Dangerously Irrelevant

The status quo no longer suffices: An open letter to the Ames (IA) School Board

The Ames (IA) Community School District – my kids’ district – is hiring both a new superintendent and a new high school principal for next year. Below is the letter I just sent the school board members. I thought some of you might be interested. Everything I do has a Creative Commons license, so feel free to use as desired. Also available in Microsoft Word (.docx) and/or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format!

——-

March 7, 2010

Fellow Ames citizens and Board members of the Ames Community School District,

I am the coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University and the director of the nation’s only center focused on preparing technology-savvy school leaders. I also am a parent with three children in the school district. With the pending departure of Dr. Beyea and Mr. McGrory, you have the chance to hire both a superintendent and a high school principal that share a new vision for P-12 schooling. I sincerely hope that you will avail yourself of this unique opportunity.

The economic imperative

We currently are living in times of exponential change. Not only have digital technologies radically transformed how we conduct our professional and personal lives, they also are destroying entire segments of our society. Non-location-dependent manual labor jobs are increasingly offshored to the developing world, coordinated through technology-suffused global supply chains. Many service jobs also are increasingly fungible, able to be located anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection. The next two decades will see many complex service jobs broken up into component parts, much as we did in previous decades for manufacturing work. Once these tasks are disaggregated, they will be done by lower-skilled workers who can do these discrete components of the overall work, facilitated by software. In other words, many high-paying service jobs will turn into globalized piece work. Since the service professions represent 60% of our nation’s economy, the impacts of this are going to be quite significant. Our school system must prepare graduates for our new economic reality.

The educational imperative

We are creating a new information landscape for ourselves, something that we have not done as a society in centuries. The printing press removed third-party intermediaries (the king’s messenger, the priest) between average citizens and access to information. This new revolution is disintermediating the creation of information, allowing us all to be content creators, not just recipients.

We no longer live in an information push-out world where we passively receive information that is broadcast out to us by large entities. We all now can have a voice. We all now can be publishers. We all now can find each other’s thoughts and ideas and share, cooperate, collaborate, and take collective action. Time and geography are no longer barriers to working together. This too is destroying entire segments of our society.

Long-existing barriers to learning also are disappearing. We now have the ability to learn anything from anyone, at any time, anywhere. Our informal learning is exploding. Formal learning institutions are scrambling to reinvent themselves for the new digital paradigm. Our school system must prepare graduates who are masters of our new information landscape.

The status quo no longer suffices

We are blessed to live in a community whose families possess a tremendous amount of intellectual and social capital. We have a community that understands science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) issues like no other in the state. Our community is not just globally-aware but globally savvy, with international experience and understanding rarely found outside of large cities. We have a community that deeply cares about its children’s education. These are powerful assets, but we cannot afford to be complacent. The status quo no longer suffices.

The technological and information revolutions that now are occurring are upending everything. Our society is being reshaped in significant ways, and the process is just getting started as digital tools and environments continue to advance at a rapid pace. Every information-oriented societal sector - journalism, banking, medicine, politics, travel agencies, music, higher education, television, and real estate, just to name a few - are finding that transformative reinvention is the cost of survival in our current climate. Schools shouldn’t expect that they somehow will be immune from the same changes that are radically altering other information-oriented societal sectors. We can’t continue to pretend that these revolutions aren’t going to affect us too, in compelling and as yet unknown ways.

Dr. Tony Wagner, Harvard University, notes that there are two achievement gaps in this country. The first is the gap between the educational experiences of middle-class children and those of most poor and minority children. The second gap is that between what even our very best schools are teaching and testing versus what all students will need to be successful in today’s globally interconnected, technology-suffused, information economy. The new educational paradigm requires an emphasis on critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving, creativity and innovation, information fluency and media literacy, data synthesis and analysis, and the applied use of many other higher-level cognitive skills, much more frequently than we currently are doing in our classrooms.

Our students and schools have a tremendous track record of academic success here in Ames. We have many things of which to be rightfully proud. But the second global achievement gap that Dr. Wagner so aptly describes will increasingly be an issue for our schools and our community if we do not transition from a system in which student success is judged by mastery of lower-level cognitive work to one that emphasizes to a much greater degree the skills of higher-level thinking and real-world application.

Future-oriented leadership

The Board has an opportunity this year to fill two critical positions with educators who understand the new landscape that I have described above, who may even have a track record of success at preparing students for the demands of the next half century. The Ames Community Schools already are an exemplar for many of the state’s school districts. Given the tremendous assets that we have in this community, with the right leadership we not only could do what’s right by our kids but also be an exemplar for the nation and the world. I am hopeful that you will see this hiring opportunity for what it is and act accordingly.

If you are interested, you may view my presentation to the National Education Association Board of Directors on this topic at www.3dwriting.com/mcleod. My presentation to the Dubuque School Board is available at http://bit.ly/c3NnNt. I also would be happy to talk further with the Board about this at any time.

Thank you.
 
Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.
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Why don't schools with the biggest challenges have access to the biggest talent?

Rethink Learning Now asks:

Why don't schools with the biggest challenges have access to the biggest talent?

Answer My answer:

Because as educational systems we allow individual teacher preferences and/or union seniority systems to trump what’s best for kids.

If the Number 1 school influence on students’ success is the quality of their teachers, the fact that we often (usually?) give our most disadvantaged students our least-qualified instructors is an indictment of all of us.

Many districts across the country are laying off teachers right now. This would seem an especially critical time to ensure that the kids who need the best teachers get them. Instead, prepare for another summer round of the ‘dance of the lemons’ (or ‘pass the trash’). Shame on us.

[hat tip to Carolyn Foote for the video]

Notes from India: Educators as risk-takers

I just returned from ASB Unplugged, a 1:1 school laptop conference hosted by the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India. If you can imagine nearly 300 educators from international schools all across the world - all talking about technology integration and implementation, effective instruction, and empowering leadership within the context of 1:1 laptop programs - then you probably can guess what a great time I had. I was in charge of the leadership strand of the conference. Jamie Fath and Nick Sauers, whom many Iowa educators know from the Transitioning and Boot Camp training that CASTLE is doing with the School Administrators of Iowa, accompanied me. The conversations that the three of us had with the international educators were extraordinarily robust, meaningful, and insightful. My time in India sparked some thinking about educators and risk-taking…

Part 1: International educators are risk-takers

One of the things from the conference that resonated with me was the international educators’ willingness to take risks. If you’ve been teaching the same thing in the same school for the past 15 to 20 years, it may seem like a fairly big deal when someone then comes in and asks you to start integrating this technology stuff into your daily teaching practice in a meaningful way. On the other hand, if you’ve already packed up your entire family and headed off to work in Nairobi, Kenya - and then Caracas, Venezuela - and then Budapest, Hungary - and then Doha, Qatar - and then Shanghai, China - you’ve already taken the enormous risk of repeatedly uprooting your entire lifestyle and adjusting to a new school, city, and country. For international educators who already have proven themselves as risk-takers, being asked to pull technology into their educational practice may not seem as big a deal.

So I think one of the biggest assets these international schools have - even more than their globally-minded students and parents and their tremendous financial resources (tuition often is upward of $30,000 per student) - is that they have buildings full of educators who already have established themselves as risk-takers. It seems to me that a school full of people who are willing to try things - to ‘give it a go,’ if you will - is extraordinarily well-poised to be successful in a rapidly-changing climate such as that in which we now live. The challenge for those of us who don’t work in such schools is how we create this kind of learning climate within our own organizations.

Part 2: Wouldn’t Google’s CSI event be a good model for educators?

Google has an annual event called Crazy Search Ideas (CSI), for which employees bring their most offbeat ideas about Internet search to the table for vetting. This is a classic technique to foster innovative brainstorming. Why don’t schools do this? I’m sure that front-line educators have plenty of out-of-the-box ideas that might potentially be breakthroughs for school organizational and/or instructional logjams. Until we find ways to empower school employees’ risk-taking and innovation - and then scale successes to the larger school system - we’re never going to become the true learning organizations that we need to be.

Part 3: Assessing educators’ willingness to take risks

I’m working with an ISU honors Psychology student, Hana, to identify assessments of individuals’ proclivity to take risks. What we’d like to do is run some educators against the assessment(s) to see if they’re more likely to be high or low risk-takers. We may even do some comparative work where we also assess professionals in other industries. If your school or organization might be interested in participating in this project, please drop me a note in the next couple of weeks.

Seth Godin: It's easier to teach compliance than initiative

Ordinarily we bloggers don’t repost someone else’s entire blog post. But I just had to for this recent post by Seth Godin, It's easier to teach compliance than initiative. Read it and weep.

Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat.

Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It's difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it's a huge pain in the neck to do reliably.

Schools like teaching compliance. They're pretty good at it.

To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset.

Of course, now that's all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

Our April 7 Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I) is full!

Just a quick post to note that registration for our Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I) on April 7 is now closed. We hit our mark of 500 attendees last week despite doing very little publicity.

I’m excited. This conference has grown very organically (we’ve used Edubloggercon as a model; thanks, Steve Hargadon!). It’s going to be a great day!

My answers on the ISTE SIGAdmin survey

The ISTE SIGAdmin just asked its membership two questions. Here are my answers…

1. How has the Internet changed thinking?

The Internet has allowed distributed thinking (and thus learning) to become more visible, thus facilitating conversations (and thus learning) and connections and collaborations that previously were impossible.

2. What Web 2.0 tool do you find most helpful in your administrative work?

Google Reader is without a doubt the most useful tool in my technology arsenal. As much as my blog is doing for me (and it's doing lots), I'm watching over 500 feeds in my Reader - organized by topical folders - and my learning (quantity, quality, rate) is astounding me right now.

What would you have said?

Our April 7 Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I) is filling fast!

Just a few weeks after publicizing our first-ever Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I), we already have over 300 people who have registered to attend on April 7. Our registration is capped at 500, so if you’re interested, sign up soon! Oh, did I mention that attendance is FREE?

Angela Maiers has agreed to be our keynote speaker. It looks like Wes Fryer will be coming to do a few sessions. The CASTLE staff will be in action as well.

What else are we doing that day? Well, how about a couple of Web 2.0 Smackdowns, a TweetUp, and a variety of role-alike conversations for teachers, administrators, and board members? And some space set aside for an ‘unconference.’ And, of course, lots of good sessions from 1:1 laptop districts in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois. And whatever else we come up with…

Stay tuned. Hope to see you in Des Moines in April!

ISTE 2010 keynote - Jeff Piontek named as winner

It’s been an interesting few months for ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote project. We have seen twists and turns (what happened to Kevin Honeycutt?), candidates such as Jeff Piontek that were surprising (at least to much of the edublogosphere), more than a wee bit of snarkiness, and, unfortunately, some allegations of vote rigging and some downright rudeness. All in all, it’s been very similar to a political election!

Well, it’s over. Jeff Piontek has been named as the winner. In many ways, I don’t envy him. Now the pressure is on him to deliver a keynote that appeals to the thousands of diverse personalities that will attend ISTE in Denver. In addition, he has to give what may be the most scrutinized ISTE keynote ever. From all accounts, it appears that he will rise admirably to the occasion.

As most of you know, I supported Chris Lehmann for this keynote process. I have no regrets that Jeff was named instead and am looking forward to his keynote (I don’t have anything against Jeff; I’ve never met him; I just know that Chris is great). He may be relatively unknown to the edublogosphere (and I, too, wish he was a more visible user of social media since he writes about and advocates for it), but by all accounts he’s a fantastic leader who’s doing amazing things for kids in his school organization. In the end, that’s all I wanted – for the keynote to affirm the importance of leadership and, if possible, to represent the administrators like Jeff and Chris that are creating the new future of P-12 schools.

I challenge those of us in the edublogosphere to leave our preconceptions at home. Jeff deserves an honest chance to win our hearts and our minds rather than us prejudging him before he even gets a chance to speak.

Thoughts on ISTE’s process

I’m still not sure how to think about ISTE’s process. During Round 2, when we were able to discuss candidates, Chris was the clear leader. During Round 3, when we were not able to discuss candidates, Jeff was the clear leader. What does that mean? I have absolutely no idea.

I know others have been critical, but I’m glad that ISTE took a leap and tried this keynote crowdsourcing project. I’ve enjoyed observing and writing about the experiment and intend to fully enjoy listening to Jeff this June. See you in Denver!

Our kids don't have a choice. And neither do we.

Will Richardson says:

[T]his generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology was an add on, and for many of us, we still see it as a choice, especially in education. (Just the other day I was at a meeting of about 25 school leaders and teachers to discuss how social learning tools can be infused into an inquiry based curriculum and only one person was using technology to take notes…me.) I look at my own kids and I know that technology will be a huge part of their learning lives because a) they want it to be and b) they’ll be expected to be savvy users of the devices of their day to communicate, create and collaborate (among other things.) They’re not going to be able to “opt out.”

and

We may not feel comfortable in a world filled with technology. We may not like the way it’s changing things and, even more, how fast it’s changing things. We may not like the way it pushes against much of what we’ve been doing in schools for eons. But our kids don’t have a choice. And if we’re going to fulfill our roles as teachers in our kids lives, neither do we.

If the leaders don't get it, it doesn't happen

As I’ve said many times:

If a teacher gets it, a classroom changes. If a principal gets it, the whole building begins to change. If a superintendent gets it, the whole district begins to change. [And, if state or federal policymakers get it, the statewide or nationwide climate begins to change.]

Seems obvious, right? So why are so many government / corporation / foundation educational technology reform initiatives (money, time, training, energy, vision) focused on teachers, who at best are usually informal leaders, rather than formal leaders such as principals and superintendents? Do they want systemic change or just something they can tout for public relations purposes?

I’m all for investing in students and teachers when it comes to educational technology. But if we don’t also set aside some dedicated resources for formal leaders, the kind of changes we need are never going to happen.

ISTE 2010 keynote - Out of sight, out of mind?

How’s the voting for the 2010 ISTE keynote going? No idea. There are no running totals for candidates on the Round 3 web site. Nor are there even running indicators of how many people have voted to date. Maybe 6,000 people have voted. Maybe 6 have voted. There’s simply no way to tell.

There’s nothing to do on the Round 3 voting page except click on a dot and submit your vote. Your selection vanishes into the digital ether and you’re done. There’s no ability to even leave a comment there. There are no comments on the ISTE Connects page that announced the final round of voting and invited reflections on the process. There are no comments on the ISTE 2010 Ning. There are no comments on the ISTE Community Ning. There are 7 comments on my previous post that announced that the final voting round was underway.

I think ISTE has somehow lost an opportunity here. No information = no sharing = no discussion = no buzz. In the previous 2 rounds, there was conversation and attention to the process. Some of it was instigated by me, some by ISTE and/or other bloggers. This round, nothing.

There are 3 days left to vote for the ISTE 2010 keynote. Does anyone care? There’s simply no way to tell…

ISTE 2010 keynote - Final voting is underway!

[Of course I’m voting for Chris Lehmann since I nominated him and had him in mind from the very beginning!]

The final voting round for ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote speaker has begun! Here are your choices…

You can compare the list above with the final voting totals from Round 2 (my apologies for previously leaving Peter Reynolds off the bottom list):

All five of these individuals will be fantastic keynote speakers. I confess I would have liked to have seen Karl Fisch and Michael Wesch make the final list.

Note that there is no discussion allowed on the ISTE site for this final round. As Leslie Conery explains,

[ISTE is] staying truer to Surowiecki’s guidance and building on the public discussion that has come before to solicit decentralized and independent opinions. The votes for each of the keynote candidates will be made anonymously and the tallies will not be shown during the voting process.

In other words, ISTE would like you to look over what’s gone before and then make your own decision (which I believe is also what we did in Round 2?). I think that ISTE is trying to minimize groupthink and herding. I’m still not sure that prohibiting discussion (or “lobbying” or whatever you want to call it) makes sense (or is even possible in this hyperconnected age where we all can have voices outside ISTE’s site), but we’re all learning in this keynote experiment and I’m not going to second guess ISTE on its choice for this final round. I recognize that it’s difficult to set up a process that allows individuals to be informed, but not unduly influenced, by others. I and others have had plenty of opportunities to state our case for Chris; hopefully the final voting totals will mirror the previous round.

Question for which I don’t have an answer: If the final totals differ from Round 2, will that confirm or discredit the validity of this whole process?

Kudos to ISTE for trying this interesting experiment. Happy voting, everyone!

ISTE conference keynote - Final totals (by category and overall)

Here is the final leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Category winners are Chris Lehmann, Alan November, David Pogue, David Rose, and Karl Fisch.

If votes from all categories were totaled, this would be the leaderboard:

The top five - Chris Lehmann, Jeff Piontek, Gary Stager, Barack Obama, and Daniel Pink - received all or the majority of their votes in the leadership category.

Someone with more time than me will have to go in and see how many of these votes were from the same person but in different categories. For now, I’ll just say that Chris Lehmann, Gary Stager, Michael Wesch, Sir Ken Robinson, and Will Richardson had more support than appears from the single category totals.

Thanks to everyone who voted (and who put up with all of my updates on this ISTE project). There are lots of good names on these lists and I’m sure any of these folks would be a bang-up keynote speaker. Now it’s in ISTE’s hands. We’ll see what happens next!

12-14 ISTE conference keynote update - David Rose takes over category lead

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Not much voting activity. Chris Lehmann still holds his lead over Jeff Piontek. David Rose has taken the lead in the Universal design for learning category.

I’ll post one more update tomorrow, which is the last day of voting, and then another post showing the final results. Have you voted yet?

 

A day with Will Richardson, Part 3

Here is Part 3 of my notes from our day with Will Richardson. You also can see the live chat and/or follow the Twitter conversation and/or participate in EtherPad.

• We started with a visioning exercise (and accompanying discussion)
• Are we suffering from information overload or information overchoice?
• The nichification / ghettoization / balkanization of society
• Communities of interest don't look like communities of geography
• The #1 characteristic of a healthy network is diversity of ideas. (Stephen Downes)
• Adolescents are growing up in a much more transparent environment than previous generations; whatever they do is likely going to be public (whether they like it or not)
• We are spending a lot more time interfacing through screens
• We are failing to teach adolescents how to use these technological affordances in socially responsible and productive ways
• This is because the vast majority of educators aren't information literate themselves
• If you can't figure out who's behind http://www.martinlutherking.org/, you're illiterate these days
• It's not hard to make the case that the world is now 24/7/365 anyone anytime anywhere. But we need access to it.
• Turning to the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A). We used this document as a self-rubric.
• 1a: share the story of what it could look like for kids, lots of meetings with stakeholders, showed videos/inspiring tool usage by educators, visited other places, created cognitive disconnects, built partnerships with business/industry
• 1b: has to be an ongoing process/conversation
• 2b: making videocasts, using iPod touches for teacher observation/evaluation, moved to Google Docs, using digital discussion forums, using blogs/wikis/EtherPad, school board is now paperless
• 2e: working with SETDA or iNACOL, being active in the blogosphere / Twittersphere
• 3c: are you creating opportunities for staff to do this?
• 5c: give credit when you use photos (modeling attribution),
• We've got to share more with each other and with others (can CASTLE collect some of these stories?)
• For example, Todd Abrahamson (Sigourney) is doing podcasts
• Could we fill in the rubric examples as a group and then share with others?
• Networks are about people who are cooperating and sharing; communities are groups of people who know each other, roll up their sleeves, and collaborate (go even further than networks)
• We now live in an era of perpetual professional development
• Check out the Electronic Crime Institute (John Carver)
• Digital literacy/safety/security issues need to infuse everything; it's not a stand-alone unit
• Are our safety/security efforts both everywhere and nowhere?
• I want my kid to fail safely in the vicinity of some responsible adult that can help her recognize the ramifications of the mistakes that she is making
• It can't all happen at school (Dave Keane). Where else is it going to occur? (Will Richardson)
• Modeling by adults implies intentional, visible behavior
• Models that Will has seen
• Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, PA) - inquiry-based laptop magnet school, students are patenting a student-created biodiesel generator, SLA is tough to scale, defining questions = how do we learn?, what can we create?, and what does it mean to lead?, core values of inquiry/research/collaboration/presentation/reflection
• High Tech High (San Diego, CA) - very tech-infused but not getting the global/networking piece yet
• Australia is getting every kid a netbook/laptop by 2012
• Can we do this? Is it possible? What choice do we have?

A day with Will Richardson, Part 2

Here is Part 2 of my notes from our day with Will Richardson. You also can see the live chat and/or follow the Twitter conversation and/or participate in EtherPad.

• How are you personally taking advantage of these online / technological affordances?
• If you're not, can you participate in the conversation? 'Cause you don't have the context.
• The business sector is behind this; they want specific policy initiatives (can ISEA / SAI / Iowa business leaders / etc. all get behind these?)
1. Get every kid/home connected (broadband)
2. A device for every teacher
3. A device for every (secondary?) student
4. Do you have a curriculum that supports the things that Will is talking about? (does the Iowa Core go far enough?)
5. Community forums that educate the average Iowan / statewide visibility initiative
6. More online coursework options (e.g., statewide virtual high school)
7. Education of teachers / community members about workforce / 21st century skills / globallization needs/issues
8. Greater flexibility for schools to use existing funding streams
9. Repeal / revise Dillon's Rule?
10. Different / better assessments
11. Allow schools to use/create free textbooks and use textbook money for student computers
• We are the last generation that had a choice about technology (Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach)
• I am amazed that schools are investing in all of these technology tools
• Schools should be in the curriculum business, not the hardware business or connectivity business
• We need learners, not teachers, in the front of our classes
• Teachers are no longer the smartest people in the room; the smartest people in the room are the ones you invite in from outside
• Teachers come in all shapes and sizes from all parts of the world
• We need to create learning communities, not teaching communities
• I don't know any kids or teachers that have SmartBoards in their bedroom; why aren't we focusing on the technologies that our kids have in hand?
• We need a new graduation requirement: Students will be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways
• In Iowa, we need a movement!
• If folks aren't at the table, get them there!
• The world is about networks right now (how can I get the answer I need when I need it?), it's not about textbooks and memorization
• Check out fanfiction.net to get a sense of user-generated communities
• We're preparing kids for a world in which they're going to be Googled over and over again in their lives
• If you don't share, you don't get hits / visits; you're not visible
• If you can't be found, you're irrelevant (Scott McLeod)
• You have to put yourself out there in ways that people can find you
• Kids are doing this every day without us
• Kids don't care about much of what we have them do in school - it's inauthentic, it lacks meaningful and relevant purpose, it's disconnected and decontextualized
• MIT is offering all of its courses online
• Tough questions from Will
• Can you please teach my child to read and write in the context of <insert student's interest here>?
• How many of your schools teach Wikipedia (how it works / how to contribute / etc.)?
• How many of your schools teach kids how to read/write in hyperlinked environments?
• How many of your schools teach kids how to be Google-able?
• It's just not us edublogger blowhards; see, e.g., the NCTE Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment
• Gut check: How many of these bullet points can you do? Are you literate according to NCTE? And if you're not, how are you going to teach our kids?
• This stuff is here already; this is not future stuff
• Will demonstrates Diigo using this Science Daily web page
• Annotated web pages, for example, are social reading. No one is teaching our kids how to be social readers.
• We gotta rethink "Do your own work." Collaboration is everywhere.
• Schools spend money on a lot of things that they don't need to be buying except in limited numbers: software licenses, textbooks, etc.
• It's increasingly an open source / Creative Commons world
• See the Flat Classroom Project 2006, 2007, and beyond
• Will collected all of the work that got sent home in his two kids' Friday folders for a year; the stack was 2.5 feet tall
• This didn't include all the work that stayed at school
• His kids never went back and looked at all that paper; they had zero investment in it
• Will showed Radio WillowWeb
• Will showed the 2009 Horizon Report
• "Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time."
• Is your own personal learning practice transcendent? Are you learning / interacting differently? And if not, why not?
• Will quoted Howard Gardner: "[A]fter millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person’s own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning."
• The reality is that the way we've done professional development for the last 30 years doesn't work.
• You have to create a culture in your teaching staff where, if they need to know how to blog, they can go online and learn themselves (in communities)
• We've made teachers as passive about learning as kids - kids wait for teachers to tell them how/what to learn; teachers wait for us to tell them how/what to learn
• NSDC agrees: it should be long-term, job-embedded professional development that really shifts practice
• There aren't enough educators / policymakers that are looking at the current system of schooling and saying "Oh, crap! We need to stop tinkering."
• Leadership is a choice. It's a choice not to do nothing. (Seth Godin)

A day with Will Richardson, Part 1

Here is Part 1 of my notes from our day with Will Richardson. You also can see the live chat and/or follow the Twitter conversation and/or participate in EtherPad.

• I'm going to make you uncomfortable; you should be uncomfortable
• If you're not uncomfortable right now in education, you're not paying attention
• Conversations are spreading far beyond physical space, in ways that previously were not possible
• My learning today looks nothing like the learning that's occurring my kids' classrooms
• There are no adults right now teaching kids how to LEARN, not just be social, in these networks
• Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuFsDN8dsJU
• He assumes there's an audience and that they'll respond
• He's comfortable asking for help
• He views YouTube as a learning tool (Elliott Smith)
• This is inquiry- / problem-based learning
• After 101 views, he had 10 comments (10% hit rate); all 10 had specific feedback/suggestions for him
• This 12-year-old kid can throw out a question to 1.7 billion people
• Shirky: We are experiencing a tectonic shift in how we form groups and self-organize
• Wesch: This is not simply a technological revolution, this is a cultural revolution.
• Outside of school ALL of our learning is inquiry- / passion-based
• That's the way that world looks for anyone with an Internet connection
• Finland has legislated nationwide broadband access by 2012
• Schools have a lot of tech, but nothing's really different
• Still memorizing a lot of stuff
• Curriculum hasn't changed
• Instruction hasn't changed
• This group-forming ability is everywhere
• Obama's use of social media for Presidential election
• Flickr tag: iranelection
• Raw information is being released rather than it being edited / filtered first
• We now can live stream video from our phones; imagine a world in 5 years where everyone's phone is iPhonish
• Justin Bieber became famous by uploading his talent show videos to the Web
• Check out surfthechannel.com
• Today, instead of writing a letter to the editor / Better Business Bureau / CEO, you make a video
• Business is different today because people can form groups,
• Allstate (and others) has hired people to monitor the Twittersphere; don't call; tweet!
• Best Buy has 1,200 people monitoring TwelpForce; don't call, tweet!
• Alvin Toffler: if you're a cop with a speed gun, the car going by at 120 mph is business, the car going at 5 mph is education
• This MacArthur Foundation report is a must-read
• Kids are using social networks to connect with their friends / peers
• They're also connecting with adults around the world in interest-based networks
• Educators need to teach kids how to do this responsibly and powerfully b/c this will be the majority of their online interactions in the future
• Adults are uncomfortable with the idea of being hyperconnected and hypertransparent
• They're wary of being open and findable
• How are we going to think differently in 3-5 years when every kid comes to school with ubiquitous access (via cell phones) and has the world's sum of knowledge in their pockets? (see Will's post on this, along with the 130+ comments)
• Research shows that the online predation issue is not nearly as big as we think; the threat is overblown; we've been Datelined to death; and that most kids are pretty good at navigating the Web safely
• It's a basic risk-reward equation
• Adults are not having these conversations with kids, they're simply blocking and/or ignoring the issue
• Just like we have driver's ed, we need Internet ed (Dave Keane)
• There's nothing personalized or passion-based about what we're asking kids to do in school
• How can we square this with entrepeneurship, innovation, creativity, 21st century skills, etc.?

12-10 ISTE conference keynote update - All is quiet on the voting front

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. No major changes in the last four days. Voting is slowing. Chris Lehmann still holds his lead over Jeff Piontek.

I’ll try to post an update every day or two between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

 

CASTLE has a new blog! Check out 1to1Schools.net

Some of you have noticed that CASTLE has a new blog: 1to1 Schools. We’re excited about this new venture, which is meant to highlight news, stories, videos, and other resources related to elementary and secondary 1:1 laptop programs.

1to1 Schools is a group blog. For example, check out Nick Sauers’ series on using John Kotter’s 8–stage change process as a model framework for schools that are considering 1:1. Or his post on banning boredom, not laptops. Nick and I also have been on the road with our Flip camcorders, making videos of educators who are involved in laptop programs (see, e.g., our chats with Wynn Draper-Bryant and Marge Beatty).

Pamela Livingston, author of 1-to-1 Learning: Laptop Programs That Work, recently had two posts about an international survey of students in 1:1 programs:

• Part 1
• Part 2

She also wrote recently about how laptops are NOT for listening.

Blair Peterson, another occasional contributor, has noted that we should be prepared for the expected opposition to laptop programs.

The blog is a work in progress - and like many new blogs we’re still working on finding our voice - so please contact us if you have suggestions. If you’d like to be a contributor (or know someone else who’d be a good writer for us) please let us know that too.

Happy reading!

12-06 ISTE conference keynote update (including overall vote totals)

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Chris Lehmann holds his lead over Jeff Piontek. Gary Stager continues to make his move.

I’ll try to post an update every day or two between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

FYI, if votes from all categories were totaled, this would be the leaderboard:

Someone with more time than me would have to go in and see how many of these votes were from the same person but in different categories. For now, suffice it to say that Chris Lehmann, Gary Stager, Michael Wesch, Sir Ken Robinson, and Will Richardson have more support than appears from the single category totals.

4 tales out of school

Here are four tales out of school, as relayed by parents:

Hatshepsut and Thutmose

Four questions from a study packet for a middle school World Civilizations class:

A. Nubia developed trade routes over land because:

1. there was not enough wood to build boats
2. the Egyptians controlled the Nile
3. the cataracts prevented river travel in Nubia
4. Nubians only traded with West Africans

B. According to legend, who united Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt?

1. Hatshepsut
2. Menes
3. Amon-Re
4. Thutmose III

C. Thutmose III was all of the following except:

1. a conqueror
2. an educated man
3. unmerciful to the defeated
4. a great Pharaoh

D. What was the kingdom of Kerma known for?

1. great poverty
2. skilled archers
3. delicate pottery
4. ironworking

These are just a sample; most of the items in the packet are similar. Students have to ‘learn’ these because they’ll be quizzed on them.

It’s very hard for me to see this kind of schoolwork and not think that vast amounts of student time are just being wasted. And I’m the first to admit that I did this when I taught 8th grade. I didn’t know any better, but that didn’t make it right. There are lots of great higher-level concepts possible in this unit, such as the inter-dependent relationships between people and land, what influences where civilizations develop, and so on. But I don’t see those concepts here (and I wasn’t ever taught to focus on those as a teacher or student teacher).

[Correction: I've been informed that students did get to learn/write about some of those higher-level concepts too. That doesn't remedy the multiple-choice items for me, but it does help me feel slightly better.]

Study hall rules

In a high school cafeteria, there are flyers about study hall that say (among other things):

• Students may eat and drink as long as they clean up after themselves.
• Students may listen to music as long as they have headphones.
• Students may talk quietly.
• Game/Card playing, laptops, or any other such devices are not permitted in Study Hall. I-Pods are for music only.
• NO CELL PHONE USAGE!

In other words, you can eat snacks, hang out and talk with your friends, and listen to your music during ‘study hall,’ but you can’t use what may be the most powerful learning devices that humanity has yet invented.

Assessment reliability, validity, and parent (dis)trust

An e-mail exchange between a parent and a high school teacher…

Parent

Dear [teacher], I would like to find out how to get a copy of my son's exams for his Algebra 2 class. My son's name is XXXX XXXX. He informed me that he is not allowed to take them home. I am very surprised by this. I don't know how I, as a parent, am supposed to help him if I don't know what he is not understanding. Also, it is very helpful to students to have their exams to study for the final. I am happy to pay for copies. Please let me know what I need to do. Thank you.

Teacher

I am attaching a pdf of our departments rationale for keeping students' tests on file. In addition, students are welcome to set up times when they may review a test in the math study center. When exams are returned, they are welcome to write down a question in their notes to which they may refer later.

Parent

I am very disappointed by this policy although at least the department lets parents and students look at their old exams. I appreciate not letting them come home until all students have taken the exam, but it seems that waiting a week would be fine. The "needing copies on hand" can be dealt with by letting a parent pay for a copy to take home if requested or by scanning and emailing. As for the issue of not wanting to make up new problems, math is one of the easier subjects to do this in so I'm really surprised.

I hope that students have been informed of this policy; I as a parent certainly haven't been by any department. My son didn't seem to be aware of it though, but that could be a teenage thing. What times are available for me to come in and look at the exams? Do I make the appointment with you to get the exams or go through the math study center? Thanks for your help.

In other words: No, we don’t trust you or your child (and/or we can’t be bothered to make an alternative assessment); if you are willing and available to take off work and come down here, we’ll show you what you want to see and you can take some notes but you may not have even a copy of your child’s work.

No computers for you!

It’s December and some upper elementary students have yet to use a computer this year for anything other than typing practice and to look up things in the library catalog.  [I’m not sure there’s anything to say about this except to sigh in dismay]

Wrap-up

Four tales out of school. Four tales that could exist in most districts in the country. Four tales that illustrate the disconnects that often exist between our schools and the caring, empowering, relevant, meaningful, modern learning environments that we should be creating for students and their families. Got one or more tales to share of your own?

12-04 ISTE conference keynote update - Gary Stager is gaining ground!

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Chris Lehmann holds his lead over Jeff Piontek. Gary Stager continues to climb the charts.

