Thursday, February 22, 2007

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

TRUE DIGITAL Assessment BEGINS with the END (Intention) in MIND!

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Assessing 21st century skills

If we’re going to teach Information and Communication Technology (ICT) literacy skills in schools, we need ways of determining whether or not those skills have been learned by students. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills notes that answering the question ‘How do we measure 21st century learning? will be critical as we try to prepare students who can be productive citizens in the new technology-suffused, globally-interconnected economy.

Over in the United Kingdom, the British government’s Key Stage 3 ICT Literacy Assessment for 12- and 13-year-old aims to assess higher-order thinking skills in conjunction with ICT use. For example, as part of a task to draft and publish a journalistic article, students must use search engines to collect and analyze employment data, e-mail sources for permission to publish their information, and present data in graphic and written formats using word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all within a simulated computing environment. Student actions are tracked by the computer and assessed for both technical and learning skills such as finding things out, developing ideas, and exchanging and sharing information. If you’re interested, you can download a demonstration file and see for yourself.

Other interesting projects in the U.K. include Northern Ireland’s Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment A-Level Examination in the Moving Image (students must create and assess digital film clips), the Ultralab International Certificate in Digital Creativity (students must defend their digitally-produced film, artwork, and music to a panel of peers and professionals), and the eViva e-portfolio initiative (online space where students can receive feedback on their research and communication, data analysis, and presentation skills). If anyone in the U.K. is reading this post and has experience with any of these assessments, I’d love to hear your perspectives in the comments section.

Over here in the United States, ETS also is attempting to create new assessments of 21st century learning skills. I had a chance last fall to get a personal demonstration of the ETS ICT Literacy Assessment. Like the Key Stage 3, ETS’ assessment is a scenario-based test. This is a completely new paradigm for ETS, which the ETS representative said is challenging but also exciting for its psychometricians to try and wrap their heads around. I encourage you to visit the demo site and see how the test works. It may not be ideal, but I think it’s a lot further from your typical standardized test than one might expect. It’s an interesting attempt to blend both the technology and information literacy skills needed by future generations and at least offers some food for thought. Also check out the News and Research links to find out more about the results from ETS’ pilot tests.

We will see the birth of many new 21st century assessments in the years ahead. Like these early attempts, most of these assessments will be performance-based and thus will avoid some of the objections we hear about current standardized tests. Most, if not all, also will utilize the multimedia, simulation, and tracking power of digital technologies to create more authentic assessments of real-life tasks. It should be an interesting journey.

Credits

Much of the information in this post, including some very close paraphrasing, comes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills report, Assessment of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape. If you’re interested in 21st century learning skills, this report should be an important addition to your reading list.

Other resources

DIGITAL Assessment!


Digital-Age Assessment

By Harry Grover Tuttle
February 15, 2007
URL: http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604246

e-portfolios are the wave of the future.

Effective 21st century assessment reaches beyond traditional testing to look at the broader accomplishments of learners. Assembling an e-portfolio, or electronic portfolio, is an excellent method for assessing students' progress toward school, state, or national academic standards, as well as 21st century skills. An electronic portfolio is a purposefully limited collection of student selected work over time that documents progress toward meeting the standards. Work may be collected over a semester, a year, or even several years, passing from one grade level and teacher to the next. E-portfolios reflect more in-depth, more comprehensive, and better thought-out evidence of student learning than on-demand tests. For instance, a student's three-hour state benchmark essay offers the feedback of a 5/6 score, while an e-portfolio allows students to document the many aspects of their essay writing improvement over the course of a year.


Student reflections in an e-portfolio should detail what a student learned and what they still need to learn in a given subject.

Getting Started

Educators can begin by showing the students sample e-portfolios so they understand the overall format and the richness of artifacts—digitally produced homework, classwork, and projects—that can be put into it. A common e-portfolio format includes a title page; a standards' grid; a space for each individual standard�with accompanying artifacts and information on how each artifact addresses the standard; an area for the student's overall reflection on the standard; and a teacher formative feedback section for each standard. Within the e-portfolio, the evidence of student learning may be in diverse formats such as Web pages, e-movies, visuals, audio recordings, and text. Elementary students might explain the biology standard through e-movies of plant experiments and explain their cultural art to another class via a recorded videoconference. Middle school students might demonstrate their understanding of community by posting interviews to a Web site, or for P.E., display their understanding of life-long fitness through a spreadsheet of their wellness activities. High school students might document their comprehension of negative numbers through digital pictures or record a radio show where they role-play the parts of authors discussing common book themes for a humanities class.

