Category: Technology & Learning

I’m not calling this “edutech.” Never.

The iPad 2 for Learning: Initial Questions

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As we move forward in the thick stew that is the beginning of any international school year, as faculty shake off the jet lag and slowly lose their suntans, a few questions have arisen in our iPad 2 pilot project that need to be (and soon will be) ironed out once the higher priority tasks are ticked off the list. They are:

  • Syncing – If students have individual iPads to use daily and take home at night, should they be synced to an individual laptop in a 1 to 1 school like ours or to a central Mac for managing purchased apps, etc? It’s a pilot and we are well-resourced, but we don’t have a blank check for sweet games at 10 bucks a pop. We are heading toward syncing to a central computer, but that brings up…
  • When do iPads get synced to a central computer? How much ownership will kids lose or perceive themselves as losing when they give up the iPad for syncing? Does this matter at all?
  • What about the accessories? Clearly, the iPad needs a protective case, needs paid apps, needs charging which, if centralized, becomes pretty expensive quickly.
  • In a 1 to 1 environment with laptops and iPads, how will students manage care of their electronics? Are their hands full already in a purely concrete respect?
  • Will the iPad create an efficient workflow for kids, or will it be a Personal Distraction Device?
  • The million (and millions of) dollar question: How on Earth can the iPad be anything other than an engaging, useful sidecar to a solid computer? I spent an hour today making a Google Doc flow chart in Adobe InDesign complete with flow charts and I couldn’t even come close to duplicating this on an iPad based on what I have been able to find so far. It’s simply not tooled up for that level of creativity. Which brings me to
  • What do we want kids to do in school? If the iPad doesn’t unleash the full potential of current computing technology for kids to do things with, to explore, tinker, discover, and make, and we consider it as a laptop replacement, what are we doing wrong?

These are my big questions so far and the students aren’t even back yet. But, within two weeks kids will have their hands on the iPads, so I want to be collecting answers and revising questions immediately. I really wonder what issues and questions other teachers working with iPads have at this point and need to do a little digging in the next few weeks.

The iPad 2 for Learning: First Impressions

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I have received an iPad 2 prior to a pilot program that my Digital Journalism class will be a part of this year and after a few days of playing, I see possibilities, but wonder if the iPad 2 can rise above its functional design concept.

In short, the iPad is clearly a window for consumption, consumption of media, consumption of goods, and primarily for consumption of iTunes downloads. Compared to my Android phone, the iPad suffers from a dearth of high-quality free apps. Some exist, clearly, but the initial flow of all information is via iTunes and the structure of the iPad’s OS relies heavily on their proprietary software. That’s kind of a drag after experiencing Android for the past six months. I may find killer free, open source apps for the iPad yet; it’s still new to me. However, that’s not the design concept.

Additionally, the iPad is tough to be beautifully creative with. It’s possible, but it’s not as easy as a comparable laptop computer . Free online resources like Aviary become a number of costly proprietary programs like iMovie and Garage Band. My biggest shock so far (I obviously am not a golfer) is that the iPad doesn’t run Flash on Safari. Wow. Again, the design concept won’t allow it, or savvy people would never buy Garage Band. Apple’s desire to control the usage of it’s products has led me away from iPods and all things iTunes, but now it’s all back like Ferris Bueller’s sunglasses and fedoras thanks to the iPad. The iPad interface is locked down and all conduits to information are via Apple. It’s worth considering the medium and the message when we give these fun toys to kids.

On the plus side, the iPad takes good snapshots and video. It’s no Leica, but the possibilities exist, especially for crowdsourced content for student online journalism. My initial impression is that the iPad should be wed, like all media machines, to media literacy with an emphasis on media creation. This will require an upfront  capital outlay on Apple software that will allow for such creation or as a viewpoint of the iPad as a capture device first, with student laptops as the media studio, which is what I am leaning toward. Additionally, the iPad seems fairly well equipped to become a nice journalism tracking device for informed media consumption. Student journalists should be able to follow a wide variety of journalism in print, podcasts, and video form through RSS feeds, but I haven’t found a really great free, ad-free reader. With ads, plenty of options exist and work fairly well, although I haven’t seen one with folder capability yet. The design says consume, and so they shall.

All of this notwithstanding, the iPad is going to get student attention. And then immediately demand more of it. That’s a joke, for the most part. First impressions: minor frustration, resigned acceptance to the Apple business model, and tenacious curiosity.

Edit: Feeddler RSS is a perfect Googler Reader style app for free and without ads so far. Google docs is another story…

Brain Elasticity & Learning Through Action

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I just listened to a fascinating podcast from On Being entitled “Investigating Healthy Minds” with Dr. Richard Davidson and it meshed with an interview published recently in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Don’t Know Much About History” with famed historian David McCullough. While Dr. Davidson makes many points about the nature of the mind and the effect of meditative practices on the mind from the perspectives of a practitioner and a neuroscientist, toward the end of the interview, a question about meditative practices as “spiritual technology” elicited the following, fascinating response:

Potentially. I don’t think I’ve used that phrase, but certainly I have talked about the range of practices, really the mechanics of practice, that are so richly described in some of the contemplative traditions and the potential value that many of these practices might have for modern science and our modern understanding of the mind. You know, I certainly — the idea of transformation is one that to me meshes perfectly well with conventional scientific understanding. I’ve no problem with that and, you know, I think that really is a natural byproduct of understanding many of these constructs as the product of skills that can be enhanced through training. (emphasis added)

This idea underlies all of teaching and learning: the acquisition of skills over time changes the brain at any age. So often, I see kids sitting and staring at their desks, their notebooks, their laptops when they are working on prewriting exercises or planning stages of projects. Almost invariably, when I ask what they’re up to they respond with one word – thinking. My response is also almost invariable – thinking is doing, so do something. This is not merely flippant. I have a raft of suggestions for activities from taking a walk to drawing a picture to working on something else for a bit. Every assignment and project isn’t perfectly designed to capture every student, intrinsically motivating them into motion, but at the end of the day, thinking is action. So, do something, analyze the result, revise, and try again with an altered approach. Learn to do, better and better, through practice, approaching this process as a skill related to fluency in other skills, like writing, speaking, or film making. In the context of the conversation, I take Dr. Davidson to mean that meditative practices transform the mind in powerful ways because they are learned skills worked closer and closer to perfection over time. Because these practices are learned and then put into action repetitively, I see them as analogous to any performance skill taught in a classroom.

Learning as doing that transforms the mind is also reflected in the Wall Street Journal’s conversation with David McCullough, as he suggests, among other great ideas like active, involved parenting, student centered projects and art in the teaching of history in order to create critical minds:

And teach history, he says—while tapping three fingers on the table between us—with “the lab technique.” In other words, “give the student a problem to work on.”

“If I were teaching a class,” he says, “I would tell my students, ‘I want you to do a documentary on the building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Or I want to you to interview Farmer Jones or former sergeant Fred or whatever.” He adds, “I have been feeling increasingly that history ought to be understood and taught to be considerably more than just politics and the military.”

What about textbooks? “I’d take one of those textbooks. I’d clip off all the numbers on the pages. I’d pull out three pages here, two pages there, five pages here—all the way through. I’d put them aside, mix them all up, and give them to you and three other students and say, ‘Put it back in order and tell me what’s missing.'” You’d know that book inside and out.

Mr. McCullough advises us to concentrate on grade school. “Grade school children, as we all know, can learn a foreign language in a flash,” he says. “They can learn anything in a flash. The brain at that stage in life is like a sponge. And one of the ways they get it is through art: drawing, making things out of clay, constructing models, and dramatic productions. If you play the part of Abigail Adams or Johnny Appleseed in a fourth-grade play, you’re never going to forget it as long as you live.”

“We’re too concentrated on having our children learn the answers,” he summarizes. “I would teach them how to ask questions—because that’s how you learn.”

McCullough’s final point is powerful and true. History isn’t a fixed quantity to be memorized and held (or forgotten), but a series of techniques for understanding the past through drawing connections and interweaving disparate narratives and artifacts. Skills. Teach doing, build fluency in questioning and examination as skills, and transform minds as meditative practices transform minds thanks to the brain’s elasticity. Spiritual practices and history are both shrouded in mystery, but through the sometimes mundane, sometimes transformative process of doing each, we learn and are changed for the better.

Google Chromebooks and Corporate Computing

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Google is launching the Chromebook, and making the profit savvy move of marketing it as a tool for education. I’m not sure if the conjoining of business and education within the initial marketing splash says more about the currently depressing state of American educational discourse or about what Google misunderstands about education. However, tapping into taxpayer cash is always a good decision for the bottom line, and that’s what Google is doing. Even though the Chromebook is slightly more expensive than a comparable netbook, a higher price that includes the Chromebook’s reduced functionality, educators are already piloting Chromebooks for free, saying good things about how quickly they turn on, and loving the new administrator panel that allows for easy web filtering. The rush to love is on. Of course, educators are also loving the low, low price!

But, let’s slow down for a minute. What bothers me the most about the rush to support a device that doesn’t even hit the market for another few weeks is that the Chromebook locks in corporate control with even more finality than Windows or Apple’s fierce-cat entitled operating systems. To be sure, Chrome offers many apps that are open source and free and offers the capability of user-designed apps with much greater ease than writing Windows or Mac software, but the platform is more narrow than what we’ve come to expect from a PC because it’s locked into an internet and cloud-centric system. Creating images and sound in Aviary’s Chrome app, even if offline for storage in the cloud later, is still working in a browser. Browsers browse, they troll for goodies and suck our time in StumbleUpon. Google is an internet company, and so their new OS vision reflects their vision, which is the primacy of the old web. Google Buzz didn’t generate much web 2.0 action, and the Wave has crashed. So why go forward into tomorrow with 1999’s, or even today’s coolest search engine? The answer seems to be because it’s better than 1981’s QDOS. But, is this not a false dichotomy for no other reason than Apple exists?

What about Linux? Can we take what makes us excited about app development and give it teeth through basing the development of creative and educational software on open source platforms? I think about the apps I love on Chrome, and I wonder if they will stay free, if they will begin to include ads, which would be an OS-based ad pipeline to students using Chromebooks, or if they will start to charge a little, and incrementally the bargain-that-was will become death by a million cuts. It’s unclear, and this would be worth nailing down before committing an organization to the Chrome path. I’ve written before about path dependence and the arguments I’m hearing for Chromebooks sound like arguments against the Windows path, which I sympathize with. But, it’s not a very convincing argument. I’m ready to have an argument about non-corporate computing in schools, but I’m not sure how to win it beyond the obvious democratic nature of open source software. Perceived ease of use, familiarity, and path dependance – that up-front investment that locks in future decisions – always seem to win the day. The shape of this debate, or more accurately non-debate, has echoes that resound throughout free societies. I’d love to think we had the boldness to trust each other and to take on the burden of learning something new if only for the personal benefits, but the scary unknown tends to fold us in on the familiar and the authoritarian.

But, that’s probably too opaque and possibly too idealistic. Here’s another big Chromebook related question: As organizations move to corporate controlled and held data in the cloud,  how organizations view their relationship to their data, to what they create?As I consider my use of Google docs – which I like very much – and what I’m putting there behind the curtain of my OS and my browser, I find an important distinction between what I hold digitally on a drive in my hand or in my computer and between what is held digitally in a Dick Cheney-style undisclosed location by people who I’m trusting to be responsive to me. Chrome is a leap all the way into this brave new world, in which we, the users, trust nice folks elsewhere with our digital products for work, learning, and play. I feel the requisite warm fuzzies to Google’s brand, but I can’t figure out why I should trust them more than Facebook, about which we are all quick to remind kids (and not each other) about thinking twice before uploading information. The differences are clear, but so are the similarities: Facebook and cloud operators like Google hold our data and form giant monoliths from which it is sometimes difficult to wrest accountability. As it has grown, Google has become a major target, like Microsoft before it, of cyberattacks from hackers and possibly quasi-superpowers like China. Eventually, Chromebooks are going to need anti-virus apps, or something like that, to protect them from the black hats.

Let’s slow down and catch our breath about Chromebooks and the cloud. I use the cloud – Google apps, Dropbox, the Aviary suite, SlideRocket, and so on. I love the ease of sharing between my PC and Android phone. Still, when we talk about a new direction for schools, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the whole picture, and simple cost analyses and brand loyalty isn’t enough. If Chromebooks reflect what we want kids to do with computers in school, we may need to start asking them to do more before we give them less.

Learning Spaces & the 1 to 1 Classroom

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Recently, it seems like the idea of using and not using technological tools during interactions with other people is ripe and alive in the media. I have just finished listening to a podcast of “On Being” from American Public Media entitled “Alive Enough,” and featuring a conversation between host Krista Tippett and Sherry Turkle, who is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. The title of this show/podcast refers to a moment Turkle had with her daughter at a Darwin exhibition while they looked at a Galapagos turtle. Her daughter, who had been exposed to animal robots from an early age due to Turkle’s work, remarked that a robot would have been “alive enough” to substitute for the turtle, without anything really getting missed. Reflecting on what works and what doesn’t for me so far in a 1 to 1 classroom, the idea of “alive enough,” and a number of other key points raised in the broadcast illuminated interesting questions for me. In any classroom, space matters, as I learned from Harry Wong’s classic The First Days of School. Space should be managed cooperatively between students and teachers, and the laptop opens a window the size of the Earth in each student and teacher’s personal space. What are the best ways to teach, learn, and cooperatively manage this new space? Additionally, I’ve been realizing lately how often I engage in conversations in our staff office while reading an article, or scanning emails, or flitting back to the screen from eye contact. I’m not fully present in the conversation, and both I and the other end of the conversation lose something as a result; the same happens in the 1 to 1 classroom, and I wonder what the best ways are to create moments of maximum human engagement, or if others are thinking about this. Finally, as our personal computing technology and network technology matures, what does this mean for education?

Obviously, in the 1 to 1 classroom, we can close the laptops and bring everyone out of the technological space and into the physical space, from an attention standpoint, at least momentarily. Of course, students have been distracting themselves from classroom instruction and activities since the dawn of classroom education, and a big reason for this is teacher-centered activities. When students are working on engaging, authentic, and self-directed activities to build their own understanding of topics and fluency in skills, they are more likely to be attentive, technology or no. However, the rise of “multitasking” and its attendant challenges has led, in my informal observations, to students who cannot stop the mini-distractions that arrive through their connected laptop and who don’t fully engage with something that I really believe they would otherwise. It is clearly arguable that the task isn’t engaging enough in such a case, but come on – they distract themselves from Facebook with Skype, so I’m going to state that something new is happening here. Tippett and Turkle discuss “sacred spaces” in their conversation, and the ideas could easily apply to our connected, 1 to 1 classrooms:

Ms. Tippett: You do use this phrase “sacred spaces.” One moment of insight that I had about technology was when I was talking to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Do you know him?

Ms. Turkle: No.

Ms. Tippett: He’s a scientist, but he’s worked on bringing meditation into medicine. He made this really simple observation that technology goes 24/7, but we don’t. I mean, biologically, physiologically, we can’t. It’s this boundarylessness. I mean, this gets back to your point that it’s not just a matter of choices. At some point, it’s a matter of survival we have to set boundaries. When you talk about sacred spaces, what are you talking about there?

Ms. Turkle: To make our life livable, we have to have spaces where we are fully present to each other or to ourselves, where we’re not competing with the roar of the Internet and, quite frankly, where the people around us are not competing with the latest news off the Facebook status update. They may not have anything new. They may just be there being in a way that needs attention… Anyway, I guess I’m saying that sacred space is for me the places in your daily life where you want to keep them for yourself and the people who you need to give full attention to.

Note, this isn’t a discussion of paying attention to stuff, like how to punctuate an end citation, but to each other. I’ve had great success with motivating and engaging students through cooperative projects, and I’ve had some success with cooperative projects using technology like Google docs. However, when students are having a guided small group discussion in a self-selected space, I so often walk upon them and find one student ignoring their peers partially or completely through their laptop. This runs counter to what I expect from teenagers – the drive to be a part of the group. Sometimes, I’m sure it’s an escape from interpersonal friction of some sort, but how serious? How minor? When the space between students is thinned or undervalued and the cyberspace escape is before them, choosing the escape is totally predictable. Prioritizing the interpersonal is essential in all classrooms, but I can see clearly that this must be addressed explicitly in the 1 to 1 classroom. How? Probably modeling. The discussion continued:

Ms. Turkle: I have very simple rules. I mean, so far as I have rules for how to know you’re close to one or in one or should be having one: It’s dinner, it’s sharing meals with your family, it’s that moment at school pickup when your kid looks up and is trying to meet your eye. You know, you’re looking down at your smartphone and your child is trying to meet your eye.

I have enough data from children who’re going through this experience to know that it’s a terrible moment for them. It’s on the playground. Very bad when your child’s on the jungle gym and is desperately trying to have you look at them, for them to be taking hands off the jungle gym to try to get your attention — accident time. I mean, be in the park. Be in the park with them. Spend less time there, but make it a space. Make it a moment. These are important moments.

Ms. Tippett: It’s so interesting that you’re talking as much as or more about adults not setting boundaries with this, right? I mean…

Ms. Turkle: Oh, absolutely. Well, this is data-driven. I mean, this is data-driven in the sense that this is one of the surprises to me in doing the research. I thought when I started this research that I was going to be telling a story of children driving their parents crazy.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Ms. Turkle: And I’m not. It ended up that it was a story of parents — as much a story of parents leaving their children feeling lonely and alone and modeling the very behavior that then they came to find irritating in their children.

While the focus in this discussion is parenting, the parallels to the classroom are clear (and fascinating – what are we modeling?). Even in this piece, I am struggling to define the anti-social (in anal0g) behaviors that I do, such as partially ignore a colleague in the staff office, while tracing the contours of similar student behavior in the classroom. So, what are the signals for interpersonal space, for interpersonal digital space, for solo space or solitude for thinking, or for solitude in digital space, which can be so hard to find in Web 2.0? Tom Ashbrook, in a recent “On Point,” discussed texting in a fairly facile conversation, but he covered the expressive abilities of teenagers to signal with an eyebrow that they are still listening, but need a moment to read and respond to a particularly important or provocative text message. Should we create explicit classroom structures that delineate specific times for specific spaces, as listed above (or including spaces I haven’t considered), sending the “eyebrow message,” if you will, that it’s time to work alone on a short written response, and that this alone time should mean close the browser, shut off the Skype alerts, turn off the music, and everything else for a little time alone with your mind? I think this could do a world of good. As they continued the discussion, they addressed the idea of what schools and universities could be doing in this regard:

Ms. Turkle: That’s great, you know, but knowing how to do that and getting good at doing that, this is the art and science of 21st-century communication arts and sciences. It needs to be nurtured and developed, and I think that’s the problem that we’ve had in education where, you know, you set up the ability for people to have WiFi in classrooms, you put them in big lecture halls, and they shop [laugh]. You know, I mean, was it just because we put them on WiFi that we thought they were going to be setting up exciting fora in which they would be bringing things to a higher level?

One university after another is rethinking this and, as I go around the country, you know, we talk about it, we laugh about it because everyone who’s a professor today pretty much, you know, a senior faculty were there when this was set up and we remember what was on our minds and now we stand in the back of those classrooms and watch our students, you know, ordering from REI Sports and Amazon and on Facebook and on J. Crew. You know, we didn’t give it enough thought, so that’s what I mean.

Ms. Tippett: So that’s part of the growing up.

Ms. Turkle: Just this is part of growing up. Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think the Internet is all grown up and it’s not.

You know, what are the things that, if we don’t pass them on, even with this new technology, we’re going to feel we didn’t do our job? (emphasis added) And I know the ones for me. I mean, I have the ones that are important to me. I feel very strongly about privacy, a very important conversation. You know, I can’t necessarily make that conversation come out the way I want it, but I want to make sure that my voice is heard in the mix. That’s very important to me, and then solitude, the importance of solitude.

Ms. Tippett: And this question of where leadership lies in starting these important questions about how we shape technology to be humane and sustainable, and the possibilities of that answer are more interesting because of the nature of this technology, right? There’s a possibility for everyone to be a leader on their Facebook page or as they reshape their family lives. I don’t know.

So, because I value thoughtful classroom spaces, I value shaping classroom structures that mimic thoughtful human interaction or solitude in digital spaces. This is new territory for students and teachers, and I can imagine an action research project in which we work together to shape these new classroom norms. Using syncing technology to block internet connectivity for digital personal space doesn’t feel right to me, because it is authoritarian and inauthentic. Nobody learns how to take care of themselves more humanely in an authoritarian structure. If students work with me to shape these spaces, they will be censoring their own flow of information and connectivity, which seems like an essential skill for our brave new world. Connectivity is like cookies, and ultimatums like: I will no longer eat cookies! tend to go nowhere. We need to work together to find a way to moderate our cookie intake to something healthy and protective of the essential deliciousness of the cookie (too far with the metaphor?). As pointed out in this program, the internet itself is new, and Web 2.0 is newer; we’ve gorged. Now, as the web matures, technology matures, and we mature as users and people, what new practices are best for the connected 1 to 1 classroom? Many practices, like student centered, constructivist approaches will always be fantastic. However, my thoughts for next year are as follows:

  • Work with students in transparent action research to create  signals and processes for creating cooperative interpersonal space in the physical classroom, cooperative interpersonal digital space,  solo physical space or solitude for thinking, and solitude in digital space for thinking.
  • Model interpersonal engagement during interactions, and avoid the eye flit, the microdistraction. In short, be present with others.
  • Prioritize a cooperative environment in the physical classroom through cooperative structures, as I may have been blinded by the technology and let this slip a bit.
  • Continue reflecting on what I value in learning and build classroom structures that support that.
  • Reflect and respond to the maturing technology in ways that support learning. I am really thinking a lot about Google Chromebooks, and have thoughts on this that will follow soon. But, that’s for another day.

On Game Based Learning

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Of course, anytime Bill Gates decides to shower money on public education, it’s news. And, while it is hardly surprising that the manufacturer of the X-Box supports “game based learning,” I find it surprising that anyone takes this as a sign of the efficacy of game based learning.

So often, as games are touted as educational wonders, one hears tales of flight simulators, battle simulations, biohazard and terrorism response simulations, and Myst. Myst. Seriously. Students narrate their fantasy world of Myst and explain their problem solving along the way, and that’s a great language arts lesson. Perhaps I’m a Pollyanna, but I believe that students have real, analog lives worthy of narration – real or imagined (remember imagination?). Surely young people are solving problems in life, maybe even in our classrooms, in more compelling ways than choosing which door to walk through or decoding digital runes in a make-believe land with gentle background music. So, while spinning up student interest in writing about reality may take real, concrete instructional steps including instructor modeling (What? Me, write?), and involve a fair amount of non-sexy time in which students work together, talk, share, laugh, play, get off task, come back to the task, and ultimately write, I can’t help but wonder how electronic game play beats life?

Answer: Because stuff blows up engagingly in video games. Let’s keep in mind the overwhelmingly martial usages of game-style simulators, which have become most authentic these days via Predator drone attacks currently being flown remotely from southwest American desert bases in far off countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya to name only the most obvious and least classified. In the case of Predator piloting, I totally see the logical link between game play and actual authentic tasks. I can also see a time in which students play “Operation: Baby Pig” on their iPad app instead of doing actual dissections, which has no authentic benefit over the real thing. Martial simulations are acceptable substitutes to combat because nobody gets hurt in video games, and we can always get Elf food and drink or locate a cache of extra lives and ammunition under a stairwell. Academia should be a simulation of sorts as it is, an opportunity to explore, to try, to succeed, to fail and try again with a new approach. Adding an additional, electronic layer of simulation to a simulation that is already becoming wildly divorced from that which it is meant to replicate, at least in some ways, seems silly at best.

The benefit quietly touted is cost savings, using resources as best we can – and those resources are always financial. Would Bill Gates go to a doctor who had done his cadaver work on his PC? Done residency with a team through “Scrubs for X-Box?” Probably, but probably not a physician who worked on iDissect; count me out for both. When the dust settles, game based learning is likely to mean that every kid gets to fly a simulated plane, but no feet will ever leave the ground. Every kid gets to be a Guitar Hero, but the orchestra pit is vacant. Every kid gets to write about her Second Life, while the first atrophies from a paucity of attention. I believe everybody wins when “FIFA 2011” is turned off and a game commences in the backyard, and I believe our kids should be making actual products and messages with their technological tools, rather than wallowing in the virtual ether, unaware of what they are missing.

Thinking About “Tools for Thinking”

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Now is an amazing time to be alive, but the context of now is clearly that of the past. A case in point – what you think of the uprisings of “the Arab wave” will likely be determined by how you view the world, based on your upbringing, education, and myriad other factors. The United States is behaving in these conflicts like a griffin of sorts – half Cold War beast, half Bush doctrine hawk – and the result is a superpower behaving unpredictably. Why, exactly, does this happen?

David Brooks suggests in a recent column entitled “Tools for Thinking” that such behaviors may be attributable to certain intellectual traps, like the Einstellung effect, which he describes as trying to “solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms.” Beyond simply applying solutions that have worked in the past, I would argue that we often view the present as more of the past, past 2.0. Of course, the context has changed over time, wildly differing causes can lead to remarkably similar effects. Knowing this is only a little helpful, however, as it takes a truly divergent thinker to break with deep-seated instincts like the Einstellung effect.

The Einstellung effect is somewhat related to another trap labeled Path Dependance, which “refers to the notion that often ‘something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.'” Brooks gives the example of the QWERTY keyboard, which we use today across the English speaking world. The QWERTY keyboard was designed not for ergonomic ease, but to slow the typist, reducing jamming of typewriter keys, which I think we can all agree will never happen on an iPhone screen. We use the QWERTY keyboard because it’s what we use, not because it’s what we should use. The difference is clear, yet…Path Dependance rules the day.

How does this relate to the classroom? In a number of ways, I’d venture. I have a Smartboard and projector in every classroom I enter, and I use it like a chalkboard from the nineteenth century roughly 80% of the time (that may be low). We want technology in the classroom, so products are designed based on existing, low tech products – like chalkboards/whiteboards – and the problem is solved! Sort of. Not really. Part of this disconnect is the path dependent design of the tool, and part of it is my own experience and sense of classroom context. Can the Smartboard be used to get the teacher out of the front of the classroom, or students away from PowerPoints, acting as teachers in front of the classroom? I don’t see it.  Breaking the model, changing the path – here lie innovative solutions. Here we are, 1 to 1 – why use a Smartboard to share information? We could use Google docs and Dropbox over coffee and conversation in the hallway.

If you, as a student, use your tablet computer as a notebook, a textbook, or even Scott Klososky’s “outboard brain,” how engrained is the path? Can you make your tablet into a sidecar easel, a portable printing press, an onboard media studio and darkroom, a compact global network? As a teacher, what are ways for me to facilitate the path shift? I think, first and foremost, we need to bring an attitude of play into each class, removing the life-and-death, fear of failure paradigm wrapped up in our AP/IB courses and start blazing divergent paths to the top of this mountain we’ve chosen to climb (worth it or not). Creative learning is learning, and if the tests have any validity, they test learning. If they don’t have any validity, we should be smart enough to change the path.

In our brave new world, a successful thinker is a free associater, one who can draw connections between broad sets of information and create new, valuable information for wide or specific audiences. Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, has something to say about this, as well, in his “Six Verbs for the New Web.” Check out the last one: Generate! If you want to make a mark, and have an audience, you must generate something new and useful, or at least fun. Can you take a fresh look at the world, de-Einstellung yourself (so, the solution is not on a single Wikipedia page, bout could be in 15 taken together), break with the path dependance of tools (see iPad), and make something new?

Can we? I’d love to hear any and all thoughts on this one.

Additional, tangentially-related, and fascinating discussion with Kevin Kelly via the good folks at Radiolab in a roughly 20 minute podcast here.