Throwing out the textbooks

I presented a keynote a couple weeks ago on Open Education. In talking about the reasons for open ed, I make the following points:

• We must differentiate instruction if we are going to engage and reach students who have increasingly diverse backgrounds, skills, and interests.
  
• Textbooks are not an effective tool for differentiating (or engaging) students.
• Technology can be a better tool, but high quality content is required for effective integration.
  
• There is a huge industry that has grown up around the development and adoption of textbooks. There is a lot of money invested in this industry, and it is not likely to change, regardless of the benefits to learning.
  
• Open educational resources (OER) provide a new approach to this challenge.
  

So after my presentation, a very excited teacher came up to me and said, "I've done just what you've said! I've thrown out our textbooks!" (He told me later that they actually sold their textbooks. Great idea for a fund-raiser!)

He then went out to his car and brought back the materials he's developed to share with me. He is a history teacher and has developed a very innovative system that he calls the "dynamic classroom." It involves binders that the kids construct over the course of the year, bringing together predictable learning routines, effective strategies, and hands on activities.

What most struck me in talking to this gentleman was 1.) his passion for his subject matter and for teaching, 2.) how much personal time and effort he's put into his teaching, and 3.) the results he's gotten with his students.

Then I started thinking about the potential of this approach. The materials appeared to be perfectly suited to building a wiki. I began imagining each kid with a $300 laptop building interactive web sites instead of binders. The possibilities are rich. Then I started thinking about this project built as an open-licensed curriculum. Everyone could benefit from the work this industrious teacher has done.

I know that there are teachers all over the world doing creative things like this, prompting their students to have rich learning experiences. These teachers know more about their content and engaging kids than most textbook publishers do. I think that most of these teachers are willing to share.

This is the potential of Open Education.
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Image courtesy of Alexander Baxevanis.

It's the content

There is a lot of resistance to cell phones in schools based on fear of undesirable consequences and the lack of a good reason to have them in a school environment. How much would that change if every child could access interactive textbooks, instructional videos, educational simulations, and an electronic library via their phone?

A new approach to defining what's important

Yesterday, David Warlick, in writing about Wikia, mused "what if we had a curriculum that was open and inviting to being gamed by the learners -- in a good way?"

I've spent most of the last couple months neck-deep in state standards, textbooks, and other curriculum materials, trying to develop some more comprehensible and engaging ways to teach things. A few thoughts and experiences I've had while doing this:

- If a kid was tasked with creating with a concise, understandable, and engaging way of presenting a math concept as a 2-3 minute video (as I've been doing), he or she would sure understand the concept.

- If a kid researched the history of India and found three "reliable" sources (none of which were Wikipedia, though I'd add that as a fourth resource) that each had a very different take on the "facts" with no consensus on "key dates" like when India became a British colony, some real understandings would emerge. (Some of these might include that all sources are somewhat subjective; that there often isn't clear consensus on what is a "fact;" that events happen on a continuum, not on a specific day; and that understandings of underlying motivations and themes are more important than names, dates, and places.)

- If a kid had to develop an assessment that tied to key state standards, they might well wonder how these standards were developed and have some interesting reflections on curriculum, standards, and assessment. (Or maybe that's just me talking.:)

All of this fuels my interest in the open education movement and the idea that open tools like wikis are a very interesting alternative to textbooks. My interest in this area is grounded in a belief that most textbooks and other curriculum materials are ineffective educational tools.

One real problem with the idea of having kids actively creating their own curriculum and learning is time. I concede that there really aren't enough minutes in the school schedule (or even hours in the whole day) to explore the content required in that kind of detail. Of course if teachers didn't have to reteach skills and content every year because it wasn't mastered in previous years, that would help. But there still isn't enough time for everything.

Following that line of thought leads to looking at curriculum frameworks. There is simply too much included in most sets of standards to be reasonable. That leads to a curriculum that becomes a whirlwind of trying to get kids to memorize a rush of facts that will get them through the state tests. The result is kids who don't know the basics and, even worse, who have poor basic literacy skills and a real lack of critical thinking and analysis abilities.

We need to examine critically state standards.

Having sat on various discussions with state DOEs and textbook committees, I know the problem. We all want kids to learn what is important. And we all have different ideas of what is important. Get a committee of 20 or more people together to discuss and negotiate this, and before you know it, you have a set of grade level expectations that is 100 pages long and a textbook that weighs so much that it is a health concern (for chiropractic reasons....not considering the learning implications :). [Sidenote: The textbook industry has come up with the clever solution of having schools buy two textbooks for each child so that one can be left at home. They seem to have sidestepped the learning implications at stake.]

How much of this is really critical information? Will it help kids get a job or compete effectively in the 21st century world?

These are tough questions. It's much easier to include everything in the curriculum than to make hard decisions about what to drop. It's more politically expedient to declare that no child will be left behind than to look at why our education system is not preparing students for the modern world. It's more convenient to blame things that are out of our control like kids' home lives or text messaging than to think that the problem is at the very core of how we've been defining successful learning.

While I've heard a lot of luminaries point to a lot of problems with education, I haven't heard many people point to frameworks and standards as a source of the problems. What do you think? Do state (national, district) standards need to be reformed?

This problem is so steeped in politics that it is difficult to know where to begin working on it. But like others, I want to try.

