Will Richardson offered on April 18 an interesting speculation about student creative writing.
At my school, our quarter ends this week, and I know what that means. New classes, new books, new content for teachers to disseminate, old content for students to throw away. I’m going to make some assumptions, but if our 3,000 or so students each create just 2 pieces of content each day, that’s 1,080,000 pieces over the course of the year. I’m going to be generous and say that via the hallways, the Website, and various other outlets, a typical student or teacher at my school may run across 250 of those artifacts in a year in any “published” form. That’s somewhere around .0002 of what our students produced. (If that’s wrong, remember, I’m an English teacher by trade…you get my point.) Even if we assume only five percent of the total content our students produce is really quality stuff, worthy of being added to the knowledge base, that’s 54,000 nuggets of information, 53,750 of which I’ll never have the chance of seeing.
Will obliguely illustrates the point that people attend to what someone inspects, not necessarily to what they expect. At least that’s the management principle that came to mind when reading his post. Will seems to assume that people can (should?) inspect student creative writing. He breaks this creative content down to countable iterations.
It seems fair to extrapolate from this illustration.
Tablet PC education ISVs may want to identify and count the number of transactions and iterations in your programs. Then, use these data in your marketing plan to explain how teachers may use your programs to increase student learning in schools.
In this way, you allow someone to calculate the relative efficiency of your program against other instructional procedures. That comparison is good, but sometimes unintentionally provocative.