Words of Wisdom from the Technology Experts
Excerpts from School CIO's archive of CIO Profiles.
Compiled by Susie Meserve
Charles Thompson, CTO of the District of Columbia Public Schools, on getting good data:
“My definition of good information is that it must be accurate, concise, able to be manipulated, and timely to the user. But most districts have their data residing in individual silos. Right now we’re investing in applications that can easily “talk” to each other so data elements can feed from all the functional areas into a data warehouse that allows analysis to take place. Every application will be School Interoperability Framework certified—not just compliant, but actually certified—so if we decide we don’t like a partner, we can pull them out and put another SIF-certified module in without much disruption. My advice to other CIOs: Don’t build a data warehouse to meet NCLB, build it to capture the appropriate data for analysis.”
Bijaya Devkota, CIO of Maryland's Charles County Public Schools, on information technology:
“The bottom line for technology is that if it’s not used for the purpose of instruction, it’s all a waste of money. Most small school systems do not take good care of IT needs and decisions, and often IT is not well liked or well respected. We’re focused on IT here because it is critical to everything we are doing, and we can bring up any issues we have for very quick resolution. IT cannot be pushed aside, not if you want to make good use of your technology budget and improve the ability of your district to provide effective curriculum delivery now and in the future.”
Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at Plano Independent School District in Texas, on learning in the 21st century:
“Our students are very much into a world that is collaborative, and because of that, they tend to see things a little bit differently. They are exposed to a greater number of information resources than ever before, and whether it’s good or bad, they’ve come to expect that information to be available and free. Because of the Internet and its growth in their lifetimes, they’ve had the opportunity to share and remix information that none of us have had before. If nothing else, over the past 15 years, the rapid increase in understanding of learning in terms of brain-based research has taught us that our school systems have been successful for more than 100 years, but we also have to take into account the fact that information doubles every 2.5 years. We can’t just say that students will learn in the same environment [year after year].”
Sharnell Jackson, chief eLearning officer of the Chicago Public Schools, on virtual professional development:
“Why is classroom training for teachers and administrators declining while e-learning gains? I'll tell you why. Because there's a reduction in cost per person, increased reach, reduced time to train, increased consistency and compliance, and increased tracking and reporting [with e-learning]. So think about the benefits—it's immediate interaction and feedback, collaboration and social learning, reduced travel costs, and reduced time away from work and home. Those are huge benefits. Classroom training is like eating out at a restaurant: you need to make reservations. Asynchronous e-learning is like doing your own microwave dinner at home. But synchronous e-learning is like room service. Who doesn't like room service?”
Gerald Crisci, director of technology for Scarsdale Public Schools in Scarsdale, New York, on measuring return on investment:
“It’s easy to show what the impact of technology is on someone’s teaching, but it’s difficult to show a direct correlation between IT and student learning. In studies that I’ve seen, people talk about things like improving student attendance and improving student test scores. At the end of the day, that’s not really a compelling argument in terms of the value you put on technology. How does IT change what kids can do? How does it change how they learn? Those are the key questions.”
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
THE Drives of Digital Relevance
Kids Today
Researcher Peter Grunwald believes students' increasing taste for technology will transform classrooms.
By Lindsay Oishi
from School CIO
Peter Grunwald is the founder and president of Grunwald Associates, a market research and strategic consulting firm that has been conducting industry-wide surveys on education and technology since 1995 . School CIO recently got Grunwald's perspective on why today's kids are more tech-savvy than ever, and what that means for educators.
Q. How do you think this generation of students is different from previous ones?
A. Kids are taking control of the media they use, whereas the model in previous generations was passive consumption. Students today are producing content themselves, which is reflected in the explosion of personal Web pages, profiles on social networking sites, blogging, podcasts and so on. The whole definition of a cool kid has changed. Now, cool kids are often smart about technology and use it to amplify their voices. From a school's standpoint, this has implications for the expectations about technology that kids bring with them to school.
Q. Your current study investigates students and social networking. What should CIOs be aware of in this domain?
A. There's a lot of focus on the dangers of the Internet and social networking sites in terms of kids connecting with people they ought not to or being exposed to inappropriate content. There is some of that, as there is in a variety of other media. There hasn't been much discussion yet of the educational benefits of social networking. It's hard to predict, but connecting kids in geographically diverse locations to collaborate on projects or learn about each other's realities and cultures can be useful. Multiplayer games and simulations also have educational value. The possibilities are going to become more obvious as the dangers are dealt with or, better yet, put into perspective.
Q. Do new technologies mean that old tools like television have less value?
A. We have found that kids who have the Internet at home are also watching TV, listening to the radio, and talking on the telephone. So the issue becomes how to deal with attention spans that are a product of multitasking. Sometimes that means that kids have shorter attention spans. Or it can mean that the student is used to being in control of where his attention is. That doesn't mean throw out the TV as a deliverer of instructional media. TV is just part of a broader package of technology. The more important matter is understanding the role of all kinds of media in engaging and reaching students.
Q. How can technology be used to engage students?
A. Technology needs to be seamlessly integrated into the classroom rather than making it something that students have to get up and walk to. If I'm playing a game or answering a quiz question, the fact that I'm calling on information that I may have on a handheld device, laptop, or on the Internet becomes less relevant as the technology becomes more robust. Technology as a discrete activity, separate from everyday learning, is going to become less important.
Q. Have you found that school districts use technology more for administrative rather than instructional purposes?
A. I wouldn't want to quantify one over the other. It's easier to figure out, "How can we more accurately record information such as attendance?" The benefits are more readily apparent than the benefits of using technology to help deliver instruction and engage students in the subject area. However, taxpayers and the public think first and mostly of technology's benefits in the classroom. Since taxpayers are significant stakeholders in how schools construct and spend their budgets, it's important to keep in mind that from the public's standpoint, using technology for instruction is the primary consideration.
Q. What advice do you have for CIOs based on your research?
A. What is often most surprising to school district leaders is the importance of supporting and encouraging parental participation in technology decision making. In some ways it's counterintuitive. It means one more set of stakeholders to deal with, which can complicate the decision-making process. But the data is pretty compelling that when it is done intelligently, there is a strong connection between the level of parental participation and the size and health of the technology operation as a whole. It's really all about buy-in. Whenever you are dealing with a constituency, if they feel that they have a stake in the decisions, they'll be much more likely to back technology initiatives.
A "little something" for the Fear Monster in ALL of US!
We Have Nothing to Fear but Fear of Learning
by Marcia Conner
Could you learn more if fear didn't hold you back?
Some people believe they require fear to excel. They count on an adrenalin rush caused by wicked deadlines or overbearing colleagues (or by positive emotions) to push them forward.
Pressure can play a useful role, but stress that's powerful enough to cause fear ultimately shuts us down. Fear causes the amygdalae, regions of the brain, to release the stress chemicals cortisol and vasopressin, putting the body on alert, quickly shutting down higher-order thinking, long-term memory, and our capacity to perform.
Fear constrains performance no matter the setting. While some business leaders blame everything from unmotivated workers to outmoded training departments for lackluster productivity, fear of learning -- actually, fearing what's to be learned -- results in the greatest stagnation. When employees become uncomfortable about learning -- when fear influences how we do our jobs -- it affects the bottom line.
As a coach and educator I see five fears of learning play out: worry over others' opinions, anxiety around changing routines, panic over the possibility of failing, personal distrust around mastering a topic, and terror facing scary stuff. Each fear leads otherwise curious people to avoid exploration and to lose out on learning experiences.
Examine what you fear learning and find a way through.
Feeling Dumb
Do you fear people losing respect for you if you ask questions? Perhaps you believe you'll reveal a terrible secret: You're not as brilliant as you lead everyone to believe.
