My webquest is now essentially complete. This has been an interesting project, and one that has been very helpful to me in terms of learning new methods to incorporate technology into teaching. I've seen and used webquests before, but until now I had never actually built one myself from the ground up. In terms of evaluating its effectiveness, there are three criteria I need to examine.

First, how does it address questions about the most important things teachers need to do to help students prepare for their futures? As I've said numerous times before, both here on this blog and in other places, one of the trends I see for the future, as technological innovation and computing power grows more and more ubiquitous, is the wealth of information at our fingertips. Anything that we, as teachers, have to contribute as far as content can be found online by those who know how to look. But there is also a flood of useless, inaccurate, or plain wrong data out there that must be sifted through. Ultimately, this may be what educators will have to do; we'll need to teach students HOW to distinguish good information from bad, and how to analyze it and use it to reach meaningful conclusions. That is what this webquest does. It invites students to seek out information online about a specific topic (citizenship of various nations), determine that the information is credible and legitimate, and then make an informed decision based on what they have found.

Second, how do the ideas in the webquest relate to social justice and the core values and vision of our class? Well to begin, by comparing citizenship requirements of other nations with the United States, students can begin to see some of the differences in how national governments treat their citizens and view the very concept of citizenship within their borders. I expect that, depending on which other country they select, some students will be quite surprised at how restrictive some other countries are... or how incredibly permissive they can be. They may conclude that citizenship may be too hard a goal to achieve for some people in some places... or they may determine that it is perhaps a little too easy to obtain for others. But ultimately, it will foster an appreciation for the differences of national policies on a global scale. Our class has been devoted to an increasingly global perspective and fostering a sense of "worldly citizenship" or participation. This webquest focuses on exactly that.

Finally, how does this webquest relate to NCSS standards 8 and 9? Well, NCSS 9 is easy. Standard 9 is all about global connections. It deals with personal, national, and global decisions, and the analysis of policies, actions, and their consequences. Again, this webquest focuses on exactly that. I hardly feel that it needs more explanation, once you've seen and perused the webquest itself. NCSS 8 is a bit trickier, and at first I didn't know how to incorporate it. Standard 8 deals not only with science, technology, and society, but with the consequences of technological change and progress. In other words, how technology and advancement can change our lives and affect how we interact with the world. To satisfy this standard, I invite students to spend some time reflecting on their search for citizenship in the world. I ask them to think about the resources they had at their disposal to find this information, and how quickly (comparatively) they could do it. More importantly, I ask them to imagine how different the task would be in a world with no computers, no internet, none of the easy global connections we now enjoy. I ask them to picture how difficult it would be to find out how to become a citizen as little as fifty years ago, when the only way to get information about the process would be to go firsthand and in person. I believe that this reflection - this connection to the past - will help students appreciate how the march of technological progress can fundamentally change how we live.

If only we could...

I hear it every time I work in a school. I heard it every day during my internship, and I hear it every day as a substitute teacher. If only we could change this, or reform that, or do away with this other thing... we could turn education around for this country. But often, I get the impression that these wishes are more often based on knee-jerk reactions to unpopular administrative decisions than on actual, supportable plans for true change. Granted, not always... but often. And of course, I don't mean to imply that teachers do not have a well-deserved right to complain about the administration. In fact, I believe it may be a law somewhere that as a teacher, you must complain about some facet of how your school is run at least once a month in order to maintain your bona fides.

The point I am trying to make is that more often than not, the complaints are centered around what we are doing wrong, rather than how we can do it right.

"Well okay then, Smartacus," I hear you say. "Let's hear your great ideas."

If we are going to do this, we must accept that we are entering into a hypothetical realm where we have the authority and power to declare a thing is so, and it is so. Then I can explore this question: If I could completely do away with current current constraints on schooling, how would I re-imagine public secondary schooling to be effective for the year 2025?

Regardless of unpopular policies and administrative decisions about leave, pay, or budget cuts, I can sum up my "what if" in one sentence: I would change the focus of schooling.

My father, who happens to have a Doctorate in education, said to me during a recent conversation that the goal of schooling is not and should not be about teaching. It is and should be about learning. I agree wholeheartedly - but it seems that unfortunately, we as a nation have lost sight of this somehow.

It starts with standardized testing. The emphasis on standardized achievement testing as a benchmark for student advancement has caused far more damage to secondary education than it has cured. This can be seen all over the nation, as otherwise successful schools and otherwise effective teachers are fired because of poor test scores. My God, it has even led to a spate of high-level cheating... not by students, but by TEACHERS! An Associate Press report in 2003 revealed that teachers had "read off answers during a test, sent students back to correct wrong answers, photocopied secure tests for use in class, inflated scores, and peeked at questions then drilled those topics in class before the test." Why? In order to meet testing standards and keep their jobs. Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner followed up on this report and by analyzing data from schools across the country, confirmed that this pattern was (and to some extent, may still be) epidemic.

Seriously, folks. If the pressure to perform is so strenuous that people are willing to commit ethical breaches that would lose them their jobs if discovered, ironically only to keep from losing their jobs... then the pressure is way too high.

Perhaps the reason for this is one of perception. As my father pointed out in his doctoral dissertation, "standards are conceived by most educators as static constructs - as imposed requirements." (See footnote below) Teachers see standards as most anyone would... as something they are required to meet. The problem with that is that the way standards are used today creates an environment of high-stakes, win or lose testing. And high-stakes testing - the kind that may hold a teacher's or a whole school's future in the balance - is not a good educational tool. It leads to a focus on test-preparation and imparting information, rather than actual learning and imparting knowledge. Thus my assertion that if I could institute a drastic re-imagining of secondary education for the future to shift the focus of schooling from teaching to learning, it is here where I would start.

Don't get me wrong... standardized tests can have a valuable place in education. But they should be used as a pre-assessment rather than as a prognostic measure. We should use them to see where a student is, and where he needs to focus, rather than a measure of what he has absorbed. Because frankly, for that last purpose, they don't work. The way we use them now, they only measure what a student has been able to cram, not what he has actually retained.

Standardized testing is not the only place we can realize this shift. In the George Lucas Foundation's Edutopia website, the video "10 Big Ideas for Better Classrooms: Striving to Improve Public Education" showcases a double handful of ideas that have been already put into action by several schools across the country. If you don't want to watch the 18 minute video, I can sum it up for you here. These ideas are all about shifting education from the theoretical to the practical... from the abstract to the authentic. Projects instead of tests, real-world applications instead of hypotheticals.

In terms of pure realism, this is a hard one for many schools to implement, mainly due to budgetary problems, but boy, if we had the money we truly needed (and deserved... seriously, how about we cut professional athletes' salaries by one percent and give that money to education? Shall we do the math? See below.), every school could realize this shift. And as one teacher very eloquently put it in the video, "I remember the projects I did in school. I don't remember the tests."

That's because when it came to that kind of hands-on, practical learning, he wasn't taught... he learned.

1. Walser, F.L. (1989). Similarities and differences in procedures for developing

and approving voluntary standards in selected organizations in education

and the private sectors .Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young

University, Provo.

Note: The Math. So, according to AOL Jobs, the minimum pay for an NFL player in 2009 was $310,000. With 53 players per team, 32 teams in the league, that's 1,696 players... for a total minimum salary of $525,760,000. 1% of that is $5,257,600 a year. That's just from the NFL. What if we added in Major League Baseball and the NBA? The minimum 2009 salary for MLB (750 players) was $400,000 for a total salary of $300,000,000... 1% of which is a cool $3 million), and in the NBA (432 players), it was $457,588 for a total of $197,678,016... 1% of which is $1.98 million.

So all told, between the NFL, MLB, and the NBA, if all players were getting minimum salary (which we know is ludicrous... most players earn ten to twenty times the minimum), 1% of all their salaries combined would be on the order of ten million dollars. A drop in the bucket on a national scale for educational needs, but it would definitely be a small step in the direction of re-establishing a sense of priority in this country.

Ah, don't get me started on this one. This is an old, old argument.

The Role of Schooling - 2025 C.E.

We've already talked about the role of content knowledge in 2025, and how it is important for teachers to be able to not only provide a filter between the surfeit of information out there and the sponge-like minds of school children, but to show them how to construct and maintain such a filter for themselves. But what about schooling? By which I mean the process of education... the process of learning in a school environment?

To be frank, I think it will be much the same as it is today, albeit operating within a more technological paradigm. There are those that may feel that with the continual advancement of information-based technology that is readily available to the average student, that schools may become obsolete. Kids will be able to take total control over their own education and learn from any location with an internet connection. In such an environment, the very idea of schooling will be obsolete.

I do not think this scenario is realistic or even desirable. There is a great leap between a student empowering and taking responsibility for his education and taking total control over it. It is the same leap (metaphorically speaking) as exists between a would-be pilot seeking out qualified instruction and that same person leaping directly into the cockpit of a jumbo jet. In the first case, the student/pilot understands the need and desire for knowledge and information and takes steps to obtain it responsibly and accurately. In the latter, the student/pilot hopes to self-train - and although all the information may technically be out there for a motivated individual to find for himself, any attempts to immediately use that information without tempering it with actual knowledge and preparedness could (and very likely will be) doomed to tragedy.

This is not to say that it is impossible for students to grow, develop, and learn without a formal schooling process. Indeed, in the technological world of 2025, it may be easier to become a true autodidact than it was just a quarter-century ago. But the irony of the matter is this: the very thing that makes it potentially easier for students to "just do it" and seek out learning and education on their own - the sheer amount of readily available information that hovers at our fingertips - is the very thing that ultimately makes it more difficult to succeed in this endeavor. As I have said before, and undoubtedly will say again, without the ability to filter between good, reliable data and unsupported, questionable information (the wheat from the chaff, as it were), self-teaching is and always will be an uphill battle. For middle and high school age children, who for the most part have not yet developed the maturity and discipline needed for such a challenge, formal schooling will be necessary.

THIS is what I feel the true role of schooling will be in 2025. Teachers will continue to teach and impart their content knowledge to their students, but their main role will be to help students develop the skills and techniques they will require to take reasonable, responsible, and ultimately productive control over their own education and learning.

In many cases, this will be accomplished through non-traditional methods that the teachers of a prior generation may or may not recognize. Teaching will be more about making authentic connections between a student's world and the world "outside". Just how will this be done? Stay tuned.

I love this video. I stumbled across it once upon a time, and shamelessly linked all of my history/government friends to it. Enjoy.

The Role of Content Knowledge - 2025 CE

Learning... that is to say, true learning... is far more than simple memorization of facts and the assembling of data. Learning connotes understanding, and in order to achieve understanding, one must have a degree of expertise with the content. A student can memorize data and know that the French & Indian War ended in 1763. He can absorb facts and know that the American Revolution began in 1776, and may even know some of the more popularly-known causes (taxation without representation and all that). But without content expertise - the ability to make connections and inferences between facts and data and draw logical conclusions that may go beyond the raw data - he may never realize or understand just how inextricably commingled these two historical points are, or why it is of such importance for modern American citizens to appreciate this link.

Where do students get that content expertise? Up until now, the only source has been the teacher. Textbooks contain data, facts and figures, but it has been teachers who provide the student with the means of putting it all together. Teachers explain, illuminate, decrypt and build upon that raw information and help the student turn it into something meaningful. Teachers must, therefore, be experts in their field. They must possess content knowledge to be effective educators.

However, in this progressively technological and informationally connected world, there is another source of not only information but interpretation and analysis that is literally at the fingertips of almost every student in America: the internet. By the year 2025, it is entirely conceivable that anything a middle-school student would need to learn would be available online, not only in the form of pure information, but accompanied with detailed (or not so detailed) analysis and explanation. The question is, does this ready source of content knowledge render the teacher obsolete?

Not by a long shot.

No matter how pervasive the technology is, no matter how easily it can be interfaced and referenced, a massive electronic clearinghouse of data and information can never sufficiently match the vitality and potential of having a conversation with an expert who is willing and eager not only to share his expertise, but to admit that it is not complete and can only grow with the sharing. Students may search online databases for the Intolerable Acts and find tomes of writing that will help them regurgitate any and all vital figures and numbers, but chances are they will not have truly learned the material until they have had a chance to discuss it and hear it critiqued, reviewed, and debated.

Most importantly, the ubiquitous nature of online information means that not all of it can be trusted to be accurate or complete. Websites like Wikipedia are wonderful sources of information, but must be reviewed with care, since anyone can, at any time, alter any data there that they see fit. Without the expertise of a teacher who deeply understands what the content should be to serve as a filter, many students could learn the wrong things. This is part of what teachers (particularly history teachers, I dare say) are there to do; They are there to help students understand how to see and recognize the difference between fact and fiction.

Thus, the single-most important skill that students of 2025 must master in order to be productive is the ability to discern for themselves the veracity of what they see and hear. I hear you cry that the ability to skillfully interface with technological advances must surely be more important... but I maintain that it is not. In fact, it is the inexorable pace of those advances that calls this need into sharp focus! In the face of an overwhelming flood of information from sources that range in reliability from respected news sources and researchers to sidewalk bloggers and agenda-peddlers on virtual soap-boxes, students must be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And it is our job as teachers to help them learn how to do it.

The March of Progress

I remember sitting at my friend's computer in 1988, discussing with him the future of computing technology. He had just installed a memory upgrade, and his computer was the fastest machine we had ever seen. We waxed prophetic for a moment, and theorized that should a computer ever reach 1 gigabyte of memory, it would suffer almost insurmountable overheating problems... and should it ever reach 1 terabyte (heavens!), the power requirements of maintaining the drive would cause local brownouts as the power grid was overwhelmed.

Oops. Good thing we didn't put any money on that one.

So why bring this up on an education-themed blog? Because the future of education and the future of technological progress go hand in hand. With an increasing focus on integrating technology in the classroom, teachers must keep on top of what innovations come down the pipe, and must keep their minds open to the possibilities of what technology may or may not become available.

Good thing I've read William Gibson.

Opening Shots

Welcome! My name is Mike, and I am a graduate student at George Mason University. I just completed the Secondary Education licensing program (bonus points if you can guess my content area), and now I am pursuing a Master's Degree. Stay tuned here for my thoughts on education, technology, and where the future will take our schools and students. (Is it weird that I am following my own blog?)