So I was doing some research this morning on Professor Tom Hatch, who I am looking forward to meeting in a few weeks, and came across the KEEP Toolkit. This toolkit is an outgrowth of the work that Tom and his colleagues have done capturing and archiving the classroom experience for the NCREST and the Quest Project.

Here’s the punchline. In a few months, Yahoo will launch its Yahoo Teachers site w/ the vaunted “Gobbler” feature, which sounds an awful lot like what they have been doing with KEEP Toolkit for some time now.
I am not so sure that gobbling or copying from the Internet is the killer app for teachers, but it is interesting to see the parallels in these two products.

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.

It is a miserably humid day in NYC. Luckily for me, my apartment stays relatively cool without the need for A/C. Thanks to a low floor and high ceilings, I think I will manage to get through today

Onto more pertinent matters. I read Gary Stager’s piece on the declining costs of laptops vs the stagnant costs of school supplies. Gary highlighted the fact that these cost curves are getting perilously close to meeting. Gary was asking why we are wasting resources on traditional learning implements, when the ultimate learning implement, an Internet connected laptop is only a fraction more expensive.

It is a powerful question and one worth pondering….however I think the answer is in the comments to his post. In particular, the infrastructure for adopting such a change is not really in place. That infrastructure is both technical and human. This infrastructure excuse is miserable as it is cuts the legs out from so many great proposals, but it is ultimately a powerful reason for saying no.

Infrastructure is the key to all things and it is a process that is long and drawn out. However, sometimes an event can trigger explosive growth and change. That trigger must be an economic opportunity where private resources come into play. What is that trigger in education?

1. The massive demographic shift- In California the shortage of teachers will be particularly acute, though I have looked at the stats from the Bureau of Labor Stats and it looks like nationally we are going to lose about 1/3 of our teachers to retirement in the next 7 years.

What Does This Mean?

It means that there are a lot of teacher openings to be filled by recent graduates or job transfers. The infrastructure of the human component just changed and they need help to be the best teachers they can be. Will the private sector fulfill this need by financing laptops for every child and a deep interconnectivity between classrooms and teachers?

2. What about broadband speeds and costs- According to this there are a whole lot of people in this world with faster broadband than the US and at a fraction of the cost. The Internet and Green Energy seem to be the long term impactful technologies to our world, so if the US is falling behind on our Internet what is the effect on our ability to grow our economy.

What Does This Mean?

Seems to me that if the US Government wakes up to the fact that our telecom/cable monopolies are derailing our ability to grow the economy, there is going to be a movement to solve the problem. That movement will probably be a big free market push to wire us up, or more than likely wireless us up. With a deep national investment both financially and psychically in changing our high speed Internet fortunes I would bet that our schools will be direct recipients of this high speed technology largesse. Now we have the infrastructure where laptops make sense in school.

I guess my question is, in 5 years will students be doing their back-to-school shopping at Apple and Best Buy or at Staples ?

Another food for thought: How many of you use listservs to find teaching ideas? What is the biggest downside to these listservs? Ryan Bretag wrote a response (it’s at the bottom) to my comment on why teachers might be resistant to adopting aggregators as their first foray into the wonders of Web 2.0. In his response he mentioned that a combination of Ning networks and Listservs may already be the tools that teachers need to find valuable teaching resources.

I must admit that this entry is a little disjointed, but read on for a few choice nuggets.

PlansForUs was founded on this statement “Creation through Collaboration”

It is the simple statement that we think encapsulates all that we intend to do at PlansForUs. I was reading a piece by Jay Matthews on the happenings at the KIPP School Summit and was enjoying his description of the collegial and collaborative atmosphere that KIPP was creating between its 57 schools and then was walloped by these excerpts:

…All the speeches, all the panels, all the training sessions were about getting better. The most overcrowded rooms had KIPP teachers running the sessions. It was standing room only at a day-long presentation by the World Class Writing Project…The three instructors gave a sample from a seventh-grade KIPP student’s essay on the Elie Wiesel book “Night”…They compared this to a sample of a private school 9th-grader’s essay on the Robert Frost poem “Design”…They asked the assembled KIPP teachers if the KIPP student was really just two years away from reaching the level of the private school student…But most of the audience agreed that if that was going to happen, they had to do a much better job teaching critical thinking, sophisticated syntax and vocabulary and all the other tools their student would need.

