SITE 2010

I've just returned from the SITE 2010 Conference in San Diego. I found it somewhat disconcerting that the opening keynote was talking about her recent arrival to teaching online. It reminded me that a colleague and I did a presentation that covered the issues of preparing to teach online and about the importance of School of Education faculty teaching online at a SITE conference at least 10 years ago. Of course we weren't doing a keynote.

I asked the 60+ folks who were at my session how many were teaching online and got about half the audience to indicate they were doing so, but when I asked how many were preparing their pre-service teachers to teach online only a handful responded.

Virtual Schools have been around now for 15 years and it's not a passing fancy. But it seems based on a very informal survey that Schools of Education are behind the times. This is something I've been asking them to do for the past 15 years. Obviously, I'm not getting through.

I'm not the only one. Iowa State had a FIPSE grant, TEGiVS (that I consulted on) that ran from 2005 - 2007 and they developed modules to incorporate virtual education content into teacher preparation programs. Those modules have been available for Ed Schools to use. Iowa State presented at SITE as part of the project's dissemination efforts. I guess they weren't heard either.

And also this year at SITE I was part of a pre-conference workshop raising the issue of Ed Schools now incorporating engineering education into their pre-service preparation of K-12 teachers.

I've been clear in my position that our education system needs to be redesigned. I don't think the nation's Ed Schools can be seriously redesigned until we've got our new K-12 model, but I do believe Ed Schools can make the adjustments to reflect the current realities happening in K-12. But, as Bruce Droste used to say, "changing schools of education is like pounding cement."

There are individual School of Education faculty who are introducing their pre-service teachers to the latest in education, but we need to get the programs to reflect that thinking, we can't depend on all the faculty to do that. Just look at how many of them are preparing their students to be online teachers.

Android computer

So the previous post is an interesting lead-in for speculation about what the impact will be of Android tablets. There was lots of speculation before the iPad was introduced about it. Clearly, some of my colleagues are very excited and optimistic about what they see as the potential for educational adoption of the iPad.

I have seen reports that both Dell and HP are developing hardware that will run on the Android OS. This week I was talking with someone from Dell who was bemoaning the delay in getting their Android platform out. At the CoSN conference I was talking with a Verizon rep about the lack of educational apps for their Android smartphones. I was told the developers are well aware of that lack and were working hard to develop the apps. (Of course what else could he say?)

Will the price point for the iPad insure that HP and Dell will price their tablets to be competitive? Will the Android developers produce useful educational apps in time to help HP and Dell be seen as potential competition to the iPad in the education environment?

Demise of the Desktop?

Elliott Masie in his March 5, Learning TRENDS newsletter posts:

Google Predicts Demise of the Desktop: John Herlihy, Google's VP of Global Ad Operations, has claimed that desktop PCs would become "irrelevant" in three years down the line. Addressing the Digital Landscapes Conference in Dublin, Herlihy predicted a bleak future for desktop PCs, as smartphones, netbooks, along with other gadgets are evidently gaining grounds over them. In his keynote speech, Herlihy said: "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs".  This echoes Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments Global sales of smartphones and other high-end handheld devices have been soaring at a rapid pace and would very soon surpass sales of traditional PCs." This has huge implications for the learning field - as we look towards supporting learning through a new and broader range of mobile based resources. Learning designers will need to refocus their design sensibilities towards a smaller footprint and very different type of learning application.
And if this is true, what does it mean for K-12?

Reforming Teacher Education

A week ago I participated in a conference at the University of Texas at Austin. There were about a hundred participants. The goal was to begin a conversation about what teacher education should look like for digital age learners and share that with policy makers, and leaders in teacher preparation.

You can see the materials and presentations on the conference website.

It was interesting and frustrating. It became clear to me that without a clear picture of K-12 education in the digital age; without the vision for restructured public education, it's almost impossible to develop a new model of teacher education. There was consensus that the notion of the teacher as expert on everything needs to be changed, but that was about as far as we got. If we don't know what education should look like, how can we say what the teacher education programs should look like?

There were very interesting discussions. There's a lot of data, and I believe there's actually a great deal of interest in reforming teacher education, but that can't be done without reform of what is now referred to as K-12 education.

Teacher education programs are in part measured on their ability to place graduates into teaching roles. That means the graduates have to fit in to the current culture and design of education in our schools. Today many teacher education programs want to prepare their graduates to teach in technology-rich environments, but that's not often the reality they experience. So, if that was the focus of a teacher education program there might not be a good fit with a teaching job. Then fewer graduates would be hired and the program wouldn't be as well regarded. What would happen if teacher education programs started preparing their graduates for a really restructured eduction system?

I'm back to the proposal I've made before. I want to pull together a group to create a new vision for education in the 21st Century. Once that is developed, then bring together another group to create the infrastructure to enable that vision. Developing the infrastructure involves more than just a redesigned teacher education program, there are policy implications, facility design, and more. I just need to find the funding.