Change the technology culture of school. The voice & choice of inclusive education needs an open by default infrastructure for communication and collaboration. Technology will not find its place in the classroom until we move away from the remediation of the deficit model and embrace open and accessible collaboration.
Read Mindstorms. https://t.co/BBhsgwY2FZ—
Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) August 01, 2016
‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’
Source: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Don’t mistake that common platform for a locked-down, top-down LMS. Don’t mistake it for shrinkwrap, cargo cult culture bought from a corporation whose business model is the deficit model. We’re not talking ed tech, we’re talking indie ed-tech–the real, promethean stuff.
For his part, in that Stanford talk, Jim Groom pointed to 80s indie punk as a source of inspiration for indie ed-tech. “Why 1980s indie punk?” Groom explains,
First and foremost because I dig it. But secondly it provides an interesting parallel for what we might consider Indie Edtech. Indie punk represents a staunchly independent, iconoclastic, and DIY approach to music which encompasses many of the principles we aspired to when creating open, accessible networks for teaching and learning at [the University of Mary Washington]. Make it open source, cheap, and true alternatives [sic] to the pre-packaged learning management systems that had hijacked innovation.
The LMS is our major record label. Prepackaged software. A prepackaged sound.
Source: ‘I Love My Label’: Resisting the Pre-Packaged Sound in Ed-Tech
"If we don’t like ‘the system’ of ed-tech, we should create one of our own." https://t.co/teQ92fR4Y8
Yes.https://t.co/NFDBJhaavF
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) January 5, 2017
Projects, teams, passions, & play + indie ed tech powered communication-is-oxygen. Not complicated, not expensive, not someone's biz model.
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) January 13, 2017
The Basics of Open Technology
Albemarle County Schools‘ Seven Pathways uses open technology informed by toolbelt theory and universal design for learning. Their Basics of Open Technology is a good primer on how to do tech in the classroom right. This is compatible with neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and structural ideology.
The promise of contemporary technology lives in what these tools can do that previous learning and educational technologies could not — they are open, connected, individualizable, and flexible. But if your school adopts these new technologies without adopting the policies and practices that take advantage of these differences, you have likely defeated your students before you’ve even begun.
Student Control
An Abundance of Tools
Accessibility
Access Everywhere
BYOD and an Open Network
Talk to Parents
Worry About Behavior, Not Technology
Spend Wisely
Trust in Children and Childhood
Their philosophy emphasizes assistive tech and helping kids find their voice through technology.
No student will have mechanical limitations in access to either information or communication — whether through disability, inability at this moment, or even just discomfort. Learning is our goal, and we make it accessible.
Source: The Basics of Open Technology | Edutopia
No child within the Albemarle County Public Schools should need a label or prescription in order to access the tools of learning or environments they need. Within the constraints of other laws (in particular, copyright) we will offer alternative representations of information, multiple tools, and a variety of instructional strategies to provide access for all learners to acquire lifelong learning competencies and the knowledge and skills specified in curricular standards. We will create classroom cultures that fully embrace differentiation of instruction, student work, and assessment based upon individual learners’ needs and capabilities. We will apply contemporary learning science to create accessible entry points for all students in our learning environments; and which support students in learning how to make technology choices to overcome disabilities and inabilities, and to leverage preferences and capabilities.
Source: Seven Pathways
Follow superintendent Pam Moran and technology innovation director Ira Socol on Twitter, and read their blogs.
https://speedchange.blogspot.com/
https://sites.google.com/site/iradavidsocol/
https://medium.com/@irasocol/
https://spacesforlearning.wordpress.com/
https://medium.com/@pammoran
And check out their educational technology plan.
The Open Schoolhouse
Charlie Reisinger (@charlie3) is a good resource on the open schoolhouse, open learning, service learning, 1:1 laptop programs, student help desks, and WordPress in education. In his school district, Penn Manor, student IT apprentices write code, write documentation, image laptops, and provide helpdesk support. Their code and docs are open source and available on GitHub.
