Solvation

Education Reconceived

Jamais Cascio, a compatriot at Institute for the Future, recently gave a Keynote on the Future of Education at Moodle Moot. His talk covered quite a bit of ground, some of which is fairly disconcerting, as the implications in some cases are of "disruption" in its most negative connotation. 

As I listened to his talk, I found myself wondering what the call to action is for educational pedagogy. 

This is the result: if I were in charge, based on the challenges it appears likely that this world will face in the next couple of decades, the following list would be what would be covered over the 13 years of schooling. Imagine the most basic components taught to small children building to the most complex for high school students. But the idea is that these would be the core subject areas, rather than English, History, Math, Science, Language/Culture, and PE.

(1) Learning Skills. (Learning how to learn)

• Personal organization and study skills
• Emotional intelligence
• Project planning
• Conflict management

(2) Science.

• Science
• Experimental Method & Problem Solving
• Technology
• Math
  

(3) Technology Practicum. (A curriculum of the use of whatever technology is of critical use. For example, right now:)

• Typing
• Social media (e.g. myspace, youtube, etc.)
• MS Word, Excel, and Ppt (or equivalent)
• Search skills
• Drivers' training and public transportation
• Home technology (safety, money, financial systems)

(4) Communication.

• Media
• Languages
• Logic

(5) Human Context.

• History
• Geography
• Political science
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Appreciation of arts and music

(6) Stress management.

• PE
• Meditation
• Counseling
• Food selection/preparation
• Practice of arts and music

Needless to say, this is rather different from the current pedagogy. If you've never looked into it, but are interested, here are the California Content Standards.  In reality, I realize we're in a period of tightening conformity, so I have little hope that this kind of instruction will transform our disintegrated public schools. However the point of moodle and other software is to provide ad hoc and open lessons available for those who choose to take them.

What I did there was scrunch all the liberal arts "common knowledge" courses into one bucket, but I expanded the bucket. Similarly, I put science and math into the same bucket but added experimental practice and technology.

Then I also took both the sciences and the arts and divided them into two parts: the theory and the practice.  The theory remains relevant because the point of school is to give us this shared context.  However, explicit practice in both technology use and the creation and dissemination of new communication forms is also critical. 

Beyond that I added  the practical topic of learning skills, which includes conflict resolution and emotional intelligence, two things that are absolutely fundamental to maintaining an effective society and so of course we never teach them in school...(!) And equally key is the ability for people to manage their own health. For kids, the biggest issue is usually how to manage their stressors, so instead of Physical Education (and drug/sex education) alone, integrating that into a larger curriculum of (physiology-based) stress management. As the earth undergoes stress it will be even more critical for people to be sophisticated in how they manage their own health.

Barack Obama's Mom = Powerful Boomer Chick

I read a twitter post about how pro-choice women are backing McCain -- presumably over Hilary? I don't know... but I thought I'd go check out Barack Obama's mom.

There are a few great stories on her. What emerges is that she was a woman who spent grades 8-12 in the Pacific Northwest (the grandparents are northwestern, but Mom graduated from Mercer Island High School). 

Her name is Stanley Ann. She was a teen mother who eventually got her PhD in anthropology. Here it is covered in the Chicago Tribune a year ago: BARACK OBAMA: His mother Stanley Ann Dunham.

I see here (by reading the paper) despite TV media handwringing that he'll have trouble convincing anyone that Harvard-educated Obama can relate to the working class,  turns out his white grandfather was working class, and his mom -- who was raised in a wealthier environment -- nevertheless worked at a Boeing plant during WWII.

Am I the last one to hear the news? Here it is in Time Magazine. What is wrong with the media that they can't understand that one man can have a whole bunch of different contextual influences?

 

Health Care, Doctors, and Managed Care

The New York Times published a piece,  "Fed Up With the Frustrations, More Doctors Change Course - NYTimes.com," about how the difficulties of getting insurance and administration to pay for prescribed care affects their ability to do their work. To get a gist of the article:

In a survey last year of nearly 2,400 physicians conducted by a physician recruiting firm, locumtenens.com, 3 percent said they were not frustrated by nonclinical aspects of medicine. The level of frustration has increased with nearly every survey.

and

“I’d write a prescription,” [the doctor] told me, “and then insurance companies would put restrictions on almost every medication. I’d get a call: ‘Drug not covered. Write a different prescription or get preauthorization.’ If I ordered an M.R.I., I’d have to explain to a clerk why I wanted to do the test. I felt handcuffed. It was a big, big headache.”

...

He continues to be frustrated by payment denials. “Thirty percent of my hospital admissions are being denied. There’s a 45-day limit on the appeal. You don’t bill in time, you lose everything. You’re discussing this with a managed-care rep on the phone and you think: ‘You’re sitting there, I’m sitting here. How do you know anything about this patient?’ ”

Recently, he confessed, he has been thinking about quitting medicine altogether and opening a convenience store. “Ninety percent of doctors I know are fed up with medicine,” he said.

The article also points out that plenty of people are self-educating on the internet and demanding irrelevant procedures, and that doctors have to deal with that. (I'm certainly guilty of "educating" my doctor. But then again I tend to send him medical journal articles about my diagnosis, not whatever I see in O Magazine that month. He says he appreciates it, but he may just be being polite.)

A friend of mine, who works at a high level in health care operations, mentioned recently how pricing has to cover those unable to pay their copays as well as those who are outright uninsured, and so of course the degree to which ones practitioner covers the un(der)insured affects their overall pricing structure.

Nearly simultaneously, I heard about someone who simply refused to pay for health insurance for his family (astronomical for the self-employed), and negotiated terms on everything. He noted that for now, he's getting such good discounts from medical care providers that he's content to carry on this way. It's a sensible conclusion, assuming he didn't know and so hasn't thought through the consequences for other peoples' medical costs.

That conversation was tangentially related to a recent experience where I was involved in a conversation about alternative mechanisms to fund private health care. Once again, human beings can do without money, but we can't do without health, social support, and whatever knowledge we need.

It's only because the wealthy have access and the poor don't that we continue to measure money so carefully and other assets only minimally: if the only way to have access to private practitioners who aren't overworked and to have medical procedures done in a hospital in a timely way is to pay for them; if the only way to be considered part of some groups is to have shared (costly) experiences; if the only way to get a good education where teachers can teach and students can focus on class (and not outside obligations) is to "buy in"... well, then yes: we will continue to live as greedy people.

Let's let Chuck Jones do the narrative via Daffy (circa 1957, for those who keep track).

Father's Day - In Memoriam

As is the case nowadays on Father's Day, I am in remembrance mode. I know it's a "Hallmark Holiday," but it doesn't really matter. It's more poignant this year, though: a friend's father is dying, and he's taking on the burden of primary caregiver. It takes a lot of courage, but then again he's an admirable man.

For those who don't know, my dad was a child and adolescent psychoanalyst who did a lot of work regarding suicide, and later moved into the legal system providing a friend of court brief on behalf of the children involved in custody hearings.

In Memoriam:
Lionel Margolin's Top Platitudes

Many people like to bring up Yoda's line: "Do or Do Not; There Is No Try." I don't like this phrase -- on the surface, it's great; but probe a little bit deeper and it's anti-learning, as it ignores the importance of intent: intent is intangible, but nevertheless often the most important aspect to consider when a mistake is made.  Instead of this, I would choose my father's wisdom, something also media-inspired: the combination of "Be Your Own Hero" and "There is No Finish Line." *

In response to "Life isn't fair!" (something I evidently said rather frequently during my adolescence), my father would reply, "Who ever told you life was fair? I never said that! You're right; life isn't fair!"

About Childrearing, "You can raise children to be obedient, or you can raise them to have character. You can't do both." What he meant by this was that in order to have character, you have to confront and question the established order. In fact, I mildly disagree, because there's a bridge: if part of your character is to be generally a proponent of social structure, then it would make some sense to have a "default" of loyalty, causing you to behave obediently as evidence of your willingness to support the existing social infrastructure, at least conceptually, and at least until there's a reason not to.

