Reading many of these works now, it’s hard not to be struck by how precisely they describe many of the realities of today’s world. It’s inarguable that an education in the United States (and elsewhere) remains vastly unequal among socioeconomic groups and various races and ethnicities. The systems that drove schools years ago prevail and, in many cases, are less and less economically viable by the day. By and large, education is something still organized, controlled, and delivered by the institution; very little agency or autonomy is afforded to the learner over his or her own learning. Decades of reform efforts guided principally by politicians and business-people have failed to enact the types of widespread changes that those Penguin authors and many others felt were needed for schools to serve every learner equally and adequately in preparing him or her for the world that lies ahead.
It’s the “world that lies ahead” that is the focus of this book, part of the Solutions for Modern Learning series. Let us say up front that we in no way assume that these books will match the intellectual heft of those writers in the Penguin series (though we hope to come close). However, we aspire to reignite or perhaps even start some important conversations about change in schools, given the continuing longstanding challenges from decades past as well as the modern contexts of a highly networked, technology-packed, fast-changing world whose future looks less predictable by the minute.
Changes in technology since the early 1990s, and specifically, the Internet, have had an enormous impact on how we communicate, create, and most importantly, learn. Nowhere have those effects been felt more acutely than with our learners, most of whom have never known a world without the Internet. In almost all areas of life, in almost every institution and society, the effects of ubiquitously connected technologies we now carry with us in our backpacks and back pockets have been profound, creating amazing opportunities and complex challenges, both of which have been hard to foresee. In no uncertain terms, the world has changed and continues to change quickly and drastically.
Yet, education has remained fairly steadfast, pushing potentially transformative learning devices and programs to the edges, never allowing them to penetrate to the core of learning in schools. Learning in schools looks, sounds, and feels pretty much like it did in the 1970s, if not in the early 1900s.
Here’s the problem: increasingly, for those who have the benefit of technology devices and access to the Internet, learning outside of school is more profound, relevant, and long lasting than learning inside the classroom. Connected learners of all ages have agency and autonomy that are stripped from them as they enter school. In a learning context, this is no longer the world that schools were built for, and in that light, it’s a pretty good bet that a fundamental redefinition of school is imminent.
While some would like to see schools done away with completely, we believe schools can play a crucially important role in the lives of our youth, the fabric of our communities, and the functioning of our nations. But moving forward, we believe schools can only play these roles if we fully understand and embrace the new contexts that the modern world offers for learning and education. This is not just about equal access to technology and the Internet, although that’s a good start. This is about seeing our purpose and our practice through a different lens that understands the new literacies, skills, and dispositions that students need to flourish in a networked world. Our hope is that the books in the Solutions for Modern Learning series make that lens clearer and more widespread.
Introduction:
The Manila Envelope
A couple of years ago, my mother gave me a large manila envelope full of my old schoolwork, including drawings, writings, and photos from as far back as preschool. I remembered making some projects, but many I didn’t recall. Mostly the envelope contained various administrative records—my report cards, various certificates of achievement, and some ribbons.
My mother, I should note, has always been fastidious about our family’s recordkeeping. She saved almost everything, certainly much more than was in the envelope that she eventually gave to me. She stored boxes and boxes of papers in the basement, and she kept a closet full of scrapbooks that chronicled our family vacations and holidays in detail—my childhood as told through photographs, postcards, and travel brochures.
When my parents divorced, an awful disassembling and re-sorting of these scrapbooks took place, as my mother decided what would be hers to keep, what would be my dad’s, what would be my brother’s, and what would be mine. These were the records of our lives.
That manila envelope my mother gave me was a careful curation of what counts as my education records. They were only a small part of all the schoolwork she’d kept—all those piles of paper that, in a predigital age at least, I’d bring home at the end of every school year (or when commanded to clean out my desk or my locker). The manila envelope didn’t include every worksheet and quiz. My mom only kept, and in turn gave to me, what was meaningful to her. But these items were also a reflection of the meaningful work that I’d done in school. This was one of those moments of clarity: of all the work I’d done in school, only a fraction was meaningful work.
What happens now that schoolwork is increasingly digital (that is, schoolwork that isn’t paperwork but has been digitized as work done directly on computers)? Is there a digital equivalent to my manila envelope? Schoolwork done on computers should prompt other questions too, such as: What counts as student work? Content? Data? What happens to that work, not just at the end of the school year but on a day-to-day basis?
Sadly, despite the great promise of technology to transform how we teach and learn, students continue to do menial, repetitive work in new digital worksheets and in new digital environments. One might not see this work as worth preserving in a virtual manila envelope, but it’s still worth asking what happens to it. Are schools using the data for decision-making purposes? Are ed-tech companies using the data to build and refine their applications and algorithms? Do students or parents have any say about what happens to these data?
Are students able to retain control or retain a copy of their work? That is, once students work on software at school and not on paper, can they obtain their work to take home or store on their own devices? Can they obtain that work in a format that’s actually readable by humans and machines and that’s moveable, storable, and sharable as they or their parents deem fit?
Where Is the Digital Manila Envelope?
A couple of years ago, I met a young girl whose school was piloting a one-to-one iPad program. This girl’s family wasn’t particularly tech oriented, and they didn’t have a computer at home. At the beginning of the year when the school offered them a chance to buy the iPad, they declined. It was expensive. They didn’t see the point. But by the end of the school year, they had changed their minds—the iPad was easy to use, and their daughter loved it. She downloaded several applications and used them to create a multitude of drawings and write several stories. So, the family approached the school about buying the iPad. But it was too late, the school told them. The purchasing opportunity was limited to the beginning of the year. Therefore, the family was required to return the iPad with all of their daughter’s schoolwork, drawings, stories, and data on it. There was no manila envelope—physical or digital—for much of her sixth-grade schoolwork.
The family had no home iTunes account to sync with the girl’s iPad data—that’s what you’re supposed to do to get your data off of an iPad, school issued or otherwise. You sync the data to your personal computer at home. There are a lot of assumptions in this scenario—about access, equipment, and the home.
Even if students do have computers at home, schools often create “dummy” accounts for the devices they issue to students and for the software they require students to use. That means, even if students do have their own computers