The book includes the basics of project-based-learning—exhibition, multiple drafts, and critique—and provides lots of examples, resources, and even forms for teachers to use.  It, along with recent postings by Edutopia, is a good place to start for teachers and schools exploring how to better engage students.

The Innovation Unit, itself, is also worth a visit.  The organization exists to bring radical innovation to the public services, particularly in education, early childhood services, local government, and health.  Its board is chaired by Australian educator Tony Mckay.

Their work in education struck me in part because of the similarity between some of their ideas, such as 10 Ideas for 21^st Century Learning and the set of ideas I’ve been writing about in the Learning 2.0 series of posts.  Their site is well worth a visit.

Produced by 10-Graders; available at blurb.com

Ben Heckman, an 8^th grader from Framington, MN, is a twice-published novelist whose story was told in a New York Times piece about the growing number of young writers who break into print, usually with a little bankrolling from their parents.  Hundreds of teenage and younger authors are publishing every year.

The Times story by Elissa Gootman also illustrates what I call Learning 2.0, the next full scale upgrade of public education.  The authors in her story all wrote fiction, but publishing non-fiction student work also is an important pedagogy, a departure from the century-old acquisition-and-storage model of learning.  Publishing student work is an act of exhibition, an invitation for people to view and comment on it, and a validation of self worth of the writer.  Publication says that students can do something, know something, and be something.

My exhibit “A” resides at High Tech High in San Diego, where 60 books are listed on the school’s web site creating both examples of the school’s own ideas about its best work and the transparency through which others can judge it.  (I’m writing a case study of the school that should be published soon.)

San Diego Bay begins about 200 yards from the HTH Point Loma campus.  It serves as a social and scientific laboratory, and students have written four books about the bay and its environs.  One of them, San Diego Bay: A Story of Exploitation and Restoration, was published by the University of California, San Diego, and supported by the National Sea Grant program.

Through a series of projects developed by teachers Jay Vavra in biology, Tom Fehrenbacher in humanities, and Rod Buenviaje in mathematics, students interviewed Native Americans, Chinese fishermen, and hunters.  They follow the fortunes of tuna, sea lions, white sea bass, abalone, and dolphins.  They applied Jared Diamond’s themes from Guns, Germs, and Steel to the Bay.  They ended by saying, “Only when we realize that all the pieces of the bigger picture we call nature must be considered will we be capable of sustainably using the Bay, and the rest of the world’s environment, to its fullest extent.”

Several other groups of students, and their teachers, have produced “alphabet books” or dictionaries on academic disciplines.  Andrew Gloag’s students published Absolute Zero, which illustrates physics terms.  “A is for Antimatter” writes Kathy Anderson, explaining that high energy antimatter engines are still si fi stuff, but that PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans of brain activity exemplifies a practical application of the science.

Jenny Morris and a biology class at HTH Chula Vista, wrote Alphabet Soup: The A-Z of Cell Biology, about which Morris comments: “This book is living proof that students will aspire to and reach the high expectations you set for them, if you provide a safe and supportive environment in which to try, fail, try again, and eventually succeed.”

Dan Wise’s economics students produced posters explaining economic terms in language a junior high school student could understand.  (Students had to test their examples on them.  If a sixth grader couldn’t understand; start over.)  Think: could you define a “moral hazard” or a “free rider”?  In the process of creating these examples, the students learned the underlying economics, concise writing, and design.  They illustrated each defined term with linoleum block prints that became part of the posters, and the posters and definitions became part of a book, Economics Illustrated.

Ben Daley, HTH chief operating officer, sees great value in publishing student work: “I have observed the pride that many students feel at having their words and their work appear in print.  One of my high school senior advisees solemnly observed to my advisory group, ‘I’m a published author now.’  I believe that micro-publishing is an opportunity that allows almost any teacher to work alongside students to produce high quality products in which students not only absorb new information but also transform it to help make it their own, as well as develop important skills such as learning to work well in a group and the ability to effectively communicate one’s ideas.”

Exhibition also creates incentive among students.  As HTH art teacher Jeff Robin says, “If you think that you are an artist, but your paintings are only in your mother’s garage, you’re really not an artist; you’re just cluttering up your mother’s garage.”  Teacher and students need to know where the project will live. “If you know that the project will be displayed in an art gallery in downtown San Diego and your family and friends are going to be there, you are going to want to do a better job.”

Publishing does not substitute for practice in writing, just as performing does not substitute for practice in music, or playing does not substitute for practice in soccer. In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits the 10,000-hour rule, the length of time it takes to master most anything.  Exhibition as pedagogy does not assert that it creates prodigies; it simply creates more opportunities for practice that is subject to critique.  In a way, it’s serious play, and incentivized learning in ways that receiving a traditional red-penciled paper from a teacher decidedly is not.

Students show me how they learn with iPods at Pachappa Elementary School in Riverside

Part of Learning 2.0 is being Beta tested in the Riverside Unified School District, the 43,000-student school system 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

At the invitation of Superintendent Rick Miller, I undertook a blitzkrieg tour of Riverside schools last week and came away impressed with how they have pushed the envelope of teaching and learning toward the five principles of Learning 2.0.  They have done so without leaving traditional schooling behind.

Impressively, everyone I talked to in RUSD understands what they are doing is a work in progress, an on-going experiment in teaching and learning.  Not everything they have tried has turned out the way that they thought it would.  Their virtual high school, for example, serves more students in a blended learning mode than it does students who take all their lessons on line.  So, they are paying a lot more attention to the advantages of technology as an option for students enrolled at a brick and mortar school.  Smart whiteboards didn’t seem to increase student achievement.  So, they are using them less.  RUSD uses a lot of technology, but the goal to support learning, not to show off digital toys.

Second, the schools have wisely chosen to retain a great deal of what is traditional and valued about schooling.  Parents, educators, and administrators steeped in Learning 1.0 will see schools and teaching that they understand and recognize.  I still need to better understand how students and teachers blend the old and new, how they step to the edges of their comfort zone without vertigo.  Movement to the edges is the hardest for administrators, I think.  They have both personal stakes and a sense of entitlement rooted in the old system.

In Learning 2.0, schooling operates under the realization that students, rather than the adults, are the real workers in the system.  RUSD recognized this.  The district’s technology initiatives have been built around getting consumer level electronics—tablets and pods—in the hands of students and giving them a lot of freedom over how they use those devices.

In several schools, every student is issued a tablet computer or a handheld device. (Students prefer tablets to laptops.)  They can take then home, put their own music and games on them.  So far, the loss and theft rate has been low, and the district has spent less money on replacements than it previously spent on lost textbooks.

I visited a kindergarten at Pachappa Elementary School, where each of the students was working on an iPod.  They were all working independently, and they seemed to know what they were doing.  Instructional technology director Jay McPhail said that for the most part the district has not found it necessary to hire adults to teach the students how to use new technologies; the students teach each other.  They also self enforce to a degree.  In the kindergarten class I visited, one student was correcting another who had strayed from the assignment into another application.

The district is also rolling out a dashboard that contains student progress indicators that are updated almost every day.  The dashboard delivers current, necessary data, not all the minutia schools collect.  Each student gets data on five or six key variables, including how they are doing on the requirements for admission to California colleges and universities.  Student dashboards, along with their texts, are available on district-issued Android tablets.  But the district’s system works regardless of the platform the student chooses.  Some students use iPads they have received as a gift or bought with the proceeds from part time jobs.

Any adult on campus can ask to see a student’s dashboard.  A cafeteria worker can remind a student that this is sixth period and that they ought to be in class rather than sitting on the picnic table.  A teacher can look at a student’s academic history and suggest a class that the student might profit from in the coming semester.

There is always the possibility that another student, or someone else, might see a student’s information.  But the kind of legally sensitive information about race, poverty, or special education status that make educators wary of sharing data are not on the dashboard.  It derives from the official student information system, but it does not replace it.

The student bill of rights initiative

The folks at Riverside are also the force behind the Student Bill of Rights Initiative, and they need to gather about 750,000 signatures for the proposal to appear on the November ballot.  The initiative would allow students in any public school to take on-line courses that would meet the University of California or California State University entrance requirements regardless of who offered the course.  Currently, state law creates barriers for students who want to take courses outside their home district.

The proposers maintain that more than one million students in the state attend schools that do not offer all the courses necessary for university admission.  They also argue that on-line offerings would help lower the remediation courses now required of students, especially at the community colleges. (These claims have been challenged, see comments.)

The initiative would require that on-line courses be taught by credentialed teachers and that they be approved by the University of California.

The initiative is important for a number of reasons.  It might actually pass.  Although visibly supported by the online community, the education establishment has been slow to endorse it, and one suspects they are waiting to see if the signature collection is successful before weighing in.  But it’s safe to say there is no groundswell among the districts.

Whether or not initiative passes, it is important as a signal of intelligent life in California, which despite playing host to the digital revolution ranks dead last among the states in openness to online learning.  In addition, it signals an important shift in thinking about how learning is produced.  For 100 years, education policy supported a standardized process delivered by geographically based hierarchies.

The initiative suggests that the contents of instruction and its pedagogy may come from many sources, and that students, as the workers in the system, might get some choice among them.  It also suggests that school districts might become more network like, linked to one another, rather than vertically connected to the state.

Responses to Comments

I’ve received some response to the Politics of Learning 2.0, much of it helpfully critical. Here, in a nutshell, are some amendments that these critiques have spurred.  Thanks to all for your thoughts.  What follows are comments followed by my reactions.

I’m not sure Learning 2.0 is a good basis for all of education.  Some teachers will have the initiative and smarts to pull it off, but is this replicable by all.  Doubtful?

I made a serious error, I believe, in not explicating the software metaphor that lies behind the transition between Learning 1.0 and Learning 2.0.  Smart software designers understand backward compatibility.  Learning 2.0 builds on rather than replaces the previous version.  Projects don’t replace direct instruction.  Working across disciplines does not replace working in them.  These are points that will be made in a revision of the report you read.

Building Learning 2.0 on the shoulders of Learning 1.0 supports direct instruction and also fosters the systematic development of projects, internships, sophisticated career/technical education, and other forms of combined head-and-hands learning builds capacity in the public education system.  Building capacity is the central argument: California needs to switch its policies from the endless seesaw between more regulation and more deregulation in governance to systematically building capacity.  One of the ways to do that is to build something like Learning 2.0.net: an information, teaching, and testing utility.

This is so old.  You can even find old standards done in the earliest day of the outcome-based education movement.

I freely admit that there is “oldness” to some of the hands-on, participatory ideas.  In one of my writing exercises leading up to the report you read, I reviewed the Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown book The New Culture of Learning, which tries to capture the possibilities of the Internet age, alongside of John Dewey’s School and Society published in 1900. There are striking parallels, including “true believer” cultishness and an underestimation of the administrative cult of efficiency that would marginalize Dewey and his followers.

Still, dismissing the new because it resembles the old misses the point.  Both Thomas/JSB and Dewey wrote in response to a change in society’s basic mode of work and production.  Dewey saw the challenge of organizing learning in the industrial age.  Thomas/JSB wrestle with the Internet.  If education were a consumer market, or even a commercial one, the standard mechanisms of technology adoption, including the disruptive characteristics that Christensen, et al. write about, would sort this out.  But public education, as we all know, is deeply institutional.  Its politics have to do with brokering interest group behavior and legitimating certain activities while delegitimizing others.  That’s what happened a century ago in Dewey’s time, and it’s what we have the opportunity to rethink now.

Students as workers: This views students simply as workers and not literate citizens.

There seems to be some confusion on this point.  The student-as-worker phrase has to do with the inherent division of labor within schools, not the aim or schooling.  In most of school reform, we treat students we try to get the adults to work differently or harder rather than recognize that what students do that counts. I am not suggesting The Lord of the Flies or Summerhill, only that at the policy and infrastructure level we recognize that regardless of what program of instruction one adopts, students have to do the work.  Law and social norms can bring students to school; whether students use school as a place to learn is their decision.  Always has been.  Internet technology extends student agency about where and how they learn.  My plea is simply to take advantage of this technology rather than treat it as distractive pop culture.  The best way to take advantage of Internet technology is to place its educative potential in the hands of students directly.

What is lacking in this and always has been is solid liberal arts education where knowledge and subject matter competency means something.

You’ll get no argument from me that disciplinary knowledge is important.  But the acquisition and storage model of learning is a disincentive for many if not most students.  Consider writing.  One learns to write by writing.  Mechanics and grammar help make writing better, but learning them does not make one a writer.  Most teachers of writing don’t understand the distinction.  Most have produced little published work, nor have they assisted many students in becoming accomplished writers in any genre.  It is only at the edges of the massive writing instruction enterprise that we find students engaged in the kinds of work that professional or scholarly writers undertake.  Journalism classes, creative writing anthologies, and real research papers are celebrated more as exceptionalities than the way most students make their way through elementary and secondary schooling.  So, if students end up using pop slang in texts or 147-character tweets, it’s because we have not provided a more attractive outlet for their developing talent.

Peer Production: The idea of thousands of people working on something for free will lead to high quality is questionable.

The argument for peer production is not a question of whether Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia, Moodle is the best classroom management system, or Linux is the best operating system.  It’s a question of who controls the intellectual core of teaching and learning.

Public education exists in the old information economy, along with newspapers, television networks, and traditional universities.  All these are extremely capital intensive and oligopolistic.  The firms that profit from the old information economy in education have become both commercially acquisitive—in many cases replacing the curriculum development staffs of school districts and states—and highly protective of their interests through lobbying and copyright legislation.

If it chooses, public policy in California can establish, aid, and protect the new information economy built on networks of people rather than corporate vendors.  The state can say to its 300,000 teachers that their grounded knowledge of what works, when, and how can be easily transmitted and used by others, that teaching no longer has to be an isolated occupation, and that collaboration can be rewarded rather than discouraged.  Otherwise, technology will be used only to increasingly inspect teaching processes and to emphasize the industrial character of teaching work while decreasing its artistic and craft dimensions.

Building Capacity in California

A closing note on capacity building:  I’ve watched educational policy being made for more than four decades.  I’ve watched the institution descend from a celebrated civic virtue to untrusted object of derision.  I’ve witnessed most of the new money being directed toward categorical programs for those not served well by the conventional system, rather than redesigning the system itself.  I firmly believe that we cannot regulate ourselves to success and we cannot expect success to emerge from a deregulated market.  We have to build capacity that makes public schools educational and political winners.  That, I believe, is the big policy bet and the new California exceptionalism.

Learning 2.0.net is one of the relatively inexpensive ways that we can do so.  Many options exist for building it.  We have a lot of technology talent in this state to advise about how to put together an innovative public-private collaboration.  We probably don’t need a “one best system” solution, but we do need to find a way forward with technology integration and its capacity to change learning and teaching.

Early morning on the dunes near Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley, California

There are new pictures in the gallery, including the image shown here of Death Valley in the early morning.  I had rolled out of bed at Stovepipe Wells before dawn in order to capture the rising sun over the desert.  This, with a little enhancement, is one of the results.

In addition, there are the best of non-family pictures from 2010, and 2011, some taken close to home, many of them in the Baltic, Hawaii, and Italy.  I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did making them.

The Politics

Over the last two years, I have been researching and writing about Learning 2.0, the next full scale version of public education.

I started the research to find a way through the political gridlock of education politics, not because I considered myself an expert in learning theory or pedagogical practice.  I think I have.

In a report to the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, which supported my research, I called for the creation of Learning 2.0.net, a public venture that would change how students learn, how teachers work, and how students gain credit for what they do.

Learning 2.0.net is both possible and necessary because the leading schools are departing from the century-old industrial batch-processing model in two ways.  First, they use a form of flexible specialization, a means of production capable of responding to the needs of individual students quickly and economically.  Second, they rely on peer production, social sharing and exchange to build things of value.

In the growing world of peer production, individuals cooperate to create goods and services without the intervention of firms or government agencies, although they may be enabled by them.  Individual self-identification rather than management authority determines the division of labor in ventures, such as Moodle, Wikipedia or the virtual reality system Second Life.  Peer production is possible because the Internet is different from other technologies because it passes the power of production and the ability to collaborate in production into the hands of individuals.  It does not mean that all the capital necessary to process, store and communicate information is under individual control.  That is not necessary.  But with a very modest investment, individuals gain the ability to access information, to take from it, rework it and submit it back to the commons.

Learning 2.0.net

The relevant policy question is whether California can feasibly take steps that use the new production system to bring Learning 2.0 into being and to use the new production technology to build the capacity of the state’s education system.  I believe it can.

California needs to invest in a learning infrastructure for students, one that uses the new network production technology.  Think of it as a combination of Facebook for school, the best computer game you ever saw, and a smart app for your mind.  By thinking of the student as the end-user rather than designing educational products that will be attractive to a textbook adoption committee, the state can vastly open up learning to new participants, approaches and ideas.

Learning 2.0.net would contain information necessary for students and their parents to navigate schooling, teaching and tutoring in different modalities and styles, and the ability for students to test their knowledge and gain credit.

For students and their parents, information lights the pathway to college and career. By when should a child be redesignated as English fluent to have a good chance of getting into college?  Why are class placement tests at a community college important?  At a minimum, students and their parents ought to have on-line access to reliable information about where they are on a pathway, an educational GPS function.

The second part of Learning 2.0.net would offer a variety of learning experiences, or access to them.  The number learning applications grows almost hourly.  In fact, there is so much learning material on the Internet that Learning 2.0.net should function as an aggregator.  Also, it should assist the development of particularly sophisticated applications, social or scientific simulations.  And it can be the site for collaborating teachers and students.

The third part of Learning 2.0.net would allow students to take tests and get credit for learning.  Students could take tests when they were ready, could pass courses when they were ready, could take tests as formative feedback.  Unbundling teaching and testing also allows the whole education system to become more productive.  If the financial rewards for school systems were correctly managed, it might also incentivize schools and districts to accelerate learning.  And instead of drawing students away from substantive learning, substantive tests would motivate students and place the teacher in the position of a supportive tutor and coach to help them reach their goals.

Creating a Politics of Winners

Learning 2.0.net would change the politics of education in California by changing the way students interact with the tools of learning.  By changing the way students and teachers work, it would activate new interests in education, and reshape the interests of well-established parties, such as teacher unions, parents, and school districts. It would activate student and parent expectations of schooling.  It would allow teachers to have field trials of new ways of arranging their work without frontally attacking the idea of a class or student-teacher ratios.

No state agency or district would demand its use as a matter of system design.  Learning 2.0.net’s growth would come about through practice adoption rather than mandate. Learning 2.0.net allows teacher unions and school districts to embrace technology without forfeiting the students, the revenue they bring to a school district, or the teacher jobs that revenue allows.  Students would remain enrolled in their home school and district.

Learning 2.0.net could also serve an important educational laboratory function.  All the new modes of learning are in their infancy and they need more of the D(evelopment) part of R&D. Instead of a standard design, California needs many laboratories.  It would help preserve a legal commons so that the intellectual property of schooling stays in the public domain.  And it would allow attaching school-finance and human-resources politics to productive changes in learning.

And more than anything, Learning 2.0.net would allow existing schools to be winners, politically and educationally.

The full report is available here.

His template for transformation comes from the QED Foundation: learning moves from classroom to community, organization from compliance to cooperation.  You get the drift.  If test score advancement is your singular goal, then your favorite school is unlikely to make the cut.

Sam’s list contains some of the places I would nominate, and I would add these three:

1. The Avalon School in St. Paul, Minnesota.  The 187 students in this charter school learn through projects they design.  Their Congress devises the school’s rules, and their restorative justice system handles infractions and disputes.  The faculty (the executive branch of government) divides leadership roles including hiring, budgeting, and employee evaluation and discharge.
2. High Tech High in San Diego County, California.  Another deeply project-based set of schools in which learning is based on the integration of head and hands, school and community, race and class.  Teachers design the curriculum.  Lots of highly engaged students, and a leadership team of education evangelicals.
3. Scotland, the first country in the world to develop an educational intranet (a closed internet) for its schools, families, teachers, and students.  But the purpose of Glow, as the connectivity system is called, is to foster collaboration and the development of great learning experiences that fulfill the aims of that country’s national curriculum.  Rather than turn to publishers, the Scots turned to their teachers.

In a new labor agreement that embraces local school autonomy, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy has jumped from one school reform horse to another.

He dismounted from the Public School Choice horse, thus ending the era when the school district sought to improve schools through robust competition between district-run school management teams, charters, and other complex operating arrangements.  Under what has been called “portfolio” logic, the school district would assemble the best collection of schools it could, putting underperforming ones up for competitive bids while encouraging the ones that were doing well.

The labor agreement now being voted on virtually ends Public School Choice.  For the next three years, no charters or external school management organizations can apply, and the district is forbidden to reconstitute a school making what the agreement calls but does not define as “reasonable progress.”

Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles president Warren Fletcher saddled up a new filly—the daughter of school reforms past—called decentralization.  The underlying logic is that diversity in approach to schooling is good, that many different models of instruction are needed, and that teachers and administrators know best how to design schooling and to self-regulate their jobs.

They were right to get off the old horse.  It was dead or at least hobbled.  The 2009 Public School Choice resolution offered by former board member Yolie Flores was an audacious idea, but political push back tied its legs from the beginning.  Its racing life was short.  In the first round of applications, the school board rejected Superintendent Ray Cortines’ recommendations and awarded none of the newly constructed schools to charters.  The persistently underperforming schools, which had been ordered to write competitive proposals, largely competed against themselves.  Few charter or external organizations sought to run them.  Conventional wisdom in the charter world is that taking over existing public schools is too fraught with pain and difficulty to be worth the effort; better to start new.

However, the new decentralization horse does not have a good track record.  LAUSD rode this horse hard during the 1990s, and both Deasy and Fletcher could learn from that trial.

The 1990s decentralization horse didn’t get fed enough.  Schools that joined the LEARN project were promised budgetary flexibility, which largely never appeared, and added funding, which dried up after a few years.

There may be no food at all for the new decentralization mount.  While the labor agreement promises formative assistance for struggling schools and help for planning newly decentralized ones, the state budget shortfall, with more in store next week, may truly empty the food bag.

The 1990s decentralization horse often didn’t know where the finish line was.  LEARN training focused more on adult process skills than hard-core analytics about student achievement.  There was no agreement about how to measure the outcomes the schools wanted, and for most of the period California lacked statewide measurements.

The same ambiguity applies now.  Will the decentralized schools be judged only by the state’s Academic Performance Index?  Will teachers be evaluated by how much they contributed to test score increases?  Teachers in general and UTLA in particular loathe so-called “value added” measurements, but they have not proposed an alternative.  The expectations for decentralized schools, the means of evaluating them, and the consequences are all up for grabs.  Without a finish line, the new school reform horse is likely to spend its time chewing the infield grass as galloping on the track.

The 1990s school reform horse had inconsistent trainers.  Teachers and principals attended sometimes extensive workshops and residencies.  (Palm Springs in July.  Bring gloves; your steering wheel will be too hot to touch.)  They learned the process rudiments of what was called a professional learning community.  But these schools were isolated within the larger LAUSD and UTLA organizations.  The idea of teacher leadership was rejected by the administrative establishment as improper and by union activists as not being tough minded enough.

The 1990s school reform horse had a short season at the track.  LEARN was approved by the school board in 1993 and got underway the following year.  By 1999, the race was over.  External supporters grew frustrated with LAUSD, and they moved on to foster charter school development, particularly those now called the Alliance Schools.  Opposition in the district, school board, and union increased.  Victory was declared, but the season ended.

Fletcher and Deasy may have saddled up a better horse.  Using the union contract as a reform document gives reform a stable home.  Contracts last longer than superintendencies or a union president’s term, and they are good at patterning behavior.  Still, neither union nor district could resist the temptation to mire their new ideas on a slow muddy track of committee approvals, school votes, plan documents, and more approvals.  It may never get to the starting gate.

I don’t know whether this horse will run, but I’m putting down my bet.  See you at the $2 window.

Indeed, CAVA is the largest existing test bed for the learning systems devised by the for-profit firm K-12, which actively markets its products to school districts and individuals. Rather than being understood as a vehicle for home schooling, CAVA is better thought of as a new production system for learning, highly designed yet flexible.  It provides a substantial amount of agency for students and parents to tailor their learning, but it requires much more active engagement from them than attending a brick and mortar school.

In a case study just published on this site, Laura Mulfinger and I describe the development of virtual education and visit with CAVA teachers and families.