I am a producer. I like to produce things, whether that means businesses, websites, or blogs.
For the most part, education fails to thoughtfully educate producers. Over the centuries, schools have gotten very good at teaching consumers. We emphasize reading and math, so consumers can consume more.
There is nothing wrong with this. Many people are consumers, and everyone needs the skills to be one. However, a growing tide of people are producers — people who feel the unquenchable need to make. The education system fails to even recognize this trend, let alone teach to it.
From a purely business perspective, this is dangerous. Producers are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the GDP, and giving producers better education will help to increase that. But it’s also important from a human perspective — education should match the personality of the student.
A good start would be to help students identify whether they are a producer or consumer. This is as easy as asking a simple question:
Some people are consumers by nature; they consume vast quantities of knowledge purely for learning’s sake. Others are producers; they consume knowledge with the intent of one day acting on the knowledge and producing something, be it a book, a song, a blog, a startup, etc… Neither is better than the other.
The key is to answer one question: which are you?
Beyond that, schools can give education appropriate to each type of student. For the most part, we are a mix of both producers and consumers; teaching consumption and production will help everyone.
The one additional component which producers absolutely need more of in their education is practice. Whenever possible, there should be time to practice (authentically) producing businesses, books, or music. Though practice doesn’t make you perfect, it does make you a whole lot better of a producer.
Schools need to recognize and identify producers, so a proper education can be given to them.
How do you teach producers?
Article found via Michael Mistretta
When I was younger, I thought history didn’t matter. To me, history was a dusty land filled with dates, maps, and death rates. I thought the inhabitants of this land — historians — were old, dusty people who had nothing interesting to say.
In short, I confused history with historical societies.
Right: An Aerial View of the Smithsonian
I was, and am, a person driven by change (action) and, to an unhealthy extent, power. Technology and politics, my passions, both move at a breakneck pace and are always focusing on the future. To my naive self, history was entirely antithetical to my entire philosophy.1
As one might expect, school was at fault. School taught me to memorize dates and people.2 We almost never explored the context of these events; we never delved into the legacies of the leaders beyond the most basic level. Timelines made regular appearances, as did color-coded maps. All this memorization took up time, time which would have been better spent thinking.
Naturally, given this context, I felt that history was something to be avoided like the plague.3
Now, of course, I know better.
Once I got teachers who actually understood and enjoyed history, I was able to see beyond the numbers. I discovered that history wasn't a textbook or timeline, but a story, and a damn good story at that. With this discovery, I was able to find the joy of the past.
Not to go all philosophical on you, but the past really is the present.
Society evolves, but evolution involves a lot of repetition. Each iteration is almost exactly the same as the last, with only minor differences. A knowledge of that past iteration helps you to understand the current iteration — and the differences between the two.
Understanding — truly understanding — the world (politics, society, technology, etc.) is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Thankfully, we have the past to help us. With the wisdom of the past, we can more easily understand the present. Instead of having to draw an entirely new map of the world, we only need to draw a map of the new parts.
Almost every situation we encounter, somebody else has encountered before. Even when we can’t see them, we’re walking in someone’s footsteps. Thankfully, that someone has probably already come up with a solution for or analysis of the situation. I am continuously reminded of this, whether in my daily Googling of technical problems or my comparisons between Palin and McCarthy. When it comes down to it, history is probably the most useful subject there is.
Sadly, far too many teachers get it wrong. Though I'm sure you're not one of them, you probably know some of them. History, more than any other subject, is really easy to get wrong.4 It is far too easy to get caught in the micro-history (who fought in what battle on what date?) and forget about the macro-history (why was he fighting?), especially because the micro-history is very easy to teach and test. Given this, it is no surprise that many history teachers don't teach history.
And every time it is a tragedy. When taught as a collection of dates, history loses its spark. A bad history teacher will — guaranteed — make history dull and lifeless. In other subjects, one can get by with a poor teacher and still enjoy it. History, more than any other subject, depends strongly on the quality of the teacher. A good history teacher5 will make even the most reluctant of students sit up in their chairs, but a bad history teacher will make even (or, especially) the future-historians start texting under the table. In no other class is this true: math people will always find numbers mathematical language interesting, and some never will.6 The cost of a poor history teacher is great, but the benefits are superb: history gives students a framework to understand their world.
So please, remember to take the hi- off history.
Of course, at some point the “facts” do become important. The dates and names aren’t entirely irrelevant, especially as one wishes to progress. To talk effectively and intelligently about the ideas, one must know the facts — especially if one aims to convince others. However, the ideas are indisputably more important — without them, history is pointless. Unfortunately, the ideas are generally only seriously discussed in the upper grades of high school and college. Up until then, the bare facts hold almost exclusive domain. By the time students reach the exciting parts of history, we have built a (false) image of history as boring and pointless — in fact, many never reach those discussions simply because they assume all history is as boring as 5th grade history. Even at the unit level, history is taught in the wrong order. Most teachers start with the bare facts and only touch on the bigger ideas near the end of a lesson. This should be reversed on both the micro and macro levels, with grand ideas being taught first to build interest and discussion. Only with the themes in place should the facts be taught, to supplement and reinforce those themes, leading to continued investigation. The primary focus of history should always be the story.
Right: My countdown wallpaper from Mediumjones at Smashing Magazine
What do you think the proper order of history education is? Do you think schools need to focus more on the context of history?
Of all the amazing social media tools in the world, one of my absolute favorites is drop.io. They provide a dead-simple way to share media, but also realize that there is so much more to that than simply sharing files. Not only is it easy to share files, voice and communication can be shared in the exact same interface. Essentially, drop.io supports a plethora of outputs and inputs without complicating things. Drop.io realizes that the point of technology is to make complicated things (like sending a message across the globe in seconds) easy (with the click of a button). Drop.io provides an excellent service with a minimum of effort and cost.1
Given this unique set of features, drop.io is perfectly suited for use in the educational market. The base service is free, so there is no need to purchase additional hardware or software. Additionally, there is no need to register for an account at all – thus, no emails needed. Finally, drop.io is by nature non-permanent and private – drops are erased after 1 year of disuse and will never be monitored or searchable (unless you ask them to be). For this minimum of effort, a lot is accomplished. You can upload any kind of media, whether through the web interface, email, a Firefox extension, or even your phone.2 This media can then be shared through email, RSS, iTunes (dropcast), SMS, Twitter, Facebook, or the plain old web interface. In short, drop.io provides a plethora of ways to share educational content freely.
Once you have mastered the basics of drop.io, you begin to realize its potential. One of the best applications is giving students a way to easily record a podcast without any additional hardware. Though there are other ways to do this, I believe drop.io does it the best as you will shortly see.
First, you need to create a new drop. This drop shouldn’t include any media, but a unique name will help you to remember it. The name can be changed by clicking it. If you would like to block outside access, just click the “additional settings” dropdown and adjust settings accordingly. Once your settings are confirmed, just “drop it.”
Right: You should definitely set an admin password, as it will let you make changes later.
Once you have a drop ready to go, copy down the voicemail address (it is in the top right corner, under “Contact this Drop”). If you give this number a call, you are prompted to enter the extension of your drop and are then taken to a recording section where you can immediately leave a message. Seconds later it will show up in the web interface as an mp3 file.
Right: Just call the listed email to record a voicemail, like I did with this sample drop.
After your content is recorded, it is easy to syndicate it out through other services – like RSS or Twitter. Since this is a podcast, syndication through iTunes is the best method. To do so, just click share, then RSS/Dropcast, then subscribe to Dropcast. iTunes will open up and you will have a simple podcast which can automatically be updated from your phone.3
As you can see, drop.io offers a great way to podcast with your students – all you need is a phone. As helpful as this is, it is only scratching the surface of what drop.io can do. What else can you think of using a ubiquitious sharing service like drop.io for?4
The crucial flaw of NCLB, in my opinion, is that is fails to inspire. The law has many other faults, of course, including its lack of funding and regimented focus on testing. However, the root problem is that NCLB is attempting to use an evolutionary methodology for a truly revolutionary goal – almost total proficiency. There is no easily articulated goal which all citizens can rally around: the standards are convoluted and the metrics for success are continually redefined in contradiction with themselves. Doug Noon perfectly captures this, in the context of Kennedy’s space program:1
If we’d have used an NCLB-style approach to the Apollo moon mission, President Kennedy would have simply ordered NASA to fly conventional airplanes higher and higher until they fell out of the sky, and then blamed the pilots for lacking the will and the know-how to get the job done.
How can we reach for the moon with education?
What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:
Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.
Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.
The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box.
In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.
If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativity1. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”
What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.
Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.2 Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.
Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.3 Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.
In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skills4. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.
To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable — you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught — and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.
Right: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.
The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.
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