Great piece from Google on Internet safety.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/common-sense-approach-to-internet.html

Authentic tasks and crowdsourcing

Great post by Andy Carvin regarding the Google, Amazon/Mechanical Turk collaboration to search satellite images for traces of Steve Fossett. This exciting application of technology points out two powerful opportunities for educational technology collaboration and authentic tasks. There's no reason today why kids shouldn't be working on real-world tasks in distributed teams of students and professionals.

Why 1:1?

Advocates of technology have long been in the position of defending the contribution of technology to the educational process and outcomes ... and that's a good and necessary thing. After all, technology initiatives are costly, both financially and in terms of the time commitment and human capital required to making educational technology productive. With high stakes, proponents of educational technology need to be able to articulate the vision for technology and put some "skin in the game" with regard to expected outcomes.

The latest "attack" on educational technology came in the form of the New York Times article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" As this article illustrates, if the goals for an initiative are poorly articulated, when it comes time to look at the impact, you end up in a "he said / she said" guessing game. Were these laptops supposed to impact student achievement (as measured by state high stakes tests)? Hopefully not, since the research between the causal relationship between educational technology use and high stakes testing is far from definitive. Even the term "educational technology" is incredibly broad. What sorts of interventions are we applying? What supports are in place? And if they were supposed to directly impact test scores, by how much, for which students and by when? Chances are the champions of these laptop initiatives did not put themselves on the hook for specific gains. It's likely that the promised results were very ill defined, and that's where the problem lies.

If we're going to spend the amount of money we're spending on technology, it's beholden on everyone involved to very specifically articulate the desired outcomes and method of measurement. As this article points out, the laptops seem to have had an impact on attendance, motivation and have provided a creative tool and outlet that may help discover the next George Lucas or Steve Jobs. Again, was that the goal?

So why do 1:1 at all? Supposing you've bought the argument that technology is a necessary component of a modern education for all the typical cited reasons (preparedness, engagement, etc.). Why them, should you choose to put a laptop in the hand of every school or teacher rather than just implement labs or portable laptop carts. Incidentally, and this is something we'll explore in a later post, we've found that the cost of implementing a 1:1 program assuming leased laptops is approximately $860 per student per year when you factor in the hardware, software, infrastructure, and personnel cost. That's about 33% more expensive then a laptop cart implementation that would achieve a 4:1 (computer to student ratio). That's a lot, but 1:1 exponentially more expensive which is what most people assume. More importantly than the cost, 1:1 has significant implication for the educational environment, training, and safety requirements within a school so it's not something to be approached lightly.

I think there are four main reasons to do 1:1 rather than a more typical technology approach (e.g., carts or labs). And schools should only undertake 1:1 initiatives if they can sustain the additional capital requirements and want to improve one or more of the following factors.

• Access
  1:1 initiatives take away the barrier of access, both in the classroom and in the homes. Computers are omnipresent and must be integrated. This creates certain pressures on teachers to use computers which can be both positive and negative. Access also creates increased technology proficiency since students and teachers are "owners" of their machines.

• Extended and Personalized
  1:1 initiatives have the potential to both 1) Extend the school day since students can continue working on school projects seamlessly at home and 2) Learning can become much more personalized. One can envision a near future with IEPs for every student and in inexhaustible set of learning experiences that are highly customized and tied into interim assessment data and progress monitoring and delivered via the student's laptop.

• Connected
  1:1 environments foster a collaborative learning environment where students are connected to one another, to teachers, and to the community and beyond. These collaborations foster engagement and there are a multitude of examples of kids collaborating with scientists, researchers, community members, etc.
  

• Authentic
  1:1 environments commonly feature projects with a real-world focus or an emphasis on the creativity and media. Students develop skills that they will take on to subsequent academic pursuits and eventual careers.
  

As I said, 1:1 is not for everyone. Part of what has contributed to the state of affairs described in the New York Times article is schools entering into 1:1 initiatives with ambiguous goals. I suggest that if you value one of the four goals above, you need to make sure that your particular implementation is designed to foster these goals and that you have specific, measurable objectives. If your goal is to extend and personalize the learning experience, what strategies are you employing to make sure that students have high quality, relevant instructional experiences adapted to their particular needs? Can you track inputs (e.g., time spent and curriculum utilized) and outputs (e.g., attainment of instructional goals) by student? It's also important to have a multi-year plan that identifies the costs and milestones for each year of the program.

