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[applause]
(Alan) I’m gonna tell a bunch of stories and I at first don’t expect that they’re gonna have any connection at all and then in the end,
I’m gonna try to bring them together.
First story is in 1975 and I am a teacher of biology and chemistry in Roxbury High School in Boston and I find out that
the local subway line which is elevated at the time, is gonna be put underground and the local huge subway terminal bus station called
Dudley Station is auctioning off various store fronts to the community because over the next ten years they're going to dismantle it.
No more investment. So I am probably one of the only teachers in the country who’s ever bid and won for a dollar, I got a barber shop. And
the barber shop, I needed the barber shop because a couple of months before that my roommate, at medical school, had one of my
students arrive in an ambulance, who had never really had any medical care in his life. And he tells me this, and I’m teaching biology and
he says, “You know, you really ought to teach your kids some practical stuff because too many of kids in your neighborhood
there where you are teaching don’t have good medical care, but it’s free. And if they only knew about it, they could, they could
have better wellness. So, see what you can do.” So the barber shop was this great location
in the center of the community and I sent kids out to all the hospitals, all the health centers, they gathered information left and right,
and we turned the barber shop into a health information neighborhood center. After school, kids would sign up, march down, I marched
with them three blocks from the school and we had a blast handing out information to probably thousands of people from our barber shop.
Played music, ran ads and it was just an absolute blast.
That was in 1975. And then I learned from that, that if you give kids involvement in a community along with their schooling, if it goes
hand in hand and you can make meaning out of what they're learning in class, if you have them
involved in the community after class. Years later I am teaching at Lexington High School,
a phenomenally different environment than Roxbury High School and I am given a computer lab and told to invent anything I want, any
computer course that I want at all. At the time, the only thing that they taught was programming, including Pascal, Basic, and Logo
- do you remember those days? The days when all you did was teach programming. At the time, my roommate was a Harvard Business School
Professor who told me, “Don’t teach programming. What you really need to do is imagine that software is coming and the Internet
is coming and what you really need to do is teach critical thinking and problem solving. Not any particular technology because they're
short term.” And so I took his advice and designed a course called Community Problem Solving with Technology, based after the
barber shop. And so all my students were asked to go out in the world and find a real problem to solve first.
Then we'll figure out what technologies you need to learn later. The reverse basically of what we do today. And so one of my students, got to tell
you this one story, she had a disabled friend and in a wheelchair and she found out that there was no yellow pages for handicapped people in
Greater Boston. So she decided her project was going to be similar to the barber shop, organize this massive amount of information.
It turned out to be 97 agencies providing service to the disabled, across Greater Boston and she built a database.
And in '94 I had some business connections and that went online in 1984.
I get a call a couple weeks later from a professor at Boston University Medical School saying that
one of his interns is working at an agency and my student’s database shows up linking all the agencies together online.
They had never seen anything like this and in fact, could he come and meet with my high school student who built the database.
And I said, “Well I’m very busy, it’s the end of the school year”...
And he said, “I don’t want to meet with you, I want to meet with your student." [audience laughter]
And I, I kind of had to take a retake there, yea that was a moment.
And you know how often does a professor call and ask to meet with one of your students. So the guy comes in,
he brings a couple of his master’s students in public health, one of them had experienced the database and they offer her a job.
They want to know, if during the summer, this is spring time, during the summer if she would run a seminar teaching his students
how to design databases for the handicapped.
And they want to take it across Massachusetts and into upstate New York. They want to greatly expand it. They offer her a pretty good salary.
She says she’ll take the job but not the salary, no money, and I’m saying, take the money, take the money. [audience laughter]
And she’s saying, no money. And afterwards, I talk to her and I said, “Why didn’t you take the money?” That was a lot of... and she
needed the money. She said "That’s my project, they’re helping me build on my project, I should be paying them.” So she taught me a lot about
dignity and integrity of work. That if a kid is adding value to the world, using technology to make the world a better place, it’s absolutely
fascinating what they'll do without a grade, without money, just because they own the problem. They identified it, they own it, they
built it, she felt responsible for it. So what I want to do now is go further along in the stories. One of the questions I think is
really important is, are you student’s leaving a legacy? Are they contributing to the world? Are they creating content, creative content,
technical content, any kind of content that adds value? Helps other people learn? Helps build a yellow pages for a database for the
handicapped? There’s just unlimited numbers of real problems that connect all the way across the curriculum.
There’s no limit but the imagination.
So this is her quote on the money. I’m fascinated by Dan Pink’s book Drive. When he analyzes what really motivates people in
almost any organization, it turns out the answer is purpose. Does the individual at work think they have purpose? Does the work have
purpose? Sadly, I have to tell you that a lot of student work in their minds does not have purpose. They don’t own it, they didn’t identify
it, they don’t control it. It’s given to them in largely without purpose. So one of the questions I ask is what is purposeful work?
What does it look like? How do we manage it? How do we grow it? Purpose is everything, again from Dan Pink.
So another story. My daughter, about 2002 - 2003, loves Harry Potter. And she's the one who goes to the store at midnight, dressed up in
character, I got to wait in line and we buy the book. We come home, she’s reading the book in the car. By breakfast, the 750 pages is done
and she wants another one. She came down and says “Daddy, when do you think J.K. Rowling is gonna do another one?” I said,
“Honey I have no influence over J.K. Rowling, I just don’t know.” So she solves that problem by going on to fanfiction.net, she discovers
fanfiction.net. Fanfiction.net, if you don’t know, is an early website where if you want to write in the style of any author, you go for it.
And you publish it and people around the world comment.
So she's reading one chapter after another in the style of J.K. Rowling by kids around the world. Building network, this is before Facebook,
this is before MySpace, before a whole bunch of stuff. My thirteen year old is busy doing all this. And then I said, “Honey you should write one of
these chapters, you're a great writer.” She says, “No daddy I'm a better critic than I am an original writer. I'm just criticizing.”
That’s what she did, she just criticized other people, she loves that. [audience laughter] And...
Then one day she comes down and she says, “Dad I have a great idea. I’m going to give the Golden Cauldron Award.”
I said, “What’s the Golden Cauldron?” She said, “I made that up. I'm gonna put out on Fan Fiction that this award is up for the best
absolute writer honoring the style of J.K. Rowling.” And I said “Well who’s on your committee?
She said, ”I’m the Golden Cauldron, no one’s on the committee, just me.” So she gives the award and I look at the finalists and one of these
is a 13 year old girl who has 10 chapters. And I am fascinated by how she gets better and better and better, the writing just clearly progresses.
So I start showing this in workshops, bet there's some people in the room who've seen me do that.
And one day I am giving a workshop to middle school kids and their teachers and you're not going to believe this...
As I’m showing the work of this chapter, there's a buzz in the middle of the auditorium with these middle school kids and their teachers
The girl is sitting in the room and I don’t know it. I’m showing her work to her and the rest of the faculty. So that’s quite an embarrassing
moment. And I took advantage of it and she came up and did a cameo and explained to the assembled how she gets an account,
how she writes, how she builds networks of other writers and how she promotes, and it was fantastic. Afterwards there was a line
of kids wanting to talk to her about getting a free account in fanfiction.net. The most remarkable part of that story though, is that the teacher, the
English teacher's waiting for me. And the English teacher says, “I just want you to know she’s not a great student.” I said, “What
do you mean?” She said, “Well, she doesn’t get her homework in, she doesn’t participate as much as she used to, it’s going down.” And that
was one of those schools where I had to stay overnight, so I found that girl later at dinner and I said, “What’s with your homework? You're
doing all this work on Fan Fiction, clearly you can get your homework done.” And she said, “Well, I decided that when I wake up I have to
make a decision now. Do I write for my teachers or do I publish for the world?” That’s a really important decision and more and more,
the answers is publish for the world. And that was in 2003, again before lots of kids had that kind of global capacity. But I realized, oh my
gosh, what if all kids get a voice? What if all kids figure out they can do something like Fan Fiction? Now they are.
Now I get it, that lots of kids want to have a global voice.
Now the next story, has to do with what can we do about this today? This is a website called mathtrain.tv.
A friend of mine, named Eric Marcos, is a math teacher, sixth grade, Santa Monica, California. This website is filled with tutorials designed by
sixth grade kids. And it turns out lots of kids like to learn from other kids. In fact, in some schools depending on who your friends are,
your progression is very high or very low. Social interaction, peer exchange, if you read the research, turns out to be really, really important.
But if you don’t have the right friends sitting at the lunch table, it’s not fair. What if we could combine the social exchange of the groups
who are in the right groups with everyone? What if we could make it fair? What if all students began to produce content of
tutorial design across the curriculum? Purpose. Because that was 2 hours of work. When you look at this video, it’s a gorgeous video. Lots of
color, some music. It took her 2 hours. I asked her about this, she said, “Well homework would have taken me 7 minutes, but I’ll spend 2 hours
if I know it is going to help my friends.” So I think we’ve underestimated kids to kids. A lot of technology is about improving teaching, which is
why so many teachers show up in staff development without kids. That has to change. We have to get a lot more kids into staff
development. And teach them how to build that same capacity with whatever tools we are giving teachers, kids to kids.
This is an example of a wiki from Ohio. It’s a digital online textbook about world history.
If you ever take a look at this, it’s phenomenal. Absolutely an amazing wiki.
When you look at the history tab and you get in to it, you can see dates in July, in August. These kids will write during summer vacation
because they know it’s a couple of years of work. Where so many student assignments are little bitsy ones. This is years of work,
collectively creating a legacy of a digital textbook written by middle school kids. You know what, the tools are free, the Web sites are
free, the kids work for free. This is really easy to ramp up, every kid producing legacy.
This happens to be a photograph, Silvia Tolisano's in the room, Silvia gave this to me.
It’s various jobs in a classroom that are organized. Every single kid in this job is like that girl with Fan Fiction.
There are back channel editors, there’s data entry, there’s live blogging, they're interviewing a guy who’s been to Antarctica on Skype.
Every single kid is creating content of one form or another that is going to be combined into a legacy piece of work. That’s a huge
change in the ecology, now here’s the kicker. In the United States, if you ask teachers who works harder, students or teachers, lots of
teachers will tell you the teachers work harder than the kids. This has been the tipping point, I talked to Silvia this morning, the teacher
in this class now understands that the kids work harder than she does for the first time in her career because she shift the ownership of
learning to the kids. And every kid is making a contribution every day. That’s much better than the barber shop. You don’t need a barber shop
anymore. And here is just one of Sylvia’s graphics, I just liked it. [audience laughter]
But it outlines some of the jobs that are happening in that classroom and the irony is
the other quote from that teacher, Silvia told me this morning, is for the first time in this teacher’s career students are asking to do more work.
Give me more work. This is not like students asking for more homework, it’s more work to make a contribution. That’s when I think
students will ask for a lot more work. And my time is up and I want to just point out none of this means that teachers are less important.
What it really means is teachers are more important than ever because this is a change in the culture, a change in the ecology of learning.
This not about adding technology, it’s a fundamental shift in relationships and roles and the feeling of empowerment that students have
when they create a legacy. Thanks for listening as "Bob" would say on the tutorial. [applause]