Dangerously Irrelevant

Biosciences will hire no dropouts

Richard Longworth says…

Men and women who carried lunch pails and spent their days on assembly lines could earn good wages, own their own homes, feed their families, and keep a cottage by the lake. It was a safe, solid way of life, and it didn’t require much book learning. One step up the ladder stood the trades, the jobs in construction and nursing and repair. The junior colleges and vocational schools taught these trades and taught them well. If they didn’t teach much science or math, that was all right, because only students going to universities needed that knowledge. . . . The Midwest has lost the knack to compete in the new economy, and the schools have lost their ability to teach it. (pp. 179–180)

Globalization may be the most egalitarian force in history. . . . If you’re good, you’ve got a chance. If you've got the education and the skills, the door is open. But if you don’t . . . you’re out of luck. . . . If the Midwest’s future contains manufacturing, it will be high-end, high-tech manufacturing, demanding two-year degrees at the least. Biosciences will hire no dropouts. (pp. 172–173)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

They are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost

Richard Longworth says…

State officials know perfectly well that globalization will swallow their traditional industries. But they’re stuck. Workers vote, and a voter who has just lost his job will be an angry voter. . . . Every time a factory dies, its workers go from a private payroll to the public dole; . . . unemployment pay and retraining costs take money away from programs, such as education, that might offer some advantage in the new economy. And so the pressure builds to subsidize the old industries, to do anything to keep them from moving away. . . . The time and money [states] spend trying to keep twentieth-century jobs prevent them from creating twenty-first century jobs. (pp. 35–36)

The dirty little secret of Midwestern manufacturing is that many workers are high school dropouts, uneducated, some virtually illiterate. They could build refrigerators, sure. But they are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost. (p. 56)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

Any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced

Richard Longworth says…

Most of [the] earlier outsourcing dealt with manufacturing and factory workers. . . . The newest wave is different. It’s white-collar outsourcing . . . and it can hit anyone whose job isn’t absolutely nailed down. . . . Basically, any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced. Defense attorneys who must appear in a Wisconsin court cannot be in India, but real estate lawyers searching titles can. An Indiana X-ray technician has to be in the same room with the patient; the doctors who read the X-rays can be anywhere. Barbers in Columbus, taxi drivers in Chicago, and kindergarten teachers in Des Moines are outsource-proof. Stockbrokers and tax accountants aren’t. All this is happening now. . . . ‘Anything that can be sent over a wire can be outsourced, anything fungible is up for grabs, any tradable service anywhere in the world. Fifty percent of global GDP is services, and a lot of that is tradable.' (pp. 11–12)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

Get comfortable with discomfort

Michael Port says…

When we are thinking small, we crave preordained outcomes. We want to know what’s going to happen before we begin. Control is an illusion. The need to know how and where prevents all progress. Outcomes are not the starting point. . . . When we seek to control it, it’s because we fear the unknown, the out of control. What we fear is reality because ultimately it can never be controlled. [The Think Big Manifesto, pp. 106–107]

Related posts

• Rise up
• The potential of our success makes [others] face their own universe, so constricted by their small thoughts
• We are the biggest obstacle
• We are squandering the gifts of the universe

We are squandering the gifts of the universe

Michael Port says…

With small thinking, we cannot grow – intellectually, spiritually, creatively, emotionally, financially. And when we cannot grow, society cannot grow. It cannot advance. It cannot develop. Small thinking is an ultimately autodestructive path. . . . The only reward of small thinking will be paid in the common currency of all small thinking – unaccomplished dreams. . . . No growth – not spiritual, emotional, professional, or social – is possible in this kind of environment. We are squandering the gifts of the universe. [The Think Big Manifesto, pp. 52–53]

Related posts

• Rise up
• The potential of our success makes [others] face their own universe, so constricted by their small thoughts
• We are the biggest obstacle

We are the biggest obstacle

Michael Port says…

Revolution is about one person at a time experiencing their own personal empowerment against an existing, deficient (small thinking) system. (p. 13)

We are the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of our doing big things in the world. We are our own worst enemies. (p. 22)

[The Think Big Manifesto]

Related posts

• Rise up
• The potential of our success makes [others] face their own universe, so constricted by their small thoughts 

Second annual CASTLE summer book club starts June 15

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to do another online summer book club. I’m supposed to be taking the summer off but last year’s discussion of Influencer: The Power to Change Anything was so much fun that I can’t resist doing it again…

This year’s reading for the CASTLE summer book club will be Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for Your Classroom. The author is Dr. Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at The University of Virginia.

Getting started

1. Complete the online participation form by midnight, June 10 (Central time).
2. Buy the book!

Commitments

• We start June 15. Be ready.
• Keep up with the reading. No excuses.
• Be an active participant in our online discussion area.
• Dissect ideas vigorously but also be nice to other discussants.
• Help foster interesting dialogue and connected community.

Schedule

1. 6/15 to 6/21 – Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 (40 pages)
2. 6/22 to 6/28 – Chapters 3 and 4 (40 pages)
3. 6/29 to 7/5 – Chapters 5 and 6 (32 pages)
4. 7/6 to 7/12 – Chapters 7 and 8 (34 pages)
5. 7/13 to 7/19 – Chapter 9, Conclusion, and Wrap-Up (20 pages)

This offer is open to all leaders and change agents, at whatever level they’re operating (hint: this might be a good summer activity for some of your local principals or superintendents!).

I’m looking forward to some interesting discussions. Hope some of you will join me this summer!

Related posts

• CASTLE Summer Book Club - Update 1

Book review - The travels of a t-shirt in the global economy

I just finished reading The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Dr. Pietra Rivoli, Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. It was quite an interesting book. Here are some things that I learned:

• Some Americans have been voicing their concerns about the negative impacts of cheap labor and clothing from China on our country’s textile and apparel companies. These “groans” by American corporations and others are identical to the concerns raised in earlier centuries by British manufacturers about cheap cotton from India and/or the New England area of the United States. They’re also identical to the concerns raised in the late 1800s by New England manufacturers as the industry moved to the Southern states, and the concerns raised by Southern manufacturers in the early 20th century as the industry moved to Japan, and the concerns raised by Japanese manufacturers in the later 20th century as the industry moved to Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and China. (Chapter 5)
• No matter how bad working conditions are in factories in Chinese, Vietnam, and other developing countries compared to Western standards, those factory jobs still are a significantly-empowering move up for the primarily-female workers who otherwise would be mired in abject rural poverty back home in their village. As the author put it, it may be rough in the factory but it “beats the hell out of life on the farm” (p. 90).
• Global activism has made textile/apparel factory jobs, even in developing countries, much better and much safer than ever was the case during the Industrial Revolution in England and America. (p. 101)
• You have to read the book to understand the sheer lunacy of the regulations, tariffs, quotas, and other restrictions that American manufacturers and lobbyists have gotten enacted into law. That said, nothing is going to save the United States textile and apparel industry. Right now, the author says, it’s “kept alive only by unnatural acts of life support in Washington” (p. 208). Moreover, most of the protectionist measures put into place actually have hurt the American industries in the long run. (Chapter 8)
• China will overwhelmingly dominate the global textile/apparel industry for at least the next few decades.
• There is an extremely robust aftermarket in developing countries for castoff clothing from the U.S., Europe, and other industrialized nations. You know those personal shoppers at high-end clothing stores that will call you when something comes in that they think you’ll like? The same thing occurs in Tanzania except it’s for donated t-shirts brought to Goodwill and The Salvation Army that have made it to Tanzanian street markets. Chapters 10 and 11, which describe all of this, were my favorite part of the book.
• Implementation of textile recycling programs (like we have for newspaper, glass, metal cans, and plastic) would easily pay for itself.

This book took a while to pick up steam but overall I thought it was well worth the read. If you decide to pick up a copy, happy reading!

Dangerously Irrelevant now available for the Kindle

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

Happy reading!

The potential of our success makes [others] face their own universe, so constricted by their small thoughts

Michael Port says…

We will be ridiculed for declaring ourselves to be big thinkers. To declare anything is to take a chance, to put ourselves on the line, to risk failure. . . . 

When we take risks, we scare other people (and most of all ourselves), because those others see the glimmer of possibilities that they are not even reaching for, because the potential of our success makes them face their own universe, so constricted by their small thoughts.

We will be put down for our efforts. Others will revel in our failures along the way. In the German language, there's even a word for it: schadenfreude. To feel pleasure at someone else's misfortune. Small, small thinking.

We may lose faith in ourselves at points along the way. Worse, we will be intentionally thwarted by small thinking people who fear big thinking because it threatens their comfortable power base.

Together we will find our warrior core, our inner strength, the root of big thinking, and nothing and no one can thwart us. [The Think Big Manifesto, pp. 36-37]

[see yesterday's post, Rise Up]

Rise up

Michael Port says…

The time has come. We cannot wait anymore. For years, we have hidden behind our own small thoughts or let ourselves be held back by other small thinking people who don’t believe in us. Worse still, we have been rejected as marginal, unrealistic, dreamers, idealists, maybe even delusional. Family, friends, colleagues, and others (not to mention our own selves) have tried to negate us, eliminate us, and silence us. We will not stand for it anymore. We say – bring it on. Our personal revolution from small thinking to big thinking is now. We will make public our aim to think big about our goals, our intentions, and, yes, our dreams.

There’s more. We will collaborate, cooperate, and join forces with other big thinkers to bring about the larger revolution our society needs if it is to survive.

You want to think big. I want to think big. Together, we will think even bigger. [The Think Big Manifesto, p. 34]

The Game of School - Wrap-up

I’ve had a lot of fun these past ten days posting quotes from Robert Fried’s The Game of School. I think Fried does a fabulous job of highlighting how schools as institutions have largely moved away from many of our desired ends for students and their learning. Not always, not for every kid, but mostly… And, as I hope you have seen for the past 10 days, he’s also eminently quotable.

Here’s a quick list of all of the posts:

• Passive acceptance of student boredom
• Wasting our children’s time
• When it’s time to worry
• The game that demoralizes even when we win
• Our temples of knowledge are lost opportunities
• Learning and power
• Test score burrito
• Complicit in the atrophy of our children’s learning spirit
• When teachers get stuck
• Are we willing to roll up our sleeves?

I also have Fried’s books, The Passionate Learner and The Passionate Teacher, sitting on my shelf. I’m looking forward to digging into those as well.

For those of you who noted that you were inspired to go out and get a copy of The Game of School, I hope that you enjoy the book as much as I did. Happy reading!

February 12 at 5:30pm - That's tonight!

Tonight’s the night! Including myself, we’ll have 19 people for our discussion of Tribes here in Ames. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

We’re going to do our best to record our chat for later download. I think that Mike Sansone and/or Angela Maiers might be live tweeting the discussion on Twitter. Mike also was making some noise about maybe live streaming. I'm letting others step up on this one rather than trying to control the event. We'll see what happens!

Alfie Kohn on the next U.S. Secretary of Education

Alfie Kohn’s new article in The Nation comes out in print next week. You can read it early online and get his perspectives on the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Here’s a quote:

Almost never questioned ... are the core elements of traditional schooling, such as lectures, worksheets, quizzes, grades, homework, punitive discipline and competition. That would require real reform, which of course is off the table.

I’m sure that many of you are unsurprised that Kohn is one of my favorite education writers. My all-time favorite education book is Beyond Discipline. I like how Kohn speaks truth to power and is willing to hold topics up to the light that are given little thought by most educators because they’re so deeply ingrained in the system.

Update: if the link at The Nation doesn't work for you, this one should.

Education Next article on education blogs

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

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

Here’s a quick quote from the article:

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

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

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

February 12 at 5:30pm

On February 12, 2009, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm Central, I’ll be at a yet-to-be-determined location here in Ames, Iowa to discuss Seth Godin’s new book, Tribes. Godin has finally tipped over from writing about marketing to writing about leadership. The discussion around this book is going to be AMAZING.

What do you do for a living? What do you make? Leaders make a ruckus. (p. 19)

If you’re in, let me know you’re coming. Dinner’s on me. If you’re coming from out-of-state and need a place to stay, let me know and we’ll see what we can arrange…

SETDA's Class of 2020 Action Plan for Education

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) has been on an unbelievable tear this year. Back in February it released its annual Trends Report on NCLB Title II, Part D (Enhancing Education Through Technology, or E2T2). Previous national reports are available at the SETDA web site. You also can access state-level reports at the Metiri Group’s web site.

Now SETDA’s Class of 2020 Action Plan for Education project is releasing its reports. The first three already are available:

• Powerful broadband access for all: Breaking through the barriers
• STEM education: Achievement and innovation
• Technology-based assessments improve teaching and learning

Two more reports are coming out this month and next:

• Empowering teachers: A professional and collaborative approach
• Robust, rigorous, and right-on-time learning through online courseware

Be sure to tap into the incredible wealth of good information on the Reports, Research & Tools page of the SETDA web site [warning: it’s easy to get lost in here for hours…]. There are numerous high-quality resources available for K-12 educational technology advocates and change agents, including the 2007 report, Maximizing the impact: The pivotal role of technology in a 21st century education system.

Keep up the great work, SETDA!

Good books button

I added a Good Books button to the right side of my blog. If you click on it, you'll get to all of my recommended reading lists that I posted over the past week and a half. The Shelfari widget is gone too...

A little blog clean-up before we head into winter!

Recommended reading - Mindblowing

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

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

Recommended reading - Effective presentations

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

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

Recommended reading - Marketing

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

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

Recommended reading - Demographic shifts

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

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

Recommended reading - Educational gaming

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

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

Recommended reading - Data-driven decision-making

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

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

Recommended reading - Teaching and learning

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

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

The bottom billion

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

I just finished Dr. Paul Collier's award-winning book, The Bottom Billion. An economics professor at Oxford University, Collier notes that traditionally we have thought of the world's population as being made up of '€˜a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people'€™ (p. 3).

Instead, we need to recognize that the developing world should be divided into two groups, the middle four billion and the bottom billion. The countries in the middle group have economies that are growing, life expectancies that are rising, infant mortality rates that are dropping, and malnutrition rates that are declining. They still have a long way to go compared to the developed world, but they are making progress. India and China are both part of the middle four billion, despite once being poorer than many of the countries in the bottom billion.

In contrast, the bottom billion people continue to live in '€˜the fourteenth century, [doomed by] civil war, plague, and ignorance'€™ (p. 3). Their economies are not growing and, '€˜given the power of compound growth rates, [the] differences between the bottom billion and the rest of the developing world will rapidly cumulate into two different worlds'€™ (p. 10). The bottom billion not only are '€˜falling behind ... [they are] falling apart'€™ (p. 3).

Below is a graph of the growth rates of the bottom five billion over the past few decades [note that the actual growth rates were not this linear; Collier reported his figures by decades so I had to approximate]. Growth rates were as follows:

When these growth rates are plotted cumulatively, the chart looks something like this:

As you can see, the bottom billion are barely better off than they were 35 years ago. About 70 percent of the bottom billion lives in Africa. The bottom billion includes countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and North Korea.

I have greatly appreciated how this book has reoriented my thinking about global economic development challenges. Being a data guy, I have jumped into some of Collier'€™s numbers in order to help me envision what the challenges are that face the bottom billion. As we look toward the plight of our own disadvantaged student populations, we would be well-advised to look for data that help us reorient our thinking so that we may appropriately address our learning challenges. What data do you have that might shake up the thinking of your educators, students, and families?

Recommended reading - School leadership

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

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

Recommended reading - The world has changed

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

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

Productive and powerful

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’m in the midst of reading Clark Aldrich’s Simulations and the Future of Learning. As Aldrich walks me through the process of developing a leadership simulation, he has a number of interesting things to say about video game and simulation design. Thanks to Aldrich’s clear and engaging prose, I’m finding myself unexpectedly captivated by the nitty-gritty of the workflow of simulation production.

So far the statement that has resonated with me the most, however, pertains as much to education as it does to the gaming industry. Aldrich said:

The goal of learning in any organization (business, educational, governmental) should be to make its members more productive (p. 3).

I’ll agree with that. And I probably would add to the end of that statement “… and more powerful.” I think that additional phrase takes the edge off what might be construed as a focus solely on preparation for work and expands it to include personal empowerment.

Productive and powerful. Isn’t that what we want for the children in our schools? Isn’t that we want for the educators with whom we work? Productive and powerful. I like it.

We have 50 million public school students in the United States. Are the thousands of worksheets that they will complete in their lifetime making them more productive? Are their countless hours of individual seat work going to lead to greater personal empowerment? Are they getting opportunities to be both productive and powerful on a regular basis?

What about our subpopulations? Are socioeconomically-disadvantaged students often getting the chance to be powerful? Do our students with disabilities or our students whose primary language is not English have multiple, ongoing opportunities to feel like they are productive, contributing members of our communities?

What about our 3 million public school teachers? Are the tens of millions of hours that they spend in staff development and training each year actually making them more productive? Do you think the bulk of them feel empowered by their ‘learning opportunities?’

Do we regularly ask ourselves these kinds of questions in our school organizations? As educators, should we?

I have some hard thinking to do about my own graduate classes and degree programs here at Iowa State…

105 (CASTLE summer book club update)

What would happen if you expected that 15 to 25 people would be interested in your online summer book club and 105 showed up instead? I don't know but we're going to find out starting tomorrow!

Ideas wanted - CASTLE summer book club

Today we officially topped 60 participants for CASTLE's first annual summer book club. That's great! - and many more people than I ever anticipated - but it also presents some challenges...

1. It's clear to me that we're going to need to have more than one discussion group. Even accounting for some attrition, if we don't break up into smaller groups then folks are going to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of comments. I also want to make sure that people have an opportunity to have a meaningful say rather than being the 53rd person on the comment list. Based on my experiences with the online courses that I teach, right now I'm thinking at least 2 and maybe as many as 4 groups.
2. I've been playing with Lefora as a potential discussion tool. I've also considered blogs and/or wikis. I definitely do NOT want WebCT / Blackboard / Moodle or any other kind of course management system (although Moodle's the least objectionable of those three). I'd like RSS subscription capability, maybe for both posts and replies. The ability to see what's new / read / unread would be nice too (I don't think Lefora has this). I'm not sure what else is out there.

If anyone has any ideas on either of these fronts - thoughts regarding group size and/or what good tools might be for this - I'm open to suggestions. I need to make some decisions soon. Sign-up ends June 1 and we start June 9!

Anything else I should be thinking about? I'm excited to get going!

Participants wanted for the first annual CASTLE summer book club

I’m going to try something new this summer. I just finished reading Influencer: The power to change anything. It’s possibly the best leadership book that I’ve read in years and I’m itching to discuss it with someone. So I decided to see if I can get an online book club up and running this summer. If you’re interested, read on…

Getting started

• E-mail me by June 1 that you’re interested in participating
• Buy the book!

Commitments

• Keep up with the reading
• Be an active participant in our online discussion area
• Dissect ideas vigorously but also be nice to other discussants

Schedule

1. 6/9 to 6/15 – Part 1 Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 (44 pages)
2. 6/16 to 6/22 – Chapter 3 (28 pages)
3. 6/23 to 6/29 – Part 2 Introduction and Chapter 4 (38 pages)
4. 6/30 to 7/6 – Chapter 5 (26 pages)
5. 7/7 to 7/13 – Chapter 6 (30 pages)
6. 7/14 to 7/20 – Chapter 7 (26 pages)
7. 7/21 to 7/27 – Chapter 8 (26 pages)
8. 7/28 – 8/3 – Chapter 9 (34 pages)
9. 8/4 to 8/10 – Chapter 10 and Wrap-Up (20 pages)

This offer is open to all leaders and change agents, at whatever level they’re operating (hint: might be a good summer activity for some of your local principals or superintendents?)

I’m looking forward to some powerful discussions. Hope some of you will join me this summer!

Don't read this article

I really wanted to like the Creating Valuable Class Web Sites article in the May 2008 issue of Learning and Leading With Technology. I really did. I believe strongly that teachers should be incorporating digital technologies into their instruction and communication with students and parents, and I know that teachers can use all of the good ideas, best practices, and resources that we can provide. But then I read the article (hat tip to Sylvia Martinez and Bud Hunt) and I was completely dismayed…

As Sylvia and Bud noted on Twitter, many of the web sites presented by the author are quite dated. Geocities and Tripod: weren’t those big in the 1990s? Netscape Composer: Seriously? FrontPage: didn’t Microsoft quit selling that a while ago? The inclusion of such tools calls into serious question the currency, and thus credibility, of the author’s expertise.

The Resources section at the end was similarly lacking. Take a look at Blog Connection. It was one of the two best blogging sites the author could recommend for K-12 educators? And EdBlogger Praxis? The site that hasn’t been updated since February 2007? At least the author linked to eMINTS when it came to wikis…

Instead of tables of outdated web resources and an irrelevant resources section, the author should have included current tools rather than those from 5–10 years ago. Some discussion of the desirability of using outside, non-district-sponsored tools also would have been nice. Instead, the article reads like it was cobbled together by someone who’s rooted in the technology of yesteryear rather than today. This was an opportunity squandered. Is this stuff what the author teaches her students? Doesn’t ISTE have a responsibility to do some checking of article content?

Learning and Leading With Technology is supposed to be helpful to educators in 2008, not 1998. And usually it fulfills that function extremely well. I hate to say this - because I’m rarely critical in public of others (unless they’re clueless leaders who should know better) – but the author and the ISTE editors didn’t do their job with this one.

Route 21 and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

At the SETDA Leadership Summit and Education Forum, we’ve been talking a lot about 21st century skills, so I thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the work that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has been doing.

The Partnership has been quite busy lately. In October, it announced new poll results that showed that a significant majority of voters ‘are deeply concerned that the United States is not preparing young people with the skills they need to compete in the global economy.’ Here’s an excerpt from the full report:

As I noted on my blog earlier this week, on Monday the Partnership, SETDA, and ISTE released a paper on maximizing the impact of digital technologies for 21st century learning. The document contains examples of successful programs that can be used as models, guiding questions for stakeholders, and action principles for moving forward. Plus there’s also this great (if depressing) quote:

No industry or organization can remain competitive today without making comprehensive use of technology as a matter of course in all of its operations. . . . [E]ducation is the least technology-intensive enterprise in a ranking of technology use among 55 U.S. industry sectors, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Today the Partnership released a new resource, Route 21:

[Route 21] represents the first comprehensive, go-to online resource for high-quality content, best practices, relevant reports, articles and research to assist practitioners in implementing 21st century teaching practices and learning outcomes. Route 21 harnesses Web 2.0 features to allow users to tag, rank, organize, collect and share Route 21 content based on their personal interests. Individuals will continuously update the site with relevant examples as well as share their reactions and insights on implementing 21st century skills in their state, district or school.

You can read the press release, watch the 10–minute video, or dive right into the resources and tagging tools:

Also, for those of you who didn’t know, the Partnership recently updated its famous rainbow framework in order to better highlight essential supporting conditions:

[read more about the framework]

In addition to the resources already described, the Partnership has a number of useful reports, issue briefs, and literacy maps, the latter of which are intended to give some examples of 21st century literacies in practice. Many of the Partnership’s presentations are available online, as are some nifty tools for educators and policymakers.

In short, the Partnership is working hard to help us move our nation’s schools forward. There are numerous helpful resources on the Partnership’s main site and in Route 21. I encourage you to check out what the Partnership has to offer.

ROTW: Assessing students with disabilities

The latest installment of the Report of the Week (ROTW) comes from Education Sector:

• Labeled: The Students Behind NCLB’s ‘Disabilities’ Designation

Here’s a quote from the report:

[B]ecause the majority of special education students have disabilities that do not preclude them from reaching grade-level standards there doesn't seem to be a need to rollback NCLB's accountability measures for students with disabilities. To the contrary, doing so could hurt such students by reducing schools' responsibility for ensuring that they are taught to high standards.

Happy reading!

ROTW: Cyberbullying and online teens

My latest Report of the Week (ROTW) comes from the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

• Cyberbullying and Online Teens

Here’s a quote from the report:

There’s one MySpace from my school this year. There’s this boy in my anatomy class who everybody hates. He’s like the smart kid in class. Everybody’s jealous. They all want to be smart. He always wants to work in our group and I hate it. And we started this thing, some girl in my class started this I Hate [Name] MySpace thing. So everybody in school goes on it to comment bad things about this boy.

Happy reading!

ROTW: Connectivity

The latest Report of the Week (ROTW) is actually two reports, both related to Internet connectivity.

The first report, brought to my attention by David Warlick, comes from the Communication Workers of America:

• Speed Matters: A Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States
  (also see the handy interactive map)

Here’s a quote from the report:

[C]ountries like Canada, Sweden, and South Korea have better, faster Internet connections. People in Japan can download an entire movie in just two minutes, but it can take two hours or more in the United States. Yet, people in Japan pay the same as we do in the U.S. for their Internet connection. Not only do they have the technology for higher speeds, but a larger percentage of people in those countries have access to high speed connections. The United States has fallen to 16th place behind other industrialized nations in high speed Internet access.

The second report, brought to my attention by Andy Carvin, is from the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

• Home Broadband Adoption 2007

Here’s a quote from the report:

Currently, 71% of adults use the internet at least occasionally from any location; of these, 94% have an internet connection at home. Among adults with a home internet connection, 70% go online using a high-speed connection, versus 23% who use dialup. . . . 27% of all adults do not use a computer at work, school, home or elsewhere.

Happy reading!

ROTW: Digital equity

My latest Report of the Week (ROTW) comes from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2007 Digital Equity Summit:

• A National Consideration of Digital Equity

Here's a quote from the report:

Educators must recognize connections between the digital divide and achievement gaps in order to reframe digital equity as an essential component of school improvement plans. However there are still a substantial number of educators who only have a superficial understanding of the role of technology in facilitating student learning. As a result, “teachers and, in some cases, administrators lack willingness to embrace new technology and ways to use digital content in learning environments,” asserted one participant. If they use technology, it is part of an enrichment activity instead of an integrated instructional component.

Happy reading!

ROTW: Parents, children, and media

I've been laying low for a few days, giving Did You Know? 2.0 the opportunity to get some traction. So far, so good, although I don't expect it to get as much attention as the first version did.

Anyway, on with the show. It's time for the third installment of my new Report of the Week (ROTW) feature. This week's report is from the Kaiser Family Foundation:

• Parents, Children, and Media

Here's a quote from the report:

Most parents aren’t very happy with the amount of sex or violence in the media today. Two-thirds say they are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate media content children in this country are exposed to, and many believe media is a major contributor to young people’s violent or sexual behaviors. In fact, a strong majority would support government regulations on the amount of such content during the early evening hours. . . . At the same time, the majority of parents see inappropriate media primarily as someone else’s problem: only one in five (20%) say their own children are seeing “a lot” of inappropriate content. The proportion of parents who are “very” concerned about their own children’s exposure to sex or violence on TV - while still high - has declined steadily over the past nine years.

I think the Kaiser Family Foundation has a number of great reports. If you haven’t seen them, also check out their reports on media in the lives of 8–18 year-olds, how kids’ media use helps parents cope, and how Internet filters affect the search for online health information.

Happy reading!

ROTW: Equity and NCLB

It’s time for the second installment of a new feature here at Dangerously Irrelevant, one that I’ve oh-so-creatively titled Report of the Week (ROTW).

This week’s report is from the Campaign for High School Equity:

• A Plan for Success: Communities of Color Define Policy Priorities for High School Reform

Here’s a quote from the report:

Often, schools serving high-poverty or predominantly minority communities do not receive the resources that their more affluent counterparts receive. Such disparities must be eliminated in order to guarantee that all students are equally well-prepared for success in life.

Like most other Reports of the Week, this is listed under the Reading and Research and Evaluation categories. Happy reading!

ROTW: Virtual high schools

Okay, it's time to try out a new feature here at Dangerously Irrelevant: the Report of the Week (ROTW). Can I find and feature an interesting education-related report each and every week? I think I can!

This week's report is from Education Sector:

• Laboratories of Reform: Virtual High Schools and Innovation in Public Education

Here's a quote from the report:

There has been no shortage of solutions for improving the nation’s public schools. School leadership, teacher quality, standards, testing, funding, and a host of other issues have crowded reform agendas. But an important trend in public education has gone largely unnoticed in the cacophony of policy proposals: the rise of a completely new class of public schools - “virtual” schools using the Internet to create online classrooms - that is bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools.

All Reports of the Week will be listed under the Reading category (and, in most instances, the Research and Evaluation category). Happy reading!

Change resource 05

Dede, Honan, & Peters (Eds.). (2005). Scaling up success: Lessons from technology-based educational improvement.

How do we take successful programs and best practices serving a few classrooms or students and scale them up? This book tells us.

Change resource 04

Gladwell. (2002). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference.

Connectors, mavens, and salesmen. These are the folks you want as your allies. These people may or may not be in positions of formal leadership. Don't invite individuals to help facilitate change because of position or title. Invite them because others listen to them!

Change resource 03

Buckingham & Coffman. (1999). First, break all the rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently.

A really, really great book for leaders and change agents.

Change resource 02

Collins. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap... and others don't.

Local communities strongly believe that their schools are good. 'Good is the enemy of great.'

[see also Good to great and the social sectors]

Change resource 01

Pfeffer & Sutton. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action.

Countless leaders know what they should do. But yet desired change fails to happen. Here's why.

How much privacy are we willing to give up?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’ve been reading Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing by Adam Greenfield. It’s a fascinating book and I’m learning a lot.

Greenfield’s essential premise is that in the foreseeable future sensors and transmitters can and will be embedded into everyday objects, ranging from the clothes on our body to the milk in our refrigerator to the blanket on our bed to the picture frame on our wall. This essentially makes the things we use everyday into quasi-digital devices. The rapid evolution, miniaturization, and affordability of RFID chips, and their incorporation into various aspects of life, is one example of this trend. The inclusion of GPS technologies in cars, cell phones, and watches is another. So is some of the work currently being done with mesh networks, smart dust, and the like. Once embedded, these sensors and transmitters will be able to communicate with each other and with more complex digital technologies like your home computer.

Why will sensors and transmitters be embedded into everyday things? Because, as Greenfield notes, in the battle between convenience and privacy, most folks are more than willing to give up some privacy for convenience. I saw this in action quite clearly during my visit to the Microsoft Home of the Future in 2006. A few illustrative examples:

• Imagine that your kitchen counter can discern what you put on it (milk, eggs, flour) and that a recipe appears on the counter surface informing you of the various things that you can make with those ingredients.
• Imagine that your electronic shopping list updates itself because the pantry has informed it that you’re running low on pancake mix.
• Imagine that a red light begins glowing on your bedside picture frame because the motion sensors in Grandma’s apartment haven’t registered any movement for the past six hours even though it’s mid-day.
• Imagine that the rooms in your house can sense the people who enter and adjust the art, lighting, temperature, etc. to reflect  individual preferences.
• Imagine the memory augmentation assistance that you could get from a sensor in your eyeglasses that could register the identity of the person walking toward you and quickly say into your ear her name and how you know her.

These are just a few of the many, many possibilities. Think medicine bottles and backpacks, toilets and toys, floors and doors, and…

Greenfield believes that the arrival of ambient informatics is inevitable. The power and potential will be too great for most people to refuse and, in many cases, the capabilities will be in place before folks even have a chance to think too hard about it and/or make objections. However, Greenfield also notes that we need to start thinking and talking about whatever social, ethical, and other concerns we may have right now. After these informatics are embedded and installed, it often will be too late because there are logic rules that are built into the construction of the sensors and transmitters. For example, maybe you don’t want your floor or front door or toilet ‘spying’ on you but you do want your refrigerator to do so. You need to think about that at the front end during the design and/or purchasing stage, not after the fact.

There’s a lot more I could say on this, but I’ll close with a strong recommendation that folks read Everyware. It’s a very different way to think about digital technologies and yet I agree with Greenfield that it will be our future. We need to start talking about this aspect of ubiquitous computing and we need to ask ourselves, “How much privacy are we willing to give up?”

Everything bad is good for you

I just finished reading Everything Bad Is Good For You. The author, Steven Johnson, makes a quite-convincing case that today's popular culture and media (video games, television, Internet, movies), rather than being 'cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual riches of yesterday,' are much more cognitively complex than what we had available to us just a decade or two ago. If you haven't yet read this book, I highly recommend it. Kottke.org has a short blurb on the book along with a number of excellent links to other resources and commentary.

One of my favorite parts of the book is at the beginning. First Johnson quotes Marshall McLuhan:

The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Johnson then hypothesizes what critics might have said if video games preceded books rather than the other way around:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the long-standing tradition of game playing - which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements - books are simply a barren string of words on the page.

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion - you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.

As Johnson notes, these new forms of communication, participation, and learning have worth. They're not the vast intellectual wastelands that cultural critics often claim them to be. Reading still has a great deal of value, as Johnson clearly states in other parts of his book, but so do these other forms of media. We might sometimes wish that the subject matter or content matter of these media forms were different - for example, I personally wish that some video games weren't so violent and gory - but the bottom line is that the intellectual complexity of popular media is much greater than before. We would be better served to tap into the affordances of these new media forms rather than criticizing them simply because they're new and different.

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.

Random thoughts on a Friday

A few random thoughts that have traveled through my brain today...

1. Next week I am giving two presentations at the Minnesota educational technology (TIES) conference. One is on administrator blogging. One of the new bloggers from our Principal Blogging Project, a principal who works in one of the wealthiest, high-achieving suburban school districts in the country, was going to Skype in with a webcam and talk to the audience for 10 minutes about his experiences as a principal new to blogging. He just e-mailed me to cancel - one of the reasons, he was chagrined to admit, is that there isn't a single webcam in the entire district. Yikes!
2. After reading David Warlick's post (and the accompanying comments) on 'fencing in the learning,' I am struck by how many different reasons we educators can come up with for not putting kids' needs first. As David said long ago, instead of asking What should we reasonably expect our education system to achieve in the next ten years?, we should be asking What should today’s children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years? Like David, I too think that our children have every reason to expect a lot more. If you haven't yet read The Rise of the Creative Class, check out the first few chapters and then think about this issue again after doing so. Or, alternatively, go watch Consuela Molina's video on digital kids in analog schools. I'm not just picking on K-12 here; it's just as bad, if not worse, in academia.
3. Sometimes people are too touchy. Let the little stuff go, I say. Don't we have bigger things on which to expend our mental energy?
4. If my 6-year-old can learn how to Skype me, and if a blog post is literally as easy as sending an e-mail, and if editing a wiki can be as simple as clicking on the Edit button, can someone remind me again what the learning barriers for adult teachers and administrators are to using these kinds of Web 2.0 tools?