A colleague who lives near me in Virginia asked an electronics store clerk in Boston to explain how to use an iPod. Some 800 miles from home, she felt less frightened to appear dumb than she did at a local store. She confessed she was deeply uncomfortable recognizing she couldn't grasp a piece of modern life.
If fear of feeling dumb makes you uncomfortable, frame a half-empty answer with something lighthearted. "I thought I knew everything about this field. Great to know I have room to grow. Where can I learn more?" Once you shed a desire to know everything, pressure's off. You can learn from everyone.
More Work
If you expand your knowledge, do you fear people will expect you to put it to use? Learning more might mean extra work. Or it might change comfortable routines. Some people find this so unsettling that they simply stop learning.
Knowledge-transfer guru Steve Trautman (Peermentoring.com) admits he's fearful to learn about the technology in his own house, even though he worked in software for years. He fears that if he does learn about it, his genius wife (who already knows how to make repairs) might expect him to fix things once in while.
Discovery itself doesn't necessitate change. It provides us options to choose from: Do I continue working the same old way, do I want to change everything, or do I pick from what I learned to find a practice that suits me best now?
Failure retry abort
Are there daunting implications about what you yearn to learn? Perhaps your romanticized view of how things should work will be ruined if you discover more.
A gifted guy, on the leading edge of his field, resists marketing himself. He fears success might change him, unsure how he'd maintain his integrity if he became well-known. And he fears the possibility of finding out that people don't care about his work.
Marie Montessori recognized that seemingly simple activities require many steps. Rather than view the areas you fear in total, consider them as small individual parts. Start with a few small activities, a little at a time, then equilibrate, build your momentum, and overcome your fear.
Not Me
Do you fear you can't learn a subject, or maybe you can't learn enough of it? Schools often teach topics from beginning to end, leaving people with the mistaken impression we should (or could) master a full subject in the real world.
I serve on the PR committee for a small community group. A savvy interior designer has created our newsletter for years although she only knows desktop publishing basics. Certain she couldn't learn further, each month she muddled through. When we worked together on a recent newsletter, she made great strides. She recognized she didn't need to learn everything. Rather, she benefited from finding helpful resources. As she learned, she gained self-confidence to learn more.
Because of our unique learning styles and the way information is presented in schools, some of us mistakenly believe that when it comes to learning we're doomed. Not so! Out of school, we can try assorted approaches. If learning from a book bores you, try a simulation, or create for yourself a way to experience the information first-hand.
Danger Danger
Sometimes learning feels too perilous to pursue. Would identifying the creaky noise in the ceiling require you to enter a dark attic with bats? Do you always skip asking the opinion of a coworker who once berated the sweetest person in the office? Informal learning guru Jay Cross (Informal Learning), who has a policy to try almost anything once, tells me he's afraid to attempt rock climbing. He fears if he were having a wonderful time on a rock face, at some point he'd fail to find a crevice and he'd fall to his death. He doesn't want to learn enough to be able to try.
Imagined dangers can hold us back as much as real ones. The emotion center in the brain doesn't distinguish between what it remembers and what it imagines. Catastrophes you envision feel real. FEAR could be an acronym for F-fantasy, E- expectations, A-appearing, R-real. When we don't feel safe, physically or emotionally, we struggle to learn.
If you didn't fear bats or that coworker your queries might instead release brain chemicals that create anticipation, excitement, the thrill of discovery-or little reaction altogether.
Fear Forward
When you fear learning something new try these tactics:
- Say aloud exactly what you fear. "Bob scares me" or "What if I fail?" Daylight makes fear seem less menacing. Then remind yourself that your reaction is natural and you can choose to address it.
- Watch a highlight film. Visualize a mental movie staring you as a capable and competent person who knows he can endure under upsetting circumstances. Pull your clip from past experience or script it from your imagination.
- Walk around the block or down the hall. Physically moving forward helps you feel strong and fit to deal with the situation.
- Create a mantra. Say "I can handle it" to bypass the state triggering your fear.
- Talk about what's stopping you. Tell someone what you need to take action. Perhaps you could use a helping hand, an extra telephone call to check in, or a specific resource or referral.
- Adjust your reaction by unlearning it. While fears can make learning feel difficult, when we truly want to learn something it often seems effortless. Deliberate steps to unlearn our habits can open us to new ways of working.
Acknowledge fear by naming it, relate it to other experiences, recognize how a recent situation differs from past ones, and decide to try a different and new approach. When we gather our fears and then meet them, we can then work our way past them. If we do this enough, we change our feelings about our situation, and we can return to learning again.
Monday, January 15, 2007
An APPLE A Day!
Apple launches television box and reinvents telephone
Apple has launched an Apple TV box, which promises to do for the television what the iPod did for music. This was somewhat overshadowed by the eagerly anticipated announcement of an Apple iPhone, which virtually reinvents the telephone as an integrated mobile phone, music and video player, with a built-in web browser.
The Apple TV was previously dubbed the iTV, although Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, repeatedly referred to it by its former codename as he introduced the product in his keynote presentation at Macworld in San Francisco.
The diminutive Apple TV box connects to a television and allows wireless access to material available on a personal computer or the internet. It enables anyone to browse and view their entire collection of digital media from across the room using a simple and intuitive remote control and on-screen interface. It is also seamlessly integrated with Apple iTunes, enabling selected movies and television shows to be streamed directly over the internet.
The Apple box features a high-definition HDMI output, although this only goes as high as 720p lines, as well as component video and analogue and digital audio.
The power supply is internal, so it can be connected directly to a wall socket without requiring an external transformer, but it does not provide powerline networking. It does however offer an Ethernet port and WiFi networking, including the new draft n standard.
It includes a 40GB hard drive, which is rather too small but no doubt larger versions will follow. It also has an Intel processor, which provides the power for the striking user interface.
The beautiful interface is simply white on black, but is otherwise reminiscent of an iPod, and is typically elegant, sophisticated and simple, with zooming animations.
Apple TV offers access to movies, television shows, music and podcasts through iTunes. It can automatically synchronise material from a designated personal computer on the network and stream from up to five computers. This can include visitors, who can connect their machines wirelessly simply by entering a personal identification code number displayed on the television screen.
Photos can also be easily displayed on a large widescreen display. As Steve Jobs noted, modern digital cameras as are all essentially better than high definition. The display will be limited to 1280x720 resolution, which is less than one million pixels, but it is possible to pan and zoom over images in smooth slideshows.
“We think this is pretty cool,” said Steve Jobs. “I’m really excited by it. We think this is going to be something really quite special.”
The Apple TV will be priced at $299 and will begin shipping in February. While there are many devices that promise to connect the television to a computer network, media centers and similar products have yet to really take off, largely because they are too complex to set up and too difficult to use. Apple could dominate the category with its characteristic consumer appeal and ease of use.
In the long term, devices such as this could begin to bypass cable television operators, with their proprietary set-top boxes, opening up the television to programming that could come from anywhere.
Apple is well placed to enter this market. In addition to two billion songs sold so far on iTunes, it has already sold 50 million television shows and over a million movies.
iPhone
The real excitement, however, was reserved for the long-anticipated announcement of an integrated mobile phone and music player.
“Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone and here it is,” said Steve Jobs, showing an image of an iPod with a rotary dial. He was, of course, only kidding.
The Apple iPhone is undoubtedly a breakthrough device, combining a revolutionary touch screen mobile phone with a music and video player and internet communications. Apple claims that it is five years ahead of anything else on the market and indeed it looks very futuristic.
Apple has developed and patented a gestural touchscreen interface it calls multitouch, which does away with the need for buttons or a special stylus. It scrolls though lists with simple intuitive gestures, rather like a touchpad.
The touchscreen automatically switches off when you bring it to your ear. The 3.5 inch widescreen display automatically detects whether it is in portrait or landscape orientation and it can show true widescreen movies either zoomed full screen or with borders top and bottom. An ambient light sensor adjusts the image to save power.
Apple has taken its usual innovative approach to user interface design to understand how people actually want to use mobile phones, to create an enjoyable user experience.
The phone itself is a quad-band GSM and EDGE device—Apple plans to make 3G phones in the future—and comes complete with WiFi and Bluetooth.
The iPhone runs the OS X operating system and features desktop class applications, including a special version of the Apple Safari web browser which allows full web pages to be displayed and navigated.
Apple is teaming up with Google to offer search and mapping and with Yahoo! to offer free push email, to compete with devices such as the Blackberry.
Steve Jobs was joined on stage by Eric Schmit, the chief executive of Google, who also joins the Apple board, and by Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!
The iPhone will be available in the United States from June with Cingular as an exclusive partner and a list price of $499 for a 4GB model and $599 for an 8GB version. It will be available in Europe from the last quarter of 2007 and in Asia the following year.
Apple is aiming to attract a 1% share in 2008—around 10 million units—although it may be expected to exceed that figure.
The iPhone is definitely desirable, but it introduces a number of technical innovations which are not without risk. If it succeeds, it could indeed redefine our view of the mobile phone.
Steve Jobs was evidently excited at his keynote presentation. He said he had been waiting two and a half years for this day and said he had not slept a wink the night before. He compared the launch of the iPhone in importance to that of the iPod in 2001 and the original Mac computer in 1984.
It could be even more significant. With around a billion mobile phones sold last year, the market significantly overshadows that of personal computers, portable music players and games consoles combined.
As a sign of convergence and its emergence as a media and consumer electronics brand, the company is even dropping the word computer from its name, to become simply Apple Inc.
CATCH the "Digital Bling" of "Clip and Sling!"
Sling helps users share video clips over the internet
CBS television is to trial a new system from Sling Media to enable users to share short segments of programming using a system known as Clip+Sling. The president of CBS was joined by the co-founder of Sling Media to give a demonstration in a keynote presentation at the CES convention in Las Vegas.
“It’s great to be here among all you wikis and mash-ups and avatars,” said Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Corporation, trying perhaps a little too hard to appear cool. His message was: “There’s no such thing as old or new media anymore. We’re just media.”
He described a symbiotic relationship between the growth of broadband and the transition to digital television, saying “at CBS we’re embracing it big-time.” Sharing the stage with YouTube and Sling Media provided some evidence of that.
“The lesson is those who don’t get in front of the parade end up marching behind it.” He said: The place for any media company serious about the future is right up front, ripping, burning, and mashing up the new beat we’re all marching to.”
“That capability sometimes comes from the most unexpected places, from services that in the past might have been seen as disruptors instead of enablers,” he said. “Part of our job as a major media company is to educate ourselves as to what the audience is capable of,” he suggested, introducing Blake Krikorian, the co-founder of Sling Media.
Sling pioneered the concept of placeshifting and as other companies have moved in to compete it is continuing to innovate around the concept. The popularity of video sharing sites such as YouTube has clearly not gone unnoticed. Capturing and uploading a clip still requires some effort, so Sling Media has decided to make it even easier.
“Now, with our new Clip and Sling functionality I can capture video from my favourite television programming, upload it, and send it to a friend in under 60 seconds,” explained the chairman and chief executive of Sling Media.
Clip+Sling allows Slingbox owners to share material directly from live or recorded television. While customers will need a Slingbox to publish clips, the content posted to an interactive portal will be accessible by anyone. It is designed to make it very easy for those with a Slingbox to share video, while enabling networks and content owners to build communities around their programming. The feature will be built into future versions of the SlingPlayer software.
Sling Media also announced its SlingCatcher product at CES. A Slingbox in reverse, it enables material from a Slingbox, or anything that can be viewed or played on a personal computer, to be received over a wired or wireless network connection and displayed on a television. The SlingCatcher can also download or stream content directly from the internet and display it on a television without the need for a personal computer.
Sling Media is discussing partnership opportunities with large and small content providers to enable them to deliver their programming directly to the television via the SlingCatcher.
Traditional media companies may previously have viewed the sharing and redistribution of their programming as anathema but they are clearly also keen to experiment themselves and embrace the opportunities that it presents.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
DIGITAL JUICE!
Conceptual AIM Program Cover & Article
(See Creative Worksheet)
*Additonal Showcase Theme?
(See Creative Worksheet)
*Additonal Showcase Theme?
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
"Simple Summary" of a Decade of Intention!
Six ed-tech trends to watch in 2007
Service-oriented architecture, ‘cloud computing’ among the developments sure to have an impact on educational technology in the coming year
By Gregg W. Downey, Editor, eSchool News
December 22, 2006
Educational technology at last has progressed to the point where differentiated, individualized instruction clearly is possible for students anywhere on the planet. It can be delivered at any time, in just the right form, with whatever frequency might be required. This has long been the dream of educational technologists. And today the dream has come true--at least in terms of the technology. The barriers to universal access are no longer technical; they're political and financial.
So while governments and society grapple with the challenges of making what's already technically feasible universally available, let's take a look at what's next on the ed-tech horizon. Here are six emerging ed-tech trends I think could have a significant impact on schools and colleges in 2007.
Trend No. 1: The leveling power of the World Wide Web
Call it community-generated content, social networking, or--if you're a young technology company pitching yourself to venture capitalists--Web 2.0. Whatever you call it, it's the trend toward end-users, consumers, teachers, and students creating content for themselves and their peers. This self-generated content can be delivered in writing, in audio files, or in video clips.
No longer need you be a major motion picture studio to create a box-office smash. You don't need a radio station to be a popular disc jockey. You don't need a television network to create a video that can be seen literally by millions. Why, you don't even need a rich daddy anymore to become an overnight billionaire--or close to it.
Here's a $1.6 billion case in point: The three young men who founded YouTube.
YouTube, of course, is the internet site that allows anyone to watch or post videos, everything from stupid pet tricks to the president's State of the Union address. In February 2005, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim--YouTube's founding trio--threw a dinner party here in San Francisco. They spent most of the evening shooting digital videos and photos of themselves. Next day, they wanted to post these to the internet. Well, posting the digital photos was no problem, but the three young men discovered it was nearly impossible to post their party videos.
Being resourceful lads and computer geeks, they had the problem whipped by the spring of last year. They created a site that let average computer-using videographers post their work without having to download special software. And so it was that the first 18-second YouTube video went up on the internet on April 23, 2005. The video shows Karim standing with elephants at the zoo. "The cool thing about these guys," intones the young narrator, referring to the elephants, "is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all."
With those immortal words was YouTube launched. It was opened to the public several days later. Steve Chen was financing the startup with his credit cards.
A couple of months ago, Chen and Hurley agreed to a secret meeting with Google acquisition attorney David Drummond at a Denny's restaurant halfway between the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., and the YouTube offices in a loft above a pizza joint in San Mateo, Calif. At Denny's in two clandestine meetings, Google executives and YouTube's three founders worked out a deal. Google would acquire the video site for a reported $1.65 billion in Google stock.
Now, Steve Chen can pay off his credit cards and can even finish earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois.
YouTube is just the latest and most spectacular example of how the democratization of the internet is about to change everything. For education, it seems to me, the populism inherent in the internet means one key thing: Call it student-centered learning, project-based education, constructivist pedagogy--all these related education philosophies and movements finally have a medium to give them genuine momentum.
YouTube also illustrates the leveling affect the internet is having on technology and business. This has big implications for schools and colleges as they seek to prepare their students for life and work in the 21st century. It's notable, too, that Google figures into this rags-to-riches tale, because Google is a central player in another emerging trend affecting education.
And that brings me to . . .
Trend No. 2: Cloud computing
About 20 years ago, all anybody could talk about was the concept of client/server computing. This is the model most of us still know best--a central server or servers linked through a network to a set of client computers, all running proprietary software--like Windows, OS X, Linux, and so on.
It would appear that the era of client/server computing is about to end. Back in 1993, Google's current CEO, Eric Schmidt, was the chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems. At the time, he made a prescient prediction. He said, "When the network becomes as fast as the microprocessor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network."
Sun streamlined Schmidt's prediction into a memorable tagline: "The network is the computer."
Not too many people back then knew exactly what Schmidt meant by that. In fact, the world at large is only just beginning to get it now. The light is dawning as the concepts of "service-oriented architecture" and "web services" begin to wend their way into the contemporary lexicon. "The premise," Schmidt says, "is that the data services and the architecture should be on the servers."
By data services and architecture, he means computer processes and protocols. To greatly oversimplify it, you don't use a word processing application like Word 2003, for instance. Instead, you call up, from a remote server, a function you might need. Such a function might be the process that makes a word appear in boldface on your computer screen.
Furthermore, the server from which you call up the boldface process needn't be on your own computer anymore--or even in your IT department.
Here's where Schmidt gets poetic.
"We call it 'cloud computing,'" he proclaims. "The servers should be in a cloud somewhere. And if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn't matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile telephone or a Blackberry--or new devices still to be developed--you can get access to the cloud."
What's all this about?
Google, along with Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com, and others, have positioned themselves for a new era of data management via the internet, which brings me to . . .
Trend No. 3: Service-oriented architecture
In a general sense, service-oriented architecture--or SOA--is a software solution intended to enable the enterprise to organize and marshal multiple processes. With SOA, software applications no longer are massive bundles of functions and processes. Instead, applications are composed by assembling modular services. A service, remember, is a single software function--such as cancel school bus route. It can be executed on demand by any system, without regard to its operating system, platform, programming language, or geographic location.
What's revolutionary about SOA is not the concept itself, which has been around for a while, but the fact that it now can be implemented via the World Wide Web. Just as web pages load on any platform, web services work the same regardless of platform, provided they are built using universal standards.
Developers build composite applications by interconnecting, or "orchestrating," services in a process flow. This flow can then, itself, be structured as a service. Developing such composite web services is often called Business Process Management. Standard SOA tools streamline the task of building service-orchestration models--similar to creating a flow chart.
SOA will have a major affect on the education enterprise, just as it will on all other types of enterprises, but some of the same concepts also have the potential to revolutionize instruction. And that brings me to . . .
Trend No. 4: The gathering SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)
A close cousin of service-oriented architecture is the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, or SCORM.
SCORM is a collection of standards and specifications adapted from multiple sources to allow for the interoperability, accessibility, and reusability of digital learning materials: everything from a video clip illustrating how cells divide to a PowerPoint explication of a sonnet.
The SCORM specifications--now in edition three--are becoming increasingly important for ensuring that digital content can be integrated into any learning management system (LMS) software, regardless of its manufacturer. What's more, SCORM is opening the door for the creation of "digital repositories," or collections of sharable, reusable online content that educators can search through to find items they can incorporate into their own instruction.
Though SCORM might sound complicated, its desired outcome is quite simple--to facilitate the sharing and reusability of digital learning materials among educators. Educators hope the untethering of content from its method of delivery will be a big outcome of SCORM.
Toward that end, educators should consider building SCORM compliance into their specifications when evaluating and purchasing online content and delivery systems. Virtually all of the major LMS solutions used by schools today comply with the standard. Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Pathlore, for instance, all have been certified as SCORM-compliant, and the open-source system called Moodle is on its way toward compliance.
Having a single set of standards on which to build content from the ground up--standards that allow educators to easily share and reuse content, or take the best elements from this content and tailor it to meet their own unique needs--has the potential to revolutionize instruction.
Before, with textbooks, you had to offer students information in more or less the same way it was put together by the textbook company. Now, with SCORM, you can assemble plug-and-play learning objects in a way that matches the needs of the learner.
Curriculum objects might liberate education from the rigid structure of textbooks, but nothing anytime soon is likely to take the place of an excellent teacher or an inspiring professor. And that brings me to . . .
Trend No. 5: Telepresence and anytime, anywhere education
Imagine a conference room with six chairs, three on each side of a conference table. Envision a clear glass panel running down the center of the table.
Walk into this room while a high-level parlay is under way, and you'd see six executives deep in conversation. But here's the catch: Only three of them are physically present. The three participants closest to you actually are in the room--in Chicago, say. The others are in San Jose, Calif., but their life-size, high-definition images are on the glass partition in the Chicago conference room.
According to an industry insider, unsuspecting visitors entering a room during a telepresence conference have at first been unaware that all the participants were not physically present:
"A person coming late to the conference and standing near the back of the room didn't realize a telepresence conference was going on until someone from the remote location said, 'Hey, Jim, could you move into camera range so we can see you.'"
The illusion reportedly is heightened because both locations use matching furnishings. Other elements that enhance the effect are that participants appear to make direct eye contact with one another, the streaming video is smooth and flawless, and the audio is perfectly matched to lip movement.
Whether schools and universities would be willing to pay for a full-fledged telepresence capability is unclear. But, in time, the potential for education could be substantial.
Leading universities already are making course content available over the internet, and medical schools are presenting in high-definition clinical demonstrations via Internet2. Large K-12 districts increasingly rely on video conferencing for management meetings and professional development.
As Cisco chief John Chambers puts it: "Video communications is the most effective way to communicate there is."
It seems to me telepresence is arriving just in time--just as the internet is underscoring the inter-relatedness of our world as never before. And that brings me to the final item on my list . .
Trend No. 6: 21st-century learning
An organization called the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a program designed to help educators prepare their students for the future. A consortium of leading schools, education associations, and corporations, the Partnership is working to put America on notice: Our students are falling behind in the world. America is losing its edge. Action is required now to reverse the decline in the ability of this country to compete in the global economy. Every child in America needs 21st-century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers, and leaders in the 21st century. Specifically, according to the Partnership, our students need:
Information and communication skills;
Thinking and problem-solving skills;
Interpersonal and self-direction skills;
Global awareness;
Financial, economic, and business skills; and
Civic literacy.
You can learn more about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills at their web site, which is well worth a visit.
The confluence of these six trends--the flattening influence of the internet, cloud computing, SOA, SCORM, telepresence, and the drive for 21st-century skills--makes it entirely possible to ensure our children are well prepared for the rest of this century. It really is possible now to bring the finest teachers and professors, instructional styles customized to the needs of individual learners, and best-of-breed curricula into the service of all our students.
Gathering up the will and resources needed to do it would make for a happy New Year, indeed.
Links:
Partnership for 21st Century Skills
http://21stcenturyskills.org
"Gathering SCORM could transform eLearning" (eSN Online, April 2006)
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6249
"'Telepresence' adds realism to video conferencing" (eSN Online, October 2006)
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6661
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Eight Learning Modalities
Bonus: Learning How to Think
http://www.designsforstrongminds.com/index.htm
The Science of Corporate Learning
| January 2007 - Donalee Markus, Ph.D. |
On first glance, neuroscientific research hasn’t taught much about the human brain that can be used to improve corporate training programs. Invasive studies that attach probes to neurons are not performed on humans, and no other species matches the human capacity for language and abstract reasoning. The discipline itself is merely 30 years old and thus still in its infancy. Much of what is known about human brain functions has been deduced from pathological studies, i.e. defective brains. Tumors, injuries and diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s that take portions of the brain “offline” have been used to map cognitive and behavioral functions in much the same way that, in the 15th and 16th centuries, European explorers mapped the American coastlines.
