I’ve recently been reading a lot about how traditional media are changing. I think there should be some parallels with school change.

It appears that listenership on radio is changing dramatically. First of all, satellite radio allowes individuals to listen to their favorite radio station whenever and wherever they are. Secondly, iPods allow individuals to listen to exactly the music that they enjoy most. In fact, iTunes with the use of Genius even helps you find new music aligned with your personal taste. And thirdly, some of the most popular radio is talk radio. So what does all this mean? In society today individuals want to listen to what they like, when they like it, and in many cases they want to interact, not just be passive listeners.

I think students in classrooms feel the same. It is just no longer acceptable, just because somebody is an adult, to stand in front of the room and spew information and expect the student to eagerly soak it up. Students want more say in what the content is, and more interaction.

TV today? I don’t know about you, but I think TiVo was one of the great inventions of the 20th century! It finds my favorite programs, records them for me, allow me to watch them when I want, and best of all, I don’t have to watch the commercials! And if that isn’t good enough I can go to YouTube and find darn near anything I want to watch, or even create my own, which I have done, and put it on YouTube! I can create my very own channel on YouTube.

So again, comparing it to the traditional classroom, I want the content that I want, in a format that allows me to consume it how I want, and the ability to make meaning of, and create my own, content!

Newspapers. Going out of business. Fewer and fewer people want somebody else to decide what’s important for them to read, and to dictate when they get it and in what format. Enter the news aggregators. I can set up a news aggregator, for example Google reader, and it becomes my personal assistance that 24/7 is searching for exactly the stories and news that I want to read. How does that compare to a textbook?!

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have much time to read. So much of what I get in terms of news and information, is in the form of a podcast or an audio book. In fact, I haven’t read a book in years. But I listened to about 60 books year. I’m guessing that we still have substantial numbers of schools that don’t allow their students to consume information in audio format. In fact I can guarantee it.

So what does all this mean for school change? Probably nothing, schools seem to be impervious to societal changes and influences. –  Steve Wyckoff

Seems like a simple concept right? Reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I thought about this this morning and chuckled to myself. If you want proof about how the world is changing just take four simple concepts like these and think about how they play out in the 21st century.

I hardly ever read any more, but I read about 60 books a year. How so you ask? My favorite library is located at audible.com. I have subscriptions for four books a month plus I typically buy several more. So am I well read? Or well listened?

Writing? I’m lost without my speech to text software. While it’s not perfect, for somebody like me who can’t spell, and can’t type, yes I’m a hunt and pecker, speech to text is a lifesaver. I recognize that I’ll never be a good writer, but speech to text does at least make me better. Hold on, does that make me a better writer or a better speaker? And is “speaking in” text the same as speaking to an audience?

And how it all of this be accepted for students in schools today? Is the most important skill reading, or  for having the content of the book get into your brain? And is the act of typing or writing the important part, or getting your thoughts down on paper?

And I haven’t even ventured  into the world of text-to-speech that is available on almost every computer today. I admit, that occasionally I will use the text-to-speech function for e-mails or articles so I can just sit back and take in the content.

All of these issues are probably irrelevant in schools because they do nothing to improve standardized test scores. And besides, most schools would not allow our kids to have the technology present in class.

Often times when I present to educators there is a discussion about the relevance of content. Not the content is irrelevant, but that is changing so rapidly that it is extremely hard to keep pace with the change. We often hear data that says knowledge is doubling every… you fill in the blank, every 12 months, every 18 months, every 24 months. I’m not quite sure how these numbers are calculated and for the longest time I wasn’t sure how this explosion in knowledge occures.

Evidently I’m not the only one that has that question. On several occasions individuals have approached me following my presentation and asked, “Just how is knowledge expanding so fast?” Usually followed by, “I just don’t get it.” I recently was vividly reminded how the explosion in knowledge occurs.

As you may be aware from previous blog post I don’t type these posts, I enter them with speech to text software. A couple of weeks ago one of my friends and colleagues, Kevin Honeycutt, began using the same speech to text software. Now for those of you that know Kevin, you know that he is a social networking fanatic. When he started using his new speech to text software he was very excited and posted a comment to Plurk and twitter. Within 30 minutes a representative of the company that makes the software contacted him to see how he liked his software.

Of course he was amazed and delighted, and also a little creeped out It’s worth analyzing how the company knew that he commented and why. Most likely, the company has created a Google alert that notifies them immediately any time Google detects whatever word or phrase the company was looking for, and e-mails them immediately. if you haven’t done a Google alert it’s easy and fun. Just go to google.com (if you don’t have an account just create one quickly, it free) and click on Google alerts, enter a phrase, and tell it you want to be notified once a day or every time an instance occurs.

