Category: Social Change

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Changing the Bathwater, Keeping the Baby

Throwing the baby out with the bathwaterIt’s clear that there is quite a lot about this thing we call “school” that probably needs to change and that there are many schools around the world that are embracing and leading that change with some really innovative ideas about teaching and learning.

However, from what I can tell, innovation and genuine change for the better in education is still rather patchy and relies greatly on the passion and drive of individual teachers, many of whom fly “under the radar” in order to make positive change in their own educational circumstance. There are certainly schools that are, as a single organisation or even a whole system, making giant strides towards reinventing what modern education should be about, but if I was able to randomly drop you into one of the many millions of classrooms around the world to observe what’s taking place inside it, I think it would still be fairly hit or miss as to whether you’d find teaching and learning that was modern, contemporary and representative of the change that many of us want to see happen in education.

We talk a lot about reinventing school. We sometimes declare that school is a “broken system” and wonder about what it would be like to start with a clean slate. We feel the weight of tradition, of a school system based around an agrarian calendar, of a system that was born in a pre-digital age and we dream about changing it. We embrace technology. We build charter schools. We try lots of ideas for making schooling not only different, but hopefully better.

But you know something? Many of the smartest people I know are a product of this “broken” system. Many students emerge from their 13 years of schooling as perfectly normal, well adjusted, happy individuals, ready to embrace the task of making their own dent in the universe. So despite that fact that we like to declare schooling to be in dire need of an overhaul, it seems that it still produces many people who do just fine, thank you very much. This broken system, for all its faults, does actually work for some people. I’m well aware that it does NOT work for many others, and that it could probably work better even for those that emerged from it doing ok, but it got me wondering what aspects of school DO in fact work.

I’m as keen as anyone else to push education forward, to help rebuild it into something that is better and more able to meet the needs of even more students. To make it more “21st century”, if you will. Like so many of my colleagues around the world, I want to be an advocate for the change we need to drag our school system, often kicking and screaming, into the current millennium.

In the process, I’m wondering what, if anything, we should try to keep.

I once asked a group of students to imagine what school could be like if we could wipe the slate clean. What would “school” look like if we could start again, with no preconceptions about what school should look like. I was trying to prompt them to imagine what would happen if we took EVERYTHING about school, burnt it to the ground and threw it away, in order to rebuild the very notion of “school” from the ground up. Their answers were interesting; some were clearly unable to imagine anything that was much different to their current reality, and others really took to the idea of school with an axe, questioning everything and leaving very little that resembled school as we know it.

If we COULD wipe the slate clean, if we could just scrap everything about school and education as we know it, is there anything that you would keep? Despite the claims that our schools are not serving the needs of our current students, is there ANYTHING we do right now that we would NOT want to lose?

I understand that society, technology and the world around our students is changing at a pace greater than at anytime in history, and I appreciate that we really do need to get on with the task of reinventing schools to make them places of learning designed for our students’ future, not our own past, but perhaps we also have to be careful we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So let me ask you… What do you think are the valuable, enduring and timeless aspects of education?  What are the things that, no matter how much we end up reinventing this thing we call “school”, you would not want to lose?

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The Digital Shift

old tvIn 1963, when I was born…

Television was delivered over the airwaves. In black and white. We had four channels to choose from and we had to get out of our seat to change them. And we hardly ever heard a swear word.

Radio was only available using an AM signal. In mono. If you didn’t like the song that was on, you could switch to the other station. If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you had a small transistor radio with a tinny speaker or a single earpiece. And if you wanted to hear “your show”, you had to listen while it was being broadcast.

Newspapers were printed on paper and printed every 24 hours. The time between a story happening and us finding out about it was often several days. Which stories made it into the newspaper was decided by an editor somewhere. The text on the page was made by rolling ink across the tops of slugs of lead in shape of letters, assembled to make sentences, and then pressing those inked letters against paper. The paper was then folded, cut, bundled onto trucks and delivered to your local newsagent where you had to go to buy it.

Photography required the use of film, a long strip of plastic covered in a silver emulsion. You could take either 12, 24 or 36 photos at a time. Once you’d taken all the photos that would fit on the roll (and only then), you had to send them away to be developed. This usually took about 2 weeks.

Moviemaking also required film. It was a continuous strip of 8mm wide plastic and required a dark room and a projector to view it. Each reel went for 3 minutes. They were expensive to process, and hardly anyone ever bothered to edit them. Having sound was an expensive luxury.