Brain-scanning equipment available today measures blood flow and glucose supply, which allows researchers to peer into healthy brains as volunteers perform memory tasks, solve problems and make decisions. These scans are the neural equivalent of a global positioning satellite (GPS) system tracking traffic flow. They can reveal where the action is without giving insight into why it occurs the way it does. With the aid of 21st-century technology, however, one thing is becoming increasingly evident: Many of the assumptions that were made in the 20th century about intelligence, memory formation and learning processes were wrong.
One of the key discoveries this young science has made is the brain’s natural plasticity, the infinite capacity for parts of the human brain to be restructured through intentional experience. For corporate trainers working to develop effective training methods and materials, brain plasticity is crucial. How memories are created and ideas generated remains a mystery, but we know intelligence is modifiable and learning is transitional because specific brain cells called neurons constantly connect, disconnect and reconnect with one another. Intelligence is not fixed but flexible, which means learning is possible. Therefore, an IQ test score is nothing more than a snapshot of a person’s intellectual ability at that moment in time. As with any other photograph, an IQ number is flat and static. It cannot predict future achievements — it only can document past experience.
Brain plasticity means human intelligence is always a work in progress. That is both the good news and the bad news. It means people enhance cognition throughout their lives, and they also can lose cognitive abilities. The part of the human brain that is the most modifiable is also the most fragile.
The best news to come out of neuroscience in the last decade is that cognitive degeneration is not a natural part of aging. People do not have to lose their mental faculties as they grow older. Just as physical exercise can keep your body strong and healthy well into your senior years, mental exercises contribute to the preservation and vitality of your brain.
If you are serious about maintaining or improving your health, both physical and mental, you know an occasional brisk walk around the block or a friendly game of bridge is not enough. You need a carefully designed regimen of gradient challenges that allows you to develop progressively without the frustration of pumping more iron than you are ready to handle.
What does all this mean for corporate training? At the simplest level, it means learning is possible and that employees can be trained to learn a wide variety of tasks and skills. The issue is far more complicated, however, when you get down to working with individuals. Many training programs might be fundamentally sound but ineffective in practice. Is this because the people in those programs are incapable of learning? Probably not. It’s that the program doesn’t address how they learn.
Eight Types of Learners
Diversity is the dominant theme of today’s business world. Suppliers and customer relations reach across countries, and colleague relationships span continents, as well as social differences such as age, sex and race. In order to communicate effectively, everyone must learn to walk in someone else’s shoes. Effective communication demands the recognition that individuals organize information in different ways. The first step to communicating effectively is to become aware of the way we take in and process information.
As you become more aware of what goes on in your mind and in the minds of the people with whom you communicate, you’ll be able to make better use of their skills. Having insight into how other people organize information vastly improves your ability to communicate with them. Misunderstanding and conflict occur in organizations because we don’t recognize how someone else takes in information. While recognizing your thinking style is like uncovering a treasure trove of information, the process is a formidable one because the majority of our thinking happens at a subconscious level — seldom do you think about your thinking.
Paradoxically, higher education tends to specialize and narrow perspectives. Consequently, many intelligent people have difficulty communicating their knowledge and effectively influencing “outsiders.” They fail to get the results they want because they don’t recognize how others organize information or interpret agendas.
The notion of different types of learners and learning styles usually refer to “auditory,” “visual” and “verbal.” While these distinctions are valid, there is a different way to think about this: in terms of how people think about their goals.
When people first confront complex problems, they tend to identify their goals in comparative terms: They want to make things better or safer, they want to be happier or richer. People want things to be different but are not clear on how or to what extent they’ll be different. In other words, they haven’t a clear vision of the result they want. Studies in decision-making processes demonstrate that when people have precise goals, the visual cortex of their brains is activated. Complex problems have elements or can produce results that are hard, if not impossible, to visualize. When you deal with complex issues, you want to have specific goals in mind while recognizing that you might need to modify them.
For some, altering a goal is the equivalent of admitting failure. And they will never admit failure. Once they’ve set their sights on a goal, they will try to move heaven and earth to achieve it. They will run a business into the ground. They will risk divorce and alienation of family and friends. They will ruin their health with long hours at the office. Perseverance is the way they get things done right.
These people can be called “bottom liners.” They focus their attention on the bottom line: What will it cost? When will it be done? They want definite answers and guarantees. Don’t bother them with details or raise issues after the course has been set because they’ll interpret your concern as disloyalty both to the cause and to them personally. Although they make good team captains and excel at planning strategies, they ignore facts that conflict with their expectations because the goal is so clear in their minds that everything else is irrelevant.
“Left-to-righters” have a similar leadership style to bottom liners in that they want guarantees from their staff, although the results they expect aren’t always articulated. Personally, they appear well-organized and like to do things in a step-by-step, orderly manner — any deviation from the norm makes them uncomfortable. While bottom liners bristle at the suggestion of failure, left-to-righters just don’t see how they could have done things differently. They had been so careful to do everything right that mistakes couldn’t have been made. But if they were made, someone else was at fault for not providing the left-to-righter with precise information in the prescribed way. Unlike bottom liners, who can consciously visualize their goals, left-to-righters are rarely aware of visualizing, but their behavior suggests their self-image closely is tied to their achievements and success.
Bottom liners and left-to-righters are particularly good at solving problems that require established routines. People look to them as natural leaders because they seem to know how to get things done right. Their strength lies in achieving simple, short-term goals. Complex problems are dynamic, though — conditions can change without warning and for no apparent reason.
The concept of a dynamic system suggests there is a “method to the madness.” Much like gears and belts in a machine, if we can determine how the pieces work together, we can predict what will happen next with some degree of confidence. Of course, sometimes belts snap or cogs break off gears. Then the whole process comes to a smoking, grinding halt. That’s one of the unknown variables that has to be factored in and makes the prediction less than perfect. But people are not always looking for a solution on which they immediately can act — sometimes they just want to understand the “how” and “why” of the complex problem. The result they want is a clear picture of the issues and the resources they’ll require.
Pattern detection is the forte of “central shapers.” If you could project an image of their minds at work, they would look like Swiss watches: complex, interactive mechanisms that are a delight in accuracy and detail. As with bottom liners, central shapers can clearly visualize a desired result. They are less interested in the result, however, than they are in finding an elegant means of achieving it. Even after the problem’s been solved, they will go back over the details, looking for a better way to solve it the next time. Their obsession with crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s is the way central shapers try to do things right next time.
As the name implies, “direction changers” do not adhere to a specific goal as strongly as bottom liners and left-to-righters. Like central shapers, direction changers can quickly perceive patterns of behavior, but they do so on a subconscious level. They have an almost eerie ability to predict cultural changes or read the boss’s mood. Their underdeveloped visual skills prevent them from acting on their intuitions in a timely manner. Consequently, most of their efforts involve doing things right by not fully committing to anything at all.
Central shapers and direction changers are particularly good at defining problems. They are the “know-how” people in an organization. They can sense what is relevant and how the pieces work together, but they tend to get bogged down in details and lose sight of the goal. Because they recognize complex problems almost immediately, they might feel overwhelmed and their self-esteem threatened. They seek relief by focusing their efforts on minor issues they can control.
Complex problems have an elusive quality — it’s like we’re viewing something moving through a fog. Here and there the fog might thin, offering a glimpse of something solid and definable. But we never clearly see all of it at one time, only bits and pieces. From the detailed parts, we need to construct a viable whole in our mind’s eye. By visualizing how the visible and invisible parts interrelate and influence the whole, we gain insight about what it will take to solve the complex problem.
Unlike central shapers, “random connectors” don’t have to fill in all the missing pieces before arriving at a conclusion. They are result-oriented, provided the result is maintaining the status quo. They have more of a feel for how the pieces fit together than a conscious visual image. Masters at networking, they think they’ve done things right if they have the “right people” on their team.
