Comm. Gist introduces (l-r) Gov. Bob Wise, Allison Powell, Tom Vander Ark

More than 300 teachers, administrators, and education professionals met at Rhode Island College today for the first-ever "Innovation Powered by Technology (IPT) conference, convened by the RI Dept. of Education (RIDE). Attendees from across the state spent six hours hearing from nationally recognized experts, doing deep-dive breakouts, and networking with counterparts from other districts.

One of the goals of the conference was to jumpstart participants' creative thinking as they gear up for a newly announced RIDE IPT Model School Grant program, which will award $470K to a district to redesign a school by leveraging technology.

Commissioner Deborah Gist, who convened the conference, urged the attendees to think big as she kicked off the day. "Try to imagine what schools will look like in just a few years," she said. "I sometimes marvel at sitting and doing [videochats] with my sister and think, 'this is something that only used to happen on The Jetsons'. Imagine what's possible."

In what became something of a running metaphor throughout the day, Gist recounted an anecdote about a very bumpy plane flight where the pilot announced to the passengers that they were experiencing "constructive turbulence" — so called because the tail wind was going to bring them to their destination sooner.

It was a theme picked up by one of the first panelists as they sketched a big picture of the future. "On the way, it's a white-knuckle ride," said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, adding that the only certain thing was that "each classroom in each school will look different."

One thing that Allison Powell, VP of State and District Services at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) was certain of is that teachers are not going away. "I envision classrooms where kids all have technology, and are able to work at their own pace," she said, adding, "Face-to-face interaction is important; the teacher is key to all this."

Tom Vander Ark, author of Getting Smart, urged attendees to consider the future as a lot closer than might be imagined. "You need to plan today," he said. With prices dropping and the rest of the world leapfrogging America, "You're going to see countries like the Philippines that will flip to tablets. You're going to see whole countries running their education on sub-$100 tabs."

Wise agreed. "The main misconception is that you have a choice. We can't do the same thing any more."

With that burning platform for change established, the second panel tackled options for creative restructuring of schools.

It was all about personalization for Michael Horn, Executive Director of Education at Innosight Institute, co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. "It should be a very intentional shift to personalizing learning for what each student needs." And, he added, "It should be exactly the steps to reach those children who are having the most issues."

Jeff Mao, the learning policy director at the Maine Dept. of Ed talked about the importance of breaking out of our current concepts of the school house. "We need to get beyond Adult Paradigm Paralysis — APP — and leadership is what really makes these things move. It's not a technology program, it's a learning program."

Anthony Kim, founder of Education Elements stressed design thinking. "It's an iterative process, and you need to start by thinking about the end state," he said. "It takes time to get there. You can't expect everyone to be there on day one."

The panelists offered their specific advice to districts approaching the tech grant process. "There are some good models out there. Look at what's going on in other schools, but don't be constrained," said Horn. "If you can't get to 1:1 [ratio of device to student], find some ways to leverage." For Mao, the pre-work was critical. "Build a shared vision across constituencies of where you're going and why," he said. "Make sure you start with solutions and educational goals, and don't start with the hardware." Kim also spotlighted working backward from goals. "Think about what you're preparing students for: college." He suggested designing the kind of school that would provide preparation. "Create that kind of environment."

After the two morning panels, the attendees broke into small topic-focused groups. In Jeff Mao's "Access to Technology," participants peppered Mao with questions about bandwidth, security, and hardware selection. One key takeaway for me was Mao's insight about device multiplication. "It's not if you're going to 1:1, it's when," he said, "But then, you have to start thinking about 2:1 and 3:1." Kids are walking around with phones and iPods, he noted, and it's better to leverage than ignore them.

In the second pre-lunch group, Allison Powell talked about communication, and fielded a series of questions about the best way to engage all stakeholders — including the sometimes-fearful staff members. "You need buy in from everyone," she said, stressing the need to involve groups like guidance counselors, paraprofessionals, and especially the tech guys. "But don't let them dictate," she said.

The group had a working lunch — pasta and salad — as they sat around tables color-coded for "birds of a feather" discussion topics. Then it was time for a series of deep-dive breakouts.

Portsmouth resident Dave Fontaine ran a session on open educational resources, higlighting the free, open-source options available for schools. Two wonderful resources he demonstrated were CK-12 and Curriki.

CK-12 offers "Flexbooks," a free library of peer-reviewed STEM textbooks which can be printed, PDFd, or read online, with many downloadable in a variety of e-reader formats. What makes them "Flex" books is the cool web interface that allows registered users, with just a few clicks, to mix and match chapters to assemble a customized package (Imagine a customized physics text that had a chapter or two of calculus built right in.)

Curriki (a portmanteau of "curriculum" and "wiki") offers educators a read-write environment where they can upload, revise, share, and rate curricular materials, with a search engine that allows educators to filter the collection by grade and subject. And just by signing up, educators can upload and share their materials. "Imagine common plannign time or professional development spent doing open-source curriculum development," said Fontaine. "What we educators have been doing for years is giving away our knowledge. This just adds a tech twist."

In the second session, Tom Vander Ark engaged a small group of attendees in a discussion of the possibilities and challenges of tech innovation. The technologies ranged from simple games and simulations — like those at PhET — to the thick descriptions available to teachers from a student's day-long interactions with "learning objects."

"Think about how much Google knows about you, and compare that to how much we know about our kids," said Vander Ark. "The shift to big data, when we can capture and mine keystroke data and mine that for individual learning patterns will enable customized learning driven by 'smart' learner profiles." He cited New York's School of One as a possible adaptive curriculum model, where students arrive in the morning and find their schedule for the day on LED signboards. Students rotate through six different centers, with their specific experiences programmed by data-driven analysis to meet their needs for that particular day. Imagine a small group with a teacher, said Vander Ark, where the algorithm has determined, "That's the right mode, the right day, with the students prepared for that lesson. That's magic. Smart tools that get teachers and kids together at the right time."

The wide-ranging discussion did not minimize the challenges. The perpetual arms race with cheating, the question of print literacy vs. the digital, and the challenge of local control all came up. And the grip of the local can be hard to shake, said Vander Ark, "But, come September, shame on you if every student in Rhode Island doesn't have access to every AP course and every language. Technologically, you can do that."

And a bit further out, there is the emerging challenge of comparability. When students take many individualized paths to mastery, how can these be aligned so that teachers and administrators can confidently assess progress. "Right now we don't have a good way to compare the results of diferent assessments," said Vander Ark. But he suggested that big data pointed the way. "This is something we're going to have to invent around the Common Core -- how different systems translate. We need a kind of Lexile scale, so that if a kid is in 12 different apps during the day, we can make sense of of it when it lands in the grade book."

The attendees reassembled for a final comment from Commissioner Gist, who acknowledged that the agenda was still very conference-like, and promised that this was only the first iteration of RIDE's vision. "We have big plans for how we move this forward, including future gatherings like this, using technology." After a raffle of door prizes (including a Middletown HS junior who took home an iPad!) the event concluded shortly after 3pm.

You can review the real-time conference Twitter feed here.

Editorial note: Long-time readers will know that I have differed with the Commissioner in the past on issues of funding, but when it comes to technology in our schools, I believe we are in alignment. We had a very nice chat after the conference, and I thanked her for organizing this event, and for her leadership. I think this is critical for our schools and our kids. Thanks to Comm. Gist, organizer Holly Walsh, all the folks at RIDE who worked to make the conference happen, and the hundreds of educators from around the state who gave up their Saturday to push this forward.

Interesting piece in today's NY Times, Airlines Study Alternatives to Jets' Black Boxes, looks at the renewed interest in streaming data or detachable recorders in the wake of the Air France crash. Money quote:

These problems have been discussed for years in the industry. What is different now is the attention being paid to the still-inexplicable loss of Flight 447, the apparent inability to retrieve the boxes from the Yemenia Airways Airbus that crashed into the deep waters of the Indian Ocean off the Comoros Islands and the expectation of air travelers that multimillion-dollar airplanes should have more, not less, technological capability than the average Twitter user.
— via NY Times

This will be an interesting process to follow, since fights over expensive retrofits to the passenger fleet often have to be justified by counting headstones. It's not just loss over deep water (uh, not to put too fine a point on it, controlled flight into buildings...) that affects the current cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and digital flight data recorder (DFDR), and sometimes the most significant moments of a doomed flight are unrecorded or unrecoverable. The National Transportation Safety Board has been asking for better recording tech for years (see their "most wanted" item).

I am loving TwitterLocal, a tiny cross-platform (Adobe AIR) app that lets you filter Twitter in real time by location. I now keep two windows, Twirl and TwitterLocal on the desktop all the time. It's like standing in the agora.

Read more at TwiterLocal

Just in case you're wondering, no, the entire Internet has not been infected, Google's alarming notice in search results notwithstanding.

You can check out the geeky, snarky discussion over at slashdot.

This one's got "Tylenol®" written all over it...

Update: And now, just as quickly as it happened, all is well again. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Glad I got the screenshot when I did...

Update 2: ComputerWorld has the story. From teh Google itself on their blog, who acknowledge an error updating their list of bad sites, but point out that the criteria for the blacklist came from StopBadware.org. StopBadware also posted a damage-control note, which pointedly spells out just what they do for Google.

This just gets better and better.

NYU's Mac classroom, 1987, waiting to be unpacked.

I had seen the "1984" SuperBowl commercial, of course, and had laid hands on that boxy ecru first-generation mouse at Macy's in Herald Square, and I knew, from the very first, that the Macintosh was a game-changer. I had been programming since 1973, when our amazing, crazy high-school math teacher had convinced the school to put in two punched-paper-tape teletypes hooked up to a timeshared PDP-8 somewhere off in the Big City. So I knew computers. Or I thought I did. Until I saw the Mac.

It was love at first sight, and it is hard to remember, now that graphical user interfaces are all around us, what an innovation the bitmapped screen was. How natural it felt to move files around by dragging and dropping. And to paint, with a mouse? Anyone who remembers paint programs from the Apple II (and I have a Polaroid somewhere that I will try to dig up and post to Flickr) was agape with wonder at MacPaint.

And now, it is 25 years later. Last week marked the anniversary of the introduction of the modern computer age. Like the Gutenberg printing press or the Sumerian invention of writing, this was one of the flex points of communication technology. Just as it took 50 years after the invention of printing for someone to come up with the idea of page numbers, it took about the same length of time to evolve a human interface into the power of computing. And from that interface came everything we know today about the Web.

In a very literal sense. The Web came directly out of hypertext research that was being done here in Rhode Island at Brown University, where one of the pioneers of the medium, Prof. George Landow, latched onto the Mac early and with the team at Brown built Intermedia, one of the first hypertext systems. Exclusively for the Mac. At the University of North Carolina, John Smith, Jay David Bolter, and Michael Joyce were doing the same thing with a desktop hypertext tool called Storyspace. For the Mac. And at Apple, Bill Atkinson, who had been one of the key programmers on MacPaint, unloaded HyperCard on the world in 1987. Which was, BTW, the year of the first hypertext conference, and the year I was privileged to be part of a very special group at New York University that started teaching freshman composition using that room full of computers from the top graphic. And we started teaching them how to do hypertext essays. In 1987. On Macintoshes.

It was this yeasty, bubbling environment of graphical goodness, that put the face on the World Wide Web. Which was developed on a NeXT machine, Steve Jobs' summer gig between stints as Apple CEO.

We live in an amazing time. Take a few minutes to look back. Check out MacWorld magazine's coverage of "25 Years of the Mac."