Lately a bunch of new mail apps have shown up which promise to help us triage our bursting inboxes. I’ve tried them all: Mailbox, Mail Pilot, Boxer, Dispatch, Evomail, Yahoo! Mail, Triage, and Gmail’s new tabbed format. They each take a slightly different approach to doing the housekeeping and in their own ways do the job well.

But they haven’t stopped the flood of incoming messages. They just help us manage the flood better. And that seems like a fool’s game to me. Even when I get to inbox zero I feel lousy: I don’t like that I just passively let a bunch of people suck up my time.

I think we are tackling the email problem at the wrong end. Instead of managing the flood we ought to be preventing it altogether. That means we need to focus on the sender, not the recipient. However good the new crop of email clients are, none of them address the send action, which is where the email problem begins. (See Chris Anderson’s excellent email charter for the reason why.

Fixing the send is really about behavioural change and about creating a different communication culture in the workplace, a complex task requiring time and will. It’s probably not something that can be done with an app alone. Still, it’s an interesting exercise to think about it, if only because it helps understand the whole email process better. A while ago, I suggested that a workplace culture built on trust might be able to get rid of a lot of email with an app like this, the Perfect Communication Tool. As a new exercise, I wonder what an email client that focusses on the sending process might look like…working on that now.

We speak–often in critical tones–of education as if it was a homogenous whole. But it is really several overlaid structures or models:

• pedagogical
• economic
• delivery (place & time)

These are interdependent and the economic and delivery structures model in particular are so tightly connected most don’t see them as separate things.

Education cannot be treated as a single entity when it comes to reform. CORE, STEM (or even STEAM) or in my jurisdiction, the BC Ed Plan, may be laudable, may be necessary, but they’re hardly sufficient to bing about the reform we seek. Unless we address the other two structures at the same time, we will find ourselves merely swapping one set of pedagogical standards for another. The force those two unchanged structures exert will dampen any effects of pedagogical change.

Cities work because they are never finished. I don’t know if I made that up or if I heard it, or something like it, from someone else. But it’s true. Cities, especially great cities, are always becoming. The regenerate themselves. Cities outlive kings and queens and empires: Rome is still here, the Roman Empire is not. Remarkably, Hiroshima is still here. Cities work because they create conditions, rather than outputs, and because civic governments largely stay out of the way of the people they govern. Oh sure there are taxes and by-laws, but these go to building and maintaining the infrastructure that people need to get on with their own business.

Structurally, the public education model is much more like the Roman Empire than the city of Rome: pretty great, glorious even (it’s a wildly successful social endeavor that dropped illiteracy rates in North America to near zero), but monolithic and programmatic. It tries to be self-perpetuating rather then self-regenerating. Alas, nothing lasts forever.

Last Wednesday I took part in a panel discussion called Empowering Educational Leadership to Innovate, one of a series of webcasts put on by Cisco’s GETideas, a global online community for educational leadership (watch the webcast here) I was glad to see us move quickly off any talk of technology which too often dominates discussions of innovation; we seemed to recognize that technology is catalytic but not central to innovation. What came out of our chat was a list of seven qualities that mark a culture of innovation. Great school leaders will cultivate these:

• Trust – We thought it fair to say schools generally run with a top-down control/dependency management model. They need to shift to a trust/capacity model. The pace and pressure of change is now too great to be centrally managed. A high degree of faculty autonomy and capacity means more power in the system overall.
• Transparency – Transparency yields accountability and accountability creates trust. This applies to all stakeholders–students, families, faculty and administration. Opaque systems, characterized by elaborate (read costly in administrative time and money) policies and controls working in place of trust, are stiff.
• Time for Collaboration – This is where faculty and administration develop capacity for themselves as individuals and collectively as a school. This needs to be a significant amount of time–a few hours a week at least.
• A User-Driven Experience – In some sense we’ve treated students as the objects of teaching: We say “We teach students,” for example, and that leads to a passive engagement from students. And we’ve asked students (and teachers) to adapt to a set of entirely artificial constraints–the school calendar and bell schedule, for example. Innovative schools will flip that around and adapt themselves to their users needs. The consumer-driven BYOD movement is just the beginning of this change.
• Maker Culture – “Our whole theory of education,” Henry Miller famously lamented, “is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water.” Innovative schools will embrace the Maker movement, explicitly or implicitly, which taps our human need to make and do meaningful work.
• Hyperlocal Decision-making – One size does not fit all in education and what works in one school may not work in another. There is a huge difference between an inner city public school on a lunch program and an Ivy League prep school. There is good research showing the best schools are the ones most responsive to their immediate communities, not to some central authority.
• Optimism – Change is messy and unsettling. A sense of adventure and an assurance that all will be well makes all the above doable.

David Byrne, in his wonderful book, How Music Works, suggests that creativity is dependent on context. This, as Byrne explains, is “the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion…[We] unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats.”

For example, says Byrne, it’s “usually assumed that much of Medieval music was harmonically simple because composers hadn’t yet evolved the use of complex harmonies.” But such music would have sounded terrible in stone-walled cathedrals where reverberation time is as much as four seconds. “Shifting musical keys would invite dissonance as notes overlapped and clashed…Slowly evolving melodies that eschew key changes work beautifully and reinforce the otherworldly ambience…Creatively, they did exactly the right thing.”

We can maybe see the effect better in reverse. Last year I attended a Dan Mangan concert at the Orpheum, a concert hall in Vancouver. The Orpheum is built to feature dynamically and harmonically complex work, such as a symphony or perhaps some jazz compositions. Mangan’s steady-state and percussive music reverberated, collided with itself and became a sonic mush. Mangan writes for a club scene or outdoor concert

There is nothing slavish or fatalistic here. Passion and genius are still present. But when we see greatness, Byrne argues, we are seeing creativity perfectly adapted to the context or environment. What we are admiring, unconsciously, is the perfection of the adaptation, the seamless alignment, rather than the created object itself.

Like Byrne, I feel a slowly-dawning realization that this insight about creation is true. I am more and more impressed by the way the structure of schools (the organizational structure, the social rules and the physical environment) shape and limit behaviour.

So now I want to ask, if we have just one kind of school structure (I think I can argue that all public schools and most of independent schools form a monoculture built on a single structure) we will have, at best, only one kind of genius? And next, is our current structure of schools capable of delivering the kind of genius we are asking for in our critiques of contemporary education, i.e. creativity, collaboration and so on? I don’t think so. My hunch is that if we want to see the innovation we asking for we are going to have to create another venue for it.

This was my submission for an assignment in a Stanford MOOC where we were asked to classify apps according to Bloom’s taxonomy. The point is, it’s rather meaningless and often restricting to classify apps and devices by a function. It’s not what the app or device does, but what human beings do with it that counts. And humans are clever and surprising. They will use Facebook to post pictures of cats; they will also use it to start a revolution.

…or, Where have all the muses gone?

Once there were nine Muses. Now there are none. That is, as Melpomene would say if she were still around, a tragedy. To the ancients, a mousaion was a shrine to the Nine Sisters and the best minds and talent gathered there to be inspired; to us moderns, a museum is a storehouse for relics, including muses painted on clay pots. Western education (unwisely) privileges math and the sciences and that has me worried that our students will graduate with a great deal of learning yet still be short of an education. Where do they learn Song or Dance and especially Comedy? The 19th century literary critic, John Ruskin, said:

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

I am fretful that fewer and fewer will be able to read that last book.

I have had enough of STEM–the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics agenda. Don’t get me wrong. I’m hardly saying these aren’t important fields. I am saying other fields are equally so and just as worthy of study. At this point someone says, “Now Brad, math is beautiful, too. And there is a special relationship between math and music, you know.” I get that. But, generally speaking, no one teaches aesthetics in K12 anymore, so that baby never gets born.

As a remedy to this slide towards a nerveless culture (if “culture” can be used at all) I am suggesting a simple word swap. We keep the acronym STEM but create a new Song, Theatre, Epic (poetry) and Music agenda.

By the way, I am pleased as punch that the BC government has just given Emily Carr University (formerly Emily Carr College of Art and Design) $113 million to build a new facility.

Just a thought:

Again, I’m hearing that the web is creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans.

” No disputing the distractibility and short attention spans. But maybe this is because what we offer young people in schools is not all that engaging.

Maybe they’re not distracted. Maybe they’re desperate.

My students and I make fairly heavy use of digital tools: we use Google Apps, Google Sites, Twitter (follow us at #tokafe11 and #tokafe12) and Storify especially. But increasingly, we find ourselves sharing analog content.

Because it’s easy. Easy to draw and doodle and scribe even complex ideas. Easy to photograph. Easy to share. Easy to archive.

Digital and paper make a killer combo. (As an aside, I think 53′s brilliant Paper app is tapping into this notion.) The barrier to entry is very low. Anyone can write or draw–we don’t need to train on a particular platform–which means everyone can engage. And we don’t need a lot of tech–just one smartphone (or even something like an iPod Touch) in the classroom and you’re good to go–which means we can get down to business cheaply and quickly and with little disruption.

To be sure, the total volume of analog work in my classes is not large, but I do see a growing trend to go pen-and-paper. Actually, it feels more like an awakened sense of possibility. One of my students has even taken to seizing a whiteboard and sketch-noting class discussions.

Until very recently, we have had to adapt to our technologies–think of the QWERTY keyboard which was designed to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam. I think we’re now in the very early days when tech is sufficiently powerful to be able to adapt to us! Watch for this to grow this year.