Dangerously Irrelevant

"School is really, really boring. I hate coming here."

Civic Enterprises has released its latest study, Raising Their Voices, concerning America’s dropout crisis. What resonated with me the most was the voices of the students in the report. Here are some samples:

“To me, high school is like elementary and middle school. It’s all the same. We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.”

“If you just fight your way through it now and get through school ... eventually it will be interesting when you get into your career field.”

“I’m going to be honest: school is really, really boring. I hate coming here.”

Issue 1: Student boredom

I hate coming here. If you just fight your way through it. The same thing over and over again. These are pretty damning words. They also are pretty common. As the report noted, many students view high school as something that must be tolerated as a stepping-stone to [something] better (emphasis added). 

When’s the last time your school organization asked its students how interesting and engaging their classes were (and then took their responses seriously)?

Issue 2: Meaningful community discussion

The researchers brought together students, parents, and teachers in four different communities to collaboratively discuss the high school dropout program in their local area. In each case, individuals remarked that this was the first time that teachers, parents, and students had been brought together to talk about any issue, including the dropout crisis (emphasis added).

When’s the last time your school organization had teachers, parents, and students (and, yes, administrators) in the same room talking candidly and safely about important issues?

Issue 3: Disconnects between groups

The report noted that:

while dropouts cited boredom as the leading cause for dropping out, many educators we surveyed did not see this as the central cause. In fact, only 20 percent of teachers saw a student’s lack of interest in school as a major factor in most cases of dropout. More than twice as many believed students were making excuses for their failure to graduate. . . .

Additionally, although students said that higher expectations would have mitigated the factors leading to their dropping out, only 32 percent of teachers agreed that we should expect all students to meet high academic standards and graduate with the skills that would enable them to do college-level work, and that we should provide extra support to struggling students to help them meet those standards.

These disconnects exist everywhere, of course. No organization is immune from them. But perception shapes reality. If students say they’re bored and teachers just think students are making excuses and don’t reflect on their own instructional practices, the problem never gets solved.

When’s the last time your school organization intentionally worked to uncover and then meaningfully address existing cognitive, emotional, and perceptual disconnects between groups?

Wrap-up

The Raising Their Voices study was conducted on behalf of the AT&T Foundation and the America’s Promise Alliance. The report illustrates the kind of conversations that can occur when you bring disparate groups of school stakeholders together. It also shows that disconnects between groups can be effectively bridged through structured dialogue and a spirit of mutual respect. The report includes recruiting instructions and a sample discussion guide to help schools set up their own local focus groups. As school leaders, we should do this more…

Happy reading!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

The future of print, part 3

Here's another envisioning of the forms that traditional print publications are going to take as tablet eReaders and computers become more prevalent. This one is from Penguin Books and shows what some interactive experiences might look like for younger children. 

Previous installments in this series were:

• Yes, this is the future of magazines (and newspapers and books and ...)
• The future of magazines, part 2

Thanks to Fast Company for leading me to this video. Happy viewing!

ComETS 2010 - Academic blogging communities, extreme presentation makeovers, and 21st century learning in universities

Iowa State University held its second annual ComETS symposium a couple of weeks ago. Faculty, professional staff, and a few outside folks gathered together to talk about technology integration and implementation in higher education.

Building a community of practice through blogging

Below is my 10–minute ‘lightning strike’ presentation, Building a Community of Practice Through Blogging. I didn’t have my ‘A game’ that day and wasn’t as energetic a presenter as I usually am. I also spent too much time on the ‘creating a listening station’ portion and not enough time on the ‘participating in the conversation’ portion. That ratio was supposed to be 50–50, not 75–25. Despite all that, I think that the presentation came out pretty well and is a solid introduction to RSS and blogging communities for academics. Here’s a quote from my talk:

Most academics have yet to realize the power of social media. . . .

The reason we go to academic conferences is for the conversations. It’s not for the research presentations because you know how good those are. And it’s not to access the papers because we can get those in other channels. It’s to be around other people and have those conversations in the hall and after the sessions and at dinner and so on that solidify our relationships with people. Well, now we can have those conversations year-round. All we have to do is choose to be part of the conversation.

Extreme presentation makeover 

My faculty colleague, John Nash, also gave a lightning strike presentation titled Extreme Presentation Makeover. He took some slides from our rejected UCEA presentation proposal and went to town. [Note to self: always present before John, not after, because he’s a hard act to follow!]. He also has a blog post about his presentation. Here’s a quote from his talk:

The other thing that we generally fail to think about when we give presentations is a call to action. What is it that you want someone to do after you’re done?

All of the symposium videos are available at the ComETS symposium web site and also are being uploaded to the ISU YouTube channel. 

Charting our course: Exploring 21st century learning

Our keynote for the symposium was Malcolm Brown from Educause. Here are my notes from his talk:

"Improvement in postsecondary education will require converting teaching from a 'solo sport' to a community-based research activity." - Herbert Simon

Technology predictions v. course charting

The pace and scale of Internet change is unprecedented, so it's very hard to wrap our heads around it. 

Every second 1,157 videos are uploaded to YouTube.

2.2 million e-mails sent every second

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline

iTunes has many academic lectures / lessons

So does Academic Earth

I love this line from the Kaplan University video: "?"

Funny thing about paradigm shifts: If we knew what the next paradigm was, we'd already be there.

Where is the student in all of this?

The opportunity is in increased student engagement [Do most profs at research universities really care about increased student engagement? If so, they haven't really showed it to date.]

How we learn, National Academies Press

Discussed the impact of the printing press

The 3 Cs of mobile computing

1. Content - delivery, anywhere anytime, ebooks, etextbooks, etc.
2. Collaboration - language learning, formative assessment, first-hand data collection, etc.
3. Community - student authors, leveraging messaging, enhanced polling, etc.

Angela Maiers: We haven't invited our students to be creators or co-creators of content.

Malcolm just cited quick penetration of clickers as examples of higher ed moving more quickly on the tech front

'Some' is not a rebuttal

Expanding from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be

I think that all colleges and universities should have technology communities like ComETS at ISU and at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I said to Jim Twetten, who’s heading the ComETS efforts here:

I like ComETS because it's an opportunity to learn from other ISU educators, both faculty and professional staff, across campus who are doing interesting things with digital technologies. The annual ComETS symposium gives us an opportunity to intersect face-to-face in a variety of different ways. The ongoing ComETS listserv connects us and allows us to share and discuss in between symposia. We're off to a good start. Now the challenge becomes: how do we expand from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be? The latter group is much larger than the former...

You can see some backchannel conversations from the symposium by searching for the Twitter hashtag: #comets. Happy reading!

The future of magazines, Part 2

Sports Illlustrated offered its thoughts on what an electronic version of the magazine might look like. Now Wired has done the same. As the iPad and other similar devices permeate society, will we still call these magazines?

Roger Wilcox, Pam Moran, and other school administrators on YouTube

Roger Wilcox, principal of West Cedar Elementary School in Waverly, Iowa, has a burgeoning YouTube channel that he’s using to communicate with his local community:

Here are three superintendents – Pam Moran, Phyllis Harrington, and Marcus Newsome – who also are using YouTube to get their messages out:

This stuff is easy

Given how easy it is these days to post online video (think YouTube QuickCapture and a webcam, Flip cameras, etc.), I’m baffled that more administrators aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to speak directly to their communities on a regular basis. Forget newsletters, e-mail listservs, or blogging; just turn on the video camera and start talking!

There are numerous benefits to being in regular communication with internal and external stakeholders. The use of online video to connect, explain, build goodwill, create enthusiasm, be transparent, share student work, highlight teacher excellence, tell a story, etc. is a powerful but untapped possibility for most school leaders. Videos don’t have to be polished or professional. Simple, honest, direct communication usually is more meaningful, anyway.

Dive in! 

School leaders, take the plunge: Turn on the webcam or Flip camera and start talking from the heart. You won’t regret it.

[P.S. Teachers can do this too. Dump that paper classroom newsletter. Instead, start a weekly broadcast to your families!]

Update: Dave Meister is off to a good start with this!

Yes, this is the future of magazines (and newspapers and books and ...)

Judy O’Connell asked if the video below is the future of magazines. Yes, absolutely. Maybe not by 2010 or 2012 but sooner than we think. And for newspapers and books too. And, to a lesser extent, maybe we’ll even start seeing more interactivity and/or multimedia embedded within scholarly research, government or policy center reports, and other manuscripts.

If ‘news’ is becoming more of a commodity every day, perhaps it’s this sort of added value from which publishers will make their money. I know I’d pay for something like this from my favorite periodicals.

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the tweet that led me to this. Happy viewing!

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?

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…

Are we too connected?

WHO TV (Des Moines) aired a special report, Are we too connected?, on last night’s news broadcast. Among others, they interviewed me and Dr. Michael Bugeja, Professor and Director of Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication.

I have interacted with Michael a couple of times. He’s a very good guy and a fun guy to talk with, but he’s also a nationally-visible technology critic who is interviewed often by the media. His technology skepticism is probably understandable given that his entire profession is struggling to reinvent itself because of the impacts of these new digital tools, but it’s also at least a little ironic given that he utilizes multiple web sites to publicize his work. He and I often fall on opposite sides of technology issues. I really need to read his book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.

Here are a few quotes from the special report:

All this really does is send a message that someone somewhere else is more important than the place we are and the person we're with. [Bugeja]

That's not a loss of connection, that's a gain of connection compared to where we were before the technologies existed. [McLeod]

There's a time and a place in society for all manner of communication. Former platforms define those areas with real boundaries. But this has no boundaries. It blurs the boundary between home and work, between school and home, between church, temple, mosque and school. It blurs everything. Why? Because it's programmed for revenue generation. ‘We want to make money off you at any time of the day.’ [Bugeja]

Happy reading!

Gen Y: Your 'real' friends are your online friends

The New York Times reports today on a study of MySpace users from the United Kingdom. Here is a quote from the article:

The MySpace study asked social networking users between the ages of 14 and 21 (aka "Generation Y") questions about their interactions both on social networks and in their real life, too. Some 36% of the respondents said they found it easier to talk about themselves online than in the real world, leading them to share more about themselves using technology. This group also felt that their online friends knew more about them, and so, in a sense, were closer than offline friends because they all knew what was going on in each other's lives.

Outside of the social networking sites, the survey respondents overwhelmingly felt ill-at-ease in social groups. A whopping 72% said they felt "left out" and didn't think they fit into any particular group. More than four-fifths (82%) said they moved between four or more different groups of friends in an effort to find acceptance.

So is this…

1. Proof that Internet naysayers are correct that the Web is eroding young people’s ability to communicate effectively face-to-face?, or
2. Proof that Internet advocates are correct that young people are breaking free of local, geographical constraints to find affinity groups that matter to them?

In other words, are these results something about which to be concerned or to celebrate? Both? Neither? Thoughts?

Is pre-loading a Twitter account for a principal a good idea?

Tom Whitby had an interesting idea: create a Twitter account for a school administrator that was pre-loaded with 50 people to follow.

Beth Still liked the idea and blogged about it. I have some hesitancy, however, about the concept, despite Tom and Beth’s good intentions and despite my inclinations to help administrators by making this social media stuff easy for them [and, yes, I’m now officially changing my mind about item #5 in the hyperlinked post]. Here’s the comment that I left on Beth’s blog:

Although I empathize with the sentiment behind this idea, I confess I have some hesitancy about it. Unlike being handing an iPod loaded with podcasts, which involves no identity infringement, I think most folks would prefer to handle their own online identities. Choice of whether or not to join an online service – or even specific online account usernames and/or Twitter IDs – is critical, I believe, for online identity formation (e.g., I wish I had a common username across services instead of being mcleod in some places, scottmcleod in others, and something else in yet others; I choose to use some online services but not others). What you choose for others may not necessarily be how they’d like to be represented. Also, third parties will begin treating those individuals’ online identities as authentic and representative, despite the fact that you, not they, created them. Your representation may or may not be accurate or fair to the person who has an online identity that supposedly represents her but instead represents your perceptions of her. It’s already tough enough trying to get a handle on the variety of ways in which we can be represented online without our permission. Despite the extremely good intentions here, I’m not sure I’d agree that this is a good thing to do.

The essential question here is whether it’s okay to create an online service account in someone else’s name, regardless of how good your intentions are. Beth says that she would let her administrator fill in his own profile. But she already would have made the account…

If you have thoughts on this, please leave them over at Beth’s post. It should be a good conversation!

Teen sexting: I failed my own information literacy test

I tweeted:

And Barry Dahl replied:

Barry’s right and I’m wrong. I failed my own information literacy test. Why? Because even though I had access to (and linked to) the original report, I didn’t critically consume it the way I should have. Instead I relied on this report from CNN:

And because I did, I made an incorrect statement that then got retweeted by others. Shame on CNN for being misleading and/or inaccurate, but shame on me too for not doing my homework the way I should have. Just because CNN is a traditional, reputable news organization doesn’t mean that I don’t need to be a critical consumer of the information it provides.

Thanks, Barry.

Walking out on bad presenters

I walked out of a 2–hour workshop last week. I actually really wanted to know the information that was to be presented, but the workshop facilitator did such a terrible job that I left after 35 minutes. My graduate assistant said the next day, “I heard you walked out on that workshop.” I replied, “Did you hear anything else about it?” She said, “Yeah, I heard it was pretty bad.”

I find myself having less and less patience for people who waste my time in unproductive meetings, boring presentations, workshops that don’t meet my needs, and so on. Even when I’m extremely interested in the topic, a facilitator’s structure and/or delivery can ruin it for me. I don’t leave right away. I try to stay mentally engaged and I give the facilitator a chance to right the ship. But if it’s clearly a lost cause, I’m usually out of there (if I can’t leave, then I start quietly checking my e-mail / surfing the Web).

I have worked very hard over the past few years to ramp up my presentation skills, both in terms of content and delivery. I try to apply that learning to the various aspects of my life, whether it be teaching, consulting, or just holding meetings. I ask myself questions like “Do we really need this meeting or activity?” and “What is my audience doing at this stage?” and “How are my students or participants feeling right about now?” In other words, I try my utmost to think intentionally and purposefully about the impact of what I do on others’ valuable time. Is it too much to expect others to do the same?

But, Scott, it’s rude to walk out on someone (or check your e-mail). Not any more rude than it is to fail to deliver a learning experience that meets the group’s needs rather than your own. It’s one thing to waste your own time. It’s another to waste the time of five to twenty to hundreds of others. Shame on you.

But, Scott, aren’t you worried about your reputation? I’m willing to stand up for quality presentations, meetings, and learning experiences. I think that collectively we would be better off if more of us left more often. We’re captive to our own ‘politeness’ (if that’s what we want to call it) and we suffer countless wasted hours as a result. If folks walk out of one of my presentations, that lets me know that their needs aren’t being met. Rather than taking it personally, I’m glad that they’re going somewhere else that is a better fit for them. If walk-outs happen in large numbers or on a frequent basis, that lets me know that I need to something differently.

But, Scott, maybe the facilitator didn’t know how to do any better. So? How is that my problem? Why shouldn’t the responsibility be on presenters, facilitators, and instructors to do a better job? Why should they get to waste our time rather than improve their skills? What’s their impetus for change if we passively acquiesce to their ineptitude?

P-12 students usually don’t have the chance to walk out of poor learning experiences (wouldn’t it be interesting if we gave every student a red ‘I’m disengaged’ card that she could lay on her desk every time she was turned off or tuned out?). But we adults do if we’re brave enough to stand up for quality learning experiences. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not investing my walk-out last week with any huge societal significance. But larger battles start one principled stand at a time… Care to join me?

Photo credit: Not my cat, but cute enough.

P.S. On a related note, my proposal submission to address the issue of bad academic PowerPoint got rejected by the reviewers for the annual educational leadership professors conference. Ugh.

Why should I come at all? Why should I come back?

Mark Ramsey notes that your web site / blog visitors ask two primary questions:

1. Why should I come at all?
2. Why should I come back?

Whether you’re a corporation, government, non-profit agency, school, or university, these two questions apply to everything you’re doing online. And many, many institutions can’t answer these questions very well.

I had an interaction recently with a health care publicist who said, “But they NEED to know our information. It’s very important. It could even SAVE LIVES.” She didn’t like it when I echoed Seth Godin: “It doesn’t matter. It’s not about you. It’s about them. If they don’t see the meaningfulness and relevance of what you’re offering, it’s your fault, not theirs.”

Time to change your communication, marketing, and stakeholder engagement strategies. Or get used to people ignoring you. Your choice.

Picture credit: Y’all come back now

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

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

Here are some examples:

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

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

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

What if you could find every school, district, or university Twitter feed in one place?

Continuing the theme of my last post, how great would it be if every school, district, or university Twitter feed was in one place? The aggregated posts would give us a sense of what each level of schooling thought was worth publicizing. I’m guessing that we’d also discover lots of interesting information that is typicallly hidden from the view of most of us…

Schools Twibe:

Districts Twibe:

Universities Twibe:

What if every Iowa educator on Twitter could find each other?

After a recent presentation here in Iowa that included some discussion of Twitter, a superintendent came up to me and said, “Okay, I’m in. But how will I find people that I want to follow?” That fantastic question led me to create the Iowa Administrators group at Twibes:

While I was at it, I also created the Iowa Teachers group at Twibes:

Shari Barnhart, Technology Coordinator for the Oskaloosa Schools, then created the Iowa Technology Coordinators group at Twibes:

So what we have here is a burgeoning effort to create spaces where Iowa educators can find others in the state who are on Twitter, see what they’re saying, and sign up to follow them. Maybe there’s a better way to do this but for now I think this has some promise, particularly if folks are willing to sign up and pass this along to others. I believe there are some great conversation and resource-sharing possibilities if most of the Iowa educators on Twitter are following each other.

"What we've got here is (a) failure to communicate" - Follow-up

Those of you who read me regularly may recall my April 24 post that highlighted some parent complaints about the new elementary school schedule that was proposed by my school district’s elementary principals. That post focused on the leadership issue of stakeholder communication…

Well, over 2 weeks later, the principals’ formal response is out (see below). As I expected they might, they give a number of good explanations for the scheduling changes. Although the memo is dated April 30, today is the day it was sent home by our school.

The communication issue is still very much present, though. At its heart, this is a conversation between three groups – school administrators, teachers, and parents/community members – and it’s being waged via paper letters and flyers, with responses several days or weeks apart. As long as it proceeds in this manner, how can this possibly be a successful, respectful conversation?

And, yes, even more trees gave their lives to the cause...

"What we've got here is (a) failure to communicate"

The elementary principals here are collectively rearranging their schools’ schedules to create a unified literacy block every morning and greater opportunity for teachers to have common planning time. In order to do this, Art and Physical Education time will take a hit, as will some elementary teachers’ ability to focus on one particular subject area (i.e., just math) rather than having to teach all of the subjects. I think that the new schedules also will allow for a greater possibility of doing flexibile ability grouping within subject areas.

Many parents and teachers are unhappy about the changes. I’ve heard from several of them and this was under my windshield wiper last night when I left our school’s Science Night:

There are both pros and cons to the changes. My kids’ elementary school has a phenomenal art teacher and we’re not too keen on our kids seeing her less often. And, of course, regular physical activity is important too, particularly given the growing problem of childhood obesity. On the other hand, I’ve seen firsthand in many schools the benefits of having common planning periods, a greater emphasis on unified literacy instruction, flexible ability grouping, and so on. In a community like ours, where the family demographics are such that most districts would die to have the standardized test results and college attendance rates that we do, there also is a strong element of ‘the current system is working fine so why change it?’

The interesting issue for me is the communication problem that’s highlighted here. The plan was presented a week or two ago and the uproar is now starting to reach critical levels. If the principals had done a better job of communicating their intentions and involving teachers and parents in the planning, could this emotional upheaval have been avoided? Without admittedly knowing any of the particulars, I’m guessing that there probably was a way to avoid some of this.

On another note, paper flyers on windshields? Um, the Internet, anyone? Maybe even e-mail? Another tree gives its life to the cause…

[FYI, the title quote is from Cool Hand Luke.]

Parents are using online tools to push on schools

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

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

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

and

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: lynetter

Help wanted - World's best PTO blog?

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

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

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

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

Teaching administrators about Wikipedia

[cross-linked at the TechLearning blog]

Last year a middle school librarian in New Jersey received a lot of media attention for her anti-Wikipedia campaign:

Linda O'Connor regards Wikipedia the same way former first lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against drugs. . . . She put up a sign saying "Just Say No to Wikipedia" over the computers in the school library. . . . Wikipedia is blocked on all computers in the Warren Hills Regional School District.

At the time I said that I was highly skeptical about this librarian's stance. On any given day, approximately 1 in 10 Internet users visits Wikipedia. This fact alone should indicate that there's something going on worth paying attention to, something that warrants a more nuanced approach than simply prohibiting access. If it was terrible, it wouldn’t maintain its audience. Folks who take the time to understand Wikipedia learn very quickly that it's actually an amazing site. It's already 8 times larger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, is growing incredibly quickly, and has been created entirely by volunteers. Peer-reviewed studies published in our top scientific journals have shown that it is as accurate as the Brittanica too, particularly those articles that reside in its mainstream core (rather than at the fringes).

If all of this is true, then why are so many educators, librarians, and media specialists upset about Wikipedia? I think the concerns stem from several different sources. One is their beliefs about accuracy. We tend to assume that print materials such as the Brittanica and school textbooks are error-free when in actuality they contain numerous mistakes. Even when identified, these mistakes usually linger until the next edition is printed and purchased (unlike Wikipedia which corrects known mistakes almost instantly). Second, the idea that volunteers can create something as valuable as that created by experts strikes us as ludicrous. But in this case it happens to be true. Sure, at any given second, some vandal or incompetent may have inserted something inaccurate into a particular article. But over time (and often unbelievably quickly), Wikipedia is remarkably self-healing, unlike the paper materials on our bookshelves. Wikipedia also is a counter to outdated information. How many of the reference books in libraries and school media centers contain incomplete or inaccurate information simply because they're old? Wikipedia doesn't have that problem.

Our students deserve better training about how to navigate our new, complex, online information landscape. They don't learn about information literacy, bias, media literacy, assessment of online validity, and other critical online skills by being denied access to that information. They don't learn how to cite and use online resources appropriately if they can't use those resources and learn from their mistakes because the materials are banned.

If you take half an hour to show administrators these things, their mindset changes. I like to have school leaders visit some Wikipedia pages with me. I start by showing them the asphalt article. After we look at the article itself, I show them the history tab (and take them all the way back to the first few revisions) and then the discussion tab. We talk about what we see and what their perceptions are regarding accuracy, quality, and neutrality. Then I put them into groups to check out more controversial articles like Sarah Palin, Islam, Vladimir Putin, or Pluto. They examine the articles for bias and inaccuracy and spend some time in the history and discussion areas.

The administrators inevitably walk away with a deeper understanding of Wikipedia and a greater appreciation for the safeguards that have evolved to protect against abuse and inaccuracy. Many of them also begin to see the site as an excellent lens for teaching students about how, as a society, we construct knowledge, negotiate meaning, and develop collective understanding. Some even begin to think about how their students might be able to serve as Wikipedia contributors. In the end, that richer understanding may be more valuable than the content of the articles themselves.

How are you using Wikipedia to teach information literacy and critical thinking?

ITEC 2008 - (In)effective presentations

I delivered a presentation today at ITEC 2008 on (in)effective presentations. I thought some of you might be interested in the before and after slides I displayed to show my own growth in this area. I’m getting better!

Download files: pptx ppt pdf

Help wanted: Podcasting superintendents?

Does anyone know of some superintendents who are podcasting? If so, would you drop a URL and/or some contact info in the comments area for this post? Doug Johnson and I are looking for some examples that we can show other superintendents…

Publicly available v. readily accessible

The authors of Blown to Bits, an absolutely superb book on life ‘after the digital explosion,’ note that

There is a difference … between ‘public’ and ‘readily accessible.’

Public records such as real estate transfers, birth records, and business transactions often contain sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, mother’s health information, credit card numbers, voter registration, fingerprints, professional occupations, and the like. While these data technically always have been available to the public, the difficulty of sifting through the paper records made large-scale aggregation and use nearly impossible.

What happens when those public records get digitized, however? What happens when public databases become easily accessible? What happens when paper records are turned into searchable text via optical character recognition and/or tagging? Or, as the authors, note, what happens when all of this public information gets merged with commercial marketing databases?

As the IowaLandRecords.org controversy here in Iowa shows, we need to do some tough thinking on this topic. Just how ‘public’ do we want our public records to be?

A few useful resources

• Arias, M. (2007). Internet access to public records v. privacy: What a complex clash to unravel.
• Bermann, S. (2006). Privacy and access to public records in the digital age.
• Center for Democracy and Technology. (1995). Public records: Access, privacy, and public policy.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center. (2007). Privacy and public records.
• Levitt, C. (2002). Regulating the availability of public records online.
• Levitt, C. (2005). How public are public records?
• Neave, M. (2003). International regulation of the publication of publicly accessible personal information.
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. (2006). Public records on the Internet: The privacy dilemma.

The back of my business card

Many of us don't think much about the back of our business cards. I think they're an opportunity. Here's what it says on the back of my card:

… and they all crossed their fingers, hoping … despite little to no investment in their leaders … despite making conscious, intentional decisions to keep it out … that somehow their students and staff would be prepared for the digital, global world that surrounded them …

The End?

I’ll probably word this a little differently next time, but I think this gets my message across that we need to better invest in our leaders and that we need to recognize that schools must be critically engaged in the preparation of digital citizens / workers. I always hand out my card with the back facing up so that the recipient at least sees that there’s something there.

What’s on the back of your business card? What could / should be?

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.]

We need to build community capacity (a.k.a. Agreeing with Jeff Utecht)

Earlier this week I disagreed with Jeff Utecht. Today I’m going to heartily agree with him. Over at the SchoolFinder blog, Jeff said:

It was interesting yesterday at a parent coffee we held where Kim Cofino and I showed the parents Karl Fisch’s Did You Know video. We had one parent ask “What is the school doing to prepare my child for this future?” That’s what we need. We need the parents to start asking those questions of our school. We need to educate our school boards, our parents, and then we will see change…..hopefully.

I’m absolutely delighted that the parent asked one of the questions from the end of Did You Know? 2.0. That’s exactly why Karl, xplane, and I included those questions - to prompt some parental and community pressure on school organizations and policymakers.

Many of us spend a lot of time working with educators, trying to help them envision what a change to a 21st century teaching-learning model might look like. But usually we don’t spend nearly enough time working with parents and community members - creating the vision, answering questions, and addressing concerns.

We need to be better communicators with our local folks, and by that I mean our entire community, not just the school board. We need to take every opportunity we can to have group conversations with parents and community supporters. They need to understand how our personal and professional lives are changing dramatically because of these digital technologies. Even if they’re not living it themselves at home or at work, they’re feeling the effects through their children, their employer, or their friends and family. But they may not understand exactly the depth of what’s occurring…

Help them understand. A side chat at a school event or over the back fence can pay dividends later when the school system asks for the community’s suppport. E-mailing a couple of videos can spark a conversation when you bump into someone at the grocery store, soccer game, or band concert. Invite a few people over for snacks and, while the kids play in the backyard or you play bridge, bring up a couple of issues for them to think about.

We need to invest more in our communities’ capacity to understand and to assist.

What are some successes that you’ve had with your local community? What are some good strategies that you can share for facilitating local stakeholder buy-in for 21st century-related change initiatives?

Help wanted: Moving Forward classroom wiki and podcast projects

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

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

• Classroom wiki projects
• Classroom podcast projects

Thanks!

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

No Facebook for you!

Over at the On Our Minds @ Scholastic blog, Tyler Reed is pondering the recent announcement by the Lamar (MS) County School District that it will prohibit teachers from communicating with students via social networking tools such as Facebook or MySpace.

The question in my mind is:

Why treat social networking spaces differently than any other means of teacher communication?

The issue is actual inappropriate teacher communication and/or behavior (which I'm guessing is already covered by board policy), not the method by which teachers communicate with students. A prohibition on use of social networking tools does absolutely nothing to prevent inappropriate teacher communication with students via other channels. So the district either needs to implement similar policies for telephones, snail mail, written notes, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, e-mail, online video, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like or it needs to justify why social networking sites are so evil compared to all the other ways that teachers and students can communicate.

If the district is going to ban social networking and other 21st century communication tools, it's going to be awfully busy making policies since new tools pop up every week. Also, one of the first things you learn in law school is that you should never make a rule you can't enforce. How on earth would the district ever monitor this?

Facebook and MySpace are the 5th and 7th most popular sites on the Internet, respectively. Instead of exploring how teachers, students, and parents can use these sites productively, the district instead has turned into the social networking Nazi: no Facebook for you! Just for kicks, I took a look at the performance of the Lamar County schools. My suggestion for the school board is that perhaps its time and energy would be better spent raising the low academic performance of the students in the poorest school in the district rather than passing unnecessary and unenforceable policies.

This whole thing is just goofy...

Blogging, tweeting, and the uncovering of personality

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

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

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

Photo credit: weblogg-ed.com

NECC 2008 - Channel overload

Is anyone else feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of the information available here at NECC? It’s bad enough when we’re at home, but the focused concentration of all of these people on this single event within a short time period, combined with the proliferating use of both older tools (Twitter, blogs, RSS, tags) and newer tools (Summize, Ustream, CoverItLive), along with all of the new people I’m meeting (and thus want to add to my ‘personal learning network’), is leading to some serious mental overload.

Is it possible to actually attend conference (and unconference) sessions as well as … ?

• talk to people
• monitor the various Technorati tags (ebc08, necc, necc08, necc2008, individual session tags)
• monitor the various Flickr tags (ebc08, necc, necc08, necc2008, individual session tags)
• respond to the blog posts, Flickr pictures, or comments that you discover
• post on your own blog!
• follow the NECC conversation in Twitter and Summize and Hitchhikr
• participate in the NECC Ning and/or your Facebook/MySpace social network(s)
• read and respond to cell phone text messages
• track down and read the various wikis, handouts, etc. that are floating around
• track down and watch the various Ustreams and CoverItLive backchannels that are floating around
• investigate some of the new technology tools that you learn about
• and so on (I’m sure I’ve forgotten something major!) …

Maybe I’m getting old, but my brain hurts. In a good way, but it still hurts.

Photo credit: 'a' stands for headache

NECC 2008 - A look ahead at the communications industry

Here are my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC. There is too much information to fit in one post so I’m breaking it up…

Communications Industry: A Look Ahead
Link Hoewing, Vice President, Internet and Technology Policy, Verizon Communications

Everything is moving from fixed to mobile technologies (both voice and broadband)

• Consumers are in control
• Three paradigms: wireless, IP, broadband
• Anytime/anywhere high bandwidth connectivity
• Lifestyle/business pesonalization
• Universal connectivity and standards
• Greater control by users at ‘the edge’
• Extension of high-capacity capabilities from hubs to endpoints
• Interactive applications and services to address social as well as business issues
• Statistics
• 54% of all homes now have broadband
• 82% of all Americans have a cell phone
• 5.6 million African-American homes had broadband access in 2005. By 2008 that was 16.1 million homes (over 40 million individuals)
• People are increasingly using cell phones as mobile data devices, not just telephones
• Some homes have 30 to 35 digital devices (computers, televisions, cameras, etc. (Pew/Internet home media ecology)
• Everyone is losing lines. Verizon had 4% line loss in 2007. Cable VOIP, wireless, cell phones, etc. 33 million homes in Verizon footprint; Verizon lost 2 million last year.
• Verizon’s new strategy is built on broadband. It’s busy upgrading its lines. Verizon had the largest expenditure of capital in the country last year (more than GE, NTT, Walmart, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhllips, etc.).
• 80% of Verizon lines are DSL capable (90% in urban areas).
• $63 billion in network upgrades since 2004 (more than any other company). EV-DO reaches 228 million people today. LTE (4G) by 2010 with 75 Mb down.
• 15–50 Mb broadband service is available. 100 Mb service is in trial. There is a need to support high-demand multimedia applications.
• The shift in emphasis is from locations (landlines to homes) to people (mobile) and connectivity.
• Everything is being driven by the technology, by competition, and by consumers who want their devices to do more.
• Solving key challenges by changing the paradigm
• About 90% of health records are still on paper
• Real-time information on energy usage can lead to 13% reduction in energy use
• Prudent use of technology (e.g., e-commerce) could reduce human-induced global emissions by 15% by 2020
• Truly individualized approaches and ‘learning communities’
• Students entering school and gaming turn out to be primary reasons for people to sign up for broadband

My not-so-friendly library, boring teachers, and other marketing interactions

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

My city’s public library is a wonderful place. It hosts a variety of well-attended events, has a phenomenal children’s section, and serves as a real hub for the community. But its formal communications stink.

The very first time that you have an overdue book, the initial notice that you receive says that failure to pay your fines may result in being turned over to a collection agency. Ouch. When you request a book, the notification that the book is in says that failure to pick up the book promptly will result in a $0.50 fine. Huh? If you write a letter to the public library’s director highlighting the somewhat draconian tone of its communications, you receive a letter justifying the library’s terseness (trust me on this one). So despite all of the great things that the public library does, you’re still left with a bitter taste in your mouth.

Seth Godin reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron / stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.

What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction. And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.

Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities. We can bemoan the lack of student engagement / parent support / community involvement / referendum votes all we want, but our actions probably led to the problem(s) in the first place. Putting forth a glossy spin on the surface (We’re the best! Support us!) does no good if we’re not willing to look at our underlying practices as the marketing interactions that they are.

Moving Forward - Blogs for special education teachers

Many of you know that I'm asking the edublogosphere to gradually help me flesh out the Moving Forward wiki so that it can be a valuable resource to presenters and others who are trying to facilitate change in schools. For example, in April we identified a number of high-quality elementary classroom blogs.

This week I'm asking for great blogs that are of interest to special education teachers (particularly special education teachers who are blogging themselves). By great blogs, I mean the kind that you might show in a presentation to persuade others of the power and potential of blogging for teachers of students with special needs. If you know of any such blogs, please add them to the wiki!

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.

Not so irrelevant 008

My latest roundup of links and tools…

I read blocked blogs

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

Are you up to the challenge?

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

Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia

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

No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!

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

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

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

New tools I’m finding quite useful

• Taboo Firefox extension
• FeedDemon RSS reader

The impetus is on us, not them

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

A couple of gems from Clay Burell…

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

And a couple more from Gerald Bracey

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

We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?

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

And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson

• Don’t count your Twitter followers

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

ITEC 2008 - My proposals

The Iowa Technology Education Connection (ITEC) conference each year is fairly small. Despite its size, however, it tends to bring in some really big-name speakers for its keynote addresses. Last year the keynote speakers were Steve Wozniak and David Pogue (I also had a chance to finally meet Dennis Harper, which was super fun for me). This year’s keynotes are Hall Davidson and Alan November.

Below are the proposals I just submitted to ITEC 2008. Hopefully some will get accepted. Hope to see you in Des Moines in October!

Getting your principals and superintendent on board

If the leaders don't get it, it's not going to happen. This highly-interactive workshop will focus on some techniques and strategies for getting principals and superintendents to be better supporters of technology integration efforts. Bring your laptop!

Establishing an effective online presence in an attention economy

In an attention economy - when there is more information than people can possibly pay attention to - it's hard to get noticed. Learn why an effective online presence is now necessary and how to get started.

Why aren't you having a bigger impact?

Feel like you're working hard but making less of an impact than you'd hoped? Join us for an interactive discussion about technology, school change, and informal leadership.

(In)Effective presentations

Death by PowerPoint. Everyone knows the phrase and yet dry, boring, ineffective slideware presentations continue to be the norm. Both educators and students can learn how to create and deliver memorable presentations that leave audiences wanting more!

Moving Forward - Elementary classroom blogs

Thanks to @rickscheibner, @abubnic, @rrmurry, @kolson29, @plugusin, @glassbeed, @pmcanulty, @tracyweeks, @NancyW, @RickTanski, @juliafallon, @swvalley, and @rwentechaney, I now have a number of new elementary classroom blogs to show my children’s principal today. What's with the @ signs? Oh, those are Twitter IDs. What’s Twitter, you say? Well, among other things, it’s a great way to get questions answered. Fast.

I’ve added these blogs to the Blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki. If you know of any other great elementary classroom blogs – ones that have students blogging (as opposed to just teachers) – please add them to the wiki. What’s the Moving Forward wiki, you say? It’s a communal resource for people trying to facilitate change in schools. Check it out.

Thanks for the tweets, everyone!

Bad PR: Chorus concert copyright restrictions

One of the local school districts here in Iowa had an all-elementary-school chorus concert on Friday. At the beginning, the audience was told

Please turn your cell phones off. Please do not use flash photography; we don’t want to startle any of the participants. And no videotaping, please, because of copyright restrictions.

Not safety or privacy or confidentiality considerations. Copyright restrictions.

270 shining little faces on stage, ready to perform. A packed auditorium full of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and family friends. And the deflating message that they get, mere seconds before their children begin to sing in their dulcet voices, is:

Hi, John Q. Public. Thanks for slogging your kid to school, even in the rain and snow, every Wednesday at 7:30am all year for chorus practice. Thanks for getting your kid all gussied up for this huge event. We know that your precious angel is up on stage getting ready to sing his or her heart out. We know that the whole extended family is here to support that little boy or girl. But even though your heart is just bursting at the seams to capture the joy and excitement of this experience and share it with your child and your loved ones, we’d like to invoke ‘copyright protections’ so, too bad, you can’t do that. Have a good concert!

What a slap in the face. And we wonder why the public doesn’t support school bond referenda…

We Think

Here's a nifty video by Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. The book looks interesting. I don't know how much it overlaps Clay Shirky's phenomenally excellent book, Here Comes Everybody, but I might have to get it (it's only available at Amazon UK?).

Many thanks to Rob Jacobs for leading me to this video. I have a feeling I'll be using it in some presentations in the near future.

A tale of two posts: The vortex and the virus

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

As David pointed out, two posts from a couple of weeks ago fostered a great deal of conversation in the blogosphere. Both were impactful, but in very different ways. The first one was Will Richardson’s post about 21st century skills for educators (and presenters). The second was my post highlighting seven videos that students had taken of their teachers during class. Since the target audience for the work I do at CASTLE consists of school administrators who mostly tend to be unfamiliar with the blogosphere, I thought it might be helpful to dissect the two posts a bit to illustrate some of the power and potential of blogging.

The vortex

It’s fun to get comments on a blog post. I know that I eagerly check my Recent Comments section each day to see if anyone has chimed in on what I’ve written. In fact, the feedback can be addictive, sparking the desire to write more and expand the conversation. Those of us who blog know, however, that most of our posts get a handful of comments at best and often get none at all.

In contrast, Will’s post was a veritable vortex. He started a conversation that drew in numerous people and inspired them to participate and to return again later to check in on its progress. A multitude of comments swirled around and doubled back on each other and, like a tornado, new discussion threads were sucked in and incorporated into the larger whole. Will’s post took on a life of its own, a storm of conversation that grew in unforeseen ways. Will was the first to admit that the conversation that occurred was far bigger than he ever could have anticipated at the onset.

How do we capture the impact of a post like Will’s? Well, we can do a simple count of the total number of comments: an astounding 164! Recognizing that online readers rarely have to scroll down more than a few screens worth, we also can note that the total commentary represents 119 screens’ worth of information (at least in my browser). My copy-and-paste of the entire dialogue into Microsoft Word reveals a count of 713 paragraphs over 63 pages (Times New Roman, 12–point font): a total of nearly 23,000 words! Or we can use Britt Watwood’s innovative approach and represent the conversation as a word cloud (below is the one I just made in ManyEyes):

I’m sure there are other ways to think about and represent a vortex-like post. The essential idea here is that a blog post of this nature draws in outsiders and keeps them swirling around the central core (the post itself).

The virus

If Will’s post was notable for the number of comments it spawned on his blog, my post illustrates the other kind of impact that a blog post can have: the ability to spawn conversation and connections in places other than the original blog. Similar to a nuclear chain reaction that continuously sparks additional activity further and further out, a virus-like post captures the attention of others and inspires them to comment, not on the original blog but on their own blogs. In other words, the original post ‘infects’ a few other bloggers, whose posts ‘infect’ even more people, who in turn ‘infect’ even more, and so on. Commenting and hyperlinking is occurring in a variety of different places, many far removed from the original post. In its totality, a rich, complex dialogue is occurring. It’s just difficult to figure out where.

Although conversations that occur across the blogosphere are much more difficult to monitor due to their dispersed nature, Technorati, a blog search engine, can help. After searching for the URL of my post in Technorati, I painstakingly went through the results. I visited each unique blog link, read what it had to say about my post, and counted how many comments it had garnered. I also put the URL of each of those posts into Technorati to see how many links they had garnered in addition to my original post. The table below shows that my original post garnered 88 comments and that 57 other blog posts linked to it. Those 57 posts in turn sparked another 198 comments and another 92 blogs linked to them. If I was ambitious, I could have searched each of those 92 secondary links on Technorati to see which of the 57 were cross-linking to each other, if there was a third level of additional blogs linking to those 92, etc. However, what I did was already very time-intensive so I decided to stop.

The essential idea for a virus-like post is that much, if not most, of the conversation is swirling around outside the original blog.

Closing thoughts

Two types of blog posts. One that generates conversation on-site. One that sparks discussion out in the wild, wooly world of the Web. Is one kind of post better than the other? Nope. But together, these two kinds of posts illustrate the powerful and interesting connections that can occur across geography and time if we choose to take advantage of the affordances that these technologies lend us.

Cell phone cameras in the K-12 classroom: Punishable offenses or student-citizen journalism?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Take a look at the seven YouTube videos below, all taken by student cell phone cameras in classrooms. Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for filming and posting these?

Do the math

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Update: As of May 2009, I now have about 5,000 subscribers to this blog. Alter my calculations accordingly...

According to Feedburner, I currently have about 2,100 subscribers to my blog. While that's obviously not a huge number compared to many other blogs (see my Technorati rank, which is slightly below that of the TechLearning blog), let's do the math for a minute...

Let's say I average 4 posts a week for 50 weeks a year. 4 x 50 x 2,100 readers equals 420,000 person contacts each year. In other words, through my blog I have the opportunity to have 420,000 interactions with my audience every twelve months. These are folks who have actively sought me out and are voluntarily reading what I write (which, by the way, still blows my mind). Over 10 years, that's over 4 million opportunities for me to spread my message to others, assuming that my current reader totals don't improve at all (which, obviously, I hope they do).

Now, let's compare this with a journal article. According to the information sent to me by the editors, the most prestigious peer-reviewed educational leadership research journal, Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ), has approximately 160 individual subscribers and 1,630 institutional subscribers (i.e., libraries), for a total of about 1,800 subscriptions. Because EAQ serves folks interested in a broad range of educational leadership issues, at best only a small fraction of the individual readers will be interested in an article on technology leadership-related issues. This also is true for anyone doing a literature search for a research article or dissertation. For argument's sake, let's say that each technology-related EAQ article might have 60 readers a year, or 600 readers a decade (this is probably quite generous): a very rough ratio of one-third of the subscription total. [Note: this is obviously not very scientific. I'm engaging in some very loose back-of-the-envelope calculations here. There's probably a better way to come up with a more accurate estimate.].

Now of course faculty don't publish in only one journal. An unbelievably productive faculty member might publish 5 to 10 articles a year, each in a journal with roughly 500 to 5,000 individual and institutional subscribers. For this example, let's assume the faculty member is super-productive and is publishing in journals with the widest reach. Using the same rough ratio I used for EAQ (i.e., about 1/3 of the subscription numbers over a decade), 10 articles per year x 10 years x 5,000 subscribers x 1/3 = 166,667. Again, I think this is quite optimistic. Few faculty members are this productive and, even if true, it's pretty likely that readership of a faculty member's articles is nowhere close to this total.

Okay, let's review:

• blog = 4,200,000 person interactions per decade
• journals = 166,667 person interactions per decade

The blog wins hands-down from a numbers perspective, even assuming what I think is probably the absolute best case scenario for the peer-reviewed journal path. If we also consider

1. the ability to hear back from people via blog comments (i.e., to have a true conversation about what's written);
2. the ability to easily search the content of the blog via Internet search engines (unlike research databases, which typically allow you to only search within article abstracts, not full articles);
3. the greater availability of blogs to the public generally and educators specifically (particularly since most K-12 folks rarely read peer-reviewed journals);
4. the ability of popular blog posts to be spread through other bloggers and tools like Digg to even larger audiences;
5. the ability of blogs to handle multimedia content (i.e., graphics, audio, video); and
6. the superior connectivity of blogs compared to journal articles (i.e., direct hyperlinks to other resources versus footnotes);

the case for a blog seems even stronger.

So this raises the question... Why would anyone who wishes to actually reach educators and hopefully influence change in schools not be blogging?

Also... why haven't more faculty caught on to this?

Everything is a marketing interaction

Every time you interact with a customer, you're engaging in marketing. Doesn't matter if you're instituting a policy, gaining some data, delivering an invoice... it's a marketing interaction.

… When you yell at a classroom full of kids because one kid misbehaved, that's a marketing decision.

from Seth Godin, What’s the point of this interaction?

Just Say No to Wikipedia

A middle school librarian in New Jersey has gotten some media attention for her anti-Wikipedia campaign:

Linda O'Connor regards Wikipedia the same way former first lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against drugs. . . . She put up a sign saying "Just Say No to Wikipedia" over the computers in the school library. . . . Wikipedia is blocked on all computers in the Warren Hills Regional School District.

I’m highly skeptical.

If the district is going to take a principled stand against Wikipedia because some information is biased or incorrect, is it also taking out all of the encyclopedias (which research has shown, on average, to be as inaccurate as Wikipedia)? Is it removing all of the news magazines and newspapers? The article makes a big deal about how school librarians preview materials before they’re placed on the shelves, but I can guarantee you that librarians and media specialists do not have time to screen every word of every incoming publication. They miss errors and biases just like the Wikipedia community does. Also, it’s ludicrous to pretend that the school library vetting process is free of bias. Oh, and I challenge you to find a school library that doesn’t have old, outdated (and thus inaccurate) non-fiction and/or reference materials on its shelves.

This is all of a bunch of hooey. This shouldn’t have even been a story. When is the Associated Press going to run this story?

Schools teach kids how to wisely and appropriately navigate 21st century information channels

Or this one?

New Jersey school district blocks kids from using one of the most important and powerful information resources in existence because of mistaken beliefs about inaccuracy and bias

Or maybe this one?

Wikipedia is an amazing contribution to the body of human knowledge. New Jersey school district says ‘No thanks.’

Or is it asking too much of the newspaper press to avoid bias by showing the other side of this issue?

Youth violence and electronic media

This arrived in my e-mail inbox yesterday:

CDC REVIEW OF ELECTRONIC MEDIA AND YOUTH VIOLENCE
Research Shows Increase in Electronic Aggression

In September 2006, experts from academic institutions, federal agencies, and nonprofit organizations gathered at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, to better understand the varied ways new media technology – blogs, instant messaging, chat rooms, email, text messaging and the Internet – influences youth aggression. The two-day meeting, "Electronic Media and Youth Violence," was held to review current research and to discuss the implications for youth, parents, school staff, and educational policymakers. Data from the review show although rates of electronic aggression are lower than rates of physical and verbal aggression, these rates seem to be increasing. In 2000, 6 percent of internet users ages 10 to 17 said they had been subjected to online harassment; by 2005, the percentage had risen to 9 percent – an increase of 50 percent. 

The complete review can found in the December 2007 supplement of the Journal of Adolescent Health. To access a complete copy of the Journal and the supporting issue briefs, which summarize the research and discuss the implications of these findings for youth, parents, school staff, and educational policy makers, please visit www.cdc.gov/injury.

A few thoughts…

1. Most parents probably don’t do near enough at home to teach and monitor children’s appropriate usage of electronic communication tools. We know that schools and religious institutions don’t when kids are with them. So why should we be surprised that some children and adolescents are using these tools for inappropriate purposes? It’s like Lord of the Flies out there when it comes to adult supervision!
2. The JAH research articles on this topic are impressive. It’s going to take me a while to read through them all. My first scan, however, is that while there seems to be a bevy of top notch, peer-review-quality research there, it’s all on the harmful effects of communication technologies and none on the empowering effects of the same. We need good, data-based information on this topic, but I’d like to see academia provide some counterpoint research on the positive aspects too, not just more fear-driven research. I want to also see a two-day meeting on Electronic Media and Youth Empowerment. We’re not going to back to a tech-less society. Why can’t we get info on both sides of the coin so that we can make intelligent decisions about this stuff?
3. ‘An increase of 50 percent’ sounds ominous. An actual rise from 6 percent to 9 percent doesn’t. Presentation makes all the difference.
4. The policy implications from the expert panel crack me up. Essentially the panel said ‘The federal government should do very little. The states should do more. School districts and schools should do the most.’ In other words, they could have just typed the word ‘federalism’ on a piece of paper, handed it in, and gone out for coffee. Nice job, folks!

The importance of being 'clickable'

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

• The importance of being 'clickable'

Here's an excerpt:

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

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

Michael Wesch dust-up

A few weeks ago I highlighted some videos made by Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University. If you haven’t seen them, I encourage you to do so.

David Warlick liked A Vision of Students Today. Gary Stager didn’t. And Michael was stirred to make a clarification. The comments on all three blog posts are informative and interesting.

The great part of the Web, of course, is that it makes all of this conversation public, transparent, open to participation by others, and, dare I say, even possible. Sure, before the Internet and blogs existed, Michael, David, and Gary could have exchanged thoughts about Michael’s work via mail or e-mail. But this is more powerful (and much more fun).