Dangerously Irrelevant

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

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

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

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

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

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

The (un)certainty of professional persistence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Officemate disappears

Data-driven decision-making resources from CASTLE

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

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

I hope these are useful to you. Happy reading!

10 questions about books, libraries, librarians, and schools

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

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

Random questions

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

Reactions from librarians

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

Librarian 1 (I received this one indirectly)

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

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

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

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

Librarian 2

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

Librarian 3

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

Librarian 4

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

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

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

Suggested reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the top 5 topic suggestions to date:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 steps to success when working with administrators

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download this file: png ppt pptx

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

ISTE 2010 conference keynote: The gloves are off!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts

• Please vote for my ISTE 2010 conference keynote suggestion

Related tweets

• Please RT!
• Right now leadership is losing to TOOLS yet again. Ugh.

Please vote for my ISTE 2010 conference keynote suggestion

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

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

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

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

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

ITEC 2009 - Tweetup videos

Russ Goerend posted a couple of short video snippets from our small Tweetup at ITEC 2009 (for some reason a host of Flip cameras suddenly emerged…). In addition to a number of us Iowa tweeps, David Warlick and Steve Dembo kindly joined in the conversation.

Here’s the first video: 

And here’s the second one (FYI, the first 2.5 minutes is a repeat of the end of the previous video): 

I love the end of the second video where Angela Maiers talks about the lack of teacher time to learn/do technology:

They have time to run copies. They have time to go make blackline masters. They have time to correct 15,000 true-and-false questions. They have time to make cute little art projects for kids to cut-and-paste for 45 minutes…

Happy viewing (and thanks, Russ)!

ITEC 2009 - PLN: A gardener's approach to professional learning

David Warlick is a wonderful speaker and an even more wonderful person. I was very fortunate to spend some time with him last night and this morning. I have very much enjoyed being a learner in his presence...

My notes from David’s second presentation at ITEC 2009:

• Blogging is about listening as much as it is about writing
• David is talking about who he reads (for example, Stephen Downes serves as a filter for David)
• PLN = personal learning network
• There's nothing new about PLNs; they existed long before the Internet; they were just more limited than they are now
• Everyone's PLN is different
• David: "I blog to learn. Many of my blog entries are questions from which I learn from others."
• For a lot of people, Twitter is the heart of their PLN. For others, it's their blog, Facebook, Second Life, Ning, Delicious, Flickr, or whatever.
• The Classroom 2.0 Ning has 31,705 members as of this morning
• The real power of PLNs is in mining the conversation. Because conversation is getting laid down, becoming part of the record, it can be monitored, mined, etc.
• Founder of Technorati: "Blogging is the exhaust of the human consciousness."
• Warlick: “As a 6th grade teacher, I learned very quickly that the amount of time students paid attention to me was directly related to the strangeness of what I was talking about.”
• David’s bookmarks are at www.delicious.com/dwarlick
• Social bookmarking is my personal digital library
• Tagging is a key function in the networked Internet

See also: A gardener’s approach to learning

Keywords: personal learning network Warlick

ITEC 2009 - David Warlick keynote

Group notes from David Warlick's keynote at ITEC 2009.

Keywords: redefine literacy Warlick

ITEC 2009 - Daniel Pink keynote

Group notes from Daniel Pink's keynote speech at ITEC 2009.

The end of teacher sameness and solidarity

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

[I]n American education, policy making is not guided by what is best for children or the larger public. It is a political process driven by power. And the most powerful groups in that process are special interests, led by the teachers unions, with a stake in keeping the system as it is. . . . Reforms of real consequence are vigorously resisted and watered down. (p. 149)

Traditionally, teachers have taught students face-to-face in classrooms. This is the standard role, common across virtually all teachers, and has allowed for a pervasive sense of occupational sameness that has long been a very good thing for the unions. It encourages teachers to see themselves as having a common set of work interests, as being equally deserving, and as sinking or swimming together. And all of this promotes solidarity, which is critical to the unions’ ability to attract members, gain their financial and emotional support, and mobilize them for economic and political ends. (p. 158)

[T]eachers unions are steadfast in demanding sameness . . . [t]he idea is to minimize all sources of differentiation, because they undermine the common interests and solidarity that so contribute to union success. . . . [H]owever, technology gives rise to a differentiation of roles among teachers. Some may still work face-to-face with students in classroom settings. . . . Some may work with students in computer labs, handling much larger classes than today’s teachers do (because the computers are taking over much of the actual teaching). Some may work with students online but still do it in real time. Some may engage in distance learning but do it asynchronously . . . Some may work mainly with parents, monitoring student progress and assuring proper student oversight. Some may oversee or serve as mentors to the front-line teachers themselves. And more. These and other jobs . . . require different skills and backgrounds, may call for varying levels of pay, . . . offer teachers a vast array of occupational opportunities they didn’t have before, encourage a level of entrepeneurialism and individualism among them . . . The profession of the future will be a much more differentiated and entrepeneurial one, and such a profession spells trouble for the unions . . . it is destined to be a profession that will no longer concentrate teachers in common geographic locations and monopoly employers – and the resulting dispersion of teachers to new locations, combined with the diversity of employers that goes along with it, cannot help but create additional layers of differentiation that affect how teachers see their own interests. (p. 159–160)

[T]he pervasive sameness that the unions have always counted on will slowly fall apart. As the years go by, they will have a harder time generating the solidarity they need to motivate teachers to join, to keep them as members, to mobilize supportive action - and to do the things successful unions need to do if they are to wield power in politics. As sameness and solidarity decline, so too will their political power. (p. 160)

[Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education]

Previous posts in this series

1. Education’s resistance to technology will be overcome

2. It would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and NOT have transformative implications for how children can be educated

3. Technology will free learning from the dead hand of the past

4. Technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions

5. Correlation or causation? Teacher resistance to state technology initiatives

6. Greater use of technology allows for decreased numbers, but improved quality, of teachers?

Greater use of technology allows for decreased numbers, but improved quality, of teachers?

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

There is every reason to believe that technology will only become more effective with time. The same cannot be said of the traditional “technology” of education - teachers and classrooms - unless that world changes fundamentally. (p. 77)

Scores of technology-based instructional programs are being used in schools throughout America. . . . A recent survey indicated that the two main issues holding back technology use are “It doesn’t fit in the schedule,” and “There is not sufficient time to train teachers.” Nowhere does it say that the software is inadequate or that technology has dubious instructional value. (p. 77)

If elementary students spend but one hour a day learning electronically, certified staff could be reduced by a sixth. At the middle school level, two hours a day with computers would reduce staff requirements by a third. High schools, with three hours of usage, could reduce staff by up to a half. This level of computer usage is quite feasible given instructional technology that exists today. (p. 80).

The quality of teachers would benefit from the increased use of technology in at least two important ways. Even after investing in hardware and software, which are trivial compared to the cost of teachers, schools would have funds from staff savings to increase teacher pay and to provide more time for teacher training and planning. Added time for professional development, with proper supervision and accountability, would improve teacher quality. Added pay would help attract and retain better talent. Better talent is the most important ingredient of better schools. The [Dayton View Academy and Dayton Academy] charter schools . . . are already demonstrating the feasibility of these ideas – in the toughest of circumstances. (p. 80)

[Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education]

Previous posts in this series

1. Education’s resistance to technology will be overcome

2. It would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and NOT have transformative implications for how children can be educated

3. Technology will free learning from the dead hand of the past

4. Technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions

5. Correlation or causation? Teacher resistance to state technology initiatives

Correlation or causation? Teacher resistance to state technology initiatives

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

A. “The average technology score [from Education Week’s Technology Counts 2008] drops as union membership grows. . . . technology seems to be advancing more quickly in states where the unions are weakest” (p. 107). [chart is from p. 108]

B. “The percentage of states with state-level virtual schools drops steadily as the unionization of teachers grows” (p. 118). [chart is from p. 119]

C. “[We] look at the percentage of states . . . that have data systems with the capacity to link students and teachers . . . [and see] the same basic pattern as for virtual schools – which is telling, as virtual schools and teacher identifiers have little to do with one another aside from their impact on union interests” (pp. 138–139). [chart is from p. 139]

[Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education]

Previous posts in this series

1. Education’s resistance to technology will be overcome

2. It would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and NOT have transformative implications for how children can be educated

3. Technology will free learning from the dead hand of the past

4. Technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions

Technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

The fact that [technology] offers enormous benefits is not enough to guarantee that it will be embraced by the public schools and its potential fully realized. Technological change will run into the same political roadblocks that all major reforms have run into, and for exactly the same reasons. Powerful groups will try to block it. (pp. 29–30)

It is a fact that the teachers unions have vested interests in preserving the existing educational system, regardless of how poorly it performs. It is a fact that they are more powerful – by far – than any other groups involved in the politics of education. And it is a fact that in a government of checks and balances they can use their power to block or weaken most reforms they do not like. To recognize as much is not to launch ideological attacks against the unions. It is simply to recognize the political world as it is. (p. 54)

If anything is stone-cold certain about the current structure of power, it is that technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions and their allies. This is “their” system, and they are compelled by their own interests to preserve and protect it. They will go to the ramparts to see that technology does not have real transformative effects. (p. 55)

[Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education]

Previous posts in this series

1. Education’s resistance to technology will be overcome

2. It would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and NOT have transformative implications for how children can be educated

3. Technology will free learning from the dead hand of the past

Technology will free learning from the dead hand of the past

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

The American education system faces much more than a performance problem. It also faces a political problem that, in the grander scheme of things, is more fundamental than the performance problem itself - because it prevents the performance problem from being seriously addressed and resolved. . . .

What sets technology apart from other sources of reform is that . . . it also has a far-reaching capacity to change politics - and to eat away, relentlessly and effectively, at the political barriers that have long prevented reform. Technology, then, is a double-barreled agent of change. It generates the innovations that make change attractive, and at the same time it undermines the political resistance that would normally prevent change from happening. . . .

This will mean real improvement, and real benefits for the nation and its children. It will also mean something still more profound: the dawning of a new era in which politics is more open, productive ideas are more likely to flourish – and learning is liberated from the dead hand of the past. [Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, pp. 10–12]

It would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and NOT have transformative implications for how children can be educated

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

Even today, with educational technology in its earliest stages:

• Curricula can be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students.
• Education can be freed from geographic constraint.
• Students can have more interaction with . . . teachers and students who may be thousands of miles away or from different nations or cultures.
• Parents can readily be included in the communications loop.
• Teachers can be freed from their tradition-bound classroom roles, employed in more differentiated and productive ways, and offered new career paths.
• Sophisticated data systems can put the spotlight on performance [and] make progress (or the lack of it) transparent.
• Schools can be operated at lower cost, relying more on technology (which is relatively cheap) and less on labor (which is relatively expensive). . . .

Information and knowledge are absolutely fundamental to what education is all about . . . and it would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and not have transformative implications for how children can be educated and how schools and teachers can more productively do their jobs. . . .

Precisely because technology promises to transform the core components of schooling, it is inevitably disruptive to the jobs, routines, and resources of the people whose livelihoods derive from the existing system. [Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, pp. 7–9]

Technology Mentoring: A Timeless Idea

First, I'd like to thank Scott for hosting me as part of my virtual tour to support The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology. You can follow the entire tour at Ed Tech Jen. To thank you for taking the time to find out a little about me and about the book, I'll be giving away a copy of the book to one lucky commenter.

Technology Mentoring

In pulling together this collection of the best articles from a five-year span of Learning & Leading with Technology, I looked for three things:

1. Articles that were compelling to read.
2. Articles that many of our readers responded to, nominated for the collection on The Best of L&L blog, or had included in course packets.
3. Articles that contained ideas that transcended specific technologies or educational settings.

One article that really stood out in the technology leadership area was "Teacher to Teacher Mentoring" by Kathleen Gora and Janice Hinson. (ISTE members can read this article here.)

Gora and Hinson described a program in their school where the more-experienced technology users helped teach their fellow teachers to integrate specific technologies into their instruction. They found much better results from these mentorships than from other professional development methods they had tried in their school.

One of the nice things about this program was that it had the deep support of the principal. This was really a key component of its success, and the main reason that the program is still in effect today.

When I contacted many of the authors whose works are included in the book, they shared a different result. Some had retired, and some had moved into other educational settings where technology use was not as well supported. Those who were still teaching used many of the same pedagogical techniques, but were unable to include the technology component. Thus, the fact that the program described in this article is still active is notable.

One of the compelling points for me was that this school had taken a solid teaching truth and applied it to itself. We know that students learn a topic really well when they have to teach it to their fellow students. So it makes sense that teachers who have to train other teachers in a technology integration technique or the use of an application would learn it better than if they were just using it personally.

What about you. Have you used mentoring in your educational setting? If so, what sort of process have you used to group mentors and mentees and to assign topics of study? How do assess the effectiveness of the mentorship?

Have you taken any other tenet of effective student learning and applied it to teacher professional development or to your own professional learning? How has it worked? Have you thought about sharing that idea with other technology leaders?

About Jennifer Roland

Jennifer is a writer living in the Portland, Oregon, area. She holds bachelor’s degrees in magazine journalism and political science from the University of Oregon. Her education also focused on history, economics, linguistics, and educational policy and management. Before embarking on her freelance career, she was a staff member at ISTE. Follow Jennifer on her blog tour at http://edtechjen.com; each tour stop includes a chance to win a copy of The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology.

About The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology

ISTE’s flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology, is where the organization’s members and industry experts share and discuss the latest and greatest in using technology to enhance education. This collection includes the very best articles from 2003-2008. Along with the articles as they originally appeared in the magazine, the book includes commentary and context introducing the articles as well as short essays from the original authors, who further discuss the issues and topics of their articles and how they’ve affected the ed tech world.

Education's resistance to technology will be overcome

Terry Moe and John Chubb say…

The revolution in information technology is historic in its force and scope: reshaping the fundamentals of how human beings from every corner of the globe communicate, interact, conduct their business, and simply live their lives from day to day. Education has so far resisted this revolution, as we could have predicted. But . . . we believe the resistance will be overcome – not simply because technology generates innovations of great value for student learning (which it does), but . . . because it is destined to have surprising and far-reaching effects on politics and power . . . . Technology will triumph. But the story of its triumph is a political story. [Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, pp. xi-xii]

Tony Wagner speaks to Iowa educators, Part 3

Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 3 is below…

Tony Wagner speaks to Iowa educators, Part 2

Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 2 is below… 

Tony Wagner speaks to Iowa educators, Part 1

Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who authored The Global Achievement Gap, is speaking to over 600 Iowa administrators and teachers today in Des Moines. Nearly 30 students are liveblogging their reactions to Tony’s presentation. Part 1 is below… 

Video - Did You Know? 4.0

Three years, 20+ million online views, and many, many face-to-face showings later, the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) video still is going strong. Just this week it was mentioned in TIME magazine. Karl Fisch and I continue to get a bazillion e-mail messages about it…

Karl, XPLANE, The Economist, Laura Bestler, and I are very pleased to announce the release of Did You Know? 4.0, created for The Economist’s Media Convergence Forum in October.

I think XPLANE did an absolutely fabulous job with it, but let me know what you think in the comments. Downloadable versions and source files are available on the Shift Happens wiki under a Creative Commons license. Happy viewing (and please spread the word)!

Update: Be sure to read Karl's post on this too!

Slide - Who's deciding your fate?

Download this file: png ppt pptx

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

We trust you with the children but not the Internet

Many schools filter YouTube, Twitter, blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networking, and other content-rich online services for both students and employees. Why on earth would you filter the adults who work for you? This is a loser strategy that prevents educators from accessing potentially-powerful educational material and damages employee morale. Does this make sense to anyone? Nice job, administrators…

Download this file: png ppt pptx

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

Two thoughts about President Obama's speech tomorrow (and my own speech the day after)

Much ado about nothing

I just read the text of President Obama’s hotly-contested speech tomorrow. I encourage you to do the same. Could it be any more innocuous? Whatever happened to waiting to see what happens first and THEN hollering about it? A lot of crying wolf has been going on lately…

If only these opportunities actually existed at scale

I was pleased to see this passage:

What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

I just wish I had more faith in our current schooling system to nurture the problem-solving and critical thinking skills and creativity and ingenuity that the President mentions. Right now I don’t think we’re doing so well in these areas…

On Wednesday I spend the day with 80 or so high school students (juniors and seniors, mostly) in Northwest Iowa. What should I be saying to them about their schools, technology, globalization, and their futures?

Video - The Digital Education Revolution in NSW

The New South Wales province in Australia is on a quest to outfit every Year 9 to 12 student with a customized Lenovo netbook by 2012. It is expected that over 200,000 computers will be distributed to students and teachers. If you’re interested, you can read more about the project or listen to a podcast about the initiative. 

I think this is a GREAT idea. Guess which high school graduates will be better prepared for a digital world: those who get to use computers in interesting and empowering ways on a regular basis or those who don’t?

Below is the publicity video for the initiative (thanks, John Strange, for leading me to this). Happy viewing, everyone!

Locus of control

Here’s a great quote from Jim Collins’ new book, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In:

Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.

Do most educators believe this or are they instead inclined to point fingers at the world around them? 

