Dangerously Irrelevant

Opening up my classes, looking for co-learners: Fall 2009 School Law & DDDM

Some of you may have noticed that I have two online courses coming up this fall. Here’s what I’m thinking…

I’ve been reading Jeff Jarvis’ superb book, What Would Google Do? (which I’ll be writing more about soon). Over and over again, he stresses the importance of openness, transparency, collaboration, collective action, co-learning, co-creation of knowledge, and giving up control in this new Internet era.

So what would that look like in a graduate-level course? I’m not quite sure but I want to find out. I’m taking my two most popular educational leadership courses - School Law & Data-Driven Decision-Making - and offering them online to anyone, anywhere who wants to take them.

I’m looking for teachers and administrators who want to dive in deep, wrestle with thorny problems, and challenge their thinking regarding these two important school leadership topics. I don’t know yet what directions we’ll go; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet what topics we’ll cover; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet how we’ll demonstrate our learning; we’ll determine that together. The point of this is that I’m not going to be the omniscient, omnipotent faculty member dictating course structure, sequence, assessment, etc. This is a joint exercise in learning and I need participants who are willing to be active co-learners.

I’ve taught these classes online before with great success. I’ve prided myself on being a student-centered instructor. But it’s time to take my teaching to the next level. Am I a little uncertain about this? Absolutely. But a little healthy instructional tension will be good for me and my students both.

More information on the two courses - including tuition costs and how to register - is here. Both classes should be excellent options for educators who need relicensure credits, are exploring the idea of graduate-level coursework, or need to take an outside course for an existing graduate program.

Hope some of you will join me; please feel free to also pass this along. We start at the end of August!

Online instruction, stubborn resistance, and stupid faculty

A two-part tale of higher education and online instruction…

“Students demand free beer too”

A May 29 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reads as follows:

Opponents of online instruction believe that traditional, face-to-face teaching is always better. A colleague of mine, wary of caving in to students’ demands for online courses, remarked recently that “students demand free beer, too; that doesn’t mean we should give it to them.”

What her academic colleague somehow, incredibly, fails to realize, of course, is that students don’t have to attend his institution. Since postsecondary students vote with their feet and their pocketbooks, the institution does indeed have to give students online courses if that’s what they want. Otherwise, the university literally won’t have any tuition revenue because its potential students went elsewhere instead.

I can’t wait to see what happens over the next couple of decades. As online courses become even more prevalent than they are now, colleges and universities either will have to get in the game or be left behind. There are too many options available to students for anything else to occur. Some postsecondary institutions are going to realize that they must become more responsive to student needs and desires in order to survive; others won’t realize it until it’s too late and will disappear altogether. It should make for interesting times.

In the meantime, all I can say is… stupid faculty.

“I’ll never do it again”

Another article in the same issue of The Chronicle describes one faculty member’s woeful experience teaching online. The author goes into detail regarding all of the problems that she had with the course, including (but not limited to):

1. there was a ‘lack of immediacy’ in communication;
2. she was ‘only able to introduce students to a limited amount of material outside of the textbook readings;’
3. it is ‘simply impossible to replicate a lecture online;’
4. there wasn’t ‘enough time or a proper forum’ to help students ‘develop writing and critical thinking skills or to foster original ideas;’
5. online courses are too big;
6. she had no time off during the week like she would with a regular 3–hour, once-a-week, face-to-face class;
7. she got too many e-mail messages from students; and
8. she suspected her students didn’t like her very much.

This faculty member obviously has no idea that 1, 3, and 5 are dependent on how the course and the technology were structured. Setting up the course in a different way might have alleviated many of her concerns. Issues 2 and 6 seem to be the result of her own decision-making, not any inherent flaw in online instruction. Issue 4 doesn’t make any sense to me; didn’t she have the same number of weeks as for her other courses? It’s hard for me to be sympathetic regarding Issue 7: My students contacted me too much and asked me too many questions! Waaahh! I guess she prefers it when her students stay out of touch and don’t try to get their questions answered. Finally, can she really blame Issue 8 on the fact that the instruction was ‘online?’ There sure are a lot of faculty who teach online and also have students who like them.

Again, my main thought on this is… stupid faculty.

Wrap-up

Whether we want it to or not, the paradigm shift is occurring around us every day. As postsecondary faculty members, it behooves us to learn about it and adjust rather than dismissively rejecting the new learning landscape and stubbornly trying to stick to the status quo.

[Okay, calling these faculty members stupid probably is a little harsh. But I think clueless fits quite nicely…]

Are educational leadership faculty seen as 'leaders' by the leaders that they serve?

Here’s a recent Twitter conversation that I had, followed by some additional thoughts…

Okay, Russ, I’ll bite. How should it be?

Well, of course, in an ideal world educational leadership faculty should be seen as "leaders of leaders." If we’re preparing educators for formal leadership positions such as principal, superintendent, or special education director, we should be seen as credible authorities and thought-leaders. And we educational leadership faculty are sometimes seen as "leaders," I believe, in specialized arenas like research and (maybe) policy circles. 

I'm not sure, however, that educational leadership faculty often are seen as "leaders" by administrators in the field. Sure, we're usually seen as good people who often provide a decent (or at least not horrible) credentialing experience. But that's not the same as being looked to for leadership. 

I think this situation occurs because educational leadership faculty typically are not deeply engaged with schools and/or the people who lead them. Other job demands and institutional reward structures both work against tenure-track faculty spending a lot of time in the field. To be honest, many higher education faculty also aren't that interested in being too involved with K-12 practitioners. A great number of us are pretty introverted (as Sir Ken Robinson notes, we faculty 'live in our heads'), a trait which is okay in academe but typically isn't associated with great success in K-12 school administration. 

If success in academia is a four-legged stool - research, teaching, service/outreach, and grants/external funding - service/outreach is definitely the short leg of the stool. When we do define "service" in academe, it's primarily seen as disciplinary service such as serving on editorial or advisory boards, as journal editors, as officers in academic organizations, as proposal reviewers for conferences, and so on. The idea of service as "active engagement with and assistance of K-12 educational practitioners" is not very high on most faculty members' agendas. Often we see our teaching and credentialing (and an occasional meeting of a statewide committee or task force) as fulfilling that role of service to the field. When educational leadership faculty ARE involved with schools (i.e., we actually leave the university and go inside school buildings), it's often simply for a research project that may or may not have much tangible benefit to the participating school organization. We also like to have our 'clinical faculty' (i.e., non-tenure-track and thus, at many universities, "lesser" faculty) be the ones that primarily go out and work with schools, not us tenure-track folks.

We can point to isolated examples where what I've said here is inapplicable, and I'm sure that some of my academic peers across the country would take great exception to this post, but I believe that I've accurately described the general trend for most educational leadership faculty at most universities (particularly our most prestigious research universities), whether we want to admit it or not.

As those of you who regularly read or interact with me know, I'm a bit of an anomaly within my academic peer group. I see university education faculty as being in a service profession, one which should be serving the needs of K-12 (or higher education) practitioners. That's why I struggle with our definition of "service" as internally-focused service to ourselves rather than externally-focused service to others. That's why I struggle with academic publication hierarchies that value an article in a "prestigious" academic journal that no practitioner ever reads over an article in a still-selective practitioner journal that's read by tens of thousands of school administrators. That's why I struggle with a system that, for myself, can't (or won't) figure out how to value things like

1. trying to serve as a thought leader that hopefully can mobilize an entire state's (and maybe down the road an entire country's) K-12 leadership community to move their schools into the digital, global era; 
2. providing professional development and technical assistance to tens of thousands of administrators and teachers on issues that are really important; or 
3. blogging, podcasting, and providing other online resources that reach hundreds of thousands of educators all over the world.

Will my "roll up my sleeves and get into schools / write in places where others can find me / actually try to be helpful" path be successful in the long run in academe? Will my current university figure out how to place a value on the things that I do? Should other educational leadership faculty view writing and/or service/outreach more like I do? Only time will answer these questions. In the meantime, however, don't hold your breath waiting for much help or thought leadership or, in fact, any kind of "leadership" for K-12 administrators from educational leadership faculty. The system that currently exists places value on other activities and it's not changing any time soon.

Videos - The future of the humanities in the Internet era

Here are two presentations by Dr. Richard Miller, Chair of the English Department at Rutgers University, that are well worth any university instructor's time to watch.

The Future Is Now: Presentation to the RU Board of Governors 

This Is How We Dream, Part 1 and Part 2

Facebook, college students, and lower grades

A pilot study at Ohio State University has found that Facebook users in college have lower grades and spend less time studying. I pieced together the following chart from the news release:

Aryn Karpinski, a co-author of the study and doctoral student in education at Ohio State University, said that:

There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades. It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.

The news release noted that:

Typically, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0. In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non-users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.

Karpinski said it was significant that the link between lower grades and Facebook use was found even in graduate students.  She said that graduate students generally have GPAs above 3.5, so the fact that even they had lower grades when they used Facebook -- and spent less time studying – was an amazing finding.

My reaction when I started reading the news release was “They found some undergrads who aren’t using Facebook?” Then, sure enough, I found when I calculated the numbers that there were a mere 15 undergraduate non-Facebook users in the study.

I confess that I’m a little wary of some of Karpinski’s generalizations. Although she noted that other factors may be involved besides Facebook use or non-use, the ones that she hypothesized have to do with personality traits and/or predilection for online socialization.

Right now I’m not totally convinced that these findings don’t just represent the fact that about 80% of her non-Facebook users were graduate students. I think it’s safe to say that grad students generally spend more time studying than undergrads. Also, as she noted, grad students’ GPAs typically are higher.

In my mind, the overall generalizations from the study don’t seem to adequately recognize the extremely heavy skew in the non-Facebook group toward graduate students. If I saw that the data (to which she alluded) show that the lower grade trend for grad students was of equivalent size to the undergrad group, then I’d have more confidence in the overall generalizations that are being made in the news release.

Maybe Karpinski will find this post and share some more about her study. Clearly it’s a provocative topic and, if replicated at a larger scale, might provide some really useful information. While her data likely won’t curb Facebook use among college students, they might at least help us understand the potential impact of social networking on postsecondary academic achievement.

One final note: We all should look at – and think carefully about – any research findings that get reported out like this. We need to ask questions like Does this make gut-level sense? and Are the generalizations limited to the data or overbroad? and What more do I need to know to be confident in these findings?. Being informed consumers of research is critical if we are to make research- and/or data-driven decisions to benefit our students.

What would you ask university students about technology in their learning?

Tomorrow is Iowa State University’s first-ever symposium for the new ComETS group here on campus. Modeled after a similar group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ComETS is an attempt to bring together all of the folks at the university who care about technology integration into one place. George Siemens from the University of Manitoba is our headliner; he’s doing a morning workshop and an afternoon keynote for us. Other events on the schedule include affinity group meetings and ‘lightning strike’ sessions on interesting technologies.

To conclude the symposium, I’m moderating a panel of students that will be discussing how they think about technology in their personal and academic lives. I’ve set up a wiki page where we’re generating questions for the students. If you’d like to add a question, please do!

I’ll probably be live-blogging George’s keynote and/or workshop tomorrow. Stay tuned at my Twitter feed for more details…

Academics on Twitter

Recently I was interviewed for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s article on academics who Twitter. Here’s my portion of the story:

8. Scott McLeod, an associate professor at Iowa State University and director of the university's Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education. Tweet: "College students are online more AND reading more? http://snipurl.com/eko4k"

http://twitter.com/mcleod
Followers: 1,307. Posts: 1,190.

Mr. McLeod argues that professors have been too slow to adopt Twitter. Academic discussions online often take place on closed e-mail lists, he says, when they should be happening in public forums like Twitter, so that a diverse group of outsiders can join in. "I think academics are actually missing a lot by not being involved in more of these social tools," he told me. "There are a lot of academics who think, 'If it's not coming from some other academic it's not worth a damn,' and that's not right."

He admits that some of the messages on Twitter are banal, such as people describing what they had for lunch that day, but he said such notes are part of what makes Twitter such a powerful way to feel connected to far-flung colleagues. "It's like those daily interactions you have with your neighbor — sometimes they're highbrow and sometimes they're lowbrow, but after a while you really get to know the person."

I don’t know if academics have been too slow to adopt Twitter specifically, but I definitely believe that academics have been too slow to adopt social media generally.

Check out the article if you’re interested. What do you think are some good ways that professors could be using Twitter?

4 Guys Talking - Episode 2

Yesterday was Episode 2 of 4 Guys Talking, the new ‘talk radio’ podcast series from CASTLE. Like last time, our conversation ranged widely. Among other things, we discussed whether or not university educational administration programs should bear some blame for the poor leadership that exists in many schools, the fact that most school district technology leaders have had little to no leadership training, the unfortunate and continuing marginalization of technology to its own ‘silo’ within school organizations, and efforts within our respective states to train school administrators to be better technology leaders.

You can download the podcast or listen to a Web-streamed version here:

• www.blogtalkradio.com/uceacastle

You also can subscribe to the 4 Guys Talking feed using iTunes or a RSS reader.

Thanks to those of you who joined us live yesterday, either by calling in or listening over the Web. Future dates/times are as follows (all times Central):

• April 1, 12pm to 1pm
• April 20, 2pm to 3pm
• May 11, 9am to 10am
• May 26, 1pm to 2pm

I'm still reworking CASTLE Conversations, the old CASTLE podcast channel, which will include all previous and podcasts (including 4 Guys Talking). I'll post about it when it's ready.

Happy listening!

Kaplan University ads

If you haven’t seen them yet, here are two ads currently being aired by Kaplan University. They come out pretty strongly against the traditional postsecondary paradigm. What do you think? 

Laptops in higher ed classrooms

Britt Watwood had a great post a few weeks back on student use of laptops in university classrooms. I just found it and left him a comment (as you can see, I was my usual restrained self!):

The whole issue is just goofy.

First of all, who in their right mind expects students to sit and listen to them for 50 minutes (or longer) without EVER wandering off mentally? It’s unreasonable and goes against how we know the brain works. You can’t fight nature!

Second, as Seth Godin notes, if your target audience isn’t listening, it’s not their fault but yours. Just like we tell K-12 teachers: classroom management (i.e., student attention) stems from good instruction.

Finally, these digital devices - particularly in conjunction with the Internet - are the most empowering things we humans have yet created. Why don’t we start figuring out how to use them productively in class rather than banning them?

Our K-12 and higher ed students think we’re totally clueless and they’re right.

Be sure to check out Britt’s post. I thought his scenarios were excellent.

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.

DRAFT - Statewide 21st century learning system

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to outline what it takes to get your state or province from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ In other words, what would it take to get from our current system of schooling to a robust, province- or statewide system of 21st century learning? Here’s my first attempt at this task (click on the images for larger versions)…

PART 1

What needs to be done

The first step is to figure out what needs to happen…

1. Curricula that emphasize 21st century skills. Instead of simply adding on 21st century skills to our existing content-based standards, put them at the core of new, more focused curricula.
2. Preservice and inservice training for teachers and administrators. Training in colleges and universities. Training on the job. Regular, frequent, strategic, and ongoing.
3. Robust statewide online learning infrastructure for students and teachers. Because of resources or geography, high-level and credit recovery courses aren’t available to many students. Training opportunities aren’t available to educators. A vibrant system of online courses can help.
4. Computing device in every student’s hands. Laptops. Netbooks. Smartphones. Devices that have some power, are mobile, allow students to type, and can access the Internet.
5. Statewide no-cost or low-cost broadband wireless access. High-speed wireless in every corner of the state.
6. P-20 coordination, cooperation, and vertical articulation. Curricular, programmatic, workforce development, and other alignment across the P-20 spectrum.

Environmental supports

Some supports need to be in place to facilitate effective implementation…

1. Federal, state, and local laws, policies, and funding support. A thoughtful, helpful array of legal, policy, and funding supports for what needs to be done.
2. Monitoring, assessment, and evaluation. Regular, frequent, ongoing. To inform practice, not just for accountability.
3. Mindset shift. The digital, global age is here. It’s time to learn how to survive and thrive in it rather than being afraid of it or ignoring it.

PART 2

Marketing

There’s also a marketing piece to this. Who needs to be informed about what needs to be done in order to facilitate a broad base of support and buy-in?

1. Parents and community members
2. School board members and P-12 educators
3. Postsecondary faculty and officials
4. Employers
5. Legislators and policymakers
6. Media

PART 3

Cost

I’m working on this part…

YOUR INPUT IS DESIRED

I could use some help on this not-so-theoretical assignment. This is a draft. I need a final version by November 5.

• What would your system look like? How would you organize things differently? What did I leave out?
• How can we calculate some rough, back-of-the-envelope costs of these activities (e.g., just how much would it cost to get wireless broadband across the state)? I could really use some assistance costing this out.
• How is my thinking flawed? What am I forgetting? What is particularly important to emphasize? What else should I be considering?

Angela Maiers and Mike Sansone have been of great assistance with this first draft (any mistakes or logic flaws are mine alone!). I hope you will be willing to lend your thoughts as well. Thanks in advance!

[Feel free to download and play around with these files: png1 png2 ppt pptx]

Meet Tony Powell and The University Review

Imagine you’re a new MBA student at Lehigh University. After a little while in your program, you’re ready - like any good Internet citizen - to share your experiences with others so that they can make informed choices about their own MBA programs. You look around at the various choices on the Web for sharing your point of view and find, much to your dismay, that none of the existing options resonate with you very well. What to do?

Well, if you’re Tony Powell and his buddy Jake, you create your own review site, The University Review. You do this in your spare moments (apparently MBA studies leave you with lots of free time?), tinkering with the database and interface. And, slowly, people begin to find your site and leave their reviews. Excellent!

In his book, The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain notes that

Ideas like free Web-based e-mail, hosting services for personal Web pages, instant messenger software, social networking sites, and well-designed search engines emerged more from individuals or small groups of people wanting to solve their own problems or try something neat than from firms realizing there were profits to be gleaned. (p. 85)

That’s why I’m rooting for Tony and Jake. They have a good idea - well-executed - and they’re having a blast just goofing around with the site. They’re trying to provide a valuable service rather than make a ton of money and they’re extremely open to user feedback. For example, I suggested that they include the option to rate universities by program of study. A short while later, the site had incorporated the official United States Department of Education program codes into the university review page. Once the database of user reviews gets big enough, users will be able to search by program (Which Educational Leadership programs get the highest ratings by their own students?).

Will Tony, Jake, and The University Review survive the rough-and-tumble world of the Web? Who knows? They’ve got some stiff competition from sites like Students Review, College Prowler, and College Grader. But their emphasis on good design, their receptivity to user feedback, and their passion for providing value to others make them a pretty decent bet. Mosey on over to Tony and Jake’s site and review your own university (Go Tribe!). You’ll be glad you did.

There's more to the story...

Apparently Tony and Jake have caught the innovation bug. They’re looking for the next great idea and are willing to see if they can create it:

We are really enjoying being in the Ed Tech space. It's a great community, full of wonderful people, and it's a place where we can provide value. Because of that, we'd like to build something else useful for members of this community. In fact, we'd like to continue building tools in this space as long as we can. To that end, I was wondering if you have a 'dream application' or something that's missing from this space, or something that can be improved. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Hopefully we can continue to contribute to the community, and we're looking for the best way to do that.

Got an idea for Tony and Jake? Drop them an e-mail and share your thoughts!

NECC 2008 - SETDA PD Roundtable

Here are my notes from Tuesday’s Professional Development Roundtable sponsored by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). This was an EXCELLENT conversation.

Effective professional development for educators

• Peer-to-peer training is particularly effective for teachers and administrators. Training also should be job-embedded. The focus should be the project or task, not the technology.
• Alabama has found that the graduates of their Gates grant initiative constitute the bulk of the innovative school- and district-level technology leaders in the state.
• Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, Executive Director of SETDA, asked me to talk about CASTLE! Administrators need dedicated funding, training, and TIME to learn.
• Coaching models for professional development (PD) work extremely well.
• New York City has a comprehensive PD model that includes principals, teachers, etc. Principals want to see best practices and what’s working in other schools. In contrast, teachers want people to come to their classroom, to discuss ‘what works here.’ Having an in-school professional developer works really well for teachers. It’s important to have both the in-class and the off-campus components.
• A lot of people don’t really know what high-quality PD looks like.
• Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education: If you get professional development right, student learning will improve.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: The politics of cost is incredible. EDC has found that If you can get one PD coach per building, the results and progress are amazing.
• Project-based administrator training needs to involve the team, not just individuals. The principals need their assistant principals, teacher leaders, etc.
• We need to get teachers into other classroom via learning walks, observations, lesson study, etc.
• Principals need to have an actionable theory of change.
• There are a number of strong PD models in existence. SETDA is going to try to collect and then disseminate some of these models.

Barriers to effective, scalable professional development

• Lack of adequate, large-scale Internet access in training facilities. The West Virginia Department of Education forced state hotels to step up or risk losing all of its workshops!
• IT people still aren’t talking to curriculum people, assessment people, etc.
• There is a fairly large number of obstructionist teachers.
• Time, perceptions of endurance, perceptions of efficiency. Teachers wonder if it’s worth investing in a technology because it is changing so fast. Teachers have seen a number of technologies come and go [and they have resisted all of them!].
• Lack of exposure to effective models for technology-related PD.
• Many teachers view technology as a classroom distraction rather than as a meaningful learning tool.
• We don’t bring IT people into the process soon enough. They need more lead time and more involvement.
• Statewide programs have trouble ensuring consistency and implementation fidelity.
• Intentionality is important. Technology training that’s driven by subject learning goals (e.g., we need to get our math scores up) is more successful. Dedicated time and focused assessment also are necessary.
• Leadership turnover and program sustainability are issues.
• Leaders need help translating models of effective PD and time reallocation to their local implementation context.
• Content area people need to be involved in the tech training. Instruction first.
• Tom Carroll, NCTAF: Are we applying the right treatment to the right teachers? One technology PD model does not fit the learning needs of all teachers (just like students).
• Students need to be the ultimate focus of teacher PD efforts. It’s not about the tools, it’s about how it benefits the students. Having students demonstrate and discuss can be a powerful motivator to teachers. Clayton Christenson: The disruptive innovation in education is not charter schools or online schools. It’s student-centered learning.
• New teachers are effective users of personal technologies and are comfortable with instructional technologies. However, they have few models of good technology integration in their schools and they also probably had instructional technology courses in their pre-service program that were separate from their content methods courses.
• Preservice teachers do not come out of college as instructional designers.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: One of the most incredible opportunities of our lifetimes is before us.
• We need to use pride, greed, hope, love, and guilt to get teachers moving.
• Schools’ poor use of technology is having negative impacts on the retention of young teachers.

Policy and practice recommendations

• Specific guidelines of 1 instructional coach per 1,000 students.
• Concrete strategies for changing how we do business (at all levels), maybe differentiated by setting, size, and locale.
• Strategies for informing and engaging parents / community members.
• A comprehensive K-20 vision and agenda – state level and/or national level – that drives forward movement.
• Mandatory interactions between K-12 and higher education. [NCATE requires that colleges work with schools?]
• We need to pay more attention to our leaders!
• Colleges of education are not going to accept any responsibility (for technology training, outreach, service, PD) until legislatures, departments of education, and/or accrediting agencies make them do so. [U. Minnesota performance review: ‘Dr. McLeod’s work with schools is exemplary but inappropriate.’]
• We need to follow up statements of ‘It’s so expensive to do this’ with the reply ‘What is the cost of not doing this?’ We need to think more in terms of investment (not cost) and return on investment.
• We have to figure out what to take off educators’ plates (the idea of prioritized abandonment).
• Most high-functioning companies spend about 4% of their budgets on employee training. We come nowhere close to this in K-12 education.
• We need to remember the interconnectedness of the success of the whole. We don’t want others to cherry pick components of what should be a comprehensive approach to systemic school reform.

Not so irrelevant 008

My latest roundup of links and tools…

I read blocked blogs

• I’m gettin’ me some of these super-cool buttons (made by Stephanie Sandifer; inspired by Bud Hunt). What a great thing to hand out to administrators!

Are you up to the challenge?

• The 2008 Comment Challenge is now on (and, hey, recognize a fantastic commenter!)

Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia

• Rick Hess perfectly captures one of my primary complaints about academia, which is that much of what we do is completely inaccessible (and/or meaningless) to K-12 educators

No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!

I was incredulous to read ... the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely ... school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on.
– Gareth Long

Like Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer forces us to rethink / justify

• Who do we think we are?
• The difference between us and them
• Sobriety

New tools I’m finding quite useful

• Taboo Firefox extension
• FeedDemon RSS reader

The impetus is on us, not them

Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] ... focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation.
– Wesley Fryer

A couple of gems from Clay Burell…

• Muhammad Ali: A D- student or an F- school?
• Education as pretense: Schooly “speeches” versus real “talks”

And a couple more from Gerald Bracey

• Proficient readers: Dear Strong American Schools (be wary of those NAEP proficiency levels!)
• A test everyone will fail

We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?

• Fujitsu’s world map (thanks, Brett!)

And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson

• Don’t count your Twitter followers

One year ago: Well, what's your answer? and Principal blogging not allowed

Knowledge networks

My latest higher education article for Technology & Learning, Knowledge Networks, is now available. The article draws deeply from my previous blog posts, Linked, Scholarship 2.0, and The Future of Academic Publishing.

Here are a couple of quotes from the article:

[T]he system [of academic writing] is fairly clunky. There aren't easy ways to tell who the [top scholars] are, nor are there ways to easily find hidden nuggets of wisdom. . . . Tracking down a new resource from an existing article or book also is difficult, since readers have to first find the publication through trial-and-error searching of various databases and then either download it or track down a print version. Much high-quality writing never sees the light of day or isn't cited by anyone because it's not in the "right place." We can do better. . . .

If we can figure out how to get beyond academic publishers' revenue protection concerns, the world's body of scholarly research can be available to anyone with an Internet connection. That's a goal worth working toward.

Happy reading!

This stuff is too easy not to use

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I talked my department chair into letting me do a 10–minute technology demonstration to my faculty colleagues at each of our monthly department meetings. My last one was titled ‘Fun With Audio.’ It went something like this…

Hi everyone. You know how you open up your word processor software, type some stuff, and then hit Save and your file’s somewhere on your hard drive? Let’s take that same thought and extend it to audio…

[open up Audacity with the LAME MP3 encoder already installed]

This is audio software. It’s like your word processor but for voice.

[hold up tabletop mic]

This is a microphone. $30 at Best Buy. I plug it in here and I’m ready to go. I click on this record button, start talking [blah blah blah], hit stop when I’m done. Voila! A sound file!

[play back file]

What can I do with this? Well, I don’t know about you but I can talk faster than I can type. So maybe I’d like to send a message to my class…

[demonstrate a quick voice memo to students - blah blah blah]

Click on Export as MP3, put the file where I want it, and send it as an e-mail attachment. Ta da! I’ve just freed up 20 minutes of my day. What else might we do with this?

[talk about voice instructions for online course management systems, sending voice e-mails instead of text e-mails, doing interviews for research studies, interviewing local experts for department web site, etc.]

[expand my faculty colleagues’ horizon by quickly mentioning Skype and the ability to record long-distance phone calls for free; offer to help anyone install Audacity and get up and running; drop a hint that I’m going to do a hands-on podcasting clinic in the spring]

Done! Thank you very much!

[next month: YouTube QuickCapture!]

This stuff is getting too easy not to use. Faculty members in colleges of education don’t tend to be very tech-savvy. With the right approach, however, we can get them using, and thus exposing future educators to, these tools. My audio demonstration took about eight minutes, I never mentioned the word ‘podcast,’ and I had a ton of questions and interest at the end.

We can do this. Share the love, share your knowledge: adopt a professor today.

The importance of being 'clickable'

I blogged before about my regular column on technology and higher education for Technology & Learning magazine. My latest article is now available:

• The importance of being 'clickable'

Here's an excerpt:

In the Internet era, it's not enough to have good ideas or content. People also have to be able to find you. Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, puts it this way: "[The risk is] obscurity: the risk that one's work will get lost in the vast digital wilderness of content and voices....In today's information-soaked environment, writers and content creators need to find ways to permeate people's consciousness." . . . [M]y academic colleagues are not clickable.

FYI, I sent Will Richardson a big thank you for his post that inspired the article.

Higher education column for TechLearning

A few months back, Susan McLester, Editor in Chief of Technology and Learning magazine, asked if I would write a monthly column on higher education technology issues. Always mindful of opportunities to spread the word about CASTLE, of course I said yes!

Here are my first few articles:

• Professors who blog (May 15, 2007)
• Our ethical obligation (August 15, 2007)
• Document management tools (September 15, 2007)
• RateMyProgram.com (October 15, 2007)

2007 recipients of the Technology Leadership Research Award

It is my great pleasure to announce that Dr. Chris Gareis and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach are the recipients of the 2007 Technology Leadership Research Award. Here is the abstract from their co-authored article, Electronically Mentoring to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers:

With nearly half of all new teachers leaving the classroom within five years, schools are faced with the challenge of retaining early-career teachers while simultaneously providing them with the support they need to develop into effective professionals. Mentoring novice teachers by pairing them with experienced teachers in schools is a widely adopted practice for addressing these needs; however, face-to-face mentoring is subject to challenges. A promising complement to face-to-face mentoring may be found in the innovative use of computer-mediated communications, such as online forums. In an effort to support, develop, and retain novice teachers, The College of William and Mary has partnered with the Center for Teacher Quality to create ENDAPT – Electronically Networking to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers. ENDAPT is an asynchronous online forum that brings together novice teachers and teacher leaders in a virtual mentoring community. This article provides an overview of the program model and presents research findings from a study of participants' postings using content analysis methodology to identify and describe the nature of professional conversations among mentors and novice teachers.

Although we can’t share the actual article with you (because it’s currently under review by a journal), Chris and Sheryl will be giving a presentation on their paper at the UCEA conference in November which we will try to make available to folks.

I would like to publicly thank the other practitioners and academics who took the time out of their extremely busy schedules to participate in the anonymous review process this year:

• Kurt Bernardo, Technology Coordinator, Orange City (OH) Schools; 2005 Ohio Technology Coordinator of the Year
• Dr. Jim Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
• Dr. Chris Sessums, Director of Distance Education, University of Florida College of Education; Best Individual Blog, 2006 Edublog Awards
• Dr. Jon Voss, Coordinator, Northern Star Online (MN) Schooling Collaborative

The Technology Leadership Research Award is jointly sponsored by CASTLE and the UCEA School Technology Leadership Special Interest Group.

Kudos to Chris and Sheryl. I'm looking forward to the submissions for next year!

The Chronicle features Henry Jenkins

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great feature on Dr. Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. Too bad it's locked down so that most folks can't access it...

If you haven't yet read Convergence Culture, you should!

Largest U.S. universities

Surprised? Two primarily online universities and one community college among the top five. FYI, the University of Phoenix has more than twice the number of students (117,309) as any of the next four (which range from 54,169 to 50,663).

[Source: Chronicle of Higher Education. Campuses with the Largest Enrollments, Fall 2005. August 31, 2007.]

Interview with Chris Craft

Is it already July 3? Way back on June 20 I had the pleasure of talking with Chris Craft about online learning for a class he's taking. The focus was mainly on higher education but much of our conversation was relevant to the K-12 world as well. Chris posted our discussion as a podcast in case you'd like to hear it:

• Interview with Chris Craft (23:46)

Gone

From a colleague's e-mail autoreply:

I am away for the summer semester and will return Aug 15, 2007. I will not be able to respond to your e-mail until then.

This is a pretty common occurrence in academia. Postsecondary faculty that aren't teaching during the summer will disappear for a few months and then resurface in the fall. Many leave answering machine messages and/or e-mail autoreplies that they're gone, completely unavailable (literally) to anyone who might want to reach them. They're recharging their batteries and taking advantage of the quiet time to work on articles, books, and other projects. It still strikes me as sort of odd, though, to simply disappear like this.

Other than K-12 teachers, I can't think of any other professions that simply vanish for months at a time. No postal mail + no telephone + no e-mail = no contact.

[photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/ron_richardson/280329347]

Education strategy

The Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project recently released a report titled An Education Strategy to Promote Opportunity, Prosperity, and Growth. After noting that approximately $874 billion per year is spent on education in the United States, the authors highlight the economic and educational benefits of universal preschool and rethinking our current system of financial aid for higher education. Here are some interesting quotes from the report…

Preschool

Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University and Isabel Sawhill of The Brookings Institution propose a program called Success by Ten. This program would give children from low-income families high-quality, full-time education for the first five years of life, and then would use proven-effective methods to give them extra help during their elementary school years. The early childhood program would be based on the successful Abecedarian Project; it could be thought of as “Head Start on steroids,” as it would combine, expand, and transform the Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Ludwig and Sawhill estimate that, if fully implemented, Success by Ten could increase GDP by up to 0.8 percent, while, on an individual level, bringing the dramatic benefits of Abecedarian - greater employment and college entry, reduced teen pregnancy and crime - to millions of American children.

Higher education

Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton, both of Harvard University, argue that the complexity and sluggishness of the federal system for distributing student financial aid creates serious obstacles to college attendance by making it enormously difficult for low- and moderate-income students to assess their eligibility for aid. Indeed, studies have found scant evidence that the federal program of grants and tax credits actually increases enrollment, in contrast to the proven effects of much simpler programs such as the Social Security Student Benefit Program and Georgia’s HOPE program. While the complexity of the current system is intended to target aid to those who need it most, Dynarski and Scott-Clayton show that a dramatically simplified aid process could nearly reproduce the current distribution of aid. Under their proposal, students could figure out their grant aid eligibility by looking at a small, simple table that fits easily on a postcard. In fact, the table would be put on a postcard and distributed through schools and the mail so that aid information could be simple, certain, and delivered early. Meanwhile, the application process could be as easy as checking a box on the family’s regular tax returns. Dynarski and Scott-Clayton estimate that their proposed program would increase enrollment among the grant-eligible population by between 5.6 and 7.4 percentage points.

The authors also discuss the teacher labor market and K-12 curricular experimentation, among other things. Even if you’re not interested in large-scale education policy issues, the report might be worth a quick read just to familiarize yourself with some of the ways national policymakers think about K-12 education.

Scholarship 2.0

As an untenured professor at a major research university, of necessity I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about 'writing' and 'publication.' I’ve blogged about some of this before. I’m essentially caught between two worlds: the dynamic, interactive, freewheeling, rough-and-tumble, unmoderated cosmos of Web 2.0 and the slower-moving, calmer, peer-reviewed realm of traditional academic publishing. It’s often a difficult tension, particularly for those of us who are using these new communication and collaboration tools but whose tenure decisions are being made by peers that are not active technology users. Recently several higher education organizations have explicitly noted the strain and advocated for some reconsiderations of what it means to write, to publish, and to reach an audience.

• MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion: Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 5)
• 2007 Horizon Report: Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased. (p. 4) 

George Siemens has noted that

The central filtering agent is no longer the teacher or institution. It’s the learner. Think about what that means to our education system as we know it today. It changes everything . . . . [A]s educators, we are not grasping (or prepared for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it's happened (breaking apart the center) in every other industry - movies, music, software, business - what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our institutions? Ourselves? Our learners?

He also notes that

Information validity is increasingly determined by the views of many individuals, not the select domain of a few [e.g., Amazon book reviews or Digg or Technorati rankings] . . . . [E]xpert-bases systems have value, but their value diminishes simply because no single person can keep up with today's information. A network, however, can.

Of course this has major implications for the academic concept of peer review (which is under fire on some fronts). I wonder when the egg is going to crack in academia. Two years? Five? Ten? And how do we retain our hedgehog concepts of research and scholarship while simultaneously adapting to the realities of a new era?

FYI, I highly recommend the Horizon Report, which highlights six technologies that will have major impacts on higher education in the next one to five years.