Learning is Change

59. What makes a bad app in education? #lifewidelearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 28, 2016

I am an app hoarder.

Even before the App Store launched in 2008, I was jailbreaking my iPod Touch and finding apps to put on it. As it became easier to do, I would install any app that piqued my interest, even if only for a minute. I would install things because they were temporarily free. I would install others because I thought they might be useful in the future, even if I didn’t currently have a use for them. In all, I have downloaded thousands of apps and I currently have around 200 on my phone (all carefully organized into a single page on the home screen).

The vast majority of these few thousand Apps that I have installed have one thing in common, though: they are bad.

Now, I am not an App snob or someone who picks things apart unnecessarily. These Apps are all bad in their own special ways. They tend to fall into specific “bad” categories, and I would like to enumerate those here. Because I believe that anything can be an educational app, I am going to leave these categories rather broad. I will call out where I think these “bad habits” are particularly egregious for educational settings, but for the most part these will apply any app. Also, while I primarly have experience in using iOS Apps, many of these categories can be found in the Google Play store as well.

Without further ado, here are the categories of Bad Apps:

1. Single Use Apps
2. Bloated Apps
3. Ad-supported or In-App Currency Apps
4. Web-site wrapper apps
5. Languishing Apps
6. Content/Service-Unaware Apps
7. Service-Dependent Apps
8. Missing Business Model Apps
9. Data-mining Apps
10. Facebook Apps

Single Use Apps

There are so many examples of great apps that only do one thing. The problem, though, is that they are so singular in their focus that their one function gets consumed by another app or within the OS itself that it loses relevance. Apps like Camera+ or Instapaper were severely hampered by their intense focus on features that were later made (more) obsolete by updates to the stock Camera app and the Reading List in Safari. In education, these apps tend to have a specific feature that sets them apart initially. For example, Penultimate was a perfect app for taking notes and  sharing quick sketches. It initially had a huge educational following, but when Paper by 53 came out, it was all but forgotten because of the huge amount of customization and sharing options available. This happens all of the time for single use apps, and can be avoided by looking for apps that have a robust feature set that have shown willingness to grow into new use cases over time.

Bloated Apps

On the opposite end of the spectrum are apps that try to pack too many features in. Although a lot of people still like Google+, this is the perfect example of how a bloated app made for a Bad App. When it tried to pack Hangouts, Hangouts on Air, Photos, Communities, Collections, and Streams all in a single app, it made for a terrible experience. I still used this app but I didn’t enjoy opening it or trying to figure out where the new features were hidden. This happens in education-focused apps all too often as well. They start with a core experience (i.e., social learning) and then they continue to bolt other features on top of it (i.e., gradebooks, content purchasing, enterprise integrations, parent accounts, etc.), often to the detriment of all users. Knowing the core of your app matters.

Ad-Supported or In-App Currency Apps

There are many apps that are technically “free”, but instead use advertisements to ensure profitability. This makes for one of the single worst App experiences because there is no way of know what ads are going to show up on the screen or where/when they will occur. If I notice advertising within an app, I will delete it immediately and try to find a competitor to purchase the app from so that I can give money directly to the developer rather than having the intermediary of advertisers. This goes double for any app that chooses to use an “In-App currency” that you have to purchase in order to engage in purchases or experiences. This is most prevalent in games, but it sneaks into many of the educational apps that have grade-level content for purchase. These kinds of pseudo-subscriptions are terrible for educators, but they are just as bad for consumers. We should pay for the apps we use, leveraging them to their fullest extent. We should not continually have to purchase credits just to maintain the services we need in classrooms or outside of it.

Web-site Wrapper Apps

Anyone that wraps a website inside of a native app is doing a great disservice to both those using websites and mobile applications. They are not getting the full benefits of a mobile website because the display engine for browsers inside of apps is inferior to those in mobile Safari (or Chrome on Android) and many of the features of file systems within apps (uploading files/images) don’t exist in “Wrapper Apps”. Many education-focused startups tend to start making apps in this regard because it is much easier to build a web app and deploy it everywhere than to build a native app for each platform. This leads to a far inferior experience.

Languishing Apps

There are many apps that start off with a clear purpose and are updated regularly in the face of new version of the OS, but are abandoned over time and never meet their full potential. The best way to tell if an app is Bad in this way is to see if the interface has been updated with a modern look (Flat design in iOS and Material Design in Android). If it hasn’t then it means that the developers are no longer seriously looking at this app and new features are unlikely to make their mark. While these apps are still usable, they become more and more painful to put into your workflow because you are unsure if the service is going to continue. Zite is the classic example of this type of app. For a very long time, Zite was the best way to follow news and gather information on a topic. It was far better than Flipboard in many respects, but it was purchased and then abandoned shortly thereafter. This is the fate of many educational apps, as many startups are testing to see if there is a market for their work or not. Ask3 is an example of how this played out directly in the Education space.

Content/Service Unaware Apps

There are many companies that act as if their app is the only one on the phone and that their services are the only ones that exist. In many cases, this manifests itself as apps that do not allow you to connect Google Drive or Dropbox for accessing/importing files. In other cases, this means that you can’t export videos, pictures, or other creations made within the app to an external service or another app. This creates a walled garden within the app that makes it incredibly unlikely to build AppSmashes or other workflows for getting complex tasks done. In education, this rears its ugly head when a company is really looking for ways to create vendor lock-in where it doesn’t need to exist. An example of this is in the Swivl Capture app for recording classroom practice. It should allow you to export videos to your Camera Roll, but it doesn’t. This is core function of every other video capture app in the App Store, but alas, Swivl is unaware that this should be a default option because it wants you to upload only to its service.

Service-Dependent Apps

On the other side of this spectrum are apps that are dependent upon other services for their core functionality. The most basic form of this is an app that requires you to register with Twitter, Facebook, or a Google Account. By requiring you to be a member of another service, the app is limiting their user base as well as ensuring that those folks who are concerned about privacy become wary of signing up. Another service dependency comes in the form of syncing services. If you are uninterested in using iCloud or another similar syncing service then there are huge amounts of apps that you will not be able to take advantage of. From notes/files syncing to address books, if you do not buy in to the Cloud-based service model, these apps are hamstrung. In education, this tends to look like an over-reliance on outside services for core functions (i.e., Crocodoc for embedding, which is no longer available).

Missing Business Model Apps

There are some apps that have made it clear that they are not interested in making any money, and in education that can seem like a boon. But, I am extremely wary of any app that is giving away huge amounts of online storage or functionality without charging anything. If the massive graveyard of EdTech apps is any indication, there are many folks who have foregone a business model who have later regretted it. While this is a sin akin to the ad-supported apps, it is perhaps even worse. To release an app that gains traction among users (and schools/students/teachers) just to realize later that you have run out of money because you never had a business model betrays the trust of those users. It also makes them less likely to try new things or to continue to see technology as a sustainable solution. If you must charge for your app to stay in business, do so.

Data-mining Apps

With nearly every app that I install I get alerted to additional permissions that are required in order to use the app. Most often, it is the location services that I have to turn on so that the app can know where I am in the world at all times. For an app like Google Maps this makes sense. For an app that I am simply editing documents, it does not. Any time that an app asks for more permissions than it really needs, it erodes the trust I have in the app and the company that makes it. Other types of data mining that seem to creep into Educational apps are ones that are constantly asking you to rate things or evaluate things within the app. This could be evaluation of content or simply +1’ing items to improve search results. When the app makes you a data point in the broader system, your experience for actual learning or using the app is significantly diminished.

Facebook Apps

I do not enjoy Facebook. That much is not a secret, but I find their apps to be pretty much the worst apps I have on my phone. I include Facebook, Messenger, Paper and Moments in this list of terrible apps. If you look at the other categories of Bad Apps from this list, you will notice that each and every one is found within these apps. Moments and Messenger are single use apps that make you switch back and forth between the main Facebook app multiple times to get a full experience. Facebook is a bloated app of the worst variety, mixing video, long form posts, pictures, and many other functions into an un-unified mess. Facebook is terribly ad-supported and encourages many of its games to use in-app currency instead of real money. Many of the links that you tap on are simply wrapping a browser into the app without giving the full functionality of being able to share the link outside of Facebook. Paper has been languishing since it was first released and hasn’t been updated since March 11, 2015. The main app is fully unaware that Twitter or Youtube exist, instead consuming everything into its own awful interface. Each app is also overly dependent upon your Facebook account for everything you do within it, mining each like and view as something to better help understand your interests and serve up ads accordingly. The only category that might not fit for Facebook is the “Missing Business Model”, but I might change that to be a Missing Ethics Model instead. They are clearly making a lot of money off of their advertising, but I am unconvinced that they are doing it in an ethical way, as all of the content you share with Facebook is owned by them and they are making huge sums of money off of Freebooted content. The worst part for me, though, is that because Facebook is so popular and influential, many EdTech app makers are trying to follow suit. They are trying to create the same kind of sticky ecosystem that Facebook has created and I believe it will lead to a much worse experience for all learners.

With all of that said, I don’t want to make the case that there are no good apps out there, either in education or in the consumer market. So, in an effort to call attention to those folks who are doing an amazing job of avoiding the pitfalls above, here are some of my current favorites:

1. Overcast – This is the single best podcasting app to ever exist. It is both simple and robust. It makes me happy whenever I use it.
2. Tweetbot – This is the Twitter client that gets nearly everything right. It is beautiful and it lets me focus on exactly what I want to learn and know more about.
3. Waze – Although it isn’t as robust as Google Maps, its purity of purpose for getting me where I want to go is second to none. The fact that it knows when I want to go home and starts routing me without me touching the screen is also lovely.
4. Medium – While I don’t love all of the things that are written on this platform, I find that the reading experience here is better than anywhere else.
5. Product Hunt – I check this app exactly once a day and I am never disappointed with what I find. I feel so wonderfully knowledgable about new trends in technology whenever I see what is being posted and discussed within this robust community.
6. Voice Dream – This app reads me PDF’s, but it lets me talk to every other app that can open PDF’s too. It is hugely customizable and makes my life easier.
7. Wirecast Go – This app is the holy grail of video streaming and I use it as often as I can. The on screen information while you are streaming makes going live really easy.
8. Protube – This is the app that Google should have built for Youtube. It is beautiful and it lets me speed up videos on mobile which is essential for me.
9. Drafts – I find myself needing to jot things down and quickly add ideas. This is by far the quickest and most flexible way to do it.
10. RecApp – The ability to start an audio recording from the notification center is amazing. I use it all of the time to quickly capture ideas out loud. Truly wonderful.

I hope you can see a number of reasons why these apps have made it into heavy rotation on my primary learning device, my phone. I am wondering where your top 10 apps would fall. Do they exhibit the “Bad Habits” identified here or are they able to avoid them and find their rightful place among those that will last in your home screen?

Leave a comment and let me know.

57. What are the benefits of not having a plan? #LifeWideLearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 27, 2016

I’m often aware that that I need far less planning than others need in order to move forward. In general, I do not need task lists or long-term timelines. Rather, I rely upon a few guiding principles and general workstreams to determine what should happen next. This tends to work extremely well when I am not dependent upon others, but much less well when other people have to join me in the work.

And therein lies the benefits and detriments of not having a plan.

Planning isn’t really for you. Planning is for others that you might need to communicate with. Planning is for sharing progress and working collaboratively. It is for building capacity and coalitions. When you make a plan, you are committing yourself to others rather than just making promises that you can easily rationalize or retract.

And that is what makes not planning into a luxury that can only be held within yourself. You are untethered to a plan about what you are doing on Saturday afternoon, and that feels wonderful. You can change your intentions at a moments notice and be truly serendipitous with your energies. But, if you are too often untethered, you will start to feel alone. You will know that unless you build a plan with someone, you will never truly connect.

Life is nothing more than a series of promises that we make to one another about where we will be and what we will be doing there. If we make no promises, we will not be burdened by having to keep them. That is simultaneously freeing and isolating. If we make promises, we will be forced to reconcile when we cannot keep them despite our best efforts. If we make promises, we cannot be self-sufficient. We must rely on others who have also made promises to us. We further entangle ourselves in promises, and therefore, planning.

To plan is to be together, for better and worse.

To not plan is to be alone, for better and worse.

56. When is lecture good? #LifeWideLearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 25, 2016

Lectures are about control:

• Control of the narrative.
• Control of the cannon.
• Control of the information to be disseminated.
• Control of the time it takes to listen and (maybe) understand.
• Control of the pace and format for learning.

But, sometimes those controls can lead to really great learning. Sometimes a lecture is exactly what is needed to better understand a topic or to learn from someone with a specific expertise that is difficult to share in other ways. I would like to enumerate all of the times that lectures are good, but before I do so, I must lay out a few caveats.

The true benefits of lecture can only be felt if the following are in place:

1. An authentic choice has been made by the participant to listen to and learn from the lecture. This means that there was a conscious decision to NOT do some other type of learning. It cannot be a passive decision or a “path of least resistance” decision. Rather, it should be an enthusiastic decision to learn by letting someone else share their experience.
2. A backchannel is available. If the participants are not able to discuss their learning with one another as a part of the session (turn-and-talk, etc.), they must at least be able to process with one another through a Twitter (or some other technology) backchannel.
3. The lecturer knows the audience. The person at the front of the room should know their audience and be responsive to them. She should be able to take cues and receive feedback from the audience in the form of laughter or energy in the room, incorporating it into the scope of the lecture itself.
4. The lecture must tell a story. While I do not believe all lectures have to be riveting, I do believe that all effective lectures have a core conflict. There is some broader purpose for the relay of this information, and there is some deeper truth that is trying to be uncovered.

With all of those deep caveats in mind, the benefits of lecture are:

1. Participants get to react and think through to a single argument. Most other learning formats do not allow for participants to dig into a single argument because each participant is hearing and working on something slightly different. When you have more voices in the room speaking, there is no single compelling idea for which to react to and build upon.
2. Important ideas can be easily transferred. If TED talks or An Inconvenient Truth are any indication, videos of lectures are one of the easiest ways to transfer important ideas from a small group of people to millions. This is why speeches still dominate political discourse. It is why we remember key metaphors and talking points and don’t need to constantly re-watch the same ideas over and over again. Lectures create a shorthand for ideas, and it can hugely benefit the transfer of those ideas.
3. The barrier to entry is really low. For many types of learning, especially more active formats, there is a specific set of prerequisites for taking part. This includes technical understanding or even the ability to actively work together as a group. The lecture does not require anything other than your ability to listen. This simplicity is powerful. Although it can be abused by lecturers who try and obfuscate meaning, when done well, it allows everyone to learn.
4. It gives a voice to anyone who is willing to speak. While it doesn’t happen as much as it should, when underrepresented opinions are given a platform from which to share, it lends an authority that wouldn’t otherwise be present. This is particularly acute in “keynote lectures”. When women, people of color, LGBT, or other people with substantially less privilege can stand up and speak their minds, it can be a powerful way to push back against injustice.

Clearly, lecture has its place. While I do think that for most learning lecture gets in the way of creation or collaboration, it can be done well and used strategically by an individual or an institution. In many ways, I hope that lecture doesn’t go away, but rather is used for what it is best suited: when the right voice is the one voice that should be heard.

Note: I did a Youtube video recently on when Lecture works best in PD environments. Go have a look.

 

55. If you had to choose one book for your kids’ teachers to teach, what would it be and in what grade? #LifeWideLearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 24, 2016

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

-George Orwell, 1984

I read 1984 in the eighth grade. The above quotation is the single image in all of literature that has stayed with me more than any other. More than Gatsby’s light. More than the white whale. More than The Raven. It is the dystopian future where there is no inner private life and the world exists to perpetuate pain and control.

It stays with me because the book is about the fear of being forgotten. It is about never learning from the past. It is about authoritarianism and what happens when we trade too much of ourselves in service of stability. It is about a kind of constant war, both inside and out.

It is the one novel that most made me want to teach, and I believe it is the one novel that my children need more than any other. It does not speak to the kinds of diverse opinions that I want them to have, nor does it really enrich their lives with inspiration or happiness. It isn’t meant to.

For me, 1984 is to be read because it reveals what you are willing to compromise on. It reveals how important privacy and imagination are to you and whether or not you are willing to push against authority even if it is a futile pursuit. I want each of my children to know that about themselves, to know just how far their humanity will take them.

I’m not sure 8th grade is the perfect time for everyone, but it certainly was for me. If I had to guess, my daughter will be ready in 6th grade and my middle son will likely not be ready until 9th or 10th. I don’t yet know about my youngest, but I’d like to imagine that he could read it with a teacher whenever he so chose. By the time he is ready, I want it to be possible for a mentor to walk him through why the Proles are so important to the future of society. I want him to debate the symbolism of the telescreen in relationship to the ubiquitous screens of our world.

I recognize that it is firmly in “The Cannon” of literature, but I can’t think of another book that so heavily relevant to where my children are headed, or indeed where we are all headed. 1984 is the kind of book that needs to be contextualized and thought through. It is the kind of book that needs a teacher, and I want each of my children to have a good one. For this book, and for many many others.

54. What is an opinion you’ve changed since becoming an educator? #LifeWideLearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 23, 2016

Life experience is very easy to write off when you don’t have any. It seems inconsequential and more of a burden than a blessing as you find yourself in your first real job out of college. Everything seems possible, and though you want to learn from others, you are pretty sure that anything they might teach you, could easily be learned from a book.

I was that guy.

And while I have always had a great deal of respect for veteran teachers, I didn’t fully understand who they were and what they had to offer.

Veteran teachers:

• Know what has worked and what hasn’t in their own classrooms.
• Have discarded more lesson plans than you have ever written.
• Can build communities of learners and learn all names in a few short hours.
• Have committed their lives to something that you are willing to use as a stepping stone to something else.
• Have touched more lives than you can imagine.
• Are amazing human beings, each with their own story that has led them to their own educational philosophy and teaching style.

Learning from veteran teachers, I changed my opinion on life experience. It was no longer something to be feared as a way in which each of us succumbs to stagnation. Rather, it became something I longed for, as every single event in my classroom was a “first time.” First times are as amazing as they are exhausting. They help to build us into who we are, but they don’t last. Their impact can only be felt until the next first time comes along.

When I looked at those veteran teachers and their knowledge of “next time” or “this time” in contrast to my never-ending “first times,” I couldn’t help but be jealous. They knew how to react and how to build something that lasts, and better yet, they could teach me. And so, I learned to listen. I learned that their experience was not archaic or from a bygone era. It was for right now, for my needs in the classroom, and for my kids.

And I realized that Life Experience is the one thing that I could never hope to learn, but rather something that could only be lived with one another. It took me stumbling into relationships with some of my favorite teachers to fully understand this. It is something I consider the foundation of the way in which I trust teachers and the way in which I try to support what they know and want to know rather than what I think they should.

And while I have a lot more experience than I did when I first set foot in my first classroom on the second floor of Cresthill Middle School, I will never have enough. It is something I continue to thirst for.

Ever more, every day.

53. What education philosophers speak loudest to you? #LifeWideLearning16 @bhwilkoff

— Zac Chase (@MrChase) February 22, 2016

I do not often reach for Dewey or Vygotsky when I am trying to sort out a particularly thorny educational issue. I don’t even seek out living theorists like Papert or Chomsky all that much, even though I tend to agree with much of what they say. Rather, I find that the most important educational philosophers of the moment are two people that are rewriting what educational philosophy can do and be: Watters and Belshaw.

I find their writing, in consort with one another, to be the most powerful form of critique and inquiry imaginable. From Watters’ analysis of how we continue to talk about the future without looking backward to see what the future has meant to us in the past. To Belshaw’s deep thinking on how we honor one another’s learning and build it into every informal act we make both inside and outside of schools.

They are philosophers in the best sense of the word: they offer a distinct viewpoint on learning that sets them apart from many of those around them. Although they are part of a broader blogging and academic community, they are not of it. They are both reaching further and creating more. And it is in this act of creation that I am most inspired.

Audrey’s foray into ensuring that everyone has a distributed writing platform amazes me continually. As I continue to seek out new ways of expressing myself, I know that she has done much of groundwork for keeping those ways open and connected.

Doug’s use of open tools and his insistence that everyone has access to create new things makes me want to work harder to do the same. He is unafraid to go below the surface when a company has “open-washed” their product. He inspires me to think critically about the tools that I choose to endorse by using them every day.

These are the two voices that are speaking loudest for me right now. They speak for many of us, actually. They are telling the history of what is happening right now. They are telling our story, with all of its rough edges and pitfalls. They are making the art of educational philosophy about the craft of building digital and modern learning. They are not just looking at the shiny tools or the academic research, they are painting the picture of what it means to be learner.

I feel a part of something when I read their work. I feel like we are moving forward, methodically and carefully, but ever forward.

Thank you, Audrey.

Thank you, Doug.