Dangerously Irrelevant

• What I said to the NEA
• Creating the new schooling paradigm: Educational technology policy priorities, Part 1 [due date: Jan. 20]
• Does your school organization reflect our new digital information landscape?
• The Iowa series – Wrap-up
• Don’t teach your kids this stuff. Please?

Video - The Class

Here’s the latest educational technology video that’s making the rounds. I know a few professors like this!

“If you are here, why are we Skyping?”

Grading student projects: Separating content from delivery

I am a big fan of student choice. When students work on projects, I think that they should have as much choice as possible regarding both the topic and the delivery. Choice increases student buy-in and ownership.

Teachers allow choice of topics, not delivery

When teachers and I talk about integrating technology into their lessons, I encourage them to try and build in more choice for students. Most teachers already allow students to choose topics of study, at least some of the time. For example, students are allowed to pick a historical figure, select a mystery book, decide what they sculpt out of clay, and so on.

Fewer teachers seem to be comfortable with student choice of delivery. For any given project, how students show their learning often is tightly circumscribed. Teachers, not students, typically decide whether the end product will be a written report, diorama, oral presentation, mobile, clay sculpture, poster, etc. Teachers, not students, determine what the evaluation criteria will be for delivery, often in excruciating detail. I have seen many of these delivery mechanism evaluation rubrics: they’re normally designed to be student-proof. There’s very little leeway for student decision-making and thus, in the teacher’s mind, error.

The digital technologies that we now have available to us open up a wealth of new ways for students to show their learning. Many of these tools also make it easy for students to work collaboratively. I think there is growing pressure on teachers to open up student delivery choices to include many of these new digital learning options. Parents and students see what the possibilites are and wonder why they aren’t available in their local classrooms.

The need to separate content from delivery

As teachers move in this direction, I think it’s going to be increasingly important to help teachers learn how to separate content (what students need to learn) from delivery (how students show they have learned). Often the two are intertwined in teachers’ minds, and it is hard for many educators to partition grading of the learned content from grading of the delivery mechanism.

I also have heard from teachers that, even if they’re amenable to - and/or experienced at - giving separate grades for content and delivery, they don’t know how to grade effective delivery when students use digital tools. Over time the teaching profession has evolved general ideas about what ‘quality’ looks like when it comes to a written report, a poster, or an oral presentation. Fewer instructors know what they should look for to determine the quality of a video, collaborative mind map, wiki, or photo essay.

It might be helpful for a group of teachers (and students) to come together to create a set