40 Days to Personalized Education: A call to action September 20, 2012

*** If you need the cliff notes version of this post, skip down to the Call to Action section!

Last year I had a “hunch” about learning…specifically about curriculum.  That hunch turned into a full-fledged idea and a mission to do better for kids.  Everywhere.  Along the line I met some truly incredible people who taught me things I didn’t know how to do before.  Like wire framing (thanks @ianchia), and pitching ideas (thanks @houseofgenius), and how to go about picking up programmers (thanks@toma_bedolla).  Now I’m ready to share the culmination of all this work with you.

This isn’t just a post to tell you about what I’m doing, it is a call to action for everyone (yes, even you).  It is a request for you to join me in this mission in whatever form that may take.

I have a vision: to make personalized learning a reality for EVERY child. 

I know, it is big.  It is also doable.

For those who are new to following me, here was my original “hunch” written here,Dreams of Education:

“The problem with curriculum and textbooks is that they complete thoughts.  Curriculum and textbooks give the impression that learning has an end.  That when you have made it from cover to cover, the job is done.  I know in my own schooling this was true, I thought that school was teaching me what was important and that anything outside of the curriculum wasn’t important or relevant to my life…wouldn’t they have included it otherwise?  How did curriculum get this way?  Well, people realized that there was no possible way to cover every facet of learning, so they stripped it down to what they thought was important.  The problem? What is important to you may not be what is important to me.  What’s more, something that is very important to me may have been cut all together so I don’t even get the chance to know that it is important to me.  Humans tend to like things that are definable, we like things that we can put into a neat, orderly box and carry out in a predictable way.  It feels safe and manageable.  This is what led me to the following hunch:

What if curriculum was more flexible?  What if curriculum/schools/learning looked more like Pandora.  If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, it is an online radio station that plays the music that it thinks you will like.  You type in an artist or song and it creates a customized radio station just for you.  It is remarkably accurate.  Pandora almost never gets it wrong for me.  It is like they have a direct line to my brain and can predict what song I would like to hear next.  When it is wrong, I can give the song a thumbs down and it apologizes profusely for the error and promises never to play that song again on my station.  The other thing I love about Pandora: I can have multiple radio stations.  Because sometimes I really couldn’t think of anything in the world better than Frank, Dean, and Sammy; but other times  I also want a little Timberlake, Whitestripes, or Bangles.  What if curriculum looked like that?  What if learning happened as a result of typing in one subject or topic that a student was enamored with and a completely personalize learning journey began playing out for them?  What if students were led through a journey that was completely customized?  What if they had several stations mapped out for them?”

I believe this is possible.  I believe it is within our reach to create a completely personalized learning experience to every unique child.  I believe that we can honor humanity instead of treating our kids like widgets in a factory.  I believe that teachers should be teachers, focused on the needs and development of the child instead of teaching the masses through scripted curriculum.

This is The Learning Genome Project.

The Learning Genome Project will empower teachers and parents to become engineers of learning by providing each individual student the exact content they need, at the exact moment they need it.  The Learning Genome will enable students to explore the process of inquiry, experimentation, discovery and problem solving.  Instead of learning how to pass the next test, we will enable students to construct meaning and learn how to transfer that meaning to new life context.  At the hub, the Learning Genome is a platform that aggregates resources and, using a series of algorithms, provide recommendations of the BEST resources to meet the individual learning needs of a specific child.  The Learning Genome creates those serendipitous moments of finding just the right learning tool to meet the needs of children at the right time.

Much like Pandora finds that perfect piece of music, the Learning Genome will find the perfect piece of learning material to aid the student in learning.  The key to the Learning Genome’s success is crowd sourcing.  I will be drawing on educators around the world (that’s you!) to help me tag curriculum, books, lessons, videos, apps, websites and other educational content.  This collection of tagged content lives in the centralized ”cloud” and wil allow users around the world to find and access materials that best suit student needs.  By gathering information about the individual student’s learning style preferences, multiple intelligence strengths, social/emotional levels, interests and passion, the Learning Genome can help teachers to create customized learning maps for each individual.  This portion will be free. Every child deserves a unique learning experience.

In addition to the Learning Genome Hub (the aggregate), the site will include a complete Student Information System, planning tools, e-portfolios, e-learning, individual learning plans, assessment and blogging tools.  All of these will work seamlessly together for you go-to for learning and planning.

Changing the world here.

Call to Action

So…how can you help?  I’m glad you asked!

1.  Learn more about the Learning Genome at indiegogo.

2. Please consider investing in this mission (see the awesome perks that includes below).

3.  Blog about the Learning Genome with a link back to the indiegogo campaign (be sure to link to those posts you write in the comments below!)

4. Tweet about this project…a lot.  Let’s completely take over the Internet with tweets about the Learning Genome and taking over education for kids! Please make sure to link back to the indiegogocampaign so that others can learn about it! Use the hashtag #standagain (because after all, we are helping children “stand again” in their learning)

5. Offer your time as a Learning Genome Content tagger or beta tester

6.  Mention us on Facebook and like us on Facebook!

7.  Did I mention spread the word? Seriously, that is SO helpful!  You never know who might see that tweet and drop a couple thousand (or more) to make this project go!

8.  Time is of the essence.  I have 40 days starting NOW to make this happen.  eeek!  I need your help!

So, what are the perks to helping with this project?  

$5  gets your name on the Learning Genome Change Makers page.  You are changing education. That makes you a big deal.  I want everyone to know what a big deal you are!  I know many of you don’t think that your $5 can do anything.  Wrong.  According to my cluster map, I have hundreds of thousands of visits to this blog.  If each of you pitches in…we all win fast!

$10 Remember all those cool Bloom’s Taxonomy posters I made?  This campaign is now the ONLY place you can get them.  These are 8.5″ x 11″ versions of the poster.

$30 Learning Genome beta tester. You get the inside scoop and ability to play before ANYONE else.  I know, pretty cool.

$60 EXCLUSIVE A full size large-format print of my Bloomin’ Peacock mailed to you.  That awesome little Peacock looks even better large.  Did I mention this is the ONLY place you will get a big version of this?

$500 Even more EXCLUSIVE  you get all of my Bloom’s re-imagine posters in the large format.  Perfect for your classroom, library or as a gift to your favorite teachers.

$1000  My Searching for daVinci webinar for your school.  What better way to spend your professional development dollars than learning how to create a daVinci like culture of learning at your school?  Worth it!

$5000 For my corporate friends who want to see their logo in lights as a company that supports education and changing the world.  If you have an education company, The Learning Genome Project will be the place to be seen.

 

We have $85,000 to raise.  It sounds like a big number.  We can do it together.  I figured if I am going to lean on crowdsourcing to transform education, the funding should be crowdsourced too.  How awesome will it be to join together as an education community to say, together we transformed the way learning is done.  We changed things for every child in the world.  Yeah, it’s big.

Hijacked Words December 14, 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greeblie/3338710223/

Sometimes words get hijacked and get new meanings and understandings associated with them.  This has certainly become the case for many educational words and phrases. Standards for example.  In education standards has become a dirty word because it has been hijacked and become synonymous with meaningless tests, scripted curriculum, and the stripping of creativity.  But, if we take a step outside of the system and remember what standards really are…it isn’t such a bad little word after all.  The problem with hijacked words is that the true meaning is often forgotten, and with it a little bit of truth and importance once associated with it.  We are so eager to dismiss the hijacked word as “bad” that, lumped with it, we dismiss the original idea.

In this morning’s #edchat, the topic was: Is the idea of digital native a myth? Do most kids already have the skills & knowledge 2 master tech 4 learning?

The conversation quickly turned to one of labeling kids and the belief that Digital Native is a myth because many adults are more tech savvy than their students.  There was a lot of discussion about kids needing to learn the technology, that they aren’t naturally gifted at using it.

It was at this point that I realized that Digital Native has become a hijacked word.  The idea of Digital Natives started with an article written by Marc Prensky.  You can read the article in its entirety here. In the article, Marc is painting a picture about the differences in the students we teach.  They think differently, view the world differently, and learn differently.  He says:

“It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of
their interaction with it, today‟s students think and process information fundamentally
differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most
educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain
structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in
the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed –
and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is
literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will
get to how they have changed in a minute.

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for
Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is
Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of
computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital
world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many
or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital
Immigrants.

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all
immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain,
to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant
accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather
than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program
itself will teach us to use it. Today‟s older folk were “socialized” differently from their
kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later
in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.”

Here is what Marc isn’t saying: Kids born today come out of the womb knowing how to use all technology and use it well.  Even though Marc doesn’t say this, judging by today’s #edchat this is what many educators believe the term means.

Being a Digital Native has more to do with worldview than anything else.  If you are born in a time where GPS technology is built into every device you are going to think about reading a map differently than someone who grew up without GPS.  If you are born in a time where the printing press is gaining speed and books are ubiquitous, you are going to think about where information comes from differently than someone who grew up with oral tradition only.  Every generation has its technology “natives” and “immigrants”.  When I am around 8 year olds who are talking about Skyping each other after school I am an immigrant.  Not because I don’t know how to use Skype, not because they are better at utilizing it than I am.  I am an immigrant because I didn’t grow up with that technology as part of my world.  When I was a kid the best I could hope for was a cordless phone I could take into my room.  As far as the 8-year-old Skype user is concerned, Skype has always existed as part of their world.  That changes their worldview. That changes the way they think about communicating.  Compared to the 58-year-old I am a native. I have never known a world without color TV, remote controls, video games, or the home computer.  That is different from the world they grew up in.  It affects the way we view the world, the way we collect information, the way that we approach a problem.

I believe what Prensky was getting at was a matter of worldview.  I do not think he intended to suggest that students naturally understood how to use all technology, or that they could naturally use it well.  The point is that the technology blends into the background for them.  My students really don’t “get” how COOL cell phone technology is.  I am still amazed that I can pull out my phone and call anyone in the world no matter where I am.  My students don’t remember the days of the brick with poor reception, impossibly expensive cell bills, and that the first cellular phones weren’t actually all that convenient.  For them this technology blends into the environment.  It is a given.  This doesn’t mean that they will pick up every cell phone and know exactly how to use it. It means that when they approach learning and thinking, they do so with the worldview that we are connected at any time and in any place.

Consider this example: I was born in 1982. Home computers were, at best, novelties.  The first computer I remember playing on was the Commodore 64.  We used it to play a Top Gun video game with “amazing graphics!”  I thought it was REALLY cool that we had to use a joy stick.  We had a computer lab at school with Apple iie’s in it.  We played Number Crunchers and Oregon Trail.  The computer was for entertainment purposes.  It wasn’t until I was in 6th grade that I typed a “published” piece of work on a computer.  Everything was hand written first…in our neatest handwriting.  To this day if I am writing something important, I hand-write it first. I have notebooks full of blog post drafts, grant proposals, reports, etc. all written out long hand.  It isn’t because I don’t know how to use a computer, it isn’t because I’m not tech savvy.  It isn’t even because I really like extra work.  It all comes down to the worldview I grew up with.  You write first, then you publish. (My accent is showing.)  My students think it is ridiculous to write something before typing it.  They often ask why I would do that.  Because I’m not a native.

One last example: I grew up with cameras that used film.  Film was expensive to buy and process.  We had to take time getting a picture just right before taking it because we didn’t want to waste film.  My students have NO concept of this at all.  They take thousands of pictures, post them digitally and never worry about wasting film or money on bad pictures.  Even though I use a digital camera, know how to use the digital camera, know that I can take as many pictures as I want with it- I am still careful about trying to get a picture just right on the first try.  I still think I need to have every picture I take printed.  Different world views. For one of us the digital camera is native…I am the immigrant with an accent.

I think the idea of Digital Natives is important and has roots that need to be remembered.  When we look at students and call them Digital Natives, it isn’t because they know instinctively how to use every piece of technology. We call them Digital Natives because it reminds us that they are approaching learning with a different worldview.  They are approaching learning with a belief that technology is ubiquitous.  When we remember this definition of Digital Natives we will understand that technology and proper use has to be learned.  We will also understand that giving a Digital Native a 10-year-old textbook isn’t going to work. Technology is part of their landscape and we are asking them to learn in a way that doesn’t mesh with that worldview.  That is what Digital Native is really about.

 

Incomplete thoughts October 19, 2010

This video caused one of those hunches I was talking about in my post When Hunches Collide.  I saw this video last Thursday and immediately typed out a blog post but didn’t publish it because it somehow felt incomplete.  I thought I would give myself a day to let my ideas percolate a little more, but each time I came back to it I was left with the same incomplete feeling.  (I may very well need therapy to undo the lie that I learned in school: things that are incomplete are not worth turning in.)  I have watched this video 7 or 8 times now and each time I watch it, I notice  something different.  I think I believe if I keep watching it, this incomplete thought will reveal itself… it doesn’t hurt that each time I watch the video I feel like I am witnessing genius unfold. Those RSA animate guys know how to create!

In the video, Robinson talks about divergent thinking, the ability to come up with multiple solutions or answers to any problem.  He notes that there is a divergent thinking test which measures divergent thinking ability; at a certain level, one can even be considered a divergent thinking genius.  Robinson describes a linear test that was done with kindergarten students that followed them through the age of 15.  In kindergarten 98% of the students tested at the  genius level.  The percentage of students that test at the genius level drops steadily as the students get older.  Aside from getting older, formal education is the one thing these students had in common.  Robinson conjectures that we all have this capacity for genius level divergent thinking.  What happens in education?  We are taught that there is one correct answer and one way to arrive at that answer.  You see this all the time with kids and math.  They come home to complete a homework assignment and have an absolute come apart when they can’t remember the way they were shown how to complete the problem.  A parent steps in to help solve the problem, even arriving at the correct answer (as verified in the back of the book), but the child isn’t satiated.  Cue whiny voice and copious amounts of tears: “That isn’t the way that my teacher showed me how to do it *sniff* and we have to show our work the way we were taught or we don’t get credit.”  Not only are kids taught there is only one answer, they are also taught that there is only one acceptable “right” way to arrive at that answer.  Why has education been reduced to this?  I believe it is because that kind of education fits nicely and neatly into a box;  we can give a scantron bubble test to validate our methods.  Robinson notes that this one-right-answer approach is in the gene pool of education.  We want to  have the best education in the world and we try to answer that call by creating false measures to validate our feelings that we have the best education.  Forgive me for the metaphor, but it is like the dog that returns to its own vomit.  Divergent thinking is killed, creativity is stifled but test scores are high.  We want it all laid out nicely on paper: how many are we graduating, how many are going on to higher education?  But do high test scores really equate to better educated individuals?  Of course not.  High standardized test scores reveal students who can take tests.

Robinson’s mention of genes is what really caught my attention.  I have been thinking a lot about what genes currently make up education as we know it, and what genes make up learning.  In fact I wrote about the beginning of an idea here and asked for your help here.  Pandora (the radio station) works based on a set of “genes” or attributes that make up music.  It is called the Music Genome Project, modeled after the scientific research Human Genome Project.  The Human Genome project sets out to identify the sequence of chemical pairs that makeup DNA and then map them based on their location within the DNA and their function.  I’m not really a scientist (I just play one on my blog), but my understanding is that if we had a mastery of the individual genes, we could begin to isolate them and have a better shot of ending genetic diseases.  My thought is this, if we could map out the genes of education (read: learning) we could isolate the “diseased” genes in the current education gene pool and transform them accordingly.  If we could map out the learning genes, we could tailor learning to meet the needs of every student, Pandora style.  Right now education is ignoring all of the hundreds (thousands?) of genes that make up learning and focusing on two: logical mathematical and reading.  There is nothing wrong with these two genes.  They are important genes.  But we can’t ignore all the other attributes of learning.

And this is where my thought lies incomplete.  Is it possible to take on this kind of project?  Learning is incredibly complex and multifaceted…but then again so is music and DNA.  I don’t think it is an impossible task and yet I’m not sure what to do with it either.  I’m not sure that we can really transform education until we have the ability to truly customize it.  Until we can customize education, it will end up falling into a new set of standards.  They may be an improvement on the standard but they will still be missing something vitally important: the ability to meet the complexity of individuals.  Please understand, I am not recommending that students learn only those subjects they are interested in. I believe students can be interested in every subject if it is approached uniquely to meet their learning needs.  I use history as an example: in school I would rather have teeth pulled than sit through a history class and read through a textbook.  You can imagine my surprise when I got out of school and discovered that I really enjoy history, as it turns out what I don’t enjoy is textbooks. Learning has to be customized, it has to take into account the individual.  I believe mapping the genes of learning could bring us one step closer to realizing a customizable education.  So, I invite you to help me complete this thought.  Comment with your hunches, pass on your ideas and maybe those hunches will begin to collide into big, actionable ideas.

(Great advice from @mikemcsharry that helped me finally push publish “an imperfect idea launched will always beat perfection delayed indefinitely.” Thanks Mike!)

Learning Attributes October 7, 2010

In my Post “When Hunches Collide” I talked about Pandora, the free Internet radio station.  I posed the question, what if learning happened more like Pandora, more customized, individualized?  I started digging deeper into Pandora which is based on the Music Genome project.  The Music Genome Project is an effort to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”.  It uses almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.  Each song is represented by a vector ( a list of attributes) containing approximately 400 “genes”.  Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music.

This had me thinking, would it be possible to capture the essence of learning at the fundamental level?  Is learning too complex?  I want to ask for your input on this, if we were to come up with attributes to learning what would they be?  I have created a Google form to capture your input. The Google form only contains one place to input an answer but if you have more than one idea you can add them all to the text filed.   I’ll collect everyone’s answers and post the results here.  In the comment section of this post, you can give a guesstimate of how many attributes learning has…or at least how many we can come up with
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Be the Green Dot September 10, 2010

Yesterday I was catching up on my Google Reader and ran across this gem from Seth Godin called, How Big is Your Red Zone? In the post he shares three graphs (I have created my own with a similar feel below).  The first graph shows how our joy grows over time as we learn how to do something new.  At first our joy over learning it may not be huge, it is sometimes difficult and frustrating to learn something new.  But, over time as we get better at the task, our joy in interacting with it grows.  There may be some dips of boredom with our newly acquired learning but over all the trend is upward.

The second graph shows the hassle of the same activity.  At first the hassle is large because as I mentioned before, it can be difficult and frustrating to learn something new.  Eventually overtime the hassle is less as our expertise and experience with the learning grows.

The last graph shows the two overlaid.  There is a gap between the initial hassle and the initial joy of the learning.  Seth’s contention is “that the only reason we ever get through that gap is that someone is on the other side (the little green circle) is rooting us on, or telling stories of how great it is on the other side.”

This had me thinking about student learning, professional development learning, and the value of a personal learning network (PLN).

First student learning. As teachers, it is easy to forget the frustration and discouragement that comes from learning something new.  We teach the same material year after year, in nearly the same way.  After the first few years we can start to take for granted the background information that students have and just try to dive into the new learning.  This is a mistake.  It causes the hassle graph to rise quickly and the joy of learning drops substantially.  We need to remember to meet our students where they are at and be that green dot that is rooting them on and encouraging them to keep going so that they enter that place where learning is a joy.  I think one of the major problems in schools today, is that we have made the green dot a grade or diploma.  The school system seems to be under the misguided assumption that if they offer a grade or diploma (as the green dot) that students will hold on to that and work to get through the hassle to the joy.  Unfortunately that green dot just doesn’t do it for most kids.  The promise of a grade on the other side diminishes the joy of learning and makes the journey to the little bit of joy a big hassle.  So, how can we transform our classrooms into places where students know that when they work through the hassle they will reach that ultimate joy?  We can be their green dot, we can encourage their peers to be the green dot.  We can work together and encourage each other in the learning process.  We can hold out our hand and help them along until the hassle drops and the joy of learning remains.  We can offer our students learning opportunities that provide  a lot of joy and discovery so that the hassle doesn’t really seem like so much of a hassle.

Professional development can be an enormous source of frustration for teachers.  This has been especially true in technology training sessions.  Teachers enter the training wary of having to learn one more thing and worrying about how to add it into their already packed curriculum.  They can enter with an attitude of hassle so before a word has been uttered, their hassle graph is already high.  The joy that might be gained from the learning is overshadowed by worries of meeting AYP, passing state tests, and thinking about a student who came to school with cigarette burns down their arm.  Trainers make the mistake in professional development of overselling.  They try too hard to make it all look like joy that the real joy of the learning is lost in a sea of wariness.  Teachers have been sold the “joy” before.  It looked great in the last training but when it was attempted in the classroom it was met with blocked websites, slow Internet connections, and unruly students.  How could professional development look different?  What if it was built into the school day instead of an extra crammed in after school?  What if teachers were really given time to learn the new tool or concept?  What if teachers were given time to work together with colleagues and encourage each other?  What if the roadblocks were removed when they got back to the classroom so they could actually use it?  I think the biggest missing piece in most professional development scenarios is the green dot who urges teachers on in their learning.  Everyone needs someone to rely on for help and support.  Everyone needs someone to remind us of the joy that is just on the other side of the hassle.  Change your professional development model to include those things and PD will suddenly be a true learning experience.

I have mentioned this many, many times before, but it bears repeating: my personal learning network consistently makes my learning a joy.  My PLN (mostly on Twitter) constantly acts like my green dot.  They cheer me on, encourage me, and help me when I don’t understand.  Whether your PLN is digital, face to face, or a mixture, invite them to be your green dot.  Let them excite you about learning and remind you of what a joy learning something new is.  Don’t forget to be the green dot for others, you may already be “in” on the learning, but don’t overlook those who need encouragement to get there.  A PLN is all about giving and receiving!

Can you be the green dot?