The Mind Control Device Under Our Finger Tips

I'm currently half way through a two-week leave of absence from my beloved iPhone. The details aren't important, but I'm now past the detox phase. While I like to claim that I use it to enhance my professional life, the truth is a tad bit sketchier. The degree to which it enhances my productivity is countered by the amount of time I use it as a digital pacifier. Tweet here, score update there, status update to boot…. I like to think of myself as above the common fray where powerful digital devices are used for mindless pleasure and distraction (think of the iPhone as a digital shovel in an all day game of Farmville), but in reality I'm not. The Canton Repository published a small piece in their Op Ed section marking the passing of Ray Bradbury in their June 7th edition. In describing the impact of his novel Fahrenheit 451, the editor said this: “More profoundly, he foresaw the potential of electronic technology as a weapon of control and oppression, not only through surveillance but also through mindless distraction.” It is this mindless distraction that I see plaguing our students today. Advertisers fill our airwaves with a steady diet of messages that pitch entertaining oneself as the highest calling a human being can aspire to. With a society that has completely abandoned the concept of limit setting as a valuable tool to develop self-control, the current generation of youth is walking around with their faces glued to screens. As I continue down the pathway towards true middle age, I am becoming acutely aware of how precious the resource of time is, and how fragile and fleeting 24 hours can be. I am concerned that digital natives, those who have never known life without devices, will lack the ability to moderate their use of devices in order to create spaces in their lives where they have the opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect without the constant drum of digital distractions. In 10th grade Biology, my teacher was giving a lesson on the impact of vitamins on the human body. She noted that taken in moderation, vitamins could have positive effects on health. However, taken in excess, vitamins have the potential to cause harm. Her tag line, which has always stuck with me, was “Too much of a good thing is bad”. How apropos in the fast-forward, hyper connected world in which we live.

Now That's Entertainment...

At a Memorial Day gathering today, I had the occasion to watch a segment of commercials on mute.  Even thought I was in a room full of people, for some reason I was transfixed at the messages that one can conjure when the audio tracks are stripped from the video.

Based on the spots I viewed, someone unfamiliar with the United States could rationally come to the conclusion that Americans' highest purpose and calling is to entertain ourselves.  I have long thought that the seductive illusion that advertisers have on us has caused a decaying of the moral and economic fiber in our country.  Watching the suggestive images roll across the screen without sound was an a-ha confirmation moment for me.

Moving forward, I believe that those who are educated and self-aware will be able to resist the allure of our consumption and entertainment based society.  I fear that those who fall into this class will continue to shrink in numbers as on-demand distractions alter our engagement patterns.

The truth is that success, be it academic, financial, or otherwise, takes hard work.  There are times when gratification must be delayed and the nose put to the grindstone in order to accomplish something of value.

For our students, one of the most difficult questions they have to answer is why they chose to engage in certain behaviors or activities.  For many, "I don't know" really is an honest answer.  Self-assessement, self-reflection, and self-restraint are all traits that have been discarded by our on-demand society.

Electronic mediums of all forms have immense power to sway our worldview and outlook on matters.  Seductive images of happy people with the latest (tech gadget, beer, clothing, etc.) saturate our screens we are glued to.  These ads are designed to make the viewer feel that the only way to measure up and not be inferior is to consume the product being pitched.

Dave Ramsey, the financial advisor behind Financial Peace University, is associated with the phrase "Live like no one else".  If more people would take this advise, and if more would pause to think about why they feel like they do about themselves in relation to products, the number of dissatisfied and discontent Americans could be impacted.

As schools continue the debate about BYOD, it is important to engage in the conversation about why schools are so eager for devices to flood the school house gates.  Is it because we, as educators, truly believe that devices can have a positive impact on student achievement, or is it just another engagement ploy in the factory batch processing system?  Devices are neither good nor bad, it is in the intentional use where meaning is derived.  I love my many devices, but I find that I have to carve out spaces away from those when I want to seriously engage in academic pursuits.

Corporate America wants as many people hooked on screens as possible.  It is a way to continually advertise and influence purchasing decisions.  So the question is how are we as educators leveraging the power of devices and screens while at the same time teaching about their drawbacks?

The fate of a free thinking society rests on this work.

To read more on this topic, I'd suggest the following:

CHEAP

The High Cost of Discount Culture

By Ellen Ruppel Shell

296 pp. The Penguin Press. 

How State Testing Mandates Inhibit 21st Century Progress

The post below originated from a post-grad assignment I was working on.  Work's been busy, so I haven't posted in a while.  However, this kind of sums up what I spend my days trying to figure out.

A quandary I spend a fair amount of time dealing with during the day is the impact of the new OTES model.  Specifically, I am concerned that the measures will produce unintended results.  Tying 50% of a teacher’s evaluation to student performance on a single or dual metric has a potential chilling effect that could derail the move towards 21^st century teaching and learning skills that are essential for workers in the interconnected, digital era in which we exist.

HB 153 is an attempt to take private sector measurement tools and impose them on public sector employees.  It is rooted in a belief that teachers and principals will do nothing to raise student accountability unless they are coerced through measurement tools that tie compensation and employment status directly to results.  It assumes that the minimum competency of Ohio students is rooted solely in teacher actions, and it further assumes that a bigger stick is the answer in order to improve student performance.

An attribution error on the part of education critics lies in blaming teachers for the approach they currently take to teaching students, when in fact they should blame the design of the current accountability system.  Under the OAA and OGT system, teachers place themselves in the best position for their students to achieve when they act as educational directors.  This is the traditional sage on the stage model of delivering a standard educational message six times per day to groups of passive students.  Since teachers never know exactly what will be on the selected response test, they operate on the cover everything mentality out of fear that the one thing fail to say will assuredly show up on the test.

On the surface all of this is supposed to change with the advent of the Common Core and the development of the new PARCC assessments.  Specifically, the promise of a performance assessment, coupled with ‘innovated computer adapted items’ (as the PARCC folks are fond of saying) is supposed to move teachers from a teacher director role to a teacher facilitator role.  Stan Heffner specializes at touting the 4 C’s in his stump speech and urging Ohio educators to adapt a student directed approach to learning.  Adding fuels to the fire of change talk are technology infusion groups such as P-21, virtual learning organizations, and B.Y.O.D. (Bring Your Own Device) advocates.  The message of personalized, on-demand, any-time learning appears to be the panacea to the disengagement and general dissatisfaction that students and parents vocalize about the current educational delivery system. 

The challenge I find as the Director of Secondary Programs in my district is how do I help teachers bridge the gap between where they know education should head (the latter description) while moving away from what seems to be a safe delivery model (the former description).  The popular argument is that if you focus on high quality, authentic, engaging lessons that capture the interests and talents of individual students, the test questions will take care of themselves.  Student choice, flipped-instruction, and on-demand learning experiences are all hallmarks of 21^st century learning.  These all require the skills of an educational facilitator who can design these types of experiences while simultaneously understanding how the learning will be measured by the State.  It requires fearlessness on the part of the teacher as well.  Giving up control with the idea that the richness of the experience will provide the necessary knowledge in order to perform well on the State test is scary when the evaluation system stakes are so high.

            This is why I believe that the mandate of HB 153 will have the effect of failing to move education in the direction that is so necessary for the students as they are prepared for the workforce they will enter.  Students need to be flexible, adaptable thinkers, with the capacity to analyze and synthesize information and create knowledge independently.  They need to be able to learn, unlearn, and re-learn quickly in order to adapt and thrive in an economy where the majority of well paying, sustaining jobs have not been developed or identified yet.  These are the types of experiences that I believe will continue to be lacking for the majority of Ohio students under the OTES model.  By tying 50% of a teacher’s evaluation to performance on State accountability tests, the teacher as director model will continue to be reinforced.  In this age of economic uncertainty, teachers will behave in the manner that is most likely to protect their economic self-interest.  As long as the State continues to place their reform emphasis on high stakes measures that are derived primarily from selected response items, educational progress and change will continue to be stunted, and students will continue to be ill-equipped to meet the demands of the current age.

Why Do We Evaluate?

The post below originally came from work I am doing in a post-graduate class on program evaluation. Current evaluation practices are designed and implemented within school systems that are ill-equipped to truly see the forest from the trees due to ingrained historical practices that date back 150 years. So, my question is: Do institutions of education have the ability and capacity to make the types of changes that digital learning demands in the new era of learning personalization?

Rhonda: You bring up an interesting point. In the evaluation processes that are being discussed in this thread, it is primarily the holders of power who are conducting the evaluation within the school system. This completely cuts out the groups who are the end users, in this case students and by extension their parents. As technology allows for more personalization and customization of learning experiences, the traditional model of schools creating common curriculum for mass delivery is at risk. It is a 20th century, outdated model. Programs like RTI and PBS are designed to provide supports for students struggling to fit within the current parameters of our age and time based system. In the near future (within five years), I believe that there will be a revolutionary shift in the way students are educated due to the disruptive nature of technology. For institutions of education to survive, evaluation should shift from past programs towards future practices. Technology tools have finally caught up with the reality that information was liberated from the school house walls with the widespread adoption of the internet in 1994. Until now schools did not have to adapt because the electronic delivery mediums were not diffused enough in society. The past three years of technological change have totally changed this. What you see now is a tension between large, bureaucratic institutions still trying to hold onto old systems and individuals who can learn at anytime, anyplace, and anywhere. If schools do not evaluate why they still insist on holding students for 13 years in a lock step progression when the tools are available for individualized, self-paced learning experiences, then they are at risk for marginalization and perhaps extinction. The current funding crisis in not going to be solved in the near term. So, what can schools do differently? (This is why I would make the case for an external evaluator on this issue. Schools just don't have the reflective capacity for an evaluation that tackles these tough questions). Here are some other resources on this issue:

Ken Robinson TED Talk:

http://www.TED.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Cathy Davidson (book)

Now You See It

Tom Vander Ark (book)

Getting Smart - How Digital Learning Is Changing The World

Infographic

I found this info graphic while reading Elisabeth Engum's 'Flipped Classroom Weekly' @PGelisa

It was part of a larger article on flipped instruction by Susan Murphy @suzemuse

Twitter Chats For Education Calendar

I ran into the following calendar quite by accident:

Twitter Chats For Education

#edchat Tuesdays at 7 looks interesting.

What a great way to have a idea about when to follow and participate in a hashtag organized discussion!

Test What Really Matters

I'm (slowly) going through the Ohio Summit 2.5 twitter backchannel and making good on my promise to write about the best of what occurred.

Stan Hefner, the Ohio Schools Superintendent, made the comment that future jobs will require collaboration and innovation. He went on to note that jobs that don't require these will digitized and shipped overseas.

This is the argument that Dan Pink makes about left brain, process oriented work. Pink says that if there is a script, a specific set of rules, or only a single outcome for task, it is a job that can be done by computer or cheaper by foreign workers.

This phenomenon has gone past blue collar jobs and is now steadily attacking white collar (formally safe jobs) as well.

For our educational system, I believe the State Superintendent is correct in his assessment. If he means it then he will advocate for assessment reform that is far more radical than the multiple choice re-design I fear we will get from PARCC and Smarter Balance for the Common Core assessments.

At a very minimum, every student should be required to create a personal, portable digital portfolio of their work as a requirement for graduation. At every grade level there should be a menu of options as to the types of submissions that need to be included. As students progress through their educational career, products can be based on collaborative experiences and focused on authentic problems that need to be solved in the local community. Upon graduating, students will have a rich product that demonstrates what they were able to create with, utilize, and extend the knowledge they gained from their experience in school.

A portfolio mandate would do several things. First, it would divert the fixed, unwavering glare that educational institutions have on directing instruction (the means) towards standardized assessments (the ends). Second, it would force schools to examine how collaboration and multiple pathways to demonstrate understanding of content can be embedded into every lesson. Third, portfolios would require teachers to abandon the notion that a project can only happen once a (quarter, semester, year, whatever). Finally, it would enfranchise learners who have been marginalized by the last twenty years of the "one size fits all" approach that standardization forces.

21st Century skills, at their core, require students to demonstrate how they can apply knowledge in new, unique, and unexpected circumstances. They require flexible, nimble, creative thought. This is NOT what is fostered in the single correct answer environment that has been propagated by standardized testing.

We can not expect this type of learning to be encouraged if the testing mandates continue to promote standardization (the ultimate 20th Century Skill).