On Tuesday and Wednesday, KnowledgeWorks held the second of four convenings on topics addressed by the Map of Future Forces Affecting Education [map]. The topic of this meeting was Modernizing Teaching Tools; we are interested in technologies that educators use for teaching and learning. Like the last convening in Denver, we sought to explore a range of ideas, not to build consensus.

The Map contains many relevant trends: Participatory Pedagogy, which offers the challenges, frustrations, and rewards of collaborative design to both the teachers and the students. Technologies of Cooperation are out there and in use, including instant messaging, social networks, telepresence, blogs and wikis, and massively multi-player games. Media-Savvy Youth and Personal Digital Media both reflect the growing competence with, and willingness to create, rich content. And the hotspot of Media-Rich Pervasive Learning perhaps best sums up the focus of this convening: anytime, anyplace learning is here.

Barriers to Adoption

During the last convening on Professional Learning Communities, I observed that all participants took for granted that technology can and will take a role in forming communities. This time around, in spite of an overall theme of technology, the crowd was again uninterested in the specific whats and far more interested in the whys and hows; they want to:

• find the good ideas
• figure out which ones are appropriate under what circumstances
• get other educators to use them

Of those tasks, finding the good ideas is the least difficult; if anything, there are too many libraries and repositories and directories for educators. Market forces and tools for personalization will probably consolidate these resources soon.

Figuring out which approaches are appropriate for a given educational challenge is difficult, especially in the current policy framework. No Child Left Behind emphasizes system-wide standards over localization and personalization.

Getting other educators to use new tools and techniques is possibly the biggest challenge identified by this group. A mix of personal attitudes towards technology, and policies that usually favor the status quo over innovation and the system over the students, combine to put up huge systemic barriers to adoption and make everyone - students, teachers, parents, administrators, etc. - averse to risk.

One other observation is worth mentioning in connection with that last task: There were several participants that would rather go around the system than work within it. The most outspoken was Robert Clegg of Tabula Digita, who envisions a pure manifestation of Open Economy Principles and Unbundled Education: a world without schools. This vocal minority demonstrate a growing belief that our educational system is set up to fail learners.

Conclusions

The challenges to innovation are many, but there are immediate and long-term strategies that can work.

In the near-term, Rick Beach of Classroom of the Future offered an excellent technique for adoption on a local level: assume that 25% of your fellow educators are interested, 50% will become interested if results are obvious, and 25% would rather die than change. That offers a starting point for right here and now: you can promote innovation in education by modeling good tools and techniques, and sharing them with like-minded folks (both locally and through online communities). As these ideas take root, the fence-sitters will join of their own accord, or because broad-minded administrators see the value and force the change.

The long-term strategy is two-pronged: keep pushing on the open economy principles that allow innovation to take place, and push hard on policy-makers to create a level playing field for students. And let’s not forget, as Karl Fisch put it during one of the final sessions:

We are the system, and therefore we have a responsibility. — Karl Fisch

The KWF site for the convenings is live; the MTT site will be updated with more detailed information about this convening, as well as the final paper.

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