Dangerously Irrelevant

Why I don't let my comments expire

Many bloggers don’t allow comments on old posts. After two weeks or 30 days or whatever, visitors lose their ability to leave comments. This is done mainly for spam protection, I believe.

In contrast, I don’t let my comments expire. Here are two reasons why:

1. Bolman & Deal frameworks: 49 comments to date. Two in June 2007, 47 in June 2009.
2. A taste of honey: 37 comments to date. Twelve in February 2009, 25 in April 2009.

In both of these instances, a professor or principal had his graduate students and/or staff use one of my blog posts as a discussion area. The dialogue for both has been excellent.

I’m happy to serve as a conversation space for people. In the end, that benefits them and me both. Them because they may not have another space readily available for easy discussion. Me because it allows me to see how people are thinking about and interacting with my content.

I want folks to find and be engaged with my past content, not just my current posts. That’s why I have a link to my “Top Posts” and why I include a search box, categories, a featured posts section, and other features on this blog. I’m guessing that at least some of those graduate students and educators also looked at some other content while they were here. A win-win all around…

Photo credit: Friday March 20, 19.01.23

HELP WANTED - Parents who are blogging about their local schools?

Back in February I noted that parents are using online tools to push back on their local school districts. Embodying the themes expressed in Clay Shirky’s excellent book, Here Comes Everybody, parents and other stakeholders are using blogs, online discussion boards, e-mail listservs, YouTube channels, and other social media tools to organize, advocate, criticize, support, and otherwise express their opinions about their local school systems.

Here are some examples:

• NYC Public School Parents
• GothamSchools
• Parents Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland
• Attack of the Narcisse Clones
• Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE)
• Catalyst Chicago
• Chariho School Parents’ Forum

Also see the parent reviews at GreatSchools (here’s an example from Dallas, Texas) and the New York City school reviews at InsideSchools (here’s an example).

I’m looking for some more examples of parents (or others) blogging about their local school organization. Not an occasional post (as I am wont to do) but rather dedicated communication channels such as the ones above. If you know of any, please share them in the comments area? Thanks!

Dangerously Irrelevant now available for the Kindle

Thanks to instructions from the kind folks at Mashable, this blog is now available in a Kindle edition. I think you now have at least four different ways to connect with Dangerously Irrelevant: going to the web site, RSS, e-mail, and Kindle. Just trying to create a variety of options for you…

Happy reading!

CASTLE Round-Up - Week of May 18

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week…

EdJurist

Over at CASTLE’s education law blog, Justin Bathon noted that eventually we need to ‘get over’ the visceral emotions associated with the Columbine school shooting and stop overreacting to student behavior. Justin also wrote about the federal stimulus funds imbroglio in South Carolina that has resulted in the governor suing the state legislature.

Occasional guest blogger Scott Bauries shared his thoughts on restraint and seclusion to control the behavior of special education students. He also threw up some initial thoughts about cyberbullying and the First Amendment. 

LeaderTalk

Cyberbullying also was on the mind of LeaderTalk contributor Nancy Flynn. She shared some of her perspectives on the issue as an elementary school principal.

Kevin Riley wrote about ‘spinning heel kicks’ and mapping the Taekwondo ideas of mastery and ability grouping to schools and standardized testing.

Dangerously Irrelevant

Here at Dangerously Irrelevant, I put up what may be one of my favorite posts ever, Are educational leadership faculty seen as ‘leaders’ by the leaders that they serve?

I also posted two lists that have gotten some attention on Twitter:

• Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators
• Top 10 K12 Online 2008 podcasts for busy school administrators

Other posts last week included some of my own thoughts about an elementary school cyberbullying incident, a notification about our upcoming Episode 6 of the 4 Guys Talking podcast and my quest to find out a little bit about my readers. Additionally, I explored the idea of how to get the Twitter feeds of all Iowa educators (and, also, all schools, districts, or universities) in one place.

Happy reading!

CASTLE Round-Up - Week of May 11

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week…

LeaderTalk

At LeaderTalk, Barbara Barreda proposed that we “join our teachers in the ritual of closing down the school year by taking stock of our office and jettisoning the bottom 20%... the things that are good ideas but not great or critical.”

When we’re drowning in social media, Angela Maiers reminds us to just BREATHE.

Inbox Zero for Social Networking: Just BREATHE

View more presentations from angelamaiers.

Chris Hitch asked how we can find ways to motivate our staff in non-monetary ways during these difficult budgetary times and offered a few suggestions of his own.

EdJurist

Over at EdJurist, CASTLE’s education law blog, Justin Bathon said that we can learn a few things from NASCAR about randomized drug testing of teachers.

Justin also noted that

We absolutely need clarity from the courts on whether school resource officers are more like school employees or more like police. This having it both ways stuff (to the detriment of the students in all cases) has got to stop.

Finally, Justin posted Episode 4 of EdJurist TV, which focused on interesting student discipline cases from last year.

Dangerously Irrelevant

Here at Dangerously Irrelevant, my post, It’s not ‘the tests.’ It’s us., generated quite a bit of interesting commentary.

I posted a new video from Stephen Heppell and another of Seth Godin at TED. I also pointed to an interesting graphic from Tech&Learning regarding what students want in e-textbooks, highlighted AASA’s upcoming Seattle Summit, and showed the name badge ribbons that I’m bringing to NECC. I gave updates on my quest to identify model 21st century schools, the number of recipes on BlogTweetCook.org, and the lack of effective communication in my local school district.

Oh, yeah, Episode 5 of 4 Guys Talking (with Lane Mills) is now available.

Happy reading!

Blog Tweet Cook - Update 1

A couple of weeks ago I launched an edublogger/eduTwitterer cookbook, BlogTweetCook.org. At the time, I said I didn’t know if it was a great idea or a dumb one. Well, to date we have 22 recipes posted, ranging from Señor Chris’ Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas to Hot German Potato Salad to Brew’s Brandy Slush to Roasted Halibut with Banana-Orange Relish.

Try some of these out. Pass along the URL. And if you’ve got a great recipe to share, please do so!

Edubloggers and eduTwitterers, share your recipes at Blog Tweet Cook!

Okay, I don’t know if this is a great idea or a dumb one but I thought I’d roll it out and see (the Twittersphere seemed to like it a few days ago)…

I am pleased to announce the formation of BlogTweetCook.org, an online edublogger/eduTwitterer cookbook. Are you an educator who blogs or tweets? Do you also have a great recipe to share? If so, head on over to Blog Tweet Cook and add your delicious contribution(s)!

As always, suggestions and feedback are welcome!

[Hat tip to an earlier, unpublicized idea by Jennifer Jones, John Pederson (Pot Roast Nachos!), and Cindy Seibel.]

What she says v. what they hear

Some brilliance from Sue King over at LeaderTalk:

I have said, "We must be explicit about what we want students to know, understand and be able to do."
What some heard was, "You are not doing a good job."

I have said, "We will be more effective [if] we collaborate and work together to figure out how to best meet the needs of our students."
What some heard was, "You are not doing a good job."

I have said, "The responsibilities of public education have changed; we can learn together how to be successful in this new environment."
What some heard was, "You are not doing a good job."

I have said, "I believe in the ability of teachers to reach and teach ALL children."
What some heard was, "You are not doing a good job."

Educators’ reflexive defensiveness is a fact of life in most school organizations and is a challenge for leaders who are trying to move their schools in new directions. What do you see in your school or district?

PostRank confuses me

Larry Ferlazzo blogged yesterday about PostRank’s list of the top education blogs as measured by “engagement.” I think PostRank has the potential to be a really useful tool but right now I have some serious questions about it. For example… [click on images for larger versions]

1. Why is edu.blogs.com on the list twice?

2. I don’t think www.ed.gov technically is a “blog.” And I don’t think its affiliated static web sites like Do[ing] What Works or African-American History [FREE] are either.

3. I confess that when I think of “education blogs,” neither EurekAlert! nor Common Craft nor OUPblog nor Clear Admit pop into my head. Ever.

4. Yesterday this blog was #78 – down from #30 the previous week – below Teacher Lingo. That was cool except my engagement numbers seemed significantly higher. So I figured maybe I didn’t understand the ranking system. But then this morning I find that this blog is #35 – down from #31 last week. Huh? What happened to me being #78 and #30? Now I don’t have any faith in its engagement numbers or its rankings.

PostRank clearly isn’t ready for prime time yet (but keep an eye on it!)…

My posts by month

Here’s a graph that’s probably only of interest to me but I thought I’d share it anyway. If you’re really interested, you can view the live graph. I’ll update it at the end of each month.

DABA: Clay Burell

Some of you know Clay Burell from his first blog, Beyond School. But what most folks don’t know is that Clay was selected by the folks at Change.org to be their education blogger and has been writing there since December 31. This week I’d like to award the crimson megaphone to Clay’s efforts at education.change.org. For a blog that’s only 3 months old, there is an unbelievable amount of good stuff there.

Clay’s cranking out several posts a day and his dopamine:yawn ratio is awfully high. Here are a few quotes to show you the diversity of what’s on the blog…

From The Rut of Learning Too Much, Too Soon, Too Long:

We're stuck in a rut of too much, too soon, and for too long.  Learning should continue for a lifetime, but force feeding a student with tons of facts isn't even remotely the same thing as educating a student.  True education, true learning, can occur in as little as a few minutes of stimulating conversation.  The "subject" is not what is most important to the student's future, it's the process of learning that will benefit him the greatest. 

From Another Foray into Tech and Literacy: Contra The New Yorker:

Having a Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make you out of date - but in my experience, it seems to increase the odds. [hey, wait a minute…!]

Case in point: my tongue-in-ballistic-cheek rebuttal to the Science Daily summary of the "tech versus critical thinking and literacy" study triggered a challenge from an education professor specializing in literacy. She challenged my lack of  "balance" in the post - a rebuttal isn't supposed to be balanced, in my book, but anyway - and recommended I read a New Yorker essay that, presumably, would set me straight.

The good Doctor's challenge was all well and good. But it was sent in an email, instead of as a comment to the post. An email. How 1990s.

I don't belittle email in any "I'm hip because I'm with it: I blog" sense. I belittle it because, in terms of literacy and critical thinking, email is impotent in comparison with comment threads and forums. Only I could read the email challenge; you couldn't.

That cheats everybody.

From Laboratories of Educational Democracy (guest blogger Bruce Smith):

I’ll admit that when I read Atlas Shrugged years ago, I found its central premise intriguing: that the way to reform society is by removing the talented people from the corrupt institutions they sustain, letting those institutions collapse, then starting all over again.

I first encountered this argument near the end of my time in public education, as I struggled over whether to stay, fighting the good fight; or to get out, saving myself but leaving behind a host of students. I ended up leaving because, despite the good I might have done there, the stress of supporting a system I couldn’t justify was driving me into the ground.

By aligning myself with Sudbury schools, I chose the power of example—that is, showing what’s possible and desirable in education—over the prospect of staying behind and pushing or resisting my way toward reform within the system. Plenty of my counterparts, however, took that other fork in the road, and continue doing what they can for the millions of children still in conventional schools.

Meanwhile the overall pace of education reform remains snail-like, with the majority of students stuck in schools an even larger majority considers unsatisfactory. How did we get stuck with such an outrageous reality? More importantly, why in the name of all that’s good do we allow it to persist?

Education.change.org is most definitely a blog that deserves a bigger audience (DABA). Here are a few other highlights from Clay and his guest bloggers:

• What Ever Happened to Socio-Economic Status?
• Obama's Ed Speech: Misinformed, or Disinforming?
• On the Evils of "Schooliness"
• Why Schoolwork Doesn't Have to Suck: Learning 2.0
• A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist
• Standardized Incoherence
• Teach For America, Awhile: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries, Part 1 and Part 2

Happy reading!

• See list of DABA blogs
• Read DABA posts on a web page
• Subscribe to DABA posts via RSS
• Subscribe to DABA posts via e-mail
• DABA clip code
• DABA blogroll code
• The Crimson Megaphone

The dopamine:yawn ratio

When I think about the edubloggers that I most look forward to reading every day, their posts are very high in this ratio:

Or, put more succinctly:

This is just another way of reframing the old adage that you need to be interesting if you want readers, but I kind of like it.

We all have different interests so the list of edubloggers whose dopamine:yawn ratio is high will be different for each of us. For myself, some (but by no means all) of the edubloggers whose posts tend to fall primarily in the numerator rather than the denominator include:

• Alan Levine
• Bill Ferriter
• Clay Burell
• Dan Meyer
• Doug Johnson
• George Siemens
• Jeff Utecht
• Karl Fisch
• Kelly Christopherson
• Mike Parent
• Sylvia Martinez
• Tim Stahmer
• Will Richardson

and, before they stopped:

• Christian Long
• Jennifer Jennings (eduwonkette)
• Kilian Betlach

How about you? Who do you think has a high dopamine:yawn ratio?

BlogBall09 - Our leagues are ready!

For those of you who are interested, here are the 24 teams that are participating in edublogger fantasy baseball this year (in alphabetical order by manager).

League A

• Swing from the Heels, Eric Bouvier, Auburn Public Schools Ed. Tech Blog
• Mr. Mojo Risin’, Jeremy Brueck, Raised Digital
• Motor City Kitties, Jim Dornberg, EdTech Update
• Rutherford’s Beard, Bill Ferriter, The Tempered Radical
• Buckeye Ballers, Toby Fischer, Future of Education
• RickRockRadio, Rick Heitmeyer, The Hump in the Bus
• Higgy’s Tribe Time, Chris Higgins, Mr. Higgins’ Blog
• Oslo Octopi, Scott McLeod, Dangerously Irrelevant
• My Momma’s a Sox Fan, Brendan Murphy, Philosophy Without a Home
• Hirschy Bears, Robert Pondiscio, The Core Knowledge Blog
• Broke a bat Mountain, Mark Schuldt, Roosevelt Elementary
• ChiSox, Dave Sherman, The Principal and Interest

League B

• A Few Good Men, Jon Becker, Educational Insanity
• TAG! You’re Out!, Russ Goerend, TAGmirror
• Kneighborhood Knine, Mark Granito, The Kneighborhood Annex
• Unsigned Free Agent, Matt Haan, Hoover Power Podcast
• Lehmann’s Demons, Chris Lehmann, Practical Theory
• Lou’s Sport Shop, Dave Meister, PHSprincipalBLOG
• Carolina Seadogs, Jason Ramsden, Raventech Reveals
• Kerplunk, Ted Sakshaug, Nonsense
• Harold’s Red Sox, Harold Shaw, Aging Reluctantly
• Great Hambinos, Brian Smith, Streaming Thoughts
• PrincipalsPage, Michael Smith, PrincipalsPage.com Blog
• BewareOfGreenWeenies, Vinnie Vrotny, Multi-faceted Refractions

My sincerest apologies to those of you who also expressed interest but e-mailed me after these folks. We didn’t have enough to make a third league or I would have done so. Maybe next year!

Good luck, everyone (and Go Twins!).

DABA: Candace Shively

This week I’d like to award the crimson megaphone to Candace Shively, who blogs over at Think Like a Teacher. I’m a big fan of Candace’s writing style and wish that I had the skill that she exhibits with her prose. Here are a couple of examples…

From Blowing and Drifting:

… without the liberal arts, without people seeing analogies and wondering aloud, the scientists would be stuck in crusty snow mounds that age and melt from the underside into cinder-filled storm sewers long after the rest of the winter has thawed.

I hope we can allow education to appreciate some blowing and drifting, veering entirely neither to white-out nor plow-hedges. We need everyone’s ideas — stirred by a little blowing and drifting.

From The Winds of 2008:

My hope is that the winds of upheaval which produce so much dissonance will also escort in a refreshing front of rethinking, a permission to look anew at everything, including the way we operate the processes we call Teaching and Learning. As someone who has been fortunate enough to have had almost entirely positive experiences with Teaching and Learning in my life, I want so much for others to feel the same winds. Even more, I wish them wind chimes of their own: an awareness that the winds ARE ushering in change. And change is not bad; you just need to put on the appropriate outerwear.

Happy New Year.

Think Like a Teacher is definitely a blog that deserves a bigger audience (DABA). Here are a few other highlights from Candace:

• A Tale of Two Cities – er, schools
• To Donna Benson: I have an idea!
• Slippery Reality
• Learning new stuff and not looking stupid
• Permission to Play
• Learning from Charlie Brown

Happy reading!

• See list of DABA blogs
• Read DABA posts on a web page
• Subscribe to DABA posts via RSS
• Subscribe to DABA posts via e-mail
• DABA clip code
• DABA blogroll code
• The Crimson Megaphone

The Iowa series - Wrap-up

I've had a lot of fun guest blogging over at The Des Moines Register this week. For those of you who would like to have a single link that you can forward to others, you can use this web address:

http://snipurl.com/iowaseries

Here are links to each of the five posts here at Dangerously Irrelevant:

• Iowa - 21st century curricula
• Iowa - A robust system of online learning
• Iowa - A computer in every hand
• Iowa - Invest in leadership
• Iowa - Better information

Happy reading!

DABA: Evan Abbey

I’m overdue on recognizing the next blog that I feel deserves a bigger audience (DABA).

This week I’d like to award the crimson megaphone to Evan Abbey, the Director of Online Learning for Heartland AEA 11 here in Iowa. Evan is a critical friend of mine and an important ally as we work to transition Iowa schools into the digital, global age. Here are a few highlights from Evan’s blog:

• 21st century skills from a designer’s point of view
• Rethinking giftedness
• New technology high schools
• 21st century skill: Unlearning
• Depth of technology integration
• 2020 vision

Also, Evan’s very best blogging is probably occurring in his series of Call to Action posts. Happy reading!

• See list of DABA blogs
• Read DABA posts on a web page
• Subscribe to DABA posts via RSS
• Subscribe to DABA posts via e-mail
• DABA clip code
• DABA blogroll code
• The Crimson Megaphone

Want a media pass for the 2009 ASCD conference in Orlando?

The annual ASCD conference is in Orlando, Florida this year. ASCD is looking for some education bloggers who might be interested in live blogging the event. If you’re already attending the conference or are going to be in the area March 13 to 16, ASCD invites you to consider registering as a media representative.

As a member of the media, you will have free access to all sessions, including ticketed sessions. The ASCD communications team will be on site to help direct you to the most appropriate sessions, connect you with speakers and ASCD staff for interviews, and ‘attend to any request that may arise.’ The team also can connect you with educators with particular interests or expertise. Did I mention that there’s a staffed media room and free wireless access to allow you to freely write and blog from the convention center?

ASCD is one of my favorite educational organizations and also one of my favorite conferences. If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll put you in touch with the appropriate people. Thanks!

Parents are using online tools to push on schools

The Washington Post recently published a really interesting article on the ability of well-connected parents to influence the decisions of their local school districts (hat tip to The Science Goddess). The term ‘well-connected’ refers to parents’ abilities to use online tools to communicate and mobilize (rather than to their connections to people with power).

The article highlights several different online communities of parents and has some great quotes:

We are not our moms, who were just involved in the PTA. . . . To expect us to show up and just make photos or write checks does not sit well with this generation.

and

It used to be that the superintendent and the School Board made decisions and said, 'This is how it's going to be,' and the community would accept that.

and

Many school systems 'are still responding to 21st-century parents with 20th-century approaches.'

Below are a few examples of parents pushing back on their local school systems. Parent tools include blogs, online petitions, and even administration countdown timers! I’ve linked to individual posts but you can click on the headers to see the blogs in their entirety.

• Has MCPS dropped American History from its curriculum?
• Change mayoral control? Beware the mushroom cloud!
• Media pig
• Wanted: a full-day kindergarten slot - do you feel lucky?

Be sure to also read about the New York City Department of Education ‘truth squad,’ whose job it is to ‘scour a group of 24 education Web logs, e-mail Listservs and Web sites in a hunt for factual errors and misinformation.’

Dean Shareski, Will Richardson, and Alec Couros, among others, have blogged about the importance of trying to manage one’s ‘digital footprint’ or digital identity. However, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, in their excellent book, Born Digital, note that “Social identities are much richer, more varied, and more persistent – AND FAR LESS UNDER OUR CONTROL – than ever before” (p. 34; emphasis added). In other words, now that everyone can have a voice, we have a lot less control over what gets said about us than before, and what does get said is more visible and findable than ever.

Online communication technologies have greatly amplified the abilities of parents to voice their opinions and mobilize for desired change. Activist parents now have a bevy of new tools and strategies to help facilitate their agendas and they are not afraid to use them. School organizations are going to have to get used to this new state of affairs in which parent activism and criticism are more public, permanent, and far-reaching. I’m pretty sure that most school leaders haven’t really thought about this…

What are your thoughts on this? If you’ve got an example of a parent group in your area leveraging online social tools to advocate for change in its local schools, please share!

Image credit: lynetter

BlogBall09

Update: Our two leagues (yes, two!) are now full. Sorry...

It’s time for another season of edublogger fantasy baseball (and, yes, you have to be an edublogger)! Last year’s champion, Jim Dornberg, will be back to defend his title. I shall return as well, hoping to improve on my team’s lackluster late-season performance (maybe I need a different team name!).

Same rules and league settings as last year. A big trophy for the winner. Friendly banter, potential bragging rights, and loads of baseball fun could be yours!

If you’re interested, send me an e-mail with BlogBall09 in the subject line. First come, first serve!

DABA: Ann Krembs

It’s time to revive the crimson megaphone!

After a long hiatus, I really, really need to get my list of blogs that deserve a bigger audience (DABA) back up and running. I can think of no better blogger to kick this off than Ann Krembs, librarian at the American School of Bombay. Ann actually has two blogs, Dear Librarian and ASB Book of the Week, both of which are wonderful resources for her school community.

I encourage you to look over Ann’s blogs. I think she’s a wonderful model of what an engaged (and fun!) school librarian can look like in this digital age, particularly since she has students helping with the blogs and her other library work. You also may be interested in Ann’s conversation with David Warlick at the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ann in person when I was in Mumbai last February. She rocks. Happy reading!

• See list of DABA blogs
• Read DABA posts on a web page
• Subscribe to DABA posts via RSS
• Subscribe to DABA posts via e-mail
• DABA clip code
• DABA blogroll code
• The Crimson Megaphone

Education Next article on education blogs

Michael Petrilli’s article on the education blogosphere is now available at Education Next:

• Press release
• Article (you can get a PDF version too)

Here’s a quick quote from the article:

[I]f I asked what Diane Ravitch, Jack Jennings, and Kati Haycock have in common, you would say they are all contributors to K–12 education policy debates, oft quoted in the nation’s leading newspapers. But what about Will Richardson, Joanne Jacobs, and Eduwonkette? If these names are unfamiliar to you, it’s time to visit the education blogosphere.

Petrilli’s stats are from August, so things have changed quite a bit since then. Not his fault, of course, but yet another example of the lack of timeliness of print publication…

I’m a fan of Education Next. The articles typically are well-written and on interesting topics (see, e.g., the forum article on virtual schools or the article on turnaround leadership) and I invariably have my thinking challenged. If you haven’t checked it out, maybe it’s time you do!

Help wanted - World's best PTO blog?

Let’s say that you were interested in creating the world’s best PTA / PTO blog as a tool to help build greater community for your kids’ elementary school. What would you include in it?

You can see what I’ve come up with so far at the Fellows PTO Blog. I’m just getting started. In addition to fun and/or helpful online resources for students and parents, over the next few months I’m going to:

• solicit student stories or artwork,
• publicize upcoming school events,
• interview principals and the teaching staff,
• highlight great books (and hopefully have students submit book reviews), and
• possibly host a few fun contests for kids and families.

If you have other suggestions for blog activities, web sites I should be checking out, or great PTA / PTO blog examples, please leave them in the comments area or send me a note. Thanks!

LeaderTalk is a nominee for Best Group Edublog 2008

Wow. That’s fun. Great writing, everyone!

Voting is open through Saturday, December 20, 5pm Eastern (USA; GMT -5). Check out the rest of the voting categories as well!

Know any music education bloggers?

I’ve been following with great interest Joseph Pisano’s year-long quest to identify (or spark the creation of) 100 music education blogs by January 2009  (I blogged about it back in March). He has been diligently updating the list as it has grown throughout the year. He’s up to 95 music education bloggers. If you know of anyone with a music education blog who’s not on Joseph’s list (or who might be a good candidate to start one), please send him or her his way. He’s got 30 days left and just 5 more blogs to go!

I think this is a great project and would love to see similar efforts in other subject areas. Joseph’s list already is on the Moving Forward wiki. If it helps, I will be happy to help promote other initiatives like this one!

Top 50 P-12 Edublogs? - Technorati shakeup

I read with great interest the other day Jeff Utecht’s post regarding his declining Technorati authority. Although I agree with others that Technorati has some deficiencies as a blogging metric, it still can be a useful tool to help monitor conversations and online presence.

Like Jeff and the handful of other blogs that he mentions, I also have seen Dangerously Irrelevant’s authority decline, particularly in the past few months. I have been attributing this to:

• my less frequent posting this semester;
• a return in late September to the blog’s appropriate level after a temporary ‘authority boost’ from an unusually popular post last March; and
• the natural competition for comments and links that results from an ever-increasing number of high-quality edublogs.

Jeff hypothesizes that another factor may be Twitter. As many of us move our conversations that direction, fewer posts and/or comments are occurring in the edublogosphere. I’m an infrequent tweeter, so while Twitter may explain The Thinking Stick’s decline, it doesn’t really explain my own. In Jeff’s comments section, Sue Waters also notes that the decreases in authority may be due to the recent changes in Technorati’s indexing methodology.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on here. Probably all of the reasons above and more. I wasn’t losing sleep about my own Technorati decrease, but Jeff’s post intrigued me because I hadn’t thought about the fact that others might also be having a similar decline. I found the time this morning to extend Jeff’s quick calculations to the entire list of edublogs from my post in June. Here’s what I found…

[note: I simply worked with the list from June. I did not recalculate the ‘top 50’ nor did I determine if any new blogs should be included instead of those listed.]

1. Nearly all of the top edublogs (as measured by Technorati authority) saw a decline in their authority since June.

As the chart below shows, some edublogs had quite dramatic decreases. The average authority decrease was 88; the median decrease was 62. [click on the image for a larger version]

2. Using today’s numbers, the list would look like this instead.

3. Here’s the list ordered by gain/loss in authority rather than overall authority. Only six blogs saw an increase in authority since June.

4. Here’s the list ordered by change in overall rank (again, within just this list and not the overall edublogosphere).

5. Finally, here’s a graphic that shows each blog’s change in rank since June (ordered by overall authority). Red is a decline; green is an increase; blue is no change.

Last thoughts

• Like Jeff (and unlike many of you!), I find much of this fascinating. For example, think:lab’s rank went up 11 spots despite the fact that Christian Long quit blogging there in August. That was a neat trick, Christian (and, BTW, I hope your new gig’s working out well for you)!
• The top part of the list was pretty stable. Most of the movement occurred outside of the top 10 or so positions.
• Students 2.0 had the biggest drop in the rankings. Was it so high before because we liked the content better compared to now? Or were we simply giddy with the idea behind the blog but now have realized that the content is not as relevant to many of us?
• Is the TechLearning blog’s decline due in part to its general inability to accept comments?
• The K12 Online Conference blog rankings likely are cyclical. Up in the fall just before and after the conference. Down six months later as all of the traffic regarding the conference drops off Technorati’s radar. Time will prove if I’m right or not on this one!
• Kudos to the bloggers (Angela Maiers, Jennifer Jennings, Steve Dembo, George Siemens, and Chris Lehmann) who actually increased their Technorati authority in the face of steep overall declines. Wow.

Any of you have thoughts on this fairly esoteric stuff?

I said, they said

My annual review said:

Dr. McLeod’s work with schools is exemplary but inappropriate.

I knew then that, despite the fact that we liked each other a lot, it was time to change institutions. So I set out in search of a university that hopefully would see value in the work that I was doing with practicing school leaders. Below is a true tale from one of my interviews…

 

I said:

I believe in engaged, hands-on involvement with administrators around the complex work of school improvement. I’m trying to help educators and kids.

They said:

We’re concerned about your lack of scholarly productivity.

I said:

I will continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals. But I’m also going to write in this new space, a place that’s revolutionizing our entire global society.

They said:

That place has no reliability. How do you know if something is valid? Those people don’t have doctorates or work at universities. How can you assess the worthiness of their writing without peer review?

I said:

There are a number of ways to help you assess whether writing is worthwhile or not, including reading it and judging its worth on its face. For example, if you actually read some of my online writing, you’ll see that it’s not just a personal rant space. Most of my writing is about bringing issues of theory down to the practical level and/or expanding our leadership conversations to include practitioners and others in the field. Second, there is an ethos in the blogosphere about hyperlinking. If you want to check the credibility of an author’s sources, simply click on the link and see for yourself. It’s much easier than with print. Third, there are a lot of really smart people out there with whom we’re not intersecting. I’ve learned a ton from folks without traditional academic credentials. Fourth, the blogosphere has its own way of assessing worthiness. Tools like commenting, Technorati, subscriber statistics, and other web traffic measures help us know if writing has value to intended audiences. In many ways, it’s much more transparent and honest than the supposedly-neutral academic peer review system.

They said:

Why do you want to be a faculty member? Maybe you should just be a consultant.

I said:

When asked to explain his hockey success, Wayne Gretzky said that he skated to where the puck was going to be, not where it had been. Someone in our field needs to be out in front, exploring the possibilities that come with these new publishing mechanisms and figuring out what they mean for educational leadership scholarship. I’m trying to be that person, the one who’s skating to where the puck is going to be. Also, you may not know it, but these tools have tremendous reach. If you count up my subscribers and other visitors and multiply those by the number of posts, I will have nearly a million person-interactions in this year alone. I’m not sure I could ever write an article in a traditional academic journal that would reach that many people in its lifetime. And did you know that this online video I’m affiliated with has reached many millions more in just a few months? For someone like me who’s trying to actually impact schools, these tools are awfully difficult to ignore.

They said:

You sure are stubborn. Why don’t you just play the game?

I said:

I’ve got 30 more years in this profession. I don’t want to be miserable for three decades. If I wanted to solely publish in journals that – let’s be honest here – are never read by the people that we’re supposedly trying to reach, I would have done so and stayed at my current university. I like it there and they like me.

They said:

We’re a research institution.

I said:

I will continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals. But I’m also going to write in this new space, a place that’s revolutionizing our entire global society.

They said:

No thanks. (and I did too)

 

Today is a great day to mention once again that I’m thankful to be at Iowa State, a place that so far sees worth in my activities and encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing. May you all find a great fit for your own work too. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

2008 Education Blogosphere Survey results

I’m both pleased and embarrassed to announce that the results from my second annual Education Blogosphere Survey are now available. Pleased to finally be done and that there were 419 participants. Embarrassed that the gestation almost exceeded that of a human newborn. Thank you, Dan Meyer, for politely staying on my case about this. I hope the results are worth the wait.

Watch on the Web

• Vimeo

Downloads

• Windows Media (.wmv)
• Quicktime (.mov)
• PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) [has clearest images]
• PowerPoint 2003 (.ppt) [has clearest images]
• Acrobat (.pdf) [has clearest images]
• Excel 2007 (.xlsx) [anonymized]
• Excel 2003 (.xls) [anonymized]

Note that I didn’t do anything with the open-response items. Feel free to dig through one of the Excel files and do your own analysis (please let me know if you do!). There are lots of useful resources in the additional information in the database.

As always, these materials are available under a Creative Commons license. Let the conversation begin!

Introducing The Edjurist

Gawker Media has Gizmodo, Lifehacker, The Consumerist, Valleywag, Gawker, and seven others.

Weblogs, Inc. has Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq, Luxist, Download Squad, and too many others to count.

Education Week and Teacher Magazine have eduwonkette, Bridging Differences, Web Watch, edbizbuzz, Digital Education, and a host of others.

CASTLE has Dangerously Irrelevant, LeaderTalk, and – now – The Edjurist!

Along with The School Law Blog, The Edjurist is a MUST-READ for anyone interested in K-12 school legal issues. We are absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Justin Bathon (U. Kentucky) and The Edjurist to the stable of CASTLE blogs.

Here are a few of Justin’s recent posts:

• Finding free educational law information
• Johnson v. Poway shows why Garcetti doesn’t work for schools
• More on why Garcetti was wrong for schools
• Catching up … some weird dress code stories
• Thoughts on the California home schooling decision

Be sure to also see guest blogger Scott Bauries’ posts on the applicability of federal e-discovery rules to K-12 education:

• Intro
• Document retention systems

There’s no better way to stay on top of the latest educational law cases, news, and odd stories than to catch Justin’s Friday Snippets. Check him out!

Now, if I can only talk eduwonkette into being CASTLE’s education policy blog, then we’ll have some pretty good coverage of educational leadership topics (anyone interested in blogging on social justice, staff development, or school finance?!).

Note

CASTLE’s previous school law blog, At the Schoolhouse Gate, is being replaced by The Edjurist. If you were a loyal reader, thanks!

BlogBall08 - Jim Dornberg, champion!

I am pleased to announce that Jim Dornberg of EdTechUpdate is our first BlogBall champion!

Well, okay, not that pleased given that my third-place team ended up sixth after the playoffs but, nonetheless, Jim deserves congratulations! Jim’s Motor City Kitties beat out Chris Lehmann’s Lehmann’s Demons in an extremely hard-fought final matchup. As promised, CASTLE will be sending Jim a trophy to recognize his championship.

Here are the final standings (and a manager’s list) for anyone who’s interested. The first season of edublogger fantasy baseball was extremely fun. If you’re interested in participating next year, drop me an e-mail with the word BASEBALL in the subject. Maybe we’ll get enough folks for two leagues…

Messianic arrogance

Am I any different than your friend or relative that insists on witnessing to you every time you see each other? Am I any different than the Hare Krishnas at the airport or the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who knock at your front door?

Seriously, am I? Let’s look at the evidence:

1. Deeply-held belief in the true cause (in my case, I believe that schools need to transition into the digital, global age NOW and that leaders are the essential lever to make it happen).
2. Deeply-held belief that I, rather than others, know what’s best.
3. Deeply-held belief that others should be listening to me.
4. Deeply-held belief that others should be acting upon what I say, preferably sooner rather than later.
5. Deeply-held belief (and sometime-snarky comments) that I will be proved right in the end and that those that delay will wish that they had listened to me when they had the chance.

Passionate, visionary leadership or self-righteous, messianic arrogance? I (we?) have some hard thinking to do…

Not so irrelevant 012

Three great questions

I especially like the last of these three questions from Rodney Trice. We should be asking teachers and principals that question more often (and just that directly).

• How do you intend to bring the global community into your classroom?
• How will you prepare students for a future that is relatively unknown?
• How you will eliminate the racial predictability of achievement outcomes in your classroom?

This just in: Teenagers play video games!

All kidding aside, the latest report from the amazing Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that kids - even girls! – are up to their eyeballs in video games.

We’ll stick to the tried and (not) true

Nope, sorry. iPods are not allowed. Back to the old way. Too bad it doesn’t work as well. Gotta do it anyway. Oh, and I love how the music players are categorically, by definition, a ‘distraction’ (if not in actuality). Who needs reality when we have these little educational policy fantasy worlds that we can create for ourselves?

Throw da bums out!

After attempts to bring in turnaround experts didn’t work, the state of Maryland is increasingly leaning toward completely restructuring schools that are academically unsuccessful. State schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick says:

We are very comfortable being more aggressive about this. We have seen much better results [when the staff is replaced].

Blog like a farmer

I ran across an old post by Mike Sansone, one of my Iowa blogging buddies. I really like his metaphor that blogging should be like farming.

Scorecards

I bet parents and community members would really like to see scorecards like this one (maybe with different data) for their local schools. I know some schools and districts already do this. Hopefully they use line graphs rather than tables of numbers. Could you tell the essential story of a school district with 10 key, well-done graphs? I bet you could!

No writing in journalism class?

Check out this excellent article about the NYU journalism student who got in trouble for blogging about her class. [hat tip to Tim Stahmer]

I got no money, honey

Did you catch Edutopia’s advice on how to innovate without extra money or support?

Spend hours on content you can find with Google in 3 seconds!

One of my favorite things about Wes Fryer is his ability to highlight the ridiculous. I also enjoy his irreverance (“Behold! I hold aloft the holy words!”), particularly when I have the same experience at my kids’ school.

Speaking of Google…

Finally, I’m digging Google Chrome. it’s now my default browser and I’m using Firefox less and less (and I love Firefox). Chrome is much faster. I also like that each tab is a separate process; I have yet to have a browser hang…

Not so irrelevant 010

My latest roundup of links and tools...

By now we should be thinking about the Internet like we do water and electricity

Slate Magazine notes that

Camp McCain . . . fundamentally does not see the Internet as essential infrastructure. . . . Instead, Camp McCain dreams of a competitive market in Internet services, and so if Obama sees the Internet as a road, McCain takes it as a car: something that consumers will buy if they want it. In fact, in 2001, Michael Powell compared the Internet to a luxury car: ‘I think there is a Mercedes divide. I would like to have one, but I can't afford one.’ Any too-ambitious government project to put a fiber cable in people's homes, thinks Camp McCain, is likely doomed to failure.

All I have to say about this is that any country that doesn’t see the Internet as essential infrastructure for driving forward its national economy and societal well-being is doomed. Doomed, I tell you! [hat tip to Will Richardson]

Speaking of which…

• The Partnership for 21st Century Skills just issued a new report on education and global competitiveness. Lots of yummy statistics in there about the changing American workplace. a plum reading choice for school leaders. Visit www.tinyurl.com/jobsarechanging

Huh?

• It’s easy to find examples of why we need people to translate the world of educational research for practitioners. To most K-12 educators, for examples, paragraphs 5 through 7 of this study summary (which purports to report the instructional value of using interactive whiteboards) are complete gibberish.

The power of transparency

• I love being able to peer into the innards of Dan Meyer’s mind and instruction. How many other teachers do we know that would even be comfortable with the thought of opening up their entire classroom curriculum for critique and discussion?

The power of the aggregator

• A couple of weeks back, Doug Johnson had a great post about the power of RSS aggregators. I’ve been introducing our new principal cohort to Google Reader. Comment from last night’s class: There’s a whole world out there that I didn’t know about!

The power of prefetching

• I like the fact that FeedDemon, the software I’m using as my primary aggregator, lets me read stuff offline.

Do you know the way to San Jose?

• The ILC conference is coming up… So is the Online Teaching & Learning Conference (which, by the way, happens to be online!).

Smackdown!

• Finally, make sure you read the responses of Karin Chenoweth and Ben Wildavsky to Charles Murray’s latest book, Real Education. If you’ve forgotten, Murray is the guy who wrote The Bell Curve and believes that poor kids should just be slotted into menial (but somehow emotionally-fulfilling) educational tracks and jobs so that our schools can go back to their business of educating the elites to run the world. [hat tip to Eduwonkette]

Recommended reading - Marketing

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on marketing. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.

[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]

BlogBall08 - The playoffs begin!

The first season of edublogger fantasy baseball is nearing its conclusion. Dr. Jon Becker of Educational Insanity ran away with the league, despite many of us his questioning his sanity as he added and dropped Billy Butler from his roster multiple time over the season (there’s apparently a real love-hate relationship there). Poor Chris Higgins of Mr. Higgins’ Blog spent much of the season holding down the twelfth spot and Chris Lehmann at Practical Theory made a heroic charge in the last week to squeak into the sixth and final slot for the playoffs. Here are the final regular season standings:

The playoffs have now begun. Here is the bracket for the top six teams vying for the championship:

And here is the consolation bracket for the rest of the teams:

Good luck, everyone!

Subscription via e-mail; Trying to reduce corporate PR pitches

I realized that in two years I had never added a link to subscribe to Dangerously Irrelevant via e-mail. LeaderTalk has had such a link since its inception. So I created one in Feedburner. Clicking on the Subscribe via e-mail link takes you to a web page where you can enter your e-mail address. Hopefully this will be a good option for administrators and others who aren’t ready yet for a RSS reader.

I also added this blurb to the navigation menu:

I rarely look at for-profit PR pitches. If you send me something, please ensure that it relates to the topics of this blog: technology, leadership, and/or school reform.

Hopefully this will cut down on the number of unsolicited publicity requests I receive from corporations touting their latest miracle initiative for schools. I know they’re well meaning – and I recognize that the initiatives actually do some good – but I think that most of the projects just tinker at the margins and basically are more about the corporations than the schools. This is not a surprise, of course. Thoughtful corporate assistance to schools that makes a real difference still is hard to find. If you know of any such projects, please share them with the rest of us (and tell us why you think they’re making a difference so that we know you’re not just a corporate shill)!

Help wanted: Moving Forward classroom wiki and podcast projects

Although we need some more lists of subject-specific blogs (which I’ll work on in future posts), the blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki is basically a pretty solid resource right now. The wiki and podcast pages, however, could use some work…

If you know of an exemplary K-12 classroom wiki or podcast project, would you add the link to the appropriate wiki page?

• Classroom wiki projects
• Classroom podcast projects

Thanks!

[The Moving Forward wiki houses a collection of resources to help presenters and change agents as they help move schools and universities forward into the 21st century. If you have a resource to add, please do so!]

Happy 2nd birthday!

I am pleased to say that 694 posts (and 3,019 comments) later, Dangerously Irrelevant is 2 years old today. I can hardly believe it's been 730 days since my first post. Thanks, everyone, for all of your good cheer and support!

Blogging, tweeting, and the uncovering of personality

Will Richardson has yet another post that’s generated a great deal of discussion. This time it’s about the value of Twitter for conversation. Will ponders Twitter’s impact on conversations and suspects that maybe it’s making us lazy…

For me it’s about the conversation but, more importantly, it’s also about the uncovering of personality. The social web is about people and connectivity, right? So every blog, tweet, Skype chat, comment, Flickr photo, YouTube video, Facebook update, or Ning post - they’re each another gap-filler for me. Chink by chink, brick by brick, pixel by pixel - the picture becomes more clear and complete. Is this someone with whom I want to connect? Is this someone with whom I want to converse? Is this someone from whom I want to learn?

That’s the power of Twitter (and blogging and … ) for me. Is it maddeningly disjointed and unconnected? Absolutely. But that’s what happens when everyone has a voice and when there are numerous tools to express ourselves. Our aggregation and monitoring tools will get better in the years to come. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the power and potential of our new information landscape, despite all of its frustrating flaws and growing pains, because I know that it has greatly enriched my life and exponentially expanded my horizons (cue the violins)…

Photo credit: weblogg-ed.com

'If I already know what someone is trying to teach me, I am not learning'

I couldn’t agree with you more, Arthus. You’ve just highlighted an enormous failing of our entire system of schooling.

I know that there’s been a great deal of consternation and conversation that has occurred about some of your recent Tweets. I’m going to take a different tack and instead applaud you for being willing to fight tooth and nail for your own learning. An admirable trait in a young adult. Keep on fightin’ the good fight.

Collaborative action? Not yet.

Chris Lehmann’s post last week regarding Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and educational change was particularly thought-provoking for me. If you haven’t yet read Chris’ post or the book, move them both closer to the top of your reading list. I thought Chris did an especially nice job of describing how the edublogosphere has been good at the task of sharing and is doing pretty well at community production (thanks, everyone, who’s contributed to the Moving Forward wiki) but has not yet done so well at collaborative action. Why? Because it’s hard to do, as Chris and Shirky note, particularly within communities that have loose ties like we edubloggers do.

Chris feels, however, that we possess the capacity to engage in collaborative action and that we maybe, probably, should be thinking in this direction:

The hardest challenge facing our community is that we've done a very good job at going after the low-hanging fruit. We've done what was easiest to do... and most of us would agree that it hasn't been easy so far. To take things to the next level is going to be hard. Not impossible... and a lot easier because of the tools we have at our disposal today, but hard none-the-less. 

But "hard" shouldn't be the reason we don't do it.

While I admire (as always) Chris’ good cheer and ‘we can do it even though it’s hard!’ attitude - and even usually possess a high concentration of those myself - right now I’m a bit more skeptical that our loosely-knit ‘community’ has the capacity, time, or even desire to begin engaging in collective action, at least at the level that Chris describes. I say this despite all of the incredible value that I gain from the edublogosphere.

At the very least, collective action is going to require a very focused target outcome and some folks who are willing to shoulder the heavy load of visioning / coordinating / re-centering focus. And I just don’t see that happening right now. I see a lot of good people who care a lot and are even willing to do numerous great things for kids, schools, and/or fellow bloggers. But I don’t see us as being in a place yet where collaborative action can occur on any meaningful and important scale (and I’m also not sure what that place would look like so I’d know that we were there).

Of course I’d love to be proved wrong…

[I confess that I’m also feeling a bit despondent today about the whole prospect of influencing American policymakers regarding K-12 education. After all, if an initiative with a $60 million budget and the backing of billion-dollar foundations isn’t getting much traction in terms of putting educational issues on the political radar screen, what the heck are our chances?]

NECC 2008 - See you next year!

Dean Shareski’s a sharp cookie, Carolyn Foote’s my savior, Miguel Guhlin’s a beach bum, and Doug Johnson’s a curmudgeon. David Jakes is under the bus, Cheryl Oakes likes cobbler, and Jon Becker likes waffles. Sylvia Martinez is a rock star, and Jeff Utecht is … hey, where’s Jeff? Darren Draper’s on the A list and I proudly hung with some guys on the D list. I tell you, NECC 2008 was smokin’ hot!

A shout out to ALL my new Edubloggercon / NECC Unplugged / Blogger’s Cafe / San Antone peeps! Pry those iPhones from the Tweetin’ fingers of Wes Fryer and Chris Lehmann. Surgically remove the webcams from Lisa Parisi and Steve Dembo. Tell Konrad Glogowski to quit his TV repair business. Y’all get some rest ‘cause next year we’ll be in my hometown, the nation’s capital – er, capitol – um, das kapital – oh, you know, that place where I’m Just A Bill was filmed.

Remember the Alamo! (if you can after all those prickly pear margaritas)

A few more pictures from my NECC Flickr set

NECC 2009 - Who wins?

Okay, let’s think about this for next year…

Famous Blogger wants to spend time at NECC conversing with / learning from friends (who might also happen to be other Famous Bloggers). Not Yet Famous Blogger and Loyal Reader would like to spend time conversing with / learning from Famous Blogger.

Who wins? Does FB have any obligation to NYFB and LR?

NECC 2008 - Sunday fun

Yesterday was a fun day here at NECC. Other than the SIGTC Forum, I had nothing scheduled. Of course I hung out in the Blogger’s Cafe!

When I showed up at the Cafe, Jeff Utecht and Brian Crosby were busy hacking the monitor that ISTE had placed there (left side of the picture below). That monitor was later used to broadcast the keynote speech by James Suriowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds (thanks, Konrad Glogowski, for getting the sound fixed!). On the larger screen (right side of the picture below) we displayed Vicki Davis’ CoverItLive backchannel conversation about the keynote so that others could follow along.

I was one of Vicki’s CoverItLive ‘panelists.’ It was a little weird to be sitting three feet behind her and other panelists but only interacting online rather in person (I’m behind the red table in the picture below). That said, everything went very smoothly and people in the Cafe could hear the keynote better than folks in other lounges because most of our lively side conversation occurred online rather than out loud during the speech.

If you ever get a chance to see Ewan McIntosh’s blog aggregator, he organizes his incoming education feeds by geography (Africa, Australia, etc.). He does a phenomenal job of ensuring that he’s receiving a variety of perspectives. As he said to me yesterday, “For every problem we’re discussing, there’s usually already a solution out there somewhere. It’s frustrating sometimes to hear U.S.-centric conversations about dilemmas that often have been addressed in other countries.” Also, interestingly, Ewan told me that his primary blog audience is his boss!

This is a picture of two managers in our BlogBall08 (edublogger fantasy baseball league), Brian Smith and Ted Sakshaug. My team beat Brian’s 8 to 2 this week!

Here’s a picture of Susan Brooks-Young as she runs the NECC orientation session for administrators. She did a great job of running a session for which the room needed to be twice as large. I sat next to someone from Georgia who apologized for putting her ‘grocery store feet’ near my face (I was sitting on the floor) [explanation: apparently your bare feet get really dirty when you walk through a grocery store]. Over 70% of the participants were first-time attendees of the conference (that’s a good thing, I think).

On our way to dinner we took a few pictures (yes, that’s James Surowiecki).

Here are some other pictures from my NECC Flickr set. The last picture is of Jon Becker and the ‘Chip Nazi.’

NECC 2008 - If we don't like NECC Unplugged, we can change it

Jeff Utecht said:

I’m worried these type of get out the tools and play sessions where we are all learning and teaching will be forced out of the Blogger’s Cafe. They are unplanned, unscripted, great discussions around tools, ideas, and just plain old good fun.

Vinnie Vrotny said:

I believe that there is a place for NECC Unplugged and people being able to have quick shares. Bur I do believe that the scheduled nature of this venture, while being created for all of the right reasons, is keeping those who may be late to the party, the ability to share.

I guess I am advocating for a rallying call to arms, a reclaiming of the Blogger’s cafe space. Like Travis, Crockett, and Bowie, and the other Texans, many whose statues are in the hallway right outside of the Blogger’s Cafe,  I am willing to defend the turf from the invasion and instrusion in order to allow for those, who like me, just want a place for informal learning and reflection. Anyone want to join?

My thoughts

1. Many of us enjoyed the conversations on Saturday, even with the boom mikes and camera crews.
2. I’m glad that Jeff and others ‘voted with their feet’ and found spaces and times where their conference needs could be met. I know that I’ve had a blast interacting with Jeff, Vinnie, and others in our informal settings.
3. I thought the Blogger’s Cafe today was fabulous. I don’t know what NECC Unplugged is going to do that atmosphere, but we can always decide as a group to dump it or move it if need be. I liked your [Jeff’s] note that we could’ve taken better control of Edubloggercon but didn’t. If we need it, we have a second chance on Monday and/or Tuesday! [left as a comment on Jeff’s blog]

In other words, if NECC Unplugged isn’t working for us, we don’t have to see it to its conclusion. We can adapt on the fly. Isn’t that one of our strengths as a group?

One final note: A lot of people in the Blogger’s Cafe today weren’t interacting with anyone. They were typing away or simply resting and watching. I’m guessing that many weren’t even bloggers but were simply conference attendees who found an open seat. We have to be cognizant of this too. Although Vinnie and Jeff don’t fall into this camp, there may be folks who prefer the more structured approach of NECC Unplugged instead of a more free-for-all conversation.

NECC 2008 - My favorite moment

No matter what else may happen at this NECC conference, I can say with no hesitation whatsoever that my favorite moment will be - after all of our Did You Know? stuff together – finally meeting Karl Fisch.

NECC 2008 - Edubloggercon

I haven’t been to NECC in years so I was really jazzed to be able to come this year to San Antonio. I came in with no agenda; my plan was to simply soak it all in at Edubloggercon. I think I did a good job of that.

On Saturday I met a TON of people – old blogging friends, famous blogging friends, new blogging friends – the whole works. It was great to finally meet some people with whom I’ve interacted regularly. It was equally as fun interacting with new folks that I’d never met before. I now have a bunch of new blogging buddies. I appreciated everyone who went out of their way to come say hello. Folks have been very kind and gracious here.

Many people were Tweeting, blogging, etc. yesterday. I didn’t even touch my laptop until the end of the day. Too many conversations!

My favorite moments of Edubloggercon

• Putting faces with blogs/names
• Meeting a boatload of new, interesting people
• Our conversation about Here Comes Everybody (I probably talked too much…)
• Our conversation about the importance of leadership

Some interesting posts about Saturday

• EdubloggerCon and my need for Beta Time
• Growing pains at NECC’s EduBloggerCon 08
• Edubloggercon’s not an unconference: here’s why
• EdubloggerCon 2008
• Bowling Alone vs. Here Comes Everybody...
• Live blogging EBC 2008 – Part 2
• Podcast 260: Edubloggercon 2008…

I don’t share many of the concerns that others expressed. Although Pearson’s filming was a bit intrusive at times, it didn’t bother me so much, even when I was facilitating. Mostly I just had a great time. I think Vinnie’s got it right - growing pains that we’ll have to work through for next year (when Edubloggercon’s even bigger!)…

Some Edubloggercon pictures from my NECC Flickr set

Calling all bloggers! - Leadership Day 2008

A year ago I wrote:

Many of our school leaders (principals, superintendents, central office administrators) need help when it comes to digital technologies. A lot of help, to be honest. As I’ve noted again and again on this blog, most school administrators don’t know

• what it means to prepare students for the 21st century;
• how to recognize, evaluate, and facilitate effective technology usage by students and teachers;
• what appropriate technology support structures (budget, staffing, infrastructure) look like or how to implement them;
• how to utilize modern technologies to facilitate communication with internal and external stakeholders;
• the ways in which learning technologies can improve student learning outcomes;
• how to utilize technology systems to make their organizations more efficient and effective;
• and so on…

Administrators’ lack of knowledge is not entirely their fault. Most of them didn’t grow up with these technologies. Many are not using digital tools on a regular basis. Few have received training from their employers or their university preparation programs on how to use, think about, or be a leader regarding digital technologies.

So… let’s help them out.

In response to that post, on July 4, 2007 – American Independence Day – a number of you helped me celebrate independent (and hopefully innovative) thinking and leadership by blogging about effective school technology leadership:

• The superb posts from last year’s participants

A year later our leaders still need help, of course. So I am putting out a new call for people to participate in Leadership Day 2008.

Guidelines

On July 4, 2008, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own. Whatever strikes you. Please tag your post with these Technorati tags:

leadershipday2008, schooltechleadership

and/or link back to this post. If you don’t have a blog, comment on someone else’s post and/or send your thoughts to me and I will post them for you. I will do a summary afterward of what folks wrote and talked about [bloggers, this means some new readers probably will head your direction!].

Some prompts to spark your thinking

• What do effective K-12 technology leaders do? What actions and behaviors can you point to that make them effective leaders in the area of technology?
• Do administrators have to be technology-savvy themselves in order to be effective technology leaders in their organizations?
• What are some tangible, concrete, realistic steps that can be taken to move administrators forward? Given the unrelenting pressures that they face and their ever-increasing time demands, what are some things that administrators can do to become more knowledgeable and skilled in the area of technology leadership?
• Perhaps using the NETS-A as a starting point, what are the absolutely critical skills or abilities that administrators need to be effective technology leaders?
• What is a technology tool that would be extremely useful for a busy administrator (i.e., one he / she probably isn’t using now)?
• What should busy administrators be reading (or watching)?

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Please join us for this important day because, I promise you, if the leaders don’t get it, it isn’t going to happen.

Top 50 Edublogs? - Follow-up

Every time I make a list of the ‘top’ edublogs (as measured by Technorati ranking), it seems that I also end up writing a follow-up post. For example, I wrote Linked after my last list almost a year ago. Here are a few thoughts about the conversation that has ensued regarding this year’s list…

Academics’ brains are weird

As Sir Ken Robinson said, professors’ bodies are basically transportation for our heads [which is probably why my brain’s in a lot better shape than the rest of me].

I like to play with numbers and ideas. I don’t know why so many people get upset about a simple list. For me it’s about trying to wrap my head around the edublogosphere as a phenomenon. How does it work? If you want to spread an idea, what’s the best way to do so? What valuable contributions can it make? And so on. No harm or self-aggrandizement intended. I’m just thinking in public.

Different strokes for different folks

For every person that thinks the list is interesting, another thinks it’s ‘one of the more inconsequential things [he] had seen in a long time.’ That’s cool. Given my previous point, I don’t mind being ‘libeled.’ I understand what Dan Meyer meant and thought Darren Draper’s comment 3 was accurate too. I did think Bill Fitzgerald’s comment 4 was perhaps a little uncharitable but that’s okay. Each of us finds value in different things.

Imputing intent

Lots of people are more than willing to impute intent to others despite having never met them, spoken with them, or otherwise interacted with them other than maybe having read a few blog posts. This occurs across the blogosphere and, of course, in other expressive media as well. One of humanity’s less-admirable traits…

Thesis + antithesis = synthesis

I really liked Ben Wildeboer’s post on the recent disagreement between Dan Meyer and Darren Draper. Well said, Ben. Mindelei’s got it right too. One of the most useful skills taught in law school is how to disagree without taking it personally.

Subject-matter teacher blogs

As Alfred Thompson said, we need – or at least need to find/identify – more subject-matter teacher blogs. Over time I’d like to collect more subject-matter blogs at the Moving Forward wiki so that we can show educators how other teachers in THEIR field are using blogs productively. Over the past few months I’ve put out calls for good elementary classroom blogs and good special education blogs. It’s time to do another call…

Make your own list

As I said in my post, make your own list! Call it Blogs you should be reading or Blogs that will blow your mind or Great blogs no one knows about or whatever. One of the best things about making my list is the new blogs that I come across, either in the comments or from the links back to my blog. It’s great to come across new, interesting voices. Send me your list. I’d love to see it and, if you so desire, also would be happy to publicize it!

How do I increase our group blog's visibility?

I got this e-mail last week from a media company (and, no, you probably don’t know who it is):

[We have] an outstanding group blog. I'd like to get more people to read it because the thinking is so good. What would you recommend I do to increase visibility for this blog?

Here was my response:

1. Have a central RSS feed for the blogs rather than a separate one for each. Right now it’s not really a group blog, is it? Archive posts by BOTH time and author.
2. Get the attention of the hubs and superhubs. How do you do that? By linking to them and by writing about content that will be interesting enough for them to remark upon and link back to...
3. Use your print media to help drive traffic to the central blog.
4. Cultivate a loyal group of otaku. Grow it over time by feeding their needs. Read Meatball Sundae if you haven’t yet done so. Also see Seth Godin’s presentation at TED.
5. Rinse and repeat. Often.
6. Be patient.
7. Advertise on my blog.  ;)   [okay, Will Richardson’s blog]

I also should have said:

• Have a core set of Technorati tags that are used with every post. Add others that are post-specific.
• Make it easy for people to bookmark and share posts. Include links for e-mail, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, etc. with every post.
• Use FeedBurner or some other system to make it super easy to subscribe to the central RSS feed as well each author's feed. Allow people to receive posts via e-mail.
• Post new content frequently so that people have a reason to keep returning.
• Do a Google search on 'increase blog traffic.' There are lots of ideas out there...

Anything you would add?

DetentionSlip.org, please stop the comment spam!

Dear DetentionSlip.org,

I like your blog. I’m a regular subscriber, appreciate your work, and will use your site numerous times for my school law class. But would you please, please stop the comment spam?

On Wednesday you left this comment:

You should have mentioned DetentionSlip.org they are ranked 10 on Alltop, just won Best Education Blog of the Year, and are read by thousands of teachers daily! http://detentionslip.org

On April 25 you left this comment (which I deleted):

Check out http://detentionslip.org to see why public schools are failing.

And I’ve deleted others in the past. It’s very clear that you’re not contributing to our conversations. You’re just trying to get people to come to your site. In April I even sent you a polite e-mail asking you to stop:

Hi. I really like your site and I also appreciate your desire to publicize it. However, you’re not really adding anything of value to www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org with your comments. To be honest, right now you’re violating blogosphere etiquette and you’re bordering on being a comment spammer. I don’t want to block you but I will if need be. Please feel free to comment, but please add to the discussion, not just try to redirect readers to your site. Thanks.

But the comment spam continues. And it’s not just me. Here’s your comment on Teaching in the 408:

Check out http://detentionslip.org for all the latest headlines in education. It's one of the leading sources for breaking news in our public schools.

And here’s your comment on ASCD Inservice:

This story is mentioned on http://detentionslip.org It's one of the leading sources for crazy news in public education.

And here’s your comment on The Homeroom:

Students have more to worry about than lunch trays at school. Check out DetentionSlip.org as a resource for all the crazy stories in public education from around the country.

And here’s your comment on Learn Me Good:

http://detentionslip.org is the only thing people are talking about.

And here’s your comment on Perez Hilton:

DETENTIONSLIP.ORG!!! DETENTIONSLIP.ORG!!! DETENTIONSLIP.ORG!!!

And here are your comments on The Huffington Post:

This story was featured on http://detentionslip.org! It seems schools across the country are doing everything they can to save money. Check out the site for more weird stories like this one.

I've read stories on http://detentionslip.org about high school kids that have contests during lunch to see who can chug the most energy drinks. They always end up in the hospital!

I read a story on http://detentionslip.org about a mother who brought loaded guns to a school conference!

Check out http://detentionslip.org for stories about school teacher drunk in class and caught with coke in school!

Check out stories about teens and sex scandals in public schools at http://detentionslip.org.

(and half a dozen more)

Not to mention your similar comments at The Fischbowl and High School Confidential and Teen Zone News and NYC Students Blog. And at Automatic Merchandiser Magazine and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Las Vegas Sun and NJ.com and Newsweek. And so on…

Your Technorati authority is 21, which means that in the past six months you haven’t received even one inbound link per week [so, no, I shouldn’t have included you on the list]. While you may be getting a number of visitors to your site, you’re not getting much word of mouth. And the primary reason, I would venture to guess, is your inconsiderate and indiscriminate commenting. You’re angering the very people you want to be sending traffic your way.

So congratulations on your blogging award. Keep up the good work on your own blog. But please add some value to my blog or go away.

Thank you.