Not So Distant Future

” . . . These employers know that for Net Geners, work should be fun.  Net Geners see no clear dividing line between the two . . . .”     Don Tapscott,  Grown Up Digital

“Our research suggests that they expect to choose where and when they work; they use technology to escape traditional office space and hours; and they integrate their home and social lives with work life.  More than half of the Net Geners we surveyed online in North America say they want to be able to work in places other than an office. . . .They prefer flexible hours and compensation that is based on their performance and market value–not based on face time in the office.”   Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tapscott’s comments about this particular expectation of Net Gen workers, because I believe that not only are we seeing Net Gen students in our classrooms and libraries, we are seeing Net Gen employees in our new(and sometimes in our experienced) staff as well.

After a fascinating coffee discussion with a colleague(both of us older than a Net Gener but sharing the characteristics of one) about our struggle with the transition from summer to “work”/school time,  I realized that as I spend more time online working with colleagues and as I have more experience, I am both more interested in how work can be “play” and also in the flexibility issue.

I wonder if we are losing the “creative set” of teachers from the classroom, as young Net Geners, (or older ones of us) who thrive on this sort of play, creativity, flexibility–but are still intensely committed employees–seek other opportunities.

And it’s a sad thought to me, thinking of the energies and talents that slip  away from education because the system isn’t all that flexible or playful.

I wonder if within existing schools what can be done about that.  Can libraries play a role in providing a time/space for ‘playfulness?”  What we can do would only be a drop in the bucket, possibly, but at least it is a start.  Yet in most schools, teachers don’t necessarily feel like they have that “Google-time”–that creative time to play and innovate–in fact, if “forced to play” teachers somewhat resent not having that time to use in their classroom or grading papers.  So what do you do if you want to foster some of that inventiveness and creativity yet have it be a meaningful part of the workplace?

Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have a job as a “creativity consultant” where your role was to bring in those creative energies and opportunities into a district?   Or the “innovation agent?”

It’s something we should be thinking about–because not only are we teaching Net Gen students, who crave this kind of flexible, playful, time shifting environment in our schools/classrooms, but we are employing Net Geners who crave these same things.  And don’t we want them to stay?

How are we really supporting their true needs?  Because I think Net Geners bring a whole range of skill sets that we need to work with “Net Gen” students.

Are we creating flexible work times?  Are we allowing some work to be done online?  Are we time shifting the idea of traditional classroom schedules?  Are we holding meetings online sometimes?  Are we building in some opportunity for creative growth or play?  And what does “play” for a teacher even look like and is this even possible with job demands/time pressures?  Are we creating open internet policies (like access to sites?–Tapscott posits that ten minutes knocking around on Facebook is like the old “coffee breaks” or “smoke breaks” of yore–time for relaxing/recharging).  Are we creating playful/flexible environments for students and staff alike?  (because some day soon, our entire staff and student body will be “Net Gen”.

Maybe we can only change the little circle of our own world at first(our classroom, our library, our department meetings, our workshops, our own workday schedule)–but maybe we should start somewhere?

When we fail to utilize what we know about our own employees and our own students, the divide between what is, and what the customer wants grows.   How can we utilize what we know, think outside the proverbial “box” and reinvigorate the concept of school in a Net Gen future?

This morning I saw a new website twittered– BooksFree.com –which allows you to “rent” books like you do Netflix videos.

Demise of library services as we know them? Will people still want to go to a place if they can get the item via their mailbox? (of course, it’s not free, you have a monthly fee, so the library is still a better deal !)

Similarly, I read in the NYTimes several articles relating to the demise of newspapers and/or magazines, including a touching one about the importance Bostonians have placed on their beloved and threatened Boston Globe, one about magazines raising their prices, and one about “hyperlocal” websites that bring aggregated local news to you customized for your location, and lastly a very telling one about newspapers and the AP attempting to control online content. Wes Fryer has been writing about this as well.

An armload of signs that are all pointing in the same direction–major change is on the horizon, driven by the economy as the tipping point. What will be telling is what communities fight to save–like the Boston Globe, and what things we let go. It will say something about us as a culture.

But more pertinent to this post is what is all of this going to mean for libraries? We are really at a tipping point? How much print content do we embrace and how much digital? When are our customers ready for what? What should we be willing to pay for if our students/staff mainly use “Google”? What will all this move to digital look like from a profit standpoint from publishers and providers that have excellent content?

So, renting books online….should we be mailing books to our students instead of them coming to us? sending them digital books via email? Only subscribing to magazines and newspapers online and not buying print ones? buying Kindles?

Yet students flock to our doors, check out more books than before, and use digital and books interchangeably. There is some need for a “campfire” to circle around for students. A place to be, to interact with books and knowledge and information….and to talk and hang out and do homework and get help when they need it.

On the other hand, I’ve found the teachers are somewhat more sequestered in their rooms with their own computers, so how do we reach them as well?

This is a mixed-up post which reflects the confusion over what direction to take.  It should be an interesting next few years.

I’d be really interested in views from my online learning community about these questions! What do you think?  Which way DO we go?

I just finished an interesting article in Fortune Magazine(the print version, I might add) about the e-reader technologies for magazines.

There are several ventures considering various types of e-readers that would download magazines onto tablets or paper-thin devices.

The article raises several questions, with which I concur, such as whether or not readers would want to purchase another separate device just to read magazines.  Seems like it would be a much more reliable business venture to create magazines readable on the Kindle or iPhone.

As the article also questions, I wonder if consumers would actually pay for an e-magazine in the first place, when currently you can get so much magazine content online for free, which makes me wonder how periodicals would change their financial paradigm.

After reading the article, though I love all things tech, I realized I would really miss magazines that you can touch, hold, and browse through.  E-reading seems so much more purposeful than the way I read magazines.   A page loads one at a time , and its not something you can “flip” through, or tear a page out and post it on your bulletin board, or read by the pool and get the pages wet.  For purposeful journal reading, such a device might work well–but for magazine “browsing” that many readers do, it seems ill-suited.

All of which brought to mind a very prescient speech I heard Molly Ivins give at the University of Texas.  She described the real difficulties facing print newspapers and wondered how they could remain financially viable, and the perils for our society if they do not.

I think in this economic market we are going to see some real shifts, and we really do need to consider how to support those media that are significant and important to education and our society.

The economy may be the tipping point that Malcolm Gladwell writes about that will finally drive changes from print to online.   It’s interesting that e-readers have taken so long to appear on the scene, actually.  I recall hearing about these from Jenny Levine at Internet Librarian a number of years ago. It seems economic issues are accelerating these technologies.

But my question is–is this tipping point really what is best for our democracy?

If we lose print newspapers and/or magazines due to economic pressures, what have we lost?  I’m all for e-reporting and blogs, but excellent newspapers and magazines really do unfold a story in a different way–both with their investigative abilities and the abilities of good print journalists to pull a story together well.

I have to wonder how this will evolve?  And how will we as a society will respond?  Will we continue to have side by side technologies for a long time?  (like printed books which show no sign of having sales slow down alongside e-readers?  Print magazines alongside electronic ones?  What will the world feel like when/if everything is on a screen rather than on paper?   Will our students notice?

When I saw this poster via a link on Twitter, I laughed and then knew I had to write about it.

Change is such a frustrating process sometimes because it is so very gradual.  We can’t always perceive it when it is happening because sometimes it seems so glacial.  Those of us who are impatient for change(count me as one of those) sometimes feel like we are butting our heads against a brick wall.

But sometimes, all of a sudden, we look back and we can see what has changed while we weren’t even looking.  An interview I did with Laura Barack for SLJ yesterday reminded me of this.

And maybe there is an evolutionary reason for change to be very gradual.

When change isn’t gradual, it can sometimes be almost startling and disconcerting, unsettling as we try to get our bearings and make sense of it.  Nongradual change, especially that imposed upon us, startles our sense of ourselves in the world.

Of course, it’s about how we adapt to change, both gradual and sudden.  Do we buckle our seatbelts and forge on? Do we cling onto the past?   Do we feel excited about the change?  Do we focus on the positives about it?  Do we have curiosity about it?   Do we fear that it will alter us?  Do we embrace it as part of life, as Zen tradition would have it?   We can see the gamut of these reactions in the students and teachers that we work with every day.   We can see it in the culture of the schools where we work.   We can see it in culture in general.

And of course we can see it in ourselves.   It’s not so simple to define either–some people may be professionally very embracing of change, but personally very nervous about it.  Some people may embrace it in their personal lives, but fear what it means for them professionally.

This brings up all sorts of questions for me, ones I often ponder.  In terms of the culture of our own school, how does change happen well, and what do we do with all the possible approaches to change that our staff might have?   In terms of us personally, how do we refine our own approach to change?

But this post is more about what we are missing when we  judge our success only by dramatic and transformative change.

We miss all the daily changes.

We miss seeing the victories in gradual growth.

Our impatience colors our perception of what is happening because it focuses on our own frustration with not being able to rapidly effect change that we feel is so critical.   And it colors us in terms of our interactions and understandings of those we work with, who are bound to see our impatience as arrogance or negativity, or as judgmental of their way of doing things.

But most of all, we miss the positives that celebrating the small changes can bring to our own lives and our own enjoyment of our work and our lives.  We miss the forest for the trees, so to speak.

(As kismet would have it, just as I was writing this, a very apropos quote was posted in Twitter by SurrendrDorothy.  “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)

So although this poster is satirical, it’s an excellent reminder to us to believe and trust in gradual change. Not only gradual change but VERY gradual change.   We can trust that it is happening even when we can’t see it.   We can trust that everything we do leads to it.  And if we can have that kind of faith in it, what could we accomplish?

Photo credit: Mike Rosulek     http://www.mikero.com/blog/2009/02/20/more-darwin

(Postscript:  This design is available for sale, and I want to give full credit to the artist because the profits are going to the National Center for Science Education.)

Sometimes as a librarian (or technology teacher) it’s easy to get discouraged. Despite how much outreach you do or how good you are, you wonder if teachers really need you or realize that they can call on your support and services? They are so used to working independently and doing things themselves.

How do you bring teachers into the program or get them to collaborate in their planning process? Or get them to utilize the richness that is there in a library or with the technology, when they are busy and doing grades and coaching and all the various things teachers are asked to do. How do you become partners in the truest sense of the word? Is it a paradigm shift, and if so, how do you get there?

There are so many ways to draw them in, of course, but an essay I read last night really encapsulated it for me.

In her collection, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about her brother, who is struggling to complete a research project on birds that he has totally neglected doing. He had three weeks to do the project, she relates, and yet procrastinated until the last night. As he was sitting head in hands, their father speaks to him–reminding him the way to get it finished is just “Bird by bird.” That’s how you do something, bird by bird, one at a time.

(Our “bird by bird” effort of late is hosting “creative Fridays”–we are having different right brained creativity activities in the library every Friday for whoever wants to come.  Not only is it relaxing for the staff, it’s a fun way to bring together teachers who might normally not see one another.  The tasks can be anything, like today we made Valentine’s, next week we’re doing a techie creative time.  But there’s something about sitting around a table together in a small communal group of adults that we don’t get enough of in schools.)

So perhaps it is a challenge sometimes but when we remember to celebrate each connection we make, each teacher or student we touch, each success we have, then maybe we begin to understand how to do it “bird by bird.”

And isn’t that true of any real tremendous challenge in life? that we figure it out, bird by bird.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkeyc/128255887/

Seen on my 4th grade nephew’s Science Fair trifold acknowledgments–

“I would like to acknowledge Wikipedia. . . and my mom and dad…”

This morning and yesterday morning both I had the honor of attending the Flat Classroom Conference in Qatar and the Educon 2.1 conference in Philadelphia, both remotely.   What was funny was that I felt such a sense of community in the chat rooms talking to students and to other wired educators, sometimes more of a sense of community than I feel where I work, even though we were half a world apart, and many of us had never met in person.   The sense of community was formed by a shared sense of purpose.

This led me to ask all sorts of questions of myself about what I want in an educational community, what fulfills me (and perhaps fulfills some students?) and which is perhaps another post.  But echoing in my thoughts after Educon were questions Will Richardson asked in his presentation yesterday and ones that were brought up by Andy Carvin and the panel this morning.

Questions like “What should we leave behind” and “What should we keep” as we make changes,  and questions like “How scalable is change?”  In the chat room this morning while listening to the Educon panel, we had a lively debate about this.

Is it different when talking about an existing school versus a brand new school?  I wonder how one creates a new sense of community in an existing school?     How do you invite people into the vision and ward off skepticism and get buy-in and really build a community of common purpose.

I also wonder if you have a vision for a school district, how do you scale that–or if you have something that works at one school, how replicable is it across a district?

So much of education is in the art of it–which really depends on the skill and talent of individual educators, (who are unique individuals and not replaceable) and the skill of leaders in particular.  But the culture of a school, which is so critical to change–how can that be conveyed across a district or across multiple districts?  Is that excitement of an environment that works scalable?  Or is it just kismet, a happy “accident,” a magical blending of time and people and place?

Does the business world have something to help us in terms of these questions?  How does a business like Apple or Toyota or Google sustain their corporate culture throughout their business?   What strategies do they use?    And how do you reach beyond a core group of teachers to create this new climate when perhaps people like the status quo?–status quo being something that seems pretty entrenched in education sometimes.

I left Educon this year(having only participated online in a few sessions) just as engaged and awed by the interactivity and excitement going on in the school for those kids as I did a year ago.   And also  awed by the enthusiasm, vision, and dedication of educators from all over the country(and world) who attended, either in person or remotely.   How do we spread/share this sort of enthusiasm, innovation, and energy with others–the kind of energy that brought the Flat Classroom Project to life?  If only we could harness that energy it could light up so many of our schools, and shine light for so many of our students.

(hint: Maybe Chris Lehmann should start a “leadership” academy at SLA to train/encourage/mentor future leaders?)

Okay, I’ve asked lots of questions, as is my habit in a post….but I really would love to hear your thoughts, musings, writings, and readings that you want to share.

Ironically, the quote on the sidebar of my blog today is:  “After all is said and done, more is said than done.  Aesop”     So, how do we harness all of this and bring it into some sustainable form?

One of my favorite things about learning is the serendipity of it all.    We know we need to learn something or grow in some way, and voila, as we are out in the world, and read blogs, and read books, we stumble over these things serendipitously.

That’s one of the things I love about bookstores and libraries as well–wandering to a shelf that seems pertinent and finding all sorts of connections there.

This morning my serendipitous find was this incredible post by Jan Smith, about the interconnectedness of our organizations, and the work of Margaret Wheatley on how change happens through an interconnected network, and not so much through hierarchical organizations.

Wheatley’s book has been sitting on my bookshelf for several years, unread, coincidentally, so now I will add it to my “real” reading list.

Smith quotes Elizabeth Donohoe Steinberger, writing in School Administrator, ironically from an article that is 13 years old!

“…I see the need to create organizations where people can bring their whole selves. Unless we create organizations where all of us feel we can contribute in multiple and unexpected ways, the organization cannot survive into the future. There is no way to be adaptive and resilient without having everyone engaged in the work.”

In this even faster-paced, web 2.0 environment, the idea that we all need to feel free to contribute, organize and create in order to be resilient and move the organization forward is important.  What role does leadership play in this?

Wheatley, it appears, would suggest that the leadership of all of us is important, something I alluded to in a recent post.

So rather than think of this theoretically, how can we take steps to be leaders on our own campuses, whether we are individual classroom teachers, librarians, tech coordinators?  What can we do to invite others in?

What obstacles prevent that from happening?  And how can we make this more concrete?

Even if conditions are not ideal where any of us are, how can we step forward and connect in serendipitous ways with others?

As we grapple with what a student-centered classroom actually looks like in practice, it clearly involves a real shift in our thinking.

Robert Fried points out in The Passionate Learner that “the difference is roughly comparable to that between the Ptolemaic and Copernican views of the solar system.” But as he points out, most of us were raised in one belief system, so even though we acknowledge that the new system should be different, it is still difficult to make that shift. And as he indicates, both parents and students are compliant in this system.

“Adults (administrators, teachers, parents) often find such a view comforting in its lack of ambiguity of who is ‘in charge and who is ‘accountable’ for effectively ‘delivering the curriculum’ Most kids accept it, too, for it reduces their responsibility for motivating themselves and allows them to play at the game of ‘kids versus grown-ups’ whenever they detetect a lapse of authority.”

Sticking to a pre-established system is definitely easier for everyone. And while I tend to agree that kids “accept it” I just wonder how much of it is due to their relinquishing responsibility and how much of it is due to their being trained into compliance from early grades of school, and how much of it is just part of the status quo.

Susan Morgan twittered about a series of student responses to a blog post asking their view of 21st century schools, and it’s interesting to see the variety in their responses but also their sense of how schools aren’t serving them well.

Some of them view the 21st century school as sort of a shiny school of the future, with built in computers, and modern conveniences, reminiscent of how we may have envisioned the future during the 50’s. But other students’ responses reflect an awareness of a different way of engaging with learning evolving, like this astute response:

“School hasn’t changed much, except for the attitude and culture that has been created by the students and faculty. Kids aren’t really afraid of their teachers anymore, and there is more interaction between students during the school day. More and more, we are encouraged to talk in class, and work in groups, do group projects, and peer edit. However, there is still a lot of sitting in class and listening and taking notes. This might be the most basis form of attaining information and learning, but the information is often lost very quickly, unless the notes are revisited. However, the revisiting usually occurs right before a test and is quickly forgotten, the space emptied to make room for more information that will be disposed of just as fast.

It seems that the information I retain the best, is that which is accompanied by pictures, labs, or small anecdotes. We all have different styles of learning that work best, but when all of the senses are involved, the information can be remembered in many ways and on many different levels. It is, therefore, my home[sic] that as the 21st century rolls on, that teaching and learning continues to progress. Technology helps, allowing for visual aids and fast access to information, but it is important to ensure that the vast amount of information is accompanied with a connection, a picture, something that will help students remember the problem, equation, or concept and be able to incorporate it into the real world.”

So what I’m wondering is–how do we encourage students at younger grades to expect more from their education and to be more active participants? Do our students like this current system, or do they, like the students above, see the need for something to be different?

If they are in high school already and used to the “old solar” system, what scaffolding do we provide to help them make the shift and ask for more? How do we empower them?

Our campus has a Vision committee which I’ve mentioned before, made up of parents, students, administrators and teachers.   Yesterday at our meeting, we were discussing the books Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner  and Horace’s Compromise by Theodore Sizer, and in discussing the two books together some interesting alchemy came up.

One of our parents delineated the five minds outlined by Gardner:  the Respectful Mind, Ethical Mind, Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, and Creative Mind.

As we started discussing the difficulty with synthesis and creativity if the curriculum is too “content” driven, one of the parents pointed out that how can we expect anyone (including both our teachers and our students) to be creative or synthesize or worry about a discipline when they don’t have the mental room to breathe in many of our rigorous-focused environments.    One of the teachers on our committee also talked about as a newer teacher, lack of that time to breathe meant she was more in survival mode her first few years of teaching than anything.

All of which brought up some thoughts for me–

1.  How are we supporting new teachers so that they have time to breathe?  We expect a lot of them–often new teachers come in with multiple assignments, as floaters from room to room, as part time coaches on the side, etc.   Even when providing mentoring, what else could we do to support them better?

2.  How are we supporting students so that they have time to breathe, and so they aren’t always rushing from thing to thing, from homework assignment to activity?  Could we have a homework/activity free week once in awhile?   Could we focus less on “content driven” curriculum where we try to “cover” things, and spend a little more time on one particular thing, delving more deeply into it?   As Theodore Sizer comments, ‘can we expect students to learn more while being taught less?’

3.  Are we passing our stress onto our students regarding testing?   Can we instead focus on passing them confidence, which helps create room for them to breathe?
4.  How do our school schedules reinforce this lack of “space” for thought?  And what can we do about that?
I wonder what we are saying to our students as future adults about how to live their lives when we foster environments that are driven by constant stress, overwork, overcommitment, and lack of creative time?

As one of the parents on our committee asked, “What do we value?  When you walk around our campus, what do we see?”

Look around your campus or classroom today.  What do you see?