New ways to look at content and 1:1

Happy New Year! I haven't been blogging as much as usual the last month or two because I am up to my ears in a ton of curriculum we're developing for mobile devices. (THE Journal ran a nice article about using mobile devices for delivering content if you haven't seen it.) We have been developing everything from mini-movies on subjects like sight words and how to skip count for little kids to interactive ebooks on topics from world history to percents, decimals, and fractions for secondary and adult learners.

This had gotten me thinking a lot about a couple topics:

1. How electronic resources can be more effective than textbooks to engage kids and especially to differentiate instruction

2. How the future of 1-to-1 computing for schools is shaping up

I think that both of these are critical if we're going to be successful in engaging kids. I'll write more about the first topic in another post. Regarding the second topic, there are a lot of new devices shipping, including things like the XO computer, the Eee, the Kindle, the iPod Touch, etc.

I think the keys to a solid device for education are:

- Low cost (under $300 seems to be a key price point for schools)
- Long battery life (at least 6 hours)
- Multimedia capability (audio and video)
- Capacity for "real" computing (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation -- could be via Web 2.0)

There are other features that I'd rate as nice-to-have but not essential like wireless, color, durability, etc.

None of the devices above quite hits all of my "must-have" features, but they are all pretty close. The second-generation releases are likely to be there. Right now, the Eee is probably the closest, though the Kindle is the one that has my attention (in part because I think it may have the longest staying power, which is really critical to schools.) Interestingly, handhelds from Palm and HP -- which have been around for years -- already have all these features. Alas, though, they are no longer the latest and greatest. (Don't get me started venting my frustration on how trend-driven technology is, even in schools.)

Some people have said that these devices are too limited for schools because there isn't textbook content available for them. The more I think about the idea of textbook publishers putting their content on mobile devices though (something I used to look forward to, though it's probably still a long ways off), the more I don't think it's the road to a better future. It's easy to list reasons textbooks don't work for most kids -- they are huge; they are boring; there is no differentiation; there is little interactivity; the content isn't comprehensible; etc. etc.

So why would we want that same content in an electronic format?

Differentiating Instruction with Mobile Technology

At NECC last week, I presented a session called "Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction." The ISTE folks had wanted to podcast the session, but I wasn't crazy about the legal agreement they were using. (It wasn't Creative Commons and gave pretty extensive rights to Apple.)

So....I created my own digital version of this session for folks to download:

Audio only (MP3)
Video version (streaming, for viewing in a browser; loads faster, but lower quality)
Video version (WMV, 320x240, for Win download)
Video version (MOV, 320x240, for Mac download)
Video version (M4V, 320x240, for ipod download)

If anyone is interested in a higher resolution version to share with folks who weren't able to attend, email me, and I'll try to send you a CD.

For those who are interested, I audio recorded this with a very inexpensive Olympus WS-100 pocket recorder. I edited the audio in Audacity and brought it all into Windows Movie Maker for editing. The visuals included exported jpgs from my presentation slides and screen-capture videos made with Camstudio. I used HandShare to create the Palm movies (which is the same software I used to present). Creating the whole thing took about 4 hours.

It was a lot of fun making this and was a good way to reflect on my own style of presenting (and hopefully refine it for upcoming events).

I hope this is a useful resource for you all.

Effectiveness of textbooks?

There have been a lot of discussions in the press and the blogosphere about the USDOE's "Effectiveess of Reading and Mathematics Software Products" report on a few drill-oriented educational software programs and the findings that their use did not significantly affect test scores. There are many obvious flaws in the study itself, as well as the extrapolation of this research to the use of technology in general. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

This made me wonder though -- has the DOE (or other independent third-party) done comparable research studies on the educational effectiveness of textbooks? I am seriously curious about this. If anyone knows of a study like this, please post a comment or email me.

If no one knows of such a study, I'd like to see research on the effectiveness of textbooks in improving student learning, increasing engagement, and developing critical thinking skills. Anyone out there interested in pursuing this?

Just think of the money that could be freed up for other uses if it were scientifically determined that kids in classrooms that used textbooks didn't score higher on tests.

Textbooks

I went to an interesting speech by the Director of the USDOE's Office of Education Technology yesterday. In the presentation, he contrasted textbooks and Wikipedia as information resources. He said that textbooks have "authoritative content," but face "distribution problems." ( I think he meant usability problems. He mentioned the heavy backpack problem.) Wikipedia, he went on to say, has wonderful distribution, but a problem with a lack of authoritative content. (He cited what I thought was not a very representative example.)

I had just presented a session at which I'd made the claim that textbooks aren't very useful to most students today. (And I worked in textbook publishing for almost 10 years, so you can imagine how much it hurts me to say that.) On the other hand, my view on Wikipedia has shifted over the last year or so. I now think it is a pretty good resource.

Then on my way to work this morning, I heard a piece on NPR called "A Look at How the U.S. Understanding of its Own History Changes." It traced the treatment of the Mexican-American war by textbooks over time. As you might imagine, it varied considerably. (Heck, we can't even agree on the cause of the war we're in right now.)

So, what does all this mean? Perhaps that no one source of information, including textbooks, should be considered to be "authoritative." Some of the most important things we can teach kids in this age of information are to be critical information consumers, to use multiple sources, and not to treat anything as unquestional "fact."