Storing Artifacts

Students need to be able to store all their digital artifacts in one location such as on the network, on a flash drive, or on their class laptop. The ideal scenario is to store them in multiple locations and archived on a CD or DVD. Some teachers have students store their artifacts within a digital folder labeled for the standard such as 1Understand. Others have students save each artifact with the number for the standard such as 3Comparetwopoems.doc. Students spend more time in thinking about the artifacts and less time in trying to figure out what the file contains if the artifact file name is very descriptive.

The Process

Another advantage to e-portfolios is that they encourage self-guided learning. Students take the lead in selecting appropriate artifacts for a given standard and explaining how these exemplify the standard's requirements. Next, they write a reflection, learning that it is not the rewording of the standard nor a description of the learning experience, but rather a statement of what they did not know beforehand, what they learned during the creation process, and what they have yet to learn.

Tools

Educators can select from many possible tools to create e-portfolios. Some use commercial software specifically designed for e-portfolios such as LiveText, Grady Profile, Scholastic Electronic Portfolio, and Sunburst Learner Profile; others use noncommercial software such as Open Source Portfolio. Another avenue is to create e-portfolios from generic software such as word processors, an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, Web pages, multimedia tools, or blogging. Students feel most comfortable with these generic e-portfolio software programs when the instructor provides a high degree of structure through a template.

Assembling the Portfolio

Using the template as a guide, students choose which of their artifacts will go in the final e-portfolio. Because they already know how to word process, they will find it easy to add all the germane parts of their projects into one long document. For example, science students open up a word processed lab report which they've saved, copy the part that illustrates a particular standard, and then paste that portion of the report into the appropriate location under the Standards section of the template. In addition, they may put in any other already created digital artifacts such as images, movies, or sound. The only new work they have to do for the e-portfolio is to write their reflections for each standard.

Blog e-portfolios

Many word processed e-portfolios are predominantly text-based with a few images, and these can be saved as a PDFs to maintain all of the e-portfolio's formatting, such as alignment and font size. In a blog e-portfolio, students create an individual blog entry and give it a name, such as Standard 2. Students enter the e-portfolio parts in reverse order so that the title page is the most recent entry and, therefore, at the top of the blog listing. The reviewer can click on the listing of previous blog entries to see each component. Artifacts can be in the form of text, image, video, or other digital content. Teachers provide a template that each student can copy into the blog since the teacher cannot format each student's blog.

PowerPoint E-portfolios

For students already comfortable creating multimedia presentations, assembling a PowerPoint e-portfolio is not difficult. Each slide may reflect one component of a standard and therefore a single standard may comprise five or more slides. Students can link pages together to help reviewers navigate. However, PowerPoint is not a good vehicle for long text passages such as an essay. When students use Web pages, they create a page for each standard or a page for each part of the standard. They can link from standard to the supporting artifacts so that the reviewer can easily navigate the e-portfolio.


An e-portfolio should include areas where educators can rate student progress and provide helpful feedback.

The Downside

A disadvantage of these generic software e-portfolios, however, is that there is no management aspect—a teacher cannot compare how well all students have done on a certain standard without manually checking each e-portfolio. Therefore, program evaluation becomes very time-consuming. Also, these student e-portfolios are not cumulative from year to year, so teachers cannot see a growth on the standards over several years in a single e-portfolio. In addition, students who do not understand the mechanics of resizing photographs and other images for their e-portfolios can create files that are too memory intensive for transfer. Furthermore, generic software, unlike many other e-portfolio packages, does not contain an archival space for the students' artifacts.

21st Century Skills

E-portfolios support 21st century skills in a variety of ways. Self-assessment becomes a regular part of learning as students frequently select or re-evaluate which of their work is the best evidence of their skills and strive to create even better evidence in their future assignments. Formative assessment also plays a key role through regular teacher feedback. He or she might comment that a student did a great in-depth explanation on a part of the standard but still needs to address the whole standard in a more comprehensive fashion. Or a teacher may note that the student's critical contrast of two literary works would have been more analytical if the student had contrasted the theme for both novels in the same paragraph.

As we continue to move more deeply into the digital age and increasingly ask students to create and innovate, the e-portfolio is likely to all but replace high stakes and other traditional testing as a method of authentic evaluation.

Harry Grover Tuttle is an educator-in-residence at Syracuse University.


Ten Tips

Creating an Electronic Portfolio

  • State and explain the specific standards and the
    subparts of each standard that will be evaluated in the e-portfolio.
  • Tell how the e-portfolio will be assessed and by whom. Share the assessment rubric with students and let them know whether the teacher, a team, or a group of experts will assess the e-portfolio.
  • Model several e-portfolios for the students so they understand the e-portfolio's purpose and general format.
  • Provide a detailed e-portfolio template for the students so they understand what is required for each part of the e-portfolio.
  • Label each class assignment, homework assignment, and project with the appropriate standard; therefore, the students can quickly identify all of the possible artifacts for a particular standard.
  • Provide network and other storage for the students'
    digital artifacts to facilitate frequent archiving.
  • Model how to select an artifact for the e-portfolio based on how well the artifact reflects the standard.
  • Model a reflection on a standard so that students show their growth in the standard.
  • Include regularly scheduled e-portfolio days in which the students archive artifacts, decide which artifacts best support the standards, assemble their e-portfolios, write their reflections, and, possibly, present it. Some teachers schedule e-portfolio days every 5 weeks, and others do it every 10 weeks.
  • Have an e-portfolio review and provide each student with an assessment of the e-portfolio.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

DIGITAL Relevance: AND Other Unintended Consequences!


























Knowledge, understanding, learning, creativity, imagination and innovation at the speed of light (AIM Program) finds "traditional education" providers unprepared, bordering on irrelevance.


HORIZON Report 2007
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf


Gordon Freedman

Waiting for the "What's Next" in Education
By Gordon Freedman

Do you ever get the feeling that the "what's next" in education is not actually going to materialize? Until recently, I thought that the various education camps -- vouchers, charters, constructivist, data-driven, AYP, research-based, technology-enabled, e-learning -- would compete indefinitely and cloud the education waters forever. However, two events have changed my mind; both, ironically, coming out of the "Motor State," Michigan, in the last year -- not a particularly good year for an economy largely based on fossil fuels.

Almost 10 years ago, when state coffers were still filled with dot-com investment dollars, a number of states, Michigan among them, started state-funded virtual schools so progressive governors could navigate online around the entrenched state education bureaucracies. In short order, a menu of advanced placement (AP) and honors courses were available to the hinterlands and the inner cities online. They were followed by remedial courses and teacher development -- all designed, developed, and delivered online by experts.

California, challenged by an access lawsuit, Florida, interested in home learners and choice, and Michigan, in the throes of finding alternate methods of retraining autoworkers, each joined the growing virtual school ranks. In 2002, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became the law of the land mandating annual yearly progress (AYP) data collection and highly qualified teachers. As districts across the nation bought data packages, installed data warehouses and began analyzing their assessment data, the virtual schools kept pumping out their expensive and engaging courses, mostly unaware of each other's work.

School Districts Use Technology for Gathering AYP Data
What has not happened in the intervening years is the crossing of the data-rich expert curriculum and instruction from the virtual schools with the rich collection and analysis of assessment data from districts. Schools and students consumed online courses to fill in gaps and work around tight schedules, but the virtual schools did not analyze their own data for student learning gains or failures. While on the physical school side of the fence, test data in technology-driven analysis systems located deficiencies that the schools address in the traditional way -- by adding more in-service training on whatever area was found deficient.

Unfortunately, the data-driven analysis has not led to immediate online actions to remedy teaching deficits, supplement curriculum 24/7, or inform parents on the importance of student work.

These two ships are still passing each other in the night. Virtual schools ship out great curriculum but it escapes the district data-gathering efforts. Conversely, schools find deficiencies using technology but address the problems clumsily at best with traditional methods, often subjecting students to re-taking entire courses when they only misunderstood aspects of a course. Technology-driven virtual courses or online tutoring could be systematic answers to certain district deficiencies, but they are not.

Instrumentation of the Learning Process

What woke me up to the possibility of a different world are the following two events where two educational trajectories collided. First, Michigan State University School of Education researcher Patrick Dickson put in a request to Michigan's Virtual High School asking for all their online data for students who had taken Algebra online. Since the courses were delivered through a course management system, there was data from that system on what the students actually did or did not do in the course, in addition to their test scores -- the only data generally available to school data systems.

Dickson wanted to compare what students did in the course (where, when, how) with their ultimate grade (assessment data). He was looking for patterns -- how did students learn well, where did certain students fail to grasp a concept, or begin missing the beat? As a rudimentary attempt, Dickson could easily detect after several weeks in the course which students were going to make it and which ones were not -- all from "click" patterns. It was as if he were looking at an electrocardiogram (EKG) tape of student learning actions. He could tell who spent a lot of time in their lessons, responded to assignments in a timely way, did well on assessments, communicated in discussion with fellow students or in conference with instructors.

What Dickson did with North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL), now Learning Point Associates, funding and Michigan Virtual High School data was essentially "instrument" the learning process. Imagine what it would take to get the same data from a classroom, a study hall, a student's bedroom or family kitchen table. It would be nearly impossible.

Evidence-Based Education and Michigan's Bold Step

I like to think that Dickson is on to something and I am going to give it a name -- evidence-based education -- to add to the education alphabet soup. Evidence-Based Education (EBE) gives us a view into the evidentiary base of learning that can be compared with assessment data and a variety of other data from demographics to lunch menus and bus ride distances. Imagine if not only the virtual courses, but the traditional classroom, could generate this kind of data. The course management system -- whether used virtually or as a supplement to the classroom -- provides the ability to gather learning use data through the process of instrumentation of teaching and learning actions recorded by the system.

That was number one for Michigan ? a new look at learning ? but still this research only created a new camper in the busy and blurry education campground. Now, enter Michigan's second act, which is the first historical crack in the hundred year old traditional land-based school machinery. In summer 2006, Michigan voted into law its high school graduation requirements (it had none before). Included in these requirements was an item supported by Michigan Virtual and the Michigan Department of Education, now working in concert. The item was an online learning requirement. In order for a student to receive a high school diploma in Michigan, he or she must have had an online experience -- a course or something similar to it; the exact definition is on its way.

This virtual crack in the physical armor of education is the first step into 21st century learning, an acknowledgement that what students and parents already routinely do --
use the Web -- should also be part of schooling, officially.

To stimulate more activity and make this move the beginning of a trend, not an isolated case, Michigan Virtual, the Michigan Department, Microsoft and Blackboard have pulled together to provide an online course for the state's ninth graders free of cost to fulfill this particular and peculiar graduation requirement. It is the hope of all parties that online education will become more commonplace in schools as it is now almost ubiquitous in college and the workforce.

Turing the AYP Process into an Improvement System

It is my hope that the education community will zero in on the "2+2=10" equation that can occur when Evidence-Based Education (EBE) data is combined, as a matter of routine, with AYP data that can then almost automatically generate the teacher training, remediation, and parent communication to address deficiencies -- at least for some students. It can also generate what stands between the hundred year old model and the future -- individualized education. School today is about classrooms, it is not yet about students. That eventual shift will be facilitated by student use data combined with student assessment data, which will lead to the ability to individualize education, or at least take the first steps in that 21st century direction, as the Web has for nearly everything else.

I think we are close to the "next thing"; it is lurking out there. Here's what's necessary to close the gap: a form of thinking that says, "One, no significant reform or improvement is going to occur without the use of enterprise technology (both assessment data and online remediation). Two, no significant use of technology will occur without reorganization in school districts and state offices. Three, no meaningful reorganization is going to occur without solid research showing what really works."

Bring in the Researchers, Please

Hopefully, Dickson, NCREL (now Learning Point), the Michigan Department of Education, Michigan Virtual and the technology providers have demonstrated that researchers need to come into the field full force to develop an evidentiary methodology for learning, adding to the already engrained data collection. This one-two punch could well be what's missing in 21st century education. We have instrumented forests, glaciers, space probes, and the human body. Why can't we do the same for learning?


Gordon Freedman is vice president of education strategy for Blackboard Inc.

Friday, February 09, 2007

WIRELESS EDUCATION!

