N.B> this is cross-posted on November Learning’s blog.

Next the researchers subbed-in a new monkey, who didn’t know the hands-off-the-banana rule. As you’d expect, the startled newcomer took a hard lesson form his pals. The researchers eventually subbed-in four more monkeys until none of the original monkeys were left. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys would go near the banana because they knew they would take a lickin’ from the others, even though the researchers had long since stopped spraying water.

Corporate policy–school policy–is too often informed by this monkey-mind.

N.B. this is cross-posted on November Learning’s blog.

The idea that students are digital natives is a myth. None of the potential educational advantages of social media or cloud computing are self-evident; and just as students had to be taught to see a pencil as a learning tool, they need to be taught to see the web as a learning tool. As we focus that teaching on ends, not means—just as we say let’s do some writing, not let’s do some penciling—we find increased student engagement and quality of work. This workshop shows how to view the web (browser) itself as the go-to platform and how to sort web tools by function—research, production, publication, discussion and management—to create a simple, solid framework for helping student and teachers make sense out of an ever-growing, ever-diversifying web.

Here’s my slide deck;

It didn’t take long to see that the iPad is not about the apps. They are great, gorgeous even. Developers are taking full advantage of the iPad’s big glass touch screen. Elements is a stunning example of what can be done on the new, Evernote for the iPad beats all other versions of that app, even the desktop. iCal and Mail are gorgeous–in fact, the iPad is now my preferred mail reader. But the iPad is not about the apps. After all, we’ve had apps for a long time–my first was an early version of Wordperfect that spit running on my old 8088 back in the late 80s.

To be sure, the iPad has a few shortcomings. It outputs video to either a projector or monitor but, frustratingly for a teacher, I cannot share the iPad screen itself; that is, I can show inline video (HTML5 or QuickTime) but not, say, a Safari search.

Projecting a YouTube video from my iPad

Also, the iPad does not connect to the cloud quite as well as you might expect for such a new device. Out of the box, I cannot create or edit Google Docs, although a third party app, Office2 HD ($7.99) does the job for now.

You don’t have to look very hard on the web to find a host more pros and cons. But these all miss the point. There is the iPad-the-thing, and as I and many others have said, it doesn’t seem quite ready yet.

Then there is the iPad-the-idea and that, I firmly believe, is a game changer.

The iPad is bigger than its little brothers the iPhone and iTouch, but this quantitative difference makes for qualitative gains. The iPad is a social tool, whereas smart phones and laptops are personal tools.

Can't do this on a laptop

Just look at the body language of the user. Phones and laptops cut the user off from whoever else is in the room, either because the user has to direct all his or her attention to a tiny screen, or because the user has to look over the laptop screen which sits like a wall between the use and anyone else in the room. I took the iPad to our parent conferences this week and connected it to our online student database. The device sat unobtrusively as a piece of paper between the students, parents and me and I felt that made a significant change in the timbre of the meetings. They seemed more open. Not that I’ve ever had anything to hide, but I’ve always felt that the big screen of my 15″ Macbook Pro created a mixed message: I was saying trust me while effectively keeping my notes hidden.

The iPad is also terrific classroom research tool, not because it has a web browser but because when a student find something it’s so easy to share. I regularly ask students to be official researchers responsible for looking up answers to questions on the fly during class. Searching is no problem on an iPhone or laptop but the former is too small and the latter is too unwieldy to hold up. The iPad screen, however, can easily be seen across a room.

I also often ask students to work collaboratively to build notes. We use Google Docs for this, with each contributor writing in a different colour. I could monitor the students work from my laptop, but that keeps me at my desk. Portability is a relative term and although it’s easy to pack my 15″ MacBook Pro from home to school in my briefcase, it’s undeniably awkward to cart it opened up from desk to desk, especially in a classroom as crowded with stuff as mine. I could close the laptop, but every time I do that I temporarily lose my wireless connection. As we do all our work in the cloud, this is annoying. Much more importantly, however, it increases the visibility of the technology whereas the goal is to make it as invisible as a pencil. With the iPad, I can keep tabs on what any of the students are writing and still move about my classroom to mingle and coach.

Monitoring collaborative docs on an iPad

That might look like a small difference, but it’s a substantial change in classroom practice. Indeed, I think it might alter the basic structure of the classroom. The presence of a teacher’s desk and the computer monitor it holds up stratifies the space, no matter how contemporary the design. That’s why I don’t have my desk in my classroom.

More observations of the iPad in use coming soon

I’m not sure if I’m gazing into a crystal ball or peering into a wishing well. But here’s what I think will be important in 2010.

School administrators will enter the conversation.

They’ll do it because they have to.

Innovation was the buzzword in 2009. It will be in 2010, too, but it will refer to structural or pedagogical innovation, not technology itself. And here we need K12 school administrators–I’m one of them–to weigh in.

They were noticeably absent in online dialogue in 2009. They probably didn’t need to be online at the start of the year. The technology field was chaotic, characterized by rapid pace of development and liberal experimenting, mostly by teachers. But at the end of the year, we have enough data to classify web tools and, more importantly, to draw a reasonably coherent picture of the potential change these tools might make. The big questions raised by web technologies are strategic questions, not technical ones. We’re witnessing the shift from an industrial model of education to…a post-industrial model? That’s a weak descriptor. To call it a 21st Century model is equally weak because no two people can agree on what “21st Century” means, not in terms of education anyway. We should search for a good term, but in the meantime, we can see that just as the web itself is distributed, the new model will be characterized by more distributed learning, facilitated by people I hope we will still call teachers. The big technology trends of 2009 were Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things, but it’s budgets, personnel, assessment, course content and pedagogy–things that have nothing to do with anything technological–that we need to talk about now.

Independent schools should have an edge here. They are, well, more independent and nimble than public schools which are administered at a district level. One school to watch: Think Global School, which has abandoned brick-and-mortar completely and taken the school on the road, is heading to 12 cities around the world in 12 semesters.

Everyone will wake up to the idea that students are not digital natives.

In September I began rolling out wikis, Nings, blogs, Edmodo and even a little Twitter to our Grade 6 – 9 students. But it wasn’t long before they began putting up resistance to the new technologies. “Why can’t we just write this in Google Docs?” they cried. I thought this might be unique to the cohort of students here on Bowen Island or to middle school students. But colleagues in other schools teaching higher and lower grades were seeing the same thing. I called up Chris Betcher in Australia and he was seeing it there, too: Here is his blog post on the idea that the notion of the digital native is a myth.

None of the potential advantages of social media or cloud computing are self-evident. Students are very quick to learn how to work with a new tool, but they still need to be shown why they ought to use it. As with anything else, online skill and even the inclination to work online seems to follow a normal distribution, so it’s unreasonable to expect that a classroom of students will leap onto the social media/cloud computing bandwagon. This means we have to teach the why as well as the how of tools. (Just as we did this with pencil and paper!)

We’ll put philosophy back on the table.

A couple years ago I presented a paper at conference on the humanities at Columbia University calling for the reanimation of the teaching of metaphysics in grade schools. Metaphysics is something of a dirty word, so let’s substitute philosophy. But the idea is that if, even in principle, the web makes all information available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, we are left to ask what should we do with all that data. Google wants to index all the information in the world. What happens when we have perfect knowledge of the facts? Now, unless we are considering trivial decisions, such as what pizzeria should we go to for dinner, the moment we utter the word “should” we enter into a moral or ethical discussion. Yes, students stepping into the data stream need to know how to filter and evaluate information, but they also need to know what to do with it once they’ve qualified it. They need teaching in both practical reasoning and ethics.

I doubt we’ll see schools add courses in philosophy by year’s end, but I do think we’ll see schools start talking about the need.