Author: Micah Shippee

Introduction

Innovation goes beyond a simple new tool, innovation infers application, capability, and methods of accomplishing a task… a better workflow. The Future Of Work will demand people are prepared to solve complex problems, interact with clients/colleagues, and be able to adapt to new tools and workflows. Over the next twenty years, we are likely to see a significant disruptions to the workforce and work as we know it in recent memory.¹ 54% of the US workforce says they are not confident their job would still exist in 20 years²… a scary self-reflection that must inform our instructional practice. Where is all of this change coming from? 

The demographic and socioeconomic trends of the past decade, like rapid urbanization and globalization, coupled with even faster advances in technology from mobile internet to increased automation and machine learning have caused a disruption like never before.¹ Are we preparing our students to be ready for this shift in the workplace?

A trend toward a gig economy has begun. A study by Intuit predicted that by 2020, 40 percent of American workers would be independent contractors.³ A gig based economy is defined as a way of working that is based on people having temporary jobs or doing separate pieces of work, each paid separately, rather than working for an employer.⁴ Contractors developing their own brand in a feast-or-famine work atmosphere must understand collaboration, resilience, perseverance… good ol fashioned sticktoittiveness!

Asynchronous working teams

In a gig-based economy our students will find themselves working on asynchronous teams in different geographies, different times, and with different cultures. How then can we prepare them for this workflow? Traditional, synchronous, “group work” has us creatively organize students in, what we believe will be effective working teams. I have been delegating these types of groups for twenty years as well as allowing students to pick their own teams (groups). I have also helped organize my students into teams and assign specific tasks to each person in the team. This makes a student the team “expert” in a given area on the project. But I ask myself: How often is this type of teams work going to happen for my students in their future? The keypoint being their future rather than organizing them according to my past. 

Asynchronous working teams are more likely what our students will be working in more often, in their future. Recently, I arranged my five social studies classes into asynchronous teams. We were working on a community-based project to document our local cemetery. The Liverpool Cemetery project has always been a favorite of mine, since the history found just a half-mile from my school relates directly to the content I teach. Each year we iterate on the following years work and ask my students to improve and grow our documentation of this local treasure by assigning groups of students specific gravesites to investigate and provide a relevant historical narrative for the people buried so close to our school.

This year I took the 30 or so sites and assigned them in everyone of my five classes. A student in my first class might be investigating site #4 and #5 and a student in my other four classes would also be assigned those sites. 

Each class was given a specific job that they needed to complete as the expert. In each class I would provide the necessary support for how to use various tools to complete the jobs. The common tasks for each class were: 

• to identify sources by keeping a research notebook 
• to use a shared Google Drive on our school iPads to take pictures of the sites.
• Share a Google Slide deck of all the work being completed to track progress and communicate needs

The project included a walk to the cemetery with each of the classes during one of our 80 minute blocks.

In class, students were organized and given direction by their project managers (in a different class). The project managers, and I, would review the work completed on the Google Slide deck and use the comment feature to assign work that needed to be completed. 

Class Period	Students studying site(s) #4 and #5	Job
1	……	Timeline: 10 events that occurred during the person(s) life.
3	……	Biographical sketch: A narrative of what life was like for the person(s) in our community.
4	……	Slideshow: What the person(s) would have seen while they were alive
7	……	Movie: Create a 45 second Adobe Spark Video about your person.
9	……	Project Manager: Assign tasks and details to keep the other students working efficiently

The project managers were coached on specific kinds of productive feedback (see “Assigned to” boxes below:

The completed task components were compiled on a website we built. My plan is to continue to iterate on this website with my future classes.

It was interesting to hear from the students following this new group dynamic. Here’s what they had to say: “The biggest thing I learned about this type of group work is….”

• “you have to rely on all your classmates. If your classmates didn’t do the work properly it affects you because you don’t know the answer. And you have to be in communcation with all your team members so you understand fully what each teammate expects from each other.”
• “you rely on your parterns a lot and when they don’t do their job like you did yours it’s disappointing and throws the whole project off.”
• “how people can indirectly help you on certain things, creating this chain of other peoples work helping someone else’s work to create something special.”

A heavy focus of student responses was on the value of communication and transparency. Students wanted to hear from each other and be able to see each other’s progress… more than actually seeing each other. Dissenting opinions were expressed as well: “I did not like not seeing my partners.”

Perhaps most insightful was a more descriptive student response:

“The biggest thing I learned is it can be AGONIZINGLY PAINFUL when only one person does their work. All I got from everyone but Sam was nothing. I got a timeline after it was due and wasn’t able to put it on the website. Julie was sick, so I can cut her some slack. However I never got wind of any slideshow(s). I can understand why teachers get so angry when we don’t do work. It is so frustrating and makes me want to scream! Sam was the exception turning in all his work to me and doing a great job at that.”

Ah, middle school… refreshing honesty through empathetic experience!

Conclusion

Clearly a technology-driven shift education is upon us and will greatly impact the future of work for our students. This shift demands a different approach to the knowledge and skills we have relied on in the past. Our need to adopt emergent technology, and meaningfully pedagogy to leverage it, has never been this high. 

Our shifts must transcend simply integrating new technology in our instruction. We must have adopt innovativeness (a mindset that embraces change) in order to prepare our students for a future with a gig-based economy and it’s demands for new productive workflows. Helping our students understand the importance of embracing a constant state of change will help them ride out the dark valleys knowing successful mountaintops are coming. 

More on this topic can be found in my book WanderlustEDU – Chapter 8: OnwardEDU “The Future of Work and the Gig-based Economy”

Sources

1. Tunkel, A. “Three Trends On The Future Of Work.” Forbes. 13 Aug. 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2018/08/13/three-trends-on-the-future-of-work/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2018.

2.  Inc., Wonolo. “Data on the Gig Economy and How it is Transforming the Workforce.” Wonolo. 15 Feb. 2018. https://www.wonolo.com/blog/data-gig-economy-transforming-workforce/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2018.

3. Rouse, M. “What is gig economy? – Definition from WhatIs.com.” WhatIs.com. https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/gig-economy. Accessed 8 Dec. 2018.

4 “GIG ECONOMY | definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary.” Dictionary.cambridge.org. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gig-economy. Accessed 10 Jan. 2019.

I have always found the work of history museum curators to be fascinating. They are tasked, in many cases, with selecting artifacts of our ancestors and displaying them in a way that allows people to make connections with the past. Do they always get it right? Do they always represent a culture with 100% accuracy? – Of course not. But there are take-aways, for us in education as we explore the concept of culture change.

Just a quick reminder from a previous post: Culture is defined as the beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a social group. These attributes are agreed upon and shared by that social group. There are five key tenets of culture:

1. Culture is learned
2. Culture is shared
3. Culture is based on symbols
4. Culture is integrated
5. Culture is dynamic

To curate is to collect, select and present information, artifacts and/or experiences. School culture is curated by defining who we are from our collective shared experience. Shaping a positive cultural norm takes purposeful, diligent effort in collecting, selecting, and presenting experiences in our schools. 

Culture curation requires we are cognizant of the context in which we are working. Are we trying to shape our classroom culture with students? Or are we trying to shape our school building culture? Or is it an entire school district/board that we are looking to shape?

A little more direction on this might be helpful… here is the N-S-E-W Positive Culture Shift practices:

• Nothing to Lose – you have to start somewhere, why not now? Showing a little bit of vulnerability now and then can go a long way. We often want to help everyone else with their stumbling blocks, but getting that help ourselves is less natural. We need to demonstrate that we, too, are learners and receive help from anyone as it comes. 
• Share – promote positivity in the way you speak. With colleagues, one conversation we can talk about is: why we became teachers to begin with! With students, share how your background may be related to theirs.
• Empower – give a voice to others. For many teachers speaking is easy, listening is equally as important. Train yourself to listen as much as you speak… easier said then done for some.
• Walk in Their Shoes – make an effort to better understand their experience more intimately. Some people are more empathetic than others, but with some effort, we can all have a better sense of empathy. Begin to refer back to the experiences of students and colleagues in your conversations with them. 

Shaping positive school culture is possible through cultural curation. Move forward, speak positively, give voice, and work to understand each other… it is from here that we can begin to grow together.

Looking to change your school culture? Check out WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory sorts people into five groups by how readily they take on something new: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. In WanderlustEDU, Dr. Micah Shippee frames that same journey through four attributes every educator carries — Motivation, Environment, Skills, and Knowledge — and argues that growth starts with recognizing which adopter pattern is already yours.

No single adopter type is “the good one” — WanderlustEDU makes the case that schools need all five working together. The goal isn’t to become an Innovator if you’re not one; it’s to recognize your own pattern, and grow the attribute — Motivation, Environment, Skills, or Knowledge — that will carry you furthest from here.

When using virtual reality in my classroom I found it difficult to engage the entire class when only one student was engaged in a VR experience. One thing that’s easy to do is to cast or stream what the user sees in their VR goggles, but it just does not do VR justice. What’s more engaging is to stream both a participant in the experience and the VR as seen here. 

I can do this through my NewTek TriCaster Mini HD-4i | All in One Compact Multimedia Production Studio with Integrated Screen” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Tricaster Mini product but that’s an expensive device with very expensive software. I wanted to be able to do it a little bit easier using my MacBook the problem I had is that I needed to be able to stream live two different sources of video one for the green screen which would be what the user sees in the VR experience in a camera on the participant while they’re using the VR experience.

A lot of people got very excited about this when they saw it on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon as seen here, where he and actress Brie Larson, play Beat Saber and you could see her playing it live. This is exactly what I wanted to do and I had done at with my Tricaster with the Anne Frank experience with one of my students as seen here. But again how do we do this efficiently at a lower cost? Through some research, I found that a lot of online gamers stream to Twitch using a free product called OBS. OBS Studio is a comprehensive open-source package for video recording and live streaming the program supports multiple sources including media files, games, web pages, application Windows, webcam for desktop, and microphone, and more. This is just what I needed so this video here explains how to use OBS to stream the participant and the participants’s experience, in this case, using virtual reality. 

What you need:

• MacBook
• OBS Studio (Download OBS Studio for Mac) this link is for an older version of OBS that I have had more luck with
• Webcam or FaceTime Camera
• iPad plugged into your Mac as a Camera Source
• VR Headset (I use my Oculus Go for this one)

The Setup:

1. Download OBS Studio
2. Click + to create a Scene “Green Screen VR”
3. Click + to add Sources
4. Select Video Capture Device
5. Create new “Webcam”
6. Next to Device select the dropdown to find your webcam, click Ok
7. Plug your iPad into a USB port of your MacBook (this will allow you to use it as a camera as seen here)
8. Again Click + to add Sources
9. Select Video Capture Device
10. Create new “iPad”
11. Next to Device select the dropdown to find your iPad, click Ok

You should now see two sources on your Preview Screen, one with a red outline the other with a blue outline.

For the Green Screen

1. Right-click on the WEBCAM video source and select ‘Filter’.
2. Click the ‘+’ under the ‘Effects Filters’ section, then select ‘Chroma Key’.
3. With your Green Screen Set up, adjust the “Similarity” until you get a clear image.

Simply stream this using a projector or TV and it will allow viewers to get a better view allowing for increased dialogue and a shared experience.

Here’s a quick clip to show you how it looks.