How do we Fix the Outdated Education Model?

Last August, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the #140EDU Conference in New York City. The topic of the discussion was the Alternatives to the Outdated Education Model; the premise of which was that the current education system isn’t broken, but rather completely out of touch with the needs of today’s learners and therefore ineffective. Because of the limited time allowed for the panel, we could only offer general ideals and best practices rather than practical solutions for change. After all, updating the very structure and purpose of education would mean a massive overhaul in a legacy system embedded within U.S. culture – not really something that can be accomplished in a 20 minute panel discussion.

I thought about this experience last night while browsing through a friend’s photo album on Facebook. He’s a bit of a political junkie, which explains why the album was from his trip to the Jimmy Carter Historic Site and Museum located in Plains, Georgia. Among other uber-nerdy shots, one was of a replica of Carter’s sixth grade classroom, circa 1937 under the direction of teacher, Ms. Julia Coleman.

 
 Look past the inkwells, hardwood floors, and dusty chalkboards and you’ll notice something rather profound – the layout is not unlike many of today’s classrooms. Sure, 75 years have brought significant change in technology and ergonomics (I assume those wooden benches were less than comfy), but the essential geography of the classroom has stayed the same. How can we bring about fundamental change when the teacher remains at the head of the class, and students remain isolated in evenly spaced rows?

I know what you’re thinking – My classroom doesn’t look like that! - and you’re probably right. But understand that you are not the norm. To prove my point, I did a quick Google search for “2012 Classroom.” Below is the first classroom picture to come up. Notice any similarities to Carter's childhood stomping grounds?

Much like my brief time as a panelist at #140EDU, I am unable to offer an answer to the problem of our outdated model of education within this meager blog post. Instead, my goal was to use visuals to help better illustrate that despite fancy projectors, cell phones, social networking, etc., we are still doing education wrong. 

How do we fix this?

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Professional Development VS. Personal Development

Last year I made the New Year's resolution to learn how to play piano. I found a quaint music shop that offers lessons, and every Wednesday I wait along with the other students (most being about half my age) in the lobby with lesson books in hand. I don't teach music, but the experience has reminded me what it's like to be the one whose job it is to learn, not to teach.

It's important to always be learning something new. If we forget what it's like to learn, then how can we expect others to learn from us? We hear all the time about professional development, but I'd hope that we are aware of personal development as well.

Can the personal and professional merge? They better, or else you may be in the wrong profession. Take, for example, my most current New Year's resolution. I've always wanted to learn how to create Flash applications, and with the help of my Instructional Technology department I now have a fresh copy of Adobe Flash CS4 Professional installed on my teacher workstation. While – and I'm aware that this is an awfully nerdy thing to admit – learning this is mostly grounded in recreational purposes, I can see Flash-based web apps, games, quizzes, and even iPod Touch apps to be something that could be integrated into my daily class activities. How cool would it be to create my own iPhone app and then host it as a free download to students through iTunes?!

I'm not there yet, but I'm learning. Here is my first Flash project - It's a pickle navigating through a maze. Okay, maybe it's lacking in educational value.

But hey, we all have to start somewhere.

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Building a Website Using Drupal

About 14 years ago, my fledgling garage band entrusted me with the duty of building a website. I registered an account with one of the free hosting providers of the time (either Angelfire or Geocities) and began teaching myself how to code html. I got pretty good at it too. This was in the days before services provided a built-in WYSIWYG editor, so I literally entered every line of code by hand.

Unfortunately for me, html has pretty much gone the way of Latin – it's a dead language. To build a professional site these days you need expertise in php, java script, Ajax, css, and other languages that are far and above simple markup tags. I know just enough about all of these to know I am grossly unprepared to take on a web design task.

Don't ask me why, but I did just that. About 6 months ago a colleague asked me to build a site for her to help market a children's book she planned on publishing. Thinking back to my html glory days, I naively said yes. I opened up my word pad, and got coding.

It didn't take long for me to realize that I simply couldn't accommodate everything she needed – user logins, message boards, checkout carts. Summer vacation came along, and the project reached a quick stasis.

A few months ago I was reading through some posts on Dooce.com and noticed the “Powered by Drupal” note in the footer. This opened my eyes to the incredible power of open source content management systems.

CMSes create a highly customizable online environment that offers the power and flexibility of a professional service provider without the cost or a need for technical coding skills. Drupal seems to be one of the more popular available, but there’s quite a few CMS applications that are free to download and install on your own web server.

Granted, it takes a bit of work to configure your web server and mySQL, but once that is done users can log in to the backend of the system and add content using a WYSIWYG editor. Do you need some tech-savviness? Yeah. But not nearly as much as someone staring at a blank txt file looking to build from scratch. Plus, the drupal.org community is thriving, so troubleshooting is just a quick search away in most cases.

Now that I finished the site for my friend, I can move on to bigger and better things. Like figuring out what I can build with Drupal that will be amazing for my students. Really, the possibilities are endless.

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Blogging Challenge

Have you ever heard of Centralia, Pennsylvania?

It's is a small coal mining town similar to many other small towns across America. The one difference is that Centralia has been on fire since 1962.

There are conflicting stories as to how this happened, but the basic idea is that a fire started in the mines beneath the town and was never extinguished. Rather than live with the dangerous sink holes and toxic gases, residents fled to safer ground. Today, Centralia is a modern day ghost town.


I see blogs like Centralia all the time - sites that were once established and thriving suddenly left derelict by their owners. Do one of these blogs belong to you? If so, here's an open challenge. Log in and post something new. Let's revive some of these abandoned blogs! If you do, post your link in the comments below!

Experts predict Centralia will continue to burn for the next 100 years or so. Let's not wait that long for you to update your blog.

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