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1185310_us_cavalryFederal ARRA stimulus funding has been keeping schools around the country on life support for the past year. Despite significant layoffs around the country it headed off catastrophe in many states. That era is coming to an end later this year or early next year.

It was heartening to see Secretary Duncan take up the cause in a statement issued today. Unless Congress acts and provides a second round the deteriorating tax climate at the state and local level is going to cause massive disruption to the education system in 2011 and beyond.

“We are gravely concerned that the kind of state and local budget threats our schools face today will put our hard-earned reforms at risk,” he stated. “Every day brings reports of layoffs, program cuts, class time reductions, and class size increases.”

532497422_f925be50c4_oOne of the annoying parts of running a blog are the spam comments from people who want to surreptitiously sneak a back-link to their site on your blog. Askimet handles most of this automatically (thank you – thank you – thank you) but every day one or two servings of spam get past the filters.

Normally the posts are pretty lame “Great post – please write more…blah blah blah” hoping that your ego gets in front of your ability to see that the website link is “buy-cheap-crap.com.”

Today was different. Whoever was at the other end of the intertubes was clearly making an effort to at least amuse themselves. While I won’t post the link I will share the content of the comment for your amusement.

Fight Apathy or don'tWhile we hash out what ARRA Stimulus funds mean for education there are larger issues at play in how we allocate public spending on children.

The New York Times has a good piece today that links to several good resources on this topic.

In a nutshell – 2.2% of GDP declining to 1.9% by 2019.

NFImageImportliteracy n. The condition or quality of being literate, especially the ability to read and write.

Surpise! It turns out that the generation in school today is writing more and reading more. Several recent reports provide evidence to support this startling claim. The internet – a time pig that has consumed us with new ways of doing things – has wings.

This trend is global – according to the CIA literacy rates went from 50-60% in the 1970’s to over 80% by 2005. Teens are leading the way. TV is for geezers.

070_picsGrowing up in New England I was taught that it was rude to discuss politics, religion, or money with casual acquaintances. Later, when I entered the business world, I was never one to socialize much with co-workers beyond lunch or meals on the road. It isn’t that I have a problem with making friends through work – I often do – but as a matter of preference I like to keep a little distance between my work life and my personal life.

Thus, when I dove headfirst into social media and on-line gaming four to five years ago I tried to establish different outposts for the compartments of my life. LinkedIn was for work, Facebook was for friends. Twitter and World of Warcraft were supposed to be for friends. Plaxo was work related. This blog is my professional on-line persona. I reserved politics and spirituality for other blogs.

FAILURE

fail-owned-my-first-failMy last post on the difficulty of educational reform got me thinking about that other massive system we are trying to reform – healthcare. One way to understand the healthcare system is to compare it to education – where we have had universal single payer access for over 100 years.

In that vein – what would education look like if if it were run like the healthcare system? By transporting our healthcare practices to another environment we can strip away the patina of familiarity and acceptance and see some of the insanity in our system in a harsher light.

Well meaning people can disagree strongly on the specifics of what is needed (and they do). I found as I wrote this that I had to examine my own pre-conceived notions. For example – state funding for education creates some of the same problems the system of private monopolies in medical insurance forces us to wrestle with. The public option in healthcare is the mirror image of charter schools in education – both aim to open up competition and provide alternatives.

66_picsThe Superintendent’s panel at EdNet this week featured a discussion about education reform that was like a cold bucket of water to the face.

The Supers were teaching us about inertia, the tendency of objects to maintain their current state. As Newton himself put it:

The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.

The panelists were discussing what will change in the next 5-10 years in education. They were looking globally at the overall system (teacher evaluation, bell schedule, technology, instructional materials, funding flows, etc.). In this context the Superintendent of one of the largest districts in the country (LACOE), in a state (CA) that is experiencing a state of extreme financial distress, stated that she didn’t think anything significant would change until we had a “major crisis.”

 Images 08Ednetlogoweb2 0408EdNet turned 20 this year. EdNet 2008 is happening right now in Boston. A huge congratulations goes out to the whole EdNet team for forging one of the required stops for the Educati. Nelson Heller, Vicki Bigham, Anne Wujcik and the rest of the team continue to put on an outstanding event year after year.

I’ve been attending since the early 90’s and it is wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many new ones every year. It is always a delicious tension to juggle attending sessions and spending time out in the hallway conducting business. More often than not business wins – but either way you come out ahead. You can learn valuable insights in the sessions or you can make valuable connections in the schmoozefest out by the coffee.

Ever since 9/11 EdNet has also been a somber reminder for me of the events that day. We were all in a general session when it happened and we retired en masse to the bar (not open) to watch in horror and sympathy as the grisly events unfolded. We could see the smoke at the Pentagon from our rooms in the hotel. I remember walking in the park a couple of days later and the unsettling silence because there were no planes weaving down the Potomac to National. Every 15 minutes a lone F18 would circle overhead.

490819_ipod_videoInformation is expanding exponentially. Applying database concepts to your information diet can mean the difference between overload and sanity, chaos and productivity. Database fluency is mandatory in a digital world. Students and teachers should be practicing and refining this skill so that today’s learners can make the most of the sea of data they swim in.

Almost anything you encounter in digital format can be managed using database techniques. At their root Facebook (relationships), iTunes (music, movies, tv, books, etc.), del.icio.us (bookmarks), flickr (photos), Moodle (lesson plans, learning management), and We Are Teachers (referrals) share a common database DNA. Even blogs through their categories and tag clouds are databases.

Email is an example. Treat the sender’s address as a data point. Then set up rules (database queries) to have all your boss’s emails sent to a high priority folder and Aunt Mabel’s political ravings sent straight to the trash. This approach allows you to target the urgent items amidst a sea of dross.

The Education Need

Educators and educational publishers have a vital role to play in our move to a database driven world. Why?

  • Students need to develop database fluency if they are going to get the most out of their digital lives. Learning Management Systems (LMS), social networks, and on-line research are all core tools for 21st Century education. Database fluency should become part of the curriculum along with textual, numerical, and visual fluencies.
  • Teachers need access to networks of peers, experts, and content to be able to deliver on the promise of individualized instruction.
  • Administrators and Policy Makers need to measure results across groups and efficiently allocate resources.

Every one of these needs is best met by a database and fluent users.

The Goal

The end result should be personal growth, valued relationships, and effective organizations. But in the first flush of widespread adoption we are losing sight of this. Consider the statement “I “friended” 1,000 people on Facebook therefor I have 1,000 friends.” Wrong. Many people are confusing the database with their relationships.

A teacher could take the Facebook example above and build an interesting set of discussions around the meaning of friendship, how to find a small network of people who are interested in the same things you are, what you can do to contribute, and how to manage the relationships that emerge. It isn’t creating huge numbers of meaningless connections that matters – it is finding the needles in the haystack of humanity that you want to build bonds of friendship with.

Database Fluency

What is database fluency – what are the core skills proficient users need to master?

  • Ubiquity – See every digital file you touch as a potential data point. Emails, MP3 files, Word documents, student records, and your photos are all potential data points.
  • Searching – Understanding how to craft logical questions that return useful information takes ongoing practice (“and”, “or”, “greater than”, “before”, etc.). Learning to to harness the advanced search features almost all applications have is another part of this skill.
  • Homing – The ability to find what is meaningful and valuable in large data sets by asking the right questions at the right time. Is this a reliable source? How recent is the data? Does this address the question I set out to answer? Is it usable or a tangled mess? How does it compare with other results?
  • Tagging – Users tag data elements to personalize them. This can be through formal taxonomies provided by the database author (“Male, Female”) or informal folksonomies created on the fly by users (flickr tag clouds). Since tagging is so open-ended having some basic rules in place can help insure you are able to use the tag cloud later to search the data.
  • Cleaning – Any collection of data gets messy after a while – knowing how to clean your data just like you clean your room is an essential part of working with large data sets. Without maintenance your searching and tagging get bogged down.
  • Reporting – Creating clear usable reports that make the point you are after is an important part of turning data into information and eventually into wisdom. When is a table better than a bar chart? Should I focus on 5 or 500 names?

None of this involves database programming. That is a skill more akin to auto mechanics – I don’t need to know how to tune my engine to drive a car. I also don’t need to know SQL to use a social networking site. However, for driving and networking I do need to know the rules of the road and how navigate where I want to go.

How these elements appear in different applications varies widely – understanding the underlying dynamics helps harness their power across many environments.

RSS readers click through to see the full article – 3 detailed examples that bring these concepts to life and some suggestions on where to start.

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