How Social Networking Liberates Teachers

This week I presented a second version of the paper on Twitter as Teacher Liberation Technology that I presented last fall at Kent State University. This time, for the 2010 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, I discussed Social Networking as Liberation Technology for Teachers and Students.

Teaching remains one of the most isolating professions I can think of, especially since lighthouse keepers have largely disappeared, and this isolation not only has profound effects on the individuals who teach, but on all of their students as well.

Even in large urban schools most teachers spend the day essentially locked within their own classrooms. Contact with their fellow professionals is limited to short lunch moments, conversations in the parking lot, and poorly designed professional development sessions. There is none of the "just-in-time" consultation which the other "professions" - doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers - have, almost none of the collaboration which routinely define those professions. There are not even "post-mortems" to challenge and advise when things go wrong.

Of course in much of the world the isolation is near total. Rural teachers may be one of two or three, or even the only teacher in a village. They may be hours from other teachers, and completely removed from any possible physical connection to teacher training institutions.

In addition to this lack of collaboration and internal support, these teachers also lack real visions of change, real alternate solutions. Teachers don't see examples of the best schools. They don't see what a real universal design school looks like. They don't see schools-without-walls. They don't see multiage or great mobile learning, unless it is right in their building.

Finally, teachers' "sight" and "reach" are constantly being restrained by national and local hegemonic power systems. Those who fund education, those who make "the rules," are politicians imposing their own vision of social reproduction on teachers. These rules - or the design of teacher education itself - constrict the sense of possibility in education. It might be the time schedule - what you can do with students in a 50 minute period is so different than what you can do in a flexible schedule. It might be how teachers are trained - in the US Teach for America workers have just six weeks of training, often devoid of alternative ideas or ideas for differing students, while in Northern Ireland, a single-year program, "just does not give us enough time [to really transform new teachers regarding inclusion]," a University of Ulster professor told us on Tuesday, and in many education programs Special Educational Needs are, at best, a tiny sidebar and Universal Design is not demonstrated at all. It might be barriers erected to learning - teachers given laptops which block certain content and certain social networking sites, or which prevent teachers from installing and discovering new learning technologies. It might be national laws - which prevent invention and experimentation. It might be locally instilled fear - many of us have seen or heard the "be scared of the internet" presentation given by poorly educated educators, politicians, and law enforcement personnel.

The result of this isolation is teachers who get stuck, who get frustrated, who are left alone to problem-solve without support - and students who too often sit through unimaginative, unchanging pedagogy.

 

A small primary school in Scotland met the scientists at the New York Hall of Science because the teacher was willing to let the students crowdsource a question about gravity and the vacuum of space

Social Networking changes the space in which teachers act
Social Networking allows an altered flow of power

I combine concepts from two philosophers to explain what I think happens when social networking tools such as Twitter and blogs enter the lives of teachers. From Michel Foucault I bring the idea that we best observe human action by watching what they actually do in a conceptual transaction space. That "space" - the "playing field" on which we operate, is shaped  by the limitations we have constructed through our own cultural experiences. And from Antonio Gramsci I bring the slightly advanced Marxist Philosophy view of power - that all humans have power in some way - that there are ways in which people resist and attempt to subvert structures imposed from above (the colonial imposition of hegemony), and it is important to watch those flows of power to understand.

Teachers seem to begin using these tools tentatively. First blog posts are often a basic question, or a happy report on something in their classroom. First tweets are typically a "hello," followed by a period of lurking. Many teachers go no further. Many of those who go no further describe the experience as "boring" or "confusing."

But for those who stick with it, those who are active enough to allow themselves to be drawn into conversations, start to see their transaction spaces change. New ideas flow into them which begin to widen horizons - they meet a classroom team running an inclusive classroom, they meet a latin teacher working without paper, they meet an American special education teacher challenging convention - or an Australian one. they see classrooms unimaginable to them, they meet new professors with different ideas - and the walls which have surrounded their perceptions - and which have appeared to limit their possible actions - begin to fall.

At this point, they begin to reach out and ask for help, they begin to wonder about possibilities, they begin to document their own experiments - which expands the circle. And then, teachers begin to collaborate.

They collaborate on pedagogy, often linking classrooms together - sharing book groups, blogs, skype calls - across their nations and around the globe. And they collaborate on power, asking for assistance in changing policies and structures, and getting it. These power collaborations range from technical advice on blocked internet applications to support for tenure.

And, once this happens, students begin to see the benefits, both indirect - teachers willing and able to attempt change, and direct, actual classroom involvement in the world.

Liberation through Social Media

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

- Ira Socol

Transactional Disability and the Classroom

I've written on this before, but this week I introduced the idea of "Transactional Disability" to my class at Michigan State University as we discussed classroom strategies for ADHD. One major disussion the students had involved the question of whether ADHD was a "socially constructed" disability or a "medical condition." This was driven, in part, by an article we'd read looking at a comparison between Sweden and the US, and the vastly different rates of ADHD diagnosis and the very different ways this "disorder" is accommodated. It seems important, so I wanted to bring it up once more...

The debate between the “social” v. “medical” models of "disability" are endless and ongoing. This is often seen most clearly when international, or intercultural comparative studies are done. In the case of the ADHD study comparing Sweden and the US, the sharp differences in the number of children seen as having “a medical disability” (and thus needing medication for “symptoms”) in the two-nation study demonstrates both sides of the debate. Across cultures we see the “differences” and yet, across cultures, we operate very differently.

One of the things which began troubling the Disability Rights/Disability Studies movement in the mid-1990s was the question of “the body” in the social model of disability. This first emerged as the Queer Studies movement’s thoughts (see Judith Butler) began being heard within Disability Studies, and was amplified by Deaf Community Activists who made their physical/sensory differences the heart of their culture. “Where is the body [in disability theory?” asked both Tom Shakespeare and Michael Oliver.

In this question I think of Michel Foucault, who, according to my favorite Foucault scholar, wanted to investigate not identity, and not causes, but the movements - the acts - we make in the "spaces" between us when we interact. “Don’t look behind the text,” he suggested, look at what people are “doing.”

So, beginning in the mid-1990s Tom Shakespeare joined the social model of disability to the body directly, yet without resorting to the medical model. He wrote about disability occurring at the "intersections" - the "places" where our bodily capabilities meet the world "as it exists."

Last year, a Twitter-pal with a visually impaired child made this very clear to me when she wrote: "Going to get son to walk around lake with me in the dark - he won't need his cane, but I'll need flashlight."

Transactional Disability

Somewhere between "the medical model" - difference described as a medical illness the way North Americans do - "a person with cancer" "a person with a reading disability" - and the "social model" - difference described as only a problem created by societal norms, lies what I have begun calling "the transactional model." Yes, we are all different in various ways, including our set of capabilities. But these differences only become "impairments" when we - the differently capable - find that we cannot negotiate the world, or a specific corner of the world, the way others have set it up.

I may not be disabled when I watch a movie. Nor when I watch television, listen to the radio, listen to a friend or a teacher, listen to music, look at art. In fact, I think my capabilities are at least "average" or better when I meet these tasks. I become disabled when people choose, instead, to present information in alphabetical code. Those former information transfer systems I can navigate with ease. The alphabetical code leaves me tripping over myself. There is nothing "wrong" with me, nor is there anything wrong with the alphabetical code - the problem occurs in the transaction space - where print and I meet.

Similarly, I am fairly short. This is not a problem in most things, but at the grocery store, top shelf items are out of my reach. Thus, my height becomes a disability. At Aldi (no shelving units) this is not a problem. At typical Walmarts (very high top shelves) it is a big problem. Now, how do I deal with this?

One way is for me to climb the shelves to get what I want. I actually have done this many times. It gets you yelled at, as many of the ways kids cope in school gets them “yelled at” or much worse. (One group of university researchers suggested about 10-years-ago that Nicotine and THC were one excellent way to reduce the tensions related to ADHD (here’s one article) which may explain much of the ‘self-medication’ you see in secondary schools.) Another way is to wait and ask for help, but I think this diminishes me as a “whole human,” and over time saps my initiative and any sense of independence. But what if there were step ladders in each aisle, something library stacks often have? That tiny shift in the “transaction space” might eliminate “my height disability.”

The challenges of wheelchair shopping

However, this winter I have been in a wheelchair. This physical reality changes things in important ways. I can’t, for example, get into the MSU police building without help to buy a parking pass (just had to throw that in). But back to the grocery store: So now, Aldi is hard, but Meijer and Walmart become impossible. 90% of items are out of reach, and the cool stuff, “gourmet” cheeses, etc, and many fresh vegetables are completely out of reach, and sometimes out of sight. No step stool will solve this – perhaps an old fashioned “grocery grabber” hung in each aisle might help – but large parts of the store would need to be completely re-conceived to make independent shopping possible for me.

However, where (and when) I grew up, grocery stores were different. The clerks stood or sat behind a counter. You went in, handed them a list or told them what you needed, and they went back to the shelves and got your order. Or you could ring them, and they would get your groceries and deliver them. This was also true of the butcher and the green grocer and the pharmacist. In fact, one of my first jobs was delivering prescriptions, and as part of that I would go into the customer’s kitchen, and if they had arthritis or a broken arm, I would open the childproof cap for them.

In that world, the wheelchair was much less of a disability while shopping. Same physical facts, different transaction space, different result.

So there is no doubt that the mother and son in the Tweet at the top have actual capability differences. Their vision capability difference is not merely a trick of societal construction. Yet there is nothing "wrong" with either. This need not be a "diagnosis." As the mother knows, the description of "disability" changes as the light does - thus it changes as the seasons change - and changes as the location changes. Walking around the lake in the dark she needs Assistive Technology, her flashlight, while he needs none. Moving across a street in the daylight, he may need supports, and she not.

This is important. I really believe it is. Right now we describe both the son above and myself in pathological terms. There is something "wrong" with us. But who decides that? That is society abusing some to raise up the power of others. The person who can't translate a construction document goes through much of their life without problem. But when they end up with a pillar in the middle of their office (I actually saw this almost happen) they are having a "transactional" problem – we need not label them "a person with a construction plan disability." The person who cannot find their way around the NYC subway system is not described as having a “directional disability,” instead we put up maps for everyone to use.

Changing the transaction space in the classroom

Which brings us to the classroom. Consider the child who is "fine" until you ask him to sit in a chair for an hour. Is he disabled? Must he be diagnosed? There's nothing inherently wrong with the chair or the child, just what happens when they meet. Alter the transaction space, or the rules of the transaction space, and the facts of the "disability," the actions of the “disability,” may not exist.

The child who can not decode alphabetic text, Is she disabled? Must she be diagnosed? What if she can understand and work with any information given to her auditorally? There is nothing wrong with alphabetic text, or the child. But the transaction as defined by the "space" - the teacher handing her the book - is failing. Text-To-Speech software and audiobooks might change that space, and that failure may not exist.

I once sat in an IEP for a fourth grader labeled ADHD and EI. “He does really badly on all of our timed math quizzes,” the teacher said, “he gets all nervous and then starts acting out.”

“How does he do if the quiz is untimed?” I asked. “They’re all timed,” she told me, “all the kids like to race.” “Well, not all,” I muttered.

So, a student with, perhaps, a definable brain difference. And a transaction space designed for other types of people. And the result is “disability.” We moved this child to another school with a Montessori type program. I checked in after his first week. The teacher came and met me in the hall. “You said he had IEPs at [x],” she said, “why?”

Change the space, the transactional area is altered, and thus the actions themselves are altered. If we follow Foucault's dictum and, as this new teacher did, and refuse to look "behind the text" - refuse to see anything but how the student is acting/functioning now, the disability has become non-existent. It has not just vanished - it has never existed in this new space.

- Ira Socol

Sarah Palin's Disability Disability

Sarah Palin hates people with disabilities. I knew that before I knew anything else about her. She introduced herself to America by holding up her baby and telling all the world everything that was wrong with him.

That's despicable.

If she really viewed her infant as a human with real potential she would have either left him and his siblings at the hotel (like a responsible parent) or simply introduced him, rather than claiming some kind of hero status because she chose not to have an abortion (a choice, by the way, which she implied was hers to make).

That plus the simple facts that Palin opposes a universal health care system (the only thing which would actually move the "disabled" toward equality), opposes adequate educational funding, opposes hate crime legislation, and opposes federal regulations which might ensure that people are treated equally in America. She also, of course, opposes parental leave laws and increased welfare benefits which might make it possible for parents to care for high needs kids.

Now we have Sarah Palin vs. Family Guy, a cartoon politician debating an actual cartoon. And, well, I'm with the actual cartoon, and here's why:

Just as The Simpsons, for all the criticism leveled at them by America's right-wing, remains the only show on television where the family eats breakfast and dinner together daily and goes to church together every week, Family Guy and South Park are the only two shows on American TV which deal consistently with disability issues in the context of normal life.

Wheelchair-user Joe, on Family Guy is - by far - the most competent male on the show, but that's not the thing... the thing that Family Guy does is face the issues. Yes Joe is a hero cop, but it won't get him into the brewery tour (see above), and yes Chris can go out with a strong, determined girl, but people will still make fun of him for dating a... yeah, you know the word. That's a kind of reality brought into American living rooms which pretty stories on the Nightly News can not offer, and which all of Sarah Palin's whining about "haters" can not touch.

Just as on South Park, where Timmy and Jimmy are truly part of their school's community, of their town's community. They are not "surprisingly successful," because, damn, few of any of us are. Instead they are real kids who sometimes do things well, often can not, who are sometimes picked on, and sometimes befriended.