[By the way, if you’re a school leader and you haven’t read Collins’ other books, Good to Great or Built to Last, you need to make an immediate trip to the bookstore!]

Chris Lehmann speaks to the FCC

I don't know how Chris Lehmann finagled an invite to speak to the FCC, but I sure am glad he did (and that he filmed it!). Click on the picture below to listen to Chris' 10-minute presentation. I promise it will be WELL worth your time. 

Don't teach your kids this stuff. Please?

  

dear parent

  teacher

  administrator

  board member

     

don't teach your kids to read

  for the Web

  to scan

    RSS

    aggregate

    synthesize

 

don't teach your kids to write

  online

pen and paper aren't going anywhere

since when do kids need an audience?

no need to hyperlink

  make videos

    audio

      Flash

      

no connecting, now

no social networking

  or online chat

  or comments

  or PLNs

blogs and twitter?

  how self-absorbed

  what a bunch of crap

and definitely, absolutely, resolutely, no cell phones

block it all

lock it down

keep it out

it's evil, you know

  there's bad stuff out there

    gotta keep your children safe

    

don't you know collaboration is just another word for cheating?

don't you know how much junk is out there?

haven't you ever heard of sexting?

  of cyberbullying?

a computer 24-7? no thanks

  I don't want them

    creating

      sharing

        thinking

          learning

you know they're just going to look at porn

  and hook up with predators

we can't trust them

don't do any of it, please

  

really

'cause I'm doing all of it with my kids

can't wait to see who has a leg up in a decade or two

can you?

  

New podcast channel - UCEA Interview Series

The University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) has started a new podcast channel and will be interviewing top educational leadership scholars from around the world about school administrator research and/or preparation.

The first live podcast will occur tomorrow and will feature Dr. Karen Seashore, who holds the Rodney Wallace Professorship for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Minnesota. Karen will be discussing the linkages between P-12 school leadership and student academic learning outcomes. As a former faculty colleague of Karen’s, I know her well and anticipate that this will be a great conversation.

• Listen live to the interview with Dr. Karen Seashore
• Download the interview afterward
• Learn more about UCEA’s interview series

We here at CASTLE have been working with UCEA to get this up and running. CASTLE is one of several UCEA centers; I also serve as UCEA’s Associate Director of Communications. Stay tuned to the podcast channel to hear future interviews and, while you’re at it, sign up for UCEA’s Twitter feed if you’re interested in more school leadership resources.

Happy listening!

Book Review - Education and Learning to Think

Here are two quotes from Education and Learning to Think, an interesting little research-based book published by the National Research Council way back in 1987!

Higher order thinking is nonalgorithmic. That is, the path of action is not fully specified in advance.

Higher order thinking tends to be complex. The total path is not “visible” (mentally speaking) from any single vantage point.

Higher order thinking often yields multiple solutions, each with costs and benefits, rather than unique solutions.

Higher order thinking involves nuanced judgment and interpretation.

Higher order thinking involves the application of multiple criteria, which sometimes conflict with one another.

Higher order thinking often involves uncertainty. Not everything that bears on the task at hand is known.

Higher order thinking involves self-regulation of the thinking process. We do not recognize higher order thinking in an individual when someone else “calls the plays” at every step.

Higher order thinking involves imposing meaning, finding structure in apparent disorder.

Higher order thinking is effortful. There is considerable mental work involved in the kinds of elaborations and judgments required. (p. 3)

The seventh item on the list, self-regulation, is one that I think is particularly lacking in many K-12 schools because the teachers “call the plays” so much of the time…

Here’s what I think is the money quote:

The goals of increasing thinking and reasoning ability are old ones for educators. . . . But these goals were part of the high literacy tradition; they did not, by and large, apply to the more recent schools for the masses. Although it is not new to include thinking, problem solving, and reasoning in someone’s school curriculum, it is new to include it in everyone’s curriculum. It is new to take seriously the aspiration of making thinking and problem solving a regular part of a school program for all of the population . . . It is a new challenge to develop educational programs that assume that all individuals, not just an elite, can become competent thinkers. (p. 7)

I liked this book. It's very short, but it made me think. I give it 4 highlighters.

 

School is tests and credits. Learning is 'getting it.'

Seth Godin is one of my favorite thinkers. I’ve learned a ton from him. Here are a couple of quotes from his post today on education.

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is 'getting it'. It's the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn't care about workbooks or long checklists.

For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.

and

If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.

Happy reading!

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!

