Karen Cator Direction, Office of Education Technology US Dept of Ed on Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Tech #mec2011

Cator was introduced by John Huppenthal, Arizona Superintendent of Public Schools. National Education Technology Plan introduced in fall through Drupal, and they said it was a “draft” because this is a working document that is alive. Not some proposal printed, stuck on a shelf and forgotten.

“Now is the Time!” Obama, Huppenthal, and Cator are speaking the language of tech in education. Teachers have been doing this for years, she said; it’s time to make hit work. Obama: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduate in the world”. Now the question actor asks is “how do we become a learning nation”. Obama said we need to “…out innovate, our educate, out build…” by learning from other nations and jumping ahead. 82% of schools are in improvement currently, and that can’t work.

CC image posted on Flickr by ALan Levine.

We need to reboot our education system … this is a “matter of national security”. One year ago there was no market for tablet computers. What we’ve seen this year is a proliferation of mobile computing that includes 24/7 access. 50-70 million tablets will be sold this year globally. Mobile productivity means we move beyond eight hours inside four classroom walls. Learning in the 21st century is about learning how to handle “Social Interactions for Learning”. There’s so much digital content out that that we can all learn from including PBS chunking their videos, universities adding free online free courses. Stop blocking student access to these things. We do need to learn how to “safe search” in schools, but don’t just arbitrarily block everything. We have paper classrooms and online classrooms but how do we blend the two? Print has become digital.

Digital books can take us deeper into concepts, teach us about the writers, take us to other books and ideas by others. Much more than just the print book of yesteryear. When disability act required ramps and sidewalks, it did not just help wheel-chaired people, but also strollers, bikes, etc… Digital print is like this as we move to a digital learning environment.

NETP has three parts. Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This is the infrastructure, and now we need to move towards productivity. Next up is R&D. What is the importance of learning and what do we need? How do real world people think and learn? “We’re training for 2020 Olympics, but we don’t know the sport yet.” We need 21st century expertise. How do students learn to think globally? In what ways do students now approach learning? NETP is grounded in how people learn and the importance of affect, language, prior experience, etc… We need to personalize learning, and with tech this is absolutely possible. There should be a universal design for learning, and multiple avenues for learning are being created so students can access learning in various ways. Finally, in the learning space learning has to be connected as informal and formal; we can’t keep kids in schools for 12 hours. Learning moves beyond the classroom walls. Students have so many opportunities: robotics, music classes, sports, etc… So much of their learning is outside of schools.

Assessment is still key. How do we make sure student performance is measured? We need to measure what matters. Assessment 2.0 goes beyond the bubble test and gives us an understanding about growth. The opportunity to embed assessment inside games, scaffolded spaces, etc… gives measurement on the fly. Which sorts of assessments work for which kids, in which circumstances, etc… By examining this, we have real time feedback. Real time feedback is better than the refrigerator door model. Online student publishing is so important today, and no longer does it really matter when teachers hang student work on their classroom walls … it’s more important to have that work published online where it is more permanent than the end of the quarter when the classroom is cleaned.

Teachers need to be highly “effective” and highly connected. Teachers need to be connected to the experts, colleges of ed, and their peers. Engage teachers in new ways of thinking about learning and how we can use ubiquitous technology. Teachers should have a laser focus on the idea of time as an issue; we live in a print based environment, but as we moved to digital, students can move on to the next piece of learning instead of waiting for the teacher. Once we put the tools in the hands of the students, teachers will have more time to be more engaged with more of our students. Differentiated roles of teachers is important. Online scaffolded education is so important as we have so many experts but so little physical time, let’s move this all online. So much teaching is outside of the school walls. And what can we do to help teachers be more successful in helping students learn. We need to inspire both our colleagues and our students. Teaching never ends when the final bells role.

Cator said teachers need to have a persistent online profile, just like a Facebook profile. The profile should include what we’re interested in, what we ourselves want to learn, what we’ve published, etc… We can’t shy away from online profiles. When this is public student can seek us out to learn from us. When we hide this information away, we reach less students.

