Dishing up an Ed-Tech Dinner

You know that dinner party game, where you get to invite four people–living or dead– to dinner, enabling you to bask in their collective brilliance?

Here's my latest entry:

danah boyd

Audrey Watters

Laurie Penny

I've arrived at this fantasy after cackling madly through Audrey Watters 100 Epic Ed-Tech Failures (or similar click-bait inspired title, bestowed, I'm sure, with ironic self-awareness). The last time I crow-laughed so consistently and loudly through snarky reporting was when I read Laurie Penny's account of the 2016 DNC Convention. I'm a little terrified of what might happen if Audrey and Laurie start to vibe, but that's part of the excitement. I imagine danah to be more like myself: capable of snark, but not one for whom it is a habitual stance.

The thing that ties them all together (beyond their brilliance, their sex, keen observation, and their ability to write) is their understanding of systems. Laurie's work focuses mostly on political systems, but I'm sure she's paid attention to education practice and policy. danah studies the intersection of technology and society in teen lives, while Audrey writes about the promise and peril of the education technologies that hope to impact schools and so shape those lives.

I imagine that by the time the first course is over we will have established a shared understanding that technologies tend to serve established systems even as they seek to disrupt them. In this, we will all agree.

The cycle of innovation and acquisition that is endemic in EdTech is part of the problem. Watters' mourning over the acquisition of Desmos is sorrowful evidence of this fact. Even in-house development, however, is fraught with systemic barriers. Part of this arises from the aging of some of the initial behemoths: Blackboard, Power School, Blackbaud– all have lost their agility, weighed down by the systems of education that were, jenga-like code bases, and customers who can only take so much change. The other constraint is the demand of the marketplace: EdTech specific start-ups are burdened by the need to gain sufficient customers and so also bend readily to the will of established systems. True innovation happens at the edges: in schools that are able to build solutions that are tightly aligned to their own vision and goals: Summit Learning, One Stone, and Brooklyn Lab are examples of this in action.

Here's the question I would pose to my guests as we get down to the main meal:

How would you innovate in government schooling, and what Learning Management and school operations systems would you design to support that vision?

Equity and the Metaverse

Let me start with a definition of the metaverse, because before we embarked on our project I didn't actually have the definition right. I thought the metaverse meant virtual worlds-- it does, but it means more than that: the term metaverse describes the natural world we live in (aka universe) that has become meshed with information from the digital world (meta in this case means "denoting something of a higher order"). In a metaverse the digital becomes real, and the real becomes digital. The line between the two blurs. We're already there, and for our students the line between the two will just get thinner and thinner.

Let me give an example: Amsterdam is building a smart city. I know this because I met a man who is working to build a system that will surveil public spaces and count the number of people there. This will enable them to collect data on how many people visit public art installations, gather data on pedestrian movement, and, I will assume, eventually automatically detect variations from expected patterns and alert public safety. Because it is the Netherlands, they are building in privacy controls. Amsterdam is clear that this will not be the same surveillance state that China has built to control the Uighurs

Alongside the camera-based surveillance, Amsterdam is planning drone lanes, automated boat lanes, and who knows what else. The digital will be ubiquitous and will be embedded in countless everyday objects. The real city will be mirrored by a virtual city, and they will both define our existence.

So what does this have to do with equity in education?

We are already teaching in the metaverse. The digital mirror of our schools and our students is being built. Both of the Vermont Agency of Education's major initiatives of recent years, MTSS and proficiency-based graduation, rely upon technology to manage a volume of data about student learning that would not be possible otherwise (at least not at current staffing levels). We now collect attendance data, standardized test scores, socio-economic data, IEP information, interventions delivered, progress towards proficiency in a standard and wrap them (and more!) up in dashboards that allow educators to make "data driven decisions." One example is Educlimber (recently purchased by once-breached Illuminate), which is being used by at least 20 schools in Vermont and which I am in the process of demoing.

In the video we watched on equity the presenter described technology enhanced personalized learning as able to accomplish

1. Meeting each student as an individual and account for their unique challenges

2. The decoupling of learning from time limits

3. Providing just-in-time performance data that quickly addresses misconceptions.

This, too, is only possible if a digital twin of a student is created, one that can analyze each click and hesitation, compare that to other students and generate, share and act on reliable data to guide each student's learning path. In this vision, the technology creates equity by adapting instruction to each student according to their needs. The dream is that the metaverse will help us guide each student flawlessly into their zone of proximal development without actually reducing class sizes.

Maybe we'll get there, but there are long-established systemic barriers we'll have to solve. True equity is saying "these are the skills you need to be a high school graduate and we will get you there no matter how long it takes or how much support you need." It does not mean lowering the bar because everyone is supposed to graduate by age 18 and little Tommy's parents have been drunk most of his life so how much can we fairly expect of him? It does not mean computer-aided recovery classes that ask easy multiple choice questions and give you four tries to get it right.

If we learned anything from the pandemic it's that human relationships will always matter. Perhaps one day not too far in the future the AI teacher laying out the personal will be able to convincingly simulate nurturing relationships with students, but I suspect somewhere deep down students will always *know* and that real human attention will always matter. So while I'm hopeful that education in the metaverse will improve equity, a part of me fears that it may, in some way, do the opposite. I worry that sufficient human attention via small class sizes, one-on-one support, and broad and strong educational support systems like libraries, gardens and mental health services will continue to mostly be available to students in well-funded schools. I worry that the students who face significant barriers will be increasingly defined by the digital twin of their data, with instruction tailored to their needs, but fewer and fewer opportunities for the emotional connections that can motivate, inspire and allow us to imagine new opportunities.

Bright spots, blindness, and bonfires

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors Dan & Chip Heath point out that one of the most important ways you can guide successful change is to look for the bright spots: focus attention on what is going right, rather than what is going wrong. So, what are some bright spots I can focus my attention on?

The first example that comes to mind when asked to think of a bright spot is what I think of as the COVID silver-lining: teachers whose personal cost-benefit analyses put learning digital tech somewhere below writing never-to-be-read feedback in red ink on printed Google Docs suddenly had to jump onto the digital platform because digital was all there was.

There's a problem with this example, though: the Heaths point out that the best bright spots can be replicated. And this one-- well, it's hard.

I'll turn to another example they give to show why. Of this example, the Heaths say "We don't want to make the burning platform a metaphor" and, because we all have an urge to do the thing we are told not to do, they pretty much guarantee that I'll remember forever their recounting of the survivor's story of choosing water over fire when the oil platform went up, flooded the land with viscous black, had survivors running odds, and has now left me with a metaphor I'm not supposed to say out loud and because of that I can't get it out of my head. The idea invoked by the metaphor-that shall-not-be-named is that catastrophe forces change. Po Bronson wrote a book back in 2002 about people who found their calling. He relates that many of those who said they found their calling found it because they were forced to make a choice: the path they were on suddenly ended. The Heaths echo this: it's easier to convince people to jump into a change when the platform is on fire. During the pandemic the traditional platforms of teaching came crashing down in a matter of days.

And man, how we learned. Teacher anxiety about using tech was suddenly less than their anxiety about NOT using it. We all progressed more in months than we had in years. It's a dazzling bright spot of learning and change around teacher use of technology, but you can't replicate it without burning down the platform again, which is unthinkable. It will be years before we will know the true learning cost of COVID times.

Because it is important for a bright spot to be replicable, back to the bright spot seeking I go. The next example that comes to mind is from just last week: the arrival of three students who came to print on the library's 3D printer. I didn't know their names. It's probably halfway through their first year, but they haven't been in the library much (if at all). I can see pretty quickly that they're long-standing Vermonters of the Ford v. Chevy, hunting, and Carhartt variety (this identity matters in defining this moment for me as a bright spot).

Ten years ago another member of their tribe, a Senior at the time, backed away from a printer jam saying "I don't do computers." I looked him sideways: "You fix cars don't you?" "Yeah," he replied. "If you can fix a car, you can fix a paper jam. It's just a machine."

He could not be convinced.

For most of my life you had to be rich to have a computer. It's pretty normal to dislike the things that make you feel less than, and computers were too expensive– in money and in learning time– for the majority of America (that I had a computer in college was a luxury: most of my classmates were clickitty clacking in the library computer lab. The was one equalizer however: pretty much everyone lost hours of work because they forgot to hit save). In most of the schools I have worked in technology was seen as something that kids like (insert group here) just didn't do. You can also insert a variety of reasons: it was too nerdy, too masculine, too hard.

Students self-efficacy beliefs around learning digital skills have split along socio-economic lines my entire teaching career. Students could be sure they could dismantle an engine, but would never believe that they could slot RAM in a motherboard. It's a hard thing to convince someone they aren't who they think they are, but some of my most important work over the years has been focused on doing that: un-othering technology for rural white students.

I've also fought hard to define technology as a tool for women. Between the 80s-2000's middle and upper class girls had access to technology at the same rate as their male counterparts, but like the rejection of technology by white rural America, many women ended up "othering" digital technology and seeing it as something that was outside of who they wanted to be. There are a host of non-profits hoping to close this and other important aspects of the digital divide.

In some ways this new bright spot is not easily replicable; it could not have happened without the ubiquity of cell phones, without a million people who started to frame a new possible, without that third grade teacher who taught 3D printing for a week.

In one important way, though, it is: all it requires is that we increase access to digital tools. This week when that girl came in leading her two guy friends and told me she wanted to learn how to 3D print, I was able to say yes and have her printing an original design by the next lunch period. It's a bright spot because it has been happening with increasing frequency during the past year. The students I work with are starting to believe:

technology is for everyone.

This is a bright spot that anyone can replicate: learn a digital technology and then use what you know to increase access for just one person. One person becomes two, becomes one-hundred, becomes one billion.

Ensuring access to key digital tools is an important bright spot to replicate, and one that is basic enough to be easily missed. This week, Intel released a report on "...how and why Gen Z has been ill-equipped to deal with the digital demands of tomorrow’s workforce, and how the tech industry and government must come together to address the education and skills gap to secure the UK’s future digital status." The Reddit collective quickly commented that the same can be said about US users, with Geolchris saying:

"I asked one of the better at computer younger ones what they thought, and she said they were all raised on iPads and iOS devices that just work and require no thinking about how they work besides turning it off and on, if they even get that far with it. Not to mention constant auto saving of work, etc.

Then they get dropped into a workplace with windows PCs (or Macs) that don’t always work right and they have no clue what do do with them when anything goes wrong."

In their recommendations, Intel offers three solutions (alongside a quote about Gen-Z being digital natives!):

Educate Gen Z about emerging technologies from an early age (AI, Cybersecurity, Quantum Computing)
Evolve from STEM to Steam, highlighting different careers in technology through varied role models and provide fuller guidance on pathways into a digital job
Private sector must develop private-public partnerships to provide Gen Z and other young people with access to digital education

The fine print of their recommendations focuses on AI, coding and software skills. Glaringly absent is mention of improving student access to the variety of hardware and software they need to be exposed to in order to develop true technological fluency. They also seem to have left out much thought about the real face-to-face relationships that young people need to help them take risks and redefine their own possibilities.

Sometimes it is hard to see bright spots beyond the bonfire.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Connecting Fullan's Six Secrets to EdTech

Author Michael Fullan states that "technology can be used to accelerate change" in schools. He's right, because all technologies– digital or otherwise– impact humans' experience of time. Some technologies such as clothing, the refrigerator, or photography extend the "expiration date," but the majority of our technologies reduce the amount of time something takes to do. Digital technologies are particularly good at speeding up communication and processes, so it feels a little obvious to say that technology can be used to accelerate change. Because of this, it's worth examining more specifically how educational technology connects to the strategies Fullan shares.

Fullan is well-known for his application of change management strategies to primary and secondary education. In his book The Six Secrets of Change he lays out these six commandments:

Love your employees
Connect peers with purpose
Capacity building prevails
Learning is the work
Transparency rules
Systems learn`

Love Your Employees

Communication

It is impossible to love your employees if you don't listen to them, and they won't feel heard it respected if you don't clearly communicate with them.

One of the deepest impacts of the internet is how it has lowered the barrier to one-to-many communication and many-to-many communication. A leader can accelerate change by leveraging digital tools to both listen to employees and communicate clearly and compellingly with them.

Examples: internet-based surveys, video recordings, email, instant messaging, graphic design software, presentations software

Invest in good tools

Employees feel valued when they work in an environment that provides robust tools to support them. In schools this means that the software they interact with makes their work easier, not harder. It means that the hardware and infrastructure is maintained and can meet the demands of the school. It requires well designed PD that empowers teachers to use technology well.

Connect peers with purpose

Digital tools can make collaboration wonderfully tangible. There is a powerful energy that can come from a group working together on a file for which they all have equal editing rights. I like this best when we are all in the same room at the same time, but I also appreciate how digital collaboration tools allow people to collaborate asynchronously. This lowers a common– and not-insignificant– barrier in schools: the availability of shared collaboration time and the isolation of the classroom.

Personal Learning networks can connect educators within a building, across a nation, or the world. If I could wave a wand, I would hold collaborative space sacred for educators. PD time ought to do this, but often it does not. While online tools offer wonderful supports for collaboration, I have yet to experience a successful school-wide initiative to leverage asynchronous spaces to get important work done.

Examples: G-Suite, Canva, word art, message boards, social media, channeled communication tools, online communities

Learning is the work & capacity building prevails

Educational technology can accelerate the formation of a school-wide community of learners in many ways– supporting equity, providing increased options for personalization, and enhancing the sharing of innovative or best practices– but the successful use of these tools is dependent on the lead learner's willingness to participate as a learner with teachers. School leaders must be willing to facilitate and participate in ongoing conversations about the impact of digital tools on our students and our own practice.

Without opportunities for explicit instruction on how to use digital technology in both the classroom and in professional development a school will never successfully build the capacity to leverage those tools.

Once a teacher has the learning required to leverage an LMS, flip a lesson, or share best practices we can accelerate learning by untethering it from specific times and places.

Transparency Rules & Systems Learn

Whole student and school data.

For many years, a school leader depended upon two sources to monitor for improvement and innovation: word of mouth, and results from standardized tests. Contemporary SIS and LMS systems provide a wealth of data that can be accessed for insight about teaching, learning, and operations.

Surveys

Digital surveys are incredibly fast to deploy, and a well designed survey makes the work of making meaning from the collected data much faster and easier. This makes it possible to gather data both to inform initial plans and to respond to what is working or not working along the way. Of course, just because you can send a survey doesn't mean you always should: survey fatigue is real, and sending too many will make colleagues feel burdened rather than heard. And, in the end, when it comes to managing change, data is valuable for the action it informs.

What kind of leader am I?

I have been:

a designated leader leading from the top down
without authority working to lead from the bottom up
a coach who finds great satisfaction in supporting and empowering others
someone who has learned that a good team compliments each other's strengths and weaknesses
an inveterate finder-outer and information sharer
someone who has learned to try to step back from leading edge into the zone of proximal development
a tech-savvy geek who frequently trains the tech averse

Before I transitioned into K12 education I had a fair bit of experience learning to lead. I was made a manager at twenty-three of a newspaper production crew who had decades on me, and as a general manager for another company in the late 90s my regional manager really did hand me a copy of "Who Moved My Cheese" as we entered into our third merger/acquisition in a year. In these years I largely equated leading with managing, but in the years since, my experience in education has done a lot to teach me the distinction.

As a librarian and technology guru I have quickly learned that while I can manage my library classroom, my colleagues can be completely ungovernable should they so choose (although it is almost always for good reason). Even with my new job roles I'm not in a position of authority- no one needs fear my judgement. In fact, the key to success in any endeavor is not how well I manage others, but how well I manage myself: how well I define goals, consider what is worth the price of change, and communicate it clearly, concisely and on time.

When I started out I was so excited by the latest and greatest technology that I couldn't wait to share it with everyone. I quickly learned the fatal mistake of thinking that everyone thought like I did and would be just as excited. Anyone who works in K12 for a while learns that new initiatives of any kind make most veteran educators recoil. Too many of them have spent years in training for this thing or the other only to have it all come to not much as soon the next "great thing" comes along. Many of the people I work with have really struggled to learn to use technology well and-- even though they have come so far!-- learning new technology is still very anxiety-provoking. As a leader of peers I've learned that while my cutting edge dreams are wonderful, I had better accurately assess the cost-benefit of a change for the most technologically challenged members of the community before suggesting something.

The constant in my journey towards becoming a better leader lies in my drive to empower others. This desire is the reason I enjoy working in education as much as I do: because not only does empowerment underly the day-to-day teaching and sharing that I do with peers, the empowerment of our learners motivates us all.

Managing can allow you to tell people what to do, and they'll do it. Leading, on the other hand, requires that people consent to be led-- and people only consent to be led if they believe in the destination and your ability to get them there. Right now my leadership style is to do my darnedest to be someone worthy of that trust.

A leader I admire

The leader I admire is:

Exuberantly optimistic
Pragmatically realistic
An empathetic visionary
Strong Communicator
Collaboration Queen!

I picked this person because of the deep impact they have had on me as a school librarian. They inspired me, kept me motivated, and helped me become better at teaching and learning. Their style is one of empowering others by gathering us together and helping us make big, collective waves!

For a good portion of my career in education, all the leaders I admired had blogs. Perhaps the most central of these was Joyce Valenza and her blog, Neverending Search. Joyce's blog had a huge impact upon me in my earliest days in education. In it, she shared the latest shiny and useful library and technology tools, and I came to rely upon her for hot leads and inspiration.

Prompted by this post I took a little click down memory lane in the archives at School Library Journal. Joyce was already blogging before SLJ picked her up-- I'm pretty sure I started reading her sometime around 2003 when blogging was still relatively hot and new. With Simon Sinek's exhortation that people follow when you lead them to a place they already identify with resonating in memory, this post of Joyce's leapt out. I can remember reading it back in 2007 and how much this post captured my why at the time:

You know you are a 21st century teacher librarian if you . . .

Make sure your learners and teachers can (physically & intellectually) access developmentally appropriate databases, portals, and websites in multiple media.

Organize the Web for learners. You have the skills to create a blog or website or wiki to pull together resources to meet the information needs of your learning community. That presence reflects your personal voice. It includes your advice as well as your links.

Make learning an engaging and colorful hybrid experience. You intervene in the research process online while respecting young people’s need for independence.

Think outside the box about the concept of “collection.” That collection might include: ebooks, audiobooks, open source software, streaming media, flash sticks, digital video cameras, and much more! You lend this stuff.

Think of your web presence as a knowledge management for your school. This is collection too, and it includes student-produced learning objects, handouts, policies, and collaborative wiki pathfinders to support learning and research in all learning arenas.

Think Web 2.0. You know the potential new technologies offer for interaction–learners as both information consumers and producers.

Are thinking interactive service: materials suggestion forms, book review blogs, surveys, online calendars, etc.

Know your physical space is about way more than books. Your space is a libratory. You welcome media production—podcasting, video editing. You welcome telecommunications events and group gathering for planning and research and social networking.

Include, and collaborate with, the learner. You let them in. You fill your physical and virtual space with student work, student contributions—their video productions, their original music, their art.

Expand your notion of searching. You work with learners to set up RSS feeds and tag clouds for research.

Are concerned that when it matters, your students move beyond information satisficing. They make solid information decisions.

Are concerned about a new digital divide. Those who can find quality information in all media formats effectively, and those who cannot.

Consider new interactive and engaging communication tools for student projects–digital storytelling, wikis, podcasts, streaming video as possibilities beyond the mortal powers of PowerPoint. (And you are rethinking what PowerPoint, what presentations should or could be!)

Consider just-in-time, just-for-me learning as your responsibility and are proud that you own the real estate of one desktop window on your students’ home computers 24/7. (My own website is used as much after school as it is during.)

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