Academic Success Isn’t Just About IPad

Academic Success Isn’t Just About IPad.

March 8, 2011- Psychology-Advice.net

Why academic success depends on technology AND people

When you think of the “typical” American high school student, the words highly motivated, engaged, and working for a better future might not be what immediately comes to mind.  As we note in our book, a lot of recent research on education shows that taking short-cuts to succeed seems to be rather endemic among American youth.  But today, President Obama and Secretary 

of Education Arne Duncan are in Boston to visit the Tech Boston Academy – a schoolwhere 95% of the students go on to college even though the majority of students come from one of the poorer areas of urban Boston and are first generation college applicants (you can see CNN’s coverage here).  This school has many advantages – it is supported by philanthropists of many types – from the Gates Foundation to Apple, Dell, and Cisco.  All of them are providing technology from SMART Boards to laptops.  And, undoubtedly, this technology is providing a huge advantage.  But we don’t think that’s the only reason for Tech Boston Academy’s success.

More and more research is showing that learning is not just enhanced by the dissemination of information, but rather by the social aspects of the classroom as well.  Our minds were designed to learn from our parents, not from computers.  As work by Patricia Kuhl and her colleagues is showing, social phenomena, ranging from the expressions we make to the social identities we have, greatly impacts learning.  Our colleague Paul Harris at the Harvard Schoolof Education, for instance, has shown that kids are more willing to learn from instructors they trust or that are more similar to them.

What does this mean for Tech Boston?  If you read between the lines, the stories the principal recounts aren’t just about technology.  It’s about the older students who come back to teach there (i.e., instructors who are similar to students and whom they can trust), it’s about the notion that once the students enter the building they’re all in there together and separate from the outside world (i.e., building a social identity), it’s about working for the future (i.e., taking a long-term view on what’s important).  How we behave is always a function of the battle between short-term and long-term focused mental mechanisms.  In Teach Boston, it’s clear that the environment favors the long-term view, and the student’s decisions are guided accordingly.

The psychology of ICT procurement in schools.

The selfish geek and the female-driven tablet revolution.

Published 17:11, 25 March 11 ComputerworldUK

by John Spencer.*

This post is about contemporary marketing of ICT into schools set against a history of men selling happily to men but coming up against the challenge of selling ‘boys toys’ to women.

Amazingly, thanks in part to truly massive government subsidies, this was successful but it would not have happened unless Microsoft Office had not become so deeply important to the work-place. To understand why, school procurement psychology needs to be understood.

Nurture Procurement
The teaching paradigm described as ‘child centric’ education became so firmly established during the past three decades that it is hard to imagine a time ‘before’. What this means to the business-person is that the whole-child -nurture model of education wields the trump card when making procurement decisions.

To illustrate, in the late 90’s and early 00’s selling of ICT into schools was so successful partly because it was generously subsidised but partly because it picked up on nurture imperative that was sellable.

Put crudely: ‘I might have no interest in computers or software but little Sarah/Josh will need these skills to get on in life, so we had better get them’. Thus the nurture model kept schools buying computers even though its workforce was becoming increasingly female and probably less inclined to buy computers simply because they themselves wanted them.

Selfish Procurement
In the past, and you will have to trust me on this, computer kit and software entirely on a selfish-procurement model. Sure the kids would benefit, surely that much was self-evident, but the driver really was what I and those like me wanted (often as a result of a starry-eyed trip to BETT), so post-hoc justification ruled the day.

The early selfish-procurement drivers ebbed away with time as schools, I would assert, became predominantly female. But at last this is changing.

To sell into schools in the 21st Century, it follows we must leverage both selfish and nurture driven buying This is actually a better place to be than you think for two reasons which are 1) the child-centric nurture model is very strong and we can add women technology purchasers to the traditional male pattern of procurement. Women buy personal technology today as much as men do and this is leading to a different profile of products listed as desirable.

Conclusion
The original PC revolution, first in business and then in schools, was led by folk bringing their own kit to work. Businesses and schools eventually simply had to acknowledge the trend, abandon the mainframe network and embrace the PC.

As we all know once the PC became the Network it was all over. Any new innovations (Linux, Netbooks) over the past ten years get strangled at birth by the Network. However what we are seeing today again are staff bringing their ‘Slates’ into work and into schools.

All we need to do to restart the buying revolution in schools is to leverage a nurture imperative to support spending on Slates. As you may know I think this is e-textbooks and one -to - one video tutorial.

Surely someone will go for it soon?

* Dr John Spencer began his teaching career in 1981 armed with a Sinclair ZX81, thereby demonstrating two things at once: Firstly he was in at the very start of ICT in the classroom and secondly he is a sucker for duff technology. Thereafter he taught joining a start-up open source company as their Head of Education in 2002. Now John is bringing his iconoclastic disposition and tendency to throw a spanner in the works to blogging.

Un buen artista copia, el gran artista roba - Good artist copy, great artist steal

"Good artist copy, great artist steal"... esta es una de las tantas citas memorables de la película "Piratas de Silicon Valley" (1999). 

- Ver película online o al final del post - 

Es un film que todo aficionado a la tecnología debiera ver, tanto los seguidores de la manzana o la ventana; esta cuenta la historia de unos jóvenes Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak  (Apple) y Bill Gates, Paul Allen y Steve Ballmer (Microsoft) dando inicio a lo que hoy conocemos como dos de las más grandes empresas de la informática. Todo lo relatado en la película permite conocer lo que hoy tenemos frente a nosotros: la personal computer y todo lo asociado a ello. Es una historia fascinante de creatividad, lealtades y deslealtades, amistad y emociones de estos personajes que sin duda han cambiado el mundo actual. 


Desde lo contrafactual, al ver el incidente de cómo Bill Gates "roba" a Steve Jobs su OS para dar paso a lo que el llamaría su creación - Windows -, da para hacer la pregunta qué hubiera pasado si Jobs no se hubiera fiado de Gates - qué hubiera sido de él -, considerando que Apple tuvo en su equipo a Microsoft... quizás no habría variado mucho la historia ¿o sí?... casi al finalizar la película se viene esta otra frase: 

Steve Jobs: “Somos mejores que ustedes. Nuestro producto es superior.”

Bill Gates: “No lo entiendes Steve, eso no importa.”

La arrogancia de Steve Jobs lo llevaría a ser despedido de su propia empresa, que Woz renunciase a Apple y Bill Gates se convirtiera en el hombre más rico del mundo por años. La película termina abruptamente adelantándose a 1997 cuando Jobs vuelve a Apple siendo observado desde una pantalla gigante en una de sus religiosas presentaciones - ¿superioridad de imagen? - por Gates siendo dueño en parte de Apple. 

Pero como la historia de la informática ha sido tan oscilante - ¿recuerdan la estrepitosa caída de los .com? -, Apple ha vuelto a resurgir de una manera asombrosa y con ella Steve Jobs, cabe señalar que el pasado 2010, Apple se convirtió en la segunda empresa con más valor en el mundo - 267.000.000.000 US -.

Volviendo al film, al finalizar se muestra en 1997 a Jobs nuevamente en Apple - después de más de una década -... durante esos años no perdió el tiempo ya que compró  Pixar a Geroge Lucas en 1985 y fundó NeXT. El 2006 se convirtió en accionista mayoritario de Disney quien compró Pixar. Y lo de iPhone, iPad, MacBook etc ya es sabido y en desarrollo.

Una última de las frases memorables: (Steve Wozniak trabajaba para Hewlett Packard en los '70 que tenía exclusividad sobre sus creaciones, en este caso su prototipo de la Apple I)...

"¿Para qué quiere la gente (común) un ordenador?" (1976)... su proyecto fue rechazado.

Ver la película online (español)