Think Different

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.  The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.  You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward…while some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

-Think Different, Apple

It was my first year at Accenture and I was in one of our typical all day all night war room tech/org design sessions. One of the senior managers in the room looked my way and asked, “Why do you wear a purple shirt like that? You know we’re not in Mexico right? Is it because you are going clubbing tonight?” I heard comments like this at Accenture throughout my six years there. As a Latino, the blue button-down, khaki pants, penny loafers look wasn’t for me. Don’t get me wrong, I really wished it were! I bought the corporate uniform and tried it for a while.  I wanted to fit in. As the only Latino in the room 99% of the time, I wanted to blend in with the people I was working with. I just wasn’t very comfortable in my own skin when I dressed like they did. I decided I would just do me and hope for the best. This led to many comments about how I dressed or what I looked like. I had nicknames like “Jose” and “Pedro.” Almost every request from a manager ended with, “Mucha gracias,” when clearly this was their entire Spanish language library. It’s been like this for 20 years. Just a couple of months ago I was presenting at an event in Chicago answering a question about the future of schools. When I was done with my answer, the panelist next to me said, “wow, you are so articulate and well spoken.” I know he meant it as a compliment but what was he expecting? I am the Global Education Evangelist for Google. I am the face and voice for Google education. What could have been the level of expectation he had for me?

Although I don’t code, I've been involved in the tech space since 1995. At Accenture I was part of the organizational development team in the electronics and high tech industry group. I worked for organizations like American Express, Motorola, Seagate, Sun Microsystems, and so on. I spent two years at Charles Schwab, helping the leadership team reengineer their human resources operation. I believe over the last 20 years, I have spent more time in Silicon Valley/San Francisco than I’ve spent at home in Phoenix! Almost everyone in my professional network is in the tech space. I’m used to always being the only Latino in the room. I've spent the last nine years at Google, so it didn’t surprise me when I saw our diversity numbers – 3% Latino, 2% Black. I was proud of the team for releasing the information. Laszlo Bock and his team stood up and said, we have an issue and need to do many many things to solve it.  

Google of course is not alone. Only one in 14 technology folks in Silicon Valley is Black or Latino. In all, less than 5% of the teams at Google, Facebook, and Yahoo are Black or Latino. This extends into the management and future direction of these organizations. For example, I read a NY Times article highlighting that 11 of the 20 companies examined, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay, had no people of color on their Board of Directors. Out of the 189 board members across those 20 companies, only three were Black and one was Latino. I should say here if any of these companies would like to put me on their Board of Directors, I’m open to discussing it!  It’s also critical to point out that this isn’t just an issue with “old” tech companies (you know, Google is 16 years old and therefore a dinosaur.) Less than 2% of startup founders are Black or Latino.

These figures are a reflection of a larger issue when it comes to STEM fields – only 13% of science, technology, mathematics, and engineering degrees are held by Black or Latino workers (Cameron White, "Equity, Diversity & Edtech," July 21, 2014.) This is a somber statistic impacting us today and in the future. By 2020, the United States will have 1.4 million computer science jobs according to estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with only 400,000 computer scientists to fill them. That leaves a gaping hole in our economy! At the same time, by the year 2043, the United States will be a majority-minority country. My six-month-old daughter is in the generation that will be that majority-minority. In 2013, there was a higher percentage of Latino high school graduates enrolled in college than non-Latino whites.

We have a perfect storm of concerns heading our way. The need for diversity in technology is not an altruistic matter. We are talking real commerce here.  This is especially true in the Edtech space. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up the majority of students in K12. The need for intellectual and social diversity is critical. Not just in terms of ethnic diversity either. We need to increase the opportunities for those people of color near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Their voice is critical in the Edtech space when it comes to solutions for their community.

The companies that will have endurance are the ones who understand how diversity helps them stay relevant. Organizations that ignore diversity, or do not see the business value of it, are in danger of becoming irrelevant and out-of-touch. It also makes very good organizational sense. Many studies show organizations with both gender and ethnic diversity tend to be more creative and profitable. The key element is how multiple perspectives help these organizations design products and services that appeal to a cultural diverse audience.

While there are some very authentic concerns we need to tackle in the tech space, this is not a tech industry issue alone. The problem starts long before the tech job posting goes live. The problem spans the entire pipeline.

As reported in many publications last year (Liana Heitin, No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States, Eleanor Barkhorn, Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts in High School,) there were three states where not a single female student took the Advanced Placement exam in computer science. In eight states, no Latino students took it. And in 11 states, no Black students took the test. In 2013, 30,000 students took the AP exam for computer science and less than 20% of those students were female, about 8% were Latino, and 3% were Black. Even if we had an opportunity to increase the number of minorities in AP computer science classes, I don’t think we would be able to staff those AP classes with qualified CS teachers. I get it. If you are a struggling school, how much are you going to invest in computer science when you are dealing with bringing students up to level in math and reading? When you are using a shot glass to bail out the water from your underfunded school system that is quickly sinking, how much bandwidth do you have for computer science?

Besides, the problem doesn’t even start in high school. We know there is an 18-month academic gap between rich kids and poor kids by the time they get to kindergarten. Most of the poor kids happen to be minorities. These students, who make up 40% of the K12 population, are not only less likely to be prepared for kindergarten, they are less likely to graduate from high school, or attend a great college. They are less likely to graduate from college and when they are in college, they are less likely to study computer science or any STEM field for that matter (Cameron White, "Equity, Diversity & Edtech," July 21, 2014.) The statistic, which I wake up with every morning, is this:

If you are a high potential low-income minority in the US, you have a 9% chance of graduating from college. 45 years ago it was 6%. At this rate we will be at 15% by the year 2105.

- White House Report, Increasing College Opportunity for Low-Income Students 

With these baffling facts, how would we ever manage to get high potential minorities into Google, Twitter, Yahoo, or any of the hundreds of tech start-ups?

We need to think differently about the whole pipeline, from what we do to make sure students of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds start their education on the right foot, to recruiting strategies at tech companies, to ensuring we create bias free cultures in all our organizations. Just increasing the number of Black and Latinos who get interviews at tech companies and startups isn’t enough, especially if nothing has been done to change organizational culture and bias.

Tech companies must demand an unbiased and inclusive workplace.  This can be done with professional development for individuals and teams. At the same time, tech companies can increase the diversity of the hiring pool by searching for real talent in various places and not just sticking to the same patterns they currently use. Tech companies can also make sure they are hiring more diverse workers in non-tech positions as well. In the long run, all of us in technology must invest in fixing the pipeline by getting involved early in the education effort.

In the Edtech space, start-ups can prioritize the recruitment of culturally and socioeconomically diverse folks to join the team. At the same time, these teams must be engaged with teachers and students, especially low-income minority students, to get their perspective and point of view on the problem they are trying to solve with their products or services (Cameron White, "Equity, Diversity & Edtech," July 21, 2014.)

At the education level, much needs to be done!

First, we need to teach our students real tech skills, building digital and technology leaders, not just consumers of technology. I’m not even talking about coding classes. I’m talking about teaching students to search, to vet, to make sense of information. You can start here with some great material from us!

Second, we need to build programing concepts (i.e., programing, design thinking, conceptual modeling) into our curriculum and in our options for after school activities. There are a growing group of organizations that are trying to address these issues through community based, technology enabled education programs (Cameron White, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education," July 21, 2014.)

• CS First provides free, easy-to-use computer science (CS) enrichment materials that target and engage a diverse student population.
• Black Girls Code teaches young girls and pre-teens of color in-demand skills in technology and computer programming.
• Science Genius leverages hip hop pedagogy to engage urban youth and educators in STEM exploration.
• Hack the Hood connects youth to real-world consulting projects building websites for local businesses and nonprofits.
• Qeyno Labs harnesses the interests of high potential youth from low-opportunity settings through radically inclusive hackathons.
• Made with Code is an initiative designed to inspire millions of girls to experience the power of code.

Third, we need to provide as many opportunities as possible to students of all socioeconomic backgrounds to engage with computer science and other STEM fields. This area will require some outside the class thinking.

Finally, we cannot forget the most important stakeholder group - parents.  Parents play a critical role in creating the demands and expectations for our students. During the industrial revolution, it was easy for workers to move from the farm to the factory. This is not the case with the knowledge-based economy. A displaced manufacturing worker cannot move from that role to a system architect at a tech company. The knowledge, skills, and abilities required for this economy require a lifelong learning mentality. Parents need to understand this and demand that their children are learning what they need to learn to thrive in their future (and in my case, make sure my kids have a house I can move into when I am older.) Parents must drive the demand for building computer science/STEM skills and capabilities for their children. This is especially true in our poor communities. I think my mother still believes the only way I will ever be successful when I grow up is to be a lawyer. I want to see parents in these communities talk about how their kid is going to grow up and be a biomedical engineer, an architectural engineering manager, an information research scientist, or a information security analyst. When someone asks me if I want my kids to speak a second language (because you know, I speak Spanish,) I respond with, “yes, Python.” Now, I just need to figure out how to get every Latino parent in the country to answer the same way!

I am working on a project I'm really excited about. I am part of a team that is designing and building a new district high school in Phoenix focused on inquiry based learning, where students use coding as the language they speak and use in the pursuit of learning. I will talk more about this project when we get to the next stage! We are really trying to think different.

My kid William showing me his lines of code...

Post Note

I published a public draft outline of this blog post before I ran a session on the need for diversity in technology at SXSWedu. I got some great information, statistics, and feedback that I included in this post.

If you want to learn more about this topic there are some great resources out there, including these well thought out posts:

Equity, Diversity & Edtech, by Cameron White

Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts in High School, by Eleanor Barkhorn

Hacking Tech's Diversity Problem, by Joan Williams

The Diversity Issue in Tech Firms Starts Before the Recruiting Process, by Catherine Rampell

How Cultural Differences Drive Diversity in Education Innovation, by Harman Singh

Is this the most exciting time in education history?

"It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.

It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine."

-R.E.M.

The potential for innovation and new solutions to deliver education has never been so high.  Traditional learning models, like those many of us grew up with, are being transformed.  It seems every few months a new idea for learning is being introduced.  In just the last few years, we’ve seen examples such as, distance learning, blended learning, personalized learning, and flipped classroom models take off.  Many in the education world believe we’re just getting warmed up!  I am optimistic because the capabilities technology and the web deliver are creating powerful tools that will continue to advance and become more readily available to everyone. 

During this time of transformational innovation, it is critical we keep our focus on learning and not on technology.  We have to make sure we aren’t just automating education, and/or making it more efficient.  Turning a textbook into a etextbook or moving from delivering a lecture in a class to delivering a lecture on video are examples of what I mean. 

I am passionate about education because I know first hand that education can be the silver bullet for millions of children and their families living in poverty.  Education has the potential to break the cycle of poverty in just one generation.  I believe this because like countless others I’ve met throughout my journey, I am living proof.  

The worry I have is that the education I received isn’t suitable for the world we live in today and not nearly suitable for the world we are constructing.  It’s an absolute certainty that students are going to need more advanced skills.  For example, we often talk about collaboration and global competency skills.  Today, we can work with anyone, anywhere in the world but our schools are still treating students as individuals who must work alone.  What would you do if you were a teacher and two students walked up to the front of your class, handed you a test, and said, “We did this together!”  Why is collaboration cheating? 

We need to make sure their learning experiences provide them the relevance and engagement they need as they build the skills for the future. It’s more than just building digital citizenship skills; they need to become digital leaders. 

In order to make this a reality, we need to focus on three key areas.   

First, we need to make sure schools have adequate broadband access.  We would never run a school without lights or heat.  For many schools, Internet access is considered a “nice to have” commodity, not a necessity.  Yet our education system is preparing students for a world where the Internet is ingrained into higher education, business practices, and our daily lives in general, a world where many of the latest teaching tools run on the web.  

Second, we need to leverage the power and prevalence of the web as we create new learning models.  Most students nowadays are growing up with the understanding that the web is where they go to get the knowledge and resources they are looking for.  By recognizing that how we learned is different than the way our children learn, school leaders can take advantage of the habits this tech-literate generation have developed.  This became painfully clear to me when my daughter and I were buying her a ukulele when we visited Hawaii a couple of years ago.  As we were leaving the store, I noticed instruction books and DVDs on how to play the ukulele.  I asked my daughter if she wanted to pick some up so she can learn how to play (after all, that was how I learned).  She looked at me like there was something wrong with me.  Of course, she doesn’t need an instruction book or DVD.  She is going to learn by watching YouTube videos.  As educators, we are starting to understand the impact the web can have.  Videos, web applications, interactive content, and collective pools of knowledge make the world’s information accessible from multiple devices 24 hours a day seven days a week.  

Third, we have to put tools in the hands of teachers and students so that they can access the rich content of an ever-expanding web.  School administrators need to choose devices that not only give students and faculty access to that content, but that are also pain-free and easy to use.  The devices have to be near invisible so that the focus remains on the teaching and learning, not the technology.  What school leaders need is to think about is what happens when you go from having 30 computers in a classroom, to 30,000 in a school district.  How you scale and how you manage the technology is a critical part of planning how to integrate it into the curriculum.  Just as important, we have to let teachers develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities to take advantage of these tools.  Today’s teachers are the ones who are going to create the new learning models we will use for generations to come!  Great professional development has never been so important.

This is an exhilarating time in education.  I know if we continue to be innovative and open to new ideas, education can be the silver bullet it was for me.  I am looking forward to watching the traditional model expand into engaging and relevant methods that will prepare our students to live in what is becoming the most stimulating and exhilarating time in history!

Abraham Lincoln was a Wimp

"You can not fail if you resolutely determine that you will not."

- Abraham Lincoln

Another critical skill students need to develop is the ability to analyze and assess information.  Information is coming at us at a pace many find overwhelming.  The quantity of global information grows at an astonishing speed.  For example, in just 24 hours, 2 million blog posts are written!  In the same time frame, enough information is consumed by Internet traffic to fill 168 million DVDs.  We send 284 billion emails every day.  It feels like most of those end up in my inbox.  Eric Schmidt has said he thinks it will take us 300 years to index and make all the world’s information searchable.  You can also look at the eruption of video creation.  YouTube, which is becoming an essential tool in the classroom, adds content at a rate that is hard to grasp.  Every minute, 72 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube!  That means that no matter how hard your kids try, and mine is trying very hard,  they will never be able to watch all the videos on YouTube. 

All the data I’ve seen suggests that most of us are, quite frankly, terrible searchers.  We just have to come to grips with that.  Most of us never developed the skills required to truly utilize the information of a digital world.  If you don’t believe me, you can go do an assessment and test your search skills.  However, I can save you time.  Trust me, you are not a good searcher.  If you don’t believe me, here is a quick self evaluation you can do to determine if I’m on the right path.

First, if you type a question mark into the search bar, you are a terrible searcher.  To go further, if you type a whole sentence in the bar, you are wasting a whole bunch of time.  If your search looks like this, “What was the date of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address?” instead of, “gettysburg date” the earth is spinning rapidly and you are wasting a lot of that spin!

Second, do you know what Command F (on a Mac – I don’t do Windows) does on a webpage?  Would you believe 90% of people have no idea what this time saving, search altering capability does?  Nope, I’m not going to tell you.  Why don’t you go search, “What happens when I type Command F on my Mac when I’m on a webpage?” 

My point is, if we are bad searchers, how are we teaching students to search?  How are we teaching them to make sense of information?  How are we teaching them to vet and dig deep into all the data available to us?  We need to help students build these skills.  Again, not necessarily as a separate subject, but more in what they do every day.  How can we incorporate technology, search and analytical skills to develop new engaging and relevant learning content for our students?

I have a confession to make.  I am a history and political junkie.  It feels good to get that off my chest.  The second part of that confession is that I have turned my kids into junkies.  This is especially true of American history and how politics coats and is engrossed in all our history.

A few Sundays ago, I was partaking in one of my favorite activities.  I was on the couch reading my paper copy of the New York Times (yes, I’ve been getting the paper Sunday times for as long as I can remember.)  I was reading their endorsement of Barak Obama.  I was summarizing the text to my daughter, who was sitting next to me (she was over to watch the Giants game with me – another one of my favorite activities, which makes me worried that so many of them involve my couch).  Her reaction was interesting but probably conventional wisdom, “well, of course they endorsed Obama. It’s a left leaning paper and they will always back the Democrat.”  She was also questioning the value of the endorsement, and if it would sway voters.  What a great opportunity to take a nose dive into history!

I asked, “well, do we know if that’s true?”  Also, have they always been right?  Has their endorsement meant anything?”  And so on, and so on.   We grabbed the laptop and started researching.  It wasn’t long before we were into some interesting material.  After we did the analysis of how many Republicans and Democrats the paper supported since they began this in 1860, and how many times they were right, we branched off into some really thought-provoking information!  We got into the first endorsement the paper ever made.  The New York Times endorsed Abraham Lincoln for President in 1860.  We found the actual text of the endorsement and all of a sudden we were in a time travel machine and found ourselves in the middle of what was happening in the country in October, 1860, more than 150 years ago!

We all learned history in a very linear and stagnate way.  First President Lincoln got elected, then he led the north in the Civil War, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, the North won the Civil War, and then he was assassinated in a theater.  When you learn it that way, it feels like one thing lead to another in very logical way.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Easy access to technology and the web gives us this time travel capability.  The combination helps us get into what was actually occurring at the time.  So we read the endorsement and what did we discover?  That folks in 1860 were making things up as they went, just like we do.  That they had no idea what was going on or what would happen!  Theirs was a messy present and they were looking at a ambiguous future.  Slippery slope theories were in full effect!

For example, in the endorsement, the paper writes:

“…there is a large class of men who have a vague but real apprehension that something terrible is to follow the election of a Republican President.  They fear that the South will be excluded by law from the territories, that slaves will be set free in the District of Columbia, that inter-state Slave trade will be prohibited, and a great variety of legislative encroachments on Southern rights will be perpetrated.”

In other words, there seems to be all these “real” but unfounded and silly worries that things in our country were going to change.  Nonsense says the editorial board at the New York Times.  They go out of their way to put to rest these unrealistic concerns.  The paper goes on:

“…whatever may be the wishes of the Republicans on these topics, they are not likely to have any opportunity to carry them into effect.”

They further go on to describe how the Democrats control congress and they would never let any of these actions take place.  They go as far as concluding that even if the Democrats lost the Senate (fat chance), the House is so strong that it’s the Democrats who are going to run things and make all the decisions.  Wow!  Really?  Boy did they call this one wrong huh?  Not only that, we were able to tie that directly to what’s going on today.  Does it matter who controls the House?  The Senate?  Can we bring about change no matter who’s in power in Congress?  The paper continues to make it’s point:

“It will not be easy…for Mr. Lincoln to do much mischief…He seems to us much more likely to be too good natured and tolerant towards his opponents, then not enough so.  Rail-splitting is not an exciting occupation.  It does not tend to cultivate the hot and angry passions of the heart…we have not the slightest doubt, therefore, that Prof. Lincoln will disappoint utterly the sanguinary expectations (of those that want change)…”

Sound familiar?  In other words, this Lincoln dude is a wimp.  Even if he had the House and the Senate, he’s still not going to do anything!  Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen.  This guy is a rail splitter, and we all know how ”those people” are.  I think they might have missed this call.  Talk about a dis!  We imagined what the board would say if someone suggested that Lincoln would be one of our greatest and most beloved presidents in our history, one we would build monuments to.  How hard would the laughter be?  Sound familiar?

So we dove deeper.  We read more about what was going on at the time.  The paranoia in the south.  The lack of conviction in the North.  We dove into the back and forth.  We used Google earth to look at the country in 1860 and where the strongholds were.  We saw where the battles took place and how many men died in the war.  We saw how the South was set up and where we thought they made some seriously bad calculations.  We learned about how the Navy was used by the north.  We listened to a audio interpretation of the Gettysburg address, in the pace and tone Lincoln would have read it.  We spent all afternoon talking about it.  We asked critical questions like, what would have happened if the south actually listened to the Times (several states in the south panicked after the election and without southern unity, declared their independence on their own.)  We compared it to what is going on today in our nation and in our politics.  How both sides lay out a vision of what’s going to happen to our country if we pick one guy over another.  What we learned is that history is a recording of chaos that only make sense in the aftermath, when all the dust settles.

That’s the power of technology and the web.  We can jump into a time machine and visit the past.  Not only so we can understand what happened, but also so we can learn how it applies to today and our potential future.  We also learned that the New York Times, even 150 years ago, has no idea what it’s talking about. 

It looks like Abraham Lincoln didn’t turn out to be so wimpy huh?

Well hello 21st Century, how long have you been standing there?

“21st century breakdown
I once was lost but never was found
I think I am losing what's left of my mind 
To the 20th century deadline…” 
- Green Day

I’m not a big fan of the phrase, “21^st Century skills” and it’s used quite often in the education world.  For example, you might hear someone say, “We need to teach kids 21^st century skills.”  You will also find, “We will need students to graduate with 21^st century skills.” 

One reason why I don’t like the phrase is because I’m not really sure what century we’re in right now and that’s a little embarrassing.  I also don’t like it because it implies some set of skills students will need in the future.  I contend that students need these skills right now and they need to start building them as soon as they get to school.

You find variations of this list of skills in numerous places.  The Partnership for 21st Century Skills uses names like “learning and innovation” skills or “life and career” skills.  My friend Tony Wagner calls them “survival skills” in The Global Achievement Gap and includes elements like “critical thinking and problem solving,” and “effective oral and written communication” skills.  There isn’t just one correct list, they are all appropriate.  In my talks, I break them down into four themes (which of course include elements of all types of skills).  I call them communication, collaboration, problem solving, and analyzing and assessing information.  I’m not going to cover all four here (that would be a very long post) but I’ll start with the first one, communication.  I will follow up with the other topics in future posts, maybe in the 21^st century!

Communication

How we communicate has evolved over time and in the last 20 years, it has dramatically changed.  In the last five years, it’s just been transformed.  When she started college, my daughter and I had to have a communication meeting.  We were having so many misunderstandings and communication fails that we had to come up with a system to deal with the expectations we had for each other.  This wasn’t an issue when I was in college.   When I had to communicate with my mother, I had one choice with three potential outcomes.  I walked over to the hallway payphone to place a long distance phone call.  The first potential outcome was that she picked up the phone and I talked to her.  The second one was a busy signal, and I just hung up.  The third option was pretty much like the second one.  If she wasn’t home, the phone rang and rang, and eventually I hang up (she didn’t have a máquina). 

My daughter and I had a much more complex system to work through.  If it’s information she thinks I need but does not require immediate attention, she emails me (i.e., here are my classes and tuition is due next month.)  If it’s information she wants to share, wants feedback on, or needs my attention that day, she texts me (i.e., hey when you get a chance, let me know if we are going shopping this weekend, I need stuff.)  If she needs my immediate attention, she calls me and if I don’t answer, she follows up with a text (i.e., I need money in my account, I’m starving!)  And how does she find out where I am in the world at any given moment?  Yes, she checks my Google+, Facebook, or Twitter status.  By the way, for those of you who are “friends” with your kids, have you talked about expectations?  I am sure your daughter has given you the, “mom, please do not post any comments to my status updates” plea.  Have you set your communication expectations with your kid?  Are you going to wait until she posts a status like, “have to take my mother to her doctor’s appointment.  She is getting warts removed from her feet and I have to drive her.”  How we communicate matters and it will continue to be even more important.

I remember thinking about how communication was changing during my senior year in college.  You see, I was from the WordPerfect 5.1 generation.  I saw the new Windows 3.1 being adopted by the underclassmen and I was so thankful to be getting out of there!  I didn’t think I would be capable of managing the new communication expectations that were going to come with those new capabilities.  I was a dot matrix printer communicator, with lots of words and maybe a few tables.  I was an overhead projector presenter, where I would type big WordPerfect words and copy them onto overhead transparency paper.  I would hand draw pie charts with my trusty Sharpie marker.  I didn’t think that would be acceptable in the new Windows 3.1 world.

I assumed students would be required to have professional looking presentations with pictures and sound and other elements I didn’t have the skill set for.  They would be colorful and vibrant.  As this capability grew, I believed the expectations would grow more intense.  By the time my daughter was in high school, I thought she would be expected to have a live interview with the researcher she was writing about in the middle of her presentation.

The truth is we haven’t really raised the bar on communication and haven’t taken in all the technological and social changes that have taken place in.  Every semester, I am asked by a fellow professor (yes, I teach classes at ASU every couple of semesters) who teaches an MBA class at ASU.  Each semester, a group of students are assigned the Google business case and they are required to do a class presentation on it.  I sit in as their guest and help review their presentation and answer questions.  What happens during the presentation stopped surprising me many semesters ago because it happens every time.  This class of MBAs who are supposed to be the future leaders of industry takes the business case, regurgitates it point by point in 20 slides, each with six bullet points.  In other words, they present their WordPerfect made transparency paper on an overhead projector.  Talk about automating bad communication.

Our students need to effectively express themselves.  They need to learn how to write complete complex sentences.  They need to create original thought and learn how to share it in everything from full blown white papers through 140 character tweets.  They need to learn how to get effective feedback in various formats.  They need to learn how to take complex ideas and communicate them to multiple audiences, including considerations for global meaning and cultural differences.  They need to learn to communicate using varies media and develop strategies for how to send out effective targeted communication. 

These skills have to be built into the new learning models we are creating.  We don’t have to teach them as separate lessons.  It is about time that we raise the communication expectations of our students.