Let's bring in the Jeff Shannon of the Seattle Times here, commenting on a BBC Ouch! poll which found Timmy to be the favorite disabled character on TV in Britain:

"So why would disabled voters choose an animated, learning-disabled, wheelchair-using fourth grader as "The Greatest Disabled TV Character"? A misfit kid whose vocabulary is almost exclusively limited to garbled repetitions of his own name, yet who has gained a minor cult following as lead vocalist for a heavy-metal garage band called The Lords of the Underworld?

"The simple answer is that Timmy is downright hilarious, but for disabled "South Park" fans, closer examination of the character's popularity (like that of "Stevie" on Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle") leads to a startling revelation: Comedy Central's controversial cartoon series, featuring a foul-mouthed batch of fourth graders in the "quiet mountain town" of South Park, Colo., is the source of the most progressive, provocative and socially relevant disability humor ever presented on American television.

"With his jagged teeth and can-do spirit, Timmy appears, at first glance, to uphold the condescending disability stereotypes that are gradually fading from mainstream entertainment. But like everything else in "South Park," he's actually challenging preconceptions, toppling taboos and weaving his singularity into the fabric of the show. Insensitive, unenlightened viewers may laugh at Timmy, but the character's popularity is largely determined by those who laugh with him.

"That this is happening on "South Park" — a series routinely condemned by conservative watchdogs — comes as no surprise to anyone who understands what the show is all about. Co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (who financed the excellent documentary about disability "How's Your News?," available on DVD) may seem like juvenile provocateurs with a liberal agenda, but "South Park" would not have become a pop-cultural phenomenon if there wasn't a method to its madness. Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity offenders, and when nothing is sacred — not even the seemingly unassailable image of the late Christopher Reeve — the satirical playing field is level, and timely issues become ripe for outrageously comedic scrutiny."

You see Sarah, holding up your baby for political gain is hate speech, bringing the disability community into the mainstream is not. I hope that when Trig grows up, Sarah, he explains that to you.

- Ira Socol

What is Technology?

What is "technology"? What is "assistive technology"?

Before we can talk about accommodations in the classroom, we need to begin to understand humans and their tools, and thus, the definitions of technology.

The issue is that schools are not at all "anti-technology" - quite the opposite. Schools embrace all the ed tech introduced by Horace Mann and Henry Barnard in the mid-19th Century. Desks and individual seats with backs. Rectangular classrooms with windows on one side. Black-Boards (or their successors) hung in the front of the room. A school day in which everyone was expected to attend from "bell to bell." Printed books ("the most significant technological invention of the last millennium" according to The Guardian). The school calendar. The idea of dividing children by age into "grades" (a radical idea imported to the US by Barnard from Prussia). Maps on the wall, the flag in the corner. OK, yes, paper had been introduced earlier, pencils would come a bit later, but all of these were intentional inventions of humans who were designing an educational system. So was the "standardized test" - that 1867 invention of the New York State Board of Regents.

All of these technologies have been "naturalized," of course, so we no longer see them as technologies. And we need to wonder how fair that is to those who might do better, be more comfortable, with newer, or other, technologies.

So I asked my students to join me in a VoiceThread investigation of what "technology" and "assistive technology" means.

I began with this: from the discussion tab in Wiktionary - 

"Technology is a word that is made of two greek words. Techne and Logos.

"Techne is the greek word for Art. Logos is the Greek word for "reasonable language" or "reasoning about". Therefore a direct translation might be "the reasonable language of art" or "reasoning about art" . So this is not confusing we might substitute the word "technique" for art. For example, a technique which is an "art form" even though it is quite technical in nature. The resulting literal definition might then be "reasoning about techniques."

"Technology is therefore "thinking about the best way to do things. - Eric
 
"Etymology of these both words is more complicated than that. Techne (also spelled tekhne) means art as in skill or craft (if we want to see a difference between art and skill). Logos means "language", "reason", "reasoning", or even "world". Also, technology isn't just "thinking", it is also constructing and manipulating the world. wikipedia:Martin Heidegger saw technology as a mode of thinking where everything that is, is seen from the perspective of manipulation. He said this the prevailing mode of thinking today. - Nikke"

The narrowest point in the East River in New York City

On the VoiceThread, which you can listen to right here, each slide begins with me introducing a technological challenge. What skills, what capabilities, what tools do you need to travel between New York neighborhoods? To absorb a story written 90 years ago? To bring a refrigerator home? To get to the 88th floor of the Sears Tower? To write a story in a way that others can read it?

After we began our VoiceThread conversation, I sent my class the following note, title: "What is technology?" 

Let’s begin with the first VoiceThread slide, the trip from Canarsie (on Brooklyn’s Atlantic coast) to the Turtle Bay neighborhood in Manhattan (the UN area). I chose these because they are two places clearly settled long before Henry Hudson first sailed in to the harbor 401 years ago.

Imagine the trip in the present, then imagine it in 1609.

Manhattan in 1609 via The Mannahatta Project

In the top image here you can see the “narrow spot” in the East River, a fast flowing tidal strait that moves with the tide action. In the next picture you see a vision of Manhattan in 1609 (the shadow represents the current landmass – see http://themannahattaproject.org/). The “narrow spot” I just talked about is just out of the scene to the right, but if you look north you can see another opportunity for crossing, where what is now called Roosevelt Island splits the river. Of course getting to that spot from Canarsie might mean covering lots more forest, and perhaps crossing a major stream which we call Newtown Creek and which divides Brooklyn from Queens (you can just make out the entrance into the East River to the right of the picture).

I bring all this up not as a history lesson (though it is a fun history lesson), but to demonstrate how our ideas of technology change and “naturalize.”

In 1609 a Manahatta or a Canarsie making the trip – and make the trip they did (it has oft been rumored that it was the Canarsie who “sold” the Manahatta’s island to the Dutch in 1625) – would have considered moccasins technology, and the clothing that prevented brambles from ripping his/her skin, and surely the dugout canoe which probably beat swimming for it. Plus the trail that crossed Brooklyn from the shores of the Atlantic to the East River (now called Flatbush Avenue).

Today, we might not even see the roads, railroads, and bridges as technology, though just a bit more than a hundred years ago those items pretty much defined technology.

So, like the teacher who says, “All I need is a chalkboard, some books, and a classroom,”(1) we tend to assume that anything we are familiar with – anything “invented before we were born” – is not “technology” but “natural.”

In schools books, desks, chairs, pens, pencils, papers, chalk-boards, the school timetable, eyeglasses, the cars which bring teachers to school, even the stairs which make it much easier to get to the second floor, have all been “naturalized.” Yet all were once “introduced” into education, many controversially.

And my argument is that every technology both enables and disables – it simply depends on the individual.

So, the human “default” method of getting from Canarsie to Turtle Bay would be walking and swimming, protected by your own skin. For climbing 900 feet high it would be, yes, climbing. Carrying a heavy object? Picking it up and carrying it, or collecting enough other humans to join you if it is really heavy. Transmitting stories? You speak, they listen, or vise-versa. Everything else which “assists” is “technology” – from shoes to roads, from stairs to ladders, from straps to wheels, from paints for cave art to paper to radio.

But with each technological “advance” there are some who can take advantage of it and others who cannot. A person without eyesight is not nearly as “disabled” in a place of verbal information transmission as they are in a world of visually transmitted data (think Homer). The learner who cannot “sit still” is not “disabled” until the classroom and the chair are joined together.

Is there a difference between “technology” and “assistive technology”? What is “unassistive technology”? Is it technology which does not help “you,” the individual?

How does our definition of technology impact how we view “disability”? If the only way from Brooklyn to Manhattan was swimming, and for survival reasons you had to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan, would the “disability” label be applied to different people than it is right now?

It took Europeans over 260 years of living in the New York area before they managed to bridge the East River (here the Manhattan Bridge – the bridge closest to that “narrow point” – is under construction in 1909)

And for those of you who were going to drive to the 42nd Street and First Avenue area of Manhattan: if it costs you $65 to park there, does that change your capabilities? What if you could not afford the $4.50 round trip subway fare? In other words, how does socio-economic status impact our ideas of “ability” and “disability”?

If you have the wealth to own and insure a car in New York City (and to have paid to get a drivers license) and the wealth to pay for Manhattan parking, the inability to walk 20 blocks at a time, four times a day, is not “disabling,” but if you cannot afford that, and you had to walk from your home in Canarsie to the bus stop, then climb the stairs from the bus to the subway, then walk from the subway to your job through a very hilly part of Manhattan, then do it again when work was done, a little “shortness of breath” can keep you from your job. But we would rarely call a car “assistive technology.”

I often say this: I am “disabled” if you give me paper and a pencil. I have dysgraphia. I am disabled if you give me an “ink on paper” book to read or you ask me to read your handwriting on the chalkboard or whiteboard, I have dyslexia. I am disabled if you expect me to sit in a chair, in a room, for 40 minutes straight, I have ADHD. But if I am working on my computer, able to move as I need to, with the TV on at home or, say, dozens of people chatting around me in a coffee shop, I am not disabled at all. I am very able.

What about your students?

- Ira Socol 

(1) "All you need to teach English are books, desks, paper, pens, and a chalkboard. You don't need any technology--just use what's there." - a university professor quoted in Steven D. Krause. "Among the Greatest Benefactors of Mankind": What the Success of Chalkboards Tells Us about the Future of Computers in the Classroom."  The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 2, Computers and the Future of the Humanities (Spring, 2000), pp. 6-16.

The future of information (a Super Bowl post)

Most of the Super Bowl ads sucked this year, let's just agree on that. Misogyny and with "men in underwear" jokes that were stale in 1959 are, hopefully, simply extreme wastes of marketing money and opportunity.

My personal favorite was probably the Volkswagen ad, a very slick transgenerational bit of minimally explained comedy...

but no ad said more than Google's...

The Google ad owes something to Michael Wesch and Kansas State University's Digital Ethnography class videos, but it also breaks out to fully explain the full reach of our contemporary information gathering tools, from the academic to the frivolous, from the mispellings ("louve") to the mis-searched (needing to add "France" to Paris is one search), from the maps to the photos to the comments on a location. This, for all those wondering what "students need to know," is what students need to know.

The Google ad was completely platform and device independent, which is key because we now search everything everywhere. What restaurant? Where is that customer? What is that professor interested in? What has this potential employee created? Is the florist open so I can bring flowers? Where do I sleep tonight? Can I make train reservations? What does ethnography mean anyway?

Whatever it is, we need to know how to efficiently, effectively search, and we need to know how to be searched, and how we, and our works, and our lives, will be searched. We will need to know how to participate as well. Who put that picture of the Parisian church up? Who put up the reviews? What is "slug bug"?

Don't tell me these are genetically encoded skills of the "digital generation." That is nonsense. I see enough teens and young twenties to know that most know very little of this, and many, nothing at all. That's because their education has failed them. They've been battered with information on footnotes and citations and APA style and MLA style, and borders and type-sizes in the schools which were supposed to be educating them for their futures.

But the schools were training them in mapping skills for the last century, and they come to universities not knowing that Google Scholar exists, and not knowing what you can find on the discussion pages of Wikipedia, and not knowing how to even refine a Google search. They are strangers in their own land because they've been led by educators still locked in some ancient time.

Let's change that. A year in which the New Orleans Saints become champions is surely the start of a new era, right?

- Ira Socol

Game Changer?

What is changing?

When Steve Jobs came out of his Fortress of Solitude last week to announce the iPad, I heard the phrase "game changer" over and over.

The iPad will save newspapers, end the Kindle experiment, completely alter education, change the design of computers forever, its potential, or the potential of this style of device, will alter the world.

Now, at the start, I'll admit that I don't believe in historic "pivot points." Yes, those are convenient solutions for history quizzes ("America was discovered in: (a) 1342 (b) 1492 (c) 1817 (d) 1776") but they always suggest the heroic breakthrough of the individual rather than an ever changing, ever evolving ("evolve" used in a non-progressive sense - is an elephant really "better" than a Mammoth? a panther better than a Sabre-tooth Tiger?) human race.

Humans change, their environments change, and thus their needs change. As those needs change, humans - the world's greatest tool makers - the world's most consistent tool users - start to look for solutions, and begin to invent answers. Multiple people went after the "voice telegraph" (the "telephone) in the mid-19th Century, because people wanted more than the telegraph. And multiple people "invented" it at the same moment. Multiple people went after the "moving picture" in the late 19th Century because people wanted more than photography, and multiple people "invented" it at the same moment.

On his blog, Shelly Blake-Plock and I have wondered about the impact of the iPad, and Shelly makes the assertion that perhaps this is the moment when those in power in education truly begin to learn the value of digital community. If so, it will be a "moment" - perhaps transformational.

Breakthroughs do occur, even if they are public conception breakthroughs. Looking back through my "new social history" lens, I've found a random few such moments:

The cheap Polaroid camera: Edwin Land had introduced (not invented) the Polaroid instant film camera in 1948. I can remember my father bringing home a massive, bellows style one using black and white film and a "do not ever touch this" leather case in 1962 (obtained used from Lord-knows-where, you would'a need to know my Da), but these were strange niche market items. In 1965 however Polaroid slashed prices on a new plastic-bodied camera and changed the perception of photography.

Prior to the Swinger photography was about memory, now, photography was a concurrent social activity. Digital photography, Flickr, etc enhanced this, but the creation moment happened 45 years ago.

The penny newspaper: In 1830 a newspaper appeared in Boston which was priced at 1/6th the price of any other newspaper in the United States. The Boston Transcript cost a penny and, for the very first time, allowed average people to carry readable news with them. And thus, the "penny newspaper" was born. It represented something else as well, the first time "published information" was provided to a mass audience far below cost because the bulk of the costs were born by advertisers (essentially, the penny cost was covering only the distribution network).

The idea spread wildly, across the US and the world, dramatically "lowering" journalistic standards (mass sales became essential to attract advertisers, thus heavy coverage of sensational crime news) - read Jack Finney's Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Storiesfor an amazing view of this - and destroying the old elite journalism which had carried the nation since colonial times.

From this point on, the model which so built US network radio and television, and which is now so despised by most newspapers, was invented. Users paid for the "delivery device" - not the content. If you bought a radio or TV the content came free. If you needed newsprint you paid for the newsprint and the delivery. The New York Times may rage at the unfairness, but it is their system. It is they who want to change the rules now, not the rules which have changed.

The dial telephone: The telephone had existed for generations before it became "self-service." Surely the phone was transformational, and yet, its function changed forever once you didn't have to ask someone to make a call for you - and perhaps - once you didn't assume people were listening in on your conversations (this is the period between the introduction of the dial phone and the George W. Bush/Tony Blair era).

So the dial telephone created a new form of non-face-to-face communication. A new kind of immediacy and intimacy not possible before. It also created the first distance communication system in which the "technology" began to become "invisible." You didn't know how it worked, you didn't care - you just picked it up and used it.

The Sears, Roebuck, and Company Catalogue: I almost included Amazon here, remembering, as I do, how Amazon was a national laughingstock in the year 2000 - "the world's largest non-profit" - because the idea of Amazon sure seems transformative - except - it wasn't really. The idea had been perfected more than a century before.

Was Sears the first? Of course not. Aaron Montgomery Ward beat him to it by more than a decade, Hammacher-Schlemmer by over almost a half-century, but Sears made shopping from home "the big thing." He transformed our way of "wishing for products." No longer did we just walk past shop windows, now we sat and browsed through a book of representations, and began to depend on descriptions and labels ("Sears-Best" "Lady Kenmore").

The arrival of the Sears Catalogue was that moment when it became "perfectly OK" to stay home and dream about consumer goods, stay home and research products, stay home and shop.

The Lisa Computer: A computer with a non-code interface. Now that's revolutionary. I recall standing in front of an Apple dealer's store window staring at thing thing, with its "desktop" and its ability to print out a real image.

You may want to skip the five minute intro, but you can look back at a time when Apple thought multitasking was really important

The Lisa was absurdly expensive and pretty much "nobody" bought it. But, and in this Shelly Blake-Plock's concept that the iPad will transform leadership thinking becomes relevant, the Lisa demonstrated that a personal computer could be used by people who were not trained technicians and the Lisa demonstrated that computers were something more than highly evolved adding machines. That was "game-changing."

Steve Jobs and his followers proclaim, of course, that the iPad is "magical." That now people will be able to go anywhere and read, write, communicate, watch video, view pictures, listen to music. "Magical" perhaps, but if I look around, if I say, walk through my campus, or my town, or ride the El in Chicago or the Subway in New York or the Luas in Dublin or the Tube in London, I see just about everyone under the age of forty, and many above that line, reading, writing, communicating, watching video, viewing pictures, and listening to music on small digital devices. The transformation, of course, has occurred. It is the packaging that has changed. Think floppy disk to flash drive, not invention of the railroad (which, although still an evolution of transportation systems, did allow - for the first time - for humans to move as rapidly on land as they could on water).

So, is the iPad transformational? My thought is that the transformation has already happened - the game has already changed. But I also know that we won't really know that for a long time. Games change when we least expect them to.

- Ira Socol

Teaching Government

A few summers ago I sat in a class - for both masters level and doctoral students - on teaching international education. Many of the students were Michigan social studies teachers. It was a fascinating course taught by a brilliant professor, but it was also horribly revealing. The teachers really did not know that people in other nations might define "democracy" as something other than "majority rules." Most did not know how Canada selected its government. None knew much about America's imperial history - wars in the Philippines, occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the seizure of Hawaii.

So I asked a question: How many teachers taught in schools where student council elections were held in a way other than "the American voting system"?

The response was, "How else would anyone vote?"

So I pulled out something which looked like this - vote counting in Ireland's Dail (parliamentary) election:

This immediately confused everyone. Once I explained that "1st Pref[erence]" meant the voters "first choice" they were more confused. As you can see, the number one "1st Pref[erence]" vote recipient did get elected, but finished third. The number two "1st Pref[erence]" vote recipient was not elected.

Americans, only knowing, only learning about, "first past the post" elections, are, logically baffled to learn that this isn't the only way. So this district in the north of Dublin elected three people to their parliament from three different parties. Drilling down in the analysis, it also suggests that about 96% of voters got one of their top choices elected. In other words, quite the opposite of America's gerrymandered, 49% angry, elections, this is "democracy" based in the idea of consensus. Then there is the role of smaller parties. In the US a protest vote usually is a vote for the candidate you like least. Ralph Nader voters in 2000 were voting for George W. Bush no matter what they say. But in Ireland you get to vote, say, Green, and select Labour as your second choice. If the Green candidate is eliminated because of too few votes, your second choice vote is counted instead, you haven't voted for Fianna Fail.

Whether this produces better government than the American voting system, or the French voting system, or the German voting system, isn't the point. Nor is the question of whether it produces better politics. Ireland's Green Party has surely proven that this system is no guarantor of integrity in the past year. But it creates a fundamentally different sense of politics, government, and democracy - and that is important.

But if Ireland was too much, I asked if they understood how New York State votes. Of course, they did not know that either.

New York is a "first past the post" electoral system with single-member constituencies like most of America (we would call Ireland a "Single Transferable Vote" system with "multi-member constituencies"), but it is a multi-party system with "Fusion" voting: Candidates can run on multiple parties and their totals are added together. This theoretically allows voters to support a candidate but not a party. This has given great power to "smaller" New York parties throughout history. the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Working Families Party.

Again, better or worse isn't the question, it is a different system. Just as a parliamentary system is fundamentally different than a "presidential" system, especially a Presidential system with a super powerful executive such as in the US, France, Russia, or Venezuela - all of which might be called "plebesceterial" (in the mind of Bush-era folks like Dick Cheney and John Yoo), in which the executive is, essentially, unchallengeable during his/her term.

I think our US students need to know these differences. Not just because they should know that they live in a society which has made certain choices, but because they will have to engage with the world in their lives. And they can not do that if they have no idea of how the rest of the world makes decisions.

So, next time your school chooses student leaders, pick a different system, or allow your students to pick a different system. Vote like the Irish, it will improve the math skills of vote counters. Vote like New Yorkers, your art students can make all those little symbols. Vote like the French, angrily, in multiple rounds. Vote like the Brits, and let people run for office in classrooms they don't "reside" in. Do one thing this year, another thing next year. Keep it changing. Keep them learning.

We might even raise a generation which thinks about how they are governed, rather than which passively accepts their inheritance.

- Ira Socol

History through Fiction

As an undergrad I took a course in the history of Europe in the first half of the 20th Century, that is, 1914 to 1945. (Step one, of course, is understanding that "historically" the 20th Century in Europe begins in 1914 and ends in 1989. I might suggest that the century is much longer in the US, beginning in 1898 and ending in 2001, but that's another story.)

The course was fabulous on many levels. We had great history students in there, and a great professor. We could debate every event from "the big four perspectives" - British, French, Russian, German (my role being - until we got to 1933 - to present the German/Central European view) - and we didn't fall for the standard "causation" theories of simplistic history. But the best thing was the final assignment.

"I want you to do something," the professor said, "which demonstrates a real knowledge of some part of this period. Do whatever you want, and tell me your sources. Those are the only rules."

I wrote a short story. Well, really I wrote an unfinished novella, calling it off and handing it in at about 75 pages - which was deemed sufficient. My story was of a German Storm Trooper (think US Special Forces, not the later Nazi version) coming home from the front in the winter of 1918-1919. I made him a Czech, an Austrian citizen who had chosen to join the German Army. I placed his fiance in Munich, living with a relative during the war. This allowed my protagonist to travel by train from France to Hamburg, and then Hamburg to Munich. It allowed me to describe Germany at that moment of defeat. And in Munich it allowed me to bring him into the bizarre story of the short lived Bavarian Free Republic and its mercurial Marxist/Artist/Philosopher leader Kurt Eisner, which was the historical tale I wanted to tell.

Eisner monument in Munich on the site of his assassination (Wikipedia)

Eisner was fascinating, since his primary pre-occupation seems to have been ensuring that new authors, playwrights, film-makers, and painters were supported - this being about democracy in art, not just government. He's historically important first because it was his government which released the "German War Guilt" telegrams between Berlin and Vienna from 1914, and more importantly, because the right-wing backlash against this leftist state turned Munich and Nuremberg into hotbeds of fascism and antisemitism. You've heard of Adolf Hitler, I presume.

The story may not have been perfect writing, but as a history lesson it was the very best. By creating a protagonist that had elements of myself in him - I too have some Czech ancestry - and it was written in the first person, I allowed myself to walk through this history. With each historic discovery I made in my research, be it the state of the German National Railroads at the end of the war, or a job offer in the Foreign Ministry of this bizarre little government seeking recognition as a separate nation by the victors, I had to push myself back in time and navigate the experience. Each step forced more research: Would I have been pro-Czech independence? Which city, Prague or Munich, would have been more appealing? Would German Army service have been accepted in Prague? Was Eisner really just following Bavaria's artistic history under the Wittelsbach dynasty? Why were Munich Marxists so different than many in Berlin?

This simple assignment turned me into an expert on this little known historic moment.

Others in the class wrote plays, made videos, one did a painting, there was a dance performance, and there were other stories, and even some "academic papers." Yes, it was all good. But let me focus on the historic fiction for the moment, because recently @bryanjack asked me - via Twitter - to help mentor one of his high school students regarding a historical fiction project.

I think that, for at least a large group of students, asking them - or allowing them - to merge their creativity with their emerging writing (or video) and historical research skills is one of the most powerful ways to teach history. As is the sharing of those projects - which bring these individual, or small group - zones of historic expertise together.

Think about this. Kids are already really good at projecting themselves into different worlds. They were great at it when they pretended to be knights in the Victorian era. They were great at recreating the "old west" or World War II in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the arrival of video games, these skills have actually accelerated, as everything from The Sims and Civilization to the "first person shooter" games is based in this projection skill.

They're not only good at it, they enjoy it.

But what we, as "educators," can add is reality. We can help them research and find the realities which will change the play into play plus real knowledge acquisition. Munich was still beautiful Munich in the winter of 1919 I discovered in my dive into this kind of fantasy, but it was often easier to find beer than many kinds of meats or the manufactured products that middle class Europeans were used to (the result of a British blockade that went on long after the fighting stopped). This didn't hurt the story I was telling, of course, it created whole parts of the story. Bringing home good soap was a wonderful romantic gift. Sausage was an extravagance, and the addition of meat meal to an evening out was important.

Your students, turned loose with their stories and their online search tools, will discover similar wonders around every corner. If you want to give them hints, and they are in Middle School or above, you might try a Thomas Mallon novel such as Aurora 7 or a Jack Finney novel like Time and Again, both stunningly researched historical fiction pieces. There are fine Finney short stories which might work for students as well, such as some of those in his collection About Time: 12 Short Stories. "What," you will be asking them, "did this author need to look for in order to tell this story?"

Just a suggestion, of course, but I see so much history made so boring in school, when, it seems to me, history is the greatest collection of stories - and kids love stories. So maybe it's worth a try.

- Ira Socol

Iron Educator America

It began as a Conan-kind of joke. NBC, the self-destroying US television network (when your home studio is Rockefeller Center how can you be so bad?), suddenly has five hours of prime time to fill. Sure, I thought, I'd like to bring back Homicide, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, etc, but, I wondered out load on Twitter, couldn't they give us one of those hours to get Americans thinking about education?

I proposed Iron Educator America. We could take Tuesday night, picking up that giant Biggest Loser audience.

Yes, it's a joke, but it's still a real idea. The chance for Americans to think about really doing education differently, just as cooking shows, from The French Chef to Iron Chef America, have changed Americans' ways of thinking about food.

I proposed that we start with Iron Educators Alec Couros (@courosa) and Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) going at it - demonstrating their exceptional skills. Dr. Couros could show us the open hybrid college course. Mr. Blake-Plock could show us a Latin class run without paper. Will Richardson (@willrich45) was tabbed by our Twitter crowdsource as "Chairman" (nimble, entertaining, and vegetarian). Few challenge "the norms" in education as effectively as Will does. Chad Ratliff (@chadratliff) got the Alton Brown host role. He is one of those exceptional synthesizers, who forces out the complex explanations behind education practice. Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo), educational reporter extraordinaire, would take the floor reporter position.

our nimble chairman, Will Richardson

Imagine: Week after week, we'd see two master educators do things differently, excite students, pull the whole class in. We'd pick "winners" because America always wants there to be a "loser," but just like Iron Chef the point would be how great both were. We could cover a wild range of styles and every grade level. See Lisa Parisi (@lparisi) and Christine Southard co-teach with Universal Design. See Michael Wesch (@mwesch) run his digital ethnography course at Kansas State. Eventually, probably during sweeps, Derrell Bradford (@dyrnwyn) and I will go at it.

Imagine: People could see what their schools might look like, instead of simply relying on their own self-serving memories of school.

