1. EACOS: A Framework for
Reinventing Education
NMC Summer Conference 2013
Tom Haymes
Director of Technology, HCC-Northwest
June 6, 2013
“There are only two kinds of artists -
revolutionaries and plagiarists.”
- Paul Gaugin
Wednesday, June 5, 13

2. Rice, Chess,
& Moore’s Law
“Digital technologies change
rapidly, but organizations and
skills aren’t keeping pace. As a
result, millions of people are
being left behind. Their incomes
and jobs are being destroyed,
leaving them worse off in
absolute purchasing power
than before the digital
revolution.”
-Brynjolfsson and McAfee,
Race Against the Machine
Source: http://
bit.ly/XDU6kF
Wednesday, June 5, 13

3. The Best
Chess Players?
“The winner was revealed to be not a
grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but
a pair of amateur American chess players
using three computers at the same time.
Their skill at manipulating and “coaching”
their computers to look very deeply into
positions effectively counteracted the
superior chess understanding of their
grandmaster opponents and the greater
computational power of other participants.
Weak human + machine +better process
was superior to a strong computer alone
and, more remarkably, superior to a strong
human + machine + inferior process.”
- Gary Kasparov
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/
2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-
computer/
Wednesday, June 5, 13

4. Pink’s
Three
Questions
1. Can someone overseas do
it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it
faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in
demand in an age of
abundance?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syo6ecgclR0&feature=youtu.be
“The future belongs to... creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and
meaning makers. These people - artists, inventors, designers, storytellers,
caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers - will now reap society’s richest
rewards and share its greatest joys.”
- Daniel Pink
Wednesday, June 5, 13

5. Outsourcing
Ourselves
Technology and the
Evolution of Work
Are We Teaching
for the Wrong Era?
Wednesday, June 5, 13

6. The Existential
Challenge
Wicked Problems identified at the
2013 NMC Horizon Report Future of
Education Summit:
1. Rethink what it means to teach
and reinvent everything about
teaching
2. Reimagine online learning
3. Allow failure to be as powerful a
learning mode as success
4. Make innovation part of the
learning ethic
5. Preserve digital expressions of
our culture and knowledge
“One way to look at what we
were doing is that we were
trying to make new kinds of
books, and telescopes and
microscopes, etc., to advance
‘seeing and thinking,’ but if
you give a microscope to a
monkey they only will hold it
up to admire their reflection in
a shiny glass barrel. And I
think this is what happened.
Education never got on the
bus and ‘augmentation of
human intellect’ (which is right
there) got completely
overwhelmed by
the mirror effect.”
- Alan Kay
SOURCE: http://www.nmc.org/news/
communique-2013-future-education-summit
Is Education ready for the oncoming
technological tidal wave?
Wednesday, June 5, 13

7. Another Problem:
We resist and norm
the unexpected
• We have to be careful about only
seeing the current paradigm
• It is easy to imagine that the
technology of today is a logical
iteration of the technology of the last
thirty years. How do we know it isn’t
a false start?
• For instance: Large computer labs
could easily go the way of the
steam-powered automobile
“1) Anything that’s already in the world when you’re
born is just normal.
2) Anything that gets invented between then and when
you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and
with any luck you can make a career of it.
3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is
against the natural order of things and the beginning of
the end of civilisation as we know it.”
- Douglas Adams
Wednesday, June 5, 13

8. How do we
systematically rethink
our perceptions of
Wicked Problems?
The problem is in most
cases no longer the
technology.
It is us.
Wednesday, June 5, 13

9. Lessons from Silicon
Valley Entrepreneurship
New ideas begin with a spark but
they require the right conditions to
become a fire.
Wednesday, June 5, 13

10. Creating a Teaching
Incubator
• Rapid Prototyping
• Frequent Iteration (Pivots)
• Data collection
• Scientific analysis
• Information sharing and
collaboration
Using Eric Ries’s Lean Startup Model
Wednesday, June 5, 13

11. This has been done before:
• In 1962, Douglas Engelbart laid out a framework designed to
“Augment Human Intellect”
• In six years he reinvented our conception of computing by reinventing
the research paradigm of his lab
• He called it “bootstrapping”
A Research Center for Pivoting Education
The EACOS Project
seeks to follow
Engelbart’s model by
bootstrapping
pedagogical innovation
in much the same way
he bootstrapped
technological innovation.
Wednesday, June 5, 13

12. • Understand the ultimate Ends of
your institutional and teaching
strategies
• Use technology to Augment teaching
• Leverage technology to enable
Creativity in overcoming barriers
• Always be on the lookout for
Opportunities created by technology
• Take a Systemic approach to
technology
EACOS:
The Theoretical
Framework
Wednesday, June 5, 13

13. What are the Ends of
Education?
• We need to think strategically about
what we’re doing by defining the ends
of our enterprise
• We need to start by agreeing on what
kind of educational products
(graduates) we are seeking to create
• Are we focusing too much on content
in an environment characterized by
content abundance? (Remember
Pink’s third question)
“The purpose of education is knowledge, and yet
education is blind to the realities of human knowledge, its
systems, infirmities, and its propensity to error and
illusion. Education does not bother to teach what
knowledge is.”
- Edgar Morin
Wednesday, June 5, 13

14. One Approach to Finding Ends:
Remixing Ruben Puentedura
http://youtu.be/cpK7h4mjUhM
“If you have an LMS and you can’t gossip in it, it isn’t going anywhere.”
- Ruben Puentedura
Wednesday, June 5, 13

15. “We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain
where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the
human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with
powerful concepts, streamlined technology and
notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered
electronic aids.”
- Douglas Engelbart, 1962
Ask yourself how your
application of technology
will Augment pedagogy
• Technology is much more iterative than it was
even a few years ago and organizations that
can leverage that capacity will have an
advantage
• Can we adopt a nimble, entrepreneurial
approach to technology systems?
Wednesday, June 5, 13

16. “Science is one of humanity’s most creative
pursuits. I believe that applying it to
entrepreneurship will unlock a vast
storehouse of human potential.”
- Eric Ries
Using
Technology
to Augment
• Engelbart is the meta-narrative as well as
a component of the EACOS approach
• Needs should drive design and design
should drive technology, not the other
way around
• Accept failure and iteration as parts of
the technological design process - this is
a central feature of “bootstrapping”
• Integrate your insights into the larger
goal and move to the next step
• Never accept technological shackles as
a given
Wednesday, June 5, 13

17. “The computer is simply an instrument whose
music is ideas.” - Alan Kay
How do we technologically
enable Creativity?
• Technology should liberate us, not confine us
• Creativity is an inherent advantage humans have over machines (remember the chess players)
• Computing technology offers the greatest potential for liberating creativity in human history
• Creativity will be the element that keeps us human in a technological world
Wednesday, June 5, 13

18. For most of computing history we’ve viewed
technologies in isolation from ends, the human
element, and other technologies.
Liberating Creativity
by Breaking the
Priesthood
“Guardianship of the computer can
no longer be left to a priesthood. I
see this as just one example of the
creeping evil of Professionalism,
the control of
aspects of society
by cliques of insiders.”
- Ted Nelson
Wednesday, June 5, 13

19. • Technology constantly
reinvents the game and it is
not a straight path
• Advancing on the chessboard
will create technological
opportunities for education
• Sweeping change can
restructure the landscape in
positive ways - bringing the
human back to the center
Be on the lookout
for technological
Opportunities
“The new age fairly glitters with opportunity but it is as
unkind to the slow of foot as it is to the rigid of mind.”
- Daniel Pink
Wednesday, June 5, 13

20. One Opportunity:
Reshaping Teaching
by Reducing the
Tech Footprint
The 1980s Technology Model
The 21st Century Technology Model?
• Learner-centered, not technology-
centered
• Characterized by open learning spaces
• Mobile technologies free teaching and
reduce technology clutter
• Mobile technologies enable dynamic
student participation
• Ubiquitous technologies transform the
entire campus into a learning space
• Maker spaces enable rapid
prototyping and entrepreneurship
Wednesday, June 5, 13

21. Think Systemically
About Technology
• Technologies do not exist in isolation from one another
• Technological systems are increasingly easy to change
these days. Human systems are not.
• Advocate for systems that interact seamlessly so that
the focus can be on task, not technology
• Don’t accept technologies that interfere with teaching
and innovation
“Intellectual life and cultural development thrive in environments
which make it easy to abstract, excerpt, borrow, and remix”
- John Naughton
Wednesday, June 5, 13

22. Institutional
interests often
work against
systemic solutions
to educational
ends
• Business profits from segmentation - don’t
mistake coverage for systemic thinking
• Business interests will make segmented
approaches attractive
• Segmentation is easier for accreditors and
legislatures to measure
• Segmentation is antithetical to 21st
educational goals
• Good technological and institutional
strategies can overcome segmentation
“It is an epistemological
mystery why traditional
education has so often
emphasized extensiveness
and coverage over
intensiveness and depth.”
- Jerome S. Bruner
Wednesday, June 5, 13

23. The Goals of EACOS
• Create a recursive, systemic
approach to unraveling wicked
problems
• Provide a theoretical framework for
challenging technologically-driven
assumptions
• Model a bootstrapping approach to
designing teaching incubators
• Scale innovation from the classroom
level to the institutional level
Wednesday, June 5, 13

24. Making it Real
1) Begin design work on a Teaching
Innovation Laboratory at Houston
Community College
2) Fall 2013 - Organize a retreat for Houston
Community College faculty to create local
working groups around the five EACOS
areas
3) Spring 2013 - Start pilot classes
stemming from the retreat
4) Spring 2013 - Begin development of an
online platform for sharing and
disseminating results of pilots
5) Summer/Fall 2015 - Opening of the
Teaching Innovation Laboratory space
Wednesday, June 5, 13

25. Contact Info
Preliminary Project URL: http://tech.nwc.hccs.edu/eacos
This presentation at: http://slidesha.re/11qZBEf
tom.haymes@hccs.edu
(713) 718-5813
Houston Community College
1550 Foxlake Dr.
Houston, TX 77084
All original photography © 2010-2013 Tom Haymes
Wednesday, June 5, 13

26. Further Reading
• Adams, Douglas, “How to Stop Worrying and
Love the Internet” at http://bit.ly/1V3v4s
• Brynjolfsson, Erik, & McAfee, Andrew Race
Against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press, 2011).
• Engelbart, Douglas, “Augmenting Human
Intellect” at http://stanford.io/3iwwIg.
• Naughton, John, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg:
What You Really Need to Know About the Internet
(London: Querecus, 2012).
• Nelson, Ted, Computer Lib/Dream Machines
(excerpt), in Noah Waldrip-Fruin and Nick
Montfort eds., The New Media Reader
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 301-338.
• New Media Consortium, The Horizon Report,
Higher-Ed Edition 2013 at http://bit.ly/wPZ75N.
• New Media Consortium, “The Future of
Education” at http://bit.ly/130a4WV.
• Pink, Daniel, A Whole New Mind(New York,
Penguin, 2006).
• Ries, Eric, The Lean Startup (New York, Crown,
2011).
• Shlain, Leonard, Art & Physics (New York,
HarperCollins, 1991, 2007).
Wednesday, June 5, 13

27. Why start at a
community college?
• Community Colleges educate more then
50% of US college students
• Teaching and Learning are the focus of
our activities
• Our students are generally more
challenged by the rigors of traditional
higher education - putting a premium on
innovative teaching methods
Wednesday, June 5, 13