Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines and a generally amazing entrepreneur and leader, founded his company on the basis of amazing customer service. He was often quoted as saying that Southwest was not in the airline business, but rather in the customer service business. Interestingly enough, Southwest has continually lived up to this mission and it can be attributed in large part to their unique corporate hierarchy. That hierarchy states that employees come first, customers come second and shareholders come third. The effects of this are described by Herb in this interview:

…if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy?

So…what if we look at the K-12 education system through the same lens. What would the hierarchy be?

Teachers first

Students second

Parents/Government third

I think that it is counter-intuitive to think that any group but the child/student should be in the first position, however that could be just our problem. PlansForUs is utterly focused on the teacher, because it is the teacher that is on the front lines interfacing with the customer. Providing the teacher with the flexible tools to do their job best should be the focus of any administration or government. We tend to focus on the systems that prevent teachers from failing and have the effect of dis-incenting their own customer service/teaching impulse.

Southwest would not have grown had it imposed rigid systems on its employees. By empowering employees, Southwest created a company that solved problems at the edge and then redistributed that new knowledge to all others within the system. That is how we can reform education, that’s how we can help our students. It is not about centralized systems, but rather empowered employees, solving problems at the edge and redistributing those solutions to all who can benefit.

PlansForUs is not the solution, but we are part of a broader solution that recognizes the impact of empowered teachers on education.

My buddy over at Apple passed along this site because he thought there may be some synergies between what we’re doing at PlansForUs and what Jeff is doing with Hellmansoft’s Planbook. I am going to look more deeply into it, but my first thought is that writing a lesson at PlansForUs and linking to it in your planbook seems like a pretty nice way to organize your work. It would also allow you to access your stuff on the web wherever you are. Write and link the plans at school and update them at home, hmmm. Sounds decent.
Jeff is a teacher in Oregon and I think it is awesome to see his work helping other teachers. If you have any thoughts on how we might work together, leave them in the comments. I’ll work on getting in touch with Jeff sometime next week and let you know how it goes.

In other news we began our user interface improvement project with a few interviews last night. I am excited about what we are learning and can assure you that there will be some serious improvements in usability. In the meantime, thanks for soldiering through and contributing to the growth of PlansForUs.

As you may have noticed I really depend on finding new content and commenting on it. I may not be utterly original but I figure that’s ok if I can expose you to a piece of information that you might not otherwise have seen. That is really the beauty of blogging and of the Internet in general. An individual generates a degree of trust and you, the reader, use that trust to sift through the mass of content produced on an hourly basis. Of course that’s also the premise of what we are doing at PlansForUs.

In any event, I was doing some research on the NewSchools Venture Fund  a veritable hub of innovative educational organizations and came across a posting from the Huffington Post entitled “Get Out of Their Darn Way and Let Educators Innovate“. This posting caught my eye because I happen to think that teachers, empowered with information and support, are the key to success in evolving our educational system.

I am going to quote two particular lines that reveal clearly why we ought to stop with the notion of top down solutions and let educational innovation happen on the edge. Those edge innovations are then shared and efficiently distributed to the places where those innovations can have the most impact.

First:

Let’s also take as axiomatic that most teachers and school administrators would prefer that their students learn, grow in mind and heart, and succeed in life. Students, we can assume, would also like to grow and to succeed. So there is a general disconnect between what we want for students, what students want for themselves - and what students get out of the educational process.

Second:

Part of the resistance…Why would they approve somebody to start a middle school that might do better than theirs, and would make them look inadequate? The charter schools can be models for them, but in reality, they’d rather not see us exist, because if there’s a school that’s doing better than they are, it’s going to propagate the growth of the movement and make them look worse.

Who is the “they” that is resisting? I’ll tell you quickly, it’s not the teachers. Innovative educators and social entrepreneurs are spreading throughout the educational system. Some of their ideas will work, some won’t. What we need to do is support these efforts, because if teachers and administrators want students to learn and to grow, we can rest assured that even if an experiment fails, that student will still learn.

As for you innovators out there, PlansForUs can and wants to be your distribution point for virally spreading your teaching ideas, lessons and passions.

I have been reading about Professor Randy Pausch’s speech since I picked up on the story on Information Arbitrage. Until today, I had not spent the 9:59 to actually watch the speech in its entirety. I am happy to report that I finally did watch the entire speech.

The man and the speech are an inspiration and his legacy will live on through the magic of YouTube and viral distribution. If you do not know about Professor Pausch’s speech here is a quick synopsis of the man, the context and the speech.

The speech is titled How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams and was given September 18 by a beloved Computer Science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. The speech was part of a “Last Lecture” series, where top professors give talks as if it is the last lecture they are going to give, ever. For Professor Pausch this very well be among his last lectures as he is going to die of pancreatic cancer within the next two months.

I hope that you will enjoy and spread Professor Pausch’s amazing speech, the entirety of which can be found here. I have embedded a video which is a compendium of good moments from the speech with commentary from WSJ’s Jeff Zaslow.

Over at Confused of Calcutta there was a piece that neatly articulates the power of networked communications. Networked communications associate generate an ongoing profile of usage about an individual which established immediate CONTEXT to any piece of information published.
JP expands beyond just the user association in his description of context benefiting IM conversations:

…one of the subjects we touched on for a while was the power of context. Conversations using social software tend to be wrapped in context, a context that is portable across time and space, with a significant reduction in switching costs as a result…You only have to use a decent “true” group IM application once to know what I mean…Who spoke. Who spoke before. What was said before. In what sequence. On what subject. For how long. Who interrupted. Who was there. Where was all this. When. Why. Everything. Those are some of the things I mean by conversation wrapped in context…

Context is what allows information to find its way to its most beneficial usage. Listservs are great at distributing information, however that information must be culled by every individual to determine its relevance for their particular context. Consider the difference in action steps when the context is wrapped around information. Now a user is either automatically directed to a piece of information that matches their proper context or a user does a quick scan to determine its relevance to their situation.

PlansForUs sits on top of a network of teachers that share information about themselves both explicitly and by their use of PlansForUs. By building and constantly adding information to a users profile we create the mechanism for efficiently delivering the information that matters most to our teachers. While exploration is a fun way to find new ideas when you are trying to write a new plan and you have already worked a 10 hour day, the last thing you really want to do is explore. Wrapping ideas and plans in context is the key to improving the lesson plan creation process for our users.

Thanks to JP for his consistently lucid breakdown of the powers of social software.

So Clarence Fisher, one of my favorite writers (I am over calling people bloggers), is always tossing compelling ideas against the wall. After my wife turned me onto the idea of creating PlansForUs, the first educational blogger that I stumbled upon was Clarence.

In his latest post he cites Will Richardson’s, “Trapped Between Stories” which talks about the significant societal changes occurring now. Will discusses the book Presence, which states that we are in a transitional period, in light of the transition happening in education.

The post goes on to describe his time at an Institute for the Future workshop where he heard the following quote that really set him, Clarence and ultimately, me off. Tom Carroll states:

Quality teaching today is a collective effort, not an individual accomplishment.

Clarence takes this statement and smartly applies it to the classroom, replacing teaching with learning. Will continues along the theme of reframing how teachers teach. As is my wont, I take this in the direction of solving this dilemma and particularly could PlansForUs be the platform to solve this problem.

I think one the biggest issues with harnessing collective effort is at the input stage. In order to generate collective effort, the collective need to generate a significant amount of inputs. These inputs are then filtered through the group and parsed out to those individuals who can put them to best affect.

Some of the esteemed writers in my blogroll have done amazing jobs contributing. Dan Meyer for one realized that the blog was the most flexible, adaptive medium he had found to share his terrific lesson plans. There are others like him who have contributed great amounts of time and energy to improving the dialogue. There are also many, many lesson plan, curriculum, teaching tactic sites out there that request that individuals submit their lessons to be used by others. What an amazing group of teachers that not only produce great lessons but then go to the trouble of submitting these lessons to a website. A testament to the collaborative nature of teachers.

But, at the end of the day what percentage of teachers does this represent. Could it be 1% of the total k-12 teachers in the US? Maybe, but that doesn’t even come close to matching a typical Pareto Distribution. I want PlansForUs to at least approximate a typical Pareto distribution of those who contribute content and those who utilize the content. A key to shifting this distribution is to MAKE SHARING PLANS/IDEAS EASY.

So how do you do it, well check out how we’re doing it at PlansForUs. We are moving the lesson plan processing experience online, so that a teacher can have a central place to keep all of his documents organized and be able to access those documents anywhere there is Internet access (overtime we will bridge the gap b/t off and online). The key here is that the word processing experience remain the same or equivalent to Word. The beauty being of simulating the Word experience online is that it requires only the click of the share button to share a plan. We have now eliminated a barrier to entry for plans, that being a teacher doesn’t have to go through another step of uploading the plan. This also might encourage teachers to share more of their work, maybe the plan isn’t worth going to the extra step of emailing or uploading it, but it certainly is worth clicking that share button.

The final thought is simplicity. If you read my pseudo-rant yesterday, I really am fed up with the educational software and websites that dominate the digital educational landscape. I mean yes, teachers have a lot of needs and interests and you don’t know which one is going to be the most interesting to them, but come on, edit yourself. Thanks to Steve, I have become a devotee of Agile thinking and have come to realize that editing yourself and focusing on the essentials is the greatest virtue of effective applications. Simplicity is a virtue. I had started writing that older teachers require simplicity, but the reality is, we all require simplicity. I mean the iPod and Google pretty much validate this concept. So PlansForUs aspires in it’s design and it’s focus to be like these icon’s of simplicity.

Join us, critique us, diss us, evangelize us. We are onto something and we are just stubborn and idealistic enough to bring a significant portion of the 65 million teachers worldwide together on a platform for idea sharing. We’ll start with the US and english speaking countries but eventually the world. Tom Carroll is right, however the only way to get there is to break down barriers to participation.

In today’s WSJ is an editorial entitled “Not By Geeks Alone” about the need to maintain a liberal arts education in our K-12 schools. It is premised on the fact that there is a huge push by the US Government to bolster our competitiveness with Asian countries in the subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Consequently there has been overwhelming support for the America Competes Act which will focus on funding those programs and institutions that show MEASURABLE success at increasing our STEM aptitudes.

The authors acknowledge that increasing our STEM aptitudes will have positive benefits, as our country will most likely close the gap with our Asian competitors in these aptitudes. The question they pose is an interesting one: What is the net effect of deemphasizing liberal arts?

As someone who graduated with an economics minor and has been enjoying Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics over the past week, I am hyper aware of the laws of scarce resources. If we spend more time on STEM subjects and rigorous testing, we will have to take time away from our study of liberal arts courses. Like the authors I believe that the ongoing success of our economy rests not only with our ability to be technically proficient, but with our ability to discover non-linear economic activities. Apple, Google, Sam Adams, Starbucks…PlansForUs. America’s success derives from those who seek solutions to problems that have non-linear economic outcomes. The skills required to identify those outcomes are described by the authors as “…creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition and problem-solving prowess.”

An engineer can have these skills, but only if that engineer spent some time thinking non-linearly. Maybe it was a class on Greek Comedies or on the Rise and Fall of the Qing Dynasty, but one must be intellectually flexible enough to absorb the huge amounts of data input that our world is constantly creating. We will never match up to countries like China and India on a pure technical basis. Sheer numbers make the probability of our success impossible. The way to maintain the success of the US amidst world competition is to generate non-linear economic thinking. Solve a problem that only you have perceived and then get funded by the incredibly flexible market system that we have constructed. Have your company destroyed by an upstart and do it again. This is the reality of our global markets, we no longer have any more access then any other country, therefore we cannot engage in an intellectual arms race.

Competitiveness, technical understanding, technical skills are important…hugely important. Now overlay that with the liberal values described by the authors above and lets keep cranking.Well rounded students are our best bet at success, so lets stop trying to churn out cogs of consistent shapes and sizes…We may all be cogs, but there is no reason that our myriad sizes and shapes can’t work together in a most harmonic way.

By the way, China is feeling like they need to bolster their liberal arts education. If you have NY Times Select (worst idea ever, glad it is being removed) look up the article “Re-Education“.

So I have been pondering this a while now and probably will continue to ponder it. What is the best way for teachers to find relevant lesson plan content?

The current model is a search model. Google goes out and assigns PageRank value to the myriad lesson planning sites and based on your search term lists them for your clicking pleasure. Then you, the searcher, begin a search for a plan that is relevant to you based on your particular criteria within these sites. Sometimes you constrain the search based on certain traditional hierarchies (grades, subjects) and sometimes the search is done through a series of search terms. It’s an alright process, I mean it’s the best we’ve got for now, but there must be a better way.

Search is awesome, without Google the web would be a real bummer to navigate. I remember when we first got Internet at my house. I was in fifth grade, I think, and my family had signed us up for the Compuserve service and I would spend a couple minutes reading about cars. After those few minutes, because it wasn’t easy to find what little else was on the Internet, I left and did other stuff. I would say that with the advent of Google I probably spent 4x as much time on the Internet. Interestingly enough my patterns have changed, now I find 60% of what interests me via blog links, Facebook, Last.FM or other communities, which leads me to…

What if you just want to connect with a lesson plan that fits your need? A lesson plan to inspire your next days class. It seems that search falls short. The reason it falls short, is because you are seeking inspiration, not just information. Inspiration is derived by knowing the backstory. It comes when there is a dialogue around a product’s use. Inspiration is found in a community. Communities can append a piece of information with all of that metadata that allows you to envision a plan’s usage in your classroom.

That’s why PlansForUs is built as a social lesson planning platform. We are not a site where people dump lesson plans and a few people pop a couple ratings on a plan. Why was Dan Myer’s lesson plan on measurement downloaded 6,000 times. Well in the first place it was good; actually my wife did a plan similar to Dan’s to teach her 1st graders and it met with similar learning success. In the second place, his blog gave the plan context. Now can every plan have the contextual layers that Dan provides in his blog entry, maybe not. However, a community interacting with a plan and a site tracking these interactions and visualizing these interactions can build those contextual layers.

PlansForUs is a lesson planning tool built on the engine of community and connection. Our motto is “creation through collaboration”, it’s simple but if we can achieve our motto then teaching will no doubt benefit.

So if you are a regular reader of my blog (don’t answer that) you will notice a new feature on the right hand bar, just below the MyBlogLog widget. Yes folks that’s my Last.FM music tracker widget.

Right now the music you see is mine, as we grow the company and consolidate into one location that widget will reflect the music being played by the PlansForUs team.

Here is what I think is cool about Last.FM. Finding new music is fun, Last.FM creates a new way for people to find new music that they may like and it requires almost no effort for me to share what I am listening to with my loyal readers. I just play the music and Last.FM broadcasts it wherever I have installed the widget. At this point it is on my Facebook profile and my MySpace profile. I hope to be able to add it to my Ning profile soon.

Anyway, I hope that you will find some interesting tracks.

So this weekend my wife and I celebrated our 1st anniversary. We celebrated in upstate New York with our parents and it was an altogether awesome weekend. A weekend where we got to reflect on our year as a married couple.

Sunday morning found my father on the porch reading “The Zeus Trip”, by Jennifer Conlin in the NY Times. At the conclusion of the article, he looked up and remarked that lesson plans were everywhere and as such, how could PlansForUs catalogue and organize these ideas from outside the teaching ecosystem.
An interesting question indeed. He’s absolutely right, there are a ton of interesting teaching experiences happening outside of the school system, but how could you incentivize those people to post their ideas, in lesson plan form, at PlansForUs. I am not sure.

However, the other place this article took me seems to be more feasible. Teaching is happening everywhere; what if our teachers began to share life experiences as lesson plans on PlansForUs. What if, rather than a writer for the NY Times, Jennifer was a teacher. How cool would it be for her to construct a lesson plan around her trip through Greece. And how cool would it be for Jennifer to connect to other teachers who had travelled in Greece and collaboratively build an even more detailed and granular lesson plan.

This can happen at PlansForUs. We will be launching user profiles soon. These profiles will be used to connect you with others who share experiences. Perhaps you graduated from the same Masters program, maybe you grew up in the same city, or you connect through a travel experience. Building connections through shared experience and then utilizing those connections to collaboratively build engaging lessons is what the PlansForUs platform is all about.

Please suggest any fields that you would like to see in the user profile. You can leave suggestions in the comments section, we will carefully consider all of your suggestions.

This morning I linked my way over to a piece by Clay Shirky entitled Andrew Keen: Rescuing ‘Luddite’ from the Luddites, which I found thought provoking from both a societal perspective and a PlansForUs perspective.

First, an admission. I never knew who the Luddites were, despite the fact that I liberally used the word in many of my college papers and most likely when trying to impress my elders (seems my contemporaries are never to impressed with my vocabulary). So, finding the history of the Luddite movement was really informative.

Now to the meat. Andrew Keen has written a book The Cult of the Amateur which has really stirred up the new media folks. His claim, most simply, is that today’s Internet is killing culture. Clay Shirky has a nuanced response which you can read, but like Nicholas Carr, I thought this quote was the most interesting:

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

I think this is a pretty great direction for society. Yes, it is confusing. Yes, it is cacophonous and sometimes difficult to filter the signal from the noise. But the beauty of the situation is that people are finding personal, unique signals amidst the noise. The consequence of so much unique/personal signal being identified and revealed is that our knowledge base is growing at an exponential rate. So keep the editors out of this, our world is growing more complex by the day and simplifying and professionally editing just hides the full reality of things.

So what does that statement mean for PlansForUs. It means, that the platform of idea exchange that we are building for teachers is full of great ideas for each of your unique teaching situations. There are no universals, just unique ways to connect your students to the knowledge that you share with them everyday.
Keep on signing up teachers, this is going to be awesome.

So I spent the morning messing around with Facebook and LinkedIn with the goal of understanding how to use these two tools to further the PlansForUs goals. To that end I asked a bunch of people to be my friend. It is sort of an artificial experience, requesting friendship, but it seems to be an interesting way to keep in touch. In a world where our attention is constantly being requested, I guess that these networks play a role in keeping us connected.

Beyond exploring, I did create a “PlansForUs-What’s Right, What’s Wrong” group in Facebook. I hope that this group will become an outlet for teachers to reflect their PlansForUs experience both to the team and their fellow PlansForUs users. If you are a Facebook user defintely join the group. That said, the Facebook demographic biases towards our younger so I would love to do something to engage those teachers who aren’t social networked up the wazoo. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, feel free to check out my profiles and if you so choose, request a friend.

This is awesome, what an amazing way to utilize Skype. Connecting classrooms in China and California together and getting kids to come back to school after hours. Now what happens when this isn’t exceptional, but commonplace.

Teachers can make these connections, build lessons around them and alter the way they instruct. Perhaps next year my wife can take her Chinatown neighborhood study curriculum and connect with a teacher in China and likewise a teacher in China can perform a unit on NYC and connect with my wife.

Open API’s, great teaching ideas and a platform for connecting classrooms. Education is an amazing place to be right now.