The art of seeing (Part III) Visiting Delphi

part one      part two          afterthought

Bill Gates is one of the most influential people in American education, by virtue of the way US leaders worship money. It is not by virtue of what he knows about education or his ability to imagine a future - and that is the critical issue.

Real computer pioneers. My father
built a Sinclair in 1979.

Bill Gates has gotten incredibly rich, but it is essential to remember that neither he nor his company has ever invented or created anything. There were many people who imagined the Personal Computer, from IBM researchers to Steve Wozniak, but Bill Gates wasn't one of them. Gates did not even have the kind of vision which would have allowed him to see, in QDOS, something he could sell to his mother's friends at IBM, that was Paul Allen. All Gates brought to Microsoft were the accidents of birth - parental wealth and connections - which are the most important things in both American education and the American economy - but make one about as automatically reputable as Paris Hilton.

And Microsoft did not invent the office suite, that was a copy of the Smart Package and Lotus 1-2-3 of the early 1980s. They didn't invent the browser - they copied Netscape. They didn't invent Windows - they copied Apple. Today they are rushing to copy Google and Mozilla. Honestly, they are pretty damn good at copying, and sometimes even improving. But still, neither Gates nor Microsoft has ever invented or created anything new.

The fact is that Bill Gates' legacy to the American economy is the advice that the best thing you can do to get ahead is to start rich and copy the work of your smarter friends.

There are leaders who can see beyond "what is." But none of them sit at the heart of America's Orwellian "Education Reform" movement. Rather, the people determined to use education to maintain America's socio-economic status quo are like Eli Broad, who got rich by playing America's business game well - by buying other people's ideas, and paying people smarter than them less then they deserved, or people like Arne Duncan, who learned early on how to make big money off of taxpayers (you learn to do this when you grow up among "investment bankers" and others who don't pay taxes).

Now, there's nothing wrong with making money these ways, not legally anyway (at least Andrew Carnegie was afraid of hell), but this is probably not the kind of job we really want to prep most American kids for anyway - because for those who will do most of that kind of exploitive money-making, the Ivy League and its feeder academies do just fine.

What we want is a nation of problem-solvers, of inventors, creators, global citizens who can see a future beyond the next quarterly stock dividend.

Leaders looked to the future, not their own childhoods. The ruins of Delphi

And to do that we have to stop looking at the future of our children through the eyes which, say, missed the idea of the computer mouse and the problems of the housing bubble, and start looking to those who can help us 'visit Delphi' and imagine a future.

I'm not a mystic or a prophet, but some things are obvious to me when I look around. For example: the IWB - the "Interactive White Board"-Smartboard-Promethean Board - was history the moment touch screen computers and the Nintendo Wii appeared. You didn't need a crystal ball to understand that these technologies promised both more interaction and better interaction than the big white one-hand-at-a-time device bolted to the Teaching Wall as a reinforcement of the idea that classrooms have fronts. Yet schools continued - even now continue - to spend huge amounts of money to acquire these dinosaurs.

They continue to purchase IWBs not just because their leaders fail to see the future, but because the American education system is led by people who refuse to see the future. These people include Presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, education secretaries like Rod Paige and Arne Duncan (both failed big city school leaders), and the leadership of the American Educational Research Association, which - to create an analogy - would have insisted that manned spaceflight was impossible until it had occurred. No "evidence-based research" you understand.

Augmented Reality Mirror, via Microsoft Kinect

or, if every student's handheld could also present (Samsung Android phone below)

It is a refusal to see the future rooted in the worst habits of rationalism and scientific management. Performance has meaning, but when we insist on measuring performance alone we tie ourselves irretrievably to the past - for the future is not measurable. I cannot prove to the AERA that Kinect apps will change interactivity, or that phones yet to appear will transform learning, but both are obvious if we choose to look up.

Everyone in this picture is at work... just not for the same company (JP's Coffee, Holland, Michigan)

Similarly, it seems almost impossible not to notice the dramatic shifts in the global workplace, in global knowledge creation, in global communication - at least the shifts which have occurred everywhere but the typical American school.

Information no longer has - OK, it never did have - anything to do with the "five paragraph essay" or the book report. Writing no longer involves hands holding pens. Reading takes many 'mechanical' forms - from decoding to listening to watching. Attention no longer means staring at a person in the front of the room. And work no longer always has set hours, set locations, or even set hierarchies. The publisher no longer defines cognitive authority, nor do the letters after one's name.

Where work gets done in MSU's College of Education - if you want quiet and privacy
you plug in your ear buds.

So, it does not require an oracle to look into any coffee shop in the world and realize that we must help students find their own work/study environments, rather than organize that for them. That we must help them discover what creates "privacy" for themselves, rather than enforce group silence. That we must help students learn to construct their own scheduling systems - say effective use of phones, Google Calendar, and text-messaging, as one example - rather than creating a schedule for them.

Quicken Loans new headquarters in Detroit. The future workplace doesn't look like your
high school econ classroom.

While one need not be an oracle, one does have to keep one's eyes open. If, in 2006, you did not notice that everyone on HGTV's House Hunters owed 110% of the cost of their home, you weren't paying attention. If, in 1970, you did not notice that the influence of writers like Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Ferlinghetti were putting pressure on the 500 year old idea of "the page," you weren't paying attention. If you chose to never look at what workplaces such as Digital Equipment looked like in 1980, you weren't paying attention.

Jack Kerouac wanted to write without
changing page sheets

The future belongs to those who see beyond what they saw at last year's vendor fair. The future belongs to those to dream differently. Page and Brinn saw a search engine no longer tied to the 18th century idea of shelving books. The engineers at Xerox PARC saw a way to navigate a computer screen without a keyboard. They saw/dreamed these things because they were not locked into the "I know what I see" paradigm. Henry Ford's true genius lay neither in automotive engineering (he was copying many others), nor in the assembly line (which had long existed), but in two futurist ideas - that the automobile might completely replace the horse and that you must pay your workers enough to not just keep them around - but to make them customers.