I’ll try to post an update every day or two between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

Does your school organization reflect our new digital information landscape?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

CASTLE has been doing a great deal of technology leadership training for the School Administrators of Iowa, some of the Iowa Area Education Agencies, some of the Minnesota Service Cooperatives, and other school organizations across the country. One of the discussion activities that we’ve been doing lately asks session participants to think in groups about the impacts that the Internet and other digital technologies have had on various sectors of our society:

• newspapers, magazines, and the news industry
• banking, money management, and personal finance
• television, movies, and video
• maps, travel agencies, and the travel industry
• radio, CDs, and the music industry
• medicine and personal health
• reading and books
• how we communicate, connect, and share with each other; and
• universities

[Download these slides: ppt pptx]

This is not an exclusive list - for example, it doesn’t include the postal service or politics / political campaigning [or real estate agents] - but it does include many of the major sectors in our society that are information-oriented. In other words, they’re societal sectors and activities that, at their heart, are all about information and knowledge in one form or another.

In groups, participants can quite easily identify that ALL of these societal sectors are undergoing major, radical transformations because of digital technologies. Information-oriented societal activities are being reshaped in significant ways, and it’s just getting started as digital tools and environments continue to advance at a rapid pace.

Characteristics of our new digital information landscape

If asked to describe the ideas or themes that cut across all of these societal changes, participants can identify the general characteristics of our new digital information landscape. It is

• open
• more accessible
• more convenient
• more immediate / real-time
• networked
• connected
• shared
• collaborative
• interactive
• individualized
• empowering
• flexible
• adaptive
• less dependent on “experts”
• rapidly-changing
• more comprehensive
• searchable
• often crowdsourced
• creative
• multimodal / multimedia
• more efficient
• often less expensive
• global
• less dependent on geography
• technology-suffused
• less dependent on physical media
• and so on…

These apply to us too!

The challenge for us as leaders, of course, is that P-12 schools also are information-oriented institutions. At our hearts, we too are all about information:

• information mastery
• knowledge transmission and transference
• organizing and accessing information
• making meaning
• etc.

Because of this, schools shouldn’t expect that they somehow will be immune from the same changes that are radically altering other information-oriented societal sectors. We can’t continue to pretend that these revolutions aren’t going to affect us too, in significant and as-yet-unknown ways.

How many of the big ideas / cross-cutting themes above describe your school? Does the daily work of your school organization reflect our new digital information landscape?

12-02 ISTE conference keynote update - The crowd speaks!

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Chris Lehmann holds his lead over Jeff Piontek. Gary Stager is climbing the charts.

At the beginning of this project round, I said:

The bottom line is that we all can have a voice now. It seems to me that ISTE is trying to make this voting area a closed space - separate from all of the other conversation spaces that we have available to us - and I just don’t think that’s either logical or feasible.

Sure enough, conversation about this round has been taking place in Twitter and in the edublogosphere:

• Wanted: Keynoter
• Penance for keynote influencers
• ISTE keynote project

See also a few posts from the last round, the first of which is Vicki Davis’ excellent reflection on the whole process:

• Crowdsourcing or loudsourcing?
• ISTE educational technology conference: Crowdsourcing
• The difference between ‘crowdsourcing’ and being lazy
• Give me the ridiculous
• Need for radical reboot – Dismissing the ISTE keynote
• The keynote I’d like to see at ISTE 2010: Vote and share yours

I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

Slide - Lose your sleep before your decision, not after it

Download this file: png ppt pptx

See also my other slides and the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool.

Photo credit: 2/365 My Work

Dear Will

Dear Will,

In less than two weeks you’ll be here in Iowa. We’re excited to have you visit. We’ve got an eager bunch of state leaders awaiting your insights.

Just to let you know, this probably isn’t your typical group of school leaders. This session with you is invitation-only and we deliberately kept it small to foster good discussion. We only have 40 attendees and, as you can imagine, we had to make some extremely difficult choices about whom to invite.

The group includes 18 of our state’s most forward-thinking superintendents. Many of them have initiated 1:1 laptop programs, have begun student virtual reality initiatives, and/or are otherwise on the forefront of technology-related school reform. In addition to the superintendents, we’ve also invited 4 building-level administrators who live on the cutting edge.

CASTLE has been working extensively with the School Administrators of Iowa (SAI) and Iowa’s Area Educational Agencies (AEAs) to provide technology leadership training across the state. Four of the attendees represent the AEAs; three attendees represent SAI. We also have the 3 individuals from the Iowa Department of Education (DE) who are in charge of P-12 technology, the new Iowa Core Curriculum’s 21st century skills component, and administrator quality.

We have good relationships with the business associations in Iowa. In attendance will be the executive directors of the Iowa Business Council, the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, and the Iowa Chamber Alliance. One of the education reporters from The Des Moines Register also will be there.

Finally, rounding out the group are 4 attendees from CASTLE: myself; my new faculty colleague, John Nash (who used to be the director of evaluation for the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning); and two of our graduate assistants who have been helping us with our technology leadership initiatives.

You should be prepared for keen thinking and tough questions from this group. They’ve been mulling big ideas and ground-level implementation issues for a while now. They’re chomping at the bit to move forward but also are cognizant of current policy, funding, and staffing realities. It should be an excellent day of conversation.

Here’s what you need to know about us

There are a few things you should know about us. For example, Iowa has long had a commitment to and history of educational excellence, which has resulted in our students consistently scoring at or near the top of all states on standardized assessments. Unfortunately, as our citizens and educators are slowly coming to realize, our past success and current practices often don’t meet 21st century needs very well. Shifting our populace out of complacency and into a different understanding is an enormous undertaking for us. The whole state is struggling to shift from an agriculture and manufacturing mindset into a knowledge economy orientation.

We have other challenges. In a rapidly-globalizing world, we are one of the least ethnically diverse states in the nation, which means that most Iowans have had little substantive interaction with people of other cultures. Most Iowa communities are small; we only have two cities larger than 100,000 and another dozen that are larger than 30,000. Most Iowa school districts are small; nearly a sixth have fewer than 300 students, 70% have fewer than 1,000 students, and less than 9% have more than 2,500 students. A third of our students currently live in poverty. Our young adults leave the state, never to return, at the second-highest rate in the country. Our rural bandwidth and technology infrastructures are less than desirable. Our online learning opportunities for P-12 students are anemic.

We’ve also got some assets. Because Iowa’s communities are so small, they often are more closely connected to schools and students than in many other states. Our state government, local community, nonprofit, and corporate organizations all care about and have been working extensively with our schools for many years; there is a successful track record of engagement and conversation. The Wallace Foundation recently found that Iowa has the most cohesive school leadership system of any state in the country. Our state’s leading newspaper actually prints numerous positive stories about schools.

Here’s what we need from you

We need you to stretch our minds and our imaginations to the utmost limit. They’ve already heard me speak about digital revolutions, globalization, and changing workforce needs. They’ve already heard me challenge existing ways of thinking and doing at the school, district, and policy levels. Many of the educators in attendance have heard Alan November, David Warlick, Daniel Pink, Tony Wagner, Yong Zhao, Richard Longworth, and others.

We’re ready to take the next step. We’re ready for you to take our already-forward-thinking brains into 2015, 2025, or even 2050. We need to hear from you what the new information and technology landscapes are going to look like. We need to hear from you what school organizations could / should / MUST look like. And because you work with schools all over the world, we need to hear from you what innovative schools currently are doing to make the shift.

We can handle whatever you throw at us. Don’t be afraid to E-X-P-A-N-D our brains exponentially by asking us difficult questions and offering us enormous challenges. We need grounding in a future reality, but we also need concrete details about current and potential transformative practices. We need our mental models to be rearranged, reframed, and reconfigured. And, of course we want lots of opportunities for discussion and hands-on experiences. All that is not too much to ask, is it?!

So that’s our context. We appreciate your willingness to come to Ames. We’ll be sitting at tables in small groups. All of us likely will have laptops and Internet access. Rock our world, put us to work, move us forward. Thanks.

11-30 ISTE conference keynote update - Chris Lehmann retakes lead over Jeff Piontek

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Chris Lehmann has retaken the lead over Jeff Piontek.

I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

17 Tweets about the ISTE conference keynote

Today there was what I thought was an engaging Twitter conversation about the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Here is the general idea in 17 Tweets…

First, I posted about the latest standings and some backchannel grumblings I’ve been hearing:

Then I heard from John Larkin and Jen Wagner:

Elizabeth Holmes thought the keynote project was a good idea:

But Sylvia Martinez was less enthused:

Julia Fallon wasn’t too keen either:

Somewhere in there I said:

Gary Stager chimed in:

As did Susan van Gelder:

Which prompted me to ask a question:

I also said:

Susan replied:

Gary also stated:

Which prompted this comment from me:

And, as often happens, Gary got the last word!

11-29 ISTE conference keynote update - Some backchannel grumbling

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Jeff Piontek has widened his lead a bit more over Chris Lehmann. Alan November has claimed the lead in a category and Karl Fisch is pulling away from Michael Wesch.

Does it matter if a nominee nominated himself? Does it matter if family members are voting for a nominee? When by all accounts the nominee is an exceptional educator and speaker, I don’t know if these matter or not, but I’ve heard some backchannel grumbling…

I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

11-28 ISTE conference keynote update - Jeffrey Piontek widens lead over Chris Lehmann

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. Jeffrey Piontek has widened his lead slightly over Chris Lehmann. Alan November also is moving quickly up the charts.

FYI, if you count totals across ALL categories, Chris Lehmann would be in the lead with 462 votes. Also, Michael Wesch would be tied with David Pogue for fourth with 199 votes and Will Richardson would be on the list with 107 votes.

I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

11-27 ISTE conference keynote update - Jeffrey Piontek now ahead of Chris Lehmann

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. As you can see, there’s been a shakeup at the top. Jeffrey Piontek is now slightly ahead of Chris Lehmann (if you don't count Chris' votes in the Universal Design for Learning category). Other folks who have moved up the charts quickly over the past 24 hours include Karen Cator and Alan November.

This clearly is going to be an interesting process! I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

Not enough school administrators are visionaries?

A recent article from The Economist, The Cult of the Faceless Boss, caught my attention. Here’s an excerpt:

In general, the corporate world needs its flamboyant visionaries and raging egomaniacs rather more than its humble leaders and corporate civil servants. Think of the people who have shaped the modern business landscape, and “faceless” and “humble” are not the first words that come to mind.

Be bold, not bland

Henry Ford was as close as you can get to being deranged without losing your liberty. John Patterson, the founder of National Cash Register and one of the greatest businessmen of the gilded age, once notified an employee that he was being sacked by setting fire to his desk. Thomas Watson, one of Patterson’s protégés and the founder of IBM, turned his company into a cult and himself into the object of collective worship. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are both tightly wound empire-builders. Jack Welch and Lou Gerstner are anything but self-effacing. These are people who have created the future, rather than merely managing change, through the force of their personalities and the strength of their visions. George Bernard Shaw’s adage about progress depending on “the unreasonable man” applies just as much to business as to every other area of life, if not more.

The previous outbreak of the cult of facelessness was in the 1950s, when books such as “The Organisation Man” and “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” topped the bestseller list, and when two of America’s biggest firms, General Motors and General Electric, were both run by men named Charles Wilson. Today’s world is as different as possible from the one that produced organisation man: an unusual degree of turbulence requires unusual bosses, rather than steady-as-she-goes functionaries.

I wonder if this is the issue with P-12 school leadership. Are most of our school administrators just ‘steady-as-she-goes functionaries?’ Are they too bland, concerned more with not rocking the boat than they are with facilitating meaningful organizational change? Do we have too many managers and not enough visionaries? If so, is it possible to foster more visionary leaders within our current P-12 organizational and higher education preparation systems or is there no hope unless our systems change? Thoughts?

11-26 ISTE conference keynote update

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

11-25 ISTE conference keynote update

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

Did You Know? video series featured on Huffington Post

The Did You Know? (Shift Happens) video series has been featured twice on The Huffington Post in the past few days. One of the stories currently is the lead for HuffPo’s technology section.

• Anatomy (and meaning) of the “Did You Know?” video series
• “Did You Know?” tracks progress of information technology

According to Technorati and Compete, HuffPo currently is the world’s #1 blog. I know that Karl Fisch had no idea that his video would turn into the worldwide phenomenon that it has. We still hear from people and organizations every single day about it. I feel very fortunate to be affiliated with this video series!

11-24 ISTE conference keynote update

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

Survey results: Why isn't your school organization making more progress?

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in my 3–minute survey, Why isn’t your school organization making more progress? We had a total of 561 participants. Some charts and tables are below (click on images for larger versions). Also, here are some downloadable files:

• Complete data packet
• Excel spreadsheet
• Word document
• “Live” results page

My online survey software provided some summary data:

The chart below shows the average rank of each item, along with standard deviations. The lower the rank, the more important the reason.

Although Lack of adequate funding emerged as the top reason cited, Ineffective leadership had more top 3 appearances than any other item. I admit that Accountability demands of NCLB came out lower than I expected.

Finally, Jon Becker wondered if maybe some demand characteristics were in play here…

Feel free to do any other analysis you‘d like on the raw data; just leave a link in the comments area for this post so we all can find it. Thanks again to everyone who participated and/or publicized this survey!

Please vote for the ISTE 2010 conference keynote!

The next phase of ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote crowdsourcing project is now live. Go vote!

The top 5 topics were as follows (in order):

1. Effective school leadership for the digital, global era
2. Trends, tools, and tactics for 21st century learning
3. Personal learning with 21st century tools
4. Universal design for learning
5. Why has technology affected so little change on teaching and learning?

This image shows how many votes each topic received:

ISTE has asked us not to campaign for speakers (see highlighted section below):

I understand what ISTE is trying to do, but I think that there’s an awfully fine line between campaigning and explaining. For example, if I say on this blog that I think Chris Lehmann would be a phenomenal speaker for the leadership topic - and that I hope voters give him all 3 of their votes - is that campaigning or explaining? If I say on Twitter that the voting for ISTE keynote speakers is now live and that I voted for Chris, is that campaigning or explaining?

If I elucidate further in the comments area why Chris would be a great keynote presenter, is that campaigning or explaining?

The bottom line is that we all can have a voice now. It seems to me that ISTE is trying to make this voting area a closed space - separate from all of the other conversation spaces that we have available to us - and I just don’t think that’s either logical or feasible. Nonetheless, in deference to ISTE’s wishes, I’ll put away all of the cool electronic campaign buttons for Chris that CASTLE’s technology director, Laura Bestler, made over the past two weeks [sigh] (if you’d like to see them, drop me an e-mail). I am happy that ISTE’s trying this experiment; it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

So please go vote for your choice(s) for ISTE 2010 conference keynote speaker. If you don’t see the name you want, make sure you’re in the right forum and then add him or her to the list. Happy voting!

UCEA Week 01: I gave a bad presentation yesterday

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. It wasn’t bad because I had poor content or delivery. It was a bad presentation because I didn’t sufficiently account for the needs and understandings of my audience. Let me explain…

I’m in Anaheim, California for the annual conference of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), which is the primary association for educational leadership faculty members at large research institutions. In other words, UCEA is the organization for professors that prepare school principals and superintendents. I currently serve as UCEA’s Associate Director for Communications. I’ve been helping UCEA transition from a very static, fairly unhelpful web site to a more robust online presence. This past year we transitioned UCEA to Squarespace and now I am helping them take advantage of its interactive tools and other social media such as Twitter and podcasting.

Yesterday morning I was scheduled to give a presentation to UCEA’s Executive Committee (EC). The EC is the governing body for the larger organization and is made up of 10 faculty from a number of different postsecondary institutions. You can see my presentation below. I shared various statistics and information about the UCEA web site, Twitter channel, and BlogTalkRadio podcast series.

The members of the EC were fine until I got to the recommendations. Then I lost them (at least that’s when I think I lost them). The problem was that I’ve been working with Dr. Michelle Young, UCEA’s Executive Director, and she gets what we’re trying to do. But the EC hasn’t heard from me in a while and to them I might as well have been speaking in tongues. As a group, their level of technology understanding was much lower than Michelle’s, perhaps because I’ve been answering her questions as we’ve gone along.

It was my fault. I know that I need to tailor my presentations to the level of my audience. I’ve done that well in the past – including with the EC – but I forgot my audience this time. The end result was a dissatisfying experience for both them and me. Although some of them said to me later that I did a good job, I know they were being polite.

So now I have to remedy the situation. For some that will mean individual follow-up conversations just to clarify or touch base. For others a series of explanatory e-mail updates will suffice. And I’ll need to roll up my sleeves with a few and start walking them through the same questions and answers that Michelle and I already have navigated. In the end it will be fine, but now I’ve created more work for myself – work I could have avoided if I’d done what I should have yesterday.

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. Lesson learned. Reminder received. Time to adjust, compensate, and move forward…

3 MINUTE SURVEY: Why isn't your school organization making more progress?

Why aren’t schools making more progress when it comes to effective implementation and integration of digital technologies? Here’s what K-12 educators usually tell me when asked (list is in no particular order):

• Lack of adequate funding
• Unsupportive state / federal legislators
• Teacher / union resistance
• Lack of professional development
• Ineffective leadership
• Lack of time / space within curriculum
• Accountability demands of NCLB
• Parent / community resistance

I’m curious about your own situation. So I created a 3–minute survey! Simply click, drag, and drop the items to reorder them.

1. Take the survey!
2. Follow the results live!

Survey closes Thursday, November 19. Hope you’ll participate (and pass this along to others)!

The (un)certainty of professional persistence

There has been a lot of good discussion on my post about the future of books, libraries, librarians, and schools (thank you, everyone). In addition to the comments on the post itself, there are some excellent thoughts elsewhere as well:

• Flat World Library Corporation
• Dangerously irrelevant libraries
• Ten hard questions
• Random questions on future libraries by Scott McLeod

I was struck, however, by something that Erin Downey said in her own post:

What has, does, and will distinguish us from [coffee shops, community centers, and Internet cafes] are LIBRARIANS. Your barista doesn't know how to help you find a price guide for 19th century china dolls, or figure out what the primary motivations were of the Romantic poets, or locate the best resource for building an addition to your house (as well as getting the right permits for local construction!). We do all that and more on a daily basis without breaking a sweat - we're trained information professionals.

As I read Erin’s post, she seems awfully certain that librarians will be around and will be essential to the new order. I confess that I’m not that certain.

Perhaps I’m reading her wrong, but her paragraph strikes me as one of absolute certainty in librarians’ worth: Of course we’ll be around in the new paradigm! We’re LIBRARIANS, dammit! We’re TRAINED INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS who are VALUABLE in and of ourselves and also PROVIDE VALUE TO OTHERS. As I read her paragraph, I started substituting other professions in place of librarians: Of course we’ll be around in the new paradigm! We’re JOURNALISTS / TELEGRAPH OPERATORS / BUGGY WHIP MAKERS / TRAVEL AGENTS, dammit! We’re TRAINED PROFESSIONALS who are VALUABLE in and of ourselves and also PROVIDE VALUE TO OTHERS.

I think that the shifts we are now beginning to experience are going to be much more disruptive than we expect. I don’t think that we can take for granted that any current information-oriented profession is going to be around in the new paradigm. I think it’s a safer bet to assume that most of us in information-oriented jobs either are going to be replaced by something new or will see our professions so radically transformed that we may need to give them new labels.

Whether we’re librarians, teachers, administrators, or professors – or newspaper journalists, television producers, radio broadcasters, or magazine publishers – or travel agents, stockbrokers, medical professionals, or postal service workers, I think we need to be more uneasy. We need to be less complacent, less certain. We need to be more proactive and forward-thinking rather than self-congratulatory and self-satisfied.

The professionals in information-oriented fields who will be best able to navigate the seismic transitions that are yet to occur will be those that DON’T take their individual jobs – or even their entire professions – for granted. We all need to be more on edge than we currently are.

Photo credit: Officemate disappears

Data-driven decision-making resources from CASTLE

I have done a lot of work over the years on various data-driven decision-making projects. I've taught courses, given workshops, delivered multi-day institutes for state departments of education and corporate partners, and written book chapters and white papers.

I collected some of the highlights of that work on my new DDDM page here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Resources include some of the products from my work with Microsoft, the American Psychological Association, the Chicago Public Schools, the Minnesota Department of Education, and others. 

I hope these are useful to you. Happy reading!

10 questions about books, libraries, librarians, and schools

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

October apparently was ‘Library Month’ for me. I was the keynote speaker for the Minnesota MEMO conference and did a breakout session for the Iowa Library Association (ILA) conference. I also brought Dr. Mike Eisenberg to Iowa for three days to talk with school administrators about technology and information literacy. As a result, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on books, reading, and the future of libraries and librarians…

Random questions

1. What constitutes a “book” these days? When books become electronic and thus become searchable, hyperlinkable, more accessible to readers with disabilities, and able to embed audio, video, and interactive maps and graphics, at what point do they stop becoming “books” and start becoming something else?
2. The Amazon Kindle e-reader currently allows you to annotate an electronic book passage with highlights and your own personal notes. Those annotations are even available to you on the Web, not just on the Kindle device itself. As Seth Godin notes, there hopefully will be a day when you will be able to share those notes with others. You’ll also be able to push a button on your e-reader and see everyone else’s notes and highlights on the same passage. What kind of new learning capabilities will that enable for us?
3. If students and teachers now can be active content creators and producers, not just passive information recipients, doesn’t that redefine our entire notion of what it means to be information literate and media fluent? Are our librarians and classroom teachers doing enough to help students master these new literacies (for example, by focusing on student content creation, not just information consumption and/or interpretation)?
4. The Cushing Academy boarding school in Massachusetts may be the first school in the country to have its library go completely electronic. In addition to using library computers, students now check out Kindles loaded with books. How tough would it be for other schools to move to this model (and what would they gain or lose as a result)?
5. When books, magazines, newspapers, reference materials, music, movies, and other traditional library content all go electronic and online - deliverable on demand - what does that mean for the future of the physical spaces known as “libraries?” Mike Eisenberg said to me that we already should be taking yellow caution tape and blocking off the entire non-fiction and reference sections of our libraries. As content becomes digital and no longer needs to be stored on a shelf, with what do we replace that now-unused floor space: couches, tables, and cozy chairs? computer stations? meeting space? And if we head in these directions, what will distinguish libraries from other institutions such as coffee shops, community centers, and Internet cafes?
6. Our information landscape is more complex than ever before. We still need people who know how to effectively navigate these intricate electronic environments and who can teach others to do so. But does that mean we still need “librarians” who work in “libraries?” Or will their jobs morph into something else?
7. How much of a librarian’s current job could be done by someone in a different location (for example, someone in India who answers questions via telephone or synchronous chat) or by computer software and/or an electronic kiosk? I don’t know the answer to this question - and I suspect that it will vary by librarian - but I do know that many individuals in other industries have been quite dismayed to find that large portions of their supposedly-indispensable jobs can be outsourced or replaced by software (which, of course, means that fewer people are needed locally to do whatever work requires the face-to-face presence of a live human being).
8. Can a librarian recommend books better than online user communities and/or database-driven book recommendation engines? For example, can a librarian’s ability to recommend reading of interest surpass that of a database like Amazon’s that aggregates purchasing behavior or a dedicated user community that is passionate about (and maybe rates/reviews) science fiction books, and then do so for romance, political history, manga, self-help, and every other possible niche of literature too?
9. If school librarians aren’t actively and explicitly modeling powerful uses of digital technologies and social media themselves and also supporting students to do the same, should they get to keep their jobs? And if they are doing so individually (which is what we want), what’s their responsibility to police the profession (and lean on those librarians who aren’t)?
10. There is no conceivable future in which the primacy of printed text is not superceded by electronic text and media. If that future is not too far away (and may already be here), are administrators doing enough to transition their schools, libraries, and librarians / media specialists into a new paradigm?

Reactions from librarians

I posed these questions in both my MEMO and ILA presentations, explained in more detail my thinking about each one, and gave participants time to talk with each other after each question. I even told them up front that they wouldn’t like some of what I said but that I had nothing against librarians and was just asking questions that I thought the profession should be discussing. Reactions of the few librarians from whom I’ve heard have been interesting…

Librarian 1 (I received this one indirectly)

[Scott spoke] to the Iowa Library Assoc conference this past week and he really was quite negative about the future of libraries and librarians with the technology shifts.

Scott is speaking a great deal for our School Administrators of Iowa and also to principals/supts through the AEA's this year and I'm worried for the future of our profession in times of tight budgets with folks like Scott out speaking to leadership and not promoting the role that teacher librarians can play with technology AT ALL.

We had Mike Eisenberg here in Iowa this past week also speaking to administrators ... which I think is a good thing ... along with Scott McLeod ... which may NOT be a good thing. The topic was information literacy, but in speaking with those in attendance at these Iowa meetings, I heard that the role of teacher librarians was not at all highlighted, and in in fact, I heard there was a bit of librarian "bashing" by administrators in attendance. (Now this is just hear-say as I wasn't there to hear these presentations)

Now, I agree with you that teacher librarians need to be stepping up to the plate at this time and demonstrating the role that we can play with these 21st century tools, but am just wondering how we compete with loud, negative voices like Scott McLeod in Iowa? You know us polite Iowa librarians, we just kept quiet during Scott's session and did not argue with him!

Librarian 2

I’m the librarian that said you scared the #### out of me! It’s kind of settled in now and I’m reviewing my job duties and seeing what I can do to stay “relevant” and to be a viable information contributor. Thank you for the thought provoking presentation!

Librarian 3

I want you to know that I have had a few of my professors writing me today about you.  They said that after having a few days to think about what you said, they are REALLY happy that they heard you speak. And that you spoke at the ILA Convention to the librarians there. Librarians and teachers alike need to hear the message of change. I also sent them the link to your blog and guess what... think you have some new followers now too.

Librarian 4

I had the opportunity to listen to you present at the ILA Conference yesterday. Your presentation was very unique compared to the speech you shared with the twelve laptop initiative schools earlier this month.... As a leader in [my] district and a huge supporter of the advocacy of information literacy skills, I feel that you underestimate the role of a good teacher librarian. I see the evolution of technology advancing and embrace what opportunities it provides myself, my fellow educators and our future citizens. You see, I was selected by my district to represent them at the 1-to-1 meeting and have been asked to attend [some of your future workshops] because of my leadership and my active role in the integration of technology. And, yes, I am their teacher librarian.

Being curious, I would like to know more about your work with teacher librarians. I'm afraid that you may have assumed the role of a teacher librarian as being one of 'holding back' the age of information. That is very far from the truth. Currently, we live in a world where both print and electronic information are accessible to all. My role is to support both realms and the patrons who use the material. While open access may soon be upon us, I know that I must help students and staff while this evolution is taking place. I know the importance of being visionary and open-minded while at the same time being grounded.

I would challenge you to collaborate with me and learn more about my role as a teacher librarian. I think the role of libraries and librarians is evolving. And, I feel that a good teacher librarian is the 'Ace' in an administrators back pocket! What other position in a school district revolves around information access, collaboration with students and staff, all while taking on a role as an educational leader in learning? Instead of demanding teacher librarians to 'get out of the way' if they are not welcoming technology, maybe we need to look at the role a librarian can play. Their opportunities to support the learning environment can become an asset. Some librarians just need to know in what direction to lead. I hope in the future you consider the value teacher librarians have in this ever-changing world. I know that I am thankful for the opportunities I provide the students at [my district], and I would like to think that they feel the same about me.

Suggested reading

If the topic of the future of libraries and librarians interests you, I highly encourage you to read the recent article in School Library Journal, Things That Keep Us Up at Night, by Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson. It’s caused quite a stir in the school librarian community…

Marge Beatty, Nebraska ESU 16, talks about 1:1 laptop programs

[cross-posted at CASTLE's 1-to-1 Schools blog]

While at Nebraska’s first-ever Educational Administrators Technology Conference, I learned that 8 of the 16 districts in Educational Service Unit 16 have 1:1 laptop programs. Marge Beatty, chief administrator for the ESU, was willing to let me ask her a few questions. Happy viewing!

My ISTE 2010 keynote topic suggestion just tipped 1,000 votes

Two weeks ago, I asked my readers to please vote for my ISTE 2010 conference keynote topic suggestion. Thank you, everyone, who has voted so far. Right now my topic suggestion is leading, but that lead is far from safe. If you haven’t yet voted, would you kindly do so in the next few days? Thanks in advance!

Here are the top 5 topic suggestions to date:

Your technology coordinator works for you, not the other way around

A conversation I had with a superintendent at Nebraska’s first-ever Educational Administrators Technology Conference…

Superintendent: I’m new to my district. I spent the first year getting the lay of the land. I’m now ready to start making things happen when it comes to technology and our students but our technology coordinator is blocking me at every turn.

Me: You know, your technology coordinator works for you, not the other way around.

Superintendent: I know. We’re having those conversations but it’s difficult.

Me: Can’t you just say ‘Look, it’s a digital age and we need to be facilitating technology-rich learning experiences for our students. Now, I can hire a technology coordinator who can help me do this or you can be that person. Which would you like it to be?’

Superintendent: Yes! I can say that! Thank you so much! I don’t know, I guess I just needed someone’s permission to do this…

I’m not sure why, but I seem to have this conversation every couple of months with some superintendent somewhere in the country.

7 steps to success when working with administrators

I spent yesterday with technology integrationists from the various Educational Service Units in Nebraska. In my experience, technology integrationists usually are wonderful people who know a lot about digital societal shifts and effective technology usage in the classroom. What they don’t necessarily know, however, is how to foster system-level change themselves and/or help school leaders do so.

Here’s what I think technology integrationists can do to assist their principals and superintendents:

1. Administrators are unknowledgeable, not evil. Recognize that most of them are dedicated educators who want to do the right thing but may not have the necessary knowledge base or skill sets.
2. The world has changed. Help them see the big picture: the larger, deeper societal shifts and transformations that form the external context within which schools are operating.
3. We need to keep up. Help them see that the larger context is a desirable and/or inevitable destination for school systems generally and for their school organization specifically.
4. We’re not keeping up. Help them see that the school system’s not where it should be in regard to the big picture. Create cognitive disconnects for them between their school organization’s status quo and the desired destination.
5. Facilitate success. Help them gain the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to move toward the desired destination.
6. Rebut the naysayers. Help them counteract the inevitable yabbuts (“Yeah, but…”; “Yeah, but…”).
7. Rinse and repeat. Do this over and over again until they, you, and the system win.

The folks I worked with yesterday stated that they generally weren’t paying enough attention to #2, 3, 4, or 6. Their typical approach was to tout the benefits and wonders of – and to try to train administrators how to use – various digital technologies without sufficiently addressing the other aspects listed above. They also noted that the time they did spend working with administrators was focused too much on tool training and that they needed to spend more time on broader technology leadership issues.

Of course this model is applicable to other educators too, not just administrators. What do you think?

Slide - The times demand that we not settle for climbing ordinary mountains

Download this file: png ppt pptx

See also my other slides and the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool.

ISTE 2010 conference keynote: The gloves are off!

Interesting conversations are occurring, well-known edubloggers are advocating for their topic suggestions (see, e.g., Vicki Davis and Brian Crosby), and, perhaps most importantly for ISTE, there seems to be a fair amount of interest in its ‘choose your conference keynote’ project.

After just a few days, my suggestion is duking it out with Kevin Honeycutt’s for the top position:

I think Kevin is a great guy, but I don’t think his topic should be a keynote over mine. It seems to me that 95%+ of the ISTE conference every year is the same thing: tools, teachers, and classrooms. These are important, but as I said in one of my comments under my topic suggestion:

We've been relying on teachers & teacher leaders & tech integrationists & tech coordinators for decades now. Where's it gotten us in terms of systemic reform? It's gotten us isolated pockets of excellence in a few classrooms. When a principal "gets it," nearly the entire school changes (minus the few resisters). When a superintendent "gets it," nearly the entire district changes (minus the few resisters).

I'll repeat... It is the formal leaders (administrators, policymakers), not informal leaders, that have control over ALL of the important variables: money; time; personnel hiring, evaluation, and assignment; organizational vision and direction; professional development; etc. All you have to do is look at a school like the Science Leadership Academy to understand the importance and power of a formal leader that "gets it."

Why such pushback on a leadership keynote? It's not like we have one every year. In fact, we'd be hard pressed to remember more than a small few in the history of NECC/ISTE. ISTE has five keynotes and I'm a big fan of Kevin Honeycutt. But one of the keynotes should pertain to effective FORMAL leadership. Otherwise we'll just keep talking about tools and teachers like we always do...

So the gloves are off, Kevin! I don’t know if I can pull this off, but I’m not going down without a fight.

Thanks to everyone who already has voted for my topic and/or participated in the conversation. Any assistance that you can continue to lend me would be most appreciated; I need more people to vote for my suggestion and to spread the word about the contest. I’ve got an uphill battle and am going to need all of the help I can get!

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Please vote for my ISTE 2010 conference keynote suggestion

ISTE is asking us to help select one of its next conference keynotes. I am asking you to please vote for my suggestion:

As of this moment, the top three vote-getters all have to do with technology tools. Technology learning tools are important, but helping principals, superintendents, school boards, and policymakers understand what effective 21st century schools look like (and how to support and facilitate their creation and ongoing operation) is much, much more important.

Please go to ISTE’s keynote suggestion web site and give my suggestion three (3) votes. We need this issue at the forefront of our educational technology conversations and we need it at the forefront of ISTE’s work. We continue to talk about students and teachers and tools in the classroom – all of which are worthy topics – but NONE OF THOSE HAPPENS if the leadership doesn’t get it.

Note that this is just a vote for the topic. We vote later on potential speakers. You’ll have to sign in to vote but it shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two.

Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support.