Here are some videos on Penn Manor’s approach to the open schoolhouse.
The Power of Open in Education
Enabling students in a digital age
Penn Manor: The power of open in education
Lessons From the Open Source Schoolhouse
Teaching The Next Generation of WordPress Bloggers and Hackers
Rewiring Generation Z
Mr. Reisinger poses the vitally important question, “Which side of the command line should our kids be on?”
Change the narrative of ed. Embrace open & give voice. “Which side of the command line should our kids be on?” https://t.co/4jKm0MJASO
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) August 22, 2016
His book The Open Schoolhouse is out now. Here are some excerpts.
Locked-down technology is a symptom of an education system designed for student compliance and defined by the incessant measurement of learning. A factory-like school system values what a student has purportedly learned on a linear path, as demonstrated by a standardized test score. Technology device restraints and restrictions lock students on the assessment assembly line, at the cost of a child’s curiosity and intellectual freedom.
Source: How leveraging open source solutions helps give students in-demand skills | Opensource.com
Given unfettered permission to revise, remix, and redistribute curriculum material, teachers are trusted to become active agents in the creation of high-quality learning materials.
At Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Linux and open source software are the foundations for more than 4000 student laptops, classroom computers, and district servers. We’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by going open source in both the server room and the classroom.
To #GoOpenSource means more than simple cost savings for underfunded schools. Like openly-licensed education material, open source values invite collaborative and participatory learning. When a school culture honors learning by doing, students become active agents in their education, and they contribute to the school community in innovative new ways.
Source: Schools that #GoOpen should #GoOpenSource
I think of Moodle and WordPress as fraternal twins. Passionate and ingenious founders with ardent beliefs in free and open source software created both software platforms. Global communities of programmers, designers, and end users drive the development of both platforms. They use similar web technologies (LAMP), and subscribe to principles of simplicity and ease of use. They are credited with creating, and disrupting, entire industries. And they made dramatic impacts on our students, teachers, and staff.
There is also a deeper ethical problem: reliance on closed source proprietary software teaches students a lesson of dependence on secret technology they are powerless to examine, study, share, and improve upon. If the social mission of schools is to amplify student potential, disseminate knowledge, and prepare students to have an impact on the world, then schools have a duty to help kids be free thinkers and self-reliant architects of their futures.
Source: Reisinger, Charlie (2016-09-29). The Open Schoolhouse: Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students. Kindle Edition.
For more selections from the book, see here.
Hacker Ethos
It’s a software-eaten world; get hip to coding and the hacker ethos.
What is code? Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.
Scratching itches: hacker ethos & project-based learning
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
Loosely Coupled, Tightly Aligned
Eat Your Own Dogfood
Release Early, Release Often
Rough Consenus and Running Code
Agile and Scrum
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
Taco Bell Programming
Break Smart
Promethean > Pastoralist
Learn to code
Plain text and Markdown
Created Serendipity: Idea Scouting, Idea Connecting, Coworking, Distributed Collaboration, and Intersectional Bricolage
The credentialist social order has been waning since peak centralization in the 1970s. Work and the world are shifting from credentialist to hacker modes of social organization. Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are useful cultural literacy. The edtech cronyism of the past 15 years– driven by greed, assessment, bad metrics, and algorithmic cruelty–is a culture ill-suited to collaboration. Software eats industries and networks eat geography, bringing collaborative hacker culture along with them. Education’s turn is now. If you’re going to get eaten by software, choose indie ed tech over corporatist ed tech and deficit model greed. Engage the digital commons and educate for massive software-driven change. When navigatating the society transforming tidal wave of automation, fluency in the hacker ethos, distributed collaboration, and loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams is very helpful.
In fact, a core element of the hacker ethos is the belief that being open to possibilities and embracing uncertainty is necessary for the actual future to unfold in positive ways. Or as computing pioneer Alan Kay put it, inventing the future is easier than predicting it.