Music was stored on round black disks called records, which had long spiral grooves etched into them that mirrored the soundwaves that described the music. It was, quite literally, an analog of the waveform. Later, you could get audio cassettes that could hold either 60 or 90 minutes of music. You had to flip them over halfway through, usually in the middle of a song. Solving technical problems with cassettes required the use of a pencil. The audio quality, in hindsight, was awful.

oldphoneTelephone calls were made from home, sitting next to the phone. If it was a long distance call you had to think in three minute blocks of time. You only called long distance on special occasions like Christmas or birthdays, and you had an egg timer sitting next to the phone. Telephones were made for making telephone calls. That’s all.

It’s now 2013.

In those 50 years that have passed, most people would agree that some of these things have undergone a few changes, and those changes have occurred mostly because they went digital.

Television went digital. It is now far more likely to be delivered over a cable In full high definition colour and 3D, with 5.1 surround sound. If you don’t like what’s on, you can choose from hundreds of other channels. If you want to watch something else entirely, you can stream on demand via YouTube or some other web-based video service.  Oh, and there probably will be swearing. Lots of swearing.

Radio went digital. You now have dozens and dozens of high quality FM transmissions to choose from. You can take your listening mobile in your car, or go portable on your MP3 player or phone. You can timeshift your listening by storing your favourite radio shows as podcasts and listen whenever it’s convenient. Or listen to stuff that you find interesting that would never make it on the radio.  All for free.

News went digital. Multiple streams of news, based on your interests, can be delivered to you almost as it happens. You can choose your sources; global, local, hyperlocal. You can contribute to the stream if you choose. You can comment, argue, debate. You can participate. Twitter redefines what we mean by news, and can help start revolutions in the process. We can find out about anything, anytime, anywhere. For free.

Photography went digital. You can now take as many photos as you want, in massively high resolution. You can see them immediately after you take them. You don’t have to wait. You can enhance them, fix them, or delete them if you don’t want to keep them. You can share them instantly with anyone, anywhere in the world. Immediately. For free.

Moviemaking went digital. You can now shoot movies in ultra high definition. With sound. You can view them immediately, edit them in ways that only professional studios could once do, share them easily with your family and friends. You can send them to any device you like, to watch right away. For free.

Music went digital. The processes for creating, storing, distributing and sharing music are dramatically different. Using services like iTunes, Pandora or Spotify, you can listen to any music you like, whenever you like, however you like, on whatever device you like. It’s delivered in high quality stereo. It’s editable and remixable. You can swap and share music with others, anywhere in the world. For free.

Communication went digital. Telephones have morphed into mobile “devices” that can be carried anywhere, making you contactable wherever you are. Voice signals now travel the world over thin glass threads at the speed of light. VOIP software like Skype or Google Voice let you talk to anyone, anywhere, for as long as you like, with multiple people. With video too if you want it. For free.

And the best part of all? Because all of these things share the same digital heritage of zeros and ones, they can be easily mixed and mashed, and can live on the same clever device, bringing us true digital convergence.

So think about it. Think about just how much the rules have changed.  In a mere 50 years – barely a blink really – we have gone from a world where things that were hard to do have become easy, things that were time consuming to do have become instant, things that offered few options now come with seemingly unlimited choice, things that were expensive have become virtually free, things that were once scarce are now abundant.

Think about what that does to the world. What happens to economics when scarcity swaps places with abundance and expensive things become free? What happens to the human experience when time-consuming things become instant and difficult things become easy?  What happens to society when things that once required special training and special equipment are now within the reach of anyone who wants to do them?

In less than 50 years we have essentially shifted from an analog world to a digital world. The implications of that change have affected virtually every field you can think of. It’s difficult to imagine how an industry like banking or travel could possibly have ever functioned without the use of digital information and communication technologies. Like it or not, this digital genie is never going back into the bottle.

So, what are your survival strategies for a digital world?
What sorts of things do you do to feel at ease in a digital world?
What are the essential skills, mindsets and attitudes that one needs for a digital world?
What moral and ethical stances make sense in a digital world?
How do you become a productive, responsible citizen in a digital world?
How do you stay safe in a digital world?
How do you decide what is public and what is private in a digital world?
How much do you share in a digital world?
What defines appropriate in a digital world?

These are the sorts of questions we should be asking ourselves as we aim to be productive members of a society gone digital. Ironically, while some of these things require a serious rethink, many of the answers may simply be an evolution of those that applied in the analog world. The question is, which ones?

And once you figure it out, how do you help children figure it out? Because for them, this is the only world they’ve even known.

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Disrupting the Bloodsuckers

A couple of years ago, I coauthored a book about teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of IWBs here, but believe me when I say I can see both sides of the arguments for and against them. Regardless of your opinions about the worth of IWBs, I was pleased that the book was able to focus on the importance of quality teaching, and I think we made a pretty solid point in the book that any classroom technology is only as good as the pedagogical expertise being applied to its use.

It was an interesting exercise, as I’d never written an actual book before. As this type of niche book goes, it’s been reasonably successful. It sold out of its first, and then second editions, and has now been reprinted several times. It got some excellent reviews. The company that published it, ACER Press, tells us that it’s actually their number one selling book, so it’s rather nice to know that it’s been well received by so many people. It’s been translated into Swedish and reprinted there, and there was also some interest in translating it into Turkish too. Sales of the book outside Australia are apparently doing quite well. By all accounts it’s been a reasonable success for ACER Press.

My fiancée Linda has also just finished writing her first book. It’s a novel, with a hilarious storyline that follows the adventures of a woman about to turn 40 who decides to give Internet dating a go. Linda’s been working on it on and off for about 6 years now, so there is a certain sense of jubilation in our house that she’s finally finished, and she’s currently going through the process of designing covers, organising a final proofread, and getting it published.

The difference with Linda’s book is that she has decided to self publish. Not only has she written it, she’s also managing the cover design, layout, typesetting and publication. She’ll buy her own ISBN, write a marketing plan for it and oversee its execution (she is, after all, a marketing gal through and through). She originally wanted to try and sell it to a publisher, but after seeing how little value traditional publishers add to the process she has most definitely decided not to do it the traditional way.

Her decision was further vindicated today when I checked the mail to find a royalty cheque from the publishers of my book. I get them twice a year. Don’t get too excited about it.

My most recent book royalty – for a book that is relatively successful – was $101.  It retails for $34.95.  I did the math based on the number of books sold and it turns out that I’m making 64 cents per copy. Yes, 64 lousy cents.

Of course, I didn’t write it all myself so my coauthor, Mal Lee, gets the other 64 cents. Had either of us written it on our own, we would be raking a princely $1.28 per copy. Awesome, huh?  I wonder where the other $33.67 goes.  Oh, of course, the publishers.

It seems that we got royally screwed in the book contract deal, because the fine print stated that we would not get any royalties from overseas sales, only Australian ones. Nice one ACER. Way to look after your authors.

Watching Linda pursue the self-publishing path got me thinking about the way so many industries are being disrupted. How the record industry was reshaped by not only “illegal” filesharing, but also by the fact that emerging digital technologies put a great deal of power into the hands of musicians to not only record their music independently but also to distribute it. We saw the same thing happen to the travel industry, as people go online to make their own travel arrangements. Look at the photographic business, and how disruptive digital technologies have been there. Look at what social technologies are doing to the way people freely share reviews of products, services, restaurants, hotels. Even the crowdsourced service that Linda used to design her book cover, 99designs, has a business model that is causing great disruption in the graphic design industry. It’s happening absolutely everywhere.

The thing that struck me tonight as I looked at my piddly little royalty cheque, was that the reason so many traditional industries fight this disruption so much is their claim of needing to protect the artists, writers and musicians. “You have to pay for the music, or musicians won’t have any financial incentive to keep producing music!” say the record companies. “We have to fight to protect the rights of authors so they can keep writing books!” say the publishing houses. They argue that their role is to provide content creators with sufficient protection so that they can keep earning an income and so continue producing their work.

I call BS on this.

Book publishers are greedy, self interested leeches that do very little to support the authors that do the actual hard work of writing. I think the same could be said of the music business, and probably many other businesses too. They are far more interested in protecting their bloated out-of-touch business models than they are in protecting the rights of their authors and musicians.

Linda is absolutely doing the right thing by self publishing. If I ever write another book, I would never, ever, on principle, work through a publisher again. I’d rather sell a few hundred books on my own terms than sell a few thousand on theirs. I will never again sign away my rights as an author to a publisher. Ever.

It’s not about the money. I write this blog for no reward. I continually turn down offers to monetise this blog, and I license everything here (and most other places I make stuff) under a Creative Commons license. I’d rather give my stuff away than have some bloodsucking publisher insult me by paying me 64 cents for the privilege of “protecting” my rights as an author by taking the other 90% of the profits.

Never again.