As with random connectors, “disconnectors” They might be highly knowledgeable on a specific subject — their minds are virtual data banks of information, just waiting to be tapped. They have difficulty visualizing future possibilities. They cannot translate their knowledge into doable actions, however. Consequently, for disconnectors, doing things right means keeping everything in its preordained place.
Random connectors and disconnectors are particularly good at explaining how things are. They’ll say what other people want to hear and think their responsibility ends there. They easily can overlook missing pieces because they have a feel for the operation as a whole. But in a complex system, small changes can have major consequences. Complex systems seem like only so much static until people turn their attention to them. Then, like tuning into a radio frequency, they began to exhibit form and substance.
“Outliners” have a knack for “flashbulb” thinking. Their minds work like cameras, snapping the big picture and capturing the moment. They recognize opportunities when they see them, but by not having time to focus, the images are often blurred. Their visualizations and their verbal explanations frequently lack detail. They make up for their shortcomings with great enthusiasm, however. Doing things right, for outliners, means getting everyone on board the bandwagon.
“Creators” are also “of the moment” people. Nothing excites them more than a new opportunity — they are innovators capable of quickly sketching out the next big thing. Just don’t ask them to get into the details or how they expect to get from here to there. For creators, doings things right means coming up with something new to do.
Outliners and creators are particularly good at ad hoc thinking. They have an intuitive sense of what might work at a particular time, but they are always fuzzy on specific details and the rationale for doing something. Provide them with too much information, and they’ll go off on tangents that, in their minds, keep getting bigger and better.
Given the brain’s plasticity, it’s possible for any brain to organize information in any of these eight ways. Once individuals’ underlying assumptions are revealed, they broaden their ability to perceive and respond effectively to diverse problems.
As corporate trainers, it’s important to be aware of these paradigms and use them as a guideline to incorporate the thinking process and behavior into the training, explicitly identifying goals and discussing the organizational mechanisms that best allow the learners to reach that goal. Great communicators connect with people by using meaningful analogies and examples with their audience. By talking about the thinking paradigm each person uses, enterprise educators provide the foundation for unprecedented interdisciplinary communication and geometric corporate growth.
TIME Tested Instructional Process
Time for Change
| January 2007 - Neil Lasher | |
It has been 50 years since we were introduced to Bloom’s taxonomy. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. Bloom found more than 95 percent of the test questions that learners encounter require them to think at only the lowest possible level: the recall of information.
The result was an instructional design theory based on asking “powerful” questions. These techniques are still widely used today in the classroom and by coaches to ensure learners gain a better education. The theory is that learners should respond to questions after thinking and replying rather than giving closed answers such as “Yes,” “No” or a choice of one of four multiple choice answers. Attempts to bring this instructional design theory to e-learning have been less than successful because many of the questions elicit closed answers.
It has been 40 years since we were introduced to Robert Gagne. In 1965 he published “The Conditions of Learning,” which outlined the relationship of learning objectives to appropriate instructional designs, identifying five categories of learning. In his later book, “The Principles of Instructional Design,” Gagne set out his model with “The Nine Events of Instruction.” These have become the industry standard for an instructional design model:
Instructional Event
1. Gain attention
2. Inform learners of objectives
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning
4. Present the content
5. Provide “learning guidance”
6. Elicit performance (practice)
7. Provide feedback
8. Assess performance
9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job
When used in the classroom, there is no better model. Many e-learning authors, however, have interpreted no fewer than three of these nine events by relying almost exclusively on questions and answers, often confusing or closed.
In doing this, you easily can create a culture of learning by inquisition. And with “forced” results of 100 percent, how do we measure the true results?
New approaches have been sought to enable e-learners to reach a far higher level of knowledge understanding rather than simple knowledge transfer.
To reach this goal, a shift is required in the approach we take to asking our staff to “learn.” We need to predict the needs of the workforce and move very quickly to select the most useful content and delivery techniques — we cannot expect working adults to spend all day, every day learning. In the last year, we have seen a major shift toward workflow learning, (task-based) informal learning and far smaller modules of embedded learning in systems.
I suggest taking a step outside the environment, looking at the whole picture as if you were an outsider. Have you noticed how easy it is to think of great learning interventions for other people’s issues? I am sure we all have considered a great program for the cashier at the grocery store on how to more quickly bag items.
Often, interventions attempt to “fix” or change an existing situation or process. Instead of the fix, start each learning design with a clean piece of paper — look at the purpose of the learning intervention as an outsider and try to identify the real reasons for the learning and what purpose it could really fulfill. This is known as “clean sheet development.”
Using the “clean sheet” process, consider how powerful enterprise learning could be if we could identify the potential customer we lost, the one who did not get customer support but voted with his or her feet and left. If we could understand what went wrong to make that person go elsewhere, we could write a learning intervention for the business that would bring measurable change directly to the bottom line.
With any luck, using techniques such as these will allow our “new” style of learning to be around for the same length of time as those of Bloom and Gagne.
Habits of Successful Learners in OUR DIGITAL SANDBOX!
Habits of Successful CLOs
| January 2007 - Elliott Masie | |
Once you get the title of chief learning officer, the challenge starts. Will this chapter of your life be a transformational experience for you and your organization? If we define “success” in the CLO role as making a significant difference in the performance and culture of the organization while having fun and being changed yourself, it will be a great trip. In observing dozens of CLOs over the past few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of “habits” of your more successful peers:
Becoming a CLO is the easy part. Making a difference for your employees, your organization and yourself is the real work.
A GREAT PLACE from Which to Begin!
  |
Happiness 101
One Tuesday last fall I sat in on a positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being — essentially a class in how to make yourself happier — at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. George Mason is a challenge for positive psychologists because it is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. Many students are married and already working and commute to school. It’s a place where you go to move your career forward, not to find yourself.
The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.
The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.
When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.
Though Kashdan brought up published studies that optimistic people live longer and that certain regions of the brains of positive people show more activity (“Have a very active left prefrontal lobe day,” he joked at one point), in class they didn’t spend a lot of time on clinical research. Absent were the rats with electrodes, data charts, syndromes and neuroses. The main experimental corpus seemed to be the students themselves, with Kashdan assuming the role of therapist, asserting that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.
I sat in on the course a few more times during the semester, and when Kashdan was done with pleasure versus selfless giving, he took up gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love, then spirituality and well-being and finally “meaning and purpose in life.” “I never use the word morality,” Kashdan said. Rather his goal was to show that “there are ways of living that research shows lead to better outcomes.”
More than 200 colleges and graduate schools in the United States offer classes like the one at George Mason. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Fredrickson passes out notebooks with clouds on a powdery blue cover for each student. At the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, students pass out chocolates and handwritten notes to school custodians and secretaries. The introductory positive-psychology class at Harvard attracted 855 students last spring, making it the most popular class at the school. “I teach my class on two levels,” says Tal Ben-Shahar, the instructor. “It’s like a regular academic course. The second level is where they ask the question, How can I apply this to my life?” True, the course is known as a gut, but it is also significant that 23 percent of the students who commented on it in the undergraduate evaluation guide said that it had improved their lives. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I started thinking maybe law school wasn’t for me,” wrote one graduate, Elizabeth Peterson, in her biographical précis for the masters program in applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She had decided to take the class on a whim. “I was pretty much hooked from there. I realized that what I loved the most was talking to people about their problems.”
Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology has always paid to the negative ones (depression, anger, resentment). Psychoanalysis once promised to turn acute human misery into ordinary suffering; positive psychology promises to take mild human pleasure and turn it into a profound state of well-being. “Under certain circumstances, people — they’re not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what’s the best thing life can offer,” says Martin Seligman, one of the field’s founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity. “Aristotle taught us virtue isn’t virtue unless you choose it,” Seligman says.
Sitting in Kashdan’s classroom, you might wonder whether psychology had abandoned its proper territory or found a new one, and if a new one, whether it owed more to science or to Sunday school. Perhaps that was because the class reflected the discipline’s own tension between simplicity and complexity, “good tough science,” as Seligman calls it, and airier talk of values. With its emphasis on the self in the world, positive psychology is already an ethics seminar. Which is fitting, given that it has its roots in a Socratic dialogue of sorts. Seligman likes to tell the story of how his daughter Nikki, when she was 5, accused him of being a grouch. She reminded him that he had criticized her for being whiny and that she had worked hard to stop whining. If she could stop being whiny, he could stop being grumpy. He realized, he says, that she was right, that he was “a pessimist and depressive and someone of high critical intelligence” and that he needed to change. Seligman, who at 54 had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and was renowned for his hard science — most of his research had been in depression — decided to put his considerable talents into finding out “what made life worth living.”
Though positive psychology is only beginning to be used as an educational tool in classrooms and secondary schools, in the nine years since Seligman’s epiphany it has taken a firm hold in academia. The field’s steering committee includes a number of psychologists and psychiatrists who have done highly regarded clinical work: Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose specialty is “subjective well-being”; Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, who has made a study of admired character traits around the world; George Vaillant, who has long headed a Harvard project tracking success and failure among the college’s graduates; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages. Last year’s annual positive-psychology summit in Washington attracted hundreds of academics working in the field or interested in doing so, as well as a children’s programming director, who was working to imbue her cartoons with positive psychology messages, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who studies the relationship between economics and perceptions of happiness. In addition there were a lot of “life coaches,” independent consultants who hire themselves out to help clients achieve their life goals.
Despite its seemingly American emphasis on self-reliance and self-expression, positive psychology is also proving popular in England and the British Commonwealth. Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University, helped found the Well-being Institute there last year and is consulting with Wellington College, a private boarding and day school, on how to apply positive psychology to its curriculum. The Geelong Grammar School, a prestigious boarding and day school in Australia, is planning to shape its curriculum around the precepts of positive psychology in 2008, and the government of Scotland has also been in touch with Seligman to see whether the discipline might help its citizens. “Our old nation has been renewed through our new Parliament, and if we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment,” one government official announced.
Positive psychology is popular with educators because if happiness is something that can be learned, it can be taught. And because being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers. Another study, by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at U.C. Berkeley, correlated the smiles that the female graduates of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., displayed in two mid-20th-century yearbooks with life satisfaction and found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying the marriage and the greater their well-being. Inspired by studies like these, positive psychologists have developed “interventions,” or practices, designed to maximize positive emotions and have tested them on thousands of people. One such intervention is to think every night about the good things that happened to you that day. Another is to make sure in any given day that you either work or play in a new area that draws on what positive psychologists call your “signature strengths” to create a sense of well-being. Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology, too; this last intervention, studies show, gives the biggest increase in happiness of all.
In the first few weeks of the semester, Kashdan asked his students to keep a record of their thoughts and experiences. He then gave them “experiential assignments” to make them happier, working their emotions the way an athletic coach might work their muscles. One week they were to report on attempts to go into “flow.” “Sex, drugs and chocolate are all highly useful avenues for people to attain flow states,” Kashdan said. To enter flow, students were asked to do something that they were good at, be it writing, playing basketball or talking to their friends. According to positive psychology, your signature strengths play a special role in building your confidence and thus bringing you happiness. Seligman’s Web site, authentichappiness.org, has a 240-question test to help determine whether your gift is for creativity, bravery, love or something else. In class, one student recounted going into flow during a fistfight; another told of being at her father’s grave. A third talked about being with a friend watching TV and suddenly having a profound conversation. “We had so much love for each other,” the student remembered in class, “and suddenly we were crying.”
Several studies undertaken by positive psychologists have suggested that meditation enhances well-being, so another class assignment was to meditate for 15 minutes three days in a row, attend a free yoga class (Kashdan’s wife, a yoga instructor, arranged this with her studio), be mindful twice a day and report on the results. The mindfulness exercises — excercises in heightened awareness and openness to experience — are central to positive psychology and made a big impression, according to Kashdan: “Some said they just noticed for the first time how many types of trees there are on the way to campus.”
The following week, students were asked to watch “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. In the former, the two fall in love through intense conversation during one long evening in Vienna and then part. The sequel catches up with them nine years later. The students had to write about the first time they fell in love. The next assignment was to pay a gratitude visit or write a gratitude letter. After that, the students were to exercise their curiosity by doing something “novel, complex, and uncertain . . . epistemic, sensory and social” — that is, they were to use their signature strengths to try something new. One student tasted a pomegranate for the first time; another went to a book reading by Carly Fiorina, the former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard. Finally, the students were asked to select one memory they would be willing to spend an eternity with, an intervention inspired by the Japanese movie “After Life.”
Kashdan’s enthusiasm — he is a passionate teacher — ate up class time, and so the students never got to other parts of the syllabus, among them optimism exercises and exercises that would make them better teammates. On the last week, students handed in their final papers, describing how they had tried to enhance their lives toward, in Kashdan’s words, “a specific, personally meaningful positive outcome” during the semester. There was no final exam; the students’ grades were based in large part on the paper and class participation.
In an era when psychology is seeking to become a hard science of fM.R.I.’s and evidence-based therapies, when, as Seligman says, “if it doesn’t plug into the wall, it’s not science,” positive psychology can seem like a retro endeavor with the appeal of a cure that fits on a recipe card. While this may make it particularly adaptable for use in the classroom, critics are often most disturbed by what they perceive as its prescriptive nature. “There is way too little evidence of stable, long-term benefits — and lack of harm — to justify large-scale incorporation of positive psychology programs into schools,” Julie Norem, chairwoman of the psychology department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, said in an e-mail message. “It pays scant attention to individual differences.” For all that the open, 1960s-style classroom has fallen out of favor, it allowed a child to find his or her own way. In the words of the founder of the famous Summerhill school in England, a child should be free “to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best.” Children were treated as unique, which you might think would result in a more capable, independent adults. By comparison, positive psychology can seem as if it is laying out a road and asking the adherent to follow. “If I could wave my magic wand, there would be no positive psychology — there would be positive psychologists,” says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, whose own work in the science of affective forecasting suggests that what we think will make us happy rarely does, or at least not for long. “I guess I just wish it didn’t look so much like a religion.”
Indeed, the sectlike feel of positive psychology can be hard to shake off when watching classes like Kashdan’s or even when reviewing the record of the field’s beginnings. When Seligman was first trying to establish the discipline, he and his colleagues invited 25 young psychologists to the Yucatán to discuss the positive side of life. They snorkeled and talked philosophy and then swam some more. They summarized their work and listened to others’ reactions. One evening, the group devoted itself to poetry and song. Seligman recited Ezra Pound’s “Immorality”; a colleague named Sonja Lyubomirsky read some of Prospero’s speeches from “The Tempest.” Seligman’s daughter Lara — Seligman educates his five younger children in part by traveling with them — recited a Delmore Schwartz poem, “I Am Cherry Alive.”
The talk under the palapas was not just about happiness but also about engagement. Participants contrasted the “hedonic treadmill” with “the meaningful life.” To find the qualities that gave life purpose, the team examined Western religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Bushido as well as the mores of 70 nations. Over time, positive psychologists, led by Christopher Peterson, settled on 24 virtues — or character strengths, as they prefer to call them — including courage, modesty, spirituality and leadership. “The agenda comes from the world,” Seligman told me. “These are universals we’re after.”
The search for what unites humans in virtue was an ambitious effort to integrate psychology with those fields that have long sat alongside it: ethics, religion, philosophy. Before the retreat in Mexico, Seligman met with one of his former professors, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. His book “The Examined Life,” written late in his career, looked at how questions of value might be related to everyday experience. It was Nozick who suggested a “taxonomy of character,” by which he meant, as Seligman put it, a list of “those abiding moral traits that everyone values.” Lyubomirsky remembers that many of the young scientists were uncomfortable doing so. “There was a lot of debate about it,” she said. “We were trained as hard scientists.” Seligman wasn’t so sure himself that he wanted virtue to be part of positive psychology either: he was wary of science becoming prescriptive, but Csikszentmihalyi was enthusiastic, Seligman recalled, and in the end Seligman agreed.
Two criticisms as troubling as the problem of positive psychology’s religiosity are 1) that it is not new — psychology always cared about happiness and 2) that the publicity about the field has gotten ahead of the science, which may be no good anyway. True, there have been attempts to marry psychology to ethics, to enlist it in the service of decoding what it means to be fully human, throughout its history. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, among others, established humanistic psychology to focus on what gave meaning to life, looking at the very subjects positive psychologists now take as their own. But where Maslow and Rogers relied primarily on qualitative research for their theories, Seligman and his colleagues hope to establish positive psychology — and thus the nature of happiness itself — on firmer scientific ground. The idea that whatever science there is may not yet be first-class troubles Seligman, too. “I have the same worry they do. That’s what I do at 4 in the morning,” he says.
When Todd Kashdan asked his students at George Mason to tell him which they liked better, experiencing pleasure or doing good, he cautioned, “Don’t give me the Miss Universe answers.” But when I met the participants in the nation’s only master’s program in applied positive psychology, at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt the spirit of Gandhi was hovering over us. One woman wrote in her application essay, “My strange and energetic career has included activism for peace and justice; teaching safety and self-defense skills to 10,000 students.” She was also a founder of two nonprofit organizations and taught “Swedish massage and stress-reduction skills.” Another sold her Mercedes and was using her savings to pay for the course. A third left banking to find the meaning in life.
There were, in all, about 30 students in the master’s class at Penn on the Saturday in September I attended. MAPP, as the program is known, is organized around intensive days of class time, online work and conference calls. Seligman, who runs the program, says that he likes to invite others to lecture so he can learn what’s going on in the field, and so that day Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” theory, while Seligman sat at a little table nodding and taking notes. “It’s a neat design that allows humans and other organisms to grow and become more resourceful versions of themselves,” she told the class.
The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones.
For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern — i.e. the triangular pattern — while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)
This was only the first part of Fredrickson’s theory. But it could be that thinking broadly has no effect on happiness or well-being — it might even be a deficit. To show that broadening led to building, she then described an experiment she had undertaken on a group of employees at Compuware, a progressive information-technology firm in Detroit. With the company’s assistance, she followed two groups — one that was taught a loving-kindness meditation (a meditation in which the practitioner repeats phrases that cultivate a caring attitude toward all life) and one that was wait-listed for the meditation. After eight weeks, she compared the two groups’ responses to questions about well-being. Those who meditated reported higher mental resources than before; their mindfulness, freedom from illness and connectedness to others all increased. But interestingly, their sense of well-being hadn’t, at least not immediately. It dropped at first. “It’s like you started a gym membership and then you realize you have to go,” Fredrickson theorized. But once their sense of well-being increased, they retained their edge over those who only wanted to meditate even after the meditation program was over.
All this interested Seligman’s students, but what Fredrickson says always catches their attention most is a study Fredrickson did with a Brazilian workplace psychologist named Marcia Losada, who observed annual strategic-review meetings of employees through one-way mirrors. The data she collected showed that the most effective teams — the criteria were customer satisfaction, profitability and internal review — were the ones who had more positive meetings. There was even a number that corresponded to the minimum amount of positive to negative feedback necessary to encourage successful functioning. That number, Fredrickson told the class, was three positive comments to one negative comment. “The ratio lady,” one student called her.
With its emphasis on universals and practical applications, positive psychology fits these divided times: it preaches values without linking them to a particular value system and embraces spirituality without making you go to church. When positive psychology was introduced into the language-arts program at Strath Haven High School outside Philadelphia in 2003, the left-leaning parents welcomed it because the values were internationally accepted; all but the most conservative ones were reassured that there were values at all.
Seligman recently held a meeting with the leaders from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and the KIPP program, a national network of public charter schools, at which the educational leaders discussed introducing positive psychology into their schools. They are all looking to restore “wholeness” to the teenage years, to replace the supposed sense of certainty that the ’60s removed and that returned in the ’80s as a national political objective but that teachers are now too bogged down in the fundamentals to teach and adults, working longer and longer hours, are simply too busy to shore up at home. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for June, this time with a dozen schools; one item on the agenda is to add personal strengths and virtues to admissions criteria. (Educational Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn’t be able to fake.) “What this is about is building character,” Seligman says.
Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology’s drawing board is at the Geelong School. “As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,” Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls “Australia’s Eton,” wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, “When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.” The Australians “have had a lot of depression in kids, that’s half the reason they want it,” said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.
What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong’s support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the “three pathways of happiness,” “the four ways to promote savoring” and “the five ways to overcome” adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try “savoring with a friend.” The students would have journals to record their emotions, their “grudges and gratitudes.” They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel “their well-being” and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback.
This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like “Lord of the Flies” and “Romeo and Juliet” with some reassuring thoughts — or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district’s curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in “Lord of the Flies” shows “what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.” And when reading “The Odyssey,” students were asked: “What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?” It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school’s students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with “books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,” like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”)
Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. “I did not think the science was ready to be applied in that big a way,” she told me. Linkins acknowledges that happiness may come at the cost of a full understanding of literature and human complexity. But, he said, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”
The question is, Can positive psychology actually fulfill its promise of making people happier? If positive emotions widen the sphere of what it is to be human, as positive psychology asserts, then positive psychology, at least as it is taught in the classroom, can seem to narrow it. If you are not optimistic, fake it. If you do not have friends, make some. I wondered what sort of student positive psychology would create. Was he or she more likely to be a future Nobel Peace Prize winner or J. P. (Gus) Godsey, the Virginia Beach stockbroker, dad and Craftsmen-tool enthusiast whom USA Weekend Magazine declared in 2003 “the happiest person in America” (“You are a blessed, happy person, Gus,” Martin Seligman commented in the article. “You’ve created many of your blessings on your own.”)
When I e-mailed various graduates of Penn’s first master’s class, I found that they continued to take positive psychology’s emphasis on the engaged life very seriously. One woman was using positive psychology to teach first-year medical students better patient-communication skills, citing Fredrickson’s optimal flourishing ratio as a benchmark. John Yeager, who has a doctorate in education and runs the Center for Character Excellence at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Indiana, wants to “help teachers ‘broaden and build’ character strengths and positive emotions in children, young adults and themselves.”
Of course the master’s students were a self-selected group, willing to pay almost $40,000 for a degree with no clear career track. The students at George Mason, though they, too, had chosen the course, were perhaps more relevant to the question of what positive psychology can really teach. There I found a mixed response. They seemed remarkably sure that they had undergone an important experience but less sure what the nature of that experience had been. Had they saved the world or themselves? I spoke to Brandon Rasmussen, an easygoing student who seemed to me like a surfer dude washed up on some New Age shore. The class had energized him, and he had been a vigorous participant — earning an A. His final paper was about learning to really be with his friends, going into flow with them, something he had long had difficulty doing. “My personal satisfaction is the personal measure for me, and my personal satisfaction is great,” he explained. “I hate to say this, but really in the scheme of things we’re not going to change the war in Iraq.” Then he paused and thought how that sounded. “We can only fix the world one person at a time.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)