So that is the setup. You can read the article to catch the details, but suffice to say the talented KIPP 7th grader has a long way to go to be as prepared as that private school 9th grader. However, the really interesting part comes here:

Unafraid of stomping on KIPP icons, Witney gave a short sample lesson that was almost a parody of KIPP’s fondness for movement and excitement in learning…Then Dolan taught the same lesson in a less physical, more nuanced way, and many in the room indicated he was showing them the way they all had to go.

KIPP has made a name for itself by outperforming many of its peer schools through its rigorous curriculum and according to this piece, refusal to accept that best practices are indeed best practices. The luxury that KIPP has is that it is a self-contained organization of 57 schools that can bounce ideas off of itself at the KIPP Summit.

We have a number of KIPP teachers in PlansForUs and I look forward to seeing their work on PlansForUs. However, I also want PlansForUs to be like a Digital KIPP Summit for those teachers who don’t have access to KIPP’s organization. Every one of you is having an impact on students everyday. Sometimes you teach a lousy lesson that doesn’t connect and students are bored…and you learn from that experience and tweak your lesson to improve it. Some of you are riding a string of great lessons that are really engaging your students; seems like Dan Meyer is having a great run. The point is everyone of you is contributing, but unlike the structure of KIPP, you are not able to collaborate and learn from one another. PlansForUs, admittedly still a few features short of replicating the KIPP experience digitally, is focused on enabling to simply share information and plans that through the power of social networking and community connectivity can approximate these summits.

Summit’s are great, but we are very busy people and can only go to summit’s once or twice a year. Digital Summit’s are accessible to you whenever you are ready, so join PlansForUs, write your lesson here (good, bad or indifferent) and let the community come together and learn from one another.

For those of you with really heavily formatted lessons, we will continue to improve our word processing capability, but please share your ideas, since humans are really efficient at scanning text (see Google).

The answer to what digital collaboration looks like…PlansForUs.

(I originally posted this at the Classroom 2.0 Ning)
I read this post from Ryan Bretag this weekend and thought this group might have some additional insights on the post.

In the post Ryan was asked the following question:

If only one thing ’stuck’ with the teachers this year, what do you hope it to be”?

His answer was (I promise to do more than paraphrase):

The one thing I want to stick this year, my major goal, is fostering the development and implementation of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for each teacher and administrator.

The form in which he hoped that the PLE took was that of an aggregator/feed reader/feed aggregator. Now I thought this was a cool idea and as a long time user of RSS readers, I absolutely recognize the power of these information organizers. With the advent of start pages, I think aggregators can be even more powerful….however what troubled me (and I commented as much) was that most teachers/administrators would have to be educated on the components that go into using an aggregator. First step is blogs (how do I find good ones? Do I really care? I don’t have enough time to read them?), RSS (What is this?) and finally Aggregators (Sounds boring? Sort of an unwieldy word?) Now there is nothing wrong with educating someone on new things, but with so many issues and so little time, is it reasonable that a large percentage of teachers would get on board with an heretofore unknown tool.

So, my response was (admittedly self-serving, as you’ll soon see) lets build personal learning environments from a common place or unit. PlansForUs, the company I founded, chose the lesson plan as the unit for sharing and building community around. Once teachers are using the community to build lesson plans, you could add other features like aggregators that can benefit from the community’s ability to introduce one another to these new feeds, blogs, and ideas.

That said, I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I figure it’s worth asking a smart group like you….how do you introduce teachers (generating viral growth and wide expansion) to the power of social technologies and Web 2.0? PlansForUs posits that it is through a known unit (the lesson plan) and as a solution to a known problem (generating new lessons) that a community can efficiently solve.

Sorry for the relatively light posting. I have been absolutely slammed lately and I haven’t had those moments to sit back and reflect on things. I also happen to be a relative newbie to efficient blogging, so that hasn’t helped.

Today I read an interesting piece in Businespundit. It was interesting to me because the article gets to the heart of PlansForUs’ value proposition:

My point is that networks are valuable for what they provide, not for their own sake.

PlansForUs continues to underplay the social networking aspects of our service because we aren’t building a social network. We are building a tool that supports a teacher’s effort to find and deploy engaging lesson plans in her classroom. We use the network to support clustering around individual teaching ideas. We use these clusters to filter the wheat from the chaff for our individual users. The article also makes an important point, particularly given our corporate mantra of Creation through Collaboration.

I think we sometimes decide to network to advance our career or business, and after a while become complacent. We network just to network, just out of habit. That’s unproductive. You don’t build a network just to have one, you build a network to use. And I don’t mean that negatively. You should give back to the network as well.

We haven’t built PlansForUs just to network. MySpace can be used for that. We built PlansForUs to simplify lesson plan sharing. Simplified lesson plan sharing means that teachers can easily collaborate to create new plans. We are seeking to make it easy for you to contribute. Tell us how we can improve that experience.

Collaboration is Hard

This is a statement posted by Matt Blumberg of Return Path and dissected in a series (1, 2, 3) of interesting posts on collaboration within the corporate realm. Given PlansForUs’ focus on collaboration within the educational sector I couldn’t help but read these posts thinking about the crossover and issues that are addressed by PlansForUs.

Yes, collaboration is hard, it is messy and difficult to arrange. However, collaboration is the most efficient way forward, particularly for educators seeking ways to engage their students.
To begin, lets start with the Wikipedia defintion of collaboration:

Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge and mutual learning between two or more people who are working together, in an intellectual endeavor, toward a common goal which is typically creative in nature. Collaboration does not necessarily require leadership and can even bring better results through de-centralization and egalitarianism.

The most interesting part of this definition is the piece on the effectiveness of collaboration without leadership. This is why collaboration can be messy. Without leadership it is left to the group to self organize and make sense of what is going on. Bees are really good at collaboratively self-organizing because they lack the ego’s that we humans have, consequently they massively collaborate on a regular basis to find the most advantageous site for their hive. Unfortunately for humans massive collaboration does not result in consistently optimal outcomes. Wikipedia is probably our best example of massive collaboration, but even Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collaboration. However Wikipedia points us to a positive outcome that can arise through collaboration and the methods for achieving that outcome.

Two features of Wikipedia are particularly powerful when it comes to creating a successful collaborative platform, asynchronous data entry and the long tail. Let’s start with the long tail. Start with unique ideas/plans, then form community around these and finally attract the participants that are engaged in solving these unique problems.

The issue that arise in artificial professional learning communities is that the participants are not equally incented to solve a problem. I wrote to some folks in MySpace about this particular drawback when it comes to Professional Learning Communities.The reality is that when you assemble as an artificial learning community to solve problems, you are either solving generalized problems to “appeal to the group” or you are solving a specific problem of one of the dominant group members. In either case you will alienating some portion of the group.

By self-organizing around shared problems, micro-communities are endorsing the utility of collaboration by buying into the learning from collective intelligence.  Micro-define your problem then seek out a group that is trying to solve that same problem or if you are using PlansForUs, that group will find you…at least that’s the goal.

Asynchronous data entry is the second feature of Wikipedia that allows collaboration to scale. Teachers are on different schedules: life, school, work load, all contribute to the time a teacher has to address her classroom strategy for the following day. When a teacher is forced into a schedule that doesn’t take into account these outside limiters the teacher may not be in the mindset to participate collaboratively. Collaboration is rigorous and exhausting and if you are already exhausted or your mind is elsewhere, can you possibly contribute your most beneficial information? I would argue that you can not.

With asynchronous data entry, you can contribute to the conversation when you are ready to contribute to the conversation. Those who have come before you have done the same thing, so the outcome is a richer more nuanced collaborative experience. The consequence of this, is that the collaboration does not happen instantaneously, it is an extended conversation. At PlansForUs, we are aggregating the conversations and then using our software to make sense of the ongoing dialogue over an extended period of time. Your job is to contribute when you can, PlansForUs will harness that contribution to improve the overall collaborative experience.

In part 2 Matt Blumberg lays out exactly why collaboration is hard. In my next piece I will describe how you can overcome these hurdles and specifically how PlansForUs is addressing these hurdles.

As some of you long time readers may know, we have been keeping our eye on Meetup for awhile. In particular, we have been interested in the NY Teachers Meetup as it is the one most local to us. I have been a member for awhile and have recently seen the level of activity pick up, as the original founder has returned. What I like most about Meetup is how it can act as a way to bring local PlansForUs users together physically. Therefore, if you are a NY Teacher I would encourage you to check out the latest NY Teachers Meetup. I am going to stay on the sidelines while I assess if I should be attending these kinds of events, but I definitely encourage you to check it out. The flyer for the August 22nd event is below:

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 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.