Eulogizing Bankruptcy and Lessons in Disruption

I went into Borders yesterday and bought a book.

Soon that sentence will no longer be a possibility. As many already know, Borders has lost it's battle with bankruptcy and is moving into full-on liquidation. While others have done a far better job of parsing the days and ways that this came about there remain valid lessons in this case for education and other targets of market disruption.

The Relationship with the Internet

As Slate points out:

Borders famously flubbed its relationship with the Internet. From 2001 until 2008, it outsourced its online sales to Amazon, essentially handing customers over to the bigger, better site during the formative years of e-commerce.

The lesson for education?

Here is an example of outsourcing core competencies. Sites like Kahn Academy and e2020 can be valid supplemental resources for things like blended learning. But that is all that these should be supplemental resources.

Overly scripted or "curriculum in a box" programs like Read 180 can provide structure and a basis for instruction but there is an implicit message being sent to educators: We don't trust you to handle it alone. Such prescriptive programs can lower morale but also affect the sense of community. Make no mistake, I still think that any teacher that feels that they can be replaced by a computer probably should be. But we should take care not to use web-based programs and curriculum in a way that removes learners from the community of education in a school because they will simply seek out another to be a part of instead.

The Future Is Digital and Will Need Curation

NPR comes on strong in it's Monkey See blog with two points.

The first:

There is no other future for reading but a digital one, and getting misty about the decline of tangible books is an exercise in futility. Reading itself has never been more popular, even if formats are in flux.

The second:

Bookstores are very special places, even the behemoths. They provide a space for cultural dilettantism. You can get lost in them for hours, perusing covers and picking up obscure titles. They are dedicated to discovery and are curated by some of the most dedicated retail employees around (even to get hired at a large corporate chain, one is still required to exhibit a sharp passion for reading).

The lesson for education?

Educators have to embrace multiple forms of authorship when it comes to content for their students both in terms of source and creation. Saying that you are a digital educator because you have a PowerPoint or Twitter lesson just isn't going to cut it. This isn't to say that all students need to be educated to be the next Amanda Hocking - but they should be allowed the option to geo that route if their passion dictates it.

The second point brings up the salience of curation. This point concerns me the more I learn about student motivation in the face of increased accountability testing. Right now education's focus is more "what's on the test" than it is "what are my students passionate about learning."

The Take-away

People have written about how much they are going to miss Borders and just as many have written about the mistakes that got Borders to this point. One could say that a series of bad decisions broke the chain. But the real take-away from an educational standpoint is that technology was either dismissed or discounted to Borders' detriment. These are mistakes that education not only cannot afford to make but also possesses the means to surmount. If education embraces technology, and through it change, Borders will be a cautionary tale. If not it will become an outlier.

The Spiral of Up-votes & Learning

Given the rise of websites like Reddit, Stumbleupon, and yes, Google+ this story from Gizmodo bears consideration. The premise:

Flickr user André Rabelo saw when he uploaded this b&w photo to a Flickr pool called DeleteMe!, which votes on whether a photo has any right being amongst the top classes of photography.

However, the joke was on the people commenting on "Rabelo's" photo. The photo was actually one by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yes, the Henri "father of modern photojournalism" Cartier-Bresson. But the plot thickens:

Over 500 comments have been added to Rabelo’s uploaded photo, and it makes for a hilarious yet thought-provoking read flipping through the pages. The first batch of comments from the DeleteMe! group some 68 months ago look rather foolish in hindsight, but not as foolish (in my eyes) as the bandwagon-jumpers who latched onto the prank once it was revealed, calling it “art” and a “masterpiece.”

This is kind of a case of "Schrödinger's Photograph" - is something quality based on its observable merits? Or should the overall work transcend its constituent parts? Who decides what is "Art" or merely "art?" What about learning?

Given the rise of the aforementioned socially curated news and web content this story could be an outlier. While I love using Google+ and want schools to have the option of adding it to the Google Apps for Education suite, I have to take Rabelo's photo as an admonition.

As an educator, the danger is to be a commenter of either extreme. Yes, there are many that want web 2.0 tools used in education, but when the discussion spirals out of the black & white which side should we be on? The one of process and learning Learning.

photo © 2009 Ariston Collander | more info (via: Wylio)

Embrace Disruption, Embrace Community

There's a great article at Slate right now called "Groundhog Decade" that details how the movie industry is failing to learn from the decade of market disruption that's just occurred. A money quote:

If the studios were smart they'd go to the mat and create a massive one-stop shop for TV and movies, find a price point they can live with and then set programmers loose to make the thing as easy to use and ubiquitous as possible. Instead they've been wasting their time strong-arming the cable companies to help them on a new crusade against illegal downloaders—an unwieldy process that doesn't address the root problem and won't work.

My takeaway is that, like many media outlets the movie industry would be better off if it embraced the disruption as what it is; change. Instead of having articles, posts, and tweets about how to thwart the New York Times pay-wall, what if they went to an National Public Radio model of funding? What would this embracing of disruption look like in education?

We've all heard a lot about how education is going to be disrupted by technology. Most involve someone from outside of the education world invoking specters of fear by citing the rapid change in technology, mentioning flip thinking, and a reference to Khan Academy.

There are those who fear change in any profession. But could with disruption come realignment?

At the end of the school year I often stand outside the school with my fellow teachers to bid farewell to our students. It's a great way to end the year, to bring things to a close. Without fail we often notice that the students that are the most reluctant to leave are the students who like to spend more time in the hallway than class. The students who refer to school as a prison have tears streaming down their faces viewing the prospect of nearly three months of freedom. These students are mourning the impending loss of their friends, their community.

Some of the students that are the most challenging students in schools still see it as their community. Some of the technologies that challenge education use social media; technologies that create and cultivate community.

Where some fear disruption I choose to see an opportunity for realignment.

photo © 2006 Antonio Campos Domínguez | more info (via: Wylio)

Minions in Grad School

This is a great short film by Nyna Wee at Stuttgart Media University. Think of it as the minions from "Despicable Me" grown up and in a grad program at Portal University. Listening to techno. Enjoy (via io9).

Cubism from Nyna Wee on Vimeo.

Golden Ratios of Blended Learning

In planning a blended learning class for the upcoming school year a great deal of thoughts have been ricocheting around my headspace. Thoughts of project-based learning, inquiry in education, PLNs and other assorted acronyms having all had their exits and entrances. But recently there's been an unlikely source cropping up; a cookbook.

One needs only to scroll back throb recent posts To realize that this writer is fond of both food and hastily taken photographs of recent cooking efforts. To that end I've been reading Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio. In particular this quote stands out:

With the advent of the Internet, we have access to an ocean of recipes but relatively less information on food and cooking. Understanding ratios and technique is, for the home cook, a step toward becoming more independent in the kitchen. But ratios are just as important to chefs and other food professionals because they provide a launching point for the development of new dishes.

Technique will ultimately determine the quality of the end result. Ratios are the points from which infinite variations begin.

Isn't this what educators should be striving to do? Shouldn't education be about helping learners find their own ratios of learning and understanding? Far too often it feels as though we are more concerned with having students memorize one recipe and woe to all involved if that memory isn't accurate. I'd rather my students have more time with activities that are reflective of their learning.

In a recent session of #edchat on Twitter the discussion topic was the Flipped Classroom. Some educators expressed concern over what a "flipped" classroom might auger for a brick-and-mortar school. In light of Ruhlman's thoughts I'm going to close by standing by an earlier tweet:

#flipclass will make physical schools irrelevant the same way that personal cooking has made restaurants irrelevant #edchat

It's time to get thinking about what ratios my students will learn and which ones I'll learn from them.

Starting to Flip

So no sooner is the school year over but it's time to begin planning things for the next one. The major challenge and opportunity is to flip my classroom. Next year one of my sections will be an on-going pilot of blending both traditional face-time curriculum and online curriculum. Here is an example of one of the videos I used to explain the concept to parents of prospective students:

My district has other intrepid teachers looking to embark on the path to a blended curriculum. In a workshop today I listened to some wonderful math teachers plan out how they would be engaging their students using this model. My mind kept coming back to Bloom's Taxonomy.

Specifically, the changes that have recently been made to Bloom's come to mind. The top of the pedagogical pyramid of thought used to be "Evaluation" or the judgement of products based on criteria.

Now, however the pyramid of Bloom's has been revised to something more like this:

Which in preparing to "flip" and "blend" my classroom has me thinking of the following questions:

• How can does one account for the "economy of focus" at work in most of today's students in regard to technology?
• How are the economics of technology access going to be addressed?
• How can technology be used to accurately check for understanding during the off-site learning process?
• What role do anticipatory sets and classroom activities take now in this model?

But I did catch two great quotes from the workshop coordinators.

The art of understanding something is different than the science of applying it.

and

Our motto with technology should be 'if you can think it, it's possible.'

I'm working with some good educators and I've got to keep thinking.

photo © 2006 LASZLO ILYES | more info (via: Wylio)

Jumping Back In

A great but chaotic school year is coming to a close for this writer. In the hopes of writing more this summer I'm attempting to switch-up my workflow using Blogsy on my iPad. This, in theory, should allow for more posts and less time spent on learning markdown coding while keeping the focus on transparency and learning. If this works, look for many more posts to follow.

photo © 2008 Sarah Scicluna | more info (via: Wylio)