CoreDrill-Goodies-21stCenturyOutcomes

Update: eLearning Task Force. The Arizona Department of Education has the appointees from the Governor’s Office for Boards and Commissions and is organizing the first meeting.

Update: K-12 eLearning legislation for 2007 is well ahead of schedule. I hope to have specifies in a few weeks.

Blog: eSATS focus has always been on increased mastery of core subjects at all grade levels leading to higher graduation rates. Our friend Ken Kay and his Partnership for 21^st Century Skills has added an additional dimension. He has expended from Core Subjects to 21^st Century Content, Life Skills, Information and Communication Literacy and Learning and Thinking Skills. We had assumed that an eLearning classroom focused on teacher practice transformation and digital curriculum with Internet would address all of the above.

Apparently; not so! A faltering student cuts text and graphics from the Internet and presents a dandy PowerPoint book report, is applauded and is enthusiastic about school. Has she learned an ICT skill? Yes. Has she learned part of a core subject, a life skill, 21^st Century content, or learning and thinking skills? Probably not.

To be continued.

Why eSATS? To Deliver Poerful Increase in Academic Performance

This report is a summary of a presentation on “Advanced Technologies for Learning in the Department of Defense” made at the Forum on the Digital Promise, 14 June 2006. Its author is a long time associate J. Dexter Fletcher, a leading researcher of the Institute for Defense Analyses, fletcher@ida.org. Dexter is a Wickenburg native who received his doctorate at Stanford. Knowledge from his many studies has been a major contributor to the design of eSATS for Arizona’s K-12 students.

The reason that military research on eLearning is so important is that they started using analog technology 70 years ago, and digital 30 years ago. Innovation based transformation is usually driven initially by adoption across industries. Here is what IDA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense say about why they are well on the way to totally transform their education and training system.

The DOD spends $16 billion per year for residential instruction; Arizona spends about $10 billion going to $14 billion in ten years. They have 1,300,000 uniformed service members, 750,000 DOD civilians and 80,000 K-12 dependents that must be educated and served with professional development programs. Arizona K-12 has 1 million students and about 60,000 educators.

A typical example of the reach, sophistication and investment by the DoD is their global distributed mission training system. The Air Force Research Laboratory, adjacent to the ASU Polytechnic campus, is a major contributor to this real time simulation and communication system. The eLearning technology leader of the AFRL has been advising and connecting eSATS team members to the latest eLearning research for 15 years.

The golden imperative of eLearning is to provide the means to transform the one teacher – 30 student classroom into a learning environment that supports academic achievement similar to full time tutoring. Fortunately the adoption of the current level of K-12 eLearning digital curriculum and pedagogy gets us half-way there, or one sigma (30% increase in learning or one letter grade improvement.)

For one form of eLearning, CBI, the interactivity emulates the human tutor.

The decreased time to learn required K-12 academics can shave years off the current 13 calendar years of K-12 education, and provides enrichment and arts opportunities.

The old text based CBI of the 1980’s gets better each decade as multimedia and intelligent systems add simulation, rich knowledge sources, scaffolding, exploratory and constructivist learning, and real time formative assessment.

The real payoff of eLearning in K-12 is dropout reduction by 90% (maybe), extraordinary achievement by motivated students ready for college, and major cost savings that free up funds to bring educator salaries up to a professional level.

These “eventualities” are all built into the eLearning Systems for Arizona Teachers and Students design (Circa 2003) with its Personal Learning Plan being launched statewide in Arizona.

Arizona also has these pieces for K-12 education. eSATS has assembled them into a systems design with will engage every student in every classroom.

Math and science has emerged as a critical issue in Arizona at the highest policy levels. The 2006 SB1512 has legislated a three year $3million eLearning middle school math pilot for 10,000 Arizona students. The Arizona Business and Education

Coalition, Governor’s P-20 Council and many others have math and science as a major policy initiative. One stand deviation in math is the absolutely lowest goal for Arizona education. The adoption of eLearning is the only possible cost effective way to achieve this goal.

Gordon Dryden Response to Drill and Practice

Gordon is our guru from down under. As a media icon in New Zealand he has studied the world of learning during his travels, and has credits in transforming learning in whole counties. His book “The New Learning Revolution” has sold over 10 million copies and he was the Keynote speaker at the Greater Arizona eLearning Assoc. conference in Mesa last May.

Gordon…

Re "drill and practice" as the forgotten requirement, I think this needs to be balanced - and I come back to Buckingham and Coffman's book, "First, Break All the Rules", with its summary of ALL Gallup's polling of "what makes great companies and great managers":

1. Everyone has a talent to be great at something (and talent is different than "specific skill". See their definition of different elements of "inbuilt talent" on page 180 of "The New Learning Revolution" www.networkpress.co.uk .

2. Great managers select for specific talents and build them into multi-talented teams.

3. Select for talent, but then train to add all the additional skills.

4. Some of those skills are "a good grounding in basics": reading, writing, math, spelling, composition and personal and inter-personal communications skills. Others are very specific to tasks and jobs (a nurse must have a great inbuilt "empathy talent", but needs specific nursing skills; a "great communicator" will have natural "communications" talent, but will then need additional "drill skills" - in my case keyboard touch typing, good spelling, ability to write clearly, specific computer skills, and - depending on what branch of communications - skills in journalism, radio, television, advertising and many other fields.

5. So some of those inbuilt talents show a great propensity for success (I could never be a great composer or musician, a great surgeon or a great accountant, or a great fiction writer - although I could perhaps learn to be reasonably good at the latter; I don't have the inbuilt personality, passion, empathy or behavioral traits.) Nor have I ever had the drive to be a "naturally brilliant ball player" - so could never be a Gretsky, Jackson, Tiger Woods or Federer.

6. And I believe the same applies to schooling - vitally important to:

a. Develop and nurture talent - and again the ability to flower in multi-talented teams. (From my experience with the best IT schools around the world, this is one of their great attributes: by starting kids from grade one as video producers and editors, scriptwriters, designers, musical composers - they show how talents can come together, and how each person can blend his or her best talent with those of others.)

b. Develop core competency in the basics: reading, writing, spelling, basic math, basic science - and often that requires drill.

c. Develop other social and lifestyle skills: reasonably good communicators, confident to operate in any company.

d. Develop creative abilities: the ability to be creative thinkers and creative producers and contributors.

e. Inculcate a drive to be high achievers in specific skills to build on one's own talent. Again that will require addition "drill and kill" for (as in your example) shooting goals at basketball, playing every possible on a tennis or squash court, kicking goals at rugby, playing a musical instrument.

f. And introduce assessment systems that both record "standardized test results" (where appropriate) and enable students to assemble digital portfolios to demonstrate their talents and skills.

I am sure you are aware that the US public school system, in particular, seems to have substituted "standardized testing" (largely based on rote-learning drills) as the main form of assessment - in a land where your incredible success has been based on terrific "non-standardized creative ideas and non-standard innovation!”

Key point: eLearning is not just about developing "repetitive drill skills". Memorization of how to spell and count (while important) is not the only thing that matters.

In New Zealand, I often use Peter Jackson and his team as "New Zealand's answer to America's Silicon Valley" (you may remember that analogy when receiving our honorary doctorates at UAT). Here is a guy who never went to college, but started making his first movie, with an 8 mm camera at age eight, and even then dreamed of producing his own version of King Kong. Years later, in one night he and his team picked up 11 Academy Awards in a night - and, by putting together an incredible multi-talented team, have turned Wellington (our capital city) into a South Pacific Hollywood.

He is, of course, highly skilled in a multiplicity of skills (and painstaking in every detail) - as well as being brilliantly talented.

Feel free to circulate this to the team if you feel it might add to the discussion.

I always have a real fear (especially from having worked in Japan, Singapore and China) that eLearning may become synonymous with rote learning. That is PRECISELY what happened in Singapore when it launched the world's biggest-per-capita investment in technology in public schools. And in China, the schools are still using computers in a very narrow way when, for example, most kids learn English much faster out of school singing English to karaoke machines in coffee shops than they do in their computer lab.

Best wishes to the team.

Gordon Dryden, Down Under gorden@learningwewb.co.nz

Building for AZ Legislative Session

Ah! Cool morning in the first of October and our doors are open, listening to the birds in the garden. What you cannot hear is the buzz of the quickening legislative season. Although the election is dominating the news, your faithful eSATS has had hundreds of meetings and conversations with allies and supporters to keep eLearning advocacy alive and kicking.

In 2005 we took the eSATS eLearning transformation bill to the legislature. Dozens of legislators supported the concept, but we were unable to get it out of Senate committee.

In 2006 we were asked by Senate President Ken Bennett to create and run an eLearning bill. The result was $2.5 million to support a state wide data system, $3 million for a three year middle school math pilot for 10,000 students. The policy for expanding effective eLearning to all students and courses was established along with ten year task force appointed at the highest levels.

For 2007 we expect to make significant progress in establishing the intellectual infrastructure required to assure student mastery learning, effective digital curriculum and eLearning savvy teachers. We will also begin the process of transforming schools into eLearning Centered Schools by focusing on what is required for individualized and small group, self pace elearning for students. The range of implementation will be from adopting efficient personal learning plans for students to creating major institutes.

A number of current efforts are underway with eSATS leaders engaged or being appointed to serve:

Eleven member eLearning Task Force from SB1512;

A legislative working group;

A council that is developing a strategic plan for cost-efficient broadband into every community and school;

A vision group for Arizona’s 2012 centennial that posits eLearning as the means to

transform K-12 education into national leadership;

We have had discussions with the leaders of half of the major Arizona educational policy groups (with good acceptance) and expect to complete this outreach by mid November.

During October we will be meeting with our dozen plus team of industry sponsored lobbyists to setup our legislative plan for 2007.

The 2007 bill is expected to be in draft form by November.

Many of you helped with advice and efforts in 2006. Your grass roots efforts were highly effective. Your talking to legislators; and attending or messaging the hearings was a major reason that SB1512 had over 100 positive votes cast for it, and approximately five negative.

This year we must triple our efforts. The time for education and interest building is over. Now is the time for long term commitment with real funding. If you can play a role, just send me an email and we will contact you directly.

In the mean time we have a small task for all or you readers.

The legislative working group needs to know of where students are using individual learning plans as a part of their eLearning system. We are not talking about the highly structured and costly IEP used in special education, but of informal learning plans that are with the eLearning system and use automated formative assessments to support student-teacher decision making.

Just drop an email to tkraver@qwest.net or 602-944-8557 with information of a source, a URL, or a digital curriculum.

Hoops and Hard Drills

Dave Hopla is the US's top shooting coach and can put 110 out of 111 shots through the hoop. What's this got to do with education? Dave's message is pure => learning is about memory, and skills need to be practiced to be learned.

Most of what we learn fades quickly from short-term memory. To push learning from short to long-term memory, you need to practice, regularly and often. The lesson we have to learn is that the 'sheep-dip' experience is wildly unproductive, unless there is follow-through and practice.

So why this sports analogy?

Recently the Financial Times surveyed 431 business leaders about the US losing its competitive edge to fast-growing economies like China and India. They found that three-quarters of incoming high school graduates were deficient in English writing skills, including grammar and spelling. Thirty percent felt that these graduates could not even write a simple business letter. Over half found high school graduates were deficient in mathematics.

How could this be?

Our graduates have high skill levels in use of technology and working in groups. These goal-oriented, tech-imbedded, multitasking, pro learning, collaborative, natural teamers, and community joiners should make idea workers. They trust parents and institutions, and want marriage, family, community, and work/life balance. Ninety percent of teens agree: “it’s cool to be smart.” along with open, honest communication, they want variety, challenge, diversity, action and to be part of something significant

Isn’t this what our employers have been calling for all through the 1990’s?

Opps, maybe we would have listened to “Mister Hoops.” To be motivated to reach goals is one thing. To put in the immense effort into drill and practice to learn vast quantities of knowledge and complex skills is another.

That is why 52 minutes a week in a computer lab is ineffective. That is why a few computers in the back of the room to run applications are ineffective. That is why laptops alone are not effective. That is why teaching students to use technology is not effective. That is why $100 and a couple of days in teacher training per year is not effective.

When eLearning is judged by these implementations then we expect it to be ineffective. eLearning levels of success can only be achieved when a school is transformed with the right level of digital curriculum, continuous teacher education and professional development, professional level of technical support, and 100% student access to instructional computing and formative assessment.

The drill and practice for reading, writing and arithmetic can be imbedded from K to 12, and our graduates will be able to sink the 21^st Century Workforce basket every time.

Why eLearning => Accelerating K-12 eLearning Adoption

This report is a summary of a presentation on “Advanced Technologies for Learning in the Department of Defense” made at the Forum on the Digital Promise, 14 June 2006. Its author is a long time associate J. Dexter Fletcher, a leading researcher of the Institute for Defense Analyses, fletcher@ida.org. Dexter is a Wickenburg native who received his doctorate at Stanford. Knowledge from his many studies has been a major contributor to the design of eSATS for Arizona’s K-12 students.

The reason that military research on eLearning is so important is that they started using analog technology 70 years ago, and digital 30 years ago. Innovation based transformation is usually driven initially by adoption across industries. Here is what IDA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense say about why they are well on the way to totally transform their education and training system.

The DOD spends $16 billion per year for residential instruction; Arizona spends about $10 billion going to $14 billion in ten years. They have 1,300,000 uniformed service members, 750,000 DOD civilians and 80,000 K-12 dependents that must be educated and served with professional development programs. Arizona K-12 has 1 million students and about 60,000 educators.

A typical example of the reach, sophistication and investment by the DoD is their global distributed mission training system. The Air Force Research Laboratory, adjacent to the ASU Polytechnic campus, is a major contributor to this real time simulation and communication system. The eLearning technology leader of the AFRL has been advising and connecting eSATS team members to the latest eLearning research for 15 years.

The golden imperative of eLearning is to provide the means to transform the one teacher – 30 student classroom into a learning environment that supports academic achievement similar to full time tutoring. Fortunately the adoption of the current level of K-12 eLearning digital curriculum and pedagogy gets us half-way there, or one sigma (30% increase in learning or one letter grade improvement.)

For one form of eLearning, CBI, the interactivity emulates the human tutor.

The old text based CBI of the 1980’s gets better each decade as multimedia and intelligent systems add simulation, rich knowledge sources, scaffolding, exploratory and constructivist learning, and real time formative assessment.

The decreased time to learn required K-12 academics can shave years off the current 13 calendar years of K-12 education, and provides enrichment and arts opportunities.

The real payoff of eLearning in K-12 is dropout reduction by 90% (maybe), extraordinary achievement by motivated students ready for college, and major cost savings that free up funds to bring educator salaries up to a professional level.

These “eventualities” are all built into the eLearning Systems for Arizona Teachers and Students design (Circa 2003) with its Personal Learning Plan being launched statewide in Arizona.

Arizona also has these pieces for K-12 education. eSATS has assembled them into a systems design with will engage every student in every classroom.

Math and science has emerged as a critical issue in Arizona at the highest policy levels. The 2006 SB1512 has legislated a three year $3million eLearning middle school math pilot for 10,000 Arizona students. The Arizona Business and Education Coalition, Governor’s P-20 Council and many others have math and science as a major policy initiative. One stand deviation in math is the absolutely lowest goal for Arizona education. The adoption of eLearning is the only possible cost effective way to achieve this goal.

Digital Curriculum Institute => eLearning/Research/Enterprise Institute

Phase I: Digital Curriculum Institute will be based in Arizona university system. Its practical task is to assess, make recommendations from the universe of K-12 digital curriculum. This wisdom and advice will be provided by a portal based knowledge system for educators. From this data the DCI can determine gaps in K-12 digital curriculum, specify solutions and advocate with providers. A hands-on extension service to schools and teachers is expected build to 100 curriculum experts and 150 instructional technologist extension agents. With the multitude of eLearning aspects at each of our universities it is expect that the DCI will have a networked flavor to its organizational design. The funding requirement for 1:2 matching funds requires outside enterprises, companies, foundations and philanthropists to become seriously engaged with the DCI. This positions the DCI as to develop and extend its reach and contributions to K-12 education.

Phase II: There could be a number of near term enhancements to the DCI. Discussions with the Advanced Distributed Learning System out of the Office of Secretary of Defense and Institutes of Defense Analysis addressed their interest in creating an ADL Co-Lab for K-12 education to collaborate with their four other US and one European eLearning Laboratories. The Air Force Research Laboratory at Gateway Airpark in Mesa is to move to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The seventy percent of the world class eLearning research cadre could be retained to work within the DCI structure. A recent Arizona project for the Office of Secretary of Defense address the design and business case for a global elearning research communities of practice portal and data base. The implementation of this design would put the DCI in the center of knowledge world wide eLearning research. The skilled staff at DCI would develop and operate a service to field test and provide sound data on new eLearning products and services. This collaborative operation with Arizona schools would provide the most advanced and effective eLearning products to Arizona student, and position Arizona as the go-to place for eLearning providers. Through being the knowledge source of K-12 eLearning research, products and effectiveness the DCI would support national and global advocacy for eLearning research and adoption for K-12 education.