So how does this make knowledge expand? Think about this, you are a scientist and this morning in your lab you made a discovery. During your coffee break you post to your blog and explain what you discovered. Soon after you posted your blog a spider from Google crawled through your bog and indexed it. As it crawled through your blog it found the exactly phrase a scientist on the other side of the world was looking for. She’d created a Google alert looking for that phrase, and as soon as Google found it, it sent her an e-mail with a link to your blog.

So on the other side of the world she was having her morning coffee and looking through her Google alerts. She found a link to your blog, clicked on it, went to your blog, read about your discovery, and a great big lightbulb went off in her head! The discovery you made was just a piece of information that she needed to move forward on her own work. She quickly applied the piece of information you had supplied and made even more gains in her work. At the end of the day, she posted her discovery to her blog and another scientist somewhere else in the world had his light turned on by her piece of information. And so the cycle goes.

In the past your initial discovery would have been written into a formal paper, submitted for peer review, published, and some months or years later ended up on her desk for her to read in a professional journal. In the 21st century that process takes hours or minutes. So you can see that the sharing of information is speeding up how quickly discoveries are made, shared, and used to create new knowledge.

Now the bad news. When speaking to educators I now ask them how many have set up Google alerts in their subject area so that they are staying current on the most up-to-date knowledge and discoveries in their field. How many respond? Almost none. It’s not all their fault, there are many barriers. Most schools mandate a textbook that the teacher must use in which the information is dreadfully out of date. Almost all states have high stakes standardized test that are as out of date as the textbooks.

So send me a comment and tell me what you think about this, I’d love to hear from you.

Take a second and look at the list below. What do each of these have in common?

Cell phones
Smart phones
iPod
Chat
Text messaging
Twitter
Facebook
E-mail

Perhaps you said these were all digital. Or that they are all customized and individualized. You may have said these are all things that kids use. Or you may have said these are all things that are used in businesses today as  tools. All of those would have been correct, but they weren’t what I was looking for.

The thing I’ve noticed that they all have in common is that each of these is banned in the vast majority of our schools. Wouldn’t you think that the tools that are used daily in our kids lives, and are also used as business tools, would be utilized equally effectively in our schools?

When I talk to faculties of high schools they are adamant that these items should never be used in school. And in fact, they identified them as huge distractions to student learning. My question to the staff members is, “who is responsible for teaching kids to write multipage research papers?” Typically, several hands go up. Usually they are members of the social studies department, or the English department, or the science department, or a combination of all of these.

But when I asked who was responsible for teaching kids the appropriate use of the items in the list there is  never hand raised. My next question then is which of these would be most often used by our students in the real world, a multipage research paper or the items in the list above? Obviously, the items in the list will be used regularly by most, if not all, of our kids in the real world as students, and adults. They will be used both in their personal life, in their professional lives.

So why do schools refuse to incorporate these items not only asked curriculum content, but also as tools to learn the existing content? What do you think? Leave me a comment below and we’ll talk about it.

My colleagues and I  are involved in one of the most interesting and exciting projects we’ve ever done at ESSDACK, and yet at the same time one of the scariest we’ve ever  done at ESSDACK. We are creating a website, My Kids Turn, that is designed to assist parents in helping their kids learn things that are important to them to succeed in school, and hopefully life.

We will have webcasts that help parents of primary school kids, three and four-year-olds, learn to read and work mathematically. We’ll have the same kind of webcasts designed for kids that are in primary grades, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

We’ll have another series of webcast for parents to understand what it means for their kids to grow up digital. To have the kinds of electronic tools that, as kids, the parents didn’t have. It’s very scary for parents to see their kids have access to technology and tools that they the parents didn’t have as kids and may not even understand as an adult.

Related to  the digital tools we will also have a series of webcasts on video gaming. For many parents this is an even scarier proposition than the digital tools. At least the parents use digital tools in their everyday life, so they have some understanding of them. But many parents have never even played the kinds of video games that  kids love to play today. So these webcasts are designed to help parents make decisions about which games to allow their kids to play, how long to allow them to play, and what the educational benefits are of the games.

So stay tuned for mykidsturn.com that will be launched in late January or early February 2010 with these and many other webcast for parents. If you have questions or comments please leave them below, I’d love to correspond with you.