#UnschoolingRules

Should Education Reform be Led by Ph.D.'s?

2012-02-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

There is an article in InsideHigherEd today called To Limit Debt, Promote Savings. The article suggests that, to reduce the crippling impact of debt on graduates, families should save even more money to pay for ever-more expensive college programs. This kind of thinking and advocacy, I thought, had to be the result of Ph.D.'s. Sure enough, both authors were part of that club.

Throughout history, there have been very powerful guilds. Masons and Swiss Watch Makers are two examples. They tightly perpetuate, refine, and market a skill set that meets a need, balancing internal quality controls and consistency of members while dealing swiftly with competitive organizations and alternative approaches.

One of the largest and most powerful guilds today is the Academic Ph.D.'s. People who get their Ph.D.'s, rather than proving and honing a creative intellectualism, instead practice a highly specific skill set, including what input they value, what methodology they use, and what output they produce.

The influence of The Guild is immense:

Unbelievably, many foundations that address education reform/evolution have efforts spearheaded by Ph.D.'s. This partially explains their advice. (See A Story of Research)

Committees that accredit colleges and universities are made up of almost all Ph.D.'s, and require many roles in the applicant institution to be filed by Ph.D.'s.

When grant-giving organizations, such as The National Science Foundation disperse millions in grants, the committees are almost exclusively made up of Ph.D.'s.

The amount of government money, including from the military, contributing towards Ph.D.'s is very, very high, not even including student loans.

Of course, the cost of creating a Ph.D. is both incredibly expensive and also very indirectly funded. The average time to a PhD. degree in the humanities nine years.

However, crack are forming.

Government discretionary spending is going way down. This includes tuition subsidies on one hand and grants and other projects on the other.

now: The Ph.D's Job Crisis: http://onlinephd.org/phd-job-crisis/
Deep Dive: Four Potential Future of College System

This is more problematic than it seems. Many Ph.D's exist solely to create more Ph.D.'s. When demand flattens out (similar to a Ponzi scheme), not only do new Ph.D.'s find themselves without jobs, but so do many Ph.D.'s currently working.

I have my personal anecdotes as well. I have sat on many workgroups with varying percentages of Ph.D's. From my own experience, once a group is more than 50% non-hard science academic Ph.D's, the productivity of the group declines precipitously.

For-profit corporations are asking, can they afford the Ph.D. biases? Can they afford the extra expense bundled into every Ph.D and every project spearheaded by Ph.D's? Is the skill set rigorously developed by the Ph.D. process the right one?

Fast Company: Silicon Valley's New Hiring Strategy: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/ign-self-taught-coders

Non-profits and finally government organizations will follow. The Guild is powerful. They don't have leaders that have secret handshakes nor hold meetings to coordinate efforts. But they do gain power, control resources, and strive to grow their numbers. Their bias and belief in self-worth is (mostly) unquestioned. They will fight against the perception of their own obsolescence. And they use a lot of public money to do it. (See Six Wrong Arguments for Growing School Budgets) And, for comparison, despite their power, Swiss Watch Makers eventually could not compete with the rise of the providers of the more accurate and cheaper quartz technology.

Ultimately, the goal of Unschooling Rules is to ask questions and challenge assumptions to help interject more creativity into a system that has proven difficult to change (and that behaves as if it is on a false peak). In this case, should education reform, including the decision of which data to collect from, and subsequent analysis of, our current system and creating prescriptions for evolving it, really be led by Ph.D.'s?

See also: If you send your children to school, you are inhibiting schools reform

Places to Learn: Community Theater

2012-02-05T20:08:00.000-05:00

Unschooling Rules #36 lists fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are. One, shown here, is community theater.

The Shift in Education from Vertical to Horizontal Specialization

2012-01-29T13:58:00.000-05:00

Here is a chart to show how easy (or hard) it is for a home or unschooling family to meet these various horizontal needs outside of industrial schools.

Industrial schools today represent vertically aligned packages of services. I have suggested in Unschooling Rules that they can be organized into The Seven C’s of Education:

Curricula: The selection.
Content: The pieces.
Coaching: The adult and the development of habits in students.
Customization: The flexibility.
Community: The peers.
Credit: The documentation.
day Care: The place.

Today's article - Inside Higher Ed's Free Courses, Elite Colleges - marks the continuation of a trend that will reshape education - the unbundling of school services.

Over the last few years we have seen the evolution of organizations specializing in the individual horizontal areas, and that are better and cheaper than have been delivered in the vertical sectors of high school or middle school.

Here's an example. Consider one sliver of the horizontal need of "content." You can go to one great college and hear a dozen great lecturers. Or you can get CDs from The Teaching Company and have access to hundreds of professors' great lectures. And you can do that in high school. Or with no school. Alternatively, you can look up content yourself.

Another example: the demand for tutors/coaches is growing. And the same individuals work inside of and outside the industrial school system.

Still other examples include: iTunes University (content), open curricula (curricula), Facebook (community), educational simulations and serious games (content), work for school credit programs (credit), and distance learning programs (everything but day care). How long until Blackboard offers a tracking mechanism for homeschoolers?

The health of a nation's education system, including cost containment (See CBS Evening News story on President Obama discussing skyrocketing costs of higher ed, Chronicle of Higher Education story), may ultimately be measured by the strong true alternatives of approaches in all of these categories, and even more so by the distribution of people taking advantage of them.

Four Potential Futures of the College System

2012-01-29T12:41:00.000-05:00

What is the future of colleges? What are different models for tertiary education, and how might they come about?

A think tank asked me to be on a panel discussing the future of colleges. To organize my thoughts, I used the framework from The Art of the Long View (which I had used at both Xerox and Gartner). In this methodology, the 'futurist' first considers two pairs of extreme conditions, which together create a 2 X 2 matrix, and then populates the four possibilities.

For my first axis, I choose the supply side. At one extreme - let's call it "Single Philosophy / The One Golden Path" - colleges and universities continue to control the bottle neck for intellectual and ambitious workers to achieve a productive lifestyle. At the other extreme - in "Multiple Philosophies" - single credentialism fades away as society shirks at the cost (see The Higher Education Bubble: It's About to Burst and Moody's Warns Student Loans May Be The Next Financial Bubble To Burst) and perceived disconnect of the degree at traditionally accredited institutions. Society may even view extended college immersion as a barrier to learning (see Are Undergraduates Actually Learning Anything?), including innovative thinking and stewardship.

For the second axis, I looked at extremes around the demand side. On one side, large enterprises are the model employer, be it corporations or government. On the other, small start-ups become the more typical or influential first jobs.

From these two pairs come four different scenarios.

I. The Indentured Graduate / Faith in Institutions

This first scenario is an extension of today. The tuition and other costs of colleges and universities continue to outpace inflation and house-hold earning power (along a similar curve to health care).

But the culture continues to believe that college and masters degrees are the key to 'white-collar' jobs. Four-year programs continue as the norm. New government loans allow for longer and longer borrowing periods for larger and larger education bills. The facilities of the top colleges rival top hotels and cruise ships as the student-life arms race continues. School-begging - the habit of society of pleading with schools to do things they won't and can't do- also continues (see New York Time Column: Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade for a current example of school-begging). Few of the thoughts of Unschooling Rules come true or are needed, and the Gates Foundation's view of the world is validated. "Learning to know" remains the academic goal.

Harvard wants to keep the world here.

II. Portfolios Rule

In the second scenario, large enterprises continue to be employers of choice. But universities are increasingly criticized and sidestepped as the single, sufficient path to get there. Enrollment levels go down significantly and college drop-out rates go up. Society stops begging colleges to improve and settles in for a cost-effective approach (see Rock the Ivory Tower).

In this scenario, HR departments have to take a more proactive role in evaluating potential new hires, and are restaffed appropriately. They have to think more about entry-level talent, not just filter.

Also in this scenario, virtual universities grow, covering curricula and content cost-efficiently through a check-box/ online-workbook approach. Virtual universities are successful not because they are better but because they are cheaper.

The college experience and associated costs are minimized (a Walmart approach to higher ed). It may even take seven or eight part-time years to get a four year degree for many. For some, a college degree goes on the bucket list. Students, without compunction, take time off formal learning to pursue interesting jobs and opportunities. People who aspire to white collar jobs worry about their portfolios more than any transcripts.

III. The Nimble University

In this model, most young people want jobs in small start-ups and fast growing businesses. This may be to make a lot of money, and it also may be to escape the trappings of creaky and toxic large institutions. They still want a structured learning program with credentials, processes, and critical content, but they also want to hold it to a higher standard both in terms of cost-effectiveness and quality of experience.

In this model (as with II), new virtual universities grow, but in this case following the model of today's virtual masters programs (such as Full Sail). They focus on developing "learning to do" skills around current tools, helping individuals learn about themselves, and creating productive virtual communities. Virtual universities integrate into a student's professional life. Traditional colleges and universities evolve to support a less lock-step but more intense student experience, modeling themselves after programs such as The Acton MBA. Advanced media such as simulations replace textbooks completely. It may take many students just two or three years to get a four year degree.

This is the best scenario to create vibrant and innovative universities that are prepared to evolve into the future.

IV: The New Existentialism

In the fourth scenario, large institutions lose their credibility from both the education supply and education demand side. Universities and large enterprises are each seen as out-of-date dinosaurs, bordering on immoral (see video War on Kids). Colleges never learn to adapt. Large corporations are mired in legal and bureaucratic limbo, are top-heavy from a staffing perspective, and become branding, integration, outsourcing, and holding companies (see chart of the rise and fall of traditional clothing companies). Creation of value only happens at small, boutique organizations or using the Hollywood model of fluid teams. (For example, Disney's prize assets of ESPN and Pixar were bought, not developed.)

Here, bottom-up social media and other web and open-source tools become increasingly powerful, eventually BTC (better than college), for providing skills, experiences, infrastructure, portfolios, and contacts. (See The Shift in Education from Vertical to Horizontal Specialization.) College/university enrollment becomes a niche, falling faster than newspaper subscriptions. (See blog entry: The New Existentialism)

Conclusion

In any such scenario planning, there is never one answer. But it does unleash the mind to think beyond the confines we have today. Because over time, there is nothing that reality punishes more severely than industries with a lack of imagination.

Five Questions about Education for Every 2012 Politician (#unrules55)

2012-01-26T08:51:00.000-05:00

Here are five questions that I believe every politician for higher office in 2012 should be asked about education:

1. What is the mission of our K-12 public education system? How should success or failure be measured? How have changes in the external world over the last two decades significantly changed the tactics, strategies, risks, or opportunities of public education? Who should decide what schools teach?

2. Is the current trajectory of public education on the right track or wrong track? At what signs do you look to make your personal assessment? If/where it is wrong, how should it be altered? Are these management challenges (incrementally improving the current system) or leadership challenges (changing the current system)? President Obama quoted the book Unschooling Rules saying "standardized tests are too punitive." Do you agree?

3. What is the right/target percentage of GDP this nation should spend on K-12 education? For education at all levels? What is the right breakdown between public and private funding? What is the role of such national government education funding mechanisms as Department of Education or National Science Foundation?

4. What choices should families have and make regarding their education path for their children at any level? How many options should be available for a healthy ecosystem? If a diversity of approaches is desired, what is the role of government in encouraging diversity of approaches?

5. Legally, is an undergraduate college degree a defendable generic requirement for a job? Do you believe the current student college debt situation is a problem, or even a crisis? How should that be handled?

What are other questions that should be asked?

What goes into a knowledge community...

2012-01-25T08:54:00.000-05:00

My own strategy has been to balance research and development in different segments' approaches to learning, including corporate, academic, and military. Here is one of my favorite visualizations from one, now-defunct vendor aimed at serving corporations (and that I used in my first book Simulations and the Future of Learning), but the framework presented is relevant to all.

Foreword to Simulations and the Future of Learning

2012-01-24T09:31:00.002-05:00

Here is a reprint of the foreword to Simulations and the Future of Learning.
I both love and hate the fact that it seems more relevant today than when it was written in 2003. I love it, because I sense that people are catching up to these thoughts, and hate it, because I want more of this to be obvious and to hope that we have moved on (which has happened in pockets).
One of my greatest pleasures in writing long form is reading the commentaries on my books, including forewords and reviews (and comments on drafts from friends). Besides the obvious egotistical reasons, that I have encouraged so often very smart people to think about my view of the world, and then write about it (so often so gracefully), is just such a thrill!
Anyway, references to my own text aside, Ms. Gery's consideration of learning is just so elegant and prescient and, yes, relevant.

Foreword

One of my favorite books is Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Soul of a New Machine (1981. Reprinted in 2000 by Back Bay Books). Kidder lived with the Data General development team that built the first 32-bit processor and told the story of both the process of building the computer and the dynamics of the team. It read like a novel, though every word was true. It had drama, humor, pathos and ran the gamut of every human emotion. Clark Aldrich’s has achieved a similar effect in Simulations and the Future of Learning. His detailed and fascinating story of the massive effort associated with developing probably the first high-fidelity leadership simulation is practically riveting. I know it sounds ridiculous. . .but it’s true.

On a higher level, Clark compels us to the conclusion that there is truly no other way to learn than through simulations. Having done that, he scares us into the realities and complexities of doing worthwhile non-trivial work. Yet his account—and the understanding of why simulations are so powerful at achieving deep knowledge and probable behavior change, does not preach at us. It makes the reader truly think about the current linear models for learning. It reveals why the kind of analysis necessary to understand the many and interrelated variables in a situation often require us to reconceptualize an entire process. And it humbles us when and if we dare to offer superficial criticism of these intense efforts. His analysis of gaming and how an entire world of game players will probably learn little in traditional environments results in the realization that we are on a collision path with the current generation when we attempt to teach them with lectures and trivial interactions and exercises.

These new learners are highly stimulated, used to complexity, will tolerate uncertainty and intensely study the variables, rules and relationships, and strategies until they “win”: until they “learn.” Just watch any nine-year-old reading Game Boy Advanced strategy books that look like hieroglyphics to an adult. The book is a metaphor for the kind of change necessary for universities and organizations to change their view of e-learning. Unless they do we are doomed to linear instruction punctuated with gratuitous media dominated by content experts who haven’t a clue about what it takes to achieve deep learning and skill. Believe it or not, the book also made me laugh out loud. In addition, I learned more about leadership by reading about the simulation than I have in thirty-five years of management training programs and book reading. These are serious accomplishments for what I expected to be a technical book.

July 2003 Gloria Gery

My last commentary on this snippet is that it is no wonder so many people are really, really mad at schools and the endless foundations and committees that pretend to improve them but really just enable them. It is no wonder that smart people, from parents to business people, are just so tired of begging schools to improve. It is no wonder that when people hear leaders including Bill Gates and Barack Obama say the answer for everyone is to spend more time in and more money on schools, they get livid.

So it is no wonder that almost two million homeschoolers have done the only thing that will really improve education in the long run - given up on today's schools and committed themselves to finding and even developing real alternative models. And it is no wonder these numbers are growing.

Want to be thought of a brilliant education revolutionary? Just champion any one of The Unschooling Rules.

2012-01-21T09:23:00.002-05:00

Unschooling Rules was based on interviews with homeschoolers and unschoolers. I asked two simple questions.

The first was, what do schools do that seems bizarre?
The second question was, what do schools not do that seems critical to education?

I then organized the comments into The Rules, informed by my own research and experience in everything from working at an environmental education foundation to serving as the Governor's appointee to my state's Joint Committee on Educational Technology to building education simulations for universities, corporations, and the US Military. This effort was done on my free time, not using millions of dollars from National Science Foundation or Harvard or Gates or MacArthur or U.S. Department of Education. (I'm happy to take any donations, of course :) )

Having said that, some people have asked for more official citations for the rules - stamps of approval to validate their own common sense. (I believe this motivation actually comes more from a desire to kick the can for real solutions and a love of debating methodology than self-doubt.) And they are in luck. I suspect over the next ten years, various people will come to national attention and be hailed as brilliant and controversial and thought-leading as they champion each of these rules.

So perhaps Unschooling Rules should be thought of as a book from the future, say 2022, that summarizes most of the bold, startling, surprising, revolutionary, and breakthrough ideas of 2012 to 2022. Pretend it was the result of collectively 100 million dollars of grants, if that will make you feel better. The truth is that most of these are obvious, but we will pretend they are not as long as possible. Society is better able to absorb them one at a time anyway (i.e. that is more "realistic"). I am just impatient.

Here are some early citations for some of the rules:

Introduction

Three percent of American students -- about 1.5 million children -- are homeschooled, according to the 2012 Statistical Abstract recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau. (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0240.xls)

Part One: Curricula
1. Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know.

Psychology Today: Why Children Protest Going to School
Deeper Dive: Campfire and the Veld

2. Focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Two-Thirds of WI 8th Graders Can't Read Proficiently

5. Don’t worry about preparing students for jobs from an Agatha Christie novel.

Wired Magazine: Bas Verhart: Education is failing the future-makers

Part Two: Content
8. What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom.

NPR: Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

9. Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful.

Frank Forecich of Exuberant Animal: http://unschoolingrules.blogspot.com/2011/08/exuberant-animal.html

10. Animals are better than books about animals.

NBC Nightly News: College Students Use Therapy Dogs To Cut Exam-Time Stress

11. Use microcosms as much as possible in learning programs.

Flower and egg stand

12. Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests.

Forbes: Eight Reasons Startup Incubators Are Better Than Business School

15. If you care about learning, start with food.

ABC News Do Fatty, Processed Foods Lower Children's IQ?
Washington Post: School lunch debates heat up
Deeper Dive: To gain insight into schools, look at how they treat food.

16. Embrace all technologies.

17. Listen while doing.

CNN: "Flipped" Classrooms record lectures and other presentations.

18. One computer + one spreadsheet software program = math curricula.

New York Time Op-Ed: How to Fix Our Math Education

19. Have a well-stocked library.

Picture: Maps and timelines

21. Is it better to be “A Great Reader” than “Addicted to Computer Games”?

Deeper Dive: Clark Aldrich interview of Will Wright, Warren Spector, and Jane Boston on Games and Simulations

23. Build more, consume less.

The Atlantic: The Idea Factory - What happens when you gather the world’s most imaginative minds under one roof?

Part Three: Coaching
24. Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership.

For Good Leadership Example: http://unschoolingrules.blogspot.com/2010/06/interview-with-brock-dubbels.html
Citation: The wrong leadership style gets desired short term results at the expense of long term.

25. Expose more, teach less.

Pictures: Some examples of authentic value chains:

26. Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

29. Homework helps school systems, not students.

Cornell Daily Sun: Faculty Consider Banning Homework For Academic Breaks

31. Avoid the Stockholm syndrome.

Deeper Dive: Why we cram for tests.

Part Four: Customization
33. In education, customization is important like air is important.

Deeper Dive: Education is Individualistic

Part Five: Community
41. Socialize your children. Just don’t use schools to do it.

Businessweek: Bullying May Accompany Drive to Be Popular
Edudemic: The Current State of Bullying In Schools

Part Six: Credit
46. The future is portfolios, not transcripts.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

48. Use technology as assessment.

NYTimes: Blogs vs. Term Papers

49. College: the hardest no-win decision your family may ever make.

Part Seven: [Day] Care
50. Outdoors beats indoors.

Get a Daily Dose of Green Space - NY Times Personal Health

53. Parents care more than any institution about their children.

Chicago Tribune: Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home
Deeper Dive: Is there a culture of anti-parent discrimination among some professional teachers? Is that a problem?

54. Children should be raised by people who love them.

Pharmaceuticals and Diagnosis

NYT News Service: ADHD medicine shortage worries patients, doctors

Zero-Tolerance Policies

Student suspended for reporting knife

Scream rooms: Officials say 'scream rooms' common in Connecticut schools
Huffington Post: New York School's Strict Bathroom Policy Rewards Students For Holding It In, Outrages Parents

Conclusion
55. The only sustainable answer to the global education challenge is a diversity of approaches.

Deeper Dive: Imagining a One Thousand Dollar MBA
Deeper Dive: Assessment + MMORPG + Real World Challenges: How The MESH will Change Education

Example of innovative programs:

Connecticut

Bushy Hill

Maine

Ocean Classroom Foundation
Chewonki Foundation
Aldermere Farms
Morris Farm
The New School
Maine Academy of Natural Sciences

Massachusetts

North Star
FARM Institute

Vermont

Hulbert Outdoor Center

New Jersey

Princeton Learning Cooperative: http://plcteens.org/

Texas

Acton Academy

Florida

Full Sail

California

The Tinkering Studio (http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu)

There is a final rub, however. As I said, I believe these ideas will trickle into the mainstream one at a time over the next decade. Then, each can drive a significant spike of funding for schools and the members of the Academic PhD guild who specialize in writing proposals, while a few individuals can serve as the spokespeople for those ideas. The problem is that if just one or two are introduced at a time, they will only have a little impact, probably not enough to balance the disruption required on a larger scale. For real progress, not the well funded illusion of it, we will have to consider many of the Rules collectively. Otherwise, while we will make the school industry very happy, we will not get out of the current, very deep rut we are in.

Profile: Cisco's Binary Game

2012-01-16T09:44:00.001-05:00

Title	Cisco Binary Game
Version	1
Other versions	n/a
Sponsor/Producer	Cisco Systems
Developer	DigitalMill
Series	n/a
Number in Series	n/a
Company Description	Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
Description	The Cisco Binary Game is a game to learn and practice the binary number system. It is also a LOT of fun to play for anyone who likes to play fast-paced arcade games. Simple to learn, it is great for classes, students and teachers in science, math, digital electronics, computers, programming, logic and networking.
Categories/Folksonomy	Casual Game/ Serious Game
Lead Designer	Jerry Bush and Ben Sawyer
Other Designers/ Writers	Ian Bogost
Lead Programmer	Ian Bogost
Lead Artist / Video
Price	Free
Link	http://forums.cisco.com/ CertCom/ game/ binary_game_page.htm
Demo Available	http://forums.cisco.com/ CertCom/game/ binary_game_page.htm
Link to Video	http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2Z0Z2hy739E& feature= related
Link(s) to Support Material	https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/ community/ connections/games
Platform(s)	HTML; iPhone; Android
Customizable (1 to 10)	n/a
Special Hardware	Computer; iPhone; Android Device
Toolkit/Language used	Flash
Year Designed	2006
LMS Integration/ SCORM
Skill Level (Corporate/Military/Government)/Grade Level (Academic)
Student time	1-10 minutes
Available ([O]pen / [R]estricted by Organization / [N]o longer Available	Available - Open
Single player/Multiplayer	Single Player
Category:	Serious Game

WILL Interactive's '$500,000 Simulate A Better World Challenge'

2012-01-12T12:40:00.001-05:00

WILL Interactive, an international leader in creating custom educational simulations, has launched an incredible opportunity. They are calling it their ‘$500,000 Simulate a Better World Challenge.’ (Find out more here.)

Basically, they are asking for people to submit ideas for a full-blown educational simulation that, if deployed, would have a positive social impact. WILL will then pick one of the submissions and create and distribute it.

Frankly, if almost any other sim company offered this, I would be less excited. WILL's offer should be tempting to anyone because:

WILL Interactive has an incredible track record of creating educational sims.
WILL Interactive has tackled more hard, socially tricky, complicated issues than anyone else. They are so successful because they are so honest, as well as being so competent.
WILL Interactive really does want to make the world a better place. I have known these people for a long time, and every time I leave them, I leave uplifted and excited They are a wonderful, world-class team in all senses of the word.

So, please visit their site and submit an idea or two. And please pass this news on. This really is a chance to make the world a bit better. The more ideas that are submitted, the greater chance the right one is chosen.

Thanks,

The Exuberant Animal

2012-01-07T17:59:00.000-05:00

A continued challenge for all schools is figuring out both the role of play and the role of a classroom. Here, for me, is a missing piece:

Frank Forencich is the inspirational Chief Creative Officer of Exuberant Animal (www.exuberantanimal.com). His organization is re-teaching high performing corporations the necessity and business value of active kinesthetic play (computer games don't count!). He is to the physical what Thiagi is to the verbal - a master at getting to huge issues through interactivity and engagement.

I recorded this segment of him addressing, and then engaging in serious play, a large group of executives, at my Seattle conference Serious Play. (Sadly, we didn't have time to go outside, as Frank would have preferred!)

To the degree we have organized learning, this is what it should look like.

If I could suggest just one activity for all groups (DOE, Foundations, Academic "Researchers") that (try to) help evolve schools, it would be to spend a day with Frank Forencich. He is my nominee for the Gates Foundation's Education Board if they actually wanted to improve education, rather than compliance with schools.

The Science is Compelling

Relevant Unschooling Rules

#unnrules09: Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful

#unrules26: Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

#unrules36: Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are: Pick-up sports: experience existential play and find balance.

#unrules50: Outdoors beats indoors

TEDxOKC - Jeff Sandefer - April 8th, 2011

2012-01-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

Jeff Sandefer's work is increasingly becoming "required reading" for anyone really interested in evolving education. While so many say it, Sandefer's work actually does start from the needs of the students, not the schools. Here he is:

Six Wrong Arguments for Growing School Budgets

2011-12-26T08:19:00.028-05:00

Here are six arguments that school budget advocates just can't resist to raise money, but that we should:

Use case studies from disadvantaged schools as an excuse to expand school's reach everywhere. (i.e. "Pre-K is great for children in the poorest neighborhoods, so all communities everywhere should spend on Pre-K.")

Use "getting into college" (or grad school, or Ph.D. program) as self-evident proof of earlier success. The number of new graduates who are unemployed and 200,000 dollars in debt are a success only of the school industry not society.

Use "falling behind" grade level and the vague threat of "never catching up" as an excuse to implement any program. "Grade levels" are arbitrary sets of internal standards that inevitably and erroneously assume that students are the same. Different students have different strengths and weaknesses by subject. The clustering of Math + English + Science into rigid and lock-stepped "grade levels" is a weakness of school programs, not an opportunity for more extra hours.

At the very least, schools grade on curves. 30% of the students will always be in the bottom 30%. If the bottom 30% of school children trigger automatic special help (because they are in the bottom 30%), schools have an infinite cash feedback loop.

Use test scores as broad proof of success. Tests measure a very finite set of skills. Anything extrapolation, specifically as a justification for school expansion, should be treated with suspicion. And then there is the paradox of: Test scores up? Spend more to replicate the program! Test scores down? Spend more to get them up!

Assume academic success as currently delivered by today's schools is a driver for economic success. Any statement from school lobbyists that falls into the broad camp of, "In order to be competitive in the global marketplace, we must give schools more power to..." is unsubstantiated. These statements are not backed up by our experience over the last few decades (there are no measured correlations between economic good times and previously enacted school programs), nor by highly responsive research between the new economic realities of the last few years with the new academic programs of the last few years (as this research not only doesn't exist but almost inevitably can't exist.) So at the very least, one can measure the intellectual dishonesty of education industry spokespeople by the forcefulness by which they make these claims.

Demand that childrens' experiences be 'fair' and standardized. Children have different starting conditions, home environments, and competencies. But factories and places where measurements are heavily used strive for consistent inputs. So when schools argue for activities that make "students equal" and everything "fair" (so that they can subsequently and aggressively sort and judge them against their own internal criteria), this means disintermediating parents and growing schools, inevitably fighting against authentic experiences open to students (such as family trips), and increasing their own budgets to pretend to replace what has been stripped away.

Our nation needs both broad competencies, and a diversity of world-class specialized talents which comes from passion, depth, and rigor across generations. The services that schools are structured to offer are able to help with this some of the time and for some people. But we all have to be smart, active consumers of education services seeking out the best options between real choices and working to unbundle offerings, and not just Soviet-style heterotrophs, consuming whatever our bureaucracies decide to paternalistically feed us for our so-called collective good.

My point of this piece is not that education budgets should be slashed or should be expanded. My point is that if we use the wrong arguments for growing school budgets, we will spend more and get less. And that hurts everyone.

A story that illustrates what is wrong with so many researchers of schools and teachers

2011-12-20T14:41:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I heard this academic PhD researcher gush about a teacher, roughly as such:

Let me tell you about this amazing science teacher. Some of his students were having trouble with the class module on 'The Scientific Method.' They were failing tests and papers about it. This science teacher went to meet with these students after school, and found them all playing World of Warcraft. These students had charts they had made about discoveries in WOW all over the wall. This science teacher made an incredible discovery. These World of Warcraft playing-students were actually applying the scientific method without knowing it. What he did then was to explain to the students the links between their methodology and the scientific method. From that point on, the students aced that part of the curricula.

To me, this was not a success story - it was a cautionary tale. Here is the Unschooling Rules break down.

Most importantly, the scenario is about students who taught themselves the material on their own better than their teacher, who failed utterly.
The teacher applied a testing methodology that didn't pick up the fact that these students had a working knowledge of the target skill set. The system could easily have failed the students who had the best understanding in the class of the material.
The teacher's goal and success metrics were for the students to do well in the test and papers, not master the material.
The school wrapper around the students' self-learning probably cost about two thousand dollars in total costs of resources including teacher time, all to justify a failed instructional methodology and testing methodology.

Centuries ago, in some cultures, the happy ending of a fictional story (specifically "comedies") was one in which every protagonist got married. Through our modern perspective we rightfully challenge that definition of success. Today, most school success stories (at least told in academic cultures) end when students are back on track to consume more education hours.

As long as we are stuck in the mindset of industrial education, we are just going to continue to spend huge sums of money (such as paying this researcher's salary to misinterpret this story) without making any real progress. We increasingly need sanity checks from people who come from alternative education models. Any monopoly thrives on internal metrics, but any dynamic organization requires authentic metrics.

Authentic Value Chains: Eggs

2011-12-15T09:55:00.003-05:00

Rather than read about how things are created, or just exist as a consumer, it is satisfying to participate. Chickens and eggs are an accessible place to contribute to a real and sustainable food value chain. Here are some pictures from our own experiences, including with our free range chickens.

The wrong leadership style gets desired short term results at the expense of long term.

2011-12-09T12:11:00.000-05:00

We are used to thinking of short-term results as a promise (or at least indicator) of long term results. If a student does well on a spelling quiz, he or she should be on the way to becoming proficient with vocabulary and language as a whole.

But that is not always the case. I wrote in Unschooling Rules:

Rule 24: Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership. (#unrules24)

Specifically, using the wrong form of leadership means sacrificing long term behavior changes in order to get target short-term behavior. If you order a child to write a paper on Roman history, you often enough are creating a long term resentment of both writing and history.

A great source for research on leadership comes from: Yukl, Gary (2002). Power & Influence in Leadership in Organizations 5th edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey

I like to look at Yukl's specifics in three areas:

First, what are the outcomes of the application of leadership (both good and bad)?
Second, what are the range of inputs available to a leader? How is leadership applied?
Finally, what is the system that connects inputs to outcomes? What inputs (or actions) lead to which outcomes and in which conditions?

The Outcomes of Leadership

In Yukl’s summary: “For a proactive influence attempt that involves a specific request by a single agent to a single target person, it is useful to differentiate among three distinct outcomes. Commitment…Compliance… and Resistance.” (page 147)

This Center for Army Leadership report Advanced Learning Theories Applied to Leadership Development expanded it well (italics and bullets added):

“Interpersonal influence (i.e., influencing others) can produce one of three outcomes (Yukl et al., in press).

The first outcome is resistance, where a subordinate is opposed to the leader’s request and will try to avoid doing it.
The second is compliance, where the leader provides a direct order to the subordinate and the subordinate carries out the order. This type of influence is often appropriate as the leader faces direct, immediate, high-stakes situations where accomplishing the mission at all costs is what matters. However, Yukl et al., (in press) have found that while compliance may be effective, it may also result in the subordinate becoming more apathetic and exerting less effort to future requests.
The third outcome is commitment, where the subordinate has a favorable attitude towards the leader’s request and puts forth the necessary effort to carry out the request.”

Given this framework, we can see how compliance to a leader may generate short term target behavior, but very little (if any) long term behavior changes. In contrast, commitment to a leader is infinitely more valuable and long lasting. So a fifth grade teacher, for example, may get compliance to take a test or write a paper, but in a way that actually creates more problems for the subsequent eight grade teacher.

The Application of Leadership

Yukl also identified different techniques of leadership. These are what leaders do, and they fall into these categories:

Pressure - Using explicit demands
Legitimate request - Source of authority is basis for request
Exchange - A trade of desired actions or items
Personal appeal - Friendship or loyalty is basis for request
Collaboration - Assistance or resources are offered
Rational persuasion - Experienced expert provides evidence or logical arguments
Apprising - Explaining benefits of specific requested action (benefit not under Advisor control)
Inspiration- Using strong emotion to build conviction
Participation - Involving others to establish “buy in”
Relationship building - Rapport and mutual trust are basis for request

Connecting Approach to Results

The pragmatic issue, of course, is "how do you use the right approach to get the desired results?" This involved understanding the connections between actions and results.

Yukl found that certain influencing techniques were more likely to drive the result of commitment, while others were more likely to drive compliance. As clear examples, pressure (“do this now”) often drives compliance while collaboration often drives commitment.

Finally (and this is a bit nuanced), the best leaders further match the right style of leadership to the target of influence's specific resistance:

Logical (“head”), if the target did not feel intellectually connected to the goal;
Emotional (“heart”) if the target did not feel emotionally connected to the goal;
Cooperative (“hands”) if the target needed help;
Direct if the target just needed to know what to do quickly and simply.

The actions of the influencing techniques get the most positive results if they match up with the type of resistance from the target. For example, if a target was displaying emotional resistance, the right influencing techniques were inspirational and personal appeal.

Here's a chart:

Type of Resistance	Successful Influencing Techniques
Cognitive / "Head"	Rational Persuasion, Exchange, Apprising
Emotional / "Heart"	Inspiring, Personal Appeals
Cooperation / “Hands”	Collaboration, Participation
Direct	Pressure, Legitimate Request

Conclusion

Schools are set up to use a directive leadership style that delivers, at best, short term compliance in students. And while some teachers hack the system to use different and more long term approaches to build commitment, they do it a personal and professional cost.

Any system that mistakes (and rewards) compliance over commitment will create a social time-bomb and a highly specific set of school "winners". But the educational industrial complex may not have any choice.

Authentic Value Chains: Making and Selling Clothes

2011-12-04T08:21:00.013-05:00

We live in an age of computer generated movies, thoroughly "edited" and vetted workbooks, and other derivative content. But one goal, as put forth by Unschooling Rules, is to get students as close the authentic sources as possible.

Here are some pictures we took (over time) of a value chain around making and selling clothes and other garments.

Sheep Grazing in Wiscasset, Maine

Shearing

Learning about Dyeing

The Extractor

The Looms

The Bolts

The Design Process

A Factory in Essex, CT

Factory Store

Full Retail

Profile: Algebra Touch

2011-11-28T11:08:00.002-05:00

Title	Algebra Touch
Version	1.3
Other versions
Sponsor/Producer
Developer	Algebra Touch
Series
Number in Series
Company Description	Independent Developer
Description	Touch interface to do basic algebra.
Categories/Folksonomy	Education, math, algebra.
Lead Designer
Other Designers/ Writers
Lead Programmer	Sean Berry
Lead Artist / Video	Darran Morris (app-bits.com)
Price	2.99
Link	http://itunes.apple.com/ us/app/algebra-touch/id384354262?mt=8
Demo Available	Yes: http://itunes.apple.com/ us/app/algebra-touch-intro-order/id451195905?mt=8
Link to Video	http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=A4SdNUwgkcg
Link(s) to Support Material
Platform(s)	iOS - iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch
Customizable (1 to 10)	3 (you can create your own problems)
Special Hardware
Toolkit/Language used	Objective-C / UIKit
Year Designed	2010
LMS Integration/ SCORM
Skill Level (Corporate/Military/Government)/Grade Level (Academic)	Beginning Algebra
Student time
Available ([O]pen / [R]estricted by Organization / [N]o longer Available	O - Available on App Store
Single player/Multiplayer	Single player
Category:	Serious Game

Profile: WolfQuest: Survival of the Pack Deluxe

2011-11-24T10:44:00.002-05:00

Title	WolfQuest: Survival of the Pack Deluxe
Version	2.5.1
Other versions
Sponsor/Producer	Minnesota Zoo
Developer	Eduweb
Series
Number in Series
Company Description	Eduweb develops award-winning learning games and interactives for the web, museum exhibits, and mobile devices. Our mission is to create exciting and effective learning experiences that hit the sweet spot where learning theory, digital technology, and fun meet. Our projects have won dozens of prestigious awards, including fifteen MUSE Awards from the American Association of Museums, four Best of the Web awards from Museums and the Web, an Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Software Review, and many others.
Description	An immersive, 3D wildlife simulation game, WolfQuest challenges players to learn about wolf ecology by living the life of a wild wolf in Yellowstone National Park. In the single-player game, players explore the wilderness, hunt elk, and encounter stranger wolves in a quest to find a mate in the fall, then in late winter and spring, they must find a den, establish a territory, raise pups and defend them from predators such as coyotes and grizzly bears. Online multiplayer games let up to five players form a pack to explore and hunt together. The WolfQuest experience goes beyond the game with an active online community where you can discuss the game with other players, chat with wolf biologists, and share artwork and stories about wolves.
Categories/Folksonomy	Education,Ecology, Wildlife, Simulation
Lead Designer	Grant Spickelmeirs, David T. Schaller
Other Designers/ Writers	Steven Allison-Bunnell
Lead Programmer	Russell Lunsford
Lead Artist / Video	Steve Wagner
Price	Free
Link	www.wolfquest.org
Demo Available	No
Link to Video	www.wolfquest.org/ preview_video.php and www.wolfquest.org/ preview_video_ep2.php
Link(s) to Support Material	www.wolfquest.org/ about_wolves.php
Platform(s)	Mac, Windows
Customizable (1 to 10)	0 (not customizable)
Special Hardware	No
Toolkit/Language used	Unity
Year Designed	2006-2011
LMS Integration/ SCORM	No
Skill Level (Corporate/Military/Government)/Grade Level (Academic)	None / Youth
Student time	3-5 hours
Available ([O]pen / [R]estricted by Organization / [N]o longer Available	Available / Open
Single player/Multiplayer	Single and Multiplayer
Category: Course with sims \| simulations \| serious games \| game	Serious Game

Profile: Building Detroit

2011-11-22T08:29:00.002-05:00

Title	Building Detroit
Version	1
Other versions
Sponsor/Producer	Detroit Historical Society
Developer	Eduweb
Series
Number in Series
Company Description	Eduweb develops award-winning learning games and interactives for the web, museum exhibits, and mobile devices. Our mission is to create exciting and effective learning experiences that hit the sweet spot where learning theory, digital technology, and fun meet. Our projects have won dozens of prestigious awards, including fifteen MUSE Awards from the American Association of Museums, four Best of the Web awards from Museums and the Web, an Editor’s Choice Award from Children’s Software Review, and many others.
Description	One family. Five generations. Countless ways to build a city. Starting as French immigrants in 1750, players try to make a living as farmers in the feudal economy of New France. Subsequent levels span 150 years of Detroit history as the city grows into a major industrial center. In each level, players take on the role of one of their children from the previous level, deciding who to marry, how to raise their children, and what job to do, based on the career choices of that time period. Every decision has consequences, giving players a lasting memory of what it might have been like to have lived in the historic times that shaped Detroit.
Categories/Folksonomy	Education, History, Economics
Lead Designer	David T. Schaller, Tobi Voigt
Other Designers/ Writers
Lead Programmer	Paul Gardner
Lead Artist / Video	Steve Wagner
Price	Free
Link	http:// buildingdetroit. detroithistorical.org
Demo Available	No
Link to Video
Link(s) to Support Material
Platform(s)	Browser-based Flash
Customizable (1 to 10)	0 (not customizeable)
Special Hardware	No
Toolkit/Language used	Flash
Year Designed	2011
LMS Integration/ SCORM	No
Skill Level (Corporate/Military/Government)/Grade Level (Academic)	Novice / Youth
Student time	60-70 minutes
Available ([O]pen / [R]estricted by Organization / [N]o longer Available	Available / Open
Single player/Multiplayer	Single player
Category: Course with sims \| simulations \| serious games \| game	Serious Game

How a game designer would 'teach' cell structures

2011-11-22T07:29:00.003-05:00

The restrictions of traditional passive media have shaped schools and formal education experiences more than we can possible imagine. So it is useful to consider how content might be structured using new technology.

