Laptops in Schools – The Maine Experiment

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Via Will Richardson is this post from Dave Weinberger on the State of Maine’s laptop in schools initiative for every student in Grade 7 & 8, as well as this comment about a high school principal:

Robbin Wall, the school’s principal, welcomes us. The school is 5 years old. Every student has a laptop. (Among the speakers today — via video — is Angus King who was governor when Maine gave each student a laptop.) Principal Wall says that this school is focused on training professionals; it offers no extra-curricular activities.

On Will’s post there are comments that this kind of approach to education is too narrow and students will burn out. Thinking a bit more on this, I don’t see this as a critical problem. The schools that I see have already reduced physical education and art to such a lowly state that concerned parents have to supplement them with outside activities anyway. If the school only focuses on one area, that may not be so bad, as I don’t believe that public education can solve all of our problems. I would recommend that you read all of Weinberger’s post and follow the links. Again, there are no easy answers.

Work, Education & Taxes

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David Livingstone, of the Centre for the Study of Education and Work, presented at the CSTD conference on a 2004 study that interviewed 9,000 Canadians. One of the findings that I found most interesting was that Canadians have the highest rates of formal learning in the world. A large percentage of our workers have diplomas and degrees. On the other hand, I heard on the radio this morning that there is a productivity gap in this country, and as the Globe & Mail reports:

No one can pinpoint precisely why Canada has fallen behind to such an alarming extent. The explanations range from relatively low investments in technology and equipment to lagging private-sector research and development and the fact that marginal effective tax rates on capital are high. But Mr. Goodale knows the consequences of such dismal numbers.

The truth is that no one really knows, but many lobbyists and special interest groups use these kinds of statistics to further their own agendas. Universities will say that we need greater access to higher education and conservative think tanks will call for more corporate tax cuts. Well there doesn’t appear to be a direct correlation between education and productivity if we examine our credentialed society and our perceived low productivity. In New Brunswick we have the lowest corporate tax rate in the country and one of the highest rates of unemployment. Recently our unemployment rate went up while it dropped everywhere else. So the answers are not simple, as H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Personally, I’m tired that our politicians and business leaders revert to pat answers for complex problems, such as “we need to raise personal taxes to pay for our social programs”. Perhaps productivity is the wrong measure. John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism, states that since the mid-nineteen nineties, “…two-thirds of American corporations paid no federal income tax.” Many of these corporations have branch offices in Canada – same people, same agenda.

As a society we have to understand what is important and how we can make our communities work. That means understanding the complex forces at play. Lowering taxes or decreasing tuition rates are simple solutions that won’t address the root causes. The same goes for understanding how our organisations and businesses work. There are no pat answers and the flavour of the month won’t solve our problems.

Some of the places I visit to get a better view of these issues:

Drucker on Listening Carefully

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Peter Drucker, one of my inspirations on business and management, passed away on Friday. He was 95 years old. Elliott Masie sent out a few words in an e-mail on Peter Drucker, including this comment:

I had the privilege of meeting Peter Drucker almost fifteen years ago. We had a conversation about the role that "training" could play (or not play) in the development of effective leaders. He challenged me to ask 100 leaders how they became leaders and to listen carefully to their answers. He predicted that I would find that the leaders pointed to strong role models, mentors who were brave enough to tell them the truth and opportunties that allowed them to perform, rather than slickly packaged leadership courses.

In tribute to Peter Drucker, and his incisive mind, let’s continue to ask the tough questions. Is there a direct link between training and performance? Is there a direct link in the specific case that you are involved with?

Tactics, Strategy & Humanity

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The opening session at the CSTD Knowledge Exchange in Toronto this week was by Dana Gaines Robinson on the subject of Strategic Business Partnering. This is a new term for me and at the end of the session my impression was that SBP is a new buzz-word for human performance technology, but with an emphasis on strategy. The words strategy and tactics were liberally sprinkled through her session.

This  reminded me of my +20 years in the military when strategy and tactics were my main work disciplines and got me to wondering why many in the learning field use military terms to describe their work. Gaines Robinson used another term that did not sit well with me – it is that one should “own the client relationship”. When I think of a relationship, the last thing that comes to mind is ownership. Does this kind of terminology frame the discussion in a certain way? Does it influence how we think about our profession? Anyway, it was good for me to listen to a presentation that raised these issues.

The strategic, or high level, theme was a thread throughout the conference. Larry Murphy, an attendee and past colleague, described our field as having two kinds of people, forest people and tree people. Some can see the forest and some have to focus on each individual tree. In Strategic Business Partnering I think that we’re focusing on too small of a forest. In SBP, the performance consultant is supposed to partner with the client and look at the next 1-5 years from the client’s perspective.

I prefer Roger Kaufman’s organisational elements model where he urges us to look at the Mega (societal) the Macro (organisational) and Micro (individual & group) levels in strategic planning. A focus on the Mega means taking an ethical, moral and value-based stand. This is the really big picture, not just the business microcosm. A Mega perspective to me means that you don’t try to maximize value for your clients’ profits if they are acting like Enron execs. This thought stayed in my mind through the day, but by Tuesday evening there were some answers, and more questions.

performance analysis process mega and macro

Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, presented the post-dinner speech. In his articulate and engaging way he laid out the enormous humanitarian disaster that is attacking 70 million people today. He described in case after case the spread of the disease and its effects, especially on women. After moving many in the audience to tears, Mr Lewis described what we could do. With his global  vision, he proposed that individuals and groups of learning professionals in Canada could go to Africa and help to retrain a population that has almost no teachers or trainers.

The need is great and even one person training a small group on basic skills, that we take for granted, would have an impact. When the head of a household is only 8 years old (because all of the adults are dead) there are a lot of skills and knowledge that he or she will need to succeed in life. The suggestion was that the training & development community here could start a real knowledge transfer to Africa.

The next morning, the CSTD board created a committee to begin a process of working with the Stephen Lewis Foundation in order to determine how CSTD can help an orphaned generation in Africa to learn essential skills. Stephen Lewis has shown how the strategic and the tactical levels can be aligned, but within a much larger humanitarian (mega) vision. More information on this initiative will be made available on the CSTD website.

Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars

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I participated in the EdTech Talk today that featured Jay Cross and George Siemens. The conversation flowed and the chat room stayed active with Stephen Downes and many others adding additional perspectives. The initial conversation centered on Connectivism and Informal Learning but meandered to many other corners of the learning field.

Some of George’s comments about learning and education and the conflict around what a good education should be, got me thinking about the work of Kieran Egan. His book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding, begins with the statement that Western education is based on three conflicting premises which compete for dominance. These three premises are:

  • education as socialization
  • education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  • education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

Since no one premise can dominate without precluding the others, we continue to have conflict in our education system. Our public education system was created to give equal access to all (a good thing) and to prepare workers for industrial jobs (a self-serving thing for the corporations). Public education was embraced by reformers as well as factory owners.

The problem is that education has become all things to all people, and this conflict is clear in Egan’s book. You cannot socialize, seek the truth and realize individual potential all at the same time — within a single, enclosed system.

This lack of agreement on what our education system should be, is also muddying the waters in our discussions about learning. My experience is that few people disagree with any one of these premises on its own. So which one is the primary premise? Should there even be a primary premise? Without one, we keep bouncing around like pinballs, addressing symptoms but not root causes.

When reduced to the basic process, I believe that learning is an individual and personal activity. Learning has social aspects and can be helped or hindered in many ways. How we build systems to nurture, support or coerce it, are the issues that we can address as a community. First though, we have to have a common understanding of what we’re trying to achieve.

How the death of curriculum could mean the rebirth of learning

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Brian Alger [dead link] has an excellent article on the key role that curriculum plays in the development of education. Anyone involved in learning, whether as a designer, teacher, faciliator or administrator, should read this article which describes in clear terms that education is not learning and that curriculum is a constraining force that must be understood if we wish to foster learning. I found the link between curriculum and bullying especially enlightening, as my wife has been studying, writing, and presenting on bullying in schools for the past several years:

One of the effects of curriculum design of any kind is confinement. And the confinement of human experience is an act of violence. A common example of this confinement via curriculum leading to violence is bullying.

On the question of, “Do we need curriculum?”, these additional questions show its mind-numbing effects:

When we ask the question we are also asking if we need the concept of the prerequisite, imposed forms of content, sterile classrooms as a primary location, fragmented schedules of time, as well as impersonal and ineffective forms of testing and evaluation.

Curriculum development is an enormous industry in our public education systems, and moving away from curriculum design and on to the greater task of fostering learning will be a huge, but worthwhile task.

Challenging the validity of curriculum in any form means to challenge people’s jobs whether they are political officials, school administrators, consultants, teachers, students or parents. Part of the immense control and authority that curriculum has is that it provides careers and therefore sources of income. This, in my own experience, is where I have found the most significant roadblock to change and innovation.

Congrès CSTD Toronto

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Le 9 novembre je serai conférencier au CSTD Toronto, au sujet de l’apprentissage et communautique en services de santé. Nous serons un groupe très intime, (7 personnes à  date).

Cet étude de cas est à  propos un projet fait par l’équipe Mancomm Performance de Montréal. Nous avons collaboré avec le Centre de santé et services sociaux (CSSS) du Sud-Lanaudière à  la mise en place d’un cours en ligne pour les infirmières portant sur l’approche McGill, ainsi que  la création de communautés de praticiens pour les travailleurs sociaux et les professionnels en santé mentale.

Depuis l’analyse de la performance au travail jusqu’à  la livraison sur des plateformes MOODLE et ELGG (logiciels gratuits et libres), l’équipe a travailé étroitement avec le personnel hospitalier au moyen d’ontologies de domaine et la co-construction d’une base de connaissances.

Cette session sera ciblé vers les méthodologies utilisé par l’équipe et les bénéfices des logiciels libres en apprentissage.

CSTD Knowledge Exchange – Toronto

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One week from today I’ll be presenting at the CSTD Knowledge Exchange conference in Toronto. Tuesday’s presentation will be in English and Wednesday’s in French. In case you’re one of the 32 people (25 English, 7 French) who’ve booked my session, here are some of the specifics.
I’ll discuss how we analysed the work needs of nursing staff and developed a job aid linked to an online learning environment (Moodle).
I’ll show the process that we used to develop an online community of practice for mental health and social workers, including various systems that we tested until we settled on elgg.
Screen captures of all of the online environments will be shown but the focus will be more on the processes that we developed and what we have learned so far.
With the small numbers in attendance, there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion, and my intention is to let the audience drive the agenda. I promise that this will not be “death by PowerPoint”, (I’m using OpenOffice anyway) and you will not have suffer bulleted lists being read to you. If you’re planning on attending and have any questions, please feel free to make a comment here or contact me.

UNESCO Open Educational Resources Conference

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Like Stephen Downes, I have had difficulty getting into this UNESCO conference on Open Educational Resources (open content for higher education) – lterally and figuratively.

Because of this rather large number, participants have been split into two groups:

* one group can send and receive messages (members selected to balance geographic participation);

* the other group will receive daily digests of the messages to read.

I am in the second group, so I get to receive the e-mails, which after the first week are about a dozen and some of these include an additional dozen attachments. All of the comments take a lot of time to sift through and I thought that I’d be able to summarize them and put them on this blog. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time or the discipline to do this, but Joe Hart has, so you can read his summary instead. Here’s one of his summary comments after week one:

It is important in our forum to recognize that online universal higher education is not a utopia, that it is not a threat to established education, that it is a great opportunity for producers and users alike, and that these messages should be conveyed to governments, universities, and other organizations.