Steven B. Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You and Mind Wide Open, wrote the cover piece for Time Magazine on June 15th. It was about Twitter, but more importantly about innovation. He proposed that there is a unique innovation surrounding Twitter. This new model of innovation goes beyond people finding a new use for an existing tool. It involves the end user re-designing the tool itself. This means that Twitter becomes a platform that allows end users to build and create.
You can read his article for more details but here is my area of interest. What if this model of social creativity and end-user innovation was infused into our Educational settings?
The first obvious issue is control. Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Founders of Twitter, must be fairly comfortable with end-user innovation and why not? It is working for them. Hashtags for searching and 3rd party tools for accessing Twitter are just two ways that Twitter is being constantly improved from the outside in. Imagine that model in the classroom. As a teacher, could you create an environment where your students were actively engaged in re-designing instructional practice or assessment? Could we maintain the course and direction while allowing students the opportunity to set methods or design the project? What would end-user innovation look like in our classrooms?
Next Johnson tackles that idea that modern innovation is so rapid that we cannot continue to fall back to old metrics for measuring success. His example is using Ph.D.s and patents to measure US innovation as compared to other countries. By this metric we are falling behind, but if you explore measuring success in terms of “actual lifestyle-changing hit products” the US is out in front by a mile. So now let’s talk about the classroom. Are we using the right metrics to measure success or future success? Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, Stephen Heppell, and Tony Wagner would suggest that perhaps we aren’t. While the world around us is changing, adapting, and innovating, we are still using the same models of assessment from 20, 30, and even 40 years ago. What would assessment look like if changed the metric to include creativity, collaboration, symphony, etc.? Would it change the way we assess? Assessment needs to move toward performance based assessment while retaining the strengths traditional assessment to adapted to the changing global economy and to meet the needs of our students.
Finally, the new tools and resources at our fingertips are providing opportunities for new methods of communication and conversation. Johnson’s article begins with the story of a conference on Educational Reform. The basics of the story are that there was a real-time, real-world conversation going on in the back channel – twitter, live blogging, etc. Not only were the participants able to participate by voicing their ideas, but they were able to tweet links to additional resources related to the topic. Eventually, the community outside of the conference was able to respond to the posting of those in attendance. Now I understand that when you put a laptop in front of a student or faculty and then proceed to discuss an important topic that there is a high probability of off task behaviors. I admit it but let’s explore this idea anyway. Would it be possible to have students actively engaged during a lecture tweeting additional resources or links to pertinent information to back channel for the class? Would it be a useful tool for students to have the record of the tweets or live blog account to use to reflect on the lecture? Let’s go up one more step. If students were tweeting about the lecture, would it be possible to invite others – experts in the field, interested parents, community members -to add their experiences to the back channel? It could be a way to encourage active participation in an environment that often leaves students in the role of passive recipients.
I know that this whole conversations makes some folks uncomfortable and it is understandable. There aren’t many clear cut, black and white answers for how we should adapt and innovate. New or modified instructional practices supported by decades of research and expert studies are not sitting on shelves waiting for us. How could they? Some of the very tools that we are exploring have only been around for years. Twitter, for example, just turned 3 in March of 2009. It is time, however, for us to at minimum get engaged in the conversation about the future of education. All of us need to lend our strength and problem solving skills to building a new, innovative model of Education designed for the purpose of preparing our students to improve their future.
Click here if interested in a pdf of article with my notes.