Cator said our goal is “All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.” What the Department of Education wants for our education system is: 24/7 Community wide to technology (some school districts like Vail in Tucson give them hardware), Broadband in schools, Access Points for the Internet, and support for technology (having access to people who know how to troubleshoot the hardware and software), and we need equity in technology. Data.ed.gov is launching broadband availability for US Schools. NITA and the FCC is working on this right now with the department of education. This is the National Broadband Map, and Dept of Ed wants transparency on where broadband is so we can all work on building up access so ALL students have connectivity EVERYWHERE they need it WHENEVER they need it.

How do we make sure we’re building efficiency and effectiveness in student productivity? We have had decades of print education, and we need to have new ways of redesigning processes to better deal with helping learning be more productive. Cator’s talking about Kahn Academy about learning math online; videos online is cool but now practice sets have been added, so students can practice, find out if they’re right or wrong, and then students can measure their own learning. How can teachers use this for learning?

Research and development. What needs to be invented next for all of this to work? Nobody is being funded to take these ideas to market even when we have prototypes available. There’s a gap between R&D and getting tech into the hands of our students. This is being worked on now.

CC image posted on Flickr by Devon Christopher Adams
Slide with Department of Ed’s National Technology Educational Plan outlined. At Microcomputers in Education conference at Arizona State U.

How will the Department of Education help support schools, a teacher asked Cantor? Her response: NETP is a good start if you make that required for teachers, admins, district officials and school boards. There are a ton of examples that you can put into practice right now in schools.

To conclude, NETP is improving access, creating transparency (telling thew stories of what is working in tech ed now and the classrooms, focus on people (support our communities and support system), and we need to invest in rapid improvement in technology for our students and classrooms. This is where the department of education is now, and these are the discussions that need to be going on in our schools and districts RIGHT NOW.

1. Upload PDF to Google Docs, make PUBLIC and COPY the LINK
2. Go to your Google Site, click wherever you want to embed pdf
3. Click on INSERT [all the way left]–> MORE GADGETS [very bottom of list]
4. In Gadget search box, search for “Google Docs Viewer”
5. Click on the top one (there should 2 that come up), then choose SELECT
6. In Document URL field, paste your PDF URL (from Google Docs) (I would unselect the boxes…)
[You can click preview if you want to see how it looks.]
7. Click on OK

While you’re still in “Edit Page” mode, it will look like a pale yellow box. SAVE the page to see it as they will.

I am a convert.

In 1998 I got my first cell phone while in graduate school. I went with Sprint and don’t really know why now, but it was the place to be back then. That first phone lasted about a year until this cool new Nokia came out (I can’t even begin to tell you the model names). I immediately ordered that phone (and Nokia still does make nice hardware but they’re bigger overseas), but when my wife and I moved across the country to begin our professional lives and marriage I really didn’t need it. I knew no one in AZ essentially and went to work or home. No one to call.

I was an anomaly then. People didn’t have mobile phones like they do now. To save money, I really didn’t use it and didn’t have much use for a mobile for another year until my best friend was buying a new phone and had a buy two and get a deal. I convinced the wife and ended up with a new phone. These were basics that barely even texted. I was still with Sprint and had been happy with them. The service was where I was, the prices were reasonable (especially since I signed up so early and got grandfathered in).

Fast forward through my first few smart phones, and suddenly other companies had cooler phones. They had faster, cooler, easier to use phones. I still had my Sprint phone and by now the wife had been with me in Sprint for a few years. Then the iPhone came out, and it was a hit. All of my friends thought I’d be the first in line now that I’d spent the last decade working in Instructional Technology but I didn’t. I had no desire to be with AT&T (or Cingular or AT&T) or whatever it was called that year. I’d checked out the plans once and discovered I’d have to pay almost double what I pay now to have a second line with a flip phone (for the wife who didn’t care much at that point about phones). I told them where they could stick their phone, even if the iPhone really was that cool.