Why is it so hard for us to do the right thing?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

As leaders, we often know what is the right thing to do. Just to pick a few examples…

• We know that ongoing, formative progress monitoring is more appropriate than ‘data days’ or ‘data retreats’ for yearly summative data, and yet many schools still only do the latter.
• When it comes to positive organizational and/or academic impact, we know that the ‘sit-and-get’ professional development model typically is a complete waste of participants’ time and organizational resources.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that the world is going to be quite technological and globally-interconnected, yet we continue to ignore that fact in most schools.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that schooling and/or learning and/or assessment are going to be much more personalized and invidividualized than they are now, and yet few school organizations are preparing themselves for these new ways of doing things.

We’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to be out in front, leading the way. And yet the organizations that we supposedly ‘lead’ are so very far behind in so many areas. We like to point fingers; it’s easy for us to do so and ignore our own culpability.

As leaders, when are we going to own the fact that much (most?) of it is us? Why is it so hard for us to do the right thing?

School mobile phone jammers and shoe organizers

The Des Moines Register reported today that the St. Ansgar (IA) Schools have given up on their proposal to purchase a device that would jam mobile phone signals after confirming that such equipment only can be used by federal agencies. The district had looked into the possibility of buying a jammer because it was struggling with inappropriate student mobile phone usage. One of the school board members said:

I don't think they have a place in the educational environment. The educational environment is supposed to be about students learning and teachers teaching and teachers can't teach over a cell phone. If a student is busy on the cell phone they aren't learning. It's a distraction ... and we need to minimize the distraction.

The interim superintendent also noted that he was concerned about students using mobile phones for cheating.

I e-mailed the interim superintendent a couple of days ago and asked him to consider a different, less hard-line approach, noting schools’ responsibility to prepare students for a digital, global era and that other districts have had success with more-accommodating strategies. Maybe I’ll hear from him sometime.

One of the comments to the Register’s article cracked me up:

Oh, For Crying-out-load. Just hang one of those shoe orginizers next to the door and require each student to check in thier phones on entering the classroom, then they can retrieve them after class. Just drop your phone in your slot and pick it up on the way out. Hey look, I solved the problem for less than $5.00

I don’t know if this is a fantastic idea or not, but it sure made me laugh. Sometimes easy solutions to our problems are staring us in the face if only we have the courage to think creatively. As we head into the new school year, who thinks their local school has an effective solution for inappropriate student use of mobile phones?

NECC - Why aren't you having a bigger impact?

Both of my NECC 2009 presentations are now available!

As I noted earlier, my first presentation, Effective Leadership in an Era of Disruptive Innovation, is available at ISTEVision. My second presentation, Why Aren’t You Having a Bigger Impact?, was targeted specifically at technology coordinators and is now available from Learning.com.

I think Learning.com did a really nice job of highlighting some of the main points of my presentation. Two links on the left allow you to watch the first and second halves of the presentation. You also can download my slides and an audio podcast of the session. I thought the questions and conversations were quite lively given that the session was at 7 in the morning!

Here’s a quick quote from the presentation:

The tech coordinators [like you] that I meet are very dedicated and hard-working. They’re really trying their very best to do a great job for their school and make everything run smoothly. So why do I hear so many complaints about you?

Happy viewing!

NECC - Effective leadership in an era of disruptive innovation

For those of you who have asked, my Monday, June 29, afternoon presentation at NECC, Effective leadership in an era of disruptive innovation, is now available at ISTEVision: 

FYI, you also might be interested in my K12 Online presentation on this topic. Happy viewing!

15 questions to ask about the technology leadership in your school district

For Leadership Day 2009, here are some key questions that I’d ask about the technology leadership function in any school district:

1. Who is primary responsible for technology leadership in the district?
2. If the answer to Question 1 is not the superintendent, who is the primary technology leader’s direct supervisor?
3. If the answer to Question 1 is not the superintendent, does that person sit on the superintendent’s cabinet?
4. If the answer to Question 1 is not the superintendent, how often does that person meet individually with the superintendent?
5. How many other job titles (or what other job responsibilities) does the primary technology leader have?
6. Is the primary technology leader in charge of both networking / hardware / software support AND technology integration or just one?
7. Is technology leadership a shared function within the district or does it primarily reside in one person?
8. How big is the differential between the primary technology leader’s salary and what she could make in a similar corporate environment?
9. What kind of (and how much) professional development does the primary technology leader receive each year?
10. How big is the differential between the technology staff:computer ratio and what occurs in a similar corporate environment?
11. What percentage of technology-related expenditures go toward educator professional development?
12. What percentage of the technologies purchased by the district were primarily student-centric (as opposed to teacher-centric)?
13. When was the district’s last technology referendum? Did it pass? How close was the vote?
14. When was the last time (if ever) that students were asked about their experiences using (or not using) technology in their classes? What did they say?
15. And, what might be the most important question of all, how many minutes per week, on average, do students use digital technologies as part of their classroom learning experiences (and how do they spend those minutes)?

I’m sure that I could think of other questions too, but these are a good start. Here’s why the answers to these questions matter:

1. If it’s not the superintendent, it’s the wrong answer. No one else has the power to set and facilitate the district-wide vision for effective technology usage.
2. If it’s not the superintendent, it’s the wrong answer. The further down the org chart the primary technology leader sits, the harder it is for that individual to facilitate necessary change.
3. If no, that’s the wrong answer. Not including the primary technology leader on the superintendent’s cabinet sends a message to the entire organization (and the outside world) that technology is nonessential.
4. Ideally the primary technology leader would meet individually with the superintendent at least as often as the curriculum director, associate superintendent, business manager, and/or other top-level district staff. Desired frequency will vary by district, but I would say every few weeks at a minimum.
5. Many primary technology leaders wear other hats (principal, superintendent, director of facilities, business manager, etc.). Effective technology leadership is a full-time job. I understand that many districts – particularly smaller ones – need to job share, but the more this person’s work is diluted across multiple titles and/or responsibilities, the less successful the district’s technology efforts will be. Guaranteed.
6. If just one, that’s the wrong answer. Separating these functions is a potential recipe for disaster because it often leads to turf and/or resource conflicts, facilitates confusion by classroom teachers, results in the integration function being marginalized or nonexistent, and so on.
7. Ideally the technology function is shared across the district. Effective change is much more likely to happen when many pull together.
8. The lower this differential the better, unless you want to lose your technology leader.
9. Pay close attention to the number of days the primary technology leaders gets for her own professional learning. Also pay attention to whether those days are just focused on networking/hardware/software support versus technology integration, how to facilitate effective change within complex organizations, large societal/workforce shifts that will impact schools, building effective teams, and other non-technical, leadership-related topics.
10. The lower this differential the better, unless you want to lose your technology leader. Corporate computer:support staff ratios tend to range between 75:1 and 150:1. In K-12 education, ratios tend to be 300:1 or higher (and it is not uncommon to see 800:1 or worse).
11. Ideally this number would be between 25% and 50%. A corollary question might be How much of the computer equipment that you’ve purchased doesn’t get used very often?
12. The higher this percentage the better. It’s important for teachers to use computers. But it’s more important for students to use computers since they’re the ones that we’re supposedly preparing for their future lives.
13. A lot of districts have trouble passing technology referenda. Sometimes they’re close, sometimes they’re not. Taking a look at how a district pitches its technology referenda to its local community can tell you a lot about the district, the community, or both.
14. For most districts, the answer to this will be rarely or never. That’s the wrong answer. The correct answer is at least every year.
15. For most districts, the answer to this rarely will be more than a couple of hours (and often will be less than one hour). That’s the wrong answer in a digital, global era.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the posts for this year!

Tomorrow is Leadership Day 2009!

Just a reminder that tomorrow is Leadership Day 2009 here at Dangerously Irrelevant!

You can see the posts from previous years at

• Leadership Day 2007 – Summary
• Leadership Day 2008 – Summary

Hope some of you will participate. The past two years’ posts have been awesome. Be sure to read over the guidelines for this year!

Calling all bloggers! - Leadership Day 2009

Since the past two have been so successful, I am putting out a call for people to participate in Leadership Day 2009. As I said two years ago:

Many of our school leaders (principals, superintendents, central office administrators) need help when it comes to digital technologies. A lot of help, to be honest. As I’ve noted again and again on this blog, most school administrators don’t know

• what it means to prepare students for the 21st century;
• how to recognize, evaluate, and facilitate effective technology usage by students and teachers;
• what appropriate technology support structures (budget, staffing, infrastructure) look like or how to implement them;
• how to utilize modern technologies to facilitate communication with internal and external stakeholders;
• the ways in which learning technologies can improve student learning outcomes;
• how to utilize technology systems to make their organizations more efficient and effective;
• and so on…

Administrators’ lack of knowledge is not entirely their fault. Most of them didn’t grow up with these technologies. Many are not using digital tools on a regular basis. Few have received training from their employers or their university preparation programs on how to use, think about, or be a leader regarding digital technologies.

So… let’s help them out.

Guidelines

On Sunday, July 11 12, 2009, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs, wants, etc. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own. If you participated in years past, post a follow-up reflection. Whatever strikes you. The official hashtag for your post and/or Twitter is

#leadershipday09

Please also link back to this post to ensure that I find yours. If you don’t have a blog, comment on someone else’s post and/or send your thoughts to me and I will post them for you. I will do a summary afterward of what folks wrote and talked about [bloggers, this means some new readers probably will head your direction; this is a blog carnival for technology leadership!].

Some prompts to spark your thinking

• What do effective K-12 technology leaders do? What actions and behaviors can you point to that make them effective leaders in the area of technology?
• Do administrators have to be technology-savvy themselves in order to be effective technology leaders in their organizations?
• What are some tangible, concrete, realistic steps that can be taken to move administrators forward? Given the unrelenting pressures that they face and their ever-increasing time demands, what are some things that administrators can do to become more knowledgeable and skilled in the area of technology leadership?
• Perhaps using the new National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A) as a starting point, what are the absolutely critical skills or abilities that administrators need to be effective technology leaders?
• What strengths and deficiencies are present in the new NETS-A?
• What is a technology tool that would be extremely useful for a busy administrator (i.e., one he or she probably isn’t using now)?
• What should busy administrators be reading (or watching)?
• How can administrators best structure necessary conversations with internal or external stakeholders?
• How should administrators balance enablement with safety, risk with reward, fear with empowerment?

Here are the ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT posts from the past two years

• Leadership Day 2007 – Summary
• Leadership Day 2008 – Summary

A badge for your blog or web site

Please join us for this important day because, I promise you, if the leaders don’t get it, it isn’t going to happen.

CASTLE Round-Up - Week of June 1

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week… 

Edjurist

Scott Bauries discussed how the No Child Left Behind Act has introduced some new angles into school finance equity lawsuits. Scott also shared some initial thoughts about the burgeoning movement toward national curriculum standards.

Justin Bathon highlighted some issues related to a parent’s request to read the Bible in her son’s kindergarten class.

LeaderTalk

Kimberly Moritz wants to know: Why do we do it this way? She answers: Fear of reproach is how we end up closing the doors to our classrooms and offices and doing the same things year after year.

Mark Stock also asked a question: What does school reform look like when the National Education Association agrees with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

Ryan Bretag said, “In this day and age when content is available anytime, anywhere, and to anyone, classrooms can no longer be tethered to the content-driven, physical spaces defined by 20th Century methodologies.”

Jayson Richardson highlighted some generational differences. Apparently I’m part of the Nike Generation.

Dennis Richards noted that 98% of kindergarteners were classified as geniuses when it came to divergent thinking (which is what you do when you are not forced to conform…).

Dangerously Irrelevant

I gave an update on the CASTLE Summer Book Club and I posted three quotes from Richard Longworth’s absolutely brilliant book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism:

• Any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced
• They are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost
• Biosciences will hire no dropouts

I also wrapped up my series of quotes from Michael Port's The Think Big Manifesto:

• We are the biggest obstacle
• We are squandering the gifts of the universe
• Get comfortable with discomfort

Finally, I reinstated the Not So Irrelevant feature of this blog, which I use to highlight various links of interest from around the Web. School administrators are busy. Hopefully I can steer them toward some online resources that will be informative and helpful. This time I’m limiting my selections to just 5 links per day. Last week I posted 25 links:

• Not so irrelevant 015
• Not so irrelevant 016
• Not so irrelevant 017
• Not so irrelevant 018
• Not so irrelevant 019 (I think this one’s the best)

Happy reading!

Biosciences will hire no dropouts

Richard Longworth says…

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

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

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

This is an important book for anyone who lives in the Midwest (or any other primarily rural area). It's a depressing book, but an important book. I learned a ton. I give it 5 highlighters.

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

Richard Longworth says…

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

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

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

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

Richard Longworth says…

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

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

Get comfortable with discomfort

Michael Port says…

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

Related posts

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

I had hoped for more from this book. Although it had a few good quotes, I felt that much of it was fairly uninspiring. It just never grabbed me. I give it 2 highlighters.