Keynote Flim-Flam

Will Richardson writes of his disappointment that highly paid speakers at a conference dedicated to the future of schooling lacked concrete ideas relevant to, well - the future of schooling.

This comes as no surprise to those of us who have endured endless lectures by "experts" with no educational experience, background or knowledge who apply conventional wisdom from every field except education, to improving our schools. I've asked the following question a zillion times in different forms, but continue to be clueless as to, "Why are educators so willing to take marching orders from slick talkers who know nothing about learning, have extremely limited experience in schools and have never led anything, even as assistant night manager of a 7-11?"

Will's blog about conference speakers, Michael Horn and Tony Wagner remind me of Stager's First Two Axioms of Education Reform.
(Note: Tony Wagner has considerable education experience.)

Stager's Axioms of Education Reform

1) “It is my belief that the dominant solution to any educational challenge will be wrong and make the problem worse.”

2) "Observation is not insight and counting is not wisdom!"

The best of the fancy conference talkers and airport bookstore authors can sling meaningless statistics about cellphone ownership, Indian engineering graduates and how many kids play video games like a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher. However, the conclusions they draw, if they even bother to draw them, tend to be fatuous and apropos of nothing.

In other cases, the conclusions are drawn with complete ignorance or discounting of the social, political, historical or human aspects of schooling. Merely proclaiming that the world is changing and schools will soon be irrelevant is a cheap party trick worthy of your contempt. Inventing clever puns, taking credit for ones created by others or making self-evident claims about the value of educational tradition, without questioning those traditions, is just as disgraceful (see here)

Will ended his blog on an optimistic note, but I harbor great reservations about what he sees as progress.

Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference.

• First of all, the fact that kids have decided to avoid schooling and accept an alternative, any alternative should neither surprise nor encourage us. Dropping out may be the most rational response to the current system that will not be improved one bit by kids opting out for correspondence school.


• What is lost when you never meet a teacher face-to-face? Is education merely the objective exchange of questions and answers? Of teaching and being taught?


• I am NOT comforted by increases in standardized test scores or the "deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery." This is a vision of education I find nauseating.


• While I remain a great supporter of the affordances offered learners by well-designed online learning environments (I have fifteen years worth of experience teaching online), the Florida Virtual School was not created out of pure intentions. One needs only to look at the new state law requiring online alternatives to school for every elementary school student and it's easy to conclude that the Florida Virtual School is first and foremost a stealth plan for privatizing public education and cutting costs. Jeb Bush achieved what his ideological brethren only dreamed of by offering a scheme to parents that sounds futuristic. It is impossible to see this news in an apolitical context.

Educators in Pennsylvania told me that parents tired of receiving truancy calls simply withdraw their kids from school and "enroll" them in "cyberschools." The value or efficacy of that educational alternative remains in doubt.

On another note, I'm always amazed when bloggers who use so little computing potential and offer a slightly incremental view of educational innovation also feel compelled to apologize for their advocacy of the tiniest of changes in pedagogical practice.

That doesn’t mean than we throw out all of the good pedagogy that we’ve developed over the years and make everything about technology. But it does mean, I think, that technology has to be a part of the way we do our learning business

.
You can also keep your learning "business" while we are at it.

Thinking Out Loud

Some of my best writing is in response to other people's blogs. I must get in the habit of turning my comments on other people's blogs into articles of my own. Here is an attempt at doing so...

A recent Will Richardson blog hipped me to a teacher named Dan Meyer who videoblogs.

Does this guy have a crew? I can't find the time or bandwidth to point a tripod at my keynotes. If I do, I can't find the time to edit the video and put it online. People ask me if every one of my sessions will be uStreamed. I use my computer for presentations and unless I want to publish a surveillance video, I can't control the camera while I'm presenting either.

Keeping my content current, amusing and maintaining a sense of narrative is difficult enough. I'm not Al Franken reporting for Weekend Update from his One Man Mobile Uplink.



I marvel at the output of people like Meyer, but am not sure that I find the content particularly compelling. Questions such as the following pop into mind:

• Who is HIS audience?
• Why should we care about his day?
• Is the content interesting or the production values enviable? etc...

I'm grappling with another problem that may be related, but is causing me mental paralysis. I have too much I want to say, write and blog. This leaves me obsessing about what to do first and I don't get around to doing any of it.

I also face the questions of:

• Who is MY audience?

• Why should people care what I think?

• Shouldn't I spend my time writing my book or magazine articles?
Isn't writing a book a lousy return on investment?

• Why won't magazine editors leave my jokes and personal "voice" in my articles?

• Will I be "the mean guy" because I don't follow the herd?

• Why don't people understand that just because I debunk the shoulder-deep BS in edtech that I am an unapologetic advocate for its (largely unrealized) potential and that I get up every day to make the world a better place for kids?

The Possibility of Doing Good AND Doing Well

The recent Sturm and Drang over the Associated Press' concern about their stories being excerpted in blogs and on web sites without compensation has been continued in blogs [1] [2] by Will Richardson.

Some well-fed fully-employed bloggers long for a Utopian world where all intellectual capital is free. They use the technical breakthroughs of the Web as evidence that expertise and intellectual capital are devalued in a world in which "content" can be had by the barrel at no cost.

Such a view ignores the value of art, culture and civil traditions while viewing the world entirely through the eyes of economists. The answer to runaway capitalism is not Marxism.

I just read a terrific new article about how good old fashioned hard work, competent management, respect for artists and emerging technology is being used to make opera more profitable and accessible.

New York's famed Metropolitan Opera Company is improving the bottom line and increasing its relevance without defaming, devaluing or disrespecting their employees or compromising the quality of their "product." In fact, they are honoring hundreds of years worth of artistic tradition and its importance to Western culture, by building upon those traditions and reaching new audiences.

Surely, there are some lessons here for education.

A Writing Teacher Discusses the NY Times "Blogger Girl"

Putting blogger, Emily Gould, on the cover of last Sunday's New York Times Magazine set off a firestorm among the chattering classes of traditional media and the blogosphere.

The Los Angeles Times discusses the controversy and whether Ms. Gould's blog-fueled fame/exhibitionism is worthy of such prized New York Times real estate.

Marcia Meier, director of the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference, writes in the Huffington Post, "At Least She's Writing..." in an article that makes arguments Will Richardson might share.

My sessions at the Learning 2.0 Conference

The sessions I have selected to present explore the use of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. I will share video-based examples of students from 5-adult learning in remarkable ways with computational material and encourage you to reflect upon your own practice.

It is my sincere desire to add a unique voice and perspective to the important discussions about to commence in Shanghai. I look forward to learning with all of you.

Ten Things to Do with a Laptop - Learning and Powerful Ideas
A paper entitled, “Twenty Things to Do with a Computer,” was published in 1971 by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. Few of today’s schools, with or without laptops, satisfy the goals of that thirty-five year-old document. This keynote invokes the challenging vision of the earlier document, updates it and presents ideas for using laptops in ways that offer unprecedented learning adventures across K-12 and various subject areas. A broader vision of using computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression is equally appropriate for educators with one or one hundred computers in their classroom.

Way Beyond Web 2.0
Blogging is undoubtedly cool and has captured the imagination of many educators. It can even be an effective classroom tool. However, the irrational exuberance granted blogging and other Web 2.0 tools perpetuates the dominant view that computers are best used for research purposes and that learning is about information. This misunderstands the nature of learning and underestimates the potential of computing in the intellectual and creative development of children. Such thinking deprives students of rich opportunities to construct modern knowledge in a wide variety of domains. We must explore a more expansive role of computers in areas such as math, science and the arts where learning opportunities abound yet elude far too many children.

We best serve our students when we teach them how to solve problems we can’t even anticipate. This presentation will illustrate how the web may be used for rich authentic intellectual inquiry in order to solve sophisticated problems in an increasingly complex world. Teachers will be inspired to look for such opportunities in their daily lives and demonstrate how a good prompt or interesting observation can lead to sophisticated thinking. Recommended software environments will be demonstrated along with strategies for getting a greater return on investment out of school technology. Examples from actual K-12 classrooms will be shared. Bring your laptop to join in the learning adventure!

Papert Matters - Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas
Seymour Papert, often referred to as the "father of educational technology," is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the past half-century. His work and ideas influenced Jean Piaget as well as the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematics, educational computing, learning and school reform. On a tangible level, Logo, LEGO robotics, constructionism, the $100 laptop, Hypercard, Squeak, Scratch, laptops for Maine students and many of the best ideas in educational technology were shaped by Papert's vision of children constructing modern knowledge. This session presents just a few of Professor Papert's most powerful ideas about children, computers and learning through his own words and rarely seen video. The presenter worked closely for Dr. Papert and was the principal investigator on his most recent institutional learning project. Educators new to Papert's theories will be challenged to think deeper about learning. Veteran educators will be inspired to reinvigorate their practice and challenge the status quo.

Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai

On November 14-16, 2007 I will be speaking at The Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai, China. Alan November, Jamie McKenzie, Will Richardson, Wesley Fryer, Chris Smith and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach are also on the program.

The following is some information about me for people who might attend my presentations.

About Gary Stager, Ph.D.
Occupation: Teacher educator, journalist, speaker, educational consultant, editor, professor, Executive Director of The Constructivist Consortium
Turn-ons: Expertise, people committed to making the world a better place for children, social justice, jazz, NFL football, Aussie Rules football, robotics, programming, politics, passion, constructionism, books
Turn-offs: Standardized testing, empty rhetoric, adult non-learners, technology standards, doing nothing, instructionism
Clients: Disney, Universal Studios, Apple, Toshiba, Microsoft, LEGO, LCSI, Tom Snyder Productions, FableVision, Claris, Victoria (Australia) Department of Education and Training
Proudest achievement: Being part of the production team that won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Recording of the Year: The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project - Simpåtico

Computers not only offer opportunities for children to learn things that we have always wanted them to learn, perhaps with greater efficiency, efficacy or even comprehension, but their real power lies in providing productive contexts for learning things that were impossible to learn just a few years ago. Computers are the material with which learners may construct modern knowledge.

Over the past twenty-five years I've been fortunate that hard-work and intuition have allowed me to be at the right place at the right time.

I first learned to program in 1976 as a 7th grader and led computer clubs and after-school workshops throughout high school. Then it was off to Berklee College of Music where I hoped to develop as a jazz musician. In 1982, I created one of the first computer camp programs for kids anywhere. Within a year I was leading professional development for teachers and soon after that I was the Director of Professional Development for a consortium of 150 computer-using school districts. I led and organized hundreds of teacher workshops and chaired the first seven New Jersey Educational Computing Conferences.

In 1985, I attended my first two Logo conferences, at Pepperdine University in California and at MIT. I was blown away by the level of creativity, passion, intellect and embrace of newcomers I found within the thriving Logo community. It was around that time that I first met Dr. Seymour Papert and I began consulting with Logo Computer Systems. Soon after LEGO TC Logo was released in 1986, I became one of LEGO's consultants and evangelists. I led hundreds of robotics workshops for teachers and helped design subsequent products. Around 1989-1990 I helped the Scarsdale, NY Public Schools develop a collaborative online creative environment for project-work built in LogoExpress, a version of Logo that allowed collaboration via dial-up modem. (My first modem was purchased in 1983 and I was a member of Compuserve and Applelink for years until Apple sent us a bill for a bazillion dollars.) It may be Web 2.0 to others, but it's like Web 25 to me.

In 1990, a boyhood dream was realized when I traveled to Sydney, Australia in order to present a paper at the World Conference on Computers in Education (I've since presented papers at the past for WCCEs). Many of my Logo friends (Seymour Papert, Brian Silverman, Mitchell Resnick and Steve Ocko) were also in Sydney for WCCE. Alan Kay was the opening keynote and Papert closed the conference. This was very heady stuff for the kid from Jersey.

I met great Aussie educators who knew of my work via The Logo Exchange and other publications. I count many of these people as my best friends to this very day. A multi-day pre-conference workshop prior to WCCE featured students and teachers from two Australian schools where every student had a personal laptop computer. This was extraordinary since I was a computing professional and neither I nor any of my colleagues owned their own laptops. The "laptop schools" embraced the technology as a way of turning schooling inside out and the best vehicle for realizing the ideals of Papert and other progressive educators. A 12 year-old girl and I spent a couple of days building a working fax machine out of LEGO during the pre-conference. By the time WCCE began, my mind was spinning and my life was forever changed.

Three weeks later I was back in Australia leading professional development at the world's first "laptop schools." I spent countless months in such schools over the next several years and have made approximately 30 trips downunder. My work has taken me to countless schools in every state and territory. I've also keynoted countless conferences in "Oz" including being the keynote speaker following Seymour Papert and Maine Governor Angus King at a 2004 conference to launch Apple Australia's school laptop initiatives. My 1:1 efforts are chronicled in Bob Johnstone's history of educational computing, Never-mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers and the Transformation of Learning.



I began teaching at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in 1993. My colleagues and I began teaching online around 1995. In 1997, I proposed offering an online masters degree program. The Online Master of Arts in Educational Technology degree program began a few months ago and has graduated nine classes of leaders since.

Seymour Papert, referred to by many as the "father of educational computing," invited me to join him in creating a high-tech alternative learning environment inside Maine's troubled prison for teens. That work was the subject of my Ph.D. research and documents Dr. Papert's most recent institutional research projects. That work has inspired me to work in disadvantaged schools with the most severely at-risk students in order to create models of alternative learning environments and advance my motto, "Things need not be as they seem!"



I've had the good fortune to be a collaborator in the MIT Media Lab Future of Learning Group. In that capacity, I've helped lead immersive one and two week-long professional development institutes for hundreds of Brazilian and Mexican educators. My work has taken me to six continents.

Since the late nineties, I have also been an education journalist and columnist. Close to 100 of my articles and papers may be found at http://www.stager.org.

In 2006, I launched The Pulse: Education's Place for Debate at http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse

My personal blog is at http://www.stager.org/blog

Mind-mapping What?

Will Richardson's blog reminded me to share some thoughts I've been ruminating over for several years. Will does an outstanding job of spotting and sharing new software tools, particularly those of the Web 2.0 variety. Some of these tools demonstrate human ingenuity, many make a small improvement on existing software and one or two may even make a real splash, in either social impact or as a commercial product. Will's recent blog posting, Mind Mapping Love, discussed new online tools for brainstorming, mapping and planning.

Upon reflection I felt compelled to ask, "After all of this mapping, brainstorming and planning, what do the students actually do? Is it better than what they wrote, filmed, acted, composed or constructed before such tools existed? What's the point?"

I began asking such questions a few years ago when I keynoted a national educational technology conference overseas. The walls of the convention center corridors were lined with display boards containing student work. One would assume that this work exemplified the most extraordinary efforts from this nation's classroms. However, upon further inspection I saw walls covered in three bubble Inspiration maps. Plants need... Water, Sunlight, Cool-Whip... That sort of stuff.

I was horrified. Why would we display such crap on the walls of a national conference?

This is like publishing an outline of a novel, without the novel, except it is worse than that. What I routinely see in schools is the equivalent of publishing the first three words of the outline of a novel without ever writing the novel. It's then printed in fancy fonts and framed by brightly colored construction paper before affixing to a bulletin board. I've seen it a zillion times in classrooms all over the world. The pride educators gain from such incomplete work is an acute example of what Seymour Papert calls verbal inflation.

Again, what's the point?