Cell Sim - Learning Objectives
The goal of the Cell Sim is to develop in the player a knowledge of the core components of cells, and how and why differences in cells exist. (And story, badges, et al can be added. This is just a core interface and gameplay design.)

Cell Sim - Set Up

In this sim, the player will have to design cells to meet stated challenges. Players will do this using a toolkit of simple building blocks that correspond to real world cell elements (suggested building blocks are presented below). The graphics will be accessible and encourage experimentation.

Cell Sim - Basic Screen Interfaces and Interactions
The player gets a 'board' in which they can place cell elements. The cell they define will exist in the surrounding environment, and will have a shape based on the placement of these elements (the membrane auto-adjusts the size). In this most simple of example (the level one) below, the player has to build a cell that can carry a signal from the right to the left, using a few different options.

Almost invariably, the cell the player will create will be long and thin, which maps to the cell properties of a real world transmitting cell.

The player could in the next level connect several signals and receptors, and design a cell that had the natural properties of a neuron.

Subsequently, the player could design increasingly complex cells, and for a wider variety of purposes, including some ready for growth and replication. Rather than simply be a puzzle, however, the cell can evolve dynamically during the course of a gameplay. In a similar structure to the popular iPhone game Plants vs. Zombies, the player can harvest nutrients to build functionality while defending against hostile forces. A screen shot may look similar to this:

Over the course of the gameplay, players would develop for themselves different types of cells. They would also engage in all of the essential cell activities, eventually making a multi-cellular organism.

Technical names and timelines could be used in game and interjected during transition screen to reinforce necessary vocabulary.

Cell Sim - Conclusion

The entire module could take less than 30 minutes to engage. But the player would remember core functionality and properties for years, if not longer.

How a game designer would teach polynomials

2011-11-22T07:25:00.005-05:00

Polynomials Sim - Learning Objectives

The goal of the sim is to develop a comfort level with polynomials, and bring an increased competence in solving traditional polynomial problems such as presented on national tests. This will be accomplished in part through a rethinking and presenting of the mechanics behind the math symbols traditionally used. (Bells and whistles can be added - this is just a core interface design.)

Polynomials Sim - Set Up

While some sims will have stories and scenarios, this sim will keep things a bit more abstract. The player/student will manipulate objects in order to solve presented math problems.

It is possible that different skins could subsequently be used to make the interactions more contextual, such as using, as examples, farmers with fields, friends at a party, or money in a bank, depending on player interest.

Polynomials Sim - Basic Screen Interfaces and Interactions

The sim will start off very simply and get increasingly complex. Instructions will only be minimally used.

The first level would be very easy, and consist of a single challenge. As with all levels, it will show both the traditional math symbols at the top of the screen and the workbench view below. In the workbench mode, the player/student would drag down a box until the two lines were equal. The player would hit [enter] when they believe they have solved the problem for x.

(The interface would also have other features, such as allowing the player to move around the right blue column via the other gray box, not to add or subtract value but to arrange the table in various size rows (here, 1 X 10 could be turned into; 2 X 5; 3 X 3 remainder 1) if they saw fit.)

The second level would then be slightly more complex.

(The player could also drag the red column to the right side of the equation and subtract from the right side that amount.)

The next level could add the next level of complexity. Here, a squared relationship can be introduced. The player can drag the corner to change the value of x, which will also change the non-squared X as well. The player is understanding visually and kinesthetically what these symbols really means.

The next level of complexity will be adding multipliers, which can be visualized through stacking. The player may be able to choose between how they wanted the material to be visualized.

Other levels of interactivity would be introduced. The sim can also highlight patterns, such as a lens showing if everything divisible by 3, for example. Various math steps would have kinesthetic analogies. In the sim, the role of the symbols can start taking on a higher role, and traditional technique for solving problems presented.

Finally, in more complex levels, there will not just be one solution to each challenge. The players will feel as if "their" solution is unique, and they can take pride in it.

Polynomials Sim - Conclusion

This sim will provide a visual and kinesthetic take on traditionally symbolic content. It will support, but not overlap, with traditional methodologies. By having a rigorous level structure, players will get a bit more ability, as well as a bit more complexity, each incremental level, providing motivation. Finally, it will increasingly show the role of symbolic manipulation to have efficiency in dealing with greater complexity.

There is a caveat, of course.

As with so many school related subjects, the better we collectively get at teaching them, the more limited, brittle, and useless the current curricula will seem. Even more tragically, this stick is often used to punish the innovative media, not the original program (see Schools: What if we are at a false peak?).

In this case, the problem is that math isn't real. Math itself is a pedagogy - a perfect self-contained microworld to (hopefully) eventually but imperfectly onto our imperfect world with imperfect results but to make better plans and decisions. Ultimately, it is this perspective that must be embraced to really teach math, rather than the self-referential quixotic rathole of today's school tracks.

However, as long as schools and tests are the context of math today, this would be one approach I would use to 'teach' it.

Build More

2011-11-10T13:18:00.001-05:00

Start with food

2011-11-10T13:10:00.001-05:00

Outdoors beats indoors

2011-11-10T13:01:00.001-05:00

Two reasons

2011-11-10T12:49:00.001-05:00

Animals are...

2011-11-09T17:58:00.001-05:00

Education is Individualistic

2011-11-01T19:55:00.002-04:00

The goal of education is fairly straightforward.

For everyone, it is to discover, line up, and enrich:

their individual skills (what they do well compared to others) with
their individual opportunities (such as projects, activities, internships, and increasingly sustaining jobs) with
their individual strategies and relationships (notably career, area of deep expertise and capabilities, and family) with
their individual beliefs and passions (including how to best improve the human condition).

For a good life: align what you are doing with what you do well with what you want to do with what you think is important to do (in a growing and sustainable way).

There are some common skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic (but not many). Each area must be discovered, expanded, tested, and rigorously honed. (As they say in the marketing world, most people have never tasted their favorite breakfast cereal.) And someone who loves cooking may have to fill in the non-intuitive and uncomfortable skill of reading a balance sheet if they want to open a restaurant. But educational activities that involve large passive groups are delaying tactics in meeting these goals, not solutions.

Can centralized schools play a role? Absolutely. But the role for traditional classes is smaller than we dared imagine. Currently, the DNA of schools with 'universal' approaches is to teach material that may line up with some students and not others. Which means education is a lottery - if your skills and aptitude happen to line up with one of the school paths, you win! But if not, you loose.

New educational approaches are needed, for each of the rings, around exposure, play, and rigor. We have to resist the urge to put moral value on alignment of natural aptitudes with specific, predefined paths. Because adults are different, education is necessarily individualistic. Educational models for all ages will have to be as well.

My Original Notes (from my Moleskine)

In Education, Bill Gates is Acting More Like John Akers

2011-10-04T19:03:00.031-04:00

Business organizations tend to shift back and forth between centralized and decentralized. In healthy organizations, the pendulum takes about ten years to make a complete cycle.

Businesses centralize to be efficient, forcing standardized processes, common metrics, data driven decisions, and high command and control. The Quality movement (including six sigma) was the result of centralized thinking. Middle managers are expected to be, in fact, managers.

Then, businesses decentralize to become more innovative and nimble. These smaller business units work closer to the customer to better meet needs. Middle managers are expected to be leaders with profit and loss responsibility. Innovation is rewarded rather than efficiency.

This shift in businesses is often in reaction to competition, such as to truly decentralized, entrepreneurial start-ups that can completely dethrone reigning market leaders. And these shifts do not represent reversals of strategies, but the evolution of the organization.

Similarly, our notion of food has also faced cycles, albeit it longer.

For decades, the technology and trends increasingly allowed the centralization of food production. Freezers, microwaves, fast food restaurants, giant agri-corporations, interstate highways, canister shipping systems, and soft drink companies all enabled food that looked the same and tasted the same season to season and state to state.

Then came the decentralization movement in food, including farmers' markets, locovores, organic food, whole wheat flour, and CSAs.

This shift occurred as individual "food consumers" became increasingly unhappy with the industrial offerings. They took matters into their own hands, and over time both grew their market and eventually even had some impact on grocery store offerings.

Centralized food...

...Looks different than decentralized food. Which offering is a better analogy for schools today?

In many ways, I wrote the book Unschooling Rules to (re)present decentralized education (something that has proven to be very hard for most people to imagine anymore), with ideas taken from the people who really practice it. (Our education system today more closely resembles a franchise model, but that is another story.)

Decentralized education moves away from large classrooms, standardized tests, highly structured school days, rewarding conformity, and rigid curricula, and moves towards encouraging passion, authenticity, creativity, and individualism.

Ultimately, then, what one chooses to do with this rediscovered, increasingly widely used, decentralized view of education is up to the reader.

For some, it is a suggestion that the emperor has no clothes. Education today is stuck in a giant rut, and the best a family can do is walk way.

For others, Unschooling Rules can be treated more like a diet book. A diet book may have a lot of suggestions, and the moderate readers will pick and choose. After flipping through it it, some may still get fast food, but also increase the amount of local fruit and vegetables. Any reader of Unschooling Rules will at least get some suggestions to make incremental improvements in the authenticity of the education delivered.

The changes typically proposed to schools today from various think tanks and blue ribbon panels, made up of full time academics and their customers, represent the slightest bumps in either greater command and control or customization, all in the name of being practical. Cost effective scalability and disintermediation and subjectation of home lives are necessary to their thinking.

But they will continue to fail. Because no closed system ever became more decentralized on its own. Customer panels never helped a monopoly evolve. Bill Gates is wasting his legacy, because he is acting more like John Akers. He has surrounded himself with insiders, making TQM-style improvements, talking a good game but having no vision.

Ultimately, as shown by the growing number of families opting out of the industrial model, to really improve our nation's schools we have to imagine more.

Chicago Tribune: "Supplement your child's education by stealing a few pages off the home-schoolers' playbook"

2011-09-28T09:48:00.005-04:00

The Chicago Tribune ran an excellent piece today called Home-schooled lessons: Supplement your child's education by stealing a few pages off the home-schoolers' playbook.

Here is an excerpt:

In "Unschooling Rules," Clark Aldrich lays out 55 ways for parents to inject a little "unschooling" in their kids' lives. Here are five standouts.
Create portfolios of children's deepest interests and accomplishments over the years to augment school transcripts.
Increase your children's time spent with adult experts who are passionate about what they do. Be out of sight, but do this without "dropping off" your children and transferring responsibility, at least initially.
Take your children on short family trips, even if it upsets the schools.
Include meaningful work into every week. (Taking care of a neighbor's pet, recycling, cooking a meal for someone.) Don't let the abundance of papers due and tests get in the way of helping your children actually help other people.
Encourage play in areas of interest. Allow children to pursue passions, even when it gets in the way of doing homework. Be prepared to fudge a sick day for both parent and child to indulge areas of deep passion.

Places to Learn

2011-09-21T09:25:00.012-04:00

The activity of farming teaches ethics as well as business and science. Many corporations today seem to be run by MBA's who think in terms of cramming, gaming the system, extraction, and winning for the sake of winning (95% of people in a survey thought L.L. Bean was now on the wrong track, as an example), all the attributes developed and rewarded by the current industrial school system.

Now consider the activity of family farming over writing term papers or studying for tests. Farming takes patience, physical work, stewardship, and the ability to react to a dynamic, real system.

Dr. Jack King's list of 13 influential books that can change the world.

2011-09-20T09:50:00.000-04:00

Dr. Jack King posted a list of '13 influential books that can change the world.'

13. Anyway by Kent Keith

12. Good to Great by Jim Collins

11. Strategic Intuition by William Duggan

10. They Smell Like Sheep by Lynn Anderson

9. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership by Donald Phillips

8. Unschooling Rules by Clark Aldrich

7. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson

6. The Go-Giver by Bob Burg & John David Mann

5. Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

4. Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr

3. William Wilberforce by William Hague

2. Make Gentle the Life of this World by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

1. The Servant by James Hunter

Interview with Brock Dubbels

2011-09-17T13:14:00.002-04:00

For book research, I interviewed Brock Dubbels.

This helped inform:

#unrules24: Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership.

Here is a piece where Brock explains his experience teaching high school, which should be a role model for all involved in education, including in traditional schools and homeschools:

I teach fluid dynamics and aerodynamics to “at risk” high school kids. I try to appeal to the things that might be interesting.

I know if talk about certain words too early like resistance, displacement, or friction, the students are going to check out. So what I say instead is, "next week I'm bringing in my wading pool. And we are setting up the first lake this school has ever had. And we are going to have a boat race. To win the boat race, you have to win in one of four categories: speed, weight-bearing, maneuverability, or general purpose.”

The students get a general idea of what their goal is. But they also realize that they will need things that don't currently have.

Then I asked the question, "If you were to learn about boat building, how would you like to do it?" I begin to elicit people's responses. This helps me get a sense of prior knowledge. By doing this I've accomplished building interactivity from the beginning, and I also start introducing the concept of choice. Of course, from my perspective, all of the interactivity is pre-structured. But the students don't know they're being shepherded. They just know that going to a better pasture.

Then I ask the question, "What would you build if you knew you couldn't fail?" This gets their imagination involved. This engages their ability to visualize.

Then we start building communities. I ask people to share “perfect world stories.” For example, I might say, "if you are to build boats, and you are to have a race, and I provide all of the materials for you, what would that look like? How would you build your boat? Are there other races you'd like to have?" We start tapping into the excitement.

Most people like the default model that I have up on the board. But there are always some people that won't engage unless they have some sense of choice. They won't engage unless they are heard. I look at these people as desperately wanting leadership, and not willing to involve themselves unless they have a leadership role. So, I try to get them into a leadership role as fast as possible.

This is consistent with the research around affinity groups for communities of practice. The question is, how do you distribute leadership and not hoard it?

What we might do is write up on giant sheets of paper the various ideas, and give people votes. We can have the class control the experiment.

The nice thing about this phase is, if it is done right, it eliminates one of the biggest criticisms of any kind of formal learning, which is that it's not relevant and not interesting. The students can control both.

In some cases, the students can even determine how I am going to grade them. Generally they don't deviate very far from the guidelines I put up for them. But we are creating education that is co-created not tops down or hierarchical. So we might have a wiki that explains the day-by-day curricula, and I give students the ability to change that up to the morning of that day’s class.

See more on leadership styles here.

Clark Aldrich interview of Will Wright, Warren Spector, and Jane Boston on Games and Simulations

2011-09-15T09:47:00.004-04:00

While doing book research on the limitations of traditional media and the need to "learn to do" as well as "learn to know" I talked to three computer game designers:

Will Wright (WW)
Jane Boston (JB)
Warren Spector (WS)

This helped informed some of the Unschooling Rules, including:

#unrules01: . Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know.
#unrules26: Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

(See Eliane Alhadeff's Unschooling Rules – Serious Games As Microcosms For Learning for more details.)

Here is what they said:

Clark: What ideas (and types of ideas) are best taught through simulations? What ideas (and types of ideas) should never be taught through simulations?

JB: From my perspective, simulations are best used in four ways.

First, they are ideal for developing an understanding of big ideas and concepts – those things for which experience alone can deepen understanding. It is one thing to memorize a definition of nationalism or to read a passage describing the brittleness or fragility of an ecosystem; it is quite another to enter into an environment where those ideas play themselves out based on your own actions and ability to identify and solve problems.

Secondly, I believe simulations are great for dealing with time and scale. The computer gives us an opportunity to speed up results of an action that might actually take several lifetimes to play out. This allows players to see the potential impact of decisions made now on the future. Dire warnings about issues like the finite amount of drinkable water on the earth rarely impact people’s behavior, yet a simulation has the potential of creating an emotional connection to the information that may have at least some small influence on both understanding and behavior.

I think simulations are good for situations where it is important to give people practice in decision-making before it is faced in a dangerous or critical, real-life situation. Some of the simulations used for emergency personnel provide an opportunity to experience “life-like” situations and react to unexpected and challenging problems.

Finally, simulations are wonderful resources for taking us to a time or place that we are unable or unlikely to experience directly.

Simulations are not appropriate for teaching discreet bits of information (“facts”) or for rote drill and practice. Because they are an immersive experience, they are better suited for those things that need to be learned in context and require active problem solving. There are some topics that are controversial and until we understand better what is taken away from the experience, we need to be cautious in implementing. Is a simulation of a WWII battle an immersive history lesson or a lesson in combat techniques? A simulation should never be treated lightly as “only a game”. Good simulations have the capacity to generate very strong thoughts and feelings in their participants and anyone using a simulation should be prepared for that possibility.

WS: I'm no expert when it comes to training and/or education but common sense tells me that simulations are best suited to dealing with matters of the mind rather than matters of the body. I think there are two reasons for this. First, our simulations are still pretty rudimentary -- we typically simulate only a few forms of sensory input, making genuine immersion in the sim a hit-or-miss proposition. Also, we interface with current simulations in ways that are radically different than the ways in which we interface with the real world -- I mean, there's no real world analogue of a mouse and keyboard or a gamepad! Simulations that utilize more realistic interface elements (cockpit mockups, bobsleds, skis, etc.) are few and far between.

Simulations, then, seem best suited to teaching concepts, tactics, general approaches to situations rather than specific actions. And the limited depth of our simulations today means that, even when we have real-world analogue interfaces, it's imperative that the people operating the simulation provide appropriate context and additional instruction to those who might mistake the partial simulation for an accurate recreation of a real situation...

WW: Simulations are great for understanding processes that are outside of our experience. You can play with time or scale. You can interact with molecules and planets. Many designers tend to map them into instinctive structures that we already have, either through analogy, or through gut-feel. And for a lot of things, of course, the human mind is better than any computer.

Clark: Can games change the behavior of players outside the game? How could you maximize the transferability of game-learned experiences to life?

JB: Because behavior is based on what we know and have done before, games become part of our overall experience. The degree of impact they have is much like the rest of life and is dependent on what the player brings to the game in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes; the context and circumstances in which the game is played; and what happens before and after the game. I’ve facilitated “off-line” simulations in which some participants exhibited extreme forms of emotion and carried feelings from a simulation into their relationships with others throughout the course of a two –week institute and again months, even years, later on in follow-up workshops.

I believe the transferability of game-learned experiences can be maximized by being clear about the purpose of the simulation before using it and by thinking of it as one tool in an overall learning experience. Setting an appropriate context with the players in advance is important; as is making sure that the players understand the rules and roles. In some simulations, guided practice may be needed before starting the actual game.

From my perspective, the most critical elements of a simulation come after the game itself. Debriefing what has happened – what a player experienced, felt during the simulation and is feeling afterwards, what strategies were tried and what happened, what other strategies might have been applied, what else the player needed to know or be able to do, analogies to real life situations, how the players’ own values and experience influenced their actions -- are all important items for discussion.

WS: I think the most anyone can say about the effect games may have on
player behavior is that some people will be affected in some ways at some times by some games. Not much there upon which one could or should base an educational program (or public policy!). I think the key to using games to influence behavior and/or learning is to put specifically conceived and implemented games in an appropriate context (a classroom, for example) and use them to teach very specific, targeted things. In general, I've seen very little evidence, anecdotally, that game-playing has any more influence on behavior than any other entertainment medium or social situation.

Clark: How accurate does a simulation have to be to be a valid teaching tool?

WW: In most interesting fields, like weather modeling, predictive simulations are very difficult or impossible. However the property of weather being unpredictable can be a property of a good descriptive simulation.

Let me give you an example. Say you put the ball on the tip of a cone, and let it go. A perfect predictive simulator would tell you exactly which side of the cone the ball would fall for the exact condition set up. A descriptive simulator, like SimCity, would probably use a random variable to decide down which side the ball would fall. While that simulation would fail at being predictive, it would teach both the range of possibilities (i.e. the ball never falls up), and also from a planning perspective, it teaches that you can’t rely on predicting the exact outcome, and how to deal with the randomness.

I have seen a lot of people get misled. I see a lot of simulations that are very good descriptive (like SimCity), but a lot of people use them predictive (like a weather model).

Clark: How do you research topics for a new product? What is the role of subject matter experts? A person from what perspective (i.e. academic, practitioner, consultant) has the most useful information and perspective for making a simulation?