Educational technology and perhaps particularly 1:1 initiatives will only be "worth" the investment if we articulate why we're doing them in the first place and measure our results to see if we got where we thought we were going.

Map of Future Forces Affecting Education

This collaborative effort between the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future examines 6 change drivers and their impact on family and community, markets, institutions, educator and learning, and tools and practices.

The 6 change drivers they identify are:
1. Grassroots economics
2. Smart networking
3. Strong opinions, strongly held
4. Sick herd,
5. Urban wilderness
6. The end of cyberspace

Both the content and execution of the map are thought provoking: View the map

Technology innovation and the invasive species analogy

Yong Zhao and Kenneth Frank in their article "Factors Affecting Technology Uses in Schools: An Ecological Perspective ¹ " make an interesting (albeit elaborate) case that technology innovation should be thought of as an invasive species in an ecosystem model.

The concept is that technology adoption is a dynamic process with adaptation on the part of the introduced technology and the systems and individuals who employ the technology. Whether introduced the invading species (technology) perishes or thrives depends on a) the attributes of the species 2) the conditions of the environment into which it is introduced. Zebra mussels have been so successful in their invasion of the Great Lakes because they have "wide environmental tolerance" and have mechanisms for rapid dispersal among other attributes.

This ecosystem perspective is helpful when considering technology innovation in K-12. Innovation is an interaction between the introduced innovation and the environment and organisms that populate it. To what extent do instructional technologies fill a niche and offer unique value to the instructional experience? How do host organizations and individuals change as the embrace or resist the innovation?

Four practical concepts emerge from this analogy:

1. Suitability - certain environments are more hospitable for innovations. If the "ecosystem" of the organization is under considerable dirress, it may not be an environment with the necessary conditions for success. In this formula, the characteristics of the innovation must be a good match or the conditions of the organizational environment.
2. Competition - innovations require resources. Multiple innovations may compete with one another and outstrip the environment's human or financial capacity necessary for the innovation to survive.
   
3. Adaptation - both the innovation and the host organization and organisms are changed by the introduction of an innovation. This evolution is ongoing; not static.
4. Interaction of species - or in this case the social relationships in schools. Social pressure or explicit expecations to use technology can have a strong positive or strong negative effect on computer use by teachers. The best way to get teachers to use technology for instrutional purpose is to provide time and support for experimentation, rather than highly structured professional development and mandates for use.
   

¹ American Educational Research Journal. Winter 2003. Vol 40, pp. 807-840

Open Source Science : A New Model for Innovation

Martha Lagace's recently published interview with Karim Lakhani in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge describes how open source software communities innovation and product development strategies can be applied to other disciplines -- in this case, medical research.

The finding -- "'...broadcasting' or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions. It's often outsiders and those with "expertise at the periphery of a problem's field -- who were most likely to find answers and do so quickly." The article describes how broadcast search was used with 166 distinct scientific problems and how nearly one-third of the previously unsolved problems were solved through this process.

Innovation and adoption in school systems

Most schools and districts lack the ability to systematically innovate and measure adoption and transfer to practice.

There are several knowledge management efforts under development in K-12. The New Leaders for New Schools Effective Practice Incentive Fund proposes to incentivize high performing teachers and leaders to share effective practice via a free, online knowledge base. This is an ambitious and promising project, however its success is predicated on the ability of organizations to discover and adopt practices. Knowledge management projects have two persistent challenges:

1. How do we incentivize individuals and teams to contribute best practice to the knowledge base? KM initiatives which fail to aggregate and keep current high quality, relevant practices will collect dust and fade away?
   
2. How do we promote and measure the impact of adoption into practice?
   

Many KM initiatives attempt to measure use and adoption, but as Victor Newman points out in The Knowledge Activist's Handbook, most KM efforts fail to analyze and reengineer the business processes of innovation and adoption. If districts lack the processes and skills required to research problems of practice, innovate, and manage change then KM efforts will remain relatively inert.

Firms who have innovation as a distinctive competence (e.g., 3M, pharaceutical sector, etc.) have sophisticated processes for discovery, sharing, and adoption of innovations. There's an adage in entrepreneural environments -- "innovate or die." These processes are designed to minimize the time to productivity for new innovations and maximize the return. What is a relevant innovation process for districts and schools? What is the motivation for innovation in K-12 and how can we foster and measure the transfer of innovations to practice for maximum benefit?

Subsequent posts will examine this possible model for fostering innovation and adoption in schools and districts. As always, your comments are invited.