It All Started Here

Today, as I was sitting in my empty-for-the-summer lab, getting ready for the return of my students in a week or so, I heard a voice from outside my door.

"I've just got to go in here!" she exclaimed. A young woman popped through the door, looked around and spotted me about to ask her how I could help her. "I used to go to school here," she explained. "I can't believe how much it looks the same."

I've been teaching science at this school for ten years now and I knew she wasn't one of my former students. "You must have had Molly for Science class," I offered, knowing this was a safe bet since Molly had taught here for more than thirty years.

"Yes," she brightened. "How is Molly?"

"She's retired to Oregon and spending lots of time with her grandchildren."

"You know, it all started here," she marveled, spinning around and looking intensely, trying to take in the whole room. "I remember learning about trees and flowers, studying crayfish, working with colored solutions and rocks in this room. Now I'm studying for my Ph.D. in biotechnology at Penn!"

We talked some more about what was the same and what was different, and what she remembered the most. She happily agreed to come back when she was in town to talk to my current students about her path from sitting in this lab doing many of the same hands-on investigations my students do now to working at the highest levels of science in a scalding hot area of research and development at one of the world's premier universities.

The room seemed even quieter and emptier when this dynamic young alumna, our own nascent scientist left and I was left again to my thoughts. Most school days in my lab are filled with enthusiastic kids and the wonder of finding things out through hands-on inquiry. Day to day progress is difficult to judge, however, and some days seem especially slow. Social chatter and just plain messing around sometimes seem to drive out deep scientific thinking.

But, after all, they are teens and tweens who come through my lab. Who can tell what learning will stick and what will fall away, which seminal ideas land on sand, which on rocky soil, and which on fertile ground?

Most of my students will never be scientists, but all of them will be consumers of the products of science and technology, as well as citizens dealing with the impacts of biotechnology in medicine and food production, the impacts of information technology on nearly everything, and the impacts of humans on the environment and global climate change on absolutely everything and everyone. Everyone needs a toolkit of basic science knowledge and the tools to think critically about the scientific questions and research that permeate our lives.

What teachers do, does make a difference, I mused. It all starts here.

In a Digital Future, Textbooks are History

While buying a science textbook for my daughter's high school physics class, I noticed that this $180 textbook now comes in a relatively cheaper electronic version. My wife, who loves her Kindle, had suggested that we solve the problem of lugging too many heavy textbooks and save some money by buying digital textbooks. This is emblematic of a fundamental change in educational technology.

The web and digital media disintermediate knowledge and shatter historical monopolies on information, communication, and learning. They are a classic example of what Clayton Christensen termed "disruptive technology" in his prescient first book, The Innovator's Dilemma.

First the web profoundly changed the way business is done and the way we live our daily lives. Now schools are moving online. The New York Times reports of the move of some schools and some teachers to creating their own instructional materials from PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, and YouTube videos. Neeru Khosla's CK-12 Foundation, which creates digital textbooks from free, digital media, has submitted several of its "flexbooks" for adoption by the state of California, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hopes might save millions of dollars.

My school, the Nueva School, has never used textbooks, but instead relied on the creativity and passion of its teachers to develop instructional materials from both original content and from a synthesis of available content. Distance learning and online instruction are not new but have received new boosts from the imprimatur of elite schools like Standford and M.I.T. Christensen's latest effort, Disrupting Class, also makes the case for new digital learning in this brave new digital world.