If we do not bring this Delphic Vision to our schools, we will continue to prepare students for life in the year their school leader graduated from high school - which is all too often what we do now - or, at best, do what Bill Gates does, copy the best ideas of five years ago. Gates can copy Nintendo's Wii, for example, he can even improve it, but it is up to us to figure out what Kinect can do, because even Microsoft knows that it really cannot do that with the culture Gates created.

When I say I want our students to be creators, not consumers, I mean it. I want to "graduate" students who are capable of creating their own workplaces, their own learning habits, and most importantly, their own solutions to their problems and the problems of our world. But in order to do that we must allow ourselves to see beyond the past (which is what "the present" is endlessly becoming), and we must encourage our students - every day - to do the same. We must look to leaders who have created - not those who have copied others or manipulated wealth - and we must help our students investigate what separates a Sergei Brinn from a Bill Gates. What worldview leads one to imagine that which does not yet exist, and what worldview pushes the other to copy and acquire the existing.

We must create environments which support creation of the new. If our school design remains "the shelf" - rooms lined up according to age and/or pre-determined topic... If our school schedule remains "the shelf" - time lined up by topic and pre-determined function... If our assessment measures what we expect rather than what might be imagined... we are failing to see the future and we are - very literally - blinding our students.

And we need to stop doing that. So open your eyes. Really. Open your eyes, and bring your students to Delphi, where we can imagine a new world.

- Ira Socol

The imagination tech purchasing plan

One night recently Gary Stager sent me a link to a blog post he'd written at Tech&Learning. "Want to join in?" he asked, knowing - I assume - that I sure would.Now Gary and I are hardly joined at any hip on education issues, we can clash as often as we agree, but (a) we're both serious Jets fans, and (b) what Gary was doing here, diving into the heart of the "sell tech to educators industry" and challenging their assumptions, needed and deserved support.

Specifically their assumptions regarding the value of branded Interactive White Board (IWB) systems , which cost schools about $5500 (US) apiece.

After writing my first response I went back to a current night-time ritual: working through the episodes of the 1951-1952 "live" TV science fiction series Tales of Tomorrow on Hulu. And this episode appeared, and episode focused on a retired professor who builds himself a "reading robot."

The robot uses scanner eyes, converts those images of the pages into digital text, and reads on the simple command, "Read to me, Herr Doktor."

And the debate at Tech&Learning merged with the start of this Frankenstein story as I watched.

The Great IWB Battle

There is an imagination deficit in our tech planning in education. A serious imagination deficit. And that deficit costs us to buy foolishly and throw money away. No, I'm not talking about all the schools which bought iPad v.1 - because you needed just a smidgeon of historical knowledge, not imagination, to know that you never buy Apple's initial release of anything.

But maybe in a way I am, because the failure of imagination is based replicating ("scaling up") things we see around us right now (or five years ago) and not imagining what will be possible before our kindergartners get out of primary school. And so like The Simpsons episode where the answer to the question "Where can we show something like this?" (A 16mm film), is, of course, "The School!" We continue to build museums of technology.

In the debate on Gary's blog, Alan November says this, "Professor Mazur spent 3 years developing his questions for his physics class that he uses with the clickers," and Chris Betcher says this, "I wouldn't buy a $1000 projector for a room for the same reason I wouldn't buy a $500 netpad as my main computer." And in both cases they are discussing the need to project five years ahead in thinking. But the problem is, their five years ahead seems to assume that nothing will change.

"beep"

I don't want to buy a (non-auditorium) projector I have to amortize over five years for the same reason I don't want to buy a mobile phone I need five years to pay for - I won't want it in three years. It will be ancient, inefficient, limited technology in three years. I will know that in two years.

So, as I look around at tablets and nano-projectors, at true touchscreens and multitouch, at the rapid 'de-centering' of learning, perhaps the best way to get interactive white boards now is by buying a Wii for each classroom and using it for IWB-like purposes when kids are not playing (note date).

Lowest investment, best multiple purposes. Or, if not that, I'll hook my TabletPC up to any projector and I have a cheap, pass-around-the-room IWB. But either way I won't be bolting a $5500 piece of equipment to a teaching wall... because I don't want to reinforce the teaching wall.

What I want is for kids to interact cooperatively with information in ways which better "fit" them and which offer better acess for kids on this margins. That's where I start when I think about things which might lead me toward purchasing touchscreen technologies of any kind. But we often tend to miss the first question regarding purchasing Information and Communication Technology for schools. "What do we want to do?"

With that question in mind, we can start letting our imaginations mix with research. The first time I held a nano-projector in my hand two years ago, I immediately imagined a classroom where we passed four or five of these around to link to students' mobiles. And I probably decided that IWB purchases would now become rare in my mind. Not because I could go out and buy a ton of those two years ago, but because I knew what was coming.

So where might that lead my tech purchasing? Toward cheaper IWB-like solutions now, and toward the WiFi and phone system and AC/Electrical technologies to support schools full of individual - and probably very different - mobile devices.

Likewise, if I want kids working and researching in the global cloud, I might not be buying top-of-the-line MacBook Pros or very expensive PC Laptops, but cheaper short term solutions of various kinds so that we might (a) judge student use and response, and (b) put some real cash into widening our data pipelines.

But no matter what the "What do we want to do?" question is, we should really leave anything beyond three years a set of hazy considerations.

Question, dream, imagine, consider the education you want to offer. Then look, research, question. Then buy what works now in a way which allows you to respond to the future you know is coming.

- Ira Socol