Hilary LaMonte

What do students say they want in education?

As the professionals in schools and universities seek to "retool" and update practices, students are giving us very clear signals that we haven't hit the mark yet. Students responding to the national Speak Up survey from the non-profit group Project Tomorrow say that they "step back in time" when they go to school.

For a sense of how students are thinking and communicating about their expectations for formal education, take a look at this video produced by college freshmen.

For a sense of what younger children like to do in their spare time, take a look at iCarly, a hit TV show with a very interactive website.  Check out how children are creating their own videos and growing the show together online.

If schools want to be relevant to students and engage their full energy, there's a lot to be learned from looking at what children are doing outside of the school.

Change in education - tinkering or planning?

There's a developing contrast in the thinking about change and applications of that thinking to education.  There is a long history of change in education that relies on the organization to organize(!) change.  While this approach recognizes that actual change will happen at the individual and small group levels, there is responsibility at the organizational level to ensure that the change is tapped into and coordinated to benefit overall outcomes.  The Society for Organizational Learning offers lots of information and insight to this approach, especially in the work of its founder,  Peter Senge.  Other examples include the principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and the guidelines on systemic change produced by universities, educational think tanks and other institutions.

With the dawn of social and professional networking technologies and the ease of access to them, some thinking about change focuses entirely on the actual change itself, at the more granular or individual level and leaving the coordination and communication of that change to the naturally viral nature of information in our modern world.  John Seely Brown, formerly the director of Xerox PARC and currently the Chief of Confusion at the Deloitte Center for the Edge at the University of Southern California writes about the power of tinkering as an approach to learning, knowledge production, and change.  Dr. Brown poses interesting questions and challenges for large organizations seeking to foster and harness the invention and innovation that can result.

Bootstrapping, tribes, mobs and education

After 20 years of working with schools from all sorts of angles, all of them national in scale and focused on connecting people, I truly believe that the true improvement of education comes from within the classrooms and schools themselves.  I don't believe that reform efforts shaped by legislation or regulation or even externally funded networks of research reform are going to make long-term change.  So the thinking around how change happens and how the Internet helps is really of interest to me.  Tying that to educational change is the focus of my dissertation work.

I first heard about the concepts from Doug Engelbart, a founding presence on the 'Net.

Howard Rheingold presents some relevant ideas in his concept of Smart Mobs.

And Seth Godin comes at it from the angle of marketing and how it is changing in the 'Net-based world through connecting Tribes.

I know that I want to pursue this in education, both studying it and making it happen.  What I need to figure out is what small piece of it I want to write about for my dissertation so that I can get that done and move onto the bigger work.

Professional learning communities

About 10 years ago, education researchers were studying Professional Learning Communities as an approach to improving schools and districts.  In fact, there is even a site devoted to PLCs and their presence in education.

Several years ago Richard DuFour, a superintendent from Illinois who had great success leading PLCs in his district, began writing and speaking about the work he had done.  Through his speaking and publications, he gives other educators ideas and insights into how to develop Professional Learning Communities through which teachers, principals, administrators and others in the district connect with each other and work collaboratively to improve their practice.  It's a simple idea, but one that challenges the norms of schools and districts and the ways in which they are organized. 

Teachers have often had a "planning period" in their day, but rarely one that was designed for them to use in order to work with a team of colleagues on the improvement of their teaching and their students' learning.  For most, it was a roughly 40-minute time in the day to get some planning done individually.

One angle that would be interesting to study in my research would be the presence of some of the characteristics of Professional Learning Communities in the online communities through which teachers connect.

Teacher communities of practice

Communities are changing online.  It used to be that you went to a location online to find your community.  Teachers could go to TappedIn, or their association community like NCTM or NSTA.  The place and the site defined the focus.

Now teachers have many tools at their disposal through which they can connect in ways that are meaningful to them and that they create.  They can use TeacherTube or Facebook or Twitter or any of a large number of sites dedicated to connecting people and giving them the tools to create their community.  It's a major shift.

To Twib or not to Twib

I recently found, through a knowledgeable source, a link to a list of companies that use Twitter: Twibs.  Since I'm still deciding whether this is a personal blog or one focused on business, this is exactly what I have been hunting for.

Twitter apps organize your network

From the New York Times Bits blog, here is a brief look at applications aiming to "organize and filter the hundreds of conversations, from impromptu snowball fights to political scandals, under way at any given moment."

Listed are brief descriptions of TweetDeck, StockTwits, and TweetBeep.

I think I am going to try TweetDeck.

Browser Media does well in association market

Web site developer Browser Media lists their many association clients here. It is an impressive list. And it seems that they are talking up a new version of their own CMS application.

Here is a list from their site of client case studies.

And here is another list of their clients, that shows off a really lovely affect. Mouse over each client to see how it works.

A Browser Media executive recently contributed an article (PDF) on tips for assocations buying technology, for Associations Now, the ASAE magazine. So they seem to be well-entrenched in the association market.

The Washington Post did a piece here on Browser Media's creation of a hot new Web site for the University of Maryland's women's basketball team.

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Getting the kinks worked out. Welcome!