Coaches are working with athletes…but… they can’t PLAY FOR the athletes. The coaches’ job is to prepare them, to teach them the rules of the game and to have a plan to condition the athletes to be at their physical best when it is time to play or compete. Teachers need to see us as their coaches. We can show them tools that will help them teach 21st Century skills. We can introduce them to projects, resources, hardware, software and materials that will support 21st Century literacies…but ultimately educators will have to go out on the field and “play”. We can coach them, but ultimately they will have to do the work to become “fit” for themselves.

Her thoughtful ideas extend to 21st Century literacies and fluencies. Yet, despite her clear examples, I am fixated on her introduction. Sylvia begins by half-apologizing for using the phrase “21st Century Skills” and words like collaboration, creativity, and communication. Her reason: Some edubloggers and educators feel that the 21st Century Skills movement, espoused by Tony Wagner and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, is becoming a cliche that is batted around willy-nilly in modern reform of schools. It is losing its meaning, a meaning and skill list that some believe has been around for some time.

Sylvia, don’t couch your thoughts!

One of the primary attacks against 21st Century Skills is the contention that the skills aren’t really knew. Some contend that skills like creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and connectivity are holdovers from prior decades. Tim Stahmer, a blogger at Assorted Stuff, succinctly summarizes this line of thought by saying:

As we enter the second decade of the century, this is a cliche that has lost whatever meaning it might have had. Mostly it’s used by politicians and education experts as a catch-all for whatever concept they’re currently pushing.

The skills most often included – creativity, critical thinking, communication, etc. – are nothing unique to this century.

And they are, for the most part, the diametrical opposite of the test-driven crap that has been passed off as education reform during the past decade.

In a way, Tim is absolutely correct by saying that these skills are not unique to this century. Superficially, I doubt many would be convinced that it was unimportant for students to be creative or (fill-in-the-blank with a 21st Century Skill) in the 90s, 80s, or 70s. If you look at the skills in isolation, I am certain bygone teachers would say, “Yeah, all of those were emphasized to a certain degree during my era.”

What is different is the context in which the phrase 21st Century Skills and all of the skills and literacies appear. According to Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, work and life in the modern world is vastly different then in decades past- and schools aren’t changing.

…I have come to understand that there is a core set of survival skills for today’s workplace, as well as for lifelong learning and active citizenship- skills that are neither taught nor tested even in our best school systems. Young people who want to earn more than minimum wage and who go out into the world without the new survival skills I’ve uncovered in my research are crippled for life; they are similarly unprepared to be active and informed citizens or to be adults who will continue to be stimulated by new information and ideas. Parents and educators who do not attend to these skills are putting their children at an increased risk of not being able to get and keep a good job, grow as learners, or make positive contributions to their community. I believe that opinion leaders and policy-makers who do not understand the profound implications of teaching and testing these new survival skills are complicit in an unwitting conspiracy to put our nation at even greater risk of losing our competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the bet that No Child Left Behind will save us is a losing one (p. 14).

The emphasis and need to attend to 21st Century Skills (or Survival Skills as Wagner calls them) is ever more important now because the world is quite different. The context imbues the words and phrases that Tim believes are now trite cliches with enhanced meaning and urgency, a semantic flavoring that is unseen when examining phonetic words on a printed or digital page in isolation. Yes, creativity-collaboration-problem solving-communication-critical thinking were important before, but the shifting landscape of work and life in this era adds a level of imperative gravity to the skills.

When I hear someone write or say “21st Century Skills,” I immediately think of the invisible backstory described by Wagner and Thomas Friedman- a sociological description of what it now means to be a successful student, worker, and citizen in this day and age. This backstory that appears in my mind was impossible when I first began teaching, not because I wasn’t well read or uninformed, but because the world was beginning a metamorphosis that is still happening. A change that requires critical thinking, analysis, collaboration, and communication- all of which were nice in the 80s and 90s but not crucial. There is definitely an enhanced meaning in these words and phrases for me now, much like saying “fire” in a burning building differs from saying the same word with people holding guns.

We need to talk about 21st Century Skills, not encourage people to “stop saying that” because some overuse or decontextualize the concept. Write on, Sylvia!

Before I put his book, The Future of Ideas, back on my bookshelf after 50 pages, Lawrence Lessig taught me something new: There is a difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web.  Prior to my brief reading foray into this thoughtful yet boring treatise on “commons” and the web, these two words melded together in my vernacular like Hershey’s and chocolate- they meant the same thing to me.  I used “Internet” and “WWW” interchangeably in spoken and written communication, and I undoubtedly thought that I knew what each one meant when hearing it batted around.

I was wrong according to Lessig.  These two words are less like my perceived notion of commonality (Hershey’s=chocolate) and more similar to the chocolatey symbiotic relationship of peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese’s peanut butter cup: The Internet and the WWW are distinct elements that, together, combine to form the ubiquitous communication tool that billions enjoy today.

If you’re free from geekhood, you are likely not to distinguish the WWW from the Internet.  But in fact, they are quite distinct.  The World Wide Web is a set of protocols for displaying hyperlinked documents linked across the Internet.  These protocols were developed in the late 1980s by researchers at the European particle physics lab CERN- in particular by Tim Berners-Lee.  These protocols specify how a “Web server” serves content on the WWW.  They also specify how “browsers”- such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [as well as Firefox, Safari, and Opera]- retrieve content on the World Wide Web.  But these protocols themselves simply run on top of the protocols that define the Internet.  These Internet protocols, referred to as TCP/IP, are the foundation upon which the protocols that make the World Wide Web function- HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and HTML (hypertext markup language)- run (p. 42).

Distinct and different are the words Internet and WWW.  The term that often dominates communication platforms is Internet, a word that seems to be a generic embodiment for talking about Facebook, Youtube, etc…  Yet, WWW or World Wide Web or web is more appropriate; people see the results of web-based protocols when they visit their favorite sites.

This leads me to my main point: Does the terminology misuse really matter?  If we, the general population, know that the meaning behind the terms is contextual despite evidence to the contrary, is that alright?

I want to ask these very same questions to David.  More specifically, his quasi-veiled admission that he is not going to use the word Education in 2010 in lieu of… learning?  Aren’t the two inextricably linked like the peanut butter and chocolate of my favorite Reese’s?  Can’t I infer what you mean by the tone and context of your words?

I have to agree with David that the focus and driving force for education should be learning. However, in my mind, education is a word that is packed with a number of connotations. Education is comprised of people. Education involves community. Education contains laws, rules, and procedures.  There’s a healthy dose of testing balanced by teaching and pedagogy. And, probably most importantly when effective, education leads to learning. It involves learning.

I have to disagree that one should substitute (his words, not mine) “learning” for the word “education.” There is value in considering, not disregarding, the multitude of facets within education. David’s blithe substitution list is what I find troublesome- this is not a situation where one can or should invoke an Interent-WWW rationale.  The words are too different.  If he had simply wrote that he (we) need(s) to emphasize or focus on learning, I probably never would have written this post (he did not despite claims to the contrary).

Maybe I am wrong.

1. For many of Mike Rowe’s jobs, safety is actually third on a list of priorities. It’s not that safety doesn’t matter; safety on a crab-fishing vessel in the Bering Sea is a matter of life or death. However important safety might be in a occupation like this, safety is still third because of the job itself. If he or the other fisherman “put safety first,” they would not be able to function because of the inherent dangers associated with crab fishing. Heck, they would not even be able to leave the dock.
2. Mike Rowe shouts “safety third” because it snaps people out of their daily daze. It forces an inevitable, “Huh? Shouldn’t safety be first?” Safety then becomes a focus not possible with the more commonplace phrase. It’s disconcerting.

I believe that David was trying to make a “safety third” post employing Mike Rowe’s second rationale. He was trying to be provocative, and it definitely caught my attention. I just find fault with his choice of words for the aforementioned reasons. If this was not the case, why would David still refer to himself as an educator instead of a learner?

1. What are the implicit/explicit learning objectives (stated and unstated) for the students? Standards-based or real world?
2. How are the students (and teachers) using technology?
3. To what extent is learning different in the two examples?
4. How would you go about molding and helping the type of learner(s) in each of the videos?
5. Is one type of learner “better” than the other?
6. (Video 1) Should we strive to scale-up a particular example because it easily fits within our ideal framework of teaching and learning?
7. (Video 2) If the learner was (a) American and (b) a student in the US educational system, would you expect to see this type of original thought and creativity given top-down constraints in an equally problematic scenario?

More importantly, what constitutes learning? For what purpose?  What is success?

Video 1:

Video 2:

Background: A book is the following learner’s teacher. Famine prevents the speaker, although it might not be apparent in the video, from going to school.