Two years ago I was still waiting for Sprint to get really cool phones and they still weren’t. At this same time my parents bought a new house, out in the middle of nowhere. They’d jumped onto the Sprint bandwagon with me about a half a decade ago (mostly because they didn’t care who they went with and Sprint let Mum call me for free all she wanted if she had their phone, too). Unfortunately their new home had terrible Sprint service. Terrible to the point where we literally could use NONE of our phones ANYWHERE on their property. Sprint even came out to check. We bought service booster to no avail and finally Sprint acquiesced and let them out of their contract. They signed up with the only company that worked in their new area: Verizon.

By now Verizon had been gaining ground and was a direct competitor to Sprint, and, in some ways, bypassing Sprint. The rumors of an eventual Sprint iPhone began to emerge, too. Many people I talked to thought this would never happen, and I always dreamed of a Sprint iPhone. By the time my parents jumped ship to Verizon from Sprint, the need for unlimited phone to phone on the same network was a moot point because of the new “unlimited plans”. All the while I was still waiting for a new, awesome phone. By now the best I could come up with were Blackberry phones and my Curve was pretty cool and worked well, but RIM was coming out with their Touch at this time as the next best thing and it flopped terribly (maybe they made money but I didn’t know anyone who liked it). RIM (for non corporation users) seemed to become stagnant and in the meantime this new OS called Android that I’d been hearing rumors about for years really hit mainstream. Verizon grabbed onto the Android market and ran! Partially, I think it was due to their lack of iPhone.

By now I was sick of Sprint. I’d been with them for about a decade and I had good customer service because I knew their key words, I knew who to call, and I knew what to say. (I’d even threatened to leave to get a free Curve when it was released. Yes, Free). Verizon was getting these cool Android phones pushing 1GhZ that had an APP Market that slowly grew to compete with Apple, and Sprint, well, Sprint had nothing. Nada. They had merged with Nextel and that didn’t make sense to anyone except maybe Nextel customers. There were (and still are) a few smaller outfits (like T-Mobile) that never made sense to me and were never really on my radar.

But then the Droid hit the market. I was locked into my Curve contract and knew the wife would not be interested in even hearing about my breaking a contract for something “new & shiny”. I waited. I wanted out. I’d waited long enough.

By now I’d been teaching with Google Tools for years and many times I had to force my mobile to sync with Google (and sometimes paid too much for some desktop APP that would force this) but Android WAS the Google market. It was seamless. It was to be a match made in heaven.

By the time my contract was up with Sprint, the Incredible had been released and it was, well, incredible. The camera alone rivaled anything I’d ever used before getting serious about photography. I could not believe I could do all the awesome things I always needed my computer for on my phone. I wanted it. I had to have it. It would change my life.

So I jumped ship. I told the wife I was adding a line to my parent’s account which would cut my personal bill down (she stubbornly stayed on Sprint and is still there). The week before I bought the new Incredible, Verizon announced their Droid-X. It was as cool as the Incredible but even more incredible! My brother-in-law works in AV so I ordered through him and in a few days I was an Android user. People always asked me why I went to Verizon and I told them honestly that in part it was because I wanted the Ultimate Phone Of All Time: an iPhone, and I had faith that Verizon would get it sooner or later. There was no way I was going to AT&T for it after they pissed me off about the second line for $99 for a flip phone (and yes, I made sure I was very clear it was not a second iPhone).

So the Droid-X was to be my intermediary phone, my transition into the world of the V the Z and the W! I was ready. I got the Droid-X as soon as it came out. Everyone was enamored by it. It was larger but I forgot about the size in a nanosecond. I could read books on it! (I’d been carrying my old phone AND iTouch for books only). Now I could carry just one device and it did everything. The Android Market was my Oyster and it was awesome. My phone was fast, it was cool. The 8mp camera rocked, and I could even shoot HD! I knew others who also bought Droid-X phones and loved ‘em.

We loved Android’s Swype input system. Now I could “type” faster than ever, and, sure, it takes getting use to but everything does. When I went back to my iTouch for something I automatically tried to Swype and couldn’t. It didn’t make sense. When we write, we don’t lift our hands so why when we type. I am barely lifting my fingers as I type this out on my MacBook Pro (see, I am invested in Apple!) But the iTouch keyboard was now archaic and annoying! When the Droid2 was released at Christmastime, many people were excited about the upgrade to the flagship Android phone. A good friend of mine bought it, and I was surprised that it had a keyboard. Why bother? It’s like adding a cassette deck to a 21st century stereo. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Well, some people like that. I suppose.

So now it’s been a few years since the iPhone speculation on another carrier was whispered across the nets. And then came the announcement, Verizon! iPhone! Ahhh…. awesomesauce! But was it? Was it too little too late? Sure, it would be exciting! A 4G LTE iPhone 4 on Verizon! Awesome, but NO. This was/is a 3G CDMA ho-hum iPhone. With the iPhone 5 headed to market in summer and 4G Android devices beginning to saturate the market, who cares that much? Well, Verizon did break every pre-sale record in two hours. Yes, two. Did I mention it was 3am-5am. Who gets up that early? I guess all of those people who have been waiting like me for YEARS!

But I didn’t wake up.

I didn’t even roll over in my sleep at 3am. Guess what I have? I have an Android phone. I have this cool OS that has a ton of features, is super fast, and syncs up seamlessly to all of my Google tools. The Market has almost everything I ever need (the only thing I can think of as a I write this that I don’t have is Instagram but PicPlz is gathering speed on Android to replace Instagram’s hype). I have a wildly strong camera, video built in, and speed. I have a phone with removable memory (it doesn’t take a dummy to know a 32G micro SD card is way cheaper than the add-on price for any iPhone storage upgrade, and, of course, I have Swype. And iPhone doesn’t.

When the numbers rolled in from local Apple retails, corporation, and early sales (after the pre-sale hype) from Verizon, guess what? The new Verizon iPhone wasn’t such a big deal. Who cared? According to other releases and records (here, here and here, not a helluva lot of people. Too little too late.

A year ago. Six months ago, I would not write this: I don’t want an iPhone. I love my Android. Dear Apple, you waited too long.

CC image posted by Chris Pirillo on Flickr

Ok, ladies & gentlemen, drum roll please!

You can now a Google Document and/or Google Document Folder with a Google Group. When you do, every member of that group is now shared to that Google Doc file/folder. I teach high school using Google Docs and have 100+ students in Google Groups. I use to have to keep a separate mailing list and batch email people to files I needed them to be able able to collaborate. (I realize if you just want them to see the a single file, a weblink is quick and dirty, but I want them to collaborate!)

Now, it’s no more! Now I can click on a file and add the Google Group address, and presto! 100+ kids just read and edited a proposal by a classmate! Wow.

Now, in theory, let’s take it one step further. We should also be able to Group share folders. Even though I’ve not tried it yet, I wonder if we can Group share a folder and if you then want it collaborated to the entire Group (think peer editing or building course rubrics with student input), you can just dump the file into that folder. Now for each class, I can have a Google Doc folder and then two sub folders. One called “View” and one called “Collaborate”. Google’s like a fine wine.

(CC) image posted by Ray Weitzenberg on Flickr.

Bryan Alexander began his keynote with The Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris to show how gaming works to teach. Remixed archival footage, video footage, etc… that anyone can grab and build. The multimedia synthesis is becoming the norm.

Trend extrapolation is one key of futurism that includes assumptive quantitative arcs, allows us to examine trends. Broadband increases and 5 exabytes in 2002 to 11,240 transferring online in 2011.

He’s discussing Chromium the new Google Laptop, which doesn’t have a hard drive.

Dialogue Day with Bryan Alexander MCC February, 3, 2011.

