Better Together

How to Leverage School Networks For Smarter Personalized and Project Based Learning

Lydia Dobyns, Tom Vander Ark

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119439103
• eBook ISBN: 9781119439462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Bring students, teachers, and administrators together to facilitate higher school achievement

Better Together presents a tour through one of the modern era's most important educational innovations, and provides smart strategy for working optimally within the school network sphere. There are more than 50 high-quality scaled charter networks in the U.S.; most share a learning model, professional supports, and—increasingly—platform tools. Although these charter schools get most of the attention, there are over a dozen other networks that connect district schools and provide design principles, curriculum materials, technology tools, and professional learning opportunities to streamline school improvement and help build great new schools from scratch. This book details some of the many success stories, and includes expert analysis of learning models, strategies, and innovations that are making quality scalable and helping schools produce more positive student outcomes.

Illustrative examples from the New Tech Network, Summit Public Schools, Big Picture, and other big-name networks provide both guidance and inspiration, while expert discussion clarifies essential details and processes for implementation. Teachers and administrators will find much food for thought both inside and outside of a school network system.

• Examine proven learning models for scaled school networks
• Explore the latest innovations for more effective collaborations
• Read success stories from school networks across the country
• Learn smart strategies for optimizing the educational network experience

Digital platforms have transformed the way we connect with friends, family, colleagues, and businesses. That revolution has finally come to education, opening doors to collaboration, resource expansion, and school success. Better Together explores beyond disruption to show how the U.S. K-12 system is truly evolving.

PART ONE
PLATFORM REVOLUTION

1
PLATFORMS: A Place You Call Home

Push a button and soon a car shows up wherever you are. Search, click on your favorite dish, and a few minutes later dinner arrives. Want to make a quick trip to New York? A flight and a room in a stranger's apartment are a few clicks away. Perhaps you'll visit your friend from high school—you can tell from your Facebook feed that he's enjoying his new grandkids.

Digital platforms have transformed the way we live, work, play, travel, and learn. The six largest firms (by market capitalization¹)—Apple, Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—all run platform businesses. Academics Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne and Sangeet Choudary explore the Platform Revolution in their 2016 book. They define a platform this way:

A platform is a business based on enabling value-creating interactions between external producers and consumers. The platform provides an open, participative infrastructure for these interactions and sets governance conditions for them. The platform's overarching purpose: to consummate matches among users and facilitate the exchange of goods, services or social currency, thereby enabling value creation for all participants.²

Platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon, and Alibaba have transformed consumer options and markets, but most of us don't know much about how they work. A handful of design decisions about governance, openness, and monetization guide user experience and can make the difference between scale and obscurity. For example, MySpace required users to visit other people's content while Facebook brought friend's content to the user's feed—and this small design decision made all the difference.

The rise of the platform economy and lifestyle has been supported by improved access to broadband and a dozen trends (as summarized in the accompanying grid of what platforms do and enable), which has created accelerating and unceasing change unlike anything before. Platforms change assumptions about what is possible, and they unlock new sources of value creation and supply. LinkedIn is where we connect for business. Facebook is home for friends and family. Snapchat is where we share pictures. Amazon is where we buy everything. These platforms enable new and important activities.

What platforms do	What platforms enable
Thin services (like Slack) are fast, extensible, interoperable, and easy to learn	Move freely with fluid information linked across all of your screens to learn, work, and transact anywhere
Know your preferences, locations, competencies, and interests	Connect on interests, events, and campaigns; build collective solutions
Filter the flow of information and allocate attention to the exponentially expanding universe	Create compelling images, stories, campaigns, tools, environments, and experiences. Platforms eliminate gatekeepers and scale efficiently.
Track everything and share it in simple, useful visuals	Mix and match playlists and new compilations
Recommend and remind with increasing accuracy and usefulness	Share public products with broad audiences, create community feedback loops, and bring the outside in
Improve seamlessly and continuously (no more monolithic versioning)	Learn and grow between face-to-face interactions

You probably work on several platforms. Any form of marketing starts with knowing your customers—and potential customers. Information about them is stored in a Customer Relationship Management system like Salesforce. If your company makes something, it probably uses Enterprise Resource Planning software to manage production and inventory. Human resources and accounting also usually have their own software. Over the last decade, all of these systems have migrated from operating on a computer at the business level, to operating over the Internet “in the cloud,” which makes it easy to access anywhere, easy to update, and easy to scale with growth.

Just when it looked like these giant platforms would do everything, smartphones came around. Shortly after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, a new kind of platform was born—and the Apple App Store quickly became a home for thousands, and now millions, of mobile applications. Hundreds of billions of mobile apps have been downloaded from the App Store, Google Play, and Windows Phone Store. What was once a phone is now a mobile computing platform.

With the growth in smartphone penetration and social media use came text messaging. It exploded with young people. And then Baby Boomers with email inboxes full of spam figured out that texting was much easier than email for many conversations. Slack, launched in 2014, quickly became a unicorn (valued at more than $1 billion). Millions of companies quickly adopted the thin messaging platform, which was easy to integrate. Slack proved that you don't have to be monolithic, you just have to solve a problem and be easy to use.

Platforms help us create, often co-create, and connect with broader audiences. Platforms learn about us and help us learn about the world. For most of us, growth is activated by relationships, and learning happens in community settings (more on learning platforms in Chapter Three). Platforms can make face-to-face time more productive and can provide engagement in the gap between in-person experiences.

PLATFORM ARMS RACE

Technology platforms shift every 10 to 15 years. The personal computer was the platform for a decade beginning in 1985, until the internet exploded on the scene as the new platform in 1994. The smartphone was introduced in 2007. With each shift, it appears that disproportionate gains go to the leader in the new domain. It looks like the new battlefield is artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality. The six big platform companies spend $50 billion a year on research and development, and a sizeable portion will go to these emerging capabilities.³

Vibrant platforms incorporate new user interfaces that enable new functionality and create new geographic freedom. More than 150 million Snapchat users watch 20 billion videos daily, with users spending almost a half an hour on the platform every day. Facebook bought Oculus betting that the next interface would be virtual reality. With Alexa, Amazon bet on voice as the new interface. In the coming months, digital assistants and chatbots will become more widespread thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. Speech recognition will continue to improve and will power a variety of interaction-based services.

How do platforms scale and unlock value? The secret is network effects.

NOTES

1. http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm 2. Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary (2016). Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 3. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/02/how-to-create-the-most-value-for-the-next-technology-wave

2
NETWORK EFFECTS: When Bigger Is Better

As businesses grow, there are often negative consequences to customers, employees, and even the company itself. But when networks grow, there are many ways members can benefit. If Walmart gets a new customer, your benefit is negligible. When Facebook gets a new member, each of us has someone new to connect with or learn from—and the platform gets bigger and potentially better with each new user. Online gamers benefit from participation of other gamers. Both are examples of positive network effects—each new addition makes the platform better.

Large, well-managed platform communities produce significant value for each user. Value can be driven by the power of social networks (can I connect, contribute, and get what I need?), demand aggregation (can I buy things?), and application development (can I build things?).

Platforms promote exchanges of information, goods and services, and some form of currency. The ability to monet...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: PLATFORM REVOLUTION
• PART TWO: TRANSFORMING SCHOOLS
• PART THREE: NAVIGATING THE FUTURE … STARTING NOW
• APPENDIX
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT