Lessons Learned in the Cloud...So Far

My head is spinning.  My first 36 hours at the ISTE 2011 conference have left me intellectually exhausted. And my feet hurt.  I need to tell you that the Philadelphia Convention Center is BIG.  Really.  So what have I learned that I can share with you? Well, let’s frame it in this context:  What are my “takeaways” after one full day at the largest educational technology conference in the world? Here’s a random and partial list:

1)   The conference keynote speaker was Dr. John Medina, author of the New York Times Bestseller, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.  Dr. Medina, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine revealed that every person’s brain responds to the environment in its own unpredictable and unique fashion. If there is one generalization that can be made about the human brain, it’s that "it is designed to solve problems related to survival in unstable meteorological settings while in constant motion". According to Dr. Medina, the best way to learn is in a setting that is characterized by “aerobic exercise punctuated by islands of learning”. In other words, the classrooms in which we place our children, and the offices in which we find ourselves are incompatible with our biology. The implications are that when it comes to learning, there is no one-size-fits all. Brain research is the proof text.

2)   Learning is quickly leaving the realm of the traditional classroom, and is entering an augmented, virtual reality. Mobile technology, such as QR codes, smart phones, and iPads, will soon be mainstream tools in the classroom. We’re talking within a matter of a few years, according to the Horizon Report: 2011 edition, an authoritative annual publication focusing on the future of education.

3)   On another note, it seems that Google is striving to become the proprietor of all human knowledge.  I couldn’t believe how many applications can be found with the name Google associated with it:  Plan your next vacation with Google City Tours; explore the human body with Google Body; investigate the science behind a bottle stopper at Google Patents; read the front page of your favorite magazine or news paper at Google Fast Flip.

I could go on.  I won’t because there is so much more.  I think the main thing I’ve taken away so far is that many of the assumptions that we have held about the nature of knowledge, learning and teaching are being revisited and rendered, in some cases, irrelevant. It’s almost like we need to start over and rebuild what we think we know when it comes to teaching our kids.  Knowledge no longer resides only in books or in the minds of great teachers.  We can find it anywhere, and anytime we want. 

What is great is that when it comes to the future of Jewish education, I’m going to be an optimist.  There are many Jewish educators here. Some are associated with Dayschools, others with what’s called part-time or complimentary Jewish education:  congregational schools, after-school programs and informal education.  We are all here to learn, with our general and secular education colleagues, how to build a better future for all of our students.  It is an exciting time. There is hope for a Jewish future.

Oh, and there is one more thing I’ve taken away. Hand luggage isn’t always hand luggage.  Don’t plan on a quick getaway from the airport by meticulously packing all of your belongings in a small carry-on. The flights attendants may decide that there is no room for your small bag. Then Murphy’s Law will come into play:  Your hand luggage will be the last piece to arrive.

Maybe some things will never change.  

Flying Into the Cloud

There’s something about airports. I find them exciting. For me I think they represent travelling into the unknown.  I mean I know that I’m flying to Philadelphia to participate in the ISTE11 (International Society for Technology in Education) conference, but I’m not exactly certain what to expect.  That’s a thrilling prospect.  What I understand is that thousands (according to one description I’ve read, 20000) educators and participants will be there.  Wow!

Thanks to PELIE (Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education) I’m going to have the opportunity to explore ways that Jewish education can be transformed, through the use of digital and cloud based learning experiences. My pedagogical toolbox will be restocked and refitted.  These new implements of learning and teaching can be means that will certainly enhance the way we engage our students.  Just as the radio and television revolutionized what went on in the classroom in the last century, Google Docs, edmodo and mobile technology can transform learning tomorrow.

Of course, I’m going with a specific goal – exploring how edtech can be integrated into the Jewish classroom.  Just as secular education suffers from budget constraints, Jewish education (especially complimentary Jewish education) also is impacted by a deficit in financial support from synagogues, federations and national organizations. My hope is to explore how we can overcome monetary limitations and create vibrant Jewish educational experiences with the technology we already have, while advocating for increased investment.

