how they view technology?  How would that change how they use technology, and how they learn with technology?

What would that story tell?

Most importantly, what if education was interested in this?

How would our story change?

Posted via email from David Jakes

This post is taken from my K12 Online Conference presentation, “What If the Story Changed?”  Access the presentation here.

What If?  The Hallway

You’ve probably realized by now that the most important focus of this presentation is to help change or reframe how you approach ideas, and how those ideas can be nurtured, improved, and amplified to create a new story.

To help unlock your thinking on how you approach new ideas, I’d like to present to you my first “What If” vignette:  The Hallway.

All hallways help people get from point A to Point B. 

Hallways are for storage of coats and books, and sometimes finishing up that homework before school.

But what if we created a new story for the hallway with “What If” thinking?

What if a hallway had a Twitter account?

What if a hallway had a Facebook account?

And what if you could check into your hallway on Foursquare?  What if you could become the mayor of your hallway?

Right now, are you intrigued by these ideas, or are you thinking “Yah But?”  Be honest with yourself.  What was your initial response to these three ideas centered on social media and hallways?

Maybe you’re wondering:  Why would you?   I’m wondering why you wouldn’t…

Yah But, who would post to the Twitter account?  Yah But, who would manage the Facebook profile?

I don’t have an answer, but aren’t those different and interesting questions to ask?

Are they solvable?

And what if we could create a social aspect to our hallways beyond the 5 minute analog Facebook passing period?  Could that serve a purpose?  Could that connect kids in a different way to their classmates?  Their school?

What if hallways had a blog site?

And what if students could be in hallways without a pass?  What if that was part of the school culture and students were entrusted with that responsibility, that opportunity?

What if the hallways were writeable?  What if a dry erase marker was standard issue to all students?

What if the hallways were more than cream-colored cinderblock?  What if school hallways were colorful and vibrant?  What if the culture of the school was enhanced by quotations from the school community, and contributed to a transparency of beliefs?

And what if stairwells did the same?  What if they were more than vertical egress routes?  And look at the image on the right-hallway as beacon, lit up at night, to show all who look, here is what we are and what we believe in.

Imagine QR codes on the walls, connecting kids to ideas and resources, while using their own devices…

Imagine also augmented reality hotspots in hallways that provided students with an additional information reality.  What if AR hotspots were part of a hallway learning game?

Or, you could have just have hallways.  You could be satisfied with just hallways.

The next time you walk down a school corridor or hallway, ask “What If?”

Begin developing that new story.  Challenge yourself to rethink, and to be open to possibilities and potential…

Posted via email from David Jakes