Follow-up Questions:

1. Does exemplary teaching (video 1) reflect a sugar-coated understanding of what should be taught?
2. Do the realities of American public school teaching (standards) make the first video the best example of what teachers should strive to create?
3. What would standards-based education look like in William’s community?

“When it comes to ‘technology’ use in schools, every responsible educator’s first concerns should be student safety and educational suitability. I am suggesting that we ban one of the most potentially harmful technologies of all—the pencil. We must eliminate them from schools because:

1. A student might use a pencil to poke out the eye of another student.
2. A student might write a dirty word or, worse yet, a threatening note to another student, with a pencil.
3. One student might have a mechanical pencil, making those with wooden ones feel bad.
4. The pencil might get stolen.
5. Pencils break and need repairing all the time.
6. Kids who have pencils might doodle instead of working on their assignments or listening to the teacher.

Oh, sure, kids might actually use a pencil to take notes or compose a paper- but really, what’s the chance of that?”

Doug’s tongue-in-cheek writing highlights a very real issue in educational technology: Educators, whether they are teachers or administrators, often make instructional/policy decisions about including emerging technologies in schools based on the degree to which students can abuse and misuse the tools.  According to the article, the consequence of making snap judgements based on “abuse” is that education becomes more irrelevant for students, it fosters an increasingly larger divide between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” and it squanders meaningful learning opportunities.

I agree with Doug’s assertion that abuse rationales lead to uninformed choices when it comes to banning certain types of technologies.  Yes, schools need to be aware of the pitfalls of new technologies in students’ hands, but the potential harm should not be the driving force that negates a tool’s use.  However, considering curricular and pedagogical objectives, examining possible affordances, and recognizing drawbacks with emerging technologies all provide a more robust justification. Certainly, I’m missing quite a few additional key issues.

What are the crucial questions that schools need to ask when considering whether to adopt or ban a controversial piece of technology?  How can schools effectively weigh the drawbacks and affordances of emerging technologies when the curricular/pedagogical benefits are often unrecognizable, misunderstood, or unrealized?

Please post your questions and thoughts to this post.   Jennifer Roland, editor of ISTE’s The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology, will be reading your comments in preparation for a guest post at http://edfoc.us about this topic on September 25th.  Additionally, she and I will pick one comment that reflects considerable thought and insight, and that person will receive a free copy of The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology: Selections from Volumes 31-35.

The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology: Selections from Volumes 31-35
Edited by Jennifer Roland

ISTE’s flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology, is where the organization’s members and industry experts share and discuss the latest and greatest in using technology to enhance education. This collection, assembled by former L&L senior editor Jennifer Roland, includes the very best articles from 2003-2008. Along with the articles as they originally appeared in the magazine, the book includes commentary and context introducing the articles as well as short essays from the original authors, who further discuss the issues and topics of their articles and how they’ve affected the ed tech world.

Yes.

The trend towards digitizing books and journals is a realized certainty, one that is happening whether people prefer physical publications or an electronic counterpart. For example, Google is creating digital versions of copyrighted texts from institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton with the goal of sharing knowledge with the world through efficient distribution channels. To read these texts, people use wirelessly connected devices like Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, Apple’s iPhone, and the ubiquitous computer. Easily accessible, electronic words benefit many in the form of democratization of knowledge, user accessibility, decreased publication and distribution costs, and environmental sustainability.

With the ability to access and read texts that were once only offered in physical form, education leaders are questioning the need for brick-and-mortar libraries. The fundamental question appears reasonable: If libraries aren’t where people go to find the printed word when text is digital, then what function does the traditional library serve in the community, local schools, and higher education? The economic advantages of removing a library are quite appealing. However, electronic texts and eReaders present two particular challenges not apparent in physical books and journals. These challenges make physical books and libraries a necessity.

The current incarnation of eReaders lack the physical capabilities required to accomplish the variety of reading tasks that people perform. eReaders support linear reading but make flipping to different sections in books and referencing multiple books at once both difficult and cumbersome. For example, students and researchers, whether in K12 settings or higher education institutions, need the ability to see numerous texts at one time when conducting research. The technological limitations of screen size and viewing area are problems affecting eReaders’ utility and usability. Until there is an affordable technology that adequately displays multiple texts at once with intuitive, cross-publication navigation and tools, physical publications and libraries are essential.

E-Ink, the technology used to create highly readable words with low power consumption, is the de facto standard in consumer, stand-alone eReaders. While e-Ink leads to a very pleasurable linear reading experience on mobile devices, words and pictures only appear in grayscale. In many instances, readers need to see color graphs and images; understanding certain types of graphs, viewing images, and reading picture books are three experiences that benefit from color. The decision to include or forego color in physical texts is a publication decision; in all eReaders except for computers, color is not an option. The technological limitations of e-Ink necessitate physical, complimentary texts when color is crucial.

Physical books, journals, and magazines are critical in today’s environment of digitization and freely accessible texts. The current technological limitations of eReaders and electronic texts justify tangible publications to address the variety of ways that people read and process words. Libraries, public bastions for printed words, still need to exist in the digital age as a public service agent despite the emergence and benefits of electronic texts. However, libraries can and should evolve to accommodate electronic texts and physical books as well as build upon the affordances and limitations that each media type contains.

I am definitely late to the And the Pursuit of Happiness party, but it makes me feel better that I am standing alongside Daniel Pink at the back of the line.

“Everything is invented.  Language. Childhood. Careers.  Relationships.  Religion.  Philosophy.  The future.  They are not there for the plucking.  They don’t exist in some natural state.  They must be invented by people.  And that, of course, is a great thing.  Don’t mope in your room.  Go invent something.  That is the American message.”

I’m trying out a new point system.  Do all the work, you get an A.   Don’t need an A?  Don’t have time to do all the work?  No problem.  You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there’s your grade.  Clearcut.  No guesswork.  No second-guessing ‘what the prof wants.’ No gaming the system.  Clearcut.  Student is responsible.

And how to judge quality, you ask?  Crowdsourcing.  Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year)  so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down.   If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit.  End of story.  Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem.  It just means you’ll have fewer ticks on the chart and will probably get the lower grade.  No whining.  It’s clearcut and everyone knows the system from day one.  (btw, every study of peer review among students shows that students perform at a higher level, and with more care, when they know they are being evaluated by their peers than when they know only the teacher and the TA will be grading).

That has to be one of the more interesting mechanisms for student assessment that I have seen in a long time.  However, it doesn’t quite sit well with me for a couple of reasons.  In an effort to clearly state what bothers me, consider the following writing from the controversial educator and researcher, Alfie Kohn:

Eric Schaps (1993), who directs the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California, has emphasized “a single powerful distinction: focusing on what students ought to be able to do, that is, what we will demand of them — as contrasted with focusing on what we can do to support students’ development and help them learn.” For lack of better labels, let us call these the “demand” and “support” models.

In the demand model, students are workers who are obligated to do a better job. Blame is leveled by saying students “chose” not to study or “earned” a certain grade — conveniently removing all responsibility from educators and deflecting attention from the curriculum and the context in which it is taught. In their evaluations, teachers report whether students did what they were supposed to do. This mind-set often lurks behind even relatively enlightened programs that emphasize performance assessment and — a common buzzword these days — outcomes. (It also manifests itself in the view of education as an investment, a way of preparing children to become future workers.)

The support model, by contrast, helps children take part in an “adventure in ideas” (Nicholls and Hazzard 1993), guiding and stimulating their natural inclination to explore what is unfamiliar; to construct meaning; to develop a competence with and a passion for playing with words, numbers, and ideas. This approach meshes with what is sometimes called “learner-centered” learning, in which the point is to help students act on their desire to make sense of the world. In this context, student evaluation is, in part, a way of determining how effective we have been as educators. In sum, improvement is not something we require of students so much as something that follows when we provide them with engaging tasks and a supportive environment.

-Grading: Not How But Why

Pedagogically, I believe that learning, whether it is K12 or higher education, should closely resemble the supportive model that emphasizes exploration, constructivism, passion, engagement, and “learner-centeredness.”  The support model is where it’s at IMHO.

Cathy Davidson and her crowdsourcing grading constructs are, to some extent, undermining what Kohn and Schaps identify as the five principles of supportive assessment.  Once again, I call upon the words of Alfie Kohn:

1. Assessment of any kind should not be overdone. Getting students to become preoccupied with how they are doing can undermine their interest in what they are doing. An excessive concern with performance can erode curiosity — and, paradoxically, reduce the quality of performance. Performance-obsessed students also tend to avoid difficult tasks so they can escape a negative evaluation.
2. The best evidence we have of whether we are succeeding as educators comes from observing children’s behavior rather than from test scores or grades. It comes from watching to see whether they continue arguing animatedly about an issue raised in class after the class is over, whether they come home chattering about something they discovered in school, whether they read on their own time. Where interest is sparked, skills are usually acquired. Of course, interest is difficult to quantify, but the solution is not to return to more conventional measuring methods; it is to acknowledge the limits of measurement.
3. We must transform schools into safe, caring communities. This is critical for helping students to become good learners and good people, but it is also relevant to assessment. Only in a safe place, where there is no fear of humiliation and punitive judgment, will students admit to being confused about what they have read and feel free to acknowledge their mistakes. Only by being able to ask for help will they be likely to improve.  Ironically, the climate created by an emphasis on grades, standardized testing, coercive mechanisms such as pop quizzes and compulsory recitation, and pressure on teachers to cover a prescribed curriculum makes it more difficult to know how well students understand — and thus to help them along.
4. Any responsible conversation about assessment must attend to the quality of the curriculum. The easy question is whether a student has learned something; the far more important — and unsettling — question is whether the student has been given something worth learning. (The answer to the latter question is almost certainly no if the need to evaluate students has determined curriculum content.) Research corroborates what thoughtful teachers know from experience: when students have interesting things to do, artificial inducements to boost achievement are unnecessary (Moeller and Reschke 1993).
5. Students must be invited to participate in determining the criteria by which their work will be judged, and then play a role in weighing their work against those criteria. Indeed, they should help make decisions about as many elements of their learning as possible (Kohn 1993). This achieves several things: It gives them more control over their education, makes evaluation feel less punitive, and provides an important learning experience in itself. If there is a movement away from grades, teachers should explain the rationale and solicit students’ suggestions for what to do instead and how to manage the transitional period. That transition may be bumpy and slow, but the chance to engage in personal and collective reflection about these issues will be important in its own right.

The Principles

If you drink the Kool-Aid and believe that (a) the support model is the best learning environment and (b) the aforementioned five principles determine success, then what is the effect of a Cathy’s crowdsourcing grading policy on the type of learning students will exhibit?  Here’s my take and why her assessment policy might not be a good or even adequate alternative despite crowdsourcing’s presence in today’s society.

1. Principle 1: Overdone Assessment In its current, novel iteration (this type of grading system hasn’t been attempted to my knowledge), how can assessment not become the focus of the students in Cathy’s class?  Apart from the media and blogging attention, I believe the newness factor will undoubtedly dominated the thoughts and minds of enrolled students.  How preoccupied will the students be when their efforts are displayed and assessed on a public stage?  Will the assessment constructs, specifically public evaluation, over-emphasize the grading to the detriment of curiosity and joy of learning?  Crowdsourcing grading, whether it is on a worldwide stage or within the confines of a classroom community, places the letter grade front and center where performance and appearance take precedent to other qualities of learning.
2. Principle 2: Sparking Interest, Conversation, and Further Exploration I don’t believe that the students in Cathy’s class will be naturally inclined to display ongoing conversations that refine personal thinking (back-and-forth, give-and-take) or further exploration unless individual students gravitate to the ideas presented.  Why?  She is encouraging students to do the opposite!  She is instituting a do-the-assignment-get-an-A formula with a twist of revision (just revise your work if you don’t get the grade you want and you will get credit).  From past, personal experience, I know that I have followed the pattern of “what do I need to do to appease the powers that be” when I was disinterested in a topic that I was forced to consume.  In these instances, I became hyper-focused on the outcome and closed off to the potential learning that I could have experienced with a more open mind.  The qualities that matter in Cathy’s class appear to be completing the assignment and not exploration.  With regard to this principal, the problem is not crowdsourcing but pedagogical; her choices do not lead to success in a supportive model of learning.
3. Principle 3: Safe, Caring Communities The degree to which the Cathy establishes course rules, norms, and procedures for students commenting and grading other students’ work will be the determining factor as to whether the community is safe and caring.  However, I wonder if students will “admit to being confused about what they have read and feel free to acknowledge their mistakes” in the context of a crowdsourcing grading policy.
4. Principle 4: Quality of the Curriculum I think that the topic is worth learning, so I don’t perceive any misallignment.
5. Principle 5: Students Participating in Judgement Criteria This is the more interesting question for me: Would students choose the more traditional grading mechanisms in lieu of crowdsourcing?  Why?  Would there be elements of the course that more naturally fit with crowdsourcing assessment?

Conclusion

I am unsure about this original approach to grading based on what I know and read.  However, I have a fair amount of reservations. It makes me wonder whether or not crowdsourcing should be instituted as a grading mechanism when students are still learning about crowdsourcing.