JB: Our ideas come from many places. With George Lucas as our creative director, they often come directly from him. He has a great interest in simulations and their potential as a learning tool. We also research commonly taught topics in schools and think together about which ones can be done better using computer technology. It is important to us to connect our work to those things being taught every day in classrooms.

Subject matter experts play a key role in making and creating simulations. We like to put people from lots of different perspectives around the same table when we’re working on a high concept. We’ll bring together academic experts, practitioners, and others with interesting backgrounds to help us identify the most important themes and ideas for us to convey through the simulation. For example, when we were creating Star Wars® The Gungan Frontier™, our ecology simulation, we worked with teachers, population biologists, ecology and science center staff, zoo educators, etc. You need a mix of those whose work focuses on the big ideas and concepts, those who are working directly in applying that knowledge in everyday work, and those who are translating that into educational experiences for others. None of these alone is sufficient. I also love to add to the mix that person who brings an unusual connection to the topic to the table.

WS: You research topics for a game project pretty much as you would any other kind of media artifact. You figure out what you're trying to
achieve -- what you hope players experience as they play -- and start digging up books, magazines, movies, web pages and anything else that can help you get where you're trying to go. I hate to sound mysterious or mystical but there's no one answer to this question. If you're making a game set in real world locations, go find information about those locations. If you're making a fantasy game, you might want to read every fantasy book you can get your hands on so you understand the genre's conventions well enough to represent them well (or undermine them, depending on your intent!). In making the kinds of games I do, "experts" really don't enter the picture much. (It'd be tough to find an Illuminatus who'd admit to being one and orcs and elves don't talk to humans much.) But if you were making a game about the LAPD or the Navy SEALS, you better talk to some real LA policemen or some SEALS... But, really, where games are concerned, experts and real-world information sources are only so valuable. Making a successful "real world" game involves knowing where to deviate from reality in the interest of fun more often than it does knowing reality inside out so you can cleave to it religiously.

WW: That is my favorite part of a game. I usually do a game that I am interested in. I find someone who is either controversial, or between two fields. I will use content experts as canaries in the mine. I did SimEarth based on Lovelock’s Gai.

Clark: Gaming is starting to reach the masses. What lessons can e-learning learn as it tries to do the same?

JB: Stay close to the learner (your customer) – understand his or her needs, interests, and context. Be very clear about you’re trying to do and don’t try to do everything. Use the computer in ways that take advantage of its unique capabilities. Get good at doing each thing well before spreading out to other things. Just because things are possible to do, doesn’t mean you should do them – especially when it comes to the high-end stuff. It’s important to create the highest quality possible product with tech specs that match the installed base. And, to develop products at a cost that keeps the price point appropriate for the budget realities of schools or other customers and allows developers to sustain themselves financially.

WS: As developers try to reach larger and larger audiences (to offset
larger and larger development budgets!), we have to focus on a few critical points, I think: Any time we think something is too simple, we have to make it simpler. We absolutely must streamline our interfaces and make them so intuitive users forget they're even USING an interface. We have to make sure users know exactly WHAT they're supposed to do at all times and challenge them to figure out HOW. We might even want to consider leaving the fantasy ghetto behind and giving people subject matter they're already interested in -- in other words, make games that have built-in appeal to a larger audience.

Clark: What are the elements that make a simulation immersive (i.e. to make someone who is playing the game buy into the illusion)? What happens that breaks people out of "immersiveness?"

JB: There are many factors that affect this. Perhaps the most important is what I’ve heard George Lucas call the “immaculate reality.” Attention to the detail and cohesiveness of the simulated environment is crucial. One discordant factor breaks the illusion. Likewise the choices and actions the player faces must fit within that universe and its internal “rules.” One of the important tasks a player faces in a simulation is making sense of the world he or she has entered and figuring out its internal rules – both its consistencies and its intentionally designed inconsistencies. It is important not to break into a simulated experience with peripheral information. For example, you wouldn’t want to interrupt an ecological simulation with something flashing questions about your experience at you. Save the questions for later.

WS: At the most fundamental level, making a simulation immersive involves removing as many obstacles as possible between player and belief in the reality of the depicted world. Obstacles take many forms -- shifting camera position during play (e.g., third-person conversations in a first-person game); forcing players to switch from real-time gameplay to separate interface screens; dialogue presented in text, rather than spoken, form; objects that don't behave and/or can't be used like their real-world analogues... I'm not saying you want to recreate the real world but, certainly, you want to strive for internal consistency, at least, so players aren't reminded they're "just playing a game" any more than necessary. What you want to do is (and I'm about to reveal a boatload of prejudices here!), create a game that's built on a set of consistently applied rules that players can then exploit however they want. Communicate those rules to players in subtle ways. Feedback the results of player choices so they can make intelligent decisions moving forward based on earlier experience. In other words, rather than crafting single-solution puzzles, create rules that describe how objects interact with one another (e.g., water puts out fire, or a wooden box dropped from sufficient height breaks into pieces and causes damage based on its mass to anything it hits) and turn players loose – you want to simulate a world rather than emulate specific experiences. Okay, I'm officially failing to get my point across so I'm going to stop.

WW: The more creative the player can be, the more they like the simulation. This might be giving them a lot of latitude. People like to explore the outer boundaries. There is nothing more satisfying than solving a problem in a unique way. Another derivative: being able to describe yourself to the game, and the game builds around you. It also helps if a player can build a mental model of what it going on in the simulation. This has more to do with the interface. All it takes is one weak link in the chain to blow this. Have them think they understand it enough to start testing their theories. At this point they are reverse engineering your program. You want to give them an entry path. People will say, “Oh wow, my mental model was way off.” Most of my games use an obvious metaphor and a non-obvious metaphor. They think it is a train set, but they come to realize it is more like gardening. Things sprout up and you have to weed.

Clark: How do you reward or penalize a player within the context of a simulation?

JB: I’m a strong believer that logical consequences are the best and only reward or penalty for a player in a simulation.

WS: I'm not sure penalizing players is ever appropriate in a game. Well, that's an overstatement. Obviously, there are inevitable penalties associated with failure but, when you can just load a saved game and try again, how severe do you want those penalties to be? Basically, game development is about presenting players with genuine challenges and then providing sufficient rewards to keep them feeling good about themselves and eager to tackle the NEXT challenge. Reward schedules are critical. But penalties? Punishment? Sounds like entirely the wrong tack to take. But maybe games are different from more educationally motivated sims in this regard...

WW: With a game, you need some kind of reward structure. I try to have several goal path; I try not to force them down anuyl. In SimCity, you can go for happiest people, or biggest city. There has to be paced reaward structure. Some rewards – RTS, forced multipliers, some things that a – you can build a unit that allows you to do something – decisions that force them to think long term vs. short term gain. Giving them strategic decisiojns. Giving the peoiple maximum creativeity. The games are really just problems.

There is never one way. One way kills creativity. New ways of solving problems drives people in wanting to share experiences.

The photo albums in The Sims are important. We have to create new ways for users to share. Otherwise people used to feel as if they wasted the time they spent playing a game. So it is important to have an artifact that they walked away from the game. They can show people. Getting people to engage other people with what they learned is critical. If you can get people to talk about, it creates a snowball effect. You have to create glue. The community becomes the effective tool for learning.

Clark: Any ideas at how to measure the effectiveness of a simulation? Please?

JB: All of us who work with these powerful tools realize how complex and difficult it is to measure their effectiveness. Subjective tools such as pre/post discussions, interviews, writing activities can capture some of this. Rubrics have been developed to look at actual participation during the course of a simulation, but I tend to oppose that approach. Test performance on measurable items may be used, but it is impossible to separate what combination of things contributed to the learning measured and to account for any learning not covered by the test items. If you figure this one out, let me know!

WS: I haven't a clue. The measure of a game's success is in sales or, possibly, in critical acclaim. If players tell me they played Deus Ex for 12 hours straight without eating or going to the bathroom, the team succeeded; if they stop playing after five minutes, we've failed. Similarly, great reviews tell us one thing, bad reviews tell us another. From a slightly different standpoint, if players describe the way they solved problems in a game and, in doing so, describe situations the team didn't preplan and didn't anticipate, well, that's a big win. But in terms of measuring the effect of a simulation or determining what was learned by a player, in any specific way? Beats me. You'd have to talk to an educator or a psychologist about that. And even then I'm not sure I'd believe the answer. But maybe I'm just a cynic!

WW: You first have to develop intent. The most interesting things to use simulations for are the hardest to measure. Teaching creative problem solving is very difficult to measure. A simulation is more like on-the-job experience. It is a broader element. You have experienced a larger landscape of possibilities. How you measure that, I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess. It almost feels to me that the forces that demand tight metrics would not co-exist with simulation users. They may be incompatible ecosystems.

My Sim About Anti-Doping (#unrules01)

2011-09-09T10:40:00.000-04:00

I designed this sim for the World Anti-Doping Agency to allow young athletes from all over the world to experience choices around doping. It strives to focus not on either "learning to know" or "learning to do" but on "learning to be." Take a look at this video about it:

(I had to create a neutral fictitious sport so as not to disengage any real athlete, and JumpCross came out really well!)

The process I used to create this sim, and countless others, is outlined in Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich Way (a draft of an upcoming book), and my upcoming conference Serious Play, both aimed at industry professionals. Then play the adventure game here.

Imagining a One Thousand Dollar MBA

2011-09-05T06:29:00.000-04:00

China and India and so many other countries are fully engaging the global economy from both the supply and demand side. As a result, innovative companies are breaking price barriers that were once thought impermeable.
We have already seen the sub-1000 dollar computer. Then the sub-500. And now the sub-200.
We have seen sub-4000 dollar cars, thought impossible by Detroit. While they are not perfect by the glossy standards of American companies, these vehicles fit a critical demand. One can also reasonably expect the cars' manufacturers to become increasingly powerful on the world stage. Meanwhile the cost in emerging markets of so many other services, such as cell phones minutes, are tiny fractions of their US counterpart. Every year brings more breakings of price floors - the equivalent of beating the four minute mile - in market segment after market segment.
There is one race that may be under the radar of most, but has huge implications. That is the global race to the sub-1000 dollar MBA.

Why the 1K MBA?
The need for a low cost MBA is both obvious and less so. In the obvious camp, there are highly populous nations that need to put vast numbers of workers through MBA programs to become their emerging business leaders. These are people who would be fighting for the privilege of getting an 80 thousand dollar MBA if they were in the United States or Europe.
But there are less obvious markets as well. In all countries including the United States, in most corporations, there are entire swaths of employees, from directors to vice presidents and higher, who are without formal skills in everything from financial management to project management to leadership. This “winging-it” middle management – who often resemble MBA’s in everything but skills - represent tremendous penalties to shareholder value. The lowering of MBA’s costs will greatly increase their adoption by these employees who desperately need the skills.

New Design Principles
Creating the 1K MBA will require some significant re-engineering. New principles will have to frame the design.
Before we go any further, we can anticipate the predictable response from the existing MBA vendors, including institutions and professors. They will say that it is impossible to create equivalent value proposition at this new price point. They will say that attempts are even fundamentally dangerous, as they will necessarily create cheap imitations and degree inflation.
Given that, here are some of the necessary principles for the new MBA:

The mission of the 1K MBA programs must remain the same as existing MBA’s. The quality has to be very high – in selective places better than current top rated programs, including Harvard, Insead, or Wharton.
Collectively, the 1K MBA programs will have more than ten times the number of graduates than all of the current MBA programs combined. The emphasis will be on high volume, not elitism. (This puts greater pressure on the role of quality content and rigorous certification.)
The human component of delivery has to be greatly minimized. Rather than offloading the marquee professor to the teaching assistant as is currently the practice, the programs will require the better capturing of deep content from the marquee professor in the technology itself wherever possible.
The programs will leverage distance learning technology and methodology
The programs will leverage simulation technology and methodology
The programs will leverage social networking technology and methodology

Obviously, as stated in the above principles, there will be a reliance on technology that will necessarily preclude some participation in the developing world where technology is scarce. But the continued rapid spread of technology, as well as the necessary value provided by the technology, makes this a necessary trade-off today that will increasingly be mitigated in the long run.

Technology Part 1: Distance Learning
One of the three core technologies is around distance learning. This is necessary to eliminate the need for travel, room and board - all major current costs. This also increases starting and ending time flexibility. Finally, it allows some students to get MBA’s while also holding jobs and being productive in their family and community.
There has been much progress in the areas of distance learning over the past five to ten years. Early mistakes have been made, and best practices are now established.
Unfortunately, most distance universities currently have to make a significant choice between the following two insufficient models:

Low cost/flat content. Some distance universities have flat content, but delivered at a relatively attractive price point. The universities, including many that define the distance learning marketplace, have seen the value of their master’s programs decline.
High cost/rich content. Some distance universities, such as Full Sail University’s Masters of Educational Media Design & Technology, have rich programs with high student engagement and satisfaction, but not delivered at a significantly lower cost than face to face. This is in part because of the very involved role of the instructors.

Technology Part 2: Social Networking
The second of the three core technologies is social networking. This has currently been increasingly and successfully integrated into leading distance learning programs, including through using Facebook and YouTube, and through new tools integrated into course management systems such as Moodle.
The experience of working through challenging content with a set of peers over time must be maintained and even improved. "Classes" are critical, and maybe even better assembled than through chance today. Meanwhile, textbooks will be over time replaced by open-source online material.

Technology Part 3: Simulations and Serious Games
The third critical piece of technology is simulations and serious games (collectively called sims). It is not an overstatement to say that sims are necessary for any 1K MBA due to their combination of engagement, effectiveness and scalability.
This is because, unlike the talking-head videos and interactive workbooks of first generation eLearning, sims are super-media. They:

Cover twice as much content in half as much time (4X improvement), due to their richness and interactivity.
Develop knowledge that decays at one-fifth to one-tenth the rate of directive learning (5 to 10X improvement). Sims develop passion and commitment through kinesthetic experiences.
Aggregated over time, cost one tenth (or less) per student per hour (10X improvement) for delivering content. This is because many sims, as many computer games today, are stand-alone, with instruction built in. Sims can therefore hugely reduce the amount of rote work done, allowing fewer professors to add greater value to more students.

Sims also can enable the inclusion of content that just couldn’t be covered using traditional methodology, typically in the areas of “learning to do” rather than just “learning to know.” This is done in part through careful level design, including interactive environments and challenges. This new approach is critical, as a current sharp criticisms of MBA programs is that students don't graduate with skills--they only have learning and have to figure out how to apply it, to the detriment of many companies who hire them early in their careers.
From a capitalization perspective, the cost of creating a critical mass of sims is relevant but not insurmountable. From scratch, sims cost about 100K per finished hour. This will require investment up-front in sim based content that pays off over five to seven years, but usable over an infinitely broad marketplace.

Need for Lead Designers
The technology already exist. What is needed, and is currently in short supply, are lead designers – people who have actually created large numbers of proven sims, not the academics who currently speculate about them. This is an art and science. But the grammar of this new discipline is covered in

The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games - How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created In the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google.

Current MBA Programs will be endangered
The propagation of the 1K MBA will challenge the existing models. It is conceivable that the United States will loose the bottom half of their MBA programs every five to ten years moving forward indefinitely and asymptotically. Harvard and Wharton are safe, but the overall market will shrink.

Impact and Conclusion
The 1k MBA will have multiple positive impacts. First, it will improve the standard of living of millions. It will increase the productivity of people, and at the same time curb inflation driven by higher people costs during booms. Further, it will provide a new role model for all education. It will soon impact other disciplines, and schools in general.
And the cascade effect brought about by successful low-cost, sim driven alternatives to traditional higher ed, while painful to schools in the short run, could have the long-term effect of bringing the postindustrial revolution to education.

The Education Mission of Our Lifetime: Develop World-Class Mathematicians and Scientists from 5% of Today's Homeschooling Students

2011-09-01T06:11:00.000-04:00

Here is the education mission of our lifetime: Develop World-Class Mathematicians and Scientists from 5% of Today's Homeschooling Students.

Hopefully, the national need for a world-class Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics skill set is self-evident. (This is on top of a broad base of STEM literacy for almost everyone.) These skills are necessary for building anything of value. They are not sufficient, of course, but sine qua non.

Let's at least think that perhaps some new "things" have to be done to improve our nation's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) competencies.

The instinct of national agencies and foundations alike is to initially aim broad efforts towards children in traditional (and typically public) schools. After all, this is where the volume is.

There are some problems, of which two are:

Schools waste a lot of student time, both with curricula bloat and bureaucratic busywork, with no end in sight. Both makes it hard for schools to squeeze in any new or deeper material, but it also prohibits healthy learning, including allowing for the "playing around" and experimentation with the material necessary for real learning. A budding engineer in a traditional school has to stop designing to cram for the next French class.
For those creators of innovative programs targeted at public schools (and I have sat in so many of these planning sessions), just too much effort gets siphoned off on trying to pave the way. "How can we make it politically acceptable?"

So, why develop a major STEM program targeted at homeschoolers?

There are a lot of them, over one million.
They have a lot more time in the day. There is no lining up for "Class A" or waiting while attendance is being taken or in a queue for the bus.
A program does not have to fall into neat academic blocks of classes, trimesters, or school years
Homeschoolers can embrace their passions more. They have the opportunity to do what anyone who really learns a subject does: obsesses, plays, experiments, forms communities, and searches for experts. A homeschooler at the top of his or her game should know a topic better than a similarly talented and interested person in a traditional academic program.
And, a lot of homeschoolers have a significant gap between their raw passion and talent on one hand and the available structured programs and pathways on the other (as do many traditionally schooled children).

However, any program designer needs to think how to design a program for homeschoolers, not traditionally schooled students.

The program has to be pulled by students, not pushed at them. It has to be volunteer based.
The traditional crutches of "grades" and "threat of public ridicule" are not going to work to motivate. However, certification of completion and documentation of final accomplishments are critical.
The program has to virtual, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
The program has to be flexible, allowing different students to move through at different paces.
The program will probably draw from a wide diversity of students, including geographically, age, prereqs, and skill sets.
Supplies, when non-virtual, will have to be distributed intelligently.
Coaches, mentors, and peers will all have to be better used than the role of teacher.

Programs developed for homeschoolers will eventually be able to be spun out to more children (a core premise of Unschooling Rules). But those programs that focus exclusively on homeschoolers initially will be better designed than those aimed initially for either a traditionally-schooled audience or even a mixed audience.

Schools have given generations of education innovators the license to "mean well," but fail. The advent of homeschooling puts new hope, and therefor new pressure, on organizations that want to really make a difference. Helping 5% of homeschoolers reach their dream and passion in the STEM areas is moral, efficient, scalable beyond the target audience eventually, economically critical, and (gasp) actually doable.

If you want to help traditional schools in two years, focus resources today on traditional schools. But if you want to help traditional schools in ten years, focus resources today on homeschoolers.

Schools: From Stockholm Syndrome to Cruise Ship

2011-08-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

Schools require compliant students. The worst case scenario for the best public and prep schools is a massive revolt of smart kids asking, "why are we being taught this curricula; what are the qualifications of the instructors or institutions to prepare us for the future; why are we being taught using books and term papers and tests?"

The traditional coercive tools for school are always a combination of carrots and sticks, promises of bright future for compliance and threats of public and total failure for resistance. Fair enough.

As a result, students often find themselves displaying signs of Stockholm Syndrome. This situation, when victims under the total control of a few people form sympathy with their captors, has been identified from studying hostage situations. But many students as well form a bond with teachers and institutions they feared, and who had similar (perceived but wielded) absolute control over their lives and futures.

We are all seeing the emergence of another sweeping approach used by the ranks of the industrial education complex - turning higher ed campuses into cruise ships. Universities are lavishing perks upon perks to the students, from swanky food and fashion outlets to high-end stadiums and other recreational areas.

This shameless pandering has two costs. The first is that the cost for students of colleges is spiralling beyond "out of control." The costs for tuition are simply catastrophic. Meanwhile alums are being asked to donate even more (with the fund raising processes monopolizing the mind share and creativity of school administers, just as it does with politicians). One friend of mine wrote a large check for his Alma mater, and then drove to campus in the middle of a giant freshman lobster bake.

The second problem with campus-as-cruise-ship is more subtle, but more problematic. Schools have always been out of touch with delivering skills that give students more control over their future lives. But the quasi-austere conditions at least created motivation for students to join the productive world. Now, students are shocked to learn that they are not just unqualified for most jobs, but the living conditions are a massive step down as well.

One result is that students are even more reluctant to leave their university country clubs. They become grad students, get their doctorates if they can afford to borrow the money, and then professors. And the great industrial education complex chugs on.

We as a nation are debating health care, as we should. But the failure of schools to produce students who have control of their lives and are decent stewards of their families, communities, and planet is a far bigger crisis with much larger consequences. And the recent strategy of higher ed, rather to reform the relevancy to instead pander and placate to students is completely the wrong direction.

A final note. The simulations and serious games movement continues to be pulled in two directions. One is "making content more fun" (gamification) and the other is "creating richer content." The first direction is currently a more popular perception, and highly aligned with the cruise ship model: "Let's learn history, but on the shuffleboard court!" The future of the movement, however, is in the second direction. This will take work and investment beyond putting up more plasma television sets in the student lounge. It means recommitting to a future of education.

2011: The Year of the Visionless Revolution for Schools

2011-08-14T18:26:00.000-04:00

"Don't just stand there. Do something."

That might just be the rallying cry for education change in the next 12 months. What exactly will be done, however, and why, is almost anyone's guess.

Through the rest of 2011 and through 2012, schools will be poked and prodded. Budgets will be cut, while more money will flow in. There will be rallies and protests and headlines and strikes. There will be greater calls for accountability, but no one will quite be sure towards what end.

Tests will play the role of hero and villain. So will teachers. And so will various school programs including art and sports. Unions will become more important pawns for both political sides, while the enabling behavior of the parents will go unquestioned.

The notion of forcing children to spend more time in classrooms will be realized as absurd. Yet it will be the solution from many.

Some will continue to loudly proclaim, "Schools don't work. We need to do more of it."

There has never been a time when more people want schools to change more. And I suspect at the end of the day, K-12 schools will end up relatively static throughout this period - unchanged in any real way. As with the temporary story arc in a television sitcom or drama, (a la "no child left behind") all changes will be Ozymandian.

In contrast, however, many, many colleges and universities may well be obliterated. And the cottage industries - the vendor market serving all of the above including text book makers- will find their core markets shrinking by 10% a year for now until, well, forever.

In this environment, I offer just three pieces of advice, summaries of the points I make in my book, Unschooling Rules.

The school model of: dropping off children, assembling them into classrooms, and using lectures, tests, periods, papers, and grades, is fundamentally flawed, and will never work better than it does today. We have reached the relative apex of that model.
We need to collectively do everything we can to un-standardize schools, break bottlenecks (such as college admissions processes), and reverse the lockstepping of age-based participation. The next stage of education evolution requires us to think about true diversity of educational experiences, not convergence. Having said that, I personally do not believe we as a nation have the imagination to currently visualize what a truly heterogeneous educational ecosystem might possibly look like (but again, Unschooling Rules is a place to start).
Given one and two, the best thing we can do as a nation is to realize that more and more people will home- and un-school, and that is a good thing for everyone. Like some science fiction story playing out, the homeschooling movements in all of its forms will incubate the creativity of thinking and approaches necessary, eventually, to save all of schools.

This visionless revolution, like the mob that it is, is scary. It will lash out and find scape goats. It will prop up false prophets. I don't see any national leaders today.

Because there are no quick fixes. It is only through the real work of the people who care the most, under the radar of all of this bluster, that real change will be born to birth learning in the 21st Century.

EcoKids' Yard Sale: Serious Game on Recycling and Negotiating

2011-08-03T11:01:00.010-04:00

I came across this interesting "serious game," aimed at younger kids, called Yard Sale on Canada's eco-awareness site EcoKids.

The gameplay is straightforward (and with as many nods to capitalism and self-interest as environmentalism, for both sides of the aisle). The player is putting on a garage sale. After some exposition, the player first sets the prices, and then plays through a well done, fast market engagement activity to see if they can get that price.

What is so impressive about the game is that it is very easy to play, highlights a real process that kids can follow, and then allows participants to engage in some basic practicing of real skills that they will need. It is not an addicting game, but it, even better, transitions seamlessly to the real world. It looks straightforward and easy to design such content, but it represents a lot of sophisticated thinking.

Like it or not, media is the key to education that scales. This is a great role model of a necessary evolutionary path.

What has Changed 05 - The Cost of Schools Continues to Rise Faster than Inflation

2011-07-23T09:12:00.005-04:00

The costs of schools (at all levels) is rising faster than inflation and at a higher rate than the increase in household earning power. More and more of each national dollar earned is going into education. The curve of education spending parallels medical spending, for many of the same reasons. This is more salient at the university levels, where subsidies are considerably less than subsidies for K-12.

This has been true of the last 30 years, and will likely increase moving forward. The education-industrial complex will want to get the United States in a classroom-hours race with China or India.

But at some point, we as a nation will realize that we cannot afford the current trajectory, and we may not be able to sustain even the current level. Despite the rhetoric from those in the business, the relationship between classroom-hours and economic competitiveness does not rise indefinitely, but rather has a significant inflection point.

So while many parents are happy with today's schools (until they hit college), they will soon face a revolt of the taxpayer base or the need to reduce drags on the economy by various levels of governments.

Some articles: http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/04/21/the-true-cause-of-college-tuition-inflation/,

http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml;

http://thevoiceforschoolchoice.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/senate-finance-committee-11249-per-student-public-school-student/

Places to Learn - A Mini-Farm Stand By The Road to Earn Money

2011-07-22T16:51:00.000-04:00

This stand, created and maintained by a homeschooler, teaches so much about economics.

Is there a culture of anti-parent discrimination among some professional teachers? Is that a problem?

2011-07-20T11:07:00.000-04:00

When I am participating in round-table conversations with groups made up of people from the education industry, I am increasingly aware of anti-parent discrimination.

Specifically (and this is NOT scientific), comments that I would characterize as "anti-parent" seem to outnumber comments I would characterize as "pro-parent" by ten to one. These might include:

Parents don't understand the system.
Parents are too busy to help.
Parents are always late to meetings.
Parents are illiterate.
Parents don't do a good enough job at teaching kids how to behave and communicate in a classroom.
If parents spends five minutes helping with homework, they feel as if they have done their job.

Generic conversations often drift to tales of apocryphal parents acting highly neglectful or misdirected. These are told with a certain amount of relish and righteous indignation, even competitiveness.

Further, where parents are involved in school communication, it is always asynchronous (i.e. schools communicate to parents, schools ask parents to do something for the school, and schools provide access to course management data such as homework assignments) rather than synchronous (i.e. schools ask parents what approach to subjects their children might like, schools ask parents what kind of food they should emphasize in the cafeteria, schools ask parents about preferred bus routes).

And some schools offer programs for teachers to learn how to "deal with" parents.

Given all of that, might one formally ask is there an anti-parent discrimination in the culture of some professional teachers? And if so, is that a problem?

How would schools act if they were voracious corporations bent on unfettered monopolistic growth?

2011-07-12T09:44:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun game to play. We all know that schools, unlike Wall Street banks, are organizations that are inherently benign, with loving teachers and caring administrators dedicated to selflessly making the world a better place by taking on the under-paid task of nurturing our children.

But what if, in some crazy parallel universe, the school sytems were instead voracious corporations bent on unfettered monopolistic growth? How would they behave?

Here is what you might see:

Schools would try to push more and more school hours.
They would use fear to convince everyone that their services were absolutely necessary.
They would advertise heavily to present themselves as local and caring.
Schools would try to get as much money as possible, using increasingly complex schemes and indirect charges to hide their true cost, and force as many people to pay even if they did not use the service.
New teachers, because they would not have career options, would be treated poorly (building deep resentment).
Schools would try to standardize as completely as possible the offerings. They would be inflexible in dealing with customers and the community. Students would be expected to change to meet the needs of the offering, as opposed to the other way around.
They would produce something that is both increasingly out of line with what customers actually wanted, and as complicated as possible.
Schools would have huge lobbying efforts to stave off regulation and to get more tax dollars.
They would consume an increasingly large share of a nation's GDP.
You would see schools using internal metrics to evaluate success that no one outside of the school cares about.
Schools primary functional goal would be to help children become better students (i.e. greater and lower cost consumers of education) and eventually teachers, not to help them outside of the school.
You would see bigger and bigger salaries for the people at the top.
Decisions would be made based on internal politics.
You would see larger and larger administrations - the middle layer that does not teach but that "manages."
They would truly believe their approach was the only approach.
Schools would seek to crush competition, such as vouchers and home-schooling. There would be increasingly powerful, legally enforced tools to penalize truancy and other anti-school behavior.

Well, thank goodness schools are not voracious corporations bent on unfettered monopolistic growth. Because that would be a huge problem.

Unschooling Rules Reader Email

2011-07-01T14:46:00.000-04:00

I receive some emails from readers of Unschooling Rules that are so beautifully written and powerfully stated. Here is one that the author kindly allowed me to share:

---

I took my children out of a Waldorf school three years ago. We have been detoxing from that situation ever since. I took my daughter out in the middle of 7th grade, as she was being bullied beyond belief, while continually referred to by everyone (even the bullies!) as the "sweetest girl in the class." My son was taken out from the same school at the end of fifth grade. He was at the top of the social pecking order, unlike his sister. It astonished me how wonderfully well-behaved he was at home, during travel, at high tea in Dublin, or in the Senate Chamber in Washington. Yet, he was being fussed at for disruption every day by the end of fourth grade. He loved his friends, and he was interested in many things, but he couldn't bear being lectured to all day. And at Waldorf schools, even the art is so prescribed. He had so little time to be himself. And he admitted to me that staying at the top of the social totem pole meant, in his words, "being a prick."

For the last three years, my kids have both been able to pursue a passion they both share: theater. They are both in many productions every year. My daughter loves to read and write. My son loves to film and edit. They get along with each other, with their parents, their grandparents, their mentors, directors, fellow cast members, etc. They are well-rested and happy. Neither of them have that classic, sleep-deprived, shoulder-slumped look of the average American adolescent. They look people in the eye. They notice the elderly and infirm and are moved to help out. They ask lots of civic-minded questions.

They do not do work sheets, read things that don't interest them, take classes they would be prone to try to escape mentally. They don't know if they want to go to college or not. They don't want to rule anything out. My son talks of film school, but he quickly says, "I'm only fourteen. I don't want to prepare for the future. I want to live my life now." My daughter is convinced she wants to go to a theater conservatory program, such as CAP 21 in New York City. She is enthralled with the idea of performing but equally so about directing and writing and taking over the local non-profit theater for children here in our hometown, as her mentor retires. But she is only sixteen and knows she may change her mind a dozen times.

We as their parents have been blessed with the ability to enjoy our kids and not constantly think about the assembly line of grades and college. We have not forced an at-home curriculum on them and at times, we've wrung our hands, questioning this and that. Your book has made so much click for me. I have always thought that going to a museum, then coming home and requiring the kids to write about it would be a good thing. Now, I see why it never really feels right. One of your rules talks about exposure that "requires a ticket" as being a last resort. Well, for theater nuts, it's a bit different -- but I loved the idea of shaking that up a bit. My kids are older but they still love to be read to. My reading them "To Kill a Mockingbird" last year is a cherished memory for all three of us. They could still gain so much from being outside more, walking more and so many of your suggestions.

I wish your book was required reading for everyone who looks at me like I'm crazy when I say my kids don't go to school.

Thank you so much for helping me feel less like a floundering, apologetic hand-wringing home schooler and more like a proud unschooler.

Nothing Hurts the Assumption of College Usefulness More Than the Assumption of College Usefulness (#unrules49)

2011-07-01T03:32:00.006-04:00

Unschooling Rules 49 (#unrules49) is, "College is the hardest no-win decision your family may ever make."

See all college posts here: UNSCHOOLING RULES PART 4: UNCOLLEGE YOURSELF and the posts around WHAT HAS CHANGED

John Stossel is adding to the debate, saying college a scam for many: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1032356599001/stossel-college-a-scam-for-many/, pointing to high drop out rates and useless curricula.

Another argument is even more simple: the cost of college has outpaced inflation for over thirty years, with no end in sight. Unless you believe that college is infinitely valuable, at some point, necessarily, the cost of college will be greater than what it delivers.

And as with so many school related problems, the wounds are self-inflicted, and often the result of inter-school arms-races. University A "has" to put plasma televisions in the student lounge because University B just did.

One technique to ignore the cost of college for a while has been debt financing. But now a story in the International Business Times has the appropriate headline "Student debt crisis threatens US economy." This shell game may be coming to an end.

Having said that, the value of college degrees are artificially propped up by discriminatory corporate hiring practices. Many of the best entry and even mid-level jobs assume a college degree, despite the dubious connection between the skills bestowed by many colleges and the skills required in the job itself.

If you believe the current situation is unsustainable, given these factors, what do you think will happen:

A) The U.S. government will finance more programs to allow students to pay back debt over longer and longer periods, covering up the problem for another generation?

B) Degree discrimination will become illegal as a hiring practice?

C) Colleges will control and lower costs on their own, as a result of ethics and/or competition?

Unschooling Rules Speech Notes

2011-06-12T11:49:00.001-04:00

I recently was asked to prepare a speech for Unschooling Rules. Here are what my initial notes looked like:

(Please excuse any typos!)

Writing a Non-Directive Book - Notes on Unschooling Rules

2011-06-12T09:38:00.000-04:00

A good friend of mine, Jay Cross, wrote a book called "Informal Learning." My immediate snarky response to him was, "isn't the style of your book inherently structured formal learning, and so doesn't that betray rather than role-model the experiences you seek to encourage?" He wrote back, about one of my early simulation books, basically the same thing. "If you advocate simulation and serious game based media, why am I reading a book about it?"

I have wrestled with the affordances and limitations of books. Books are spectacularly easy to create using today's tools (i.e. a word processor, a digital camera, a drawing program) and easy to share. It is also a piece of media with which we have all grown up - we know how to engage them.

Most Books are Directive
But books are, from a leadership perspective, typically directive. One is taken lock-step on the author's path. Books are, for the reader, passive. You can keep turning the pages, and you will reach the end. I walk away from directive speakers and writers with three sensations 1) I believe the writer or speaker is much smarter and more accomplished than I am, 2) I really don't know what he or she is saying most of the time, despite (or because of) all of the references made and jargon used, and 3) I have a vague feeling of depression and angst.

Even wonderful stories that are emotionally invigorating to consume can be frustrating to transfer to make one's own life better.

Can Books be Collaborative?
I attempted to write my last two books, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, and Unschooling Rules, using a collaborative leadership style rather than directive. (See my entry here about leadership styles.) The two books, superficially, look very different. The Complete Guide weighs two and half pounds and Unschooling Rules is just 8 ounces.

Many of my books have tried to challenge the traditional 'directive' affordance.

The Reader Controls the Flow
But both books are made up of independent entries. You can read both by opening to a random page and digging in. If you are intrigued by what you have read, you can bounce around in short hops, to nearby entries. If you want something completely different, you can move farther away in the book to new grounds. The reader has responsibility for his or her own journey, and I, as the author, have the responsibility to make that journey productive and worthwhile. Writing was more like laying out a city than constructing a strong story (Simulations and the Future of Learning, in contrast, was written as a first person narrative with story arcs, frustration and resolution pairs, and character development.)

The Star of the Book is the Reader, not the Author
Ultimately, though, the books are very different. True, Unschooling Rules can be read from front to back, while The Complete Guide is almost impossible. But more so, Unschooling Rules does not give the readers easy answers. (Well, it gives some easy answers and low-hanging fruit, but not too many!) It is not a comprehensive reference. Instead, it truly is (and necessarily so to be effective) collaborative with the reader. It leaves the reader invigorated, frustrated, but better positioned to create their own solutions. My goal is to reduce the number of false paths taken, call out some absurd assumptions made today regarding education and schools that get in the way, prod and inspires with fresh perspectives, take away some doubt, provide some places to start, and encourage action, but I do not take away the responsibility of the reader to create, implement, and ultimately own their comprehensive solution. I am there to help. The reader is the star, not I.

Are there Perfect Rules to Create Inevitability in Education?
The culture of all academics seeks to emulate the rigors of science, such as physics (see the impact of learning theories on National Science Foundation grants); the culture of government is to create a comprehensive set of rules to eliminate the need for judgement in employees. Even the culture of the Quality movement in corporations feeds this philosophy, with deviations from norms (i.e. students' different capabilities, backgrounds, or home environments) seen as problems to be eliminated. As a result, much research into school reforms wants to find the underlying rules and processes that, when executed exactly as prescribed (including normalizing children into students), creates inevitable success. (No wonder it is easy to predict The Gates Foundation will fail on its current path.) This approach is of no surprise given that school cultures also tend to paint parents as either drug addicts or workaholics who need to be managed and overcome, and teachers and students as slackers that need to be threatened to keep from goofing off.

A Compass, not a Map
Unschooling Rules is, of course, starts from a different place. It is a compass not a map. It tries to match technique with message. If someone wants to kick back and read a satisfying story, a devastating and irrefutable critique, or wants an exact solution to the problem to criticize or implement as they might a recipe for custard, this is not the right book. Rather, if readers wants to take ownership for the problem either individually or as a community (including a few easy wins to start the ball rolling), Unschooling Rules will be a great companion.

What has Changed 04 - The Rate of Change in the World is Much Greater than School's Ability to Adapt

2011-06-03T09:07:00.014-04:00

For education to be relevant, it has to be somewhat connected to the productive world.

Education has to prepare students for the current and future productive world.
Education has to speak the language of current students (one has to pace before leading).
Education has to use the tools currently available in the productive and recreational world.
From both a cost and benefit perspective, Education has to be "worth it" to be sponsored by taxing the productive world.

We may have passed the point, however, where the rate of change in the marketplace, in children and other students, in the tools available, and even in the funding model from the productive world has passed the ability to schools to keep up.

The U.S. Military has a stark critique of themselves: "we train our soldiers for the last war, not the next." National education is worse, effectively preparing the children for jobs from the 1950's, maybe the 1940's.

If you believe that changes in the external world require changes in the educational system (and many do not), then the examination of schools ability to adapt can be done at an almost biological level. What are the sensors that detect change? What are the mechanisms that enact change?

Into this system, put:

Textbook publishing.
Government policies.
School boards and committees.
Funding mechanisms, including property taxes but also grants (such as the National Science Foundation).
Academic research processes.
Rate of hiring and firing of teachers.
Visions of how the world will be when the students graduate.

At best, the metronome of school change beats once a year. At worse, it takes a decade or even a generation to detect change and then to enact a proposed adaptation. As the rate of change increases faster than the rate of adaption, the relevancy gap increases. Which means we are already at a point where schools are archaic, or necessarily soon will be.

Unschooling Rules on Technology

2011-06-03T09:02:00.004-04:00

I. Unschooling is infinitely more possible and arguably necessary because of today's existing technology and applications.

II. Further, a critical enabler to scaling these "Unschooling Rules" for a school environment is the creation of new applications possible but not yet accomplished using existing technology.

III. Finally, the goal of both camps has to be that the greater use of technology also opens up a greater use of authenticity.

Places to Learn: Maps and Timelines

2011-06-01T10:05:00.000-04:00

Even in the era of Google Maps and iPads, large, high-res maps (we have the world and US) and timelines provide so much content for the browsing. For my son, the perfect scaffolding for all of US history was the lives of the Presidents.

What I look for when I judge Serious Games

2011-06-01T05:29:00.013-04:00

Computer games have introduced a new grammar, totally foreign to those who have only focused on creating or studying books, movies, or traditional courses. Today, Serious Games can be used to develop conviction and competence, through the increased use of engagement, practice, emotion, and richer content. When I design or judge sims and other serious games, especially sims that are expected to be stand-alone, this is on what I focus.

A) Interactive World (30%)

From a design perspective, the highest level goal is to create and then present a small, self-contained simulation “world,” “environment,” or “content model” with appropriate rules, real-time rich interactivity, and visual and action based feedback. The player of the sim “learns” though practicing on and interacting with various subsections of this environment.

A Virtual World (from Theme Hospital)

This simulation world’s rules are framed by the learning objectives of the program. The creation of this simulation often requires novel and multi-layer visualizations and interfaces (although where computer games provide useful models, they should be adopted). These worlds may be abstract, or real world, or a combination of the two. When a player fails, the reasons for the failure have to be visualized and otherwise self-evident.

In theory, this interactive world can stand alone as a sufficient educational experience for the motivated student. However, other scaffolding increases the predictability and ease of the engagement.

B) Entice (5%)

Initially, the program actively helps the user understand and be excited about the sim engagement.

This may include a formal entice mode. Here, as in old coin-operated arcade games, the program will launch a short, non-interactive video style presentation that will expose users to basic rules, show some core interactions, and make the user excited about and comfortable with the upcoming experience. It is possible that some users will skip this content all together, while others will watch it two or three times to get a feel for the content before engaging.

C) Role of Coach (5%)

The Serious Game should use some type of “coach” framework. This provides a consistent voice throughout (all or most of) the sim.

This can include an explicit virtual coach. The “coach” avatar can be used to create a connection with the user by kicking off levels and concepts, providing debriefings, and giving tips and encouragement. Finally, the coach will present any pedagogically traditional content that will be used to augment the experience, such as bulleted summaries and diagrams of concepts. However, the best sims can predictably develop knowledge in players without explicitly teaching them anything.

This coach can be part of the story, or it can break the fourth wall.

An Example of a Coach Avatar

D) Level Components (5%)

Each level should begin with a briefing, and after the player engages the sim, end with a customized debriefing either explaining the success of failure. If the sim does not have discreet levels, a character or even note found can serve the same function more seamlessly.

E) First Level(s) (10%)

The player should be allowed to engage the interactive section as quickly as possible (i.e. there should be minimal required presentation-style content). The design goals of the first level(s), rather than highly instructional, are as follows:

1. The player has to get a general feeling for the interactivity.

2. A player can finish it quickly (in less than a few minutes), with experienced players finishing it more quickly than inexperienced players.

3. The directions and goals are unambiguous, with immediate feedback and a clear sense of success or failure. It should be set up through a brief cut scenes, and very high feedback, such as in-game tips/directions.

4. There is a reset button (to encourage exploration and reduce fear of failure).

5. There is room for some exploration, and/or promise of more interesting things to come. In fact, through the design and any instruction, players should be encouraged to simply exist in a safe, subsection of this world, exploring and testing the rules on their own. The world should feel like an open-ended sandbox. To accomplish this, players can either replay the first level as often as they want, or they can achieve the stated goal, but linger before they move on to the next level.

F) Small Challenges that Allow for Creativity (10%)

The sim, after the initial level(s), gives players small challenges in this world that can be solved using a variety of different techniques. (Minimize the use of single solution challenges.) Let players express themselves if possible. Open up the world a bit.

G) More Complicated Challenges (15%)

Then the sim should increase the depth and length of the challenges until they are more multi-faceted and elaborate. Make challenges harder, and also combine the application of various other skills. Challenges can be solved through a variety of approaches, not just one.

Imagine the skills within a player as a cone that gets bigger throughout the levels. (For example, each new level may bestow one new ability and add one new type of challenge, perhaps on a new map.)

The games can be synchronous, or the game can provide artifacts (such as screen shots of solutions, awards, or scores) that a student can share in a community.

The game may require stories for contexts. Easter eggs may be included to increase the value of community.

H) Replay with a Focus on Different Approaches to Win (5%)

Encourage players to replay the same levels over again, but try new approaches. Levels should be available for replaying after they have been won, and open-ended challenge levels should be available after the player is done with a story mode.

This may use explicit “trophies” or “achievements” to be given for the successful application of new approaches.

Examples of Achievements from the iPhone game Plants vs. Zombies.

I) Rigorous Assessment (15%)

Finally, present the player with rigorous challenges to solve. This part of the program may use a traditional presentation of material that lines up with the destination application, such as in a test or real world problem. This can serve to "prove" that the player has really learned something of value. Here, as well, there may be less ability for users to come up with unique solutions, and instead find the one correct answer.

These ideas have been taken from my (2.5 pound, almost 600 page) industry textbook: The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games - How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created In the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google (Wiley, 2009), as well as its companion book, Building Sims the Clark Aldrich Way, currently in draft version and available for free here.

InfoTrak: Clark Aldrich Interview on Unschooling Rules

2011-05-27T10:21:00.005-04:00

InfoTrak: Unschooling Rules

Education reform expert Clark Aldrich, author of Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education explained why schools are very resistant to change and are stuck in 19th century modes of education. He talked about critical skills that are seldom taught in high schools and why he believes that testing and homework don’t work. He talked about the innovative methods of education he found among home schooling families, and how those principles could be applied to public school settings.

http://www.talkzone.pairsite.com/uploads/audio/infotrak110513b.mp3

See source here: http://www.talkzone.pairsite.com/episodes/199/infotrak051311.html

What has Changed 03 - Students are Less Tolerant of Stretches of Boredom

2011-05-22T08:42:00.015-04:00

This is part of a series of posts highlighting what has changed from 20th century education making a new education manifesto necessary.

Students today need more personalized and customized feedback, delivered more often, to stay engaged, and are less tolerant of stretches of boredom. Visual, social, and kinesthetic engagement are craved.

Said another way, students have greater attention span for activities that meet their needs and less for activities that do not. Put in a positive light, where students are not engaged, they will more quickly and comprehensively create new visual, social, and kinesthetic activities to engage themselves that compete directly with the goals of the structured educational experience.

There are many reasons for this. And while the people with a vested interest in the old way of doing things may find this a moral failing, marketplaces, including news and popular media, without the luxury of complaining have instead adapted.

This shift has rendered ineffective the traditional reliance on lectures and books (although many school programs now over-use drugs and the emotion of fear to temporary mask the symptoms).

Unschooling Rules now at Barnes & Noble Stores

2011-05-21T20:55:00.008-04:00

Barnes & Noble now has Unschooling Rules in stock in their brick and mortar stores.

Click on the picture and then enter your zip code to check local store availability.

(Unschooling Rules will be featured on their "New and Notable" table starting June 1st.)

Most Popular Quotes from Unschooling Rules

2011-05-21T10:11:00.003-04:00

As gathered from Kindle readers, here are the most popular quotes from Unschooling Rules:

"The bloating of most curricula comes from a simple flaw. Each generation believes that what they love the next generation needs."

"Each child has a spark of genius waiting to be discovered, ignited, and fed. And the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world. The jobs for the future are no longer Manager, Director, or Analyst, but Entrepreneur, Creator, and even Revolutionary."

"There are two reasons to learn something: either because you need it or because you love it."

"All people unschool to learn most of their knowledge during most of their lives. The only variables are how well do they do it, and when do they start."

"Building can be done with computer code or lumber or ingredients or fabric. And building is the opposite of consuming, which is done with movies, textbooks, restaurant meals, most video games, or lectures."

"We heard the call that children should “learn to do” and “learn to be” through exposure to real-world projects, and that this growth would inspire them to “learn to know” even more."

"Any structure that does not embrace the chaotic diversity of talents is doomed to a lower common denominator approach. Ultimately, along the way that approach creates a corrupt moral framework around temporary abilities measured by incomplete short-term standards."

What has Changed 02 - New Masters Programs Have Gotten Great, Virtual, and Disintermediating

2011-05-20T10:35:00.022-04:00

If you completed college, no employer cares about high school. Likewise, if you completed a Masters programs, no employer cares about college.

A new generation of Masters-granting institutions (increasingly virtual, increasingly using cutting edge and innovative technology, with students of all ages, and both practical and theoretical) are disintermediating the lock-step and self-justifying traditional educational model that is prevalent today (Go to first grade in order to prepare for second grade. Go to high school in order to prepare for college.).

While many commentators inaccurately associate any new programs with some of the first generation online diploma-mills, these new Masters programs are instead role-modeled by such award-winning institutions as:

Full Sail Education Media and Design (see their Facebook page here) and
Acton MBA

These programs, so different from each other, are consistently ranked better than 95% of their traditional peers. They are run by leaders who care passionately about their education mission, rather than by administrators. Meanwhile, many traditional educational institutions are still trying to figure out if they should attack them head-on or emulate them completely.

The practical and psychological impact on most students is still nascent. But K-12 schools are focused on delivering standardized content; undergraduate colleges enjoy having the aura of inevitability and prestige while passing the challenge of being useful onto graduate schools. Both are courting irrelevancy. And in the next decade, the role of this dynamic Masters segment "end game" in freeing up children from the marketing pitch of "the-one-path-to-success" will be utterly transformational.

To some, it may seem odd that the schools that are the most virtual, new, diversely attended, competitive, relevant, accountable to the outside world, and optional are the best. To me, this seems inevitable.

What has Changed 01 - Content is Free and Fluid

2011-05-20T10:10:00.017-04:00

Things work until they don't. We need a new manifesto for education. Why? What has changed existentially over the last ten years? Why does education in the 21st Century need to be different than education in the 20th Century?

Reason 01: Most content is now free. Almost all content is fluid.

Nothing changes the education model more than the changes in content itself. There are three pieces to this:

1) Traditional content is free. The traditional content taught in K-12 (arguably the justification for schools) is getting asymptotically closer to free.

95% of the content in school libraries has lost all of its value in the last decade. All traditional K-12 curricula and textbooks and tests will be free (and freely available) in the next ten years. Undergraduate level material will follow about five years later. Given the increasing superiority of self-directed study, the structure of classes as a content delivery mechanism has become a net negative rather than a net positive for most people in most subjects.

2) New content is fluid: There is new content that has significant value. This currently makes up about 5% of a K-8, 10% of 9-12, 15% of undergraduate, and 30% of graduate work. But this content can be delivered all over the world at the speed of light. It is portable and increasingly accessible through a variety of outlets and funding mechanisms. Again, in the era of search engines and social media, the ability of schools to identify and present the best new content is now less effective than individuals.

3) Next-generation content is still under-used: As anyone who plays computer games or uses Facebook knows, there is a market need for new types of experiential educational content that can't be created using a word processor. But schools are generally holdouts, not innovators and leaders, in these critical areas of Learning to Do and Learning to Be.

The best way to prepare for a job and career is to start doing it

2011-05-19T18:14:00.003-04:00

Interested in being a writer? Then write blogs or books. How about a engineer? Build things to meet purposes. Scientist? Conduct experiments to glean unique insights. Movie director? Find the video record button on the cell phone or camera.

Graduation shouldn't demark the mass transition from one expensive school to another. Real graduations are the celebration of the personal transition from incompetent to valued, anonymous to cited, and unpaid to paid. Through technology, the barriers to entry for each phase will continue to get lower.

Getting money to do what you love is a primary goal of life anyway. It is never to early to start.

Places to Learn

2011-05-19T08:36:00.002-04:00

Podcast of Circle of Change Radio Interview

2011-05-17T08:58:00.008-04:00

I was lucky enough to be interviewed on Zara Larsen's great Circle of Change radio show. If you want to hear it, click on the logo below to play the MP3 file. (The interview is 21 minutes and starts about 40 seconds in.)

Nothing can be learned through standardized crafts

2011-05-10T07:10:00.000-04:00

A student cannot learn about the origins of Thanksgiving through making pilgram hats and macaroni necklaces. China cannot be better understood through making a paper mache panda bear (a real eighth grade assignment at a local middle school). No insight into Italy can be gleaned through cooking spaghetti. Construction paper snowflakes are not educational. Pipe cleaners and popsickle sticks do not shed light on anything.

Parents in the system are trapped by this busy work. They have to praise them as artifacts of their childrens' hands. But even given that, a note to principals: endless walls of identical standardized caterpillar art projects on display for parents may be pushing this manipulation - it does not establish your school as a hotbed incubator for future naturalists or artists - it is just creepy.

While experiments, physical projects, and self-directed creations and expressions of self are critical, standardized crafts are, well, not.

It is up to you to decide into which category high school chemistry falls.

Can the philosophies of home-schooling and entrepreneurism resolve the cold-war between school and business cultures?

2011-05-09T08:35:00.044-04:00

One may be amused by the dysfunctional relationship between school cultures and business cultures. Or terrified.

Arguably, the school community hates businesses. And needs them.

And equally likely, the business community hates schools. And needs them.

Schools think of businesses as over-valued, greedy, short sighted, Machiavellian strip-miners trying to deliver as little as possible for as much as possible. Even Harvard Business School professors with very profitable consulting contracts with large corporations have to culturally downplay the filthy lucre at the same time they aggressively pursue it.

Schools seem to have such disdain for businesses that even the hint that a skill may be useful in a business context turns off most of an academic audience. Take project management. If I ever mention "project management" to most school administrators as a useful thing to know by a student graduating from high school or college, I get a sneer with a statement along the lines of, "that is a vocational skill."

(When I am speaking to an audience of academics, I have discovered a loophole, however. I say it as, "Imagine that someone in a non-profit organization is tasked with distributing malaria vaccines. What skills do they they need?" If I carefully set it up in these terms, then they are receptive.)

As an aside, government and foundation grants have become increasingly useful tools for schools to get significant extra money without having to look businesses in the eye. And grant-delivering bodies, such as The Gates Foundation, tend to use academics almost exclusively both to bestow and receive grants (an arrangement that is not only inefficient, but actually works against the productive evolution of schools).

And businesses seem to hate schools. The business community views schools as sloppy and expensive parasitic institutions governed by pseudo-science and extremist philosophies that would fail if not propped up by an endless supply of new hosts. CEOs, who have no shame in getting tens of millions of dollars for their own personal annual compensation, bitterly complain about any teacher and administrative salaries beyond monk levels. Business negotiates with town to pay as little taxes as possible, while complaining about the readiness of graduating students, apparently seeing no connection.

The business community believes that schools ought to create a pipeline for their HR departments, while academics seem more intent on figuring out how businesses can better give resources to schools.

In this area as well, unschooling may shed some light. There is emerging a congruence between home-schoolers and entrepreneurs. They each rely on open-source technologies, have to quickly learn new pragmatic skills (from, yes, project management to Twitter), are quick to adapt, and are highly sensitive to their communities. With neither crippling infrastructure nor administrative burdens, and without a cash crop or customer base from which to draw, but with the raw responsibility for success, both soon become hungry and smart. They learn not just "what to know," but also "what to do," and "who to be."

Emulating the curricula and philosophies of this productive alignment should be something that both traditional schools and businesses seek as not just common ground between them, but also an internal survival and growth strategy.

Or, and perhaps more likely, home-schooling/entrepreneurism may unite the two simply by becoming the common enemy of both.

For the entire month of May, the eBook of 'Unschooling Rules" is on sale for just 99 cents.

2011-05-01T21:34:00.011-04:00

Good news! For all of this month, the eBook version of Unschooling Rules is on sale for just 99 cents! This includes Amazon's Kindle version. It will return to its normal price in June.

This is in response to the incredibly positive reaction the book has gotten so far, including in homeschooling communities and schools across the country, and even the White House!

So thank you everyone for the kind reviews, support, buzz, and emails, and I hope this sale makes the book even more accessible to anyone interested in the future of education.

Home- and Unschooling are not theoretical reforms; they are real, large, and growing movements

2011-04-29T08:07:00.049-04:00

It was a lot of fun and a real honor to be interviewed on Cultures Shocks for today's show (counter-programming to the slightly more popular Royal Wedding!). The last question by Barry Lynn was especially interesting. It was essentially a variation of, "Gee, Clark, we have been talking for an hour, and your ideas sound fine enough. They pass the sniff test. But I have seen and heard a lot of smarter people saying more interesting things about education reform for decades, and they have all failed. No matter what you say, I would bet good money that your ideas won't have much impact either."

I mumbled through some answer. But I now realize that I had bought into the assumptions of his question and I missed bringing up the real point.

The ideas in the book 'Unschooling Rules' are not theoretical. These are not nascent theories that have been used on small pilots and studied by Harvard or M.I.T. grad students. I am not in the process of begging for funding from Ph.D. controlled-foundations, school principals, or other gate-keepers to roll them out to larger sample groups as part of some quixotic tenure-securing portfolio. (And, of course, these ideas certainly aren't "mine.")

Home- and unschooling is happening now. Over a million students already home school. And the number is growing.

Unschooling Rules is no more aspirational today than online shopping. For more and more families, it is simply their reality. Many of our future scientific, business, artistic, political, and religious leaders will not have passed through today's classrooms.

As much as school administrators and those in the academic Ph.d. guild would love to be in the position of evaluating the home schooling movement and judging them (much as IBM would have loved to judge Microsoft, or Microsoft to judge Google, or Google to judge Facebook), their permission is not necessary. Rather, truly caring schools and parents will instead work to learn themselves from homeschoolers and unschoolers to get new ideas. That is the point of the book.

We are entering a new world where families do have real choices. Homeschooling and unschooling will reform schools because it is the first ever school reform that doesn't rely on schools reforming.

Places to Learn

2011-04-29T08:03:00.002-04:00

The Need for a Good Teachers' Strike

2011-04-26T08:17:00.033-04:00

Imagine that you became Governor, and you knew absolutely that in two years, there would be a massive, state-wide teachers' strike that would drag on for at least a few months. What would you do to prepare for it?

You would see how many other places could take kids, including summer camps, libraries, museums, churches, colleges, programs such as 4-H, and community centers.
You would not worry about classes organized strictly by age, but think more in terms of communities, and perhaps interests.
You would examine current curricula, and rethink what was critically necessary to teach. For those essential classes, you would post necessary support material online.
You would enable greater access to virtual school programs.
You would develop and organize the tutor community. And you would look for volunteers.
You would re-examine and modernize work-at-home policies, and encourage corporations to share best practices.
You would think about how to put students into self-study, project-based approaches where ever possible. Where kids were passionate, such as in chemistry or math, you would provide access to help and tools, but mostly get out of their way.
You would rely on parents to be the organizers and guides of their children's education, as well as the children themselves.

Second question. What if you became Governor, and you wanted to reform education, lowering the cost and increasing the value and the authenticity? What would you do to prepare for it? Probably the same things.

Political leaders act to avoid teachers' strikes, as they understand that it could rock an economy. That is why political leaders either over-capitulate to, or now are trying to eradicate, teachers' unions. Both approaches, in my mind, make the situation worse by entrenching the current mono-culture. This may be akin to over-zealous forest fighters putting out every spark, but in the process creating a backlog of deadwood and destroying the natural process of death and rebirth.

Politicians fear teachers' strikes. And so should teachers' unions. But ironically, what we need are some good, long, disruptive teachers' strikes. It may be the best hope for education. And the economy.

Two Decade-Long Study Shows 64% of Everything Taught in Schools to Be Wasted; Bigger Savings Opportunity than Health Care (Satire)

2011-04-25T06:33:00.006-04:00

SATIRE!

A comprehensive, 22-year study of the United States education system found that 64% of everything taught and tested was wasted. The content categorized as "wasted" was either "immediately forgotten" or "never used." Meanwhile, content was categorized as "useful" if it either helped "eventually improve a student's quality of life" or "lead a student to be a better steward of family or community."

Broadly, the subject of "Math" topped the "useful" list. It did very well through eighth grade, according to the report, averaging at around 88% useful. Then, once "geometry" and "calculus" were introduced, the percentage dropped precipitously to around 12%. Writing also did very well initially, but also dropped with "poetry" and "analysis of classics."

"It is important to realize that this study only measured what was in the curricula, not what the students actually learned," said one superintendent. "We educators take a broader perspective, and look at the development of the entire child. For example, we view the school bus ride as a critical part of social adaption, and necessary for the complete student experience."

"We were very disappointed in the methodology," agreed the CEO of one standardized test producer. "Just look at page 53. Advanced biology was only considered as it impacted a student's eventual health and scientific accomplishments. The study did not measure the inherent intellectual curiosity demonstrated by high school students in their pursuit of biological excellence for its own sake, nor for advantages of mastering facts about biology as a competitive differentiator in applying to colleges."

Still, others see an upside in the findings. "This means that there is a huge opportunity," said one Governor, "to reduce the school budgets of my state by about 50% and not impact the quality of education. This represents a saving of hundreds of millions of dollars."

The authors of the report agreed. They cited their conclusions, noting, "This is a bigger opportunity in terms of re-allocating national resources than health care. By a factor of ten."

The financial savings may be controversial however. One parent commented, "The study misses the point. I need to have my four children out of the house most of the day." Many other parents surveyed agreed, for reasons ranging such as "professional development" and "income generating." Many economists agree that they cost effective "day caring" of all kids, regardless of what is taught, allows for both more earning and spending that positively impacts the GDP. "We could be teaching kids about Beethoven and Egyptian history all day, and as long as we do it relatively cheaply, the economic return is significant."

The Provost of a major private university also added, "the report misses the tone of the country right now. Parents want their children spending more time in school, not less. And politicians want to be seen as pro-education. If people believe that longer school days now will lead to greater economic success in the future, we should meet this market requirement."

A principal added, "Spending money on education makes people feel better - this is comfort spending in a time of economic stress, especially if what is spent is community money. Not every parent can afford a nice home, but everyone can lobby hard to build a comprehensive school campus, where their children spend more of their time anyway."

The President, when asked, took a more moderated approach. "I don't see getting rid of two thirds of all school programs. That is just not going to happen. Instead, we must aggressively shift the curricula, from having students sitting in classroom learning Roman history to have students instead sitting in classrooms learning about applications of advanced technology. I will be creating a panel to make recommendations how to best make this transition. But," the President cautioned, "these will only be recommendations. It is ultimately up to the schools themselves to best decide what and how students need to learn."

Obama quoted 'Unschooling Rules' saying standardized tests "too punitive." Here's what he and I meant.

2011-04-21T09:34:00.003-04:00

President Obama has embraced many of the Unschooling Rules in his recent policy shifts on education. (A mutual connection sent the President a copy.)

A common headline from the speech quoted Obama's statement, "standardized tests are too punitive." Most people did not understand this connection. As the author of the original text, let me explain.

Obama connected two of the 55 Unschooling Rules with that statement.

The first was, Rule #45: Tests don't work. Get over it. Move on. This rule states that our desire to have universal, comparable, and fair metrics from which to evaluate students and teachers, and even hold both parties accountable, overwhelms the reality that the tests don't measure much of value. We might as well be measuring juggling. Further, these standardized tests have subverted the learning process.

But the phrase "punitive" is what confused a lot of journalists and pundits. I agree with the comment, but he didn't explain the path, so let me go back to my source material. Here is the quote from my book (I added italics and an underline in the relevant section).

Rule #26: Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor.

Look at the process by which children learn to swim:
First, children are introduced to the body of water. Once children get comfortable in the water itself, they naturally start to play. Finally, the children begin to test themselves through increasingly rigorous rules and specific challenges. These exercises force them to hone skills they can transfer to other bodies of water.
Children move effortlessly from exploration and free roam to structured but simple games to taking on rigorous challenges.
First, imagine how stunted and crippled and punitive the learning process would be without the exploration and play phases.
Second, imagine how the first two phases would be implemented in a traditional state-run industrial school—with tests and metrics and “teacher and student accountability.”

I believe seeing the thought in its original context makes more sense, and hopefully is more relevant. Here is an example of non-punitive learning that is also much more effective.

Other rules Obama cited included:

Rule 1: Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know.
Rule 3: Learn something because you need it or because you love it.
Rule 8: What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom.
Rule 12: Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests.
Rule 33: In education, customization is important like air is important.
Rule 36: Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are.
Rule 43: [Parents...] Avoid "the drop off."

Again, I am thrilled and honored that my book Unschooling Rules is providing a counter-balance to the broken ideas of longer class days, more standardization, and more testing. I hope this original context for the term "punitive" makes Obama's statement more clear and more powerful.

Five things that parents of school children can do to add a bit of unschooling to their curricula

2011-04-18T10:56:00.000-04:00

Not every family is going to homeschool or unschool. But there are plenty of ideas to add some authenticity and self-directed learning to any student's experience.

Create portfolios of children's deepest interests and accomplishments over the years to augment any transcripts. (#unrules46)
Increase your children's time spent with adult experts who are passionate about what they do. (#unrules44) Be out of site, but do this without "dropping off" your children and transferring responsibility at least initially.
Take your children on short family trips, even if it upsets the schools. (#unrules36)
Include meaningful work into every week. Don't let the abundance of papers due and tests get in the way of helping your children actually help other people. (#unrules13)
Encourage play in areas of interest (#unrules26). Allow children to pursue passions, even when it gets in the way of doing homework. Be prepared to fudge a sick day for both parent and child to indulge areas of deep passion (#unrules37).

#unrules10: Animals are better than books about animals.

2011-04-15T06:09:00.001-04:00

Seven places where schools can add some Unschooling Rules to their curricula

2011-04-14T08:18:00.003-04:00

The Obama Administration is shifting education policy towards the Unschooling Rules. So while school systems may not be able to embrace all of the Unschooling Rules at once, here are seven places they can start.

Designate one or two week nights a week as "no homework" nights. (#unrules29) This will help students learn more, not less.
Document students through portfolios as much as transcripts.
Reduce the overall addiction to "forced classes." Decrease the number of graded classes to around 50%, of the most "need to know" topics such as math and written composition. Increase the number of the electives, cross-age, that are ungraded and even uncredited. Challenge teachers to draw and engage students using techniques other than coercion (#unrules24) and threats. World class mathematicians are going to born of passion and volunteerism, not more standardized tests.
Rethink food in schools. Use food as the first place to reintroduce authenticity into schools (#unrules15). Realize how a school treats food is very similar to how they treat educational content.
Actively enable internships. Use microcosms wherever possible.
Give families as much choice as possible in as many areas of schools. Everyone needs to be on the same page that it is families, not schools, that are responsible for a child's future. Schools that try to be responsible for a child's long-term future, and thus disintermediate parents, are doing everyone a grave disservice.
View K-12 as the place to create visionary entrepreneurs, not proto-college students.

Schools: What if we are at a false peak?

2011-04-13T17:53:00.000-04:00

Schools, despite their differences, are governed by similar rules. For example, the system of school:

Is framed by parents dropping off children who are organized into groups of students, and
Heavily uses lectures, text books, papers, and tests.

There is a general feeling that we, as a nation and perhaps as a planet, need to do better at education. It is currently not delivering the results we want, and the cost is astronomical.

Finally, we currently have a lot of people, very smart and altruistic, working really hard to improve the system. But there is also a feeling of futility. Arguably people have been trying to improve schools for the last 50 years or more, and arguably those people have suffered epic failure.

Given that, one has to wonder, what if the system of schools is in a false peak? What if trying to improve a few metrics like school hours or teacher training by 5% isn't going to do anything meaningful?

What if, in order for schools to become significantly higher performing, we have to significantly back away from what we currently do? This becomes a challenge to our imagination.

If true, the first step of improving the system of school is that of deconstruction. We have to make explicit the current assumptions in order to reexamine them and make sure they are still valid.

That's where I hope Unschooling Rules can be relevant to people who never, ever, ever intend to home school. If you believe that education can be much better than it is today, but that we may very well be on a false peak, then it may be worth listening to the observations of home- and unschoolers about schools and education.

We may find that some of the significant assumptions of today's school are worth re-examining. As many tired hikers have realized, sometimes to go up first means going down.

To gain insight into schools, look at how they treat food.

2011-04-13T09:25:00.001-04:00

One of the first questions I am asked in interviews is, "how did schools get this bad?" How can an industry that is well-funded, well-meaning, and so critical to our national goals end up so utterly dysfunctional, even toxic?

The shortest answer is incredibly simple. Look at how schools treat food.

I first brought up these ideas in my 2003 book, Simulations and the Future of Learning. I wrote the following as a technique to understand schools:

Here is a one-hour exercise. Go to the school at noon and have lunch.

There. You are done.

A one question quiz: Did the students eat well? In far too many situations, the answer is, not at all.

Why does that matter, you may ask? School food is some outsourced function, not a core competency. I disagree. Lunch says far too much about a school.
Students care about food. It is a major theme of conversations and bartering.
Parents care about food.
Food drives short-term performance. Better food means better learning that day.
Food drives long-term health. Better food means healthier people.
Obesity is a national epidemic.
Eating well is a critical habit for gaining control over your life.
Research guides our understanding of food and the effect of food, which changes over time.
Preparing good food is hard.
And nutrition is an apt microcosm for all content. At the deepest, process level, schools handle learning similarly to nutrition. (Page 303-304)

This later was captured in Unschooling Rules 15, "if you care about learning, start with food." As an update to this thinking, see today's The Washington Post's great piece by Jennifer LaRue Huget called School lunch debates heat up. Read it with the following lens. What if a parallel column were describing curricula and methodology rather than food?

First, let me say that we know a lot more about what goes into a healthy meal than we know about educational content. I believe the debates over, say, the role of processed sugar, white flour versus whole wheat, and the value of local foods versus fast food is a lot easier and more scientifically defensible than the arguments on what classes and skills are important to teach and how.

What Ingredients Look Like

Now, look at such issues as the cost/benefit of standardization (think tests, curricula, and text books), as well as what happens when schools "decide" parents are not capable of making choices for their children (both in terms of subsequent parent involvement (hint: goes down) and cost of schools (hint: goes up)). Even putting aside the issue of school's lack of excellence not impeding their tendencies towards expansionism and parental disintermediation, there is a more straight forward realization.

If schools and communities can't agree on strategies for meeting the relatively straight forward challenge of delivering nutritious food, what faith should we have in school systems to successfully deliver the more ambiguous area of content that is actually educational?

(And by the way, as much as everyone likes to attack the various teachers' unions, here is an issue of failure of institutions and communities that has little to do with the unions. It is a leadership problem.)

Jennifer LaRue Huget ends her piece echoing Unschooling Rules by writing:

We also have to consider whether serving nutritionally sound meals at school is itself part of the curriculum; teaching kids what foods are best for their bodies by offering such foods at lunchtime.

Six Toxic Assumptions of Standardized Testing

2011-04-12T08:36:00.031-04:00

When I speak about the material in Unschooling Rules, I almost inevitably get the question, "if you don't believe in standardized testing, how can we possibly evaluate teachers and students?" (#unrules45)

This statement is, fully un-ironically, such a tacit critique of all of school systems that it cannot go unexplored and unpacked.

Just some of the assumptions are:

Families are not/cannot/ should not be able to choose their own path once in school systems. (Many parents today makes more choices about their coffee than their childrens' K-12 education.) So unlike in a free market system or democracy, choice by user is not a relevant tool for determining success.
There are no external, real world metrics to evaluate how well schools and teachers are doing. In fact, the real world is the enemy to a smooth running educational system, putting uncontrollable variables into schools. This then further encourages schools to expand (at massive taxpayer cost, of course) to replace life as much as possible as early as possible and for as long as possible to improve the purity of the test results (http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/edu_assoc_articles/153528.html).
Students are consistent test takers week to week.
School management cannot be trusted to manage.
Students should all learn the same material. There is one way of "winning" for students.
The content in (and process of taking) standardized tests are an accurate and relatively complete microcosm of valuable and valued content.

To embrace testing as the single criterion means almost necessarily rejecting the role of families, rejecting the value of real world experiences, rejecting real world evaluations of success, rejecting school management, and rejecting students' different interests and passions.

Even people in charge of call-centers and sales incentives, two of the most measured business activities out there, are realizing the fallacy of too narrow metrics that drive terrible unintended consequences. Maybe someday our school systems will learn the same thing.

In Dealing with Schools, The First Step is Getting Past Denial and Admitting We Have a Problem

2011-04-10T14:35:00.000-04:00

We, as a society, have to solve this problem that is our school system. This problem extends to all levels across K-16. But we can't honestly deal with schools until we get over our collective denial.

We are in denial about:

How much (all) schools (really) cost.
How poorly schools prepare our children for the productive world.
How guild-like the academic culture is, especially at the PhD level.
How much schools collectively act like expansionistic monopolies, actively growing while restricting our choices.
How much the role of "day care" has become the killer app of schools.
How hard it is to get rid of bad teachers.
How badly the process of deciding what content gets taught is curated.
How influential a few textbook companies and a few standardized test makers really are.
How psychologically damaging the school environment is for about half of the school children.
How ill-equipped schools are to evolve around the rise of the Internet.
How unjustified and harmful the requirement of college admissions is in the school process, and a college degree is in the hiring process.
The degree to which the people who are paid to run schools are set up to be bureaucrats, not leaders, and the problems that causes.
How we promote the students that best "game" the system, rather than the smartest or most capable.
What motivates most teachers, and how manipulative teachers have to be.
How inappropriate any school's promise of taking over a parent's responsibility for childhood education actually is.

Then, we are in denial about how to fix schools. Our creativity deficit in this area is staggering. We can't tweak our schools to produce world-class education. It will take more leadership than we think.

And once we get past denial, the next step is anger.

Places to Learn

2011-04-09T01:24:00.000-04:00

Places to Learn

2011-04-07T08:50:00.000-04:00

The World Anti-Doping Agency's Play True Challenge. Click on the picture to go to their site and play it.

Three insurmountable problems with the structure of schools

2011-04-04T10:05:00.018-04:00

Schools, parents, and politicians are used to tinkering with the current system. But there are a few "show-stoppers."

Sitting in classrooms, writing papers, and taking tests are simply really bad models for developing children.
Most valued and empowering "learning to do" skills, such as leadership and innovation, fall through the cracks in traditional schools, where development is random at best. Meanwhile, developing "learning to know" skills and providing access to content in general have shifted over the last ten years of Internet growth from being the most useful role of schools to the least.
Students become world-class in an area, be it chemistry or architecture, by pursuing their passions, gifts, inspirations, and role-models at ever higher levels of rigor, and then filling in critical holes, rather than spending all of their time trying t0 follow a standardized, national curricula.

As long as schools fight these basic rules, they are stuck in cycle of doing things increasingly well that perhaps should not be done at all.

Places to Learn

2011-04-01T05:42:00.000-04:00

President Obama shifts, embraces Unschooling Rules ideas

2011-03-31T08:01:00.016-04:00

Meeting with students, parents, and teachers during a town hall in Washington, President Barack Obama said Monday that, "Too much testing makes education boring for kids. Students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results."

The Obama Administration is beginning a significant shift in its education policies to embrace many Unschooling Rules such as the idea that standardized testing is NOT an effective way to either drive or measure a child's success. They are also realizing that, rather than life enriching skills, what students are learning in the classroom is how to be students in a classroom.

President Obama echoed many of the other 55 rules, including the ideas that students should focus their time on studying subjects they need or love, learning to do is as critical as learning to know, and knowledge should be expanded through real world experiences, not just books or pictures.

Obama's town hall meeting is timely, as his administration is making steps towards education reform, including a push for the "Dream Act" and a rewrite of the "No Child Left Behind Act" before the start of the 2011 school year.

Places to Learn

2011-03-25T07:53:00.000-04:00

Why we cram for tests

2011-03-24T09:30:00.018-04:00

Throughout our academic lives, we are berated for cramming for tests. But we do it, deliberately, for a very specific reason.

Our memory is dependent on emotions. Simply put, where emotions are involved, our memory works; where no emotions are involved, our memory does not work.

The information we are exposed to in an emotional vacuum, such as if we hear it in a typical classroom or read it in a traditional text book, neurologically doesn't stick. So the behavior we have adapted is to hack our brain through the process of a) mindlessly taking notes of facts we think are going to be needed to learned, and then b) waiting until there is genuine terror at the specter of tomorrow's test, for which we are unprepared, to use that emotion to gain even 24 hours of neurological stickiness.

This hack works, as much as it often helps us get decent grades. Teachers who want "their" students to do well in standardized tests are well served, at least in a Machiavellian sense, to ratchet up the fear factor. But it has at least two consequences.

First, facts learned through this technique have only a very short half-life. As I wrote in "The Complete Guide to Simulation and Serious Games," in a comparison to learning things more experientially and aspirationally:

Hence students remember riding a bike forever, while forgetting what year the Magna Carta was signed five seconds before [or five second after] they need to write it on the test.

The second consequence is even more grim. Many people have emotional aftershocks - similar to low-grade post traumatic stress syndrome - associated with their academic experience/childhood for the rest of their lives. Further the memories are tainted with guilt at not having been better students.

The emotional ranges of aspiration, including love and need, provides both greater challenge and greater paybacks than the emotional ranges of fear. Test taking is an inevitable tool of any industrial education system. And fear may be the emotional equivalent of the food-additive MSG. But the long-term impact may be at odds with a healthy and productive society, not an enabler of it.

Unions are American. And so are diverse markets. Now let's talk about schools.

2011-03-20T08:54:00.015-04:00

I believe unions are a right of Americans. While one can argue the various successes and failures institutionally of unions over the years, forcing a work environment where unions are not just unused but actually illegal is problematic and draconian. In some cases, the threat of unions keep organizations sane even if they are never formed. (I similarly believe in class-action lawsuits and the right to assemble.)

On the other hand, I believe in rich ecosystems, marketplaces, and a diversity of approaches. These are the counter-balance to strikes. (Diversity is also the counter-balance to price gouging, by the way. And perhaps most importantly, diversity is the anecdote to unproductive practices including the pursuit of useless rituals, abuse of employees, and failures of innovation).

So the underlying problem highlighted by Wisconsin (which will play out all over the country in various forms) is not that of union-busting. The real problem is: in our current system, schools represent a required (and even protected) monopoly both of education providers and economically-necessary day care providers.

The sustainable answer, therefore, is to create the ability for any region to successfully (if inconveniently) weather a teacher strike. This includes:

The availability of programs at libraries, museums, traditional summer camps, youth groups, church groups, clubs and community centers, 4H, even sports teams, which have to be politically and culturally independent of schools.
The ability for more parents to work at home.
A rich network of home and unschoolers that can pick up some extra students.

The value of this ecosystem goes well beyond absorbing a temporary school shut down, of course. That is just the canary in the coal mine. Where there is a mono-culture, there is vulnerability. It is only through a richness of options that we can not only treat each other fairly, but unleash the imagination that is an enduring strength and engine of success of the United States.

Places to Learn

2011-03-18T18:54:00.003-04:00

Does the inherent impossibility of education, training, and other formal and institutional learning processes drive all of those involved insane?

2011-03-15T09:23:00.002-04:00

Albert Camus famously asked, does life have meaning, and if not, should he kill himself? Here's a similar question I was pondering while in a meeting the other day. Does the inherent impossibility of traditional education, training, and other formal learning processes drive insane all of those involved for too long?

Here are some of the problems facing traditional educators:

It is almost impossible to change the long term behavior for most students in a contained event, no matter how long. There is a predictable decay curve.

The tools available themselves just too blunt for knowledge capture and sharing. PowerPoint? Lectures? Workbooks? Really?

The measurement techniques are too weak and they take too long, and they measure the wrong thing. Quizzes? Surveys? Standardized tests?

It costs too much to deliver useful content. Development costs... Deployment costs... Management costs... Infrastructure costs...

The time to return on investment and evaluation is too long. Months? Years? (For K-12) Decades?

The nature of learning interventions are too discreet from life. Leave life. Learn in foreign context. Return. Forget.

The programs are funded indirectly, so students are seldom customers. How many layers are there between a student in a public school and the people who pay for it? Or a corporate employee?

Students themselves are, of course, incredibly inconsistent. They come in with the full spectrum of background skills and knowledge, interests, and needs.

Formal learning programs have to be both individually specialized, yet integrated across other programs. Google can't even do this.

Programs require a lot of time on the part of the student outside of engaging the learning content. Downloads. Passwords. Buildings. Buses. Food. Lock down drills.

As a result of deploying classrooms, do people involved in formal learning programs go batty? Do they get paranoid, or turn into hucksters, or do they cast customers and sponsors and business leaders as enemies, or quickly burn out, or just focus on building fiefdoms? Or if all actions lead to pain, then is it easier to do nothing? Is the best strategy to tamp down all sense of ambitions and just go along with the flow?

As more funding gets cut from schools (from big steps such as forcing larger class sizes to surgical smaller steps, such as by firing TA's and forcing professors to grade their own papers) and the expectations go up, it is reasonable to assume the entire school system in this country will display the signs of an organizational nervous breakdown - including demonstrating paranoia, malaise, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Or perhaps it already has.

Places to Learn

2011-03-11T19:02:00.001-05:00

The Pathological Quest for Easy Answers in Education Institutions

2011-03-07T10:42:00.000-05:00

Whenever I see a university departments' requirements for innovations, I shake my head. It is as if they are setting themselves to fail.

Here are some of the recent requests from various higher ed leaders I have fielded in just one area, virtual worlds/education simulations:

It has to be virtually free, yet high quality and fully supported.
It has to be "proven" to work, but we will not define what the metrics are in advance that will convince us, nor will they be metrics that existing formal learning programs can meet.
It has to be really, really engaging, but not a game.
It has to have great graphics and sound (and other production values), but run on a seven year old, vanilla computer.
It has to be different than traditional programs, yet deployable without any special skills from the instructor other than traditional classroom management skills. It has to look and feel the same as existing programs but do something different.

All of these requests come from a hope that any revolution will be neat and easy. I don't think it will be.

But maybe it is even bigger than that. Perhaps the biggest reason that innovation doesn't happen is that even the university leadership who say they want change are really just looking for an excuse to do nothing.

Places to Learn

2011-03-04T19:56:00.002-05:00

If Truth in Advertising Was Applied to the School Motto

2011-03-01T16:57:00.006-05:00

One has to appreciate the enthusiasm and even aspiration of the school motto or slogan. Just consider such phrases as: "Where Students Come First"; "Success and Spirit is Our School"; "We Create the Leaders of Tomorrow"; and "Dedicated to Excellence."
One also has to wonder what would happen if truth in advertising was applied to school mottoes. If so, we might see such examples as:

Where the top 5% of our students thrive
We suppress our disdain for parents every day
Teaching the same material the same way for over 100 years
Better than prisons
Our unions get results
Free diagnosis of psychological disorder every year
We'll pretend to like your child the best
In just 12 short years, we will prepare you for an entry level job. The rest is up to you.
Teaching is our only skill
Better test-takers make for better real estate prices
We only fail the students who deserve it
97% asbestos free
More than 10% of each day dedicated to education
Stretching your tax dollars through fiber-free food and recirculated air
From Bell Curves, Excellence (better in Latin)
Better health through stronger cleaning chemicals
Preparing our children for a lifetime of memorization
$12,000 worth of education related services for only $11,749 per student per year
Classrooms: The best use of childhood
Standardizing our processes in accordance with the leading business manufacturing best practices
Every school is the same, because every student is the same

Any others? Please put them in a comment.

How Unschooling Compliant is Unschooling Rules?

2011-02-27T18:04:00.023-05:00

For some dedicated practioners and theorists, there is an approach to childhood education called "Unschooling" that strives to eliminate all forms of coercion from the process (see my post [here] and [here] for some reasons why). This approach can overlap, but is not synonymous, with "homeschooling" which can be seen as a broader umbrella concept that focuses on transferring the primary responsibility for the education of children to their parents, who may or may not then use other organizations to help them out, such as libraries, camps, workbooks, and youth groups.

Given that, there is a valid question about my new book Unschooling Rules from some that basically asks, "How Unschooling compliant is Unschooling Rules?"

My goal in researching and writing Unschooling Rules was not to define a pure take on any one of these alternative approaches (including Unschooling) but to consider the broader (and heretofore under-researched) concept of, "how are people outside of the day-to-day influence of schools framing the challenges of a) identifying the genuine best practices of schools, while b) leaving behind ineffective legacy processes and industrial conceits, and then c) filling in the considerable gaps, as they create a rich education?" The research definitely included a fair share of Unschoolers (big-U) to create a take on what might be called unschooling (little-u).

To highlight the differences, the idea that most betrays the hard-core Unschoolers is included in Unschooling Rules #2: "Focus on Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic." As much as Unschooling Rules strives to eliminate a directive and coercive leadership style and provide numerous alternative approaches (as well as shed away the curricula bloat that is suffocating many traditional schools), it does frame out a few core skills that really have to be developed by the time a child enters the productive world. And if the infinitely more powerful techniques of collaboration, participation, and self-direction are failing, either in a few targeted areas of these core skills for any student, or potentially broadly for some sliver of the population, more directive and coercive techniques (similar to a school approach, for example) should be used. This perspective is consistent with and derived from the majority of people I interviewed that met the criterion of people striving to deconstruct schools and reconstruct education in total, but not those who self-identified with Unschoolng.

It would be unfair of me to attempt to co-opt and possibly undermine an established term. Similarly, it would be tricky to invent new terms to further muddy the waters. So perhaps the best I can say is this book is more about unschooling than Unschooling.

Regardless of definitions, it will be the spectrum of options and real diversity of paths that is our best approach (more effective and actually affordable) for education for the families of any country moving forward. (And note: both Unschooling and Tiger-momming take a lot of parent work.) And, hopefully, by taking the path it does, Unschooling Rules even avoids the hypocrisy of attempting to coerce people to be uncoercive.

Assessment + MMORPG + Real World Challenges: How The MESH will Change Education

2011-02-24T10:03:00.001-05:00

Formal education institutions exist in their current form only because tests and other forms of assessment are so poor. If there was a perfect assessment system, someone could just prove what they know, regardless of how they gained the knowledge. This would render the concepts of four year college and graduate school with their archaic diplomas and transcripts instantly obsolete.

Any theoretically perfect assessment system must be reliable, accurate, and trusted (at least as much as current school systems). As well, it should by adaptive and current. This has caused problems in the past.

But these could be resolved. Imagine the emergence of The MESH.

Enter The MESH

The MESH would be structured similarly to a massively multi-player online role playing game such as World of Warcraft. But rather than killing dragons or aliens, teams would fluidly form to bid on and, if selected, attempt to solve real-world problems. Assuming they were successful, they would get a) points towards a "degree," and b) an increasingly detailed assessment of natural strengths (such as leadership or project management), industry preferences, and weaknesses to be worked on.

How The MESH would work

An organization would submit a real-world problem or challenge to The MESH, including time frame, resources made available, and maximum cash value willing to be paid by the organization for having the problem solved.

Teams would form and compete for the right to work on the challenge. The organization would then pick three teams, using such metrics as past success, final bid cost, and creativity of response. The three selected teams would work on the problem over the course of the time frame independently, and each submit their solution.

The organization would then choose one of the teams, take their solution, and pay for it. The funds would be split between the team (and each of the team members), and The MESH. More importantly, the team would also get assessment credit (that typically mapped directly to the cash paid out by the organization).

The organization would have the option of taking none of the responses, and paying nothing. But this would result in a less good rating of the organization, which may impact the quality of talent the organization could have bid on future projects.

Some Advantages of The MESH

Here are some the advantages of The MESH.

Assessments are "real" and dynamic. They are always current and adaptive.
The MESH rewards not just "Learning to Know" but also "Learning to Be" and "Learning to Do."
The MESH is self-funding.
There is a seamless transition from assessment to real work.
There is not an "all or nothing" cram mentality of current tests. Some people might get "a degree" by working full time for six months, others may earn their points over years or decades.
People currently in the workforce could seamlessly switch careers, even industries.
Institutions and other service providers would pop up or evolve to help people learn critical skills they need to be successful in The MESH.
People would get comfortable with certain other people. Trust and competence would be rewarded.
The MESH would both borrow interface ideas from current games and sims.

There would be full time staff of stewards and curators. They might organize projects to fit into each degree. They could even create (or reuse classic) mini-practice challenges, worth nothing, but good for starting.

There would also be a significant role for philanthropy or other voluntarism. For example, many successful business people would donate their time to be mentors for projects or individuals as well, with some having bias to non-profit or specialized projects. Some mentors might insist that perspective mentees accomplish a certain level before even talking to them.

Conclusion

The future of assessment, and all of education, is The MESH. Social networking sites and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) have made the case. Now the next challenge is to harness this collective power towards real goals, not just more media.

If you send your children to school, you are inhibiting schools reform

2011-02-22T10:08:00.003-05:00

Throughout history, no monopoly (or perhaps more accurately, no Keireitsu) has ever reformed itself. Equally true, no monopoly has ever been reformed by its current customers.

One of the greatest examples of wishful thinking is the adults who pretend they want traditional schools to change significantly, but still send their children to them. You can tell these people by their quotes such as:

I am very active in the PTA.
I have spent a long time looking at different schools before choosing this one. (Or the variation, I/we looked at a lot of towns before choosing this one for their schools.)
I am very direct with my children's teachers and let them know what I really think.
I have regular conversations with the principal, and (s)he agrees with me.
Because of the special relationship I have with my child's teacher, the teacher takes a special interest in my child.
Other teachers/schools are bad, but mine are different.

School teachers and administrators have necessarily developed the survival skills of pretending to listen attentively, pretending to nod in agreement, even pretending to make some changes. But ultimately, they are thinking a variation of the following:

Change is really hard.
If the school is really in need of change, why are you still sending your precious children here?

Again, no monopoly has ever been reformed by its current customers (or even trustees or other big donors, by the way). Monopolies only change if potential customers flock elsewhere. This is not because people in a monopoly are bad people - but they do suffer from a lack of imagination. IBM couldn't imagine Microsoft working. Microsoft couldn't imagine Google working. Google couldn't imagine Facebook working. And slews of customer advisory panels did not ameliorate the problem.

Given that truism, here is a fun game to play. Look at the people on this list:

http://www.whiteboardadvisors.com/news/launch-digital-learning-council

What percentage of these people have children going to traditional (public or private) K-12 schools? What percentage have children going to undergraduate universities? Masters programs? Doctorates? As they collectively pour millions of dollars at the current Keireitsu, does anyone really think they are capable of changing it? There is a reason we have this revolving door of panels and conferences and foundation work, and yet things only get worse.

These academic critics/supporters mean well. They are smart. They are accomplished. They are powerful.

And they are the problem.

Unschooling Rule's Foreword by Jeff Sandefer

2011-02-19T10:30:00.010-05:00

Here is a preview of the Foreword of Unschooling Rule (A featured book in Barnes & Noble stores) by education visionary Jeff Sandefer:

If somewhere deep inside you, you suspect there’s something wrong with America’s educational system, we have something in common.
As a successful entrepreneur and a Socratic teacher for the last twenty years, I’ve spent a lot of time working in and studying our educational systems. From the halls of Harvard Business School and inside my own classroom, to serving on blue-ribbon educational commissions for the Governor of Texas and working on educational reforms with scores of CEOs, I’ve worked inside the belly of the beast of education, where most of us aren’t allowed to go. It’s not a pretty sight.

For years I accepted the paradigm put forward by “Educrats” and worshipped by well-meaning political and business leaders: our K-16 educational system should be organized like a factory, where teachers and administrators busily pour knowledge into the heads of students in order to produce more productive citizens.
Then one day I had a wake-up call. Surprisingly, it didn’t come while working on an educational simulation with Clark or meeting with a reform-minded CEO or the Dean of the Harvard Business School, but with an elementary school teacher. And it all revolved around our own children.
My wife and I suspected it might be time to move our six- and seven-year-old boys from a Montessori preschool to a more traditional educational environment. So I asked for a meeting with one of the best teachers at one of the best private elementary schools in Austin, Texas, and asked: “When should we transition our sons to a more traditional system?”
“As soon as possible,” he replied. Somewhat taken aback, I asked why.
“Because the longer they are in a nontraditional school, the harder it will be for them to sit still and be lectured to all day.”
I pictured our two curious, lively, happy boys chained to a desk for hours on end, and before I could stop myself said, “I don’t blame them.”
The teacher looked at the floor for the longest time. So long that I thought something was wrong.
Then he looked up, with tears in his eyes, and softly said, “I don’t either.”
That moment, that day, I knew our family was finished with traditional education, destined to join Clark’s army of unschoolers. In that instant I saw why the K-16 factory analogy was so flawed, not just conceptually, but morally, too.
Because our two beautiful sons aren’t widgets. And neither are your children...

Get the full Foreword and the call-to-action Afterword by Jeff Sandefer in Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education.

Some Questions and Answers with Clark Aldrich about Unschooling Rules

2011-02-13T18:25:00.028-05:00

What is your book Unschooling Rules about?

The most powerful new ideas about education are coming from the people who have given up on school - the homeschooling and unschooling families. This book, from all-new research, distills 55 core insights that will help anyone responsible for children begin to re-examine and perhaps unlearn our current habits around schools and rediscover authentic education.

For example, some Unschooling Rules insights include:

Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful.
Twenty five critical skills that are seldom taught, tested, or graded in high school.
The ideal class size isn’t thirty, or even fifteen, it’s more like five.
Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are.
Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea.
Tests don’t work. Get over it. Move on.
Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know.
Schools are designed to create both winners and losers.

For whom is this book?

This book is for everyone who wants to make education much better than it is today – teachers, parents, and lawmakers. So Unschooling Rules is for homeschooling families as they try to re-imagine education. But it is also for families who will never be homeschoolers. To meet this goal, it is also accessible, practical, and affordable. It is as much Life’s Little Instruction Book as Waiting for Superman.
It is also for people who are just curious why today’s school activities, both legacy and innovative, always seemed to fall short.

Why did you write this book?

The epic failure of so many good ideas and innovative programs in K-16 education, plus school’s ballooning costs, made me consider if we were simply too far down the wrong track. I began looking at lower and lower level root causes. One, for example, is that education as a process has been over-industrialized including over-standardized. I begin Unschooling Rules with the question, what if a person's diet consisted only of food available in the frozen section of a supermarket? What if we need to return some authenticity and diversity of approaches to the learning experience?

What is your background?

My background is a combination of a more traditional education with developing alternative learning models. I worked at an environment education foundation for years, while I was getting my degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University.

Then, while I worked at Xerox, I was the Governor's appointee to a Joint Committee on Educational Technology. I also was involved with Xerox CEO David Kearn’s (and other CEO's) work on education. I then studies and advised Military, Corporate America, and distant University programs as a Research Director for Gartner.

Then, professionally, I started designing educational simulations and serious games for all types of organizations, including business schools. Over a dozen simulations, a patent, hundreds of speeches, and four books later, I became a recognized world authority in the area. This work in highly interactive education content shed further light on the opportunities and limitations of school curricula and content. Ultimately, my quest for places where evolution was evolving the most quickly led me to home- and unschoolers.

Is this book advocating homeschooling?

This book advocates a diversity of approaches. I would hope that ten years from now there are more alternatives and acceptable approaches to education than there are now.

Is this book anti-school?

It is anti-school as we currently define and structure them. We are suffering from a tremendous lack of imagination. But it is not anti-teacher, principal, student, parent, or legislature. All stakeholders will be needed to productively evolve the models.

Most parents still want their children to go to traditional schools. Is this relevant for them?

Anyone who reads this book will find places to improve, both big and small. Given that, the magnitude and specific "rules" with which to start are up to each person. The best analogy may be to the journey of improving one’s diet, moving from highly processed foods to exploring less processed and increasingly local foods.

For many people, the change will be incremental. Any politicians, parents, and school administrators can make a few improvements a year to an incredible cumulative effect. Different people will see different “low-hanging fruit” in their own lives.

But for some people, the decisions inspired by the thinking in this book may be bigger. Some families may decide to home school or unschool as a result. Some politicians may decide to greatly reduce testing or otherwise increase the options available to children.

Meanwhile, at a national level, there will be some sponsors of new approaches to education, such as from non-profit foundations and government agencies working on improving our nations’ science and math skills, which may realize their own resources are better spent developing new approaches for students outside of the mainstream school system initially, and only after successes there to bring it within a traditional school structure.

How Unschooling Rules is different than other education policy and reform books.

2011-02-10T11:29:00.027-05:00

I sent a copy of Unschooling Rules (unsolicited) to a friend a few days ago, and he received it yesterday.

His emailed me last night to thank me for the copy in his always gracious and charming parlance. What he said was a variation of, "I know you, Clark, to be a smart person. I expect this book to be important and well thought-out but also, given the topic, to be dry, incomprehensible, and esoteric. Although I care about the outcomes, I am an outsider to this conversation. The best I can do is connect you with some other people that I hold in high (or likely higher) regard who also know this topic, and you two can talk policy or test scores or deviations or whatever it is that people like you like to talk about." In short, Unschooling Rules was the tome equivalent of fruitcake, to be passed around with reverence and maybe appreciation but not engagement.

Then, I received a second email from the same friend this morning, about twelve hours later. His tone had completely changed. He had cracked the book and, in fact, read the entire thing. He now had great stories and examples, riffing on many of the points. It was easy to tell that his mind was racing, connecting the book to his own experiences and generating new ideas.

To me, the difference between these two emails spoke volumes. We are all too used to the "genre" of education policy and reform book that are inwardly focused, filled with industry jargon, self-referential case studies, and implied authority and exclusivity. One finishes these books feeling, well, beat up. In short, the books stylistically mirror the problems the authors are purporting to solve. Here, however, my highest hope had been realized: a smart, accomplished person who had thought of himself as tangential to the education conversation realized how much true value and experience he had to contribute.

In paper form, my last book was 2.4 pounds, and Unschooling Rules is just 8 ounces. However, there is a good chance that UR says a lot more.

The Campfire and the Veld

2011-01-22T09:33:00.015-05:00

What follows is an excerpt from The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games, my 2009 500+ page reference for the production of interactive content.
Consider, as you are reading this, that schools are based on not just media, but "campfire" style media, which structurally prevents them from being able to teach any "learning to do" skill such as leadership, project management, even stewardship.

The Campfire and the Veld

One can imagine the time in our pre-Paleolithic history (in a time before consistent writing) when formal learning consisted of two balanced parts:

During the day, people with skills would show others how to do something. “Grab the spear here,” the teacher might say, taking the hands of the apprentice and putting them in the right spots. “Go over there in that veld where you won’t hurt anybody and throw your spear at trees until you can hit the smallest tree every time.”

While at night, people around the campfire might tell of great adventures, including myths and legends. People would share ideas, and help their community expand their thinking. The audience would learn to know something. The best story storytellers would gain bigger audiences and develop their own craft of narrative and suspense.

Then came the technology of writing. And suddenly the balance shifted. Written work scaled well, where the work of one village could impact villages all around it. Communities were able to build on the “open source” written work of the past. The discipline of drama evolved geometrically.

Meanwhile, practicing in the veld didn’t change much. It was still a one-to-one activity.

Since the introduction of the technology of writing, many subsequent discoveries have further augmented the “learning to know”skills. Paintings, theaters, printing presses and books, photographs, schools, universities, sound recordings, movies, scanners, and Google all turned our culture into masters of linear content, enabling both great artists and our own building an exquisite vocabulary around plot devices, antagonists, suspense, and the hero’s journey, just to name a few. We can watch a Spielberg movie, a piece of campfire-style intellectual property that is the recipient of cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment and R&D, and evaluate it at a level of cultural sophistication that would awe citizens from a even a hundred years ago.

And yet, in the learning-to-do area, most of us are little better than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For teaching the simplest skills, we mirror our ancestors (“put your hands here”), and for the more complicated skills, we don’t have a clue. Ask a top business school professor to develop leadership (or any of the big skills) in a student and she will go into campfire mode with PowerPoint slides of grids and graphs, case studies, and so-called inspirational stories.

The advent of flight simulators and computer games, however, has finally introduced technology and examples of media around learning to do that can scale. Today, there is a robust, if nascent, set of “veld” tools that is receiving a significant intellectual investment. Today’s “authors,” often in the form of game and simulation designers, are creating virtual velds where participants can repeatedly practice skills, instead of just hearing about them.

And, correspondingly, an entirely new language is being developed. Gamers now effortlessly talk about simulation content, such as mapping actions to interfaces, and the attributes of units on maps, as well as Sim elements such as end-of-level bosses and what constitutes good or bad level design.

During the next twenty years, the “veld” technologies (the learning-to-do skills built through games and simulations) will successfully challenge the campfire institutions of universities, movies, and books not only for the discretionary time of the community (which we have already seen), but for help in improving their people’s quality of life.

We see glimpses of the latter already available through both serious games, such as Carmen SanDiego, The Oregon Trail, Age of Empires, America’s Army, and Brain Age, and educational simulations, such as flight simulators, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Virtual Leader. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, is the first Shakespeare or Beethoven of this medium.

In other words, people will engage Sims not to play a super-hero, but to actually become more like one. And the balance between learning to do and learning to know may finally be restored.

Excerpt from "The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google" By Clark Aldrich (©2009 Jossey-Bass)