Imagine: People might actually debate educational practice at "the water cooler."

Iron Educator America is a joke, of course. But maybe it's a joke whose time has come.

- Ira Socol

Answering questions with questions...

Do we teach our students to answer questions with questions?

Why not?

On Sunday morning @courosa asked on Twitter, "how many countries can you name in 5 minutes? http://is.gd/60P5G"

"What do you mean by country?" I asked in return, "UN, FIFA, other?"

A little later @AltEdAdventures asked, "I named 41. Am I blind, or was England/Great Britan not an accepted country?"

Is Wales a country? Scotland? England? Somaliland? Puerto Rico? Great Britain? Catalonia? Northern Ireland? Palestine?

"FIFA," says Wikipedia, "has 208 member associations, which is 16 more than the United Nations and three more than the International Olympic Committee, though five fewer than the International Association of Athletics Federations."

According to the United Nations - or the US State Department - there is a nation off the northwest coast of Europe called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." Nearby is a nation called "The Republic of Ireland." According to FIFA, the international soccer organizing group, there are at least five nations there: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland, each of whom compete under their own national flag, play their own national anthems. If you ask the Irish government, constitutionally, they will tell you that there are two nations: Great Britain and Ireland, with part of Ireland being occupied by Great Britain and still awaiting the re-unification plebiscite scheduled for 1925. If you ask the Irish government, officially, the answer will leave you baffled as they try to describe something both unacceptable yet fully accepted.

And what of Somaliland? An independent, functioning, self-governing nation since 1991 that no one officially recognizes.

What of Catalonia? A "nation" with its own language, culture, very distinct history, even a "not-recognized-by-FIFA-but-they-can-play" national soccer team?

Of course, then, there's Palestine.

So the child faced with the "name the countries" question or the "fill out the map" worksheet needs to ask, not answer. That new question - "What do we mean when we say "country" or "nation"?" is the really valuable topic, in a way a list of memorized names will never be. And it will introduce students to the vast differences in the ways of human thinking. The child in London understands "country" quite differently than the child in Kansas City, and neither is right. Just as "democracy" is different for the child in Dublin than the child in Boise. Just as "border" means one thing in Texas and something else in Pakistan or Yemen. Even when we start adding 2+2 different cultural rules come into play. If we ignore this, we are training our students in ignorance.

This isn't post-modernism run amok. Rather, it is training our students to understand the complexities of the world. It is essential. Hell, even business schools now understand this.

So next time you ask a question, don't look for an answer, look for the questions which challenge our knowledge of our world. That's real education.

- Ira Socol

Little Steps: History Anywhere, Math Anywhere

Crisis happens quickly. Recovery takes much longer. We often fall in a split second. We climb back up in tiny steps which seem to take forever.

So today, Saturday, three weeks after my "annual" knee destroying fall, I finally got out to the living room, and the couch, on a sunny day. I could see the sky in three directions. I could hear and speak to that wondrous woman in my life as she not only took care of the house but baked me amazing cookies from her grandmother's recipe. I could watch football (the world kind) on the big screen. "Little steps" @aleaness and @karenjan said on Twitter, but world changing for me. That's something, I thought, that we, in education today, often forget. The tiny steps that don't get us "to grade level," or "to proficient," don't get counted very often, but they can be world changing nonetheless. And well deserving of celebration.

Anyway, the last football game ended and I started watching Tony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out. It's an old film based in the story of baseball player Jimmy Piersall, one of American sports all-time wackos.

Fear Strikes Out means a lot to me. As a kid a condensed version of this story of family dysfunction and childhood fears run amok was part of the very first non-picture book I tried to read Sport Sport Sport(Jackie Robinson was also in there), and the story of how fear passes between generations struck home.

Many years later I met Jimmy Piersall in the press box of the West Michigan Whitecaps. He was a cool, if still bizarre, character. But that's not my story here...

So I'm watching the movie and Piersall as a young high schooler is signed by the Boston Red Sox and sent from his home in Waterbury, Connecticut to the farm team in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We see him leave the Waterbury station on the New Haven Railroad. I wondered, "what was that trip like in the early 1950s?" Piersall, I imagined, would have taken the New Haven down to Grand Central Station (why is it always really "Grand Central Terminal"?). Then he would have had to get cross town to Pennsylvania Station. Then, I'm presuming, the Pennsylvania Railroad would have carried him to Scranton. Then I thought, that's a nearly unimaginable trip for most American kids today. How much might they learn about history if they could reconstruct it, if they could envision it - the sights, the grand stations, the dining cars, the sense of regional differences which existed back then (Howard Johnson's in common, but anything else?).

Then I thought of all the real world math that might come in. How long would his trip have taken? What would it have cost? What does that cost translate to today? How long would it take today?

And while you are spinning those questions out, of course you are teaching research skills as well. Could we find old timetables? Can we figure out how to track inflation? Can we find old pictures? Can we use Google Maps to track all this?

In other words, just one moment in one piece of literature gives us an interdisciplinary "in" to so many things, things which may touch so many different kinds of kids, in so many ways. But when we carve out specific "lessons" - if we were, for example, committed to teaching Fear Strikes Out as an autobiography about mental illness - we'd rush right past those moments because they're not "really part of what we're doing," and all those other openings for all those other students might disappear.

And when those openings disappear, so do the chances for all those "little steps." But without those "little steps" so many of us remain stuck, and so many of us give up.

- Ira Socol

When rethinking the school itself...

What happens if you really begin to rethink what your school looks like? No, I'm not talking about rethink from a wildly radical viewpoint - like mine or say, Neil Postman's - but just if a dedicated set of educators stops "tinkering" with little changes and wonders what school might be like...

In December Apple invited me to an 1:1 school computing "event" at Holland Christian High School in Holland, Michigan. I was initially a bit reluctant, Apple - in my "educational demonstration experience" - being one of those "hard sell" kind of firms which tolerates little dissent, and tends to make fun of you if you suggest alternatives to their "cool," but I went anyway. Doughnuts and coffee were promised, it wasn't far, and I wanted to meet Twitterpal @mrlosik who would be attending. Plus, Holland Christian interested me. In my work with students on Assistive Technology evals, few schools had been anywhere near as willing to try new things, to give "disabled" students new opportunities, or to be less "rule bound."

Three years ago when I recommended Google Calendar with mobile phone alerts to keep ADHD students on task, Holland Christian was the only area high school to go with the plan - the others - the public high schools - just said, "we don't allow phones."

Anyway, I went. @endaguinan warned me from his socialist vacation home in north London that Apple reps would probably use the word "funnest" and I promised that if that happened, I'd leave and head for the pub to work. But I went, dodging a dangerously icy morning on the roads and on the school's outdoor paths. And when I walked in, I immediately began to be happy to be there. The school had physically been rebuilt in the past year, and now I entered a wide carpeted "Main Street" area filled with comfortable chairs, and beginning with a coffee shop at the near end and a glass walled library adjoining that, and ending with an open cafeteria at the far end, with a high tech auditorium in the center. Huge flat panel displays showed students at work throughout. Students moved through talking and chatting, but the noise control of the architecture turned it into a pleasant rumble. There were no big rules posted. "Adults" were there but not obviously "supervising."

Holland Christian decided a few years ago to become a 1:1 school. That alone is a huge step, but they realized that changing student tools was just one part of rethinking. And while they were rethinking, they realized that they needed to rebuild and reorganize - that new tools would only be meaningful if the educational environment altered in ways that let the tools really change things. So, after a brief and meaningless Apple introduction our day began as we listened to Glenn Vos, the school superintendent. Glenn didn't talk about Apple, or even 1:1 so much. He talked about rebuilding classrooms so there was no "front" anymore. He talked about wide hallways where students could gather. He talked about attendance policies which allowed students to sign into classes from elsewhere in the building if that made them more comfortable. He talked about multiple projection screens in every classroom to break "single focus learning." He talked about dropping text books for authentic materials and the acceptance of multiple - and student chosen - ways of demonstrating knowledge. He even talked about having big windows in classrooms both to the outside and the school corridors - "We're not hiding from the world or hiding the world from our students" he told us.

And then we listened to teachers and students, we wandered the building, and we saw. In newly built additions classroom doors were centered on one wall, projectors, aimed from the middle of the ceiling, pointed to two corners. Window walls opened outside, big windows allowed views to/from the halls. In most rooms the two projectors were in use, showing different things. In most rooms, students gathered in clusters, often passing tablet boards around.

Students described open-ended projects they worked on. Teachers described learning to trust student learning. Voss himself told me of needing to change staff thinking. "I wanted the library completely open," he said, "the librarian freaked out, so we put these pure glass walls up. She said, "they'll steal the books." I said, "Students will steal books! If they do that I'll buy you new ones." Then he said, "The books are decoration now, the kids all download digital versions of what they need."

All in all what I saw was a 1:1 initiative that had been shaped by a commitment to rethinking school, and centering the form of school on what students need now - collaboration, access to and effective use of global information, trust in students, belief in leveraging the world of today rather than avoiding it, and universal design.

"Kids don't need a lot of special services," one staffer told me when I asked about special needs. "If they need stuff added to their computers, they find it and add it or we help them. If they have to do things differently, well, everybody does stuff differently. It doesn't matter."

The Apple stuff in the building was fine. The computers were cool. But there was nothing a school couldn't do with much cheaper Windows or even Linux laptops. They used free Open Office and many free webware programs. "There are ads there," a visitor commented about a class blog. "Yes," the teacher said, "we realize that our kids do see advertising in their lives, it's no big deal." This was no cost-be-damned private school experience. It was reasonable, it was logical, and it was technology chosen for education, not technology chosen for technology.

Maybe most importantly, they had tested and considered, and are continuing to do that. "Why no IWB's?" they were asked. "We tested them in a few classrooms," we were told. "They were expensive, they didn't seem to get used very interactively. We saw better stuff with two projectors and the wireless tablet controls." "What if mobile phones become dominant," I asked, "and laptops get outdated?" "The equipment really isn't important," was the answer, "we've learned to embrace the student control and interaction, and we'll keep doing that."

The day ended with a bizarre Apple rep presentation in which they suggested military school-like quizzing of students on the "ten reasons we have gone one to one." (No, I'm not kidding - Apple corporate culture has flipped since 1984) "We stop them in the halls in this one school and they can recite them all!" But that was just a strange addendum.

What I had seen that day in December was a school where rethinking was embraced, and it was wonderful to see.

- Ira Socol

Solving the Last Problem: Schools and the TSA

Soon, if you are flying in America, you will be walking through the security arch naked while your underwear is scanned alongside your shoes.

This may have some social benefits. Americans will be forced to be less uptight about "sexual imagery" in advertising, in movies, on TV, if we get to see it all simply by purchasing a round trip ticket to Indianapolis. We might also see more dating resulting from casual travel encounters. And certain politicians might choose to fully fund Amtrak as an airline alternative after a lifetime of opposition.

But surely, it will not make anyone any safer.

Nor will shutting off airliner seatback GPS maps, taking blankets away from sleeping babies, or limiting restroom use.

Just as the x-raying of a couple of billion shoes since the "shoe bomber" got caught has not made anyone safer.

But that is not simply to say that the Obama Administration often seems no smarter than the Bush II Regime. It is also to note that the bizarre decision-making which often wrecks our schools is something which runs deep in our society.

"Call them Jihad Jockeys. These are the explosives-packed underpants worn by Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab when he tried to bring down a flight over Detroit - and managed only to set his crotch on fire. The frighty whities came with a special pouch sewn by al Qaeda's finest seamstresses. In it was a condom packed with 80 grams of PETN, a compound that's a key ingredient in the plastic explosive Semtex. The suicide bomber tried to set it off by using a hypodermic needle to inject it with a powerful acid, while trying to hide his actions by putting a blanket on his lap. The photos of the undies, obtained by ABC News, show they were only singed in Abdulmutallab's failed efforts to send the Airbus 380 careering to the ground. It was not immediately clear what the underpants were made of." - New York Post

We operate reactively in our "planning" for almost all things. At our airports we are working really hard to stop the 9/11 Hijackers, Richard Reid, and now Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab. We are so caught up in preventing those past actions that we are completely incapable of preventing some future attack.

We see this because nine years after 9/11 we haven't bothered to link our intelligence systems together in ways which might have blocked Adbulmutallab's US Visa rights, or created a quick check of cash-paying airline passengers. Of course we haven't done this, we've been searching the shoes of grandmas and babies - millions of grandmas and babies - and that is expensive, time consuming work. Work which blocks the ability to do other work. Real work.

MSU Professor Yong Zhao on solving last generation's problems

We do the same things in schools, of course. As Yong Zhao points out, our entire school curriculum push right now is designed to help our students "catch up" with the Japanese students of 1970 who were producing excellent Datsuns while we struggled to produce Vegas. We put endless energy into preventing students from "cheating" on tests so worthless that the ability to cheat on them is actually more educationally relevant than the test answers are themselves. We adopt "zero tolerance" policies to prevent the last crisis at some other school. We use research studies completed five years ago, in an entirely different technological world, to plan for how our schools will work five years from now.

In a few hours we will be in the second decade of the 21st Century, this seems to be an excellent moment to consider that no one successfully plans for a future by being bound entirely by past experience. Whether we are making air travel safe or schools relevant, we will only do things of value if we place the future at the center of our thinking.

Because once we've pushed "the terrorists" beyond the underwear bomb, we need creative thinking to meet the next challenge. The answers will simply not be, A, B, C, D, or even, E.

Happy New Year - Ira Socol