I have no reason to doubt that Will Richardson was an amazing teacher who inspired his students to express themselves with a clarity and fluency beyond their years. With Will's guidance mind-mapping, brainstorming or outlining resulted in exceptional writing or journalism. But what about his protegés? Do the students of Will's many followers produce work they can be proud of? Do their efforts justify the investment in hardware and software? Based on my observations, I fear not.

I often wonder why the package, Inspiration, has been such a runaway success. Almost every school with a computer owns a copy, while countless schools have it installed on every computer. One would think that all of this planning would lead to an explosion in creativity and dramatic improvements in student communication abilities, but aside from small anecodotal examples, no such evidence exists. Admittedly, my inner cynic gets curious whenever large numbers of educators are suddenly excited about anything. I like to know why.

Perhaps the enthusiasm for pre-writing tools, such as the Inspiration and the ones Will writes about, is based on the fact that schools hate process. Pre-writing/planning/brain-storming represents the first stage of a four or five part writing process. In order to gain benefit from this process, each stage must be completed. No step of the process is more important than another. They are equally critical. Well, at last that's the theory.

The reality of school is that teachers routinely cherry-pick the part of the process which best suits them or fits within their time constraints. This has a lot to do with why "whole language" was vilified. Teachers embraced the invented spelling aspect of the pre-writing and writing stages, but never got around to actual editing or publishing. Putting invented spelling on the wall or in publications that leave the classroom is asking for trouble.

Some teachers focus on an essay's cover, word count or fonts used while others brainstorm, but never get around to having the children write anything of substance.

This might be because writing is so hard and teachers are insecure about their own writing. An even more likely hypothesis for why the writing process rarely leaves the starting gate is time. It takes a wizard or decathelete to edit 150-200 pieces of student writing, so why require it? Even orchestrating effective peer-editing procedures takes time few teachers enjoy between the bells and other structural distractions of the modern school day. So, we skip a few steps. Favoring one step over the others tends to undermine the entire process.

We all had at least one teacher who required that an outline be turned in, even if it was written after the essay. Such requirements are profoundly indifferent and disrespectful to each distinct learner. With modern outlining tools the curriculum is too often on identifying the form of brainstorming or the shape of a mind-map, rather than on what should be the product resulting from the tool's use. Too many teachers focus on the mechanics of these tools at the expense of developing articulate creative students. Not every writer requires an outline and most "real" writing results from a much more fluid process.

Another potential reason for the emphasis on brainstorming and mind-mapping is that the activity lends itself to being teacher-centric. I've seen countless demonstrations of pre-writing in which the teacher solicits ideas from the class (with differing degrees of coercion) and then creates the visual representation on the board or computer via projection. The locus of control shifts away from the learner to the teacher. The proliferation of expensive "interactive" white boards ensures that the teacher will never relinquish control or stop dominating the life of the classroom.

Writing is inherently learner-centered. Great writers know that writing may only really ever be taught mano a mano. Effective teachers use a bag of tricks to distract the rest of the class or create peer editing situations, but writing is a recursive process of continual writing and revision. That's MUCH harder to do than make a diagram, print it out and stick it on a wall (or web page).

A Whole New Mind?

A review by Gary S. Stager, Ph.D.


I have long been uncomfortable with how eager school leaders are to embrace popular business books. It seems odd that educators would seek inspiration from business authors rather than other educators. When I attended a conference where five consecutive speakers quoted from Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, I was inspired to write the controversial article, Reading Fads: Why Tom Friedman Does Not Compute.

That article not only discussed the bizarre conclusions and sloppy logic presented by Tom Friedman, but also explored why school leaders are so drawn to business self-help books. Surely there are lessons to be learned from actual educators who can inspire educational practice.

As more and more educators discuss their craft in the blogosphere a remarkable number of them quote from business how-to manuals while very few ever mention the work of notable educational theorists and practitioners. The concise nature of the blogosphere takes already oversimplified principles and abridges them to fit the grammar of the medium.

Inspired by members of the online community I read the dreadful Everything is Miscellaneous and observed countless discussions of The World is Flat, A Whole New Mind, HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life), Wikinomics and Informal Learning. Not wanting to be left out, I rushed to the bookstore but felt queasy on the way to the cash register. With so many unread books about education sitting on my desk I could not bring myself to give any more of my money to these business authors.

Eventually I purchased and read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. I did so in order to be able to discuss the book thoughtfully on various blogs and in professional development settings.

What business gurus like Don Tapscott, Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins have in common is that none of them actually ever ran a business prior to hitting the bestseller list offering business advice to others. Most of them have never been the night manager of a Seven-Eleven let alone launched or managed an innovative business venture.

They are fancy talkers.

That is their skill. Several are evangelicals. Faith or pseudoscience, along with a dose of prosperity theology, is used to advance their arguments.

Their audience is adults who dream of being rich or increase their personal productivity. Neither goal is analogous to the education of children.

There’s trouble right here in River City

I’ve observed that the fancy talkers tend to have three or four good stories, perhaps as many as seven, they use to captivate their readers. If you see the author on Charlie Rose, you hear the three stories. Google an interview and you’ll read the three stories. Read the book and the three stories will appear verbatim. There is a polish to their schtick that often masquerades a lack of depth or thoughtfulness.

Many of these authors are linguistic jugglers. They can turn a phrase (or at least a handful of rehearsed ones) brilliantly. I compared Thomas Friedman to Nipsey Russell in my review of Friedman’s book due to his penchant for reducing complex ideas to puns.

Ultimately the success of these books is based on the authors’ ability to reduce complex concepts to simplistic binary dichotomies or playground rhymes. Such books are filled with numbered rule-based advice with little room for nuance. Issues are either black or white. The principles apply to any situation.

Obviously, lots of people buy these books. Some even read them. Many of the readers are hooked on this genre of business book and purchase lots of them. Ironically, the people who don’t read these books are successful business leaders. The New York Times article, C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success, tells us that most successful business leaders, the people self-help book readers wish to emulate, do not read business books. They read poetry and novels and great non-fiction written by experts. In short, CEO libraries are tributes to a great liberal arts education. Now that is a lesson school leaders should learn.

It is the great insecurity of wannabes that drives the sales of popular business books. I am of the opinion that educators with limited time should not squander it studying to be CEOs. This is especially true when these books are written by charlatans and touted by educational gurus who themselves are fancy talkers.

Education should be about doing, not talking. Education leaders should be well versed in the literature (past and present) of their chosen profession.

Which brings me to Whole New Mind

Alan November, Will Richardson and other well-respected educators are fans of Daniel Pink’s 2005 book. I had not read the book until recently. Recently, David Warlick wrote in his blog about how excited he was to be speaking at the same event for school leaders as Daniel Pink. Warlick is obviously a fan of Mr. Pink’s work.

I asked Mr. Warlick, “Just wondering. What are Mr. Pink’s qualifications for speaking about learning and school leadership?”

David Warlick answered my question by restating the same question. “I’m just wonder! What kind of qualifications does he need?”

Surely, an “expert” earning large sums of money for the privilege of speaking with large groups of educators about learning and leadership should know something about learning and leadership, right?

So, I broke down and bought A Whole New Mind. What follows is my initial review. I intend to elaborate on this analysis as time permits.

The Review (version 1.0)

Pink's entire thesis falls apart in the book’s opening paragraph.

"The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind - computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people - artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys."

This argument reeks of the cheapest form of populism - playing on the economic insecurities of Americans to reiterate the horrific prospect of Indian and Chinese children destroying our precious way of life. OK, lots of fancy talkers make this case (re: Tom Friedman). Pink's basic thesis is much more objectionable, he uses pseudo-science unconvincingly to advance what is otherwise another pop business book. The first paragraph of A Whole New Mind is a hideous slur against every man and woman working as what new-school Pink defines as old-school knowledge workers. It is simply not true that the kind of people he dismisses (programmers, lawyers or MBAs) either have a different kind or mind or lack any of the more desirable traits he blesses in the next sentence. These are the words of a man who never used "that" kind of mind, because if he had he would understand that scary smart people are also creative and compassionate. Programmers are not pattern recognizers or creators? Give me a break! Ways of knowing are not mutually exclusive.

These caricatures and simplistic dichotomies not only devalue the "minds" of millions of people, but do great violence to education. Pink's work will be viewed by educators (and textbook publishers) as license to move students from the old mind to the new one - I guess like deprogramming gay people. How does this reconcile with ideas such as multiple intelligence theory? (Which also is too often interpreted as finding a child's dominant intelligence and then teaching everything or nothing to a child in that way. Both approaches are wrong and counterproductive.)

One gets the sense that Pink doesn’t even really believe the right-brain/left-brain ideology he advances in the book. However, real scientists who actually study the mind dismiss such simplistic models. Marvin Minsky of MIT, and author of The Society of Mind, calls the right/left brain stuff the “dumbbell theory.” Mind and brain researchers possess a humility that allows them to acknowledge the great mysteries associated with science. Daniel Pink leads readers to believe that he has a handle on how the mind actually functions.

The need for brain-based justifications for treating humans individually and with respect demonstrates the weaknesses in thinking Pink seeks to overcome. A reliance on junk science and mechanistic explanations of unexplainable mental phenomena does little to advance the quite simple proposition that all sorts of talents and aptitudes should be celebrated.

A Whole New Mind is full of factoids woven together to conjure up grandiose theories. For example, Pink’s assertion that MFAs are more valuable than MBAs suggests a zero-sum causality that simply does not exist. The fact that fewer MBAs are being hired by the McKinsey consulting firm, responsible for Enron’s creativity, while more MFAs are hired is neither statistically significant nor interdependent. The premium on design and aesthetic Pink uses to justify the development of “new mind” employees is based on economic prosperity. Rich people want goods and services of a higher quality. Advances in transportation have more to do with these trends than a “new mind.”

By the way, if you embrace Pink's two categories of minds/thinkers/workers, where would you place teachers? I know. We'll place ourselves in the good pile of people. 

Pink can't keep the differences between mind and brain straight, but admits that the whole discussion is only a metaphor anyway. His ignorance of the "old kind of mind" is unrivaled by his ignorance of the "new kind of mind." Once again, terms like symphony are used as metaphors without the slightest regard for what a symphony is or how it's created. The fact is that there are numerous similarities between writing a symphony and programming a computer. But that's in the real world, not the "new" world Mr. Pink predicts based on his experience as a Gore speechwriter, law-school grad who never practiced and latrine digger in Botswana. 

At the end of the day there is nothing revolutionary or even new about what Pink presents as “new.” The book not only plays loose and fast with facts, but the traits ascribed to the evolved human workers of the future can be found in any good salesman of the past century.

This is personal

Many of my colleagues in the blogosphere and on the speaking circuit mean well. They honestly want schools to offer what Sarason calls, more “productive contexts for learning.” However, their embrace of pop business gurus and their methods do little to advance this noble agenda. Learning is personal, diverse and complex. Reducing learning to a handful of teaching tricks does nothing to advance education or improve schools.

A Whole New Mind cannot be reconciled with my own scholarship and twenty-five years worth of thinking about learning. My personal experience obliterates the firewall Pink builds between the two hemispheres of the brain. Several bloggers conflate Pink’s advocacy for increased arts education with his frivolous claims about the mind and economic success. Grand proclamations about the future are offered as substitutes for doing the hard work required today. Neither mind nor future economic prosperity are sufficient arguments for arts education. Students should enjoy rich, diverse and bountiful arts experiences because it is what makes us human.

However, too many of the Web 2.0/School 2.0 community have given up on the promise of school. Media mashups and video games are discussed as substitutes for the discipline and powerful ideas required to play an instrument, write a novel, build a mathematical model, design a computer application, construct a robot or make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Music education enriched my life in innumerable ways. Studying music (up to three periods per day) with professional musicians (expert mentors) in the Wayne, NJ public schools laid the foundation for both my Ph.D. in Science and Math Education and being the new media producer for a Grammy Award-winning project this year. Learning to program computers in the 7th grade, where it was required of every student as a rich intellectual pursuit, helped me develop the habits of mind that serve me everyday.

The seeds of my social activism and vocation were planted when at the age of 18 I saved school music from the budget ax. Devaluing the arts is not new or the exclusive fault of NCLB. The nation began losing its soul and sense or priorities decades ago. Pink offers scant advice for reversing this trend.

Although school was often a mind-numbing, soul-killing experience I learned to play an instrument, love the arts, program computers and compose music in the public schools.  I wish that every child may enjoy a plethora of rich learning adventures. Jingoism and junk science offer insufficient justification or motivation for educational progress.

My partial response to the OLPC discussion on Will Richardson's Blog

Will Richardson led a discussion of the One Laptop Per Child ($100) initiative, aka: the $100 Laptop, on his blog, http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/one-laptop-per-child14-billion-on-easter/

Here are a few of my thoughts on the thoughts of Will and the people who commented on his blog.

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Will,

I've spent 17 years working with 1:1 schools all over the world and I have an ongoing relationship with many of the leading thinkers behind the OLPC. Therefore, I have a number of perspectives I would like to share.

I think you miss the big idea when you say...

"Let’s hope the pedagogies that these kids are taught help them take full advantage of the awesome connection that they now have."

This is NOT about teaching. Your young children didn't need a school curriculum or NETS Standards to use the computer. Neither do children in Nigeria.

See http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html
http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=526
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/10/sugata_mitra_an.html
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/Paper01.pdf


The power of OLPC is in placing computational technology in the hands of children. The theoretical basis for the OLPC is Seymour Papert's work (suggested reading, "The Children's Machine). Papert's work concerns students using computers to make things - programs, robots, games, simulations, poems, movies, etc... - that are sharable with others. The ability to connect those computers, no matter how cool Web 2.0 tools are, is secondary to the construction of knowledge through the explicit act of making things. What makes the computer special is its ability to make lots of new things in many ways. Modern knowledge is made accessible not just by asking questions or looking things up, but by using computers to do the work of mathematicians, filmmakers, computer scientists, engineers, writers, composers, scientists, etc...

Papert began writing about the promise of every children having a computer back in the mid 1960s. He was mocked for that position then as many mock OLPC now. Alan Kay visited Seymour Papert's Logo Lab in 1968, observed young children engaged in sophisticated mathematical thinking and was inspired to sketch the Dynabook on the flight back to Xerox Park. In other words, the laptop (and personal computer - also Kay's term) was invented as an instrument for children.

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With all due respect to Brian, we here in the USA are amateurs at poverty compared to much of the world. Comparing free and reduced school lunch percentages to life in Africa really doesn't cut it. A billion or two people in the world earn less than $1 per day per family. I am however thrilled that his students are doing great things with personal computers.

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Carolyn is correct when she points out the community involvement of OLPC. I asked Negroponte why OLPC was bothering with schools at all, "Why not pass the laptops out on street corners and give each kid a purple thumb to signify that they received their computer?" Negroponte told me that they considered that, but that schools offered a distribution channel.

If the OLPC is about empowering children and the future of learning then it should come as no surprise that schooing is NOT the focus.

That is a message that the edublogger community should applaud. I read a great deal on this site about the decline of schooling and need for a replacement. OLPC represents an investment in R&D when research and development is virtually non-existent in education.

Educators seem genetically predisposed to crave professional development even when NO evidence exists that it works. A quarter century after microcomputers arrived in American schools even the wealthiest schools cannot get teachers to use them. "Lack of professional development" is an addiction. The demand for it is insatiable. Let's move on.

The most important variable of OLPC is the fact that a million or more laptops will be delivered in one country at one time. I have long known that limited access to computers is a major barrier to use.

We have no idea what might result from giving 1 million or more children PERSONAL computers at the same time. Why not support the lucky kids who receive "The Children's Machine" and see what we might learn from them. Then and only then are we in a credible position to set policy.