Source: Towards a Mass Flourishing
In our Tale of Two Computers, the parent is a four-century-old computer whose basic architecture was laid down in the zero-sum mercantile age. It runs on paperware, credentialism, and exhaustive territorial claims that completely carve up the world with strongly regulated boundaries. Its structure is based on hierarchically arranged container-like organizations, ranging from families to nations. In this order of things, there is no natural place for a free frontier. Ideally, there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. It is a computer designed for stability, within which innovation is a bug rather than a feature.
We’ll call this planet-scale computer the geographic world.
The child is a young, half-century old computer whose basic architecture was laid down during the Cold War. It runs on software, the hacker ethos, and soft networks that wire up the planet in ever-richer, non-exclusive, non-zero-sum ways. Its structure is based on streams like Twitter: open, non-hierarchical flows of real-time information from multiple overlapping networks. In this order of things, everything from banal household gadgets to space probes becomes part of a frontier for ceaseless innovation through bricolage. It is a computer designed for rapid, disorderly and serendipitous evolution, within which innovation, far from being a bug, is the primary feature.
We’ll call this planet-scale computer the networked world.
The networked world is not new. It is at least as old as the oldest trade routes, which have been spreading subversive ideas alongside valuable commodities throughout history. What is new is its growing ability to dominate the geographic world. The story of software eating the world is the also the story of networks eating geography.
There are two major subplots to this story. The first subplot is about bits dominating atoms. The second subplot is about the rise of a new culture of problem-solving.
Source: A Tale of Two Computers
Promethean > Pastoralist. Creative marginal cultures will triumph. https://t.co/YNNcUWz9N2
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) August 26, 2016
Teams
In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
Source: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Source: Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
To build 21st Century learning from the ground up, we look to see how companies like Google, Spotify, and GE build their innovative cultures. Their secret to innovation? Agile. Where focused teams unleash creativity, adapt through fast learning cycles, and iterate towards success.
Agile Classrooms self-organizes its own learning, uses visual accountability structures, and are immersed in reflective feedback. It is a structured learning environment that restores the freedom to teach and learn. Where students reclaim responsibility for their own learning and teachers shift into facilitators and coaches.
Source: Agile Classrooms
For more on teams, see my posts on Agile and Scrum in Education and Projects, Teams, and Psychological Safety.
Team Communication
My company uses Slack & hundreds of WordPress blogs running P2 to communicate & collaborate. Our three level communication stack is sympathetic to anxiety and imposter syndrome and informed by neurodiversity. We’ve been iterating on this for over a decade, and I think we get some things right. You can take an idea from small audiences to global audiences with feedback and encouragement along the way.
See P2 in action on the sites at make.wordpress.org.
For an example of using Slack for team chat, join the WordPress Slack. It’s open to anyone in the world. Come look around and lurk as the software running 26% of the web is built.
An open source alternative to Slack used by some districts is Mattermost. Penn Manor moved to Mattermost in 2016. Mattermost derives is name from the importance of communication. Communication is oxygen.
WordPress for School Districts
Newark is a large school district using WordPress for internal and external communication. @camworld of SchoolPresser built and manages the 70+ WP sites at the Newark district. This podcast talks to him about moving Newark over to WordPress. He gets into nuts and bolts and case study, including cost model.
Very interesting talk by @camworld about migrating to #WP from a proprietary CMS in public school systems #wcus pic.twitter.com/3IHnnB6eFP
— SashaEndohCodeDesign (@SashaEndoh) December 2, 2016
See his talk on WordPress for Schools at WordCamp Raleigh (slides).
There are thousands of so-called widgets, plugins and themes that are just as important for a one-person blogger than the world’s largest publishers. Gartner’s recent pace-layered application strategy shows that organisations can accelerate their innovation by choosing an array of systems that support business requirements on long-, medium- and short-term timescales.
Systems that maximise connectivity between the pace layers offer organisations competitive advantage. WordPress’ ubiquity has driven it to enjoy a rich ecosystem of connectivity and integration, something that the baked-in WordPress REST API now extends that connectivity infinitely. This is why things will accelerate in 2017.
Source: How WordPress Ate The Internet in 2016… And The World in 2017
High school, college, and sometimes even middle school students help make WordPress. Shipping to an authentic audience is powerful and life changing.
Backchannels
Ditch That Textbook provides examples of how to use blogs and team chat in the classroom. Chapter 3, Use Technology to Defeat Insecurity, offers good insight into the neurodiversity friendliness of backchannels, something familiar to tech workers.
A backchannel is a separate, often text-based, discussion students engage in while they’re receiving information via a lecture, a movie, a television show, or a PowerPoint presentation. Students use a digital device to participate in a behind-the-scenes chat so as not to disturb others trying to listen.
Backchannels provide the perfect outlet for students who have something to say but refuse to open up in class discussions. When everyone participates in the conversation, no one feels singled out. As a result, inhibitions about sharing decrease and the courage to speak up increases. Plus, when everyone types at once, the teacher spends less time calling on students one by one.
I personally believe that the backchannel is the greatest unharnessed resource that we as educators have available to us. It does not threaten me nor bother me that you learned as much if not more from the backchannel the other night — in fact, it makes me feel great that I facilitated the connection.
Source: Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Backchannels and Microblogging Streams
And that’s not even touching on the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who’d rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it.
Source: SpeEdChange: Bringing the “Back Channel” Forward
IT Culture
The culture change that @18F & @USDS embody is needed in public education to support project-based learning & BYOD. https://t.co/8FDVhpmOiW
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 5, 2016
The continuous communication, collaboration & iteration of PBL requires IT reform. Consult:https://t.co/T8HlN7sN2Ghttps://t.co/PUmXk5khlZ
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 18, 2016
To accommodate continuous communication, collaboration and iteration, change the culture of IT acquisition & digital services. Consult the 18F & USDS playbooks.
The Digital Services Playbook — from the U.S. Digital Service
Introduction – 18F Digital Services Team Playbook
18F Partnership Playbook – 18F Partnership Playbook
Code.gov
The goal was simple: burst the stereotypical beltway bubble and expose government employees and bureaucratic workflows to mainstream technology thinking.
Source: The difference between 18F and USDS – Ben Balter
Members of Congress of all stripes and party affiliations are embracing the game-changing promise of better government technology shipped by the modern approach employed by hundreds of hardworking people serving their country at 18F and USDS. Same goes for the career bureaucracy, to varying degrees. And it appears that, at least under oath and the klieg lights, the private-sector vendor community grudgingly does too.
The culture change 18F and USDS embody is starting to take hold, challenging the mindset of entrenched for-profit IT vendors, attacking the billions wasted each year on busted IT, and putting the status quo on notice.
Source: Doing IT Right: Congressional Oversight of President Obama’s Signature Tech Teams – Medium
I was in a meeting once where someone said, “How long will it take to fix that?” One person, who’d been at the company for years, said, “Three months.” A new person, who’d just come from a world of rapidly provisioned cloud microservices, said, “Three minutes.” They were both correct. That’s how change enters into this world. Slowly at first, then on the front page of Hacker News.
Source: What is code? Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.
We need the culture change of @18F and @USDS in order to humanize flow through gov. systems. https://t.co/3wr6EXzwg5
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 5, 2016
Somebody, somewhere, is doing the same thing you say you can’t do. https://t.co/6elCvZNZxU pic.twitter.com/m2mEcOrBz9
— George Couros (@gcouros) August 2, 2016
Adopting the USDS and 18F playbooks will inoculate against edtech cronyism.
When schools buy edtech cronyware, they reward the forces destroying public education. Go open… https://t.co/NFDBJhaavF https://t.co/AjylHPxrU1
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) December 7, 2016
Schools do continue to turn away from the iPad as the tablet hasn’t proven to be quite as revolutionary as some predicted. Surprise, surprise. But the rationale for choosing a certain type of computing device is almost always about testing, not about any other benefit the device might offer teaching and learning.
