Recently, I’ve been struggling with the notion of education and research. What would an educational research lab LOOK like? What would it do? How would it be funded? I keep coming back to a CSI or NorBAC lab model. Yes, I know those are TV model labs, but still and all. What would it look like to have a lab that studied teaching and learning?

The problem seems to me that Education isn’t science.

Psychology, that’s a science. I’m ok with that. Microbiology, sure. No problem. Physiology, ok, sure.

But it seems to me that all our Educational “science” is lacking a bit on rigor. Yes, we have Bloom’s taxonomy, and Gagne’s nine steps, and there are theories and paradigms abounding, but is it science?

My problem is basically, the notion that science is predictive. I mean, that’s the whole point of science, isn’t it? To explain and predict? And if that’s the case then we seem to be a bit short in the Educaiton arena because the same “intervention” which works stunningly with one student completely misses the mark on another. Sure, I did something that looked like science in my dissertation research that looked at what factors contribute to how people perceive distance, but that’s hardly on the same level of rigor as … say … DNA sequencing.

Now before I get a lot of people hyperventilating, I’m not sure that not being a science isn’t a good thing. One of the difficulties is dealing with the definitions. Education is the business of providing instruction. We tend to confound the term Education with Teaching, and I’ve purposely used that fact in this post so far. What I really mean to say is “Teaching Isn’t Science.” Of course, Education isn’t science! It’s business.

So, with that cleared up, we’re still left with the question about the labs. What would the specialties be? What skills?

A statistician, certainly and for obvious reason.

An educational psychologist? I think so. Emphasis on assessment, probably.

How about a brain physiologist?

What about an instructional designer? I’m not sure on this one.

But that begs the question, doesn’t it? Not about the personnel, but should there even be a lab? Forensics labs investigate evidence from crime scenes. Bio-research labs examine a variety of established problems. Are there parallel “problems” in Teaching? Could we do basic research into the relationships between teaching and learning? And how do we get those findings into the schools?

I don’t know. I’m feeling very unsettled about this.

August 9th, 2007
Posted in Education
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Statement by Secretary Spellings on the Center for Education Policy’s Report on Student Achievement Under No Child Left Behind

We know the law is working, so now is the time to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and continue the promise of a quality education for all of America’s children.

At what point do we stop the “promise” and start the delivery??

I’m just askin’ …

June 8th, 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing over in Ning with the Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 people. The usual suspects are there and some of the puzzlements I’m dealing with is “what the heck is this space?” and “why do we need a centralized location?”

David Warlick wrote this reflective bit about the space today:

2 Cents Worth » Starting to Get It?
I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the gravitational pull of logic.

He goes on to talk about attention and how when we started blogging, there was a lot of attention available but that as more and more voices flooded into the space, the natural limits set by hours in the day begain to overwhelm attention. I think a lot of people (at least those who’ve been doing this for more than a few months) have had the experience of trimming back their feed lists because it’s just too much. So the idea of attention has merit, but this other notion of a variety of interconnected networks precipitated another discussion.

In an ancillary conversation I was having with Mrs B on the subject of professional organizations, we began to analyze what it is a professional organzation offers to its members in a networked world. Why would anybody pay dues to be a member of a club? What could a club offer that would make it worthwhile?

She pointed out that humans are tribal animals, so we want to belong to something — that old Maslow affiliation drive. Which made me go back and think about the idea of “professional organzation” as a way of permitting its members to address the top half of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t know quite how this all works yet, but I wanted to get it down while I could remember it.

One of the things the “tribe” needs is identity and that comes from a shared vision, shared values, and shared goals — a sense of “us.” The tribe also needs a center. The center becomes the instantiation of identity through that shared vision, value, and goal. Someplace where, if you go there and meet another member of the tribe, you know you have something in common — just by virtue of their being there — even if you’ve never met them before.

The next question, logicially, is the nature of this ‘community center’ and I thought it could be decentralized. A technorati feed with the tribe’s name as tag could provide the center, but that would require a level of skill, and expertise that I don’t think a lot of people have yet. It’s going to be hard to identify with a feed and most people don’t see the river of content flowing from a feed as a center.

And that brings us back to Ning and other centralized spaces like TappedIn or MySpace or The ORG. They provide a place to go to find the tribe. To see what the members are doing. They provide a baseline that’s easier to deal with than the dispersed and distributed model. The problem with the ones I know about are that there’s no good way to merge distributed and centralized content together.

Eventually, I began to think that the community center needs to be centralized as a symbolic commitment to the tribe. We can each have our own spaces but the tribe needs a kind of metaphorical long house. It’s an answer to Stephen Downes’ perennial question of “why does there need to be another place?”

I’m working in analogy here. In metaphor. Bear with me if it breaks down.

If I go to the market and meet somebody, we share some things in common, and for a short period we even share a common goal - getting whatever we came to the market for. But the meeting is co-incidental. It’s not being driven by any kind of common vision or shared outlook except in the most superficial way. We’re not tribe.

So if I tag a post as “online community” and it merges with something that somebody else posts, it’s co-incidental. We might have opposite views and opinions, and while that has some value, it’s not the view of the tribe. While it’s true that the person is part of my network, that person is not one of “us” and is not part of my affiliation set.

And that brings me back to David’s notion of the gravitational attraction of ideas and linked and related but not congruous networks. People are finding Classroom 2.0. People are joining, reading, writing, participating. There is a rudimentary sense of identify forming — an idea of tribe. We’re still in the storming-norming stages but it’s already beginning to shape up. The conversations that happen in there tend to stay in there. They don’t appear to be pinging out (altho it’s entirely possible that I’m missing it). A few people are cross posting content from outside in and from inside out, but the link out of the community seems to consist primarily of links to the individual members’ blogs and web sites. So this sorta looks like David’s idea of connected networks holds up with one network inside the Ning garden and links in and out.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the value of places like Ning is in forming centers around which networks and affiliations can form. Not as a replacement for the distributed world of feeds and aggregators, but as kinds of hubs. Cross pollination centers. Tribes.

April 8th, 2007
Posted in Online Community, Observations
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At the turn of the last century, the most economical way to travel from New York to Los Angeles was by rail. Not many people did it because it took a long time and was relatively expensive. There were good reasons to make the trip, but not everybody was able to capitalize on those reasons. By the middle of the century, passenger rail was already slated for “has been” status in the US with the growth of the airline industry resulting from innovations in long distance air travel during World War II. Transcontinental air travel killed passenger rail — and ushered in a new era in business opportunity — by removing several days from the round trip. By 1975 almost three-quarters of passenger travel in the US was by air and less than 10% was by rail. Today it’s possible — altho uncomfortable — to fly from New York to LA for a business meeting and return the same day. It’s a long day, but it’s possible. More to the point, new business opportunities arose because air travel became more available and ubiquitous. Disney is a prime example. Without air travel, DisneyLand would never have been able to “go national” and attract visitors from around the country — and eventually the world. In a certain sense, the world’s business required the development of air travel once the technology became available. The pace of the world required it. At the turn of the last century, taking a week to get from New York to LA was acceptable because there was no other choice. Today, very few people can afford the luxury of taking that much time. And we’ve learned that the airplane can take us places where rail lines cannot be laid.

The parallel between the Academy and passenger rail is inescapable. The question of “Where are we going?” is less clear. When you need to get to LA, you know where you’re bound for. But what’s the destination for education? Is there one? From an economic perspective, we need credentials to apply for a job. The reality is that you don’t really need skill in the job to get it, just good credentials. Lacking credentials, you don’t even get the opportunity to fail. So, in a certain sense, the role of education is certification.

That’s a problem.

The line worker who loses his/her job at the factory can’t afford to spend four years getting a degree. Even two years of trade school is problematic. Unemployment compensation lasts a matter of weeks, not months, and financial obligations snowball quickly. A professional caught in a mid-career job shift has similar, albeit less immediate, problems. Having one degree makes it easier (altho not necessarily less expensive) to acquire another. Again, making the change from retail management to, say, computer programming can take years to achieve transition. In the meantime, those people have some serious problems. Forget going into math or science related fields unless you start young — say, 14 — and work forward. It’s as unlikely as becoming a gymnast at thirty.

But Education isn’t really about just getting credentials, is it? I mean the credential gives us the opportunity to apply for a job, but the skills to actually DO the job are also needed and we need a better way to get those skills than the current model of Education.

Just as the airlines superceded the railroads as passenger carriers, we need to find/develop the replacement for the current models of education. We’re still going the same places. We still need to learn. We need skills and knowledge. We need paths to credential so that we can actually use our skills and knowledge by passing the gatekeepers. We still need to get to the same places — credential, skill, knowledge, self-fulfillment. What we need is some kind of jet plane to replace our Educational Iron Horse and, when we find it, perhaps it will take us places we didn’t think were possible.

December 24th, 2006
Posted in Observations, Education
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Will Richardson had some interesting words about “Tough Choices or Tough Times” — the report from The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

“Community and Collaboration on a Scale Never Seen Before”
[I]f 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.

Here’s the problem, Will.

The report is calling for a new system, not a patch to the old. In the same way the airlines have replaced passenger rail, this new system of education will replace what we know as school. What will it look like? How will it be implemented? I agree that “blogging among ourselves” amounts to “preaching to the choir” but how would engaging the railroads in developing the airlines have helped? If we take this commission’s report seriously and start thinking about what a new — replacement — system would look like, why would those with vested interest in maintaining the status quo be willing to engage?

The Cluetrain holds — pardon the expression — a clue as does Kat Herding and Doc’s Latest writings. If business in the Industrial Age has been about economies of scale and de-personalization, then the new economy might buyers and sellers talking to each other to create products and services specific to the need. In many ways, we’re talking about artists and artisans being the workers in this new economy. Whether your art is accounting or marketing or distribution, when we start talking about creativity and imagination, we end up with art. Think: The Secret of My Success.

Which brings us to the model for this new economy. Is it something akin to a global “open mic night” where people form ad hoc collectives to create a specific work? A kind of jazz combo? Can we build cars that way? Or airliners? Will we need to, or will we let other parts of the world deal with the cheap-labor/mass-produced commodity goods?

I don’t know. ‘M just askin’

December 18th, 2006
Posted in Observations, Education
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