Microsoft joins Wireless Oakland team: Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson announced that Microsoft Corp. had signed up as a member of the corporate team behind Wireless Oakland, the effort to offer free basic wireless Internet service everywhere in Oakland County. During his State of the County speech, Patterson announced that Microsoft will "develop and maintain all content and advertising on the Wireless Oakland portal," the home page for the system that will come up first on users' computer screens. WWJ Newsradio 950's Web site is offering a podcast of Patterson's remarks, at this link. There's also a podcast of an interview on the speech with Oakland County CIO Phil Bertolini, who is leading the Wireless Oakland effort. Installation of the system began in Troy Jan. 19. Other pilot areas in Birmingham, Royal Oak, Madison Heights, Oak Park, Wixom and Pontiac will be live with service available by April 30. At that time, Bertolini said, the county will release a schedule for rolling out service in the rest of the county. All areas of the county should see service by early 2008, Bertolini said. The system will offer Wi-Fi service free at 128 kilobits per second, at no cash cost to the county. The companies financing the system will make money selling faster service tiers. More at www.wirelessoakland.com.

Pontiac Schools "Roundtable Forum"






















MORE:
http://www.pontiacschoolsroundtable.blogspot.com

Thursday, February 08, 2007

NEED for FATTER DIGITAL PIPES! Progress is Relentless!


Google and cable firms warn of risks from Web TV


AMSTERDAM (Reuters) — New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.

Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.

It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.

"The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

Google instead offered to work together with cable operators to combine its technology for searching for video and TV footage and its tailored advertising with the cable networks' high-quality delivery of shows.

One cable chief executive, Duco Sickinghe from Belgian operator Telenet, said it was "the best news of the day" to hear that Google could not scale for video.

Mixed blessing

Google was welcomed with a mix of fear and awe by the cable TV companies, which are concerned that Web companies will try to steal their lucrative TV business. The Internet on the whole is a mixed blessing, cable carriers said.

Broadband Internet delivery to homes and small businesses is one of the most lucrative segments for cable TV operators, but heavy investments in infrastructure are needed to meet the rapid rise of Internet file-swapping and video downloads.

The data involved in one hour of video can equal the total in one year's worth of e-mails.

"Most of the IP (Internet protocol or data) traffic is peer-to-peer (file swapping), and most of that is video. Every year we have to invest substantially just to maintain the user experience. In fact it has actually decreased," said Spanish cable operator ONO Chief Executive Richard Alden.

"People (Internet service providers) don't like to talk about (the fact) that just to stand still, they have to invest. But you cannot keep investing at the same clip," he added.

Research group Gartner estimates that 60% of the Internet traffic that is uploaded from computers is peer-to-peer traffic, mostly from consumers swapping films and TV shows through select user groups and BitTorrent.

Financial advisers praised the cable TV industry because, unlike the large telecoms operators, it has been expanding and has been more efficient with capital and more profitable.

Shares of cable operators trade at around nine times forecast 2007 earnings before interest, tax amortisation and depreciation (EBITDA), while telecoms operators trade at around six times, said Charles Manby, Goldman Sachs' global co-head for the telecoms, media and technology industries.

Cable operators are set to return to capital investments of a modest 10 to 12% of revenues, but they can be forced to spend much more due to outside pressures from increased Internet consumption and from rival telecoms operators that upgrade their broadband Internet packages to fibre optic super speeds.

"Then, the world becomes cloudy," Manby said.

GOING GLOBAL 2007!



Tuesday, February 06, 2007

AIM for the BHAG!














A New Story + a BHAG

David Warlick has blogged often about our need to tell a new story. A story about the technological shifts that are occurring in our society. A story about the impacts that digital technologies are having on our lives, the workplace, and, indeed, our very economies. A story about the future of eduation and what our kids need to know and be able to do in the New Economy. A story that helps people make the move from an education system designed for yesteryear to a system that is designed for tomorrow. This story needs to be told in a compelling way so that it resonates with listeners.

I agree with David. We do need a new story. We probably need multiple new stories, told in different ways to different people at different times in different settings. We need to tailor the new story for different audiences to ensure maximum reception. But I’m also thinking that a new story is not enough. A new story alone will not get us to where we need to be.

I think we also need a BHAG: a big, hairy, audacious goal. A tangible, concrete target that lets us know when we’ve reached some crucial point. A new story (or three or four…) is a necessary component, but I don’t think it will be sufficient in and of itself. I think we need a new story and a BHAG, because the BHAG will help drive action and allocation of resources. A new story tells us what the issues are but it doesn’t necessarily help people know what to do. The BHAG helps people understand where we might go and how to get there. Together a new story and a BHAG will help educators, and parents, and community members, and politicans create the will and the action to move us forward.

I think we’re starting to wrap our heads around what a new story might look like. For example, I know that the presentation set I’ve been delivering lately, which combines diifferent resources and quotes and materials from the blogosphere and elsewhere, is resonating well with folks here in Minnesota. But we still need a BHAG.

So what might a BHAG be? What might be a big, hairy, audacious goal, a target that makes us gulp a little bit but also is focused and achievable? What might be something that would help us accomplish our goal of moving schools, students, teachers, and classroom pedagogy into the 21st century? What might be a goal that is tangible and yet energizing, a goal that grabs people in the gut and serves as a unifying focal point of effort?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I can’t come up with anything better than this:

  1. ubiqitous nationwide high-speed wireless Internet access, and
  2. a wireless-capable laptop for every student and educator.

I’ve previously blogged about variations of the first component (both here and here), and I think we’re starting to see the revolutionary impacts of giving every kid and teacher a computer, even when those impacts weren’t foreseen or desired at the outset. I think these two in coordination (and you need them both, I believe) are a BHAG worth rallying around. Now of course the question is… what do you think?

Old Dogs and a One Trick Pony....DIGITAL>>>>Just Do IT!

Take it All Away, and Replace It

I had the pleasure of attending the Science Blogging Conference in Chapel Hill last weekend. It was a good conference, but not like the conferences that I usually work at. First of all, the sessions followed an un-conference format -- though many of the presenters had a pretty hard time adhering to that formula. The goal of an un-conference session is to generate conversations among the audience that teach, rather than simply teaching the group. But some great conversations happened any, and one of the best that I was a part of was with a young man I sat and had box lunch with out in the Quad under the sun.

I do not recall his name, but he was a writer/journalist by trade, and he was attending this conference in his capacity as a writer for Duke University. His job involves translating what scientists are doing into language that ex-history teachers like me can understand. We talked for a while around our delicious wrap sandwiches, provided by the conference, and one thread that we followed for a bit was about video games, as his children are just now beginning to play them.

Random Picture
Click here to see a slide show of pictures taken at the conference by attendees and then flickr'ed.

I finally asked if he was noticing any differences between the younger scientists he works with (20s and early 30s) and the older scientists (closer to my age), that might be attributed to the former being digital natives. He said that he did see that the younger scientists were much more eager to collaborate electronically, that distances seemed to mean very little to them in their work. He very quickly added that the older scientists were catching on and adopting collaborative technologies very quickly, but that adoption was a step that they had to go through.

He also said that he was seeing another shift that I found quite interesting. He said that science use to be reductionist in nature. I asked what that meant, and he said that science was about drilling down to components, cutting out and examining bits of the world, reducing it to its barest fundamentals. He said that the younger scientist spend more time synthesizing, that they seem much more interested in systems and networks, not so much how things operate independently, but how they operate as part of a larger organism, ecosystem, or cosmos.

I suspect that all kinds of speculation might be made about why science seems, at least in the eyes of this science communicator, to be shifting, and one could probably make a case relating it to younger scientists digital experiences. The connection that occurred to me, however, was with schools, which seem to me to be in a reductionist mode still. On Saturday, I presented with Nancy Willard at the NSBA Leadership Conference, a gathering of state affiliate presidents and executive directors. After our presentations, we fielded questions from the audience.

The first questioner wanted to know how they could get their hands on an RSS aggregator. ;-)

Then someone asked if the literacy skills that I was talking about were part of anyone's curriculum. The answer is, "Yes!" My own state, for one, has been teaching and testing computer skills for more than ten years. However, it is a reductionist response to the need for digital literacy (what I call contemporary literacy). We have reduced computer skills out into their own list of standards, separated again into objectives, and performance indicators. We've reduced it down to components that can be discretely measured.

I don't think that this happens entirely because of the industrial mechanized environment that many of us come from. I think it's just easier to separate things out and teach them in isolation, especially when we believe that our job is to simply teach.

I maintain that the best solution to integrating contemporary literacy (digital literacy, information skills, computer skills, whatever you want to call it.) into what and how we teach is simple. It's dramatic, but its simple -- because teachers will do what helps them do their jobs. Teachers will do what solves their problems.

So the solution is to give them a problem.

Take all the paper out of every classroom and replace it with access to digital content, and put digital/networked information tools in the hands of every teacher and learner. Then say, "Now teach! Now Learn!"

Of course you're going to have to provide them with time for retooling, and a little staff development, but it will happen, when they have little choice.

2¢ Worth!

YouTube becomes YOURTUBE!

YouTube without the lip synching dudes

Sling Media wants to make it easy to post live TV to the Web. Will it fly? Only if the company gets networks on its side, says Fortune's Stephanie Mehta.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Stephanie Mehta, Fortune senior writer
February 5 2007: 6:17 AM EST


NEW YORK (Fortune) -- "If you've been disrupted, it means your business model is broken."

Jason Hirschhorn, the effusive former MTV executive now running Sling Media's newly formed entertainment group, is explaining why his former colleagues in the traditional media world need to embrace so-called "place shifting" technologies purveyed by his new associates at Sling. (Sling created the Slingbox, a nifty gadget that enables you to transmit live television from your home to a personal computer or cell phone so that you can watch your favorite hometown programming anywhere in the world.)

And don't expect Hirschhorn, who once started a company called Mischief New Media, to sugarcoat his pitch to the likes of CBS's Les Moonves or NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker: Like it or not, he contends, people are going to watch television programming on their computers, cell phones and other devices. Broadcasters and studios need to figure out a way to turn that behavior into a moneymaker. In other words, disrupt your own model before someone else disrupts it for you.

In some ways, he's preaching to a fairly receptive choir. CBS and NBC already place video clips (mostly promotional) on YouTube. ABC, meanwhile, makes entire episodes of some of its programs available on its own Web site, ABC.com.

Viacom tells YouTube to yank videos

But Hirschhorn, 35, is asking these companies and others to go even further. He's launching a new service called Clip+Sling that enables consumers to easily clip portions of any television show and publish them to the Web. (Think YouTube, but without the user-generated clips of dudes lip synching to the Backstreet Boys.) And he's looking for buy-in from the broadcasters.

Hirschhorn is promising TV executives an opportunity to sell advertising when clips are posted on the yet-to-be-launched Sling site. (Sling currently is signing up testers for its beta trials.) Instead of just selling television airtime, a network could also offer marketers a chance to sponsor clips.

Hirschhorn's argument to potential partners is simple: People are going to post portions of your shows to the Web anyway. "Why not monetize what was piracy?" he says, throwing up his hands. "What was once a negative can be a positive."

But Hirschhorn is asking the TV world to take a big leap of faith. He needs media companies essentially to provide air cover for a technology that poses some interesting intellectual property and legal issues. In meetings, Hirschhorn says, he acknowledges those concerns up front: "Your business development people, your lawyers, they're all going to want do a number on me," he tells media honchos. "And they'll be right."

Among the potential worries: How to compensate the artists creating the content that gets clipped, and how to handle content that a network airs, but doesn't own.

Hirschhorn isn't going to be able to strike deals with every single independent television content producer - certainly not before the Clip+Sling functionality becomes available later this year - or every television writer seeking remuneration for a skit that's clipped. And so Hirschhorn is asking the networks to help smooth things over with content producers, to, as he puts it, "go to those constituencies en masse and say, 'We'd like you to not go ballistic until we prove there's a model here.'"

"We're cognizant of people's rights," Hirschhorn adds. "Just give us a beat to figure this out."

TV is dying? Long live TV!

As Hirschhorn talks, one can't help but feel like Clip+Sling is a fun technology in search of a business model. (I'm guessing the engineers at Sling weren't thinking about "monetizing what was piracy" when they dreamt up the service.) That's not necessarily a bad thing. The Google (Charts) founders didn't set out to transform the advertising industry -- they just wanted to build a great search engine.

And his eat-before-you-get-eaten seems to be resonating with media companies. CBS (Charts) (which used to be part of Viacom (Charts), Hirschhorn's former employer) announced last month at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it will participate in the Clip+Sling beta trial.

"CBS is interested in how new media solutions can help build communities around content," Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, said in announcing the trial. "As we move forward into an increasingly digital and interactive future, that capability will sometimes come from unexpected places, products and services that in the past might have been seen as disruptors, instead of enablers."

Sounds sort of like a sophisticated way of saying, that if you're being disrupted, your business model is broken.

AMERICA'S "Perfect Storm!"













Press Releases

ETS Report: Converging Forces Threaten America’s Future

Contact:

Tom Ewing
(609) 683-2803
tewing@ets.org

Princeton, N.J. (February 5, 2007) —

Three powerful forces — inadequate literacy skills among large segments of the population, the continuing evolution of the economy and the nation’s job structure, and an ongoing shift in the demographic profile of the nation, powered by the highest immigration rates in almost a century — are creating a “perfect storm” that could have dire consequences for our nation, according to a report ETS released today in a National Press Club Newsmaker press conference in Washington, D.C.

“America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” a report by ETS’s Policy Information Center, warns that America is in the midst of a perfect storm that, if unaddressed, will continue to feed on itself, further dividing us socially and economically, jeopardizing American competitiveness and threatening our democratic institutions. In the report, authors Irwin Kirsch and Kentaro Yamamoto of ETS, Henry Braun of Boston College and Andrew Sum of Northeastern University contend that the convergence of the three forces has serious implications for future generations and could turn the American dream into an American tragedy.

“America’s Perfect Storm is a wake-up call with implications for education, business, policymakers and every parent and child,” says ETS President and CEO Kurt Landgraf. “It describes forces at play in society that will affect all of us in the near future. The American dream is the idea that everyone has the opportunity to make a living, provide for a family, and raise children who will be better educated and better off. If we fail to act now on the warnings sounded in this report, the next generation of children will be
worse off than their parents for the first time in our country’s history. The American dream could turn into an American tragedy for many.”

The report also offers hope that if we act now and develop new policies that will increase literacy skills across the population, we can reduce the impact of the storm, help our nation grow together, and retain our leading role in the world.

“America’s Perfect Storm describes brilliantly the major challenges facing American workers and our economy as the result of an education system that fails to educate our young people, an increasingly technological global economy, and major demographic shifts in our population,” says Arthur J. Rothkopf, Senior Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Unless we act aggressively and promptly to reform our public education system, the standard of living of U.S. workers will decline, and the U.S. economy will become far less competitive.”

One of the major forces contributing to America’s perfect storm is inadequate literacy skills among large segments of the population. “Individuals are expected to take more responsibility for managing various aspects of their own lives, such as planning for retirement, navigating the health care system, and managing their careers,” Kirsch says. “Yet half of adults lack the reading and math skills to use these systems effectively and, therefore, will face challenges fulfilling their roles as parents, citizens and workers. Perhaps of greater concern is the fact that this problem is not limited to adults. Our high school graduation rate, at 70 percent, is far behind that of other countries, and our students lag behind many of our trading partners in reading, math and science.”

The second force is a dramatically changing economy, driven by technological innovation and globalization. “The economy itself is experiencing seismic changes, resulting in new sources of wealth, new patterns of international trade, and a shift in the balance of capital over labor,” Braun says. “These changes are causing a profound restructuring of the U.S. workplace, with a larger proportion of job growth occurring in higher-level occupations that require a college education, such as management, professional, technical, and executive-level sales. The wage gap is widening between the most- and least-skilled workers; men with bachelor’s degrees can expect to earn almost twice as much over their lifetimes as those without.”

The third force contributing to America’s “perfect storm” is sweeping demographic changes. “Half of the U.S. population growth into the next decade is expected to come from new immigrants, which will have a dramatic impact on the composition of the workforce, as well as on the general population,” Kirsch says. “While immigrants come from diverse backgrounds with varying levels of education, we should recognize that 34 percent of new immigrants arrive without a high school diploma, and of those, 80 percent cannot speak English well, if at all.”

Although each of these forces is powerful in its own right, it is their interaction over time that can have momentous consequences. “Our nation has a choice to make,” Sum says. “If we continue on our present course, we will gradually lose ground to other countries and, in the process, become more divided socially and economically. Or we can invest in policies that will help us to grow together, policies that will result in better opportunities for all Americans.”

Download the full report, “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” for free at www.ets.org/stormreport. Purchase copies for $15 (prepaid) by writing to the Policy Information Center, ETS, MS 19-R, Rosedale Road, Princeton, NJ 08541-0001; by calling (609) 734-5949; or by sending an e-mail to pic@ets.org.

ABOUT ETS http://www.ets.org

ETS is a nonprofit institution with the mission to advance quality and equity in education by providing fair and valid assessments, research and related services for all people worldwide. In serving individuals, educational institutions and government agencies around the world, ETS customizes solutions to meet the need for teacher professional development products and services, classroom and end-of-course assessments, and research-based teaching and learning tools. Founded in 1947, ETS today develops, administers and scores more than 24 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide.

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