For the next few days I’ll be blogging here about my experiences.  If you are interested in learning more about this conference from a Jewish perspective, follow on twitter at #pelietech, #jed21 and #avichaifdn. For general info about the conference, follow #iste11.

Onward and Upward!

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

One of the blogs I follow is Jewschool.com– a site that presents fascinating, and at times challenging, perspectives of the current and future state of Judaism. I just read this piece by Dan Ab questioning conventional wisdom and the view that Day School education is the primary Jewish educational tool.  The writer reiterates the point I have made elsewhere:  That the majority of children receiving any type of Jewish education DO NOT attend Day Schools. He reminds us all that we must devote our efforts to a broad based and pluralistic approach that validates and supports the various forms of formal and informal Jewish educational experiences. I’m posting this piece as a reminder that as important as Day School education is, it isn’t the ONLY answer or option.  There are many keys that will open the door for our children that will lead to future Jewish engagement. We must not put our proverbial eggs all in one basket. (Note: I’m cross-posting most of the piece. You can go here to read it in its entirety. I did not include the original last paragraph.)  

Taking from the poor to pay for day schools is not the way to improve Jewish education

A recent article in the Forward, by Jerome A. Chanes, discusses the perennial issue of why we must focus our Jewish education efforts on day schools and how to make them affordable. “The system, at least with respect to the most prominent prescription for the [Jewish] future — education — is broken. Jewish parents find themselves increasingly caught between rising day school tuitions and declining real-dollar income. Teachers’ salaries in many Jewish day schools are disgraceful. And because in tough economic times, schools cannot afford to alienate anyone, day schools are increasingly parent-driven — not necessarily a good thing. Add to these a rather flaccid commitment on the part of federations to Jewish education. The system is collapsing.” He worries that, “The Hebrew-based charter school represents a further erosion of the classic text-based Jewish curriculum… The charter schools take this erosion to a new, dangerous, level by separating Hebrew learning from Judaism completely.” He concludes that charter schools are a distraction and only reallocation of more Federation funds towards day schools will fix the broken system.

Dr. Chanes put forth an almost identical solution in a 2009 article for The NY Jewish Week . He hadn’t happened upon the Charter school bogeyman yet, but he did detail which priorities federations need to shift. He urges that federations spend more money subsidizing day school tuition and less money on gyms, immigrant aid, child care for those in need, and poverty programs. He rationalizes this by noting most of the poverty related federation programs spend a lot of money on non-Jews, and, “most analysts agree that Jewish poverty is, in 2009, not the pressing issue for the community.”

Dr. Chanes is not the only opinionator preaching the doom of Jewish peoplehood that can only be avoided if we massively increase donations to day schools. I’m highlighting him because he’s one of the only ones brave enough – at least in 2009 – to say what charitable causes he considers less important than day schools. I (and a few millennia of Jewish ethical principles) might differ with his funding priorities. It’s also questionable if the UJA-Federation of NY, with annual grants of $167 million is even big enough to meaningfully subsidize the 93,000 day school children just in NYC. I’m also doubtful federations would receive their current levels of donations if they followed his suggestions. Still, I give Dr. Chanes credit for being willing to propose where the money should come from.

My bigger concern is that the basic solution for improving Jewish education woes through massive increases in subsidies to day schools, proposed by Dr. Chanes and others, ignores the greater problem we face in giving the next generation the education they need to live Jewish lives. In discussing the importance of day schools in The NY Jewish Week, Chanes notes that almost 30% of Jewish children in the NY area study in a day school or yeshiva. Even taking that number at face value, in the US region with probably the greatest proportion of Jewish day school attendees, over 70% of Jewish children don’t attend them! Many don’t receive any formal Jewish education. And there’s no evidence that any remotely realistic reallocation of Jewish philanthropy towards day school tuition subsidies will shift these percentages by a useful amount. For example, a 2001 report from the AVI CHAI Foundation by Jack Wertheimer notes that, assuming a $10,000 cost per student, it would require an extra $1 billion a year to support a 50% increase US day school enrollment. An article in the Forward this week—in the very same issue as Dr. Chanes’ article—details how a $65 million effort by the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education has helped created new day schools and improved quality, but did little to increase the total number of children actually attending.

Many day schools provide a quality secular education paired with more hours devoted to Judaics than any other option. The children who attend them are given the skills, and frequently the desire, to be vital and active members of our communities. Day schools have unquestionably earned the Jewish community’s intellectual and financial support. However, a narrow focus on supporting day schools as the primary means to educate future Jews shortchanges the educational needs of the vast majority of Jewish children.

We need to find ways to bring more children into formal Jewish education, starting at young ages. We need to work together to improve the quality of Jewish education for children in all forms of educational programs. We need to innovate, document, and evaluate new models of Jewish education to increase the quality and content of Jewish education for children inside and outside day schools.

New models like Hebrew language charter schools paired with afterschool education in Judaics (Dr. Chanes seems to have forgotten to mention the afterschool Judaics component in his Forward article), might be a good fit for some families and communities, but not others. Programs like Kesher and Edah are trying to take the daily afterschool hours, when many families need childcare, and use them for Jewish education. I’m part of an effort to set up a similar program, currently called WMAJA, on the Maryland/ D.C. border. I described my vision in a bit more detail in an article for CJ Magazine. These afterschool programs won’t be the right fit for every Jewish family, but they do have the advantage of being mostly self-supporting (after the start-up years), and they can give children who aren’t in day schools – for a variety of reasons – more Jewish education than they’re currently getting.

Genesis Redux

“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life...Everything is changing…Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men [sic] communicate than by the content of the communications.” (Marshall McLuhan)

These prescient words were written by Marshall McLuhan in his ironically entitled book The Medium is the Massage in 1967.  The volume was an accessible explanation of his earlier (and denser) work.  His premise, ergo the title, was that:

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive…that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.  The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

Facebook has changed the world.  It’s not so much WHAT’S said on this social network.  It’s how it is said.  It is the way we make ourselves known. We declaim.  We share private moments. We express our opinions without regard of who reads our words. Being a friend is now a verb and relates to people who, in the past, we would have ordinarily forgotten. We publically open ourselves up to the world.  The public square, once the center of town, is no longer a place where we need to physically gather to find out “what’s happening”.  It is nowhere and everywhere. It is the global, virtual, social network. The soapboxes upon which we stand are plugged into an available power outlet.

So what do we do about this?  Embrace it.

If what we say becomes, as McLuhan wrote, shaped by how we express it, then we need to understand the social networking environment.  Notions of privacy are being thrown out, and replaced by new norms. The nature of public discourse is being redefined. The way our students conduct themselves in both the physical and virtual universes has been shaped by digital life and will translate into modes of behavior and learning in the classroom. The way we teach must reflect the way our students interact with their environment.  We, the instructors, are just one facet of that educational milieu. Rather than bemoan the accouterments of social networking, it is incumbent upon us to truly understand the ramifications of these new definitions and modes of behavior and direct our energies towards accommodating what we do, as teachers and educators, to these new realities.

Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, bemoans the state of humanity, blaming its inevitable demise on the invention of those insidious new technologies, the alphabet and writing.   He claims that this new fangled idea of writing things down will result in the destruction of memory. How far have we gone! Technology shapes the way we experience the world. McLuhan wrote: 

“The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye…clothing, an extension of the skin…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.  Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world.  When these ratios change, men [sic] change.”

Social media has led us to new ways to interact with the world and with each other. Maybe this is the next step in human evolution. 

And it was evening, and it was morning, the next day.

Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I Love Ya Tomorrow!

I had a conversation with a Rabbi recently.  He was upset because a cantorial colleague of his had decided to strike out on her own, performing “destination B’nai Mitzvah”, divorcing herself from synagogue life, and setting up private Hebrew schools in community club-houses.  He fretted that this is antithetical to the idea of community and affiliation.  He felt that to be a true part of the Jewish community, one needed to belong to a synagogue. He continued, pointing out that he knows that times are changing, but  he is concerned that the future of Judaism “may bear no resemblance to the Judaism that we are familiar with.”  I looked at him, paused, smiled, and said, “I certainly hope so.”

At the recent Judaism 2030 conference, Jonathan Woocher, Chief Ideas Officer of JESNA, asked participants to share their visions for Judaism in the year 2030.  I always get nervous about future oriented questions like that.  A lot can happen in the next 19 years.  In the past, the face of Judaism has unpredictably and unalterably been transformed in shorter spans of time.  Yes we need to keep our eyes on the target of long term goals. For me I guess I’d want to see inclusive, engaged and vibrant Jewish communities both in and outside of Israel. But I also think we need to be very careful that in our rush to embrace our visions, we don’t ignore the realities of what our students need today.  After all, what will be is built on what is.  At a recent NATE webinar on the “History of Identity and Technology” facilitated by Ari Kelman, this very theme was brought up.  By engaging our students in the process of creating their own Jewish knowledge databank today, we can shape how their Jewish practice might look in 2 decades.

The reality in America today is that we are in the midst of an era in which supply side economic theory is victorious and has trickled down to what we do as Jewish educators.  It’s become all about lowering “regulatory” barriers that prevent individual expression. No longer does the synagogue determine what it means to be Jewish. Parents and kids are searching for ways to engage in Judaism on their own terms - a free market mentality.  The Judaism of tomorrow will be very different from what we, our  parents, and grandparents are familiar with. It will be shaped by what we do today.

There is no one answer, one tool, one technology that can prepare us for this mission.  There are many answers:  learning via camp-like experiences, digital platforms, family programming, Day schools, Hebrew charter schools, even old-fashioned congregational schools. These are what we are familiar with now. I expect that more approaches that we haven’t thought of yet will arise.  All we do know is that we must be open to the idea of choice. Rather then reject we must be prepared to embrace. We educators must be given the resources to retool and re-envision our profession.

“Teaching” as a concept is undergoing a metamorphosis, reflective of new modes of learning that are embedded in what Eisen and Cohen called “the Sovereign Self”. We need to reconcile ourselves to this today. If we don’t adjust how we “teach” and “lead”, we’ll render ourselves obsolete.

Answers to Open the Door

Pesach is a time for questions.

So, in the spirit of the season, I would like to ask you some.  I’ll start with one: How do Jewish educators learn to use 21st century educational technology in the Jewish classroom?  This will lead to a few more.  What follows is a survey with 15 questions (an auspicious number for Pesach). The goal of this short (5-8 minutes) questionnaire is to find some answers to the question of how and what we learn.  

My friend and colleague Barry Gruber recently posted a piece about the smorgasbord of opportunities to learn what the ‘net provides. He’s right – it truly is a blessing.  I wonder if this cornucopia is so bountiful that there will be many who, like the 4^th child, will be so intimidated by all the resources available that they will be daunted by the act of beginning to learn. They won’t know where to start. They won’t know what to ask. If this is the case, what should we do about it?

Ergo the survey.   This is an independent project to explore the nature of on-line Jewish professional development related to the utilization of educational technology.  It’s focus is to find out how we Jewish educators learn about these new tools, where we learn from, and if we need to make these learning opportunities more accessible.  I'm hoping that this information will help shape the way Jewish educators can easily learn more about the use of digital tools in their classrooms.

Teaching is leading.  We educators create an environment for our students to construct their knowledge base.  The tools that are being developed today and tomorrow empower us to achieve this goal.  The complicated part is that we need to learn how to use them.  There’s the rub.  What’s the best way for the educators, who can’t go to conferences or don’t have local resources provided by central agencies, to learn how to take the next step into the world of digital Jewish learning?

Questions.  There are many.  And the answers may lead us to an understanding of what we can do to build a solid base of Jewish educators who can comfortably engage their students, speaking a common language. This is why I’m asking you all to take part in this adventure.

I must thank Jonathan Woocher and Rebecca Leshin of the Lippman Kanfer Institute for supporting this project and providing the platform to make it possible. I also want to acknowledge the many educators in the Jewish cloud who have contributed ideas to help create this survey.  There are too many to mention by name, but I do want to thank you all for you assistance.

So please click here to access this professional development survey.  Answers can be signposts leading us in the direction of creating Jewish futures for our students. We just need to start with the questions.  Together let’s find the answers.

Stepping Through the Door Together - Now's the Time

“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!”  I feel like the white rabbit.  You know, rushing hither and yon, trying to figure out how to get where I need to go without being too distracted by all the tweets, network posts, and blogs I follow; not to mention the old technologies like the printed word and emails. There is so much information available to us.  If I miss a day of twitter, I feel it’s a catastrophe.

I’m not a technical neophyte.  I sort of know what’s going on.  Can you imagine being someone who has never tweeted, doesn’t know what a wiki is, thinks a glog is a type of fruit, and is trying to just stay afloat in this ever changing new world, let alone explore the Jewish educational cloud?  There are so many resources and new technologies that appear daily.  It’s easy to be intimidated.  There are probably fantastic teachers in the front lines who are so afraid of trying to figure this stuff out that they retreat into their old tried but true habits, becoming increasingly irrelevant in the classroom.  I know that there are folks who left both the JEA and NATE conferences with a sense of despair at not knowing how to proceed. Those who were unable to attend either conference are even more lost.  I believe that the time has come for us to help our teachers, especially those working in congregational/supplemental schools, break out of their shells to find a new comfort level in tomorrow.

We can lower the level of stress associated with learning new edtech skills by creating an accessible portal through which our teachers will learn to use the tools they need to move forward.  We are all searching for scrapes of knowledge wherever we can find them.  There’s too much out there that’s spread all over the place. We no longer have the one conference a year where we all came together to learn.  Now's the time to get organized again!

This is what I propose:  Let's create a new trans-denominational platform for Jewish educators of all flavors to gather virtually or, if practical and affordable, f2f  to explore the possibilities that tomorrow presents.  This collaborative cloud-based venue would be a forum that would promote dialogue, teaching and learning. It would be a consortium of all professional development providers that would “push” the opportunities to learn to us all.  I’m talking one-stop-shopping - a mall for Jewish education. It would be one venue that would offer educators and knowledge seekers ALL the opportunities and resources to enhance the field of Jewish education:  A 21^st century virtual Pumbadita, if you will - an on-line center for Jewish learning that would be comprehensive, all inclusive and easy to access.

This idea will be made real as a result of cooperation and collaboration between all Jewish education service providers, both those affiliated with a movement, like NATE and the JEA, as well as others like JESNA and PELIE. We all need to work together.  We need to move forward now.

I’ve started to have conversations about this vision with individuals affiliated with different groups and organizations. People are interested in seeing this come to fruition. I believe it is now the appropriate moment to widen the circle and have an expanded group of those who care about the future of Jewish education come together and brainstorm how to make a new Jewish Professional Learning Network happen.  Dr. Jonathan Woocher, the Chief Ideas Officer and Director of  the Lippman Kanfer Institute, has indicated that he is happy to host such a web meeting.

This is a concrete call to action. If you are interested in joining in the conversation and taking part in a virtual brainstorming session, email me, Peter Eckstein at terrapin@mindspring.com

If not now, when?