Bryan Alexander is senior fellow for NITLE that helps Liberal Arts College use pedagogy and technology in education. Roger Yohe introduced Bryan at MCC’s LB145. We’re going to discuss the Horizon Report and discuss the purpose and why that really does matter. Bryan began talking about who he is and what he’s about including raising goats and chickens and the 6′ of snow outside his home in Vermont and the broadband inside.

Plan of today’s session is 1. Methods, 2. Near term, Medium, and Longer, then 3) Scenarios built around the future of technology. Current features he works on include Prediction Markets, NITLE Network, the Horizon Report, and various events. They work with small schools of up to 2,000 and then link them together.

Wiki is old school he says, but people think it’s emerging because they’ve not worked with them before. Showed us the methodology tree: http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/images/methodology-tree.gif and we’re discussing futurism and trend extrapolation. IP addresses are running into problems now and we’ve moved to IPv6. Non-keyboard interfaces are becoming bigger and bigger while 3D is currently flatlining.

Advantages of a future marked is distributed feedback, continuous, and affordances of play. Fantasy Football is a type of this. Black Swan is something statistically unlikely that happens and changes the entire game. Sept 11, 2001 is a black swan, and history has changed because of that. The 2008 economic crash is the same thing. We can’t predict them.

There are groups who try to filter Google Searches to predict futures. Environmental scan is used to predict new movements militaristic, etc… The Delphi method, a formed detailed focus group, that is used to create the Horizon Report. Scenario Model is a type of prediction and by using role playing, we can find gaps in our knowledge. Some issues include: overlap and interconnection, gaps, no value judgements and no probability assessments.

He’s talking about news.google.com and how you can get tens of thousands points of views simultaneously. And you can discover and analyze the echoes and repetitions to see patterns and trends.

What are the treads you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which learning-focused institutions approach our core missions of teaching, research, and service? What are the key challenges related to teaching, learning and creating?

Technology to watch out for: E-books and mobiles within this year. Then Augmented Reality, and game-based learning. After that is gesture-based computing and learning analytics. The mouse is on its way out, but many people think that sounds a little too geeky. “People do want to work, learn and study whenever and wherever they want. Work is becoming more collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and our notions of IT support are decentralized.”

Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.There are now new forms of authoring publishing and researching. It’s hard to keep up with the proliferation of information. Social Software is no longer controversy. It’s over, Bryan says. They don’t even watch these trends anymore; it’s part of the psyche of our world.

He’s continuing to discuss social media and is talking about the Hudson plane crash and how Twitter scooped traditional news media. twitpic.com/135xa … Now he’s discussing how comments are added to online publications. Media Common Press now allows users to comment anywhere they want in online publications. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ Social media is ubiquitous and we can change social publications.

Publications is changing from AUTHORITY to QUALITY, Bryan said. He did not talk to us about shooting photos, hash tags, etc… These spaces are permeable and the “social is the default”. In academia we’ve had the opposite for centuries and it’s a combination of all networking with easier media production. “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Scott McNealy the CEO of SUN said this in 1999. Social Media has already changed the world so let’s move on.

An audience member said social media changes our truths. For example in Egypt, what we’re fed is different depending on where we “eat” or consume. There’s more responsibility on user, the consumers. CNN was showing the Cairo police web cameras for sometime, which is only one point of view.

Bryan said saying you don’t use Facebook is like saying you don’t do Email, now. We can’t get away from it. We can’t differentiate our online lives either. You can’t say Linked In is just for professional and FB is only for social. Boring and won’t work. Bryan said teens don’t listen to podcasts, but adults do. Podcasts are buried by iTunes. Twitter’s for old people so why are we asking our students to use it? Now he’s talking about e-books and says they’re old and in 2011 it’s mainstreamed. He’s showing us The White House Blog and talking about how universities are basing their own layout off of Obama’s website. A year ago the Economic Report was available in Kindle, Nook, and Sony reader editions. This was in February 2010. E-books took off in the late-90s and weren’t cheap so they didn’t take off as fast as the MP3 players. The multipurpose devices, like notebooks and smart phones, where people like to read, too. Advantages to e-reading are cost, weight savings, subscription updates, dictionaries built in, pleasure reading, public domain texts, green (paperless), greater purchasing of books, e-ink, and quick updates. Problems e-readers have are limited interfaces, hardware costs, annotation issues, DRM, title availability, visual quality, multimedia, and sharing limitations. The first e-book project started in 1967 with Project Gutenberg. This is years before the Internet and the project is still going. You can read your books in a browser, too. There’s an epub reader add-on for Firefox, too. He’s continuing this discussion of ebooks and how they’re grabbing a hold and moving forward; in the recession they’ve taken off since they’re cheaper.

Emergent future: one revolution. Movie devices include phone, wifi, bluetooth, and portability. These are ubiquitous now. A “device ecology” has happened over the last 8 years. Petra Wentzel wrote on this in “Wireless All the Way” in November 2003 through Educause. The ecosystem is wireless, multiplicity, and the evolving practices and issues include: digital layer over spaces, expanded media, consumption and capture, uneven uptake, social connectors, multitasking, small groups, and attention indexes.

We should be discussing smartphones and smartpens. Here’s a great blog post by Michael Wesch: mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=206 on SmartPens. Uses for some of these (pens and tablets) include: drawing, math, world languages, multimedia consumption and the appeal of touch screens.

Personal tracking (like we’ve seen in Minority Report) has been in place in Asia for years. Sensor nets have been placed across the globe and companies like HP are doing this. Walmart uses these (in RFID chips) and so does the military. HP calls this “The Nervous System of the Earth”.

Now he’s talking about Augmented Reality, and I didn’t think I knew what that meant until he began. I definitely do know this. For example, I can open Yelp on my Android phone now and find all sorts of food everywhere. Couple that with Google Maps, GPS, etc… You can add augmented reality over the physical spaces where you are. Bryan is talking about Bruce Sterling’s keynote on AR from last year: http://www.ugotrade.com/2010/06/07/a-geekgasm-at-9am-in-the-augmented-reality-industry-are2010-bruce-sterlings-keynote-will-wright-and-the-parrot-ar-drone/. Augmented Reality adds layers to our “real world” but what is now real versus augmented. SkyMap is another example of how this works. Military applications are obvious, too. Some issues there is with the dawn of AR include: competing overlaps in layers, classic problems of copyright and privacy, acculturating and “unplugging” and also curating and overcrowding AR spaces.

Gaming has taken over the earth. We think it’s all about 14yr old pimply boys. Media age is really between 34-36, and half of the gamers are women. All nations game, and as an industry gaming makes more money than movies (but not music). This impacts hardware, software, interfaces, and other industries. There is a large and growing diversity of platforms, topics, genres, niches, and players. The number of Facebook Farmville users recently is 55,891,706 million (as of January 2011). Gaming has become part of the mainstream culture. Classrooms use games for curriculum content, delivery mechanism, and creating games. Some impact on campuses includes: changes in hardware and software, it’s part of undergraduate life, learning content is both formal and informal and affects career paths. 97% of college students play video games. Gamification has seeped into everyday life, and this is a controversy idea. Wii or Xbox are social games stuck in the living room but so many games are out in our worlds. The Airline Industry is a huge game, and was showcased in the George Clooney movie Up in the Air. Foursquare, GoWalla and Brightkite does this, and so many people have left BrightKite for Four Square because there you can be “mayor”! Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal shows us how and why gaming will change our world and impact our society.

Interface changes are coming (4-5 years according to the Horizon Report) but more like 2 years according to Bryan. The changes include the end of the mouse, touch screens (iOS), Handhelds (like the Wii) and using NOTHING AT ALL (like Kinect). The Kinect is now. Not two years out. Not 4-5 years out. This is right now. Bodiless and interfaceless device, which also responds to voice. Bryan: “hello Kinect, let us play.”

He showed us Books Ngram Viewer about terms and how they interact. ngrams.googlelabs.com. Then ended with a discussion of the future in education and technology.