:Connecting the Dots

I was 10 minutes behind all day.  Might have something to do with a late night at a bar called “Madam’s Organ” (a riff on “Adams Morgan, get it?) the night before…

In light of some pretty disappointing workshops on Monday, my strategy was to stick to the rock stars: Gary Stager, Ian Jukes.  I figured you always take something away from these sessions.  Turns out that Jukes’ father passed away last week so his partner, Lee Crockett gave the talk, instead.  A very polished but somewhat obvious plea for the addition of new literacies in the curriculum.  Stager was Stager: provocative, funny, obstreperous.  He ended with an exploration of the differences between communities and communities of practice.  He made some interesting points about entry into a community of practice, how a “newbie” has to pay his dues by imitating the masters.  I think he managed to defend connectivist learning while answering those who argue that students can’t just walk into the middle of an academic debate and start talking/posting/uploading.

On the show floor, I spent a lot of time talking to vendors of video streaming solutions for K-12, subscription sites where students and teachers can upload videos and other media and share them out to other members of the school community.  We need this, as I’m sure lots of other districts do: a “walled garden” where you can safely place video and other media for easy sharing among students, parents, and staff.  I was already familiar with Discovery MediaShare; yesterday I explored WebFTC and Kaltura.  The latter, in particular, looks impressive.  I was also impressed by Mahara, an open-source ePortfolio solution.

No Comments

So at the end of a long day of tromping around the exhibit hall and running from presentation to presentation, I was having a very overpriced drink at a reception with some of my friends yesterday and the question was, “did you see anything good today?” The answers were a pretty unanimous “not really.”  Unfortunate.  Is there a lull in innovation, perhaps the result of tough economic times?  From the exhibit hall to the concurrent sessions, it felt to me like there was a malaise about the place yesterday.  A couple of quick notes, though:

• Patrick Ledesma and Lara Long of Fairfax County Schools gave a very tight presentation on blogs and wikis in Special Ed.  This was the best I saw today: organized, knowledgable, lots of examples, and a diversity of tools.  What I learned wasn’t earth-shaking, but it was helpful.
• I spent a lot of my time on the exhibit floor talking to document camera vendors.  For a few years now, I’ve considered the Samsung document cameras a well-hidden secret, due to their excellent hardware and reasonable price point.  But I’m seeing a lot of strong competition from other vendors like Elmo and AverMedia.  Where they beat Samsung is in software: come on Samsung, let’s clean up that interface and add some features.

Further updates as events warrant…

No Comments

I don’t write a lot about “the industry” here but I can’t resist sharing a quick thought on how things are changing in the world of computers and the internet.  Microsoft, once the behemoth of the technology world, announces a new search engine called “bing” and puts it into production.  Reviews have been mostly positive but with their preview video of “Wave,” Google still somehow managed to not just steal the spotlight but to boot Microsoft right out the front door of the theater and to the curb.  Everyone is talking about this product – which is just a step above vaporware at this point.  Think about that for a moment: a single video of a product that is not even in beta yet displaces announcements about a shipping product from a – once “the” – major technology player. 

And then think about the vision of these two products:  Google is attempting to do nothing less than replace/evolve e-mail, the bedrock application of the internet; Microsoft is, well, making another search engine.  Where is the innovation and who is in the driver’s seat?  It seems to me the answer is clear, and it’s an answer that none of us would have predicted ten years ago.

“Wave” says big, sweeping, tumultuous.  “Bing” says “pebble bouncing off my windshield.”

2 Comments

Will Richardson is blogging about once per week now.  In April, he wrote a totlal of 6 posts.  In April of 2007, he wrote 27.  Andy Carvin wrote 1 post in February, 2009 and 7 in February of 2007.  David Jakes went from 8 (April, 2007) to 2 (April, 2009).  What happened?  Where have all the bloggers gone?

I suppose the answer is Twitter.  And that upsets me, because in the course of that transition, what has happened to the conversation?  We’ve gone from expansive, probing reflection to 140-character platitudes, from the symposium to the water cooler.  This is definitely the English teacher in me speaking, but I fear that Twitter is robbing us of a great opportunity to think through writing, a shift which will most harm students, who stand to learn a great deal through blogging.  I think there is a synergy between the higher-order thinking skills that educators so value and desire and blogging; I just don’t see that same synergy with tweets.

It’s not that there’s no place for the kind of rapid fire, conversational interchange that Twitter supports; there most definitely is.  But I hate to see it elbowing the kind of rich discourse that blogs engender out of the way.  Seeing this happen only proves what the most fervent critics of educational innovations complain about: we run to the “next big thing” before we’ve had a chance to master the last one and before it has taken hold in a systemic way in classrooms.

I hope that maybe when the excitement over Twitter dies down, some of our best bloggers – and our developing bloggers, too – get back to the longer stuff.  We need it!

Image Source: DigitalParadox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalparadox/16900939/sizes/s/#cc_license

2 Comments

Yes, it’s been a while.  It’s just too easy to push blogging to the back burner and too difficult to find something interesting to say.  But one thing has been gnawing at me lately. Watch:

To my knowledge, these are the only two commercials that Sprint created as part of this ad campaign: airlines and schools, and how they could be improved if “people who know how to get things done” were to take over.  So is this what it’s come to?  We’re down there with the airlines, perhaps the most hated, bureaucratic, customer-unfriendly industry in America?  Sad.  If the commercial reflects the values and beliefs of its intended audience (and I’m sure it does – Madison Avenue spends a lot of money understanding those values and beliefs), then it looks like the image of schools held by the American public is one where students are left on their own, floating around the neighborhood, administrators and teachers either unaware or unconcerned by their absence.  Inefficient.  Bloated.  Slow.

Who can do better?  Apparently workers in a job whose minimum qualifications are pretty much limited to a drug screening a clean driving record.

Either we’re doing a really bad job at educating students or else at educating the public about what goes on in schools.  Perhaps a little of both.  Clearly, change is going to require changing a lot of people’s minds about what education is now and what it can become.

No Comments

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” First published in 1993, it’s probably among the top ten most famous New Yorker cartoons.  It reveals a society just becoming aware of this new phenomenon, the Internet – and already struggling with the freedom it was granting users to obscure and misrepresent their identities.  In the fifteen years that have passed since then, the questions have only gotten bigger and more profound.  Who am I really talking to in this chatroom?  Is that really your picture on Facebook and when was it taken?  Is this e-mail really from a Nigerian prince?

We think this is a 21st-century, postmodern problem but reading Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck has led me to reconsider.  The villains in both books – real historical figures – assume and discard aliases constantly, a practice that Larson asserts was commonplace in the 1800’s.  In a rapidly-changing society lacking social security cards, bank accounts, and even fingerprinting technology, it was easy to wake up one morning and decide, “I’ve had enough of Michael Curtin and all his problems.  I’m going to hop on a train to the next city west, change my name to Bob Smith, and start all over.”  It was a real problem that offered ne’er-do-wells opportunities at forgery, fraud, and much worse.  In the time since then we’ve erected so many laws and institutions to safeguard and fix identity from the day we’re born to the day we die.

Now here we have this whole new world, the Internet, and it seems like we’re back to square one.  The horrible story of Lori Drew and Megan Meier has to send chills up the spine of even the most zealous internet enthusiast.  Maybe, as Seth Godin argues, the time has come to abandon (or at least control) anonymity on the net.  He rightly points out that privacy and anonymity are two different things and that most of the problems on the internet stem from people hiding their identity and/or pretending to be someone else.  Maybe I’m naive, but I want the people my daughter meets online and the computer programs running the sites that she visits to know that she’s only seven years old.  And if in a few years she happens to wander into a chat room with a 50 year-old sexual predator I want her to know his name and his real age.  Would this pulling away of the masks make a horrible event more or less likely to occur?  Isn’t that why we put streetlights in dark alleyways?

If we want to do business and build real relationships online, we have to know who we’re dealing with.

No Comments

Two things happened yesterday that reminded me that for all of our complaining about how schools never change, teachers never change, things only get worse, kids only get worse, the whole world is going down the tubes — some things do get better and we do move forward sometimes:

1.  America elected its first African-American president.

2.  My seven year-old daughter and I were reading an old Calvin & Hobbes book.  In one strip, Calvin tells Hobbes that he’s going to make an ashtray to give to his parents for Christmas.  My daughter stopped reading and asked me, “Dad, what’s an ashtray?”

I’m not sure which of these had a more profound impact on me, but I think that both clearly show that the world in which our children and students are growing up today is radically different from the one in which we were raised.

3 Comments

Well, Doug Johnson saw my link to LifeHack’s 10 Essential Skills and has challenged the Edublogosphere to come up with their own lists.  Here’s mine:

1. The ability to understand and interpret data: So many people – especially in education – try to prop up weak arguments and ideas with even weaker/incomplete/misleading statistics.  Worse, many people lack the tools to see when others are doing the same.
2. Seeing the big picture/putting things into perspective:  People who consider only their little corner of the organization when making decisions will forever remain in that little corner.  Teamwork means not only understanding your own “stuff” but how it fits in with everyone else’s “stuff” and collaborating to chart a path accordingly.
3. Communication: Okay, I’m a former English teacher, so I suppose this is to be expected.  Whether it’s writing, speaking, reading, or listening, there are few jobs that don’t require us to interact with others in varied settings and through diverse media.  It’s sad that one of our assistant principals had to send out a blast e-mail to the school clericals reminding them to be polite when answering the phone.  And I’ve seen people lose their jobs because they couldn’t write to save their lives.
4. Being a good compromiser: The ability to walk into a room where people are fighting and find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is very valuable.  It’s a creative, thinking-out-of-the-box act: taking a situation that has reached an impasse and finding a way out.
5. Empathy: Right on, Doug.  I would go beyond just understanding the needs of others, however, and ask that all leaders know how to minister to those needs.  Asking about family, sending a note when someone is sick, complementing a co-worker on a job well done: these little actions mean a lot.
6. Critical understanding of technology: It’s about more than just knowing which buttons to push and which icons to click.  People need to be able to recognize appropriate tools for a task and use them properly to achieve the desired outcome.  They need to be able to reject those tools that are poorly-designed, harmful, and/or irrelevent.  Otherwise money gets wasted and there is a backlash.
7. Math and logic:  The greatest value in math is the habit of mind toward logic which it develops.  Geometric proofs, in particular, are valuable because they help students to understand how to work methodically through a problem.   I’ve seen so many poor decisions made because people lacked the ability to temper emotion and intuition with a little hard reasoning.
8. Creativity: In a world where so many insitutions appear to be failing and/or inadequate to meet the needs of such a rapidly-developing culture, people need to be able to dream up innovative, new solutions to the problems we face.  People who succeed are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, and I think that’s what creativity is all about when you come right down to it.
9. Knowing where you put things- both physically and mentally:  Complexity seems to be increasing faster than our brains’ capability to manage it.  The ability to leverage tools to stay organized – both in terms of physical items, contacts, and appointments as well as ideas and facts – are invaluable.  And perhaps part of that means managing a storehouse of facts that we can quickly and easily recall – you never know when someone will name-drop “Harold Pinter” or need to know how to convert gallons to liters.  No, I’m not saying it should all be memorized and yes, it can be Googled, but we need to be able to contextualize and use that knowledge effectively.
10. Responding well to setbacks:  We all identify this as an important skill in children.  It even shows up on standards-based elementary report cards.  I think it’s equally valuable for adults: the ability to work through any crisis without giving up and without losing your head.   In the words of Judge Smails:

It’s easy to grin, when your ship comes in,
And you feel you’ve got the stock market beat,
But the man worthwhile, is the man who can smile,
When his pants are too tight in the seat!

I know I’ll think of at least 2-3 more over the next few hours now that my motor is going…

1 Comment

LifeHack has an interesting list of the 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything.  Lots of good stuff, but nothing about technology/computers.  Should there be?  Or does the development of those other skills (math, decision-making, networking, etc.) ensure that one will be able to succeed in our increasingly technology-rich world?  Is facility with technology a fundamental skill unto itself or does the development of other parts of our brains help us to conquer whatever new tools come down the pipe?  Many of the Digg commenters responding to the story indicated that #11 should be computers.  I must say that I certainly agree with the authors that the 10 skills they did identify are indeed necessary in our world; I’m just not sure that their list is complete…

No Comments

I sympathize with Scott MacLeod, who decries the information overload he experienced at NECC.  In my case, the problem with being connected was less about the overload of information emanating from the conference and more with my inability to avoid niggling issues back at work.  Monday morning started off with a cell phone call from the high school assistant principal about a problem with comments on report cards.  With my laptop, I was able to troubleshoot the problem in our web-based SIS.  More issues followed.  Even when someone wasn’t calling me, I was checking e-mail.  As a result, I found myself missing out on large chunks of lectures, workshops, etc.

I’m not a bad multi-tasker, either.  But I can’t help feeling that the thing that we all celebrate so much about computers and the internet – being connected when and where we want – has its dark side and at least in this case somewhat prevented me from fully enjoying the face-to-face interactions at the conference. I wonder if students ever feel this way when they are barraged by texts and calls from friends during class or when they are trying to enjoy a movie or be with their friends.  We all assume that, unlike us, they enjoy and can manage that full-time connected-ness.  Perhaps not.  Can being connected prevent your from connecting?

1 Comment