But this notion of an “OS War” shouldn’t be too quickly dismissed. “Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google Are Fighting a War for the Classroom,” Edutechnica wrote in June, with a look at how many colleges have adopted their competing “pseudo-LMSes.” The “war” extends beyond the productivity suite of tech tools and it extends beyond operating system in the classroom. It’s about building brand allegiance with students and/as workers, and it’s about building data profiles to sell ads and other products.
The LMS, of course, needn’t be a permanent line item in schools’ budgets. And its supposed primacy might actually overlook that there’s a great deal of “shadow” technology utilized by instructors who eschew the official LMS for something they find better suited to their classroom needs and goals.
The learning management system is a piece of “enterprise” software after all. That is, it’s built and bought to satisfy the needs of the institution rather than the needs of individual. Purchasing an LMS – or more correctly, signing a contract to license an LMS – requires its own enterprise-level bureaucracy.
I’ve argued elsewhere that education technology serves as a “Trojan horse” of sorts, carrying with it into public institutions the practices, politics, and a culture of private business and the ideology of Silicon Valley.
Of course, what drives the programming on Sesame Street now isn’t education research; it’s market research. It isn’t “equity” as in social justice; it’s “equity” as in the financial stake a VC takes in a company.
And that’s what “the business of education technology” gets us.
Source: The Business of Education Technology
"Education technology faces an inexhaustible supply of quackery." https://t.co/YtOtSd8jLg
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) December 7, 2016
'the “platform society” offers merely an entrenchment of surveillance capitalism' normalized by edtech https://t.co/3bSmeGC213
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) January 5, 2017
There is a gap developing between the business users of enterprise applications and the IT professionals charged with providing these applications. The business leaders are looking for modern, easy-to-use applications that can be quickly deployed to solve a specific problem or respond to a market opportunity. Meanwhile, the IT organization is typically working toward a strategic goal of standardizing on a limited set of comprehensive application suites in order to minimize integration issues, maximize security and reduce IT costs. These competing goals often lead to strategic misalignment.
Business users often complain that, no matter what they ask for, IT tells them either that they have to use the functionality in the existing application portfolio or that they have to wait until the current multiyear rollout is finished before the problem can be addressed. In today’s dynamic business climate, with constantly changing business models and users who are fully aware of the power of technology, this is simply an unacceptable answer.
Organizations must establish a new strategy for business applications that responds to the desire of the business to use technology to establish sustainable differentiation and drive innovative new processes, while providing a secure and cost-effective environment to support core business processes.
Source: Accelerating Innovation by Adopting a Pace-Layered Application Strategy
Writing in the Age of Distributed Collaboration
The difference between writing for an audience and writing for a grade is vast. https://t.co/QUvapBMHWU
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) November 20, 2016
As a hacker and writer, I spend a lot of time in text editors. Almost everything I write starts in my favorite text editor. A text editor is my thinking space. My notes are not just a record of my thinking process, they are my thinking process. Iteration and ideation happen in my editor, in plain text.
At my company, we say “communication is oxygen”. Most of that oxygen is writing. So far this week, we’ve written 99,786 Slack messages, 1,749 P2 posts, and 5,070 P2 comments using our three level communication flow.
Source: Writing in Education and Plain Text Flow
Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.
while many parents worked hard to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers.
We are now a global culture of avid writers.
As Brandt notes, reading and writing have become blended: “People read in order to generate writing; we read from the posture of the writer; we write to other people who write.” Or as Francesca Coppa, a professor who studies the enormous fan fiction community, explains to me, “It’s like the Bloomsbury Group in the early twentieth century, where everybody is a writer and everybody is an audience. They were all writers who were reading each other’s stuff, and then writing about that, too.”
So how is all this writing changing our cognitive behavior?
• • • For one, it can help clarify our thinking. Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.
Poets famously report this sensation. “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
Culturally, we revere the Rodin ideal— the belief that genius breakthroughs come from our gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process.
Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.
The explosion of online writing has a second aspect that is even more important than the first, though: it’s almost always done for an audience.
When you write something online— whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand-word post— you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you’re doing it anonymously. Audiences clarify the mind even more.
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly.
When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.
When asked to write for a real audience of students in another country, students write essays that are substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re writing for their teacher. When asked to contribute to a wiki— a space that’s highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words— college students snap to attention, writing more formally and including more sources to back up their work.
“Often they’re handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they suddenly were staying up to two a.m. honing and rewriting the entries and carefully sourcing everything,” she tells me. The reason, the students explained to her, was that their audience— the Wikipedia community— was quite gimlet eyed and critical.
Once thinking is public, connections take over.
Source: Thompson, Clive (2013-09-12). Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (p. 50). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Iterate Together; do_action
do_action events bring non-profits and open source communities together to build and improve websites. Let’s do the same for school districts. Students, teachers, and tech workers iterating and learning together as they build the infrastructure for oxygen.
http://doaction.org/
Privacy
.@DSISD PTA, Instead of bringing the FBI in to talk fear & predators, seek a practical ed. re: online privacy & pwds https://t.co/NmcL2xPLY4
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) May 6, 2016
Privacy and Passwords https://t.co/1Nm0UyB8WF pic.twitter.com/wehzCWpzRZ
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) September 16, 2016
For practical advice without the FUD, consult the Smart Girl’s Guide to Online Privacy by @violetblue and this overview on privacy and passwords.
Neurodiversity, The Social Model of Disability, and Structural Ideology
All of this must be informed by neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and structural ideology. We are responsible for humanizing flow in the systems we inhabit. Apply these rules of thumb.
agency > compliance
structural model > deficit model
social model > medical model
rights based > needs based
acceptance > awareness
spectrums > binaries
promethean > pastoralist
With software eating the world, we must make it humane.
Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world”, but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world.
Source: There is no “technology industry” – Humane Tech – Medium
The inequalities that I’ve chronicled above – income inequality, wealth inequality, information inequality – have been part of our education system for generations, and these are now being hard-coded into our education technologies. This is apparent in every topic in every article I’ve written in this years’ year-end series: for-profit higher education, surveillance in the classroom, and so on.
These inequalities are apparent in the longstanding biases that are found in standardized testing, for example, often proxies for “are you rich?” and “are you white?” and “are you male?”
My own concerns about the direction of education technology cannot be separated from my concerns with digital technologies more broadly. I’ve written repeatedly about the ideologies of Silicon Valley: neoliberalism, libertarianism, imperialism, late stage capitalism. These ideologies permeate education technology too, as often the same investors and same entrepreneurs and the same engineers are involved.
Source: Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2016: Education Technology and Inequality
Education, Neurodiversity, the Social Model of Disability, and Real Life
Inclusion is the new normal
Corporate Diversity and Inclusion
Inclusion > special
Growth Mindset and Structural Ideology
Inspiration Porn, Growth Mindset, and Deficit Ideology
Building Creative Culture
Thinking, Fast and Slow: Heuristics, Rules of Thumb, and Unconscious Bias
Get structural view of our systems with this pairing. structural ideology > deficit ideology https://t.co/dvtRhITjOO https://t.co/HaAmzUOgv8
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) January 2, 2017
Future Digital Humanitarians
Given agency and a default to open culture, students can become the digital humanitarians society needs.
Students can design, create, and engineer effective solutions to problems. Powerful new technologies are allowing students to create and disseminate solutions to real life problems like never before. Interestingly, it is the power of the human experience – empathy, relationships, opportunities to improve, and a sense that what they do has meaning and matters – that is the key to true and purposeful changemaking for kids. How exciting to think about where these young digital humanitarians might take these skills, understandings, and mindsets in the future!
Source: Empathy: The Surprising Secret Sauce For Authentic STEM Project Design
Video Playlists
Open education playlist:
Neurodiversity playlist:
