Welcome to the Educational Information Ecosystem

Some thoughts……

When we look into the future of resources for senior science there are many exciting directions and possibilities. Will the future be driven by stability and evolution or by innovation and revolution? There are many who would suggest the later presents the optimal path for the use of information in our classrooms of the 21^st century. Let’s open the floodgates and allow information to flow freely into the hands of kids, empowering them to learn at their own rate, and focus on their own interests. Exciting and heady times are upon us and let us seize the day seems to be the common battle cry of early adopters eager to try out the new gadgets. With the world changing almost on what appears to be a daily basis, punctuated evolution seems like a reasonable metaphor for resource development and ultimately usage of information in our classrooms. Sadly, it’s not information that drives education, but time. Our educational information ecosystem replaces energy in a natural ecosystem with time. As so the question is really should be how can any resource we produce save teachers time? And the answer to this question requires a deeper understanding educational information ecosystem for developing resources.

As Neil Postman remarked, access to information is not a problem. The problem is determining what information you want and how to use it. Essentially this thought captures past resource development for K – 12 education. A textbook took a given curriculum, brought together experts in the field and crafted a story that guided both teacher and student through the curriculum in a meaningful way that the teacher couldn’t replicate (or at least with out significant financial and time cost). With the advent of the InterWeb, these model has been somewhat roughly tossed out and the control returned to the teacher with the expectation he or she will be able to use the massive volume of free information to craft engaging (and entertaining!?) lessons and at the same time empower students to take control of their own learning. The educational landscape is littered with pilot projects from early adopters supporting the validity of this assumption. Sadly, the solutions appear unable to scale up as various factors from cost, lack of infrastructure, expertise and time pressure the next wave of users. Trending from these experiences is a growing realization that a blended model taking the best of the print world and the best of the digital world, combined with the communication tools given to us by the InterWeb might provide an reasonable way to navigate into the educational information ecosystem. If this is the case, what are the properties of this ecosystem we should consider before building a new resource for school classrooms?

Through various readings and conversations I would suggest the following properties must be present in any new resource that builds from the educational information ecosystem. And for each property, the driver is ensuring that the teacher’s time is not lost or wasted like unrecoverable heat resulting from friction.

Open – there is no one controlling authority. At different times some members of the ecosystem may have a greater role than others, but there is no top-down authority. Also connected with this idea is digital rights management (DRM). In an educational setting it doesn’t work. A better solution is to create cultural norms that model appropriate use and all teachers to follow those norms with their students with relative ease.

Collaborative – to borrow from David Weinbergers book “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web”, the relationships among the people in the ecosystem are nonexclusive, but often mutally supportive. Anyone can join the ecosystem though some have preferred positions.

Customizable – information must be customizable for the end user. At the same time, many people will not want a huge amount of customization due to the time pressures this creates. In many situations, customization may be the result of choosing between several equal options. With each class the choice may be different.

Predictable – this feature is a counter balance to customization. As time is the limiting resource, much of any resource needs to be predictable so that the teacher can use the information with confidence year after year.

So, as we move forward with creating new resources, we must remember that time is the driver of the ecosystem. Even the best ideas will not survive the educational environment if they require to much of the teacher’s time. As this is a finite quantity, any resource program needs to nurture this key component of the educational information ecosystem.