KM in Education

Seeds of knowledge at TFA

Teach for America (TFA). the Peace Corps-style program that recruits graduates from the best colleges to teach in educationally underserved schools, continues to provoke controversy as educators analyze the results of a national Mathematica study released last month. A recent Washington Post article concludes that although TFA teachers are shown to be no worse, and perhaps slightly better than other new teachers, TFA alumni are responsible for spawning the creation of innovative school models such as KIPP that are demonstrating dramatic improvement in student achievement.

TFA does not necessarily offer a silver bullet for improving student performance with its TFA teacher corps. It does, however, clearly address the issue of teacher shortage at needy schools. Perhaps even more importantly, it has exposed bright college graduates to the realities of educational inequity. In doing so, the TFA experience has effectively planted strong seeds among TFA graduates, ensuring that their knowledge of educationally underserved schools will serve as a base from which they will launch their careers. And TFA alumni have not disappointed. They are a driving force for many of the successful initiatives targeting educational inequity.

Some of TFA's greatest merits should not be overlooked. It selects talented TFA teachers who absorb the hard lessons of facing underresourced classrooms. Their experiences have helped expand the pool of future leaders and advocates for educational reform who can tap into their firsthand knowledge to generate educational innovation with greater success.

Effective principal preparation

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

This quote from Machiavelli's The Prince perfectly describes a new principal's role in a school. Strong and effective leadership by principals is essential to introducing innovation to schools. And most current principals claim that these leadership skills are gained on the job, not in the classroom.

To develop these necessary leadership skills, many principal training programs now include a residency or internship where principals-in-training spend part of their session at a school, learning 'on the job.' Consider instead the possibility of a simulation exercise that incorporates the lessons learned from many experienced principals. Wouldn't such an experience enable aspiring principals to 'learn by doing' with even more exposure to different scenarios? Principal users would also have the benefit of exploring different approaches in a risk-free environment with the ability to share insights and perspectives from a common experience with other principals.

It is exactly such a project that I undertook to design last year with Albert Angehrn at the Center for Advanced Learning Technologies. Interviews with experienced U.S. teachers and principals helped generate a knowledge base from which to design instructional scenarios that would highlight effective and ineffective ways to lead school transformation. Such a simulation is a great example of how tacit knowledge residing in the heads of experienced principals can be converted and absorbed as tacit knowledge for principals-in-training.

It remains to be seen if principal preparation programs integrate more of these experiential learning activities into their curricula.

Handheld Resources for Educators

I do not know how many classrooms and schools are actually using handhelds, but I suspect it is small and growing, given the number of sites and services I found dedicated to the use of handhelds in education.

If you have any doubts about the range of applications for handhelds, consult 101 Great Educational Uses for your Handheld Computer published by K12 Handhelds.

It's not clear who publishes handheldeducation.com, but it appears to offer unbiased, helpful resources to handheld software, hardware, as well as reviews and other web resources.

The Concord Consortium offers a site dedicated to ubiquitous computing in education, including a comprehensive supplier/vendor index. They also have created a searchable library of online reviews of Palm applications in education. Each review includes a description, a rating, download link, recommended users, and relevant academic subjects. You can learn more about Cooties, one of the more famous applications, enabling students to experience a virus-transfer simulation and in doing so, learn principles of algebra, biology, history, math and statistics.

For the futuristic-minded, IDEO and the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies produced a report defining the DataGotchi, a handheld device designed specifically for education purposes. It includes product requirements and descriptive scenarios.

Additional resources include:

The University of Michigan Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education with its handheld computing site. Their many handheld software applications are now licensed by and available at goknow.

education@PalmOne

The Idea Bank at Palm Education Pioneers

pdaED.com

Handhelds in the Classroom

Handhelds offer portable, cheap, easy access to information. These benefits have propelled handheld devices to become a standard in some organizations, from helping salespeople access their customer's information on Palms to enabling executives to check their e-mail on Blackberries.

I have been curious to learn more about the future and current uses for handhelds in schools and classrooms, as they have far more potential than PC's to become ubiquitous learning devices. I share some findings below.

The Next Generation Mobile Classroom, a project funded by the iCampus alliance between Microsoft Research and MIT, is exploring how mobile devices such as handhelds can help promote learning and interactivity in the classroom of the future. The project's target audience is higher education, but many of the features could also be applied to K-12 classrooms. For example, students can unobtrusively ask questions via a handheld without interrupting the flow of a teacher's class, permitting the teacher to also gauge how well students absorbed the current lesson.

In schools today, students, teachers, and administrators are already using handhelds for a variety of functions. The Intel Innovation in Education initiative provides a good overview of educational uses for handhelds. With these devices, students can collaborate on projects, archive information, or simply manage their personal schedules. Teachers use them to quickly retrieve curriculum standards, notes, and student information while preparing lessons or working with a student. School adminstrators find handhelds useful for easily accessing student data in a meeting or simply sharing information with other school staff.

I will provide a list of resources for handhelds in education in my next posting.

Data-driven decision-making

The amount of data that U.S. businesses collect on each customer has grown enormously over the last decade. It probably helps explain the continued consumer spending, as smart businesses target the most promising customer segment with attractive products and services based on their accumulated knowledge of their customers' life events, daily activities, income, and household habits.

The same trend is in its early stages in U.S. education. School districts are heavily investing in the technological capabilities to aggregate student data. With more data on students' backgrounds, academic performance, and personal development, as well as curriculum and teacher effectiveness, schools will be better equipped to make more informed decisions about how to best help their students, teachers and staff. One day, schools should be able to improve their performance simply because their increased knowledge capabilities will help them identify where and how they can most help each individual student.

On feedback

Depsite the controversy surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act, it should be applauded for creating a feedback loop that did not exist before. Evalution of overall student performance inherently provides feedback on the quality of a school's curriculum and the effectiveness of its teachers, enabling schools to improve their performance by better understanding the strengths and weaknesses in their offerings

It seems that in different areas of the education, feedback has often been neglected. Whether it is education schools surveying their graduates on the relative effectiveness of lessons applied in the field or principals evaluated by their staff and parents, the lack of feedback makes continuous improvement much more difficult. Closing that loop in every process involving teachers, schools, and students will help the education system as a whole make greater and more effective improvements.

Education Niches

Many education organizations today have defined themselves by targeting specific communities. This approach enables them to get to know a customer market and customize their services to the market needs.

Many of these initiatives also want to eventually broaden their impact to students nationwide. This objective invites the question of how these initiatives will disperse their targeted services to the communities that most need them. School models such as KIPP that help educationally underserved, primarily minority communities may not work as well in more diverse, well-educated communities. On the other hand, curriculum developers such as K12 that serves mainly homeschoolers could potentially contribute insights to traditional classroom curriculum development.

How does a principal wade through all the recent innovations to identify those that are most applicable to his/her school? GreatSchools.net offers parents an online guide to schools providing detailed profiles, enabling them to evaluate and identify schools that match their criteria. Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a similar service for superintendents, principals, and teachers. A service that will help school staff identify the most applicable niche models or borrow practices from other niches that match their criteria. Only by empowering school decision-makers across the country to access the innovation and knowledge that is currently being generated, will we be able to truly help education reach the tipping point of change.

The Promise of Wikis

For years collaborative tools have promised to transform the workplace. I recall how privileged my class felt to receive complimentary copies of Lotus Notes as students in Professor Tom Malone's MIT Sloan class. We thought Notes was the wave of the future, just as others have expected Groove, Sharepoint, or other technologies to take off. But none of these tools have come close to changing how we work as much as e-mail has.

Until now.

Wikis may very well become the next technology to change how organizations operate because they offer an easy, cheap, no-nonsense way to capture organizational memory. A wiki, for the uninitiated, is open-source software that allows individuals to create and edit content on a web page. For more context, Bill Ives provides a good introduction to wikis. To get a quick feel for wikis, take a one-minute crash course and then go visit the WikiWikiSandbox to try it out yourself.

Once you recognize the power of the wiki, it's easy to see why trust is frequently mentioned in the same breath as wikis. Wikis will only take off where the culture and process already incorporate an element of trust that can foster collaboration. Ironically, e-mail saturation in organizations has created an opportunity for wikis. Group e-mails or distribution lists assumed to include people who all trust each other can easily be replaced by wikis, with the added advantage of capturing the content history for future reference.

The potential for the application of wikis in education is enormous and is yet to be tapped. It can enable collaborative student projects such as one college seminar project at Bowdoin College. It could also enable facilitation of curriculum design or discussion of best practices across schools. The same could also be said for blogging, but the wiki offers the additional bonus of a collaborative experience for creating a shared product. Whereas blogs ensure the integrity of each voice, wikis arguably promote the integrity of the product at the expense of contributors. It is where the education community trusts it is working toward the same shared objectives that wikis will have the most impact in education.

Managing personal knowledge

Imagine if we could take all the knowledge we come across in a day and store it where it could be easily accessed.

That vision is becoming more real for students as applications such as BrainX offer individuals the possibility of capturing printed or digital content to be retrieved for future review. With BrainX, students can highlight key concepts on a website, in a book, or on a printed document to be stored and organized for later retrieval. The application then helps them review the information and test themselves on the content to prepare for exams.

This form of knowledge organizer is a promising first step toward helping transform personal learning and development with KM. However, there are still many gaps to fill. For example, this particular application does not address tacit knowledge that resides in people's heads or individual experiences. How revolutionary it would be to easily capture and categorize the key concepts from a professor's lecture with the highlights from an associated lab experiment! It also remains to be seen if any application successfully helps students synthesize all the knowledge they accumulate over time and across subjects.

Given the overwhelming amounts of information available today, it would not be surprising if more students move toward some form of personal KM to help them organize their learnings. The more challenging next step for all learners will be to use KM to apply what they are learning.

Cross-Pollination Revisited

Schools could benefit immensely from tapping into not only knowledge resources of other schools, but also those of the community. Through the dedication of committed school administrators or parents, some exceptional public schools have succeeded in identifying and using the full extent of community resources available. Organizations such as DonorsChoose and Adopt-a-Classroom have also established effective ways for classrooms to access communities, but for financial resources.

One article on education philanthropy calculated, that 30 million parents volunteer time at schools that is the equivalent of 3.4 million 40-hour work weeks annually. Imagine how many non-parent community members are willing to donate time and expertise to help schools. It is a huge untapped resource. For example, a local accountant could help a school with its finances, a neighborhood painter could help repaint the school facilities, or retired seniors could help tutor students. Rather than procuring more funding, effectively linking into the community's knowledge and expertise could do more to help schools alleviate budget crunches, build a supportive school community, and ultimately improve student performance.