TECHNOS

May 16, 2008

NETA Conference 2008 Provided Highlights of Interest to Educators

Reported by Joann Flick, AIT’s Broadcast/Training Professional.

NETA, the National Educational Telecommunications Association, is the primary professional organization for public broadcasters engaged in the pursuit of an educational mission. Most of the PBS stations that attend the conference offer a pre-school, K–12, post-secondary, and/or teacher professional development support service. Many of the stations at the conference are licensed under a statewide authority to provide educational services or to a college or university. Two PBS stations licensed to K–12 school districts were in attendance: KLVX in Las Vegas and KLCS in Los Angeles. More than 400 PBS staff attended the annual conference held in downtown Columbus, Ohio.

Key items of interest to educators included presentations about new technologies, a renewed interest in workplace skills, and the results of a newly published census of educational services provided by PBS stations. This report will focus on these three items, in reverse order.

What Are PBS Stations Doing for Education, What Do They Need To Do?

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Vice President for Education, Peggy O’Brien, and Rob Lippincott, Sr., Vice President for Education at PBS, joined forces to present the findings of a recent survey of educational services provided by PBS stations in the United States. The report notes that a strong majority (85%) of stations are active in the arena of education, at some level. While stations struggle to find sustainable funding for formal education activities, the report clearly indicates that stations understand the importance of service to education. More staff dedicated to educational services, more fundraising efforts targeted to educational services, and a stronger, sustainable presence in education are all needed. Both Lippincott and O’Brien stressed the importance of measuring the direct impact of services on learning.

Lippincott also explained EDCAR—the Educational Digital Content Aggregate Repository—which will be a place for all purposefully-built digital media for education. PBS stations hold significant content resources, collectively, but there are notable gaps in content areas, too. For now, PBS will pursue a proof-of-concept for EDCAR and hope to soon engage stations in submitting content to the repository.

O’Brien made note that public schools really need the help of PBS stations right now and that the stations’ mission is to address that need.

How Does the Recent Federal Report on 21st-Century Skills Impact the Educational Activities of Public Broadcasting?

Wisconsin Educational Communications Board gathered over 200 leaders of business, economic development, and chambers of commerce from across the state in March 2007 to discuss the knowledge and skills that incoming workers will need. The results of that discussion identified a skill set that emphasizes metacognition—where the learner explores and comes to understand his or her own learning style, and learning in the affective domain—considered by learning experts to be the realm of attitudes and opinions. In a formal school setting, much of the learning is focused on the cognitive domain—learning specific content and processes. Based on results from Wisconsin’s Summit on 21st Century Skills, the emphasis should focus on:

critical thinking and problem-solving
collaborative communication
people skills
contextual learning
personal responsibility
ethics
adaptability (nimbleness)

For educators and instructional designers, this report seems to support more project-based learning activities, modeling, group work, authentic assessments such as portfolios, with an emphasis on a real-world context for learning in both the affective and cognitive domains. This would seem to run counter to the current emphasis on standardized tests that deal mostly with declarative knowledge and little with real-world skills such as those listed above. For AIT, attention to these areas of learning has been an Agency emphasis since the release of the SCANS Report (The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving the Necessary Skills, U.S. Department of Labor, June 1991.) At that time, AIT placed renewed emphasis on media for modeling and for providing real-world context for learning, releasing a series of contextualized learning resources for middle and high school. So, a renewed interest now is welcome.

NOTE: See February’s Featured Interview with Linda Hanson from Wisconsin ECB for more information about how her state agency is reacting to the Summit.

How Are New Technologies Being Put to Use for Learning?

The Utah Education Network (UEN) presented some of the “gee-whiz” moments at the conference. Blogs, podcasts, student-created, anytime-anywhere learning were all part of UEN’s panel presentation. At the heart of each techno-gadget-driven initiative, however, is a plan to train and support teachers and a strong instructional design impetus. UEN works closely with the State of Utah Office of Education to identify clear priorities for instruction. The education staff at UEN includes many former classroom teachers, which keeps their work grounded in reality.

UEN offers telecourses, teacher training through PBS TeacherLine and their own sponsored local events, instructional resources including video and other media, and lots of Utah-created or themed content. The state has invested in connectivity for schools, and UEN is at the forefront in making use of the broadband connections around the state.

Conclusion and Observations

The NETA conference continued its tradition as the best peer-to-peer professional development for education staff. In many PBS stations, however, there is only one person dedicated to educational activities, and often that person must cover pre-K, K–12, higher ed, teacher professional development, and adult education services. When a television event such as the recent Ken Burns documentary series “The War” comes along, the natural outreach activities of local PBS stations often tap the expertise of the lone education staff person as well. With so much important work for PBS to do, it’s time to find more diverse and sustainable funding to expand the staff and provide resources for the educational services unit. Stations that depend on school subscriptions or ala carte services have been struggling as budgets at the local schools are strained. Better situated are the stations that have hung on to state support for their services or stations that have determined models for deriving sustainable income from their content.

All station education staff need to learn effective techniques for evaluating the measurable impact of their services on student learning. AIT can help stations design and implement effective and affordable formative and summative evaluation. The role of formative evaluation is to diagnose any problems in the design of instructional materials while the content is in its formative change and when adjustments can be accommodated. Summative evaluation measures both the output of a project and its impacts. I think many stations are daunted by lack of experience in evaluating instructional media. But AIT staff know how to document specific learner improvements, so that task is not unattainable.

The importance of correlating content to state curriculum standards and maintaining good metadata systems and files seemed to be confirmed by presentations at the NETA conference. Beyond the education staff, programmers cited the need to learn more about metadata and the need to put specific policies in place to collect and maintain metadata files. The emerging EDCAR project is an example of what might be offered where good metadata will have significant impacts on the success of the resource.

I wonder if stations have maintained the expertise to design exemplary content, conducting formative assessments along the way and proving the value of the content through an accepted means of evaluation, and then implementing the project successfully. I’ve observed that most local productions tend to be created outside of the influence of the one education staff person at the station. When PBS VP for Education Rob Lippincott mentioned “purposefully-built” materials, I think he was addressing this issue and calling upon stations to direct more local production resources to the cause of learning. Stations need to examine how they decide what programs to make and keep education as a primary consideration.

Any station that is curious about how a topic under consideration might match up to curriculum standards can contact me at jflick@ait.net. AIT routinely offers technical support to producers, pro-bono. If extended time from our professional staff is needed, we require only the right-of-first-refusal to distribute the end product, allowing the producer to secure a better deal, if they wish.