And in general, from as far back as I can remember, "Always Be Coachable!"  He intended this in the same way as people say to have a Beginner Mind.  I'm sure sometimes he meant this as "Jessica!, would you LISTEN?!?" but he also meant it as a general rule, to step into the swing (and not sideways) when swinging the baseball bat.

He had plenty of annoying, smart-ass comments -- I won't dignify them with the term "platitude" -- because he said out loud a lot of jokes that were clearly designed for his own amusement, and no one else's. I admit, I am not so funny to other people, either (just ask my son).  What can you do? No one's perfect.

So, Happy Father's Day, everyone.  And if you have a remembrance, add it to the comments.

- Jessica

* = "There is No Finish Line" was a Nike slogan poster so long ago that Nike was a startup.  At his request, I scoured Berkeley back in the day, until I found one. The irony!

Complaints Board

Several discussions I have recently had have been about how poorly creditors behave. Consumers have credit scores; why don't creditors have credit reporting based on their consumer-lending behavior?  Especially after the Countrywide fiasco, I believe that people who are financially sophisticated and able to cherrypick their creditors are no longer oblivious to the bad apple effect in their community-at-large.

This is the best I've found, and I've searched already for my current nemesis so that you can loathe them yourselves.  They have many services, and often underwrite consumer retail cards.  Complaints Board for GE Money.

Green Suburbs v. 0.9 (Beta)

In his insightful post on Open the Future: The Suburban Question, Jamais Cascio points out how the re-urbanization of the middle class and the suburbanization of the urban poor is an important trend.

He notes that the suburbs may eventually be abandoned to the low-income, people who are even less able to afford transportation costs, for example.

It's easiest to decouple suburbs from income once you realize how many people opt to remain childless, or send their children to private schools rather than neighborhood ones.  Suburbs have been able to have a more controlled environment simply due to zoning. If in the past education has correlated reasonably well to income, and the success of a child at school is most strongly correlated to the educational attainment of the primary caregiver, then lumping expensive houses together and plopping a school there might keep the children from learning some life lessons, but would presumably clump higher-academic-potential children together.

However, squeeze three families into that same McMansion, and the story looks a little bit different.

So how do we "green" the suburbs? It really is a drastic change, which is why I'm not calling it "Suburbs 2.0," but rather "Green Suburbs (beta)."  I think Jamais' focused the main issue: it's about living close to work. Greening the suburbs hingest on having clusters of product-oriented companies (not only retail services) available as employers. "First Ring" suburbs have managed this: Mountain View-to-Palo Alto have a tremendous force of high tech.  Fremont, Union City, Newark and South Hayward have benefited from the crawl north out of the Santa Clara county and into Alameda County, particularly in both biotech and solar.

This is an urban design question, in my mind: how to create a habitat where there is industry and work and social/physical/aesthetic experiences yet something of an ability to uproot and move when a new job appears.

The way to measure this -- had you thought I *wasn't* going to tie this back to the drum I beat? -- is to establish community indicators that focus on building specifically these assets. Communities need to measure what they want.  I point to the Boulder site because I believe they do a good job not only of building their program but also of explaining their results.  There are many commmunities in the United States who have begun this work.

Outcomes in Non-Profits

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had coffee with Marc Dangeard.  He related a talk he went to at Stanford on Non-Profit management, and specifically how funders want outcomes measurements but grantees lament the bizarreness that ensues when they try to meet these accountability demands. He pointed out that the take-away was that grantors should allow grantees to decide what they need to measure in terms of business process.

So, let me just go through this for education.

What is the mission of education: to educate. What does that mean?

New Model for Angel Investment

Yesterday, I had coffee with Marc Dangeard, a friend from Institute for the Future's FutureCommons.

He's working on a brilliant project. (And he is still forming if you want to investigate if this is right for you.)

Identifying the issues that start-ups have finding angel-level funding as well as the issues angels have with the volatility of their returns, he is bringing a structure that has been successful in Europe to the United States.  In this structure -- a mutual guarantee society (how insurance began) -- a capital pool is formed by angels and debt is loaned to startups. Inclusion is by invitation.

There are many things I just love about this: