Welcome back to school teachers. Have a great year. I had the pleasure of helping my wife get her class set for the year and was totally floored at the amount of time and effort that goes into just setting up a classroom for the year.

Anyway have a great year and please join PlansForUs and benefit from creation through collaboration.

(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.

So we had a great response to our inclusion in the History Channel back to school emailing. Welcome to all of our new members who found out about us through this emailing. As a result of this huge boost in traffic, PlansForUs had a breakage. If you registered with us yesterday be on the look out for an email from us. This email will detail the breakage and any steps that need to be applied to fix it, but we are working on eliminating your steps.

Two other notes for today.

Clarence’s “School Begins…But Not Here” is a really cool post. I wish that we had video Skype back in the day so that I could have communicated between New Trier (my alma mater) and our “sister school“. No wonder Clarence is an educator of the year in Canada…and yes I continue to encourage Clarence to give PlansForUs a try.

Sarah you might want to look Clarence up to discuss using Skype for video conferencing between classrooms. I know you had asked me for my thoughts, but Clarence is probably a better resource, though I am of course open to discuss.

Finally, I am really loving Caribou and Phoenix right now. In particular the song “North” by Phoenix and “Eli” by Caribou. Check them out on HypeMachine and let me know what you think.

First thought: The most e-mailed article today in the NY Times was “With Turnover High, Schools Fight for Teachers“.

Unsurprising given the huge number of teachers that are retiring. I wrote about this in a past post “Retiring Teachers, Evergreen Knowledge.” These mass retirements are compounded by the fact that the echo-boomers are a larger generation than the baby boomers and by the transition in teaching styles brought on by the expansion of broadband access and the maturation of the Internet and mobile communications.

Second thought: I noticed today in my MyBlogLog widget that I had a new reader. So, as I usually do I clicked on the associated icon. It ends up that crummychurchsigns (that’s his mybloglog name) is a teacher. His real name is Joel and he blogs at crummychurchsigns.blogspot.com. I intend to get around to reading his blog soon, since I definitely have seen my share of crummy church signs.

Now for the interesting part. When I clicked on the “Joel’s Profile” link on his blog to find out more, it was revealed that I could take one more step into the blogosphere. When I clicked on Teacher, I was led to a page that listed the 35,400 blogs written on Blogspot by self described teachers…seemed like a lot more teacher bloggers than I had suspected are blogging.

Third thought: PlansForUs is a business founded in New York City. We love New York City. Steve has lived here for 17 years and I have enjoyed the past 6 years here in the city. We love it for its culture, its vibrancy and the fact that there are more educators here in NYC than in any other city in America. It’s also interesting to see how Bloomberg is messing around with education.

What we are a little intimidated by is the climate for start-ups. As many of you know, New York is synonymous with Wall Street. Wall Street guys own the big apartments, the fancy cars and the luxurious vacation houses. Wall Street is also a culture that despite its swashbuckling culture is devoted to eliminating risk and maximizing returns….sometimes by collateralizing it and selling it off to buyers who have no idea what it is really worth; but that is not really what I want to talk about.

Founding a startup company is not an exercise which necessarily mitigates risk. While I would love to collateralize my financial risk, the wizards of Wall Street have not quite figured out how to pool me and my fellow entrepreneur’s risk, therefore we are forced to try to sell our crazy ideas to a pool of investors that by and large made their money in endeavors much less risky than a startup. Despite this it seems that NYC is becoming a place for startups. Today’s post from Roger Ehrenberg was a real boost for Steve and I, because NYC is where we want PlansForUs to be and a vibrant startup culture is a huge asset as we attempt to get PlansForUs off the ground. I look forward to sharing PlansForUs with the New York City angel/venture investment culture soon. In the meantime I will work on mitigating some of our startup risk.

Finally, A quick thanks to the History Channel for including us in their Back to School emailing, we will share the impact of that inclusion with your team soon.

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.

Class Struggle is a column written by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post. Reading Jay reinforces my original plan to sell our free service to teachers and let teachers sell to other teachers, rather than sell PlansForUs to administrations and have it filter down by mandate.

A recent Jay Matthews post produced the following distillation of his favorite passage from the book “Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade“. A book which I am picking up on my way home today.

“Passing through the gym, where kindergartners wafted a colorful parachute in the air and scampered under it in turns, Leone said of the teacher, ‘I can’t see his goal.’ In prekindergarten, where Leone saw not only ’sight words’ like is and and but also the MSA scores displayed on the wall, she said, ‘I love the way these are all posted.’ In fifth grade she was dismayed to find Mrs. Williams’s students sitting at their desks reading books while others finished a test. She encouraged McKnight to come up with a school-wide protocol for spending time after completing a test, one that didn’t include free reading.”

PlansForUs posits that teaching is contextual to a classroom and that while there can be certain universals, the means by which teachers deliver these universals should be at the teachers discretion. With that said, Leone’s ideas could have merit if properly expressed.

Best of luck to all of you teachers in the coming years and please join the growing community of teachers collaborating at PlansForUs.

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.

I have been thinking about the similarities between you and I for awhile. I see it everyday with my wife and read it in these blogs. I attempted to dig deeper into this connection but got side tracked. I am sure that teachers and entrepreneurs are the same and therefore I am performing a blog burning of the phrase:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

That phrase no longer exists in my consciousness after today’s blog burning.

Any thoughts on the similarities between entrepreneurs and teachers, please share in the comments section.

So, as you may imagine I read an awful lot about educational technology. The fact of the matter is there is a lot to read, but I am utterly despondent by the massive administrative clutter that obscures the central issue: teaching kids by engaging them in the classroom. That theme comes up again and again with the teachers I speak with about what matters most to them. This is obscured by certain administrative mandates–but at PlansForUs this is not obscured. We are about simplifying and streamlining collaborative lesson planning.

I found this piece recently entitled “The transformation of educational publishing: the emergence and growth of a teacher-centered, learning-object environment”. It was written in 2002 and is essentially a puff piece for a company called OnCourse. This particular quote got to me:

Provide exchange services–Extensive exchange forums to make collections, supported by turnkey lesson plans, that allow school, district, regional, and national peer sharing across education resources. Exchanges require a quality control review system and an extensive rights management and tracking system (mentioned above) in order to consistently audit usage among all educator/consumers who offer collections across the school network. Exchanges promote a “Build Once–Use Many” environment to create and exchange teacher-created resources contextualized to actual classroom conditions.

Now OnCourse may be a great company and some of the user testaments seem to be really excited about the program. It sounds like a great program in how it synthesizes all of the required formats into a lesson plan. It acknowledges that you do not want to repeat work, but no teaching strategy is universally good. Every strategy is contextualized to a single classroom, not just actual classroom conditions.

Come on. Teaching, while it no doubt has certain requirements, is about connecting ideas to students. In fact a classroom is composed of multiple students with varied learning styles. A lesson planning system, installed by Oracle, costing $20,000-$60,000 a year and consisting of a cascading series of drop down menus does not inspire a student and it certainly will not inspire a teacher.

PlansForUs is a growing community of educators. This community turns a basic web word processor into a powerful idea connector. That’s it. We are not planning to add anything to our product that doesn’t make finding good ideas easier. We do not have a huge number of options. We are an idea exchange tuned to support teachers. Join us and spread the word. There are 3,500,000 K-12 in the US, 8 million K-12 teachers in english speaking countries and 65 million K-12 educators worldwide. There are myriad connections between many of you, PlansForUs is a platform to find them.

PlansForUs aims to get as many of these teachers on board as possible. Does that mean PlansForUs will be immensely successful? Yes it does. But imagine what a positive force we can be if we turn our earnings into funding for teacher driven causes. Teachers change the world. PlansForUs provides an opportunity to aggregate and intensify your world changing voice.

Scared, elated, tense, relaxed, focused, diffused, confident. All of these conflicting emotions course through me on a regular basis. I know that I am supposed to just keep an even keel. No matter, good or bad, it’s all a product of your work level, so keep on working hard, the swings will even themselves out and that’ll be just great. I figure if my dad could do it, with all the pressures of raising a family, then I should be able to do it in my admittedly less pressurized situation. I don’t have a kid, a dog or a mortgage. I do have a beautiful and supportive wife and I owe it to her to keep an even keel and work my butt off to grow PlansForUs.

But the reality is that beneath my veneer of even keelness, I am a roiling cauldron of emotion. Now can I mellow that out by taking a step back, absolutely, but as things happen throughout the day and then replay themselves nightly before I go to bed; I have to admit that starting, launching and growing PlansForUs is an emotional exercise. I have read and heard from others about the emotional rawness of being an entrepreneur, but experiencing it is another thing totally.

To deal with this I have returned the coping strategies that have never failed me, physical activity. In my case basketball, running and soon, bicycling. You can find me almost every night, when I am in the city, around 6 at the Stuyvesant Courts in NYC playing hoops. Sometimes it’s 5 on 5, sometimes 1 on 1 and sometimes it me working on a shot that refuses perfection despite over 20 years of ongoing work. When I am not in the city or when the weather changes, you can find me punishing myself with a run, seeking that ultimate payoff, an endorphin rush. Soon you will find me on a classic Vitus 979 (thanks Uncle David) road bike cruising the roads of the East End and upstate New York. Come Fall, I will explore some longer rides up from the city up the Hudson.

The point of this entry is that I am interested in inviting those of you who are creating something and finding the emotional crucible of creation really intense to join me in some of these endeavors. Perhaps you are a fellow entrepreneur, perhaps you are a teacher embarking on a new experience. If you use physical exercise as an outlet, leave a comment, lets get together and regain our even keel through exercise.

So a quick observation. I have two types of educational bloggers in my blogroll. The first are those teachers that share their teaching lives in vivid detail on a regular basis. They describe the triumphs and the miseries of teaching. Sarah Puglisi’s A Day in the Life is one of my favorites. I have recently been adding some NYC based teacher bloggers like Nancy Brodsky’s Se Hace Camino Al Andar and will continue to add these local bloggers, as PlansForUs would love to hear their points of view in person.

The other type is the “technology in teaching” bloggers who advocate innovative ways to apply technology within the classroom. While they may be facing similar situations in the classroom, they choose to write about how technology can affect the classroom.

PlansForUs sits at the nexus of these two groups. We are trying to integrate technology into teachers lives by making that technology synch with the demands that are being described by the teaching life bloggers.

Please check out the blogroll, there is some good stuff.

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“.

I don’t know Charlie O’Donnell, though I understand he is a minor celebrity on Silicon Alley due to his work and his prodigious networking skills. Anyway, Charlie has posted his business plan presentation online, here. I am a big fan of transparency and this seems like a cool tactic for getting attention on your idea. Best of luck Charlie.

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: