Dangerously Irrelevant

Activity: Schools, change, and resource allocation

Here’s an activity you can do with school administrators and teachers (and maybe school board members?). Total time: about 45 minutes.

Resources needed

• PowerPoint slides (pptx ppt pdf)
• Pre-made Google Doc formatted like this, with sharing set up so that anyone can view AND edit
• Internet access and a laptop for at least one participant in each group

Set-up (about 5 minutes)

Whem most folks think and talk about organizational change, they envision it in linear terms:

In reality, change in organizations looks more like this:

In other words, change occurs more gradually, particularly at the beginning as employees spend time wrapping their minds around desired changes, how to fit those changes into existing practices, what they need to get rid of or substantially alter, what they still retain, etc. Change always starts slow and takes a while to (hopefully) gather steam.

I heard a presentation by IBM a few years back in which managers explained that, as much as possible, the company tries to frontload a heavy dose of resources toward any new change initiative. The resource allocation curve essentially is a mirror image of the change curve, allocating heavy amounts of training and training time, money, support structures, etc. up front and then tapering off closer to the end once the desired change is well-established.

The goal is to actually shift the change curve to the left - accelerating sooner to the desired outcome – by allocating large amounts of resources up front.

Few schools have the resources of IBM, of course. As a result, the resource allocation curve looks more like this in most school organizations:

In most schools, then, we have a resource allocation gap of sorts, between what we typically provide and what we perhaps should provide:

This is one of the reasons that change in schools thus looks more incremental / evolutionary / linear rather than revolutionary / exponential.

Group work (about 40 minutes)

1. Divide the group into smaller discussion groups of three to five people. Have each discussion group appoint a recorder.
2. Send the recorders into the Google Doc. Have them type in the group’s answer under the question in Part 1. 5 minutes in small group discussion, 5 minutes in large group sharing. What kind of intense resources are necessary to move you forward faster than incremental change? BE VERY SPECIFIC. Don't just say "time," say "time for ??." Don't just say "professional development," say "professional development for ??."
3. Send the groups back into the Google Doc. Have them answer the question in Part 2 by filling in the numbered items. They can add a couple more items if they have time. 5 minutes in small group discussion, a few minutes in large group sharing. What are 5-7 reasons why your school organization can't get beyond incremental change?
4. Have the groups then look at the next highest group’s responses to Part 2. For example, Group 1 looks at Group 2’s responses, Group 2 looks at Group 3’s responses, and so on (the highest-numbered group will look at Group 1’s responses). Have each group type in possible solutions for each of the reasons offered by the other group. 10 minutes in small group discussion. What are some possible solutions for each of the reasons offered?
5. Conclude with a large group discussion about the overall document in Google Docs, focusing particularly on the reasons and solutions in each group’s Part 2. Possible questions include Is it easier to identify solutions outside one’s own context?, Were the solutions reasonable or overly optimistic?, Are these true reasons or simply excuses?, Is it possible for schools to make more than incremental change?, and so on.

Obviously you could expand or modify this activity in a variety of different ways (if you do this, let me know how it went!). How would you change and/or improve this activity if you did it in your own school organization?

Video - Social Media Reading List for School Leaders

This is a must-watch video by Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School in New Hampshire. Not only does Hans have a cool title (how awesome would it be if every school had a ‘director of experiential learning?’), he makes a mean video.

Check out Hans’ 3–minute clip below, where he tries to explain the value of social media to his school leadership team. Then check out the wiki page that resulted from his efforts. Nice work, Hans!

[hat tip to Jesse Moyer at The Future of Education blog for leading me to this]

Our mental models are the biggest barrier to moving schools forward into a digital, global era

What is the biggest barrier to moving schools forward into a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected era? Our mental models of what schooling should look like.

Unfortunately, most educators, parents, and policymakers have no idea what it truly means to prepare students for this kind of world.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead and ask ‘em.

Who will be the next director of the Iowa Department of Education?

Judy Jeffrey announced yesterday that she is retiring as the Director of the Iowa Department of Education. She has been a tremendous supporter of revamping the ways that Iowa schools do business. Her signature legacies may be the Iowa Core and the Authentic Intellectual Work projects, both of which focus on students doing higher-level cognitive work in Iowa classrooms. If we can get both of these implemented AT SCALE (the first is a statewide initiative but the second is only in a few pilot schools), we may actually move Iowa classrooms significantly in directions they need to go.

We are seeing progress on other needed fronts. The number of school districts in Iowa that are implementing 1:1 laptop projects has gone from 6 (2008–2009) to 15 (2009–2010) to perhaps as high as 40 next year (which would be over a tenth of Iowa districts). Some conversations about increasing online learning opportunities for Iowa schoolchildren (currently our offerings are quite meager) seem to be reopening. The discussions that are occurring among Iowa school administrators about moving their school systems forward seem much more robust than they did when I arrived in the state three years ago, thanks to the tremendous thought leadership and professional development that the School Administrators of Iowa has been providing on this front. I am hopeful that we will make some headway on some other essential building blocks that we need to put in place (see my post on educational technology policy priorities and my Iowa series).

Of course all of this could come to a screeching halt. A change in governors and/or the state legislature would bring new policy priorities. A change in Director brings with it the possibility of someone coming in with different beliefs about where the state education system should be headed. We need someone who can keep the momentum going. Who can take the ideas embedded in the Iowa Core and get them implemented well at the local level. Who can change the belief systems of Iowa educators and citizens about what schooling should look like. Who can find ways to facilitate the other necessary structural supports that need to be in place to create a system of schooling that prepares our graduates for the next half century, not the last half century.

I know who I’d like to see as the new Director (anyone got the Governor’s ear?!). How about you?

We ARE the system

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

As school leaders, we have the responsibility to

• Facilitate learning environments that are respectful, empowering, and engaging for students
• Create workplaces that are respectful, empowering, and engaging for staff
• Prepare students for what is and will be, not what was
• Build trust, not erode it
• Be buffers, not barriers

and so on…

We can point fingers. We can blame others. We can rail against the system. But we must recognize that we are in charge of the system. In essence, as stewards of school organizations, we ARE the system. We create the system every day.

We must point those fingers inward. We must blame ourselves before we blame others. We must recognize the impacts of our own actions rather than always blaming external factors. Only then does real progress occur.

Principals, superintendents, curriculum directors, technology coordinators, and educational leadership professors: Are you ready to take responsibility for your own decision-making? Our students and staff deserve better…

[Inspired by yet another tale of woe by practicing educators about their poor leadership – and by my own recent failings as a professor.]

You can't get to outer space with a rowboat

You can’t get to outer space with a rowboat. You need something with a little more oomph.

Neither can you get to genuine 21st century learning environments without putting a computer in every kid’s hands. Not just some of the time. All of the time.

Is 1:1 computing sufficient in and of itself? Will magic happen if every kid gets a laptop or a netbook? No, but it’s a necessary and essential condition without which the true magic never will occur.

Why aren’t you moving more quickly to get a computer into every student’s hands? (Yes, I mean you.)

Photo credit: Woman in rowboat

Video - An open letter to educators

“If institutional education refuses to adapt to the landscape of the information age, it WILL die and SHOULD die.”

The video is An Open Letter to Educators. Happy viewing!

"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]

LeaderCamp 2010: An online unconference for school leaders

Scott Elias and Dave Meister are sponsoring LeaderCamp 2010, an online unconference for school administrators, on June 24, 2010. As they say, “it’s gonna be awesome.” Follow LeaderCamp on Twitter and save the date!

Notes from India - I'm not sure you appreciate...

Conference organizers usually strive to have participants leave upbeat and energized at the end of the conference. I violated that rule on the last day of the ASB Unplugged conference in Mumbai, India. 

Each of the February TEDxASB speakers had 3 minutes to speak to the audience. Scott Klososky’s segment with an American School of Bombay student was particularly awesome and I hope someone captured it on video.

In both of my two leadership workshops, I kept hearing variations of the same theme from the international educators in attendance. One participant summed it up:

I'm not sure you appreciate how far along are most of the schools here today. We're far from average in terms of our implementation of technology.

When it came to my 3 minutes, I just couldn’t keep quiet about this. So I said something like the following:

One of the participants in my morning session said that I didn’t appreciate how far along you all are and that you are way above average when it comes to integrating technology into your instruction. And yet, from my conversations with many of you over the past few days, it’s very clear to me that there still are many things you’re not doing.

For example, most of you have yet to put a computer in every kid’s hands; that’s why you’re here at this 1:1 conference. Most of you have yet to incorporate online courses into your curricula in any kind of substantive way. Few of you are teaching students to be empowered - not just responsible - digital citizens in our new information landscape. Few of you have a staff full of educators that are modeling active participation in that landscape. As far as I can tell, none of you has robust student assessments at every grade level that target higher-level, more cognitively-complex thinking and doing and being. None of you has moved to a truly personalized learning environment for every student, one in which students’ progress is facilitated and perhaps assessed by technology and is organized around student competence and completion rather than age and grade level.

So some of you are sitting there in the audience feeling pretty good about yourselves. And you should. You’re blessed with wonderful financial resources, fantastic facilities, and amazing faculty. But for those of you who think I don’t appreciate how far along you are, all I can say is that I'm not sure you appreciate how far you still have to go.

Thank you.

I’m still second-guessing my decision to use my final statement in this manner. Despite tempering my negativity with a fun follow-up Animoto of the conference, I still think I might have violated one of the cardinal rules of conferences…

This likely is my final post about my trip to India. Here are my previous posts:

• Notes from India – My TEDx talk
• TEDxASB and TEDxNYED – Getting YouTube channels into iTunes
• Notes from India – Pictures and Tweets from ASB Unplugged and Mumbai
• Notes from India – Educators as risk-takers

Notes from India - My TEDx talk

One of the highlights of my time at ASB Unplugged this year was the opportunity to participate in TEDxASB. Here is my TEDx talk, Are schools dangerously irrelevant?. Other than saying ‘divergent’ instead of ‘convergent,’ I think I did okay.

Other TEDxASB speakers were Doug Johnson, Bruce Dixon, Scott Klososky, and Helen Barrett. Happy viewing!

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

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

——-

March 7, 2010

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

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

The economic imperative

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

The educational imperative

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

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

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

The status quo no longer suffices

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

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

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

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

Future-oriented leadership

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

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

Thank you.
 
Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.
dangerouslyirrelevant.org/bio.html
dangerouslyirrelevant.org/contact.html

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

Rethink Learning Now asks:

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

Answer My answer:

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

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

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

[hat tip to Carolyn Foote for the video]

Notes from India: Educators as risk-takers

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

Part 1: International educators are risk-takers

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

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

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

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

Part 3: Assessing educators’ willingness to take risks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My answers on the ISTE SIGAdmin survey

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

1. How has the Internet changed thinking?

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

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

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

What would you have said?

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

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

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

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

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

ISTE 2010 keynote - Jeff Piontek named as winner

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on ISTE’s process

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

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

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

Will Richardson says:

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

and

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

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

As I’ve said many times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISTE 2010 keynote - Final voting is underway!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A day with Will Richardson, Part 3

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

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

A day with Will Richardson, Part 2

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

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

A day with Will Richardson, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

• Part 1
• Part 2

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

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

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

Happy reading!

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

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

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

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

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

4 tales out of school

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

Hatshepsut and Thutmose

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

A. Nubia developed trade routes over land because:

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

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

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

C. Thutmose III was all of the following except:

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

D. What was the kingdom of Kerma known for?

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

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

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

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

Study hall rules

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

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

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

Assessment reliability, validity, and parent (dis)trust

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

Parent

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

Teacher

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

Parent

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

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

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

No computers for you!

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

Wrap-up

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

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

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

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

Does your school organization reflect our new digital information landscape?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

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

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

[Download these slides: ppt pptx]

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

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

Characteristics of our new digital information landscape

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

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

These apply to us too!

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the beginning of this project round, I said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this file: png ppt pptx

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

Photo credit: 2/365 My Work

Dear Will

Dear Will,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what you need to know about us

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

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

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

Here’s what we need from you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 Tweets about the ISTE conference keynote

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

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

Then I heard from John Larkin and Jen Wagner:

Elizabeth Holmes thought the keynote project was a good idea:

But Sylvia Martinez was less enthused:

Julia Fallon wasn’t too keen either:

Somewhere in there I said:

Gary Stager chimed in:

As did Susan van Gelder:

Which prompted me to ask a question:

I also said:

Susan replied:

Gary also stated:

Which prompted this comment from me:

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

11-29 ISTE conference keynote update - Some backchannel grumbling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not enough school administrators are visionaries?

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

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

Be bold, not bland

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

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

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

11-26 ISTE conference keynote update

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

11-25 ISTE conference keynote update

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

Did You Know? video series featured on Huffington Post

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

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

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

11-24 ISTE conference keynote update

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

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

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

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

My online survey software provided some summary data:

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

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

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

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

Please vote for the ISTE 2010 conference keynote!

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

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

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

This image shows how many votes each topic received:

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

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

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

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

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

UCEA Week 01: I gave a bad presentation yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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