But it wasn’t perfect. Ptolemy himself postulated a series of smaller epicycles–cycles within cycles– to explain orbits that weren’t behaving quite according to his model. Over time, increased understanding of mathematics and the development of accurate telescopes presented additional observable challenges to the Ptolemaic universe. These required additional sets of intricately-nested epicycles to explain how celestial objects ended up where they did. The universe was getting uncomfortably complex, requiring more and more tweaking to fit the theoretical model.

Enter Nicolaus Copernicus, who changed everything by postulating that the terracentric world view itself was the problem. The Sun, not the Earth, was he center of the universe. No more tweaks–things worked as predicted, and essentially work that way to this day, quantum mechanics notwithstanding. The Earth and the other celestial bodies hadn’t changed–it just took a re-imagining of the system in which they interacted.

We have a Ptolemaic school system. It worked for a while. There wasn’t much to know and there weren’t many ways to disseminate what we did know. Social and technological change was gradual. We had (we assumed) a homogeneous national culture. It didn’t take much tweaking to make things work they way they should. But the social context for schools changed rapidly in the 20th century and continues its rapid acceleration toward a black hole of uncertainty, to continue the astronomical metaphor.

That’s why I believe that reforming our current school system won’t work. We need to start over with a re-imagining of the entire context for schools.

The current dialog about school reform is based on the perception that our schools are not performing well, either relative to other industrialized nations or to our own historical standards. This criticism comes from both conservative and liberal factions, and the arguments from both sides are compelling. I am not one to disagree with the need for drastic school reform. We’re not producing a general populace that is either educated in the classical sense of the term or prepared for the 21st century as many current reformers claim.

But I’m afraid I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that school reform is not possible, at least in the sense that we can make any more adjustments to the system that currently exists. Jay P. Greene makes a similar point in his blog post Build New, Don’t Reform Old–”build new institutions and stop trying to fix the old ones.” Our educational system–like Ptolemy’s universe–is just too complex, with too many stakeholders having an interest in its continuation as is, for any tweaks to be effective. Since the inertial jolts of Sputnik and SCANS hit, many epicyclic tweaks have been proposed, including:

Charter schools, cyber schools, technology implementation, increased standardized testing, decreased testing, Common Core standards, local standards, raise teacher pay, merit pay, cut teacher pay and benefits, privatized education, state-sponsored prayer in schools, students segregated by gender, students bused to achieve ethnic or racial balance, increased availability of STEM and AP courses, standardized curricula and lessons, increased teacher autonomy, education vouchers, parental involvement, in loco parentis; alternative certification processes for teachers, greater state or federal control, increased local control, increased emphasis on vocational and industrial arts, standards vs grades…

Virtually every element listed above has been promoted as “the” fix for schools and all have been implemented at one level or another. And yet, nothing has provided the inertial force that will alter the velocity of our massive education system. (At least we’re providing a good demonstration of Netwon’s first law.) As Greene suggests, there are just too many people and institutions invested in our current course for meaningful change to occur. I’d add that most reform efforts come not from educators but from various political factions that are not as concerned with school reform as they are with political advantage and conflicting ideologies, further complicating an already overly-complex system.

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t pockets of effective reform out there. There are; but I suspect that most will wither and die as soon as the movers and shakers that propelled them retire or give up, or the grants that funded them run out. We always revert to the way that schools have always been, and–I have concluded–will always be.

Somehow, we need to build something entirely new, based on a re-imagining of the entire social context for schooling–why we do it, how we should do it, and what we’re willing to pay to get it done. Place that next to the current system and wait a generation or so until the old model withers away in the face of a superior, flexible system that adapts to individual and social needs. We need Copernican reform, not Ptolemaic tweaks.

Is that asking too much?

Two people in my group had particular problems using the mouse until one of them, in frustration, turned the mouse around so that the cable protruded from the bottom rather than the top, as designed. After that, each happily and productively used the mouse upside down.

I initially assumed it was some sort of perceptual problem, but the real cause was much simpler–each of the two folks having problems were pilots. (Alaska is full of them.) Pilots are used to navigating three-dimensional space with a stick. When you push the stick away from you (up, in the mouse metaphor), the aircraft dives. When you pull it towards you (down, to a mouse), the craft rises. They found it non-intuitive to push the mouse away to make something go up. Pushing away should make things go down, as happened in their world of flight.

It dawned on me then that the scrolling metaphor was somewhat backwards, at least logically. To move through a document from the top to the bottom, you had to pull down on the tab in the scroll bar or press the down arrow icon. (In-window scrolling and scroll wheels had not been introduced yet.) Pulling down made the document go up in the window. It was just the opposite of what you would do with a real document; if you wanted it to go up, you’d logically push it that way.

Now, with OSX 7 (Lion), Apple has finally corrected the metaphor. It started, of course, with the iPad. To scroll through a document in a touch environment, you push up to make it go up and down to make it go down. You interact with the document itself and not the window that the document is in. That’s the metaphor that Lion has adopted, and it makes perfect sense to me. Thinking document and not window, you push up to make it go up and down to make it go down.

I’l admit that it took me a while to get used to the new action. Years of habits are difficult to overcome. But the iPad–and now Lion–have forced us the re-imagine how to interact with an information appliance. Point-and-click is over, replaced with gestures that are much more intuitive if we can break our old habits. Up is finally down, and that’s the way it should be.

I watched Mubarak’s and Suleiman’s addresses, along with much of the Egyptian Revolution, in real time on my iPhone via a live feed from Al Jazeera–coverage currently not available to much of the US. As moved as I was by the events I was observing, I was also constantly aware of the role that social media was playing in the revolution–not just in the reporting of the events, but in the actual creation and facilitation of the protests. Given what I have read and observed, I’m not sure that the revolution could have occurred without Facebook and Twitter.

Even in a society in which the major media outlets are controlled by the government, Facebook and Twitter and other social media tools exposed Egyptian citizens to ideas and viewpoints other than those espoused by the Mubarak regime. Perhaps more importantly, these media tools allowed citizens to communicate with each other about these new perspectives and to coalesce around them informally and passionately, beyond the reach of government. The seeds of the Egyptian Revolution were sewn by free access to information. It became a leaderless revolution–not led by an individual or a group but by passionate adherence to the idea that the people could find their own voice and make that voice heard. It is significant that the Egyptian government shut off access to the Internet as a defense against the gathering uprising–a strategy that is happening in other regimes as well–and even more significant that people found ways around the lack of access by using modems and finding access in foreign countries to keep the information flowing. Ultimately, the Mubarak regime could no longer hide from free access to information and the exchange of ideas. The regime fell because it could no longer control the top-down message that was the government’s chief tool for controlling the people.

Political considerations aside, there are profound lessons that we can learn from the role of social media in the emerging change sweeping the mideast. The first, and most important, is that information can no longer be controlled by a news agency or a government. As long as people can freely communicate, it will not be possible to surpress an idea supported by passion and conviction. Information will find a way to be heard as long as the message is shared between people and not filtered by an entity with an interest in controlling the message. Media outlets in the US–from Fox to CNBC–shape messages for their audiences. Al Jazerra, at least in my recent experience with the English broadcasts, is far less guilty of this than are our major networks.

The second lesson is that access to information is no longer in the hands of a select few. Over 73% of the people in the world–that’s more than 5 billion souls–have access to a mobile information device. (http://bit.ly/eneE4J) Had that not been the case, the Egyptian Revolution would never have happened. Tools like Twitter–critical to the uprising in the mideast–work over the simplest cell phones via text message. Smart phones make the process even more accessible. Controlling Internet access is one thing, but controlling cell phone access is something else entirely.

The third lesson is simple–the genie is out of the bottle. As much as governments and news agencies might try, they will not be able to manage the message in the face of a connected populace who can see through their efforts and who can communicate with each other.

Educators at every level need to be aware of the lessons from Egypt. We should examine our attitudes toward social media and to information dissemination in general. There are so many questions to be researched and answered. How will the breaking down of information barriers affect the use of propaganda to control political messages or advertising? What are the implications for media literacy? How can we use social media to involve our students in engaging pursuits? And what are you personally doing with social media? Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem?

I’m not sure why I chose those words, but my students immediately went back to their desks, got very quiet, and stared at me.

I stared back at them for a few seconds as the weight of what I said sunk in. First, I was surprised that I had dredged that term up. I didn’t say, “Sit down and be quiet.” I didn’t say, “Return to your seats and listen to me.” I just asked them for some school time. The fact that my students knew exactly what I meant by it spoke volumes to me about how my students perceived school–and, by contrast, my classroom.

It frightened me. School, to my students, was sitting quietly at their desks waiting to be told what to do. They had to stop activities in which they were happily engaged so that I could have some School Time. Whatever task I was working on was quickly forgotten as we spent the next 30 minutes or so talking about why they reacted as they did. The consensus was clear–in school, you sit at your desk, keep your eyes forward, don’t talk, and wait for instructions.

I asked them if they thought that our classroom was different. This was a tough question for most of them. We were in a school, after all, and there were desks and books and all the other familiar trappings. And yet, they clearly perceived that this experience was different, as evidenced by their quick return to their desks after my remark. Mindy finally offered a suggestion: “This is school, but it’s fun.”

Ouch, again. Wasn’t school fun? Not really, apparently. School was a set of rules that often countermanded what students really wanted to do. But don’t we have rules in this class? Yes, but they make sense. Why do they make sense? Because they let us learn.

AHA! It finally made sense to me. School wasn’t fun, but learning was fun. Students who were happily engaged in learning followed classroom rules because those rules facilitated learning rather than restricting it. When a classroom is about rules, you get School Time. When it’s about learning, you get a group of engaged students.

I did have a set of classroom rules posted on my wall. I did so because we were required to have them. They were:

1. Be nice.
2. Study hard.
3. Use your brain.
4. Don’t ask the Forbidden Questions.

They seemed to work in just about every circumstance.

For the rest of that year, whenever I needed some quiet in the room, I asked for School Time. In some ways, I regret that, as it tended to reinforce the notion that school was about rules. But it worked.

Oh. The forbidden questions were “How long does it have to be” and “Do I have to?” Tough habits to break.

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But standards are not merely goals and objectives. In fact, real implementation of standards in a school system should turn instructional practice on its end…’Traditional instructional practice  fixes the time that a student has to learn and allows the learning outcome to vary. You take Algebra II for nine months. At the end of that time, the result might be that you get an A, an F, or something in between. Standards-based instruction, on the other hand, fixes the learning outcome and allows the time to vary. Every student will show mastery of the performance standards, but some of them will show mastery earlier or later than others will.’

Read that again. It is a fundamental change in instructional practice that should shake public education to its foundations. In a standards-based system, giving a grade in reading, math, or written language would be almost impossible because what we should be measuring is progress toward mastery of a standard, not performance relative to a fixed time line. Our job as educators is not to grade students on what they remember over time but to make sure that they attain the standards set by the school system or the state, no matter how long it takes.

I still stand by my statement, but I’m increasingly aware that the standards movement of the H.W. Bush era backfired on us. The move toward academic standards should have driven a shakeup in the way we educate K-12 students. Instead, it gave us high-stress, high-stakes testing and new restrictions on creative instruction. I think it’s more than coincidental that our schools have become progressively less engaging for students as a result of the standards movement, when just the opposite should have happened.

That’s why the Common Core Standards movement concerns me. Don’t misunderstand me–I support the concept of clearly defined academic standards and I don’t have any specific quibbles with the content of the Common Core standards. However, I think the focus on standards–e.g., curriculum–detracts from the real issue of what’s wrong with our schools: instruction.

We need to face the fact that, in spite of considerable effort over the past 30 years to establish state and federal academic standards, students in many K-12 classrooms are simply disengaged from the process of learning as a result of instructional methodologies that focus on memorization and test-taking in lieu of problem solving and creative pursuits. If it’s not on the test, it’s not covered. Schools have typically been slow to adopt new technologies, and when they are adopted they are often used to extend traditional instructional models instead of creating new ones.

I would argue that what students learn–call it content, curriculum, standards–is ultimately less important than how and why they learn. Passionate involvement in a topic–any topic–will produce a better-educated student and one that is more prepared for current and emerging careers than will a focus on high-stakes test content.

I applaud the notion behind the Common Core Standards. But I fear that national adoption will create a “feel good” sense of accomplishment that will deflect focus from the real reason that our schools are failing our students. Focusing on standards did not work in the 80s-90s and I have a hunch that, in the absence of a fundamental transformation in the way we instruct K-12 students, it won’t work this time either.


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A little background information is in order here. I’m not a phone person. I prefer to communicate by e-mail or messaging. I don’t feel a need to always be in contact. In fact, I like having times during my day when no one can find me. I tried Twitter for a few months and came away thinking “so what?” I have a Facebook page, but I mainly use it to do something called “poking” which I really don’t fully understand.

Well, I’m still not a phone person, but the rest of that paragraph sounds like it’s describing someone else–a curmudgeonly Luddite not open to new ideas. The truth is that I did try Twitter when it first appeared and found it a fairly useless time-suck. I abandoned it before I understood its true potential as a professional development and communication tool. Since that time, I’ve become convinced that it’s the most important professional development tool that we have available to us. Much the same might be said of Facebook as a way to grow and explore professional communities (although poking still eludes me). These tools, along with LinkedIn, Diigo, Google Reader, and a few others have formed the nucleus of my PLN, and it’s difficult to imagine a professional life without them.

I bring this up because I still regularly encounter stiff faculty resistance to exploring social media solutions as professional and instructional tools, and for many of the same reasons I hinted at in 2008. Particular disdain seems to be focused on Twitter. How many times have you heard someone say “I don’t care what my friends had for breakfast” or “I don’t have time for meaningless chatter” in response to a question about Twitter? There is a deeper sense among many academics that Twitter will impact the ability of students to write essays, as if the fact that one engages in phone conversations somehow impacts one’s ability to give a speech.

Then there is the public nature of social media tools that causes so much unease among academics, particularly the notion that students might “friend” them or somehow discover that they have interests outside of the classroom. These are often cited as reasons that “I don’t do Facebook.”

Such resistance can be daunting for those of us involved in professional development or in instructional technology in general. Moving into social networking does involve some major restructuring of one’s thinking, but isn’t that the essence of teaching and learning–the flexible exchange of ideas in order to grow and develop? Why is it that educators are often the most dogmatically resistant to this kind of shift in thinking? More specifically, why is it that some educators offer such resistance, while others adapt and learn and incorporate new models into their practice? Are teacher preparation programs helping or hurting in this regard?

Lots of questions, but change is possible. I did.

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First, a little background. I’m an instructional technology teacher. I used BB extensively for all of my classes. All of my assignments and supplementary materials were posted there. I used extensive embedded media resources and tweaked the HTML to make things look and work just right. But it wasn’t long before BB’s limitations started to show. Students couldn’t submit multiple iterations of a single assignment. (Didn’t the BB authors ever hear of rough drafts?) Discussion boards were uselessly difficult to follow. The tiny editing window was frustrating to use. Assignments–the heart of Blackboard, to me–wouldn’t copy from one semester to another and had to be recreated each time. I couldn’t make ad hoc student groups for projects. Students couldn’t access their work after the semester ended. Social networking tools such as blogs and wikis, while present, were pale imitations of the real thing. The gradebook didn’t interface with our Sungard grade reporting system. And then there was the endless clicking on OK buttons…

I decided to move my content to Google Sites. There I had much more control over the format and functionality of my content. Media files were much easier to manage. My students set up real blogs and used real wikis for their work and we linked them to the class site. Instead of working in a vertically integrated management system, students were working with real tools and learning skills that would help them in their future careers. They were developing portfolios using Google Sites (some purchasing their own domains from Google) and creating online materials for use in their classes. They were in control, not Blackboard. It has been liberating for all of us.

I’ve concluded that Learning Management Systems place a much greater emphasis on management than on learning, and the learning that does occur is not always transferable to the world outside of Blackboard. Learning how to use Blackboard is a dead-end skill for students. How much better is it for them to learn to create portfolios with real world tools, to be able to access their work after the semester ends, and to gain an appreciation of personal learning networks and a potential audience for their thoughts through social networking tools?

My use of Blackboard now consists of a link to the “real” class site and a My Grades button so that students can check the progress of their assignments–as long as they just submit one iteration of it. Next semester, I’m going to drop that function as well.

It’s great to be free of the tyranny of the vertical.


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I thought I was pretty good at what I did. I crafted my lesson plans carefully (indexed to district curriculum, no less!) and I worked hard to put on a good show in front of the class. One lesson built on another, a veritable symphony of pedagogic order and logic. I was stoked. Until I talked to Brandi.

Brandi was a fifth-grader with huge blue eyes and an engaging smile, the sort of person that easily made friends with peers and adults. She always tried to pay attention and she worked hard in class. She was a “special” student–identified as learning disabled, but really, as I came to find out, just a very deliberate learner who needed a lot of repetition and hands on work to grasp concepts that were easy for most of her classmates. After a series of math lessons–which I thought were beautifully crafted, if I do say so myself–I became aware that Brandi just didn’t understand the concepts I was teaching. I was a little irritated. I had spent a lot of time constructing and delivering those lessons, and I was perturbed that she didn’t get it. I think I said something like this to her: “Brandi, what’s wrong with you? I taught this last week.” I may be fuzzy on the words I used, but I’ll never forget her response: “Well, you taught it, but I didn’t learn it.”

Ouch. Catharsis can be painful. Everything I had been taught about teaching suddenly came crashing down around me. By just about any measure, I was considered a “good” teacher, but here was a perfectly willing learner under my care who was not learning what I was teaching. At that moment, it dawned on me that the most important activity in my classroom was not teaching–it was learning. It wasn’t about me, it was about them, and I wasn’t doing right by them.

The rest of that year–and the rest of my life, so far, anyway– was spent in rethinking my approach to teaching and in unlearning much of what I had been taught about effective teaching. Reminiscent of the koan about the tree falling in the forest, it turns out that teaching without learning isn’t teaching at all.

Flash forward thirty or so years. I look around in K-20 education and I’m constantly reminded of Brandi, sitting dutifully in class but not gaining much from my fledgling efforts at teaching. I see districts adopting reading and math programs that dictate that all students be on the same page of the book on the same day and that all teachers say the same things to all of the students, and I think about Brandi. I watch lectures about constructivism at the post-secondary level and I think about Brandi. With great anticipation I observe one to one laptop programs, hoping to see students exploring and collaborating and discovering only to find so many of them simply doing research on the web and writing a report, and I think about Brandi. While there are many efforts at reform based on authentic learning models and implementation of technology tools, there seems to be an even larger effort to turn public schools into factories turning out uniform products.

Convince me otherwise. Please. Let me know what’s happening in your situation that is helping to insure that the Brandis of the world can be successful and learn productively.

And Brandi–if you’re out there, I hope you’re a teacher. Experience counts for so much.


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I already have an iPhone. An iPhone on a 3G network is an immensely powerful tool, capable of doing just about anything I need to do on a day-to-day basis anywhere I want to do it unless that thing includes Flash, which I hope will die soon anyway and free up our processors and bandwidth for useful tasks.

The iPhone is a disruptive technology when applied to the context of K-12 schools. Schools can control what happens on their Wi-Fi networks, but they can’t control what happens on a publicly-accessible 3G network. A YouTube video that I can’t watch over my local SD’s network plays just fine on my iPhone from the same location. Schools can restrict searches, block Twitter, and prevent access to certain sites on their own networks but not on my phone’s 3G network. With 3G, I have the same access to the world in school that I have everywhere else.

The typical school reaction to a technology that it can’t control is to ban it. But students and teachers are increasingly walking into classrooms with 3G devices in their pockets intent on using them for productive purposes. They’re engaged with their technology, and that engagement can be (should be) worked into productive time spent on research, collaboration, and real-world experience. Schools can’t control 3G technologies, and they shouldn’t try. It doesn’t impact their bandwidth, their IT expenses, or their capital outlay. If students access inappropriate materials, it’s their problem and not the school’s. Deal with it, as we always have when students do inappropriate things.

But back to the iPad. Schools can somewhat justify banning cell phones because talking on the phone to a friend is not always a productive use of time and can be very distracting to others. Smart phones are still phones (although I very rarely use mine as one) and so somewhat logically fall under the same impulse to banish them from schools. But iPads are horses of an entirely different color. They aren’t phones at all (yet, anyway)–they’re very mobile, highly connected, and easily accessible computers that will work on 3G networks in some configurations. They’ll make field trips into entirely new experiences. Students already have them. Let them–encourage them–to bring them in and use them. Make sure to play your role as an educator wisely and help students understand what’s appropriate and what’s not, and when it’s OK to tweet, watch a video, or find a simulation game.

Join the revolution. It’s happening everywhere but in schools.

UPDATE: A question by way of Twitter asks who will pay for 3G access. If a student walks into your classroom with an iPhone, 3G access is already paid for. They’re bringing their own bandwidth. I can walk into my local AT&T store and buy a $199 3G-capable netbook. Why wouldn’t I bring that to school and use it the same way I use it everywhere else?


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While search engines such as Google are becoming ever more effective at natural language searching (e.g., “How tall is the Empire State Building?”), it is still the case that forming good search queries usually results in better information. It’s also the case that the actual formation of those search queries involves thinking skills that are applicable to Boolean math and logic.

For younger students, the simple knowledge of using quotes and minus signs (-) to structure searches can be a powerful tool. For example, let’s assume that a fifth grader is looking for information on the Protestant theologian Martin Luther. Entering Martin Luther as a search query will return a lot of useful information, but it will also return information on the much more prevalent Martin Luther King. A simple application of quotes and a minus sign:

“Martin Luther” -King

instructs a search engine to search for the literal phrase “Martin Luther” but not the term “King.”

Although plus signs (+) are no longer necessary with most search engines as they interpret a search item without a + to be a required term, younger students may benefit from using a plus sign in constructing a search query. For example, to find out about Martin Luther (but not Martin Luther King) and about Luther’s role in the Protestant Reformation, a student could use:

“Martin Luther” -King +”Protestant Reformation”

Even with younger students, Boolean logic terms can be used to create a query. It’s instructive, especially with younger students, to create Boolean queries and examine their results. For example,

“New York” AND “hot dogs”

returns very different results than does

“New York” OR “hot dogs”

Using an everyday action–in this case, searching for information–can create a significant learning opportunity for students.


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