Lightning Release Cycles
Kathy Sierra has another great blog entry today over at Creating Passionate Users. She starts off by sharing a discussion with her teenage daughter about MySpace, which leads to observations about what makes services like MySpace work. Part of it is what she refers to as lightning release cycles. Users constantly make suggestions for improvements, and the developers constantly upgrade the system, often daily. It’s come to be an expectation that the system will be in a constant state of change and growth.
Contrast that with schools for a minute. How often do we “upgrade” the textbooks? How often do we adjust the curriculum? The software environments that our kids are living in are in a continually evolving, but school probably looks pretty much the same as it did last year, or five years ago, or even twenty years ago. No wonder there is a sense of disconnect for many kids.
I suppose that the constant change may not be healthy. Kathy uses the term “code crack” to describe the need of the users for their latest dose of change. I certainly want more stability in school than we see in the software industry, but I would even more like to see an ability of schools to take on these new tools and put them to greater use.
This idea came up in a different manner in a podcast by Wesley Fryer yesterday. (It was an international discussion, but two northwesterners represented us well - Jeff Allen of Olympic ESD in Bremerton, and Mark Ahlness from Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle.) One of his guests on the “Skypecast” was Ewan McIntosh, and he made a point that I really liked. Instead of following the lead of others in adopting new tools such as blogging or wikis, education should be taking the lead in developing new and creative uses of these tools. Yeah! That’s the attitude I want to see. I don’t want to sit around (or expect teachers to sit around) and wait for somebody from outside our profession to come and tell us which technologies we should be using and how we should be using them. Don’t get me wrong; I love and highly value the insights of outsiders (that’s why I linked to a blog from a software designer!), but I don’t want to give them the keys to the schoolhouse.