Cell phones versus i-Pads: Problems looking for Solutions?

In a thought provoking column in this Sunday’s New York Times, The Triumph of the Ordinary Cellphone, Anand Giridharadas, discusses whether the US has thought about high tech correctly when it comes to meeting the needs of a majority of the world’s citizens not jus the most affluent.

Americans went gaga last weekend with the iPad’s release. But even as hundreds of thousands here unwrap their iPads, another future entirely may be unfolding overseas on the cellphone. “Forgotten in the American tumult is a global flowering of innovation on the simple cellphone. From Brazil to India to South Korea and even Afghanistan, people are seeking work via text message; borrowing and lending money and receiving salaries on cellphones; employing their phones variously as flashlights, televisions and radios.”

Giridharadas makes a number of key points:

In developing countries the innovative ideas come from perfecting the cell phone to do more useful things for ordinary people–for example:

•Two organizations — Babajob, in Bangalore, India, and Souktel, in the Palestinian territories in Israel — offer job-hunting services via text message. Souktel allows users without Internet access or fancy phones to register by sending a series of text messages with information about themselves. A user who texts in “match me” will receive a listing of suitable jobs, including phone numbers to dial.
•In Africa, the cellphone is giving birth to a new paradigm in money. Plastic cards have become the reigning instruments of payment in the West, but projects like PesaPal and M-Pesa in Kenya are working to make the cellphone the hub of personal finance. M-Pesa lets you convert cash into cellphone money at your local grocer, and this money can instantly be wired to anyone with a phone.
Innovative companies are also able to build business models that allow larger numbers of people to share in the innovations while still preserving favorable profit margins:

In India, Reliance Communications sells handsets for less than $25, with 1-cent-a-minute phone calls across India and 1-cent text messages and no monthly charge — while earning fat profits. Compare that with iPad buyers in the United States, who pay $499 for the basic version, who might also have a $1,000-plus computer and a $100-plus smartphone, and who could pay $100 or more each month to connect these many devices to the ether.

Has the US taken the wrong road when it comes to truly developing the next generation of technology’s potential? ‘Ken Banks, a British entrepreneur who works in Africa and developed FrontlineSMS, a text-messaging service for aid groups, thinks so: “There’s often a tendency in the West to approach things the wrong way round, so we end up with solutions looking for a problem, or we build things just because we can.”

Does this type of backwards thinking also apply in education? I think so. Let’s just take one example, we have numerous free courses on the world wide web and amazing amount of other educational resources that are looking for users. But rather than figuring out whether these thousands if not millions of resources produced by organizations like NASA, the Library of Congress and Museums around the world have value and for whom – for profit companies continue to sell to schools entire courses that arguably keep reinventing the wheel. We are so busy innovating all the time we dont get a chance to stop often enough concerning whom are we innovating for and with what result. The result shiny new objects and software with brightly colored interactive features owned by fewer and fewer people, rather than less shiny and more useful objects and software owned by more people. You choose.

Why I Will Be Attending Greg Mortenson's Webinar Next Week

I have been a fan of Greg Mortenson's work ever since reading, with millions of others, the best selling (100 Weeks on the New York Times bestseller charts and a recommended read on my website)
Three Cups of Tea. Edutopia will be hosting Greg's webinar on April 15th at 1:30 EDT. entitled "The Power of One: Greg Mortenson's Crusade to Promote Peace through Project Learning."
There are so many things to admire about Greg--his single minded effort after he was rescued in a mountaineering accident to build a school in the remote area of Afghanistan for girls, in part to pay the villagers back for their kindness and in part because he was so moved by the plight of these children who were otherwise destined for some terrible lives. As an aside we should be in a war not against terrorism per se (how can you fight a brutal tactic) but against fundamentalist mindsets that kill hope and opportunity for the majority of human beings on the planet. What more stirring cause to awaken the young and idealist among us than this cause in Afghanistan and in the rest of the world where women and others are unjustly oppressed? But getting back to Mortenson's great qualities--he also sees the need to reconnect his work to young children back in the US as a recent article in Edutopia states:

"Mortenson hasn't forgotten that it was children who raided their piggybanks to make the first sizeable contribution to his effort in 1994. "I had been having trouble raising money," he recalls, and was growing disheartened about ever making good on his promise to build that first school. But when he shared his saga with kids in Wisconsin where his mother was then a principal, they responded by contributing "62,340 pennies," Mortenson says. It was just the vote of confidence he needed."

Also commendable is the Pennies for Peace program

"Launched in 1996 as a program of Central Asia Institute, Pennies for Peace has expanded to include a standards-based, multimedia curriculum for grades K-12. (See below, "How to Participate in Pennies for Peace.") Although fundraising is an important part of the program, it's not the main goal. At heart, Pennies for Peace is about cross-cultural understanding -- learning to listen, and learn, from others' stories."

Altogether Greg is a modern hero, teacher and good soul--so that is why I will be listening to him on the Webinar next week.

More Teachable Moments in Understanding Global Warming

A review of a new book in this Sunday's New York Times --“Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution” (Scribner, 272 pages, $26) points out how gullible we are when it comes to companies trying to sell us on how green they are.


The author Heather Rogers asserts that "green capitalism is actually undermining ecological progress.. She says corporate America has led us into thinking that we can save the earth mainly by buying things like compact fluorescent light bulbs, hybrid gas-electric cars and carbon offsets. “The new green wave, typified by the phrase ‘lazy environmentalism,’ is geared toward the masses that aren’t willing to sacrifice,” Ms. Rogers complains. “This brand of armchair activism actualizes itself most fully in the realm of consumer goods; through buying the right products we can usher our economic system into the environmental age.”

The point has been made by many people before and noted in this blog that believing you are acting "green" and doing something worthwhile for the planet are often two different things. So here is an assignment for middle and high school students--distingush between authentic and real claims that companies make and see to what extent they are part of their "green washing" campaigns and to what extent they will do anything significant to reduce our carbon fuel dependencies and help cool down the planet.

Here is a more advanced exercise--to explore leading environmentalist Chris Goodall's contention (writing in the Guardian in 2008 ) that we don't need to find hi-tech solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

"Many of these are expensive and may create as many problems as they solve. Nuclear power is a good example. But it may be cheaper and more effective to look for simple solutions that reduce emissions, or even extract existing carbon dioxide from the air. There are many viable proposals to do this cheaply around the world, which also often help feed the world's poorest people. One outstanding example is to use a substance known as biochar to sequester carbon and increase food yields at the same time.

Biochar is an astonishing idea. Burning agricultural wastes in the absence of air leaves a charcoal composed of almost pure carbon, which can then be crushed and dug into the soil. Biochar is extremely stable and the carbon will stay in the soil unchanged for hundreds of years.


Never heard of biochar? Nor have I but the following link might be helpful for those who want to explore its potential--


Having thoroughly investigated a variety of claims students might conclude as Rogers seems to that we simply need to reduce our consumption.

“Around the world, many politicians, the conventional energy sector and manufacturers of all kinds oppose any major reduction in consumption,” Ms. Rogers writes. “If people start using less, then economies based on consumption — such as that of the United States, where buying goods and services comprises 70 percent of all economic activity — will be forced to undergo a colossal transformation.”

Can we live with this conclusion? At least we need to give our students an opportunity to reach this insight themselves and make their own choices for their futures. It sounds to me like both an ethical and educational thing to do. What do you think dear reader?

IPAD –Transforming E-Learning One App at a Time?

It is never easy to jump into the iPad discussion as there is so much noise and hype out there. But since many are anticipating that the sales for iPad will rival those of the revolutionary iPhone it is very tempting to make some preliminary judgments. As many of the pundits have already said –in the near term the most popular uses for the very attractive sleek electronic package, with its ever so bright 9 ½ inch screen is for reading magazines and newspapers and playing the thousands of games and other entertaining activities that will multiply in coming years as more software developers devote their energies to designing the next coolest app.

But I am seriously wondering whether the next big use for the iPad (a killer app no less) will be to transform e-learning. The breakthrough will come if someone was to develop an LMS app as Joshua Kim speculates in his interesting blog. Kim maybe right that if that were to happen we would see an incredible growth in online learning. Currently, as Kim points out, copyright laws and some odd higher education policies prevent us from going in this direction. But there is no insuperable reason why they cannot change and we could see a content rich organization (we can think of any number from the New York Times, Pearson or Harvard University) allow students to download and sync content in much the same way we can using any newspaper app available on the iPhone. Think of the customization for individual learners as students with differing learning needs can choose from a menu of content options—videos, articles, chapters from books with some marked premium content for those that are able to pay more for the opportunity to explore a concept in more depth.

Think of the iPad as a device that you can learn from more easily from where broadband connections do not exist. Although missing a camera –the device does possess a microphone and speakers and can connect with the Internet through Skype. With not much effort we could figure out a way to have the best professors in the world deliver their lectures assisted by teams of volunteer mentors (think about the hundreds of thousands of people who play chess or scrabble online) who could provide assistance to students who are wrestling with problems. Learning organizations of all types –from tiny schools through colleges and universities to large corporations could scale up in massive ways. Some institutions might empower tutors trained in the uses of the LMS to provide personal services to students –who could diagnose student learning challenges. Others would begin to automate far more functions such as providing provide short tutorials in the form of videos that explain difficult concepts in more detail than would otherwise be available currently. The key to the puzzle of figuring out how the world of open learning squares with the current higher education system would be over—learning would be open everywhere and there would be no more barriers to higher education other than the will to learn. A utopian dream may not be that far away..

Analyzing the Significance of Google's Slow and Shrewd Exit from China

Google's recent announcement that it is no longer going to self censor its Chinese search engine and move its servers to Hong Kong is significant for more than a few reasons:

1) The move marks the end of the first phase of a Chess game that has gone on between Google as one of the premier global corporations and the Chinese state

2) It demonstrates that there is a moral center to a US global corporation and that is committed to "do no evil". Arguably the move would not have occurred had not China according to Washington Post reports , "targeted (them) in computer hacking attacks originating from China." Such attacks included prying "into the e-mail of human rights activists, according to Google..(raising) the specter that the Chinese government played a role in the espionage, although Google never made a direct accusation."

3) It makes more visible the wider economic war going on as China seeks entry into many other world markets and competes with Google for dominance in some economic sectors. As the Wall Street Journal reported "Signs of nationalism are evident in the grooming of state-owned companies to dominate their industries as "national champions," often at the expense of private Chinese companies as well as foreign firms. From airlines to coal mining to dairy products, government policies are expanding the state's role.A year ago, in a move foreign critics called protectionist, Chinese regulators rejected a bid by Coca-Cola Co. for China Huiyuan Juice Group Ltd., saying it could crowd out smaller companies and raise consumer prices. The two combined held just a fifth of China's juice market.In July, four executives of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto were detained, initially accused of stealing "state secrets," amid tense negotiations between global miners and China's steel industry over iron ore prices. Rio Tinto denies wrongdoing by the men, who await trial on reduced charges of bribery and theft of commercial secrets."

4) It reveals the relative power of an IT savvy global corporation and the relative fragility of a fearful Chinese one party state. The genius of Google's strategy is that by moving its search engine servers to Hong Kong (where different legal rules apply--two systems one country) they can can reveal the uncensored web to a country that had no idea that information was being withheld from them. We see what happens--could be as important as the kind of radio/TV stations etc Russians were picking up in the 1980s that led to the end of the cold war.

5) The conflict spotlights the historical tensions within the China's relationship to the west. As the WSJ comments "For many multinationals in China, today's profits follow years of investment, much of it encouraged by government policies designed to lure capital. Now, at the point when their dream of access to a giant market is becoming reality, China is so prosperous that it has less need for foreign funds. Foreign investment has grown much slower than the rest of China's economy, amounting to 1.8% of gross domestic product in 2009, down from a peak of 6% in 1994." That economic security means that those among the elite ruling class "who has long harbored suspicions the West wants to hobble its economic rise" have now have had their hand strengthened. Now this group wants to resist Google and others by wanting to limit "foreign presence in the economy." This group of economic nationalists seem determined and unusually angry judging by the scale of the cyber-attacks that took place back in January.

So far the US and the West reacted quite calmly to these provocations. Clearly China can behave so badly sometimes because they know we need them to continue to buy our debt and to help us solve some key problems around the world,so it will be interesting to watch whether China will continue to ratchet up the tensions or not. The best outcome will be to allow Google to continue to operate from Hong Kong and to slowly absorb the reality that we live in an age where countries borders' can no longer stop the free flow of information.

Global Competency and Why Schools Resist

One of the questions that will need to be addressed if we are to make progress in the area of global studies is the question--what do we mean by the term "global competence"?

The topic came up at a recent symposium hosted at CoSN. Alexis Menten, assistant director of the Asia Society, used the term when describing the skills that that today's high schol graduate will need:
“We’ve seen a sea change. The world has changed, so the education system also needs to change,” she said during a panel discussion explaining why global competencies are critical for today’s students. “Students need to graduate from high school not only workforce-ready and college-ready, but they also need to be globally competent.”

How to make it possible? Many more teachers are looking to use Web 2.0 tools to make this happen. For example --Sasha Connors, an English teacher at Burlington County Institute of Technology in New Jersey,uses iEARN and Skype comments that the reason why these tools are so educative is that they can cut through the media stereotypes.

“I had seen students form opinions based on what they see in the media. They had a limited knowledge of how the world works,” she said. “Web 2.0 allows students to interact with students from around the world. Skype allows meaningful global exchanges.”

The great benefit is so often ignored that by interacting with other countries such as in the case of Sasha Connors, they not only gain a better understanding of other countries such as India and Afghanistan, "but of themselves as Americans."

But the sting in the tail is that there are so few teachers like Ms Connors --she comments that she is her school's only teacher making such global technoolgy enabled connections. Fernando Reimers goes further, in an excellent article on the topic of global competency, unpacking some of the deeply embedded issues that prevent schools from taking global competency seriously. He provides some results from a survey of 150 school principals he recently administered:


"Fewer than one-half of respondents reported that their schools offer opportunities to develop global competencies, with similar percentages reporting opportunities to infuse global competencies throughout the curriculum or participate in project-based learning. Although a somewhat higher percentage reported that their schools provide opportunities for foreign language learning to students and teachers, only one in four principals reported opportunities for students or teachers to travel abroad. Support in this area is also limited: Only one in four principals reported adequate opportunities for teacher professional development in global competency, and only one in five reported partnerships with universities or other organizations to support the development of global skills in their schools."


Among the issues Reimers identifies is "not simply figuring out which specific activities contribute to fostering aspects of global competency, but also finding out how to integrate those activities into the regular work of schools and how to align them with existing curriculum, assessment, and opportunities for teacher professional development."

Clearly we need to keep our focus on this set of problems and with the thoughtful leadership of groups like OECD, the Asia Society and thinkers like Reimers we may see some progress made in the next few years on this question of how to move schools ahead in developing globally competent graduates.

Future of Ed Technology? How about the global perspective?

This blog is posted after just returning from the National Press Club meeting hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). The presentation featured some highlights from two major plans--the U.S. Department of Education’s National Educational Technology Plan and the FCC’s National Broadband Plan as they currently exist in draft form. An additional presentation was made by representatives from the Maine regarding their pioneering one laptop per child program.

What did we learn?

The future of schooling may well be for the entire country to emulate the state of Maine and their vision of "A personal digital device at the point of learning" --with the point of learning defined by the learner. According to a 2004 report conducted by the Maine Education Policy Research Institute, "more than 70 percent of students surveyed reported that laptops helped them learn more effectively, produce better work and be more organized. More than 75 percent of teachers surveyed said having the laptops helped them better meet Maine's statewide learning standards." Visitors as far away Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong have visited and there seems to be evidence of success in terms of student learning. Clearly the drafters of both reports have kept the Maine experiment firmly in mind when drafting the draft reports unveiled today. The visionaries behind the Maine approach, Seymour Pappert and Governor King were clearly vindicated in their bold program that has successfully unified federal, state and local funding and policies to a common goal that places the empowered learner at the center of the 21st century school. The success of the program can be measured by the consensus that while (in the midst of the recession) Maine has seen fit to cut many areas of the budget but not their commitment to one-on-one computing.

With the positive message from Maine as the lead off--Karen Cator the Secretary's Technology Advisor who has only been on the job four months talked about five recommendations where technology needs to be used to reach President Obama's goal that by 2020 the US will have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

1. Learning
All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.

2. Assessment
Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

3. Teaching
Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

4. Infrastructure
All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.

5. Productivity
Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff.

The public is invited to comment on the plan.

I have yet to carefully review the draft --but if there is going to be a national plan we need to provide some vision for the way ubiquitious computing can lead to the --as Karen Cator stated the "re-inspiration" of teachers to become more effective and enable their students to reach their potential. That re-inspiration is more likely to come about not because technology can provide greater order of efficiencies in terms of productivity and data management--a bias in this plan-- but also because we set out a series of best practices that motivate and inspire students to learn in ways that embrace our need to prepare students for a 21st century globally interdependent world. It would seem to me that the community has an opportunity to influence this report and by extension the debate about the role of technology in the forseeable future.


Steve Midgely from the FCC set out some key points that complemented the National Plan by talking substantively about the future of digital learning and how broadband speeds need to be increased to facilitate the best forms of the learning that require far more video and interactivity than most schools (and community colleges for that matter) are currently capable of using. He recounted that only 16% of community colleges as opposed to 91 %of research universities have the needed high speed bandwidth. He identified some of the barriers to online learning:

o Teachers prevented from teaching across state lines
o Limited supply of high quality content
o Limited digital literacy skills on the part of teachers and students
o Limited access to public data and transparency of that data
o Complexity of the E-rate program--he has some changes in mind for example for simple applications the equivalent of the EZ 1040 application, the use of networked school buildings for job trainers in after school hours.

Additionally Midgely referenced the need to advance online learning through

-technical/interoperability standards for government-generated multimedia elements, such as images from NASA, and data from other sources.

that would "help provide a uniform platform across the country for all kinds of online learning systems to consume that content, reassemble it.... [W]e should be provisioning all kinds of resources from the National Archives, from Smithsonian, from NASA, from NSF, from the Department of Energy.... All of these resources are digital; they're available now but in proprietary, unique, one-off formats. If we can get a uniform format to publish all of those resources, we can change the game in terms of how digital learning occurs in the United States."

Midgely proposed changing the copyright law to allow digital authors to make their materials available for educational use by marking such materials with a circled "e" symbol (ⓔ) instead of the current circled "c" (©). This would provide blanket permission for educational use of these materials, while publishers who did not want their materials used in this way would be able to continue using the standard copyright symbol. There was no discussion of what would constitute educational use.



So there we have it --a framework that helps to promote the idea that technology can be a vital force in meeting todays' challenge--creating more college graduates--so we can be more internationally competitive--but does not specify in enough detail how we can meet it more imaginatively and creatively than we have done in the past. Rather it simply points to the new efficiencies that technology affords and talks more confidently about a learner centered future. It is now our turn--the turn of globally minded teachers to make that vision more recognizable to every day teachers. We should not flinch from this exciting challenge.