Live Wednesday, March 7th - Panel Discussion of Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams

Join us Wednesday, March 7th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com panel and community discussion on Seth Godin’s new education manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams. I will be hosting a panel that includes Patrick Ferenga, Lisa Nielsen, Lisa Cooley, Lisa Nalbone, and Nikhil Goyal, asking them and the audience to share their thoughts around the topics addressed in the book--including K - 12 and higher education reform, home schooling, and what parents, students, and school boards can do to affect change.

With a growing sense that something has to change, Seth Godin’s manifesto addresses the need to update outdated teaching practice. He explains, “School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer.” In his 30,000 word manifesto (information on free download and discussion options here), Seth Godin imagines a different set of goals. He warns that one thing is certain: if we keep doing what we've been doing, we're going to keep getting what we've been getting.

Date: Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
Time: 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern / 00 (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-03-07.1603.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an .mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/stopstealingdreams.mp3.

Lisa Cooley - School Board Member
Lisa Cooley has been agitating for changes in public education for eight years. She serves on the school board of Maine’s RSU 3. She is also a Suzuki violin teacher and a glass bead maker and jewelry designer. She has 2 children in public school. She blogs at http://mindsofkids.blogspot.com.

Pat Farenga - Home Education Expert

Patrick Farenga is a writer and education activist who worked closely with the author and teacher John Holt, until Holt’s death in 1985. He is the president of HoltGWS LLC. and was the publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) from 1985 until it stopped publishing in 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about homeschooling, started by Holt in 1977. The Farengas unschooled their daughters, now aged 25, 22, and 19. Unschooling is a word created by Holt to describe how people learn in the world without using conventional school techniques and materials.

Farenga speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world, as well as on commercial radio and television talk shows. His media appearances include The Today Show, Good Morning America, Voice of America, Geraldo, Learning Matters, CNN’s Parenting Today, The Dr. Drew Pinsky Show, and Fox and Friends.

In addition to writing for GWS for twenty years, Farenga’s books include Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus) and The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling; articles about homeschooling and democratic education (Encounter Magazine, Summer 2011); and essays about unschooling in a number of publications such as Un Mundo Por Aprender (University of Colombia, Bogota, 2011), and the entries about homeschooling for the International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition (Elsevier, 2010) and the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (2012, forthcoming).

Nikhil Goyal - Student, Upcoming Author, Entrepreneur
Nikhil Goyal is a student at Syosset High School in New York. He is currently writing a book on education reform: Time to Think Different: Why America Needs a Learning Revolution. In addition, he writes weekly columns for the Huffington Post and guest blogs for the New York Times: Dot Earth blog. Goyal is empowering students, educators, parents, and administrators with the upcoming Learning Revolution movement to shake up the American education system. Goyal’s email is ngoyal2013@gmail.com.

Lisa Nalbone - Parent to Dale Stephens who is leading the Uncollege Movement
Lisa Nalbone has been a community activist since her long ago graduation from Duke University. Her interest in peace and social justice issues led to her work in education and with libraries. She taught various grades and subjects in public school for almost 15 years, usually stirring the pot by asking “Why can’t we do what’s best for the student?”

She began the homeschool/unschooling journey with her son Dale in 2002, wishing that all students could experience such learning freedom. Oddly enough, she still assumed Dale should enter traditional higher education even though she had such mixed feelings about her own university experience. After much research about WHICH college, she sent Dale off without really asking the bigger question of Why?

This past year she has returned to the education reform conversation at a whole new level. She has connected with many people around the country, who are asking important questions about school reform and change, for both K-12 and higher education. She blogs at www.lisanalbone.com.

Lisa Nielsen - Innovative Educator
Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively and is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on “Passion (not data) Driven Learning,” "Thinking Outside the Ban" to harness the power of technology for learning, and using the power of social media to provide a voice to educators and students. Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. In addition to her award-winning blog, The Innovative Educator, Ms. Nielsen’s writing is featured in places such as Huffington Post, Tech and Learning, ISTE Connects, ASCD Wholechild, MindShift, Leading and Learning, The Unplugged Mom, and is the author the book Teaching Generation Text.

A "Tail" of Two Ed Tech Agendas

At the Digital Media and Learning (DML) 2012 Conference in San Francisco this past week, during a panel discussion on investment in education innovation in which promises of large amounts of funding for schools were being dangled as carrots to an all-too-fawning audience, Rudy Blanco came to the microphone to ask representatives of the Gates and MacArthur Foundations why his poor school in Bronx doesn't seem to be able to get any of the millions being discussed. The answers he got were a largely uninspired description of how organizational decisions are made, and I don't think they felt any more satisfactory to those giving them than to Rudy or to those I spent the rest of the day talking to about this moment. Rudy became our focus for trying to understand a more general discomfort with what we were seeing and hearing at the conference, and the day ended with my own coming to a significant realization: two very different conceptions of technology-driven education reform were being conflated into one larger story, and if I'm right, it's very important that we break them apart.

The Long Tail, as popularized by Chris Anderson, is a graphical description of a shifting world in which previously only those products or services which sold in high enough quantity (the high end, or "head" of the curve) were carried in physical stores, as their sales justified the combined manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and warehousing costs. The products or services in the "long tail" of the curve, sharply demarcated at the point at which they were not popular enough to make it to the physical stores, for the most part just didn't used to get distributed or sold. The Internet has significantly changed marketplaces that reflect this curve of demand, and it is believed that Amazon may sell more product in aggregate in the "tail" than in the "head"--meaning they sell more books in total that don't make it to the remaining traditional bookstores than do.

The head is very vertical, as volume is the key. The head is about scaling and scope, and success is more of the same. The tail is very horizontal, as it is about as breadth and depth, and success in the tail is differentiation, diversity, and choice. The head requires hierarchy, corporate decision-making, and control. The tail requires networking, an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and freedom. The head is about money, by which approval is conferred. The tail is about passion, and approval is less about the financial and often more about relationships and fulfillment. The head and the tail are actually very different economic models, and it turns out they may also be a powerful way to differentiate two different ed tech reform models. 

What I came to realize last week is that what Rudy from the Bronx really wanted was appreciation. Because of the way the conference and its sponsors defined support as financial, he rightly felt unappreciated. But I think what Rudy, and most educators, really want is the kind of support that has nothing to do with money. It's the kind of support that the network now brings, the collegial support of those working hard to make a difference in the lives of children, and the money is a red herring. Ed tech reform in the head is about using money to scale simplified solutions of that which is popular, or the status quo. Ed tech reform in the tail is about using the network to provide freedom and choice. Ed tech reform in the head is like a diet pill, addressing the symptoms, whereas ed tech reform in the tail is like learning to eat healthfully, addressing the cause. The diet pill is easy, learning to grow and eat healthy food is much harder. Or: vertical ed tech reform based on money is like the scaled food at McDonalds, whereas horizontal ed tech reform based on diversity is like the wonderful variety of restaurants in a city like San Francisco.

Let's go even further. If more books are being sold in the tail than at the head, we might argue that it's likely that more jobs in the future will be in the tail as well--that is, entrepreneurial jobs, not corporate ones. This is actually quite stunning if you think about it. The skill-set we often say that we want for students--for them to become self-driven, passionate, independent learners--very much fits the job demands of an entrepreneurial work world. But it occurred to me last week to me that this kind of true independence of mind and of spirit is not really likely to be valued in corporate jobs, since they depend on workers assuming and complying with a corporate culture and viewpoint. In fact, if we were to describe what the corporate world is saying it needs right now, the basic message is for more skilled, compliant students. Students who do better on the standardized tests, but who don't revolt against the standardized test as a measure or pathway to successful lives. Those organizations with the big money to hand out live in this world of organized, compliant, corporate values. The people that work in those organizations gain power and influence within them by following that model. And their definitions of educational success aren't likely to be the kind of self-empowerment that, say, a Big Picture Learning school provides.

I know this sound awfully dramatic. I don't know if that's just me, or if it's actually because the divide between these two messages of education reform are as different as they seem right now to me to be. But if I'm right, then those of us who really care about teaching and learning as ways of helping to liberate the passion and independence of learners are going to have to both recognize--and figure out how to avoid--the hidden compliance agendas of the big money being doled out. And also how to make sure we're building the kind of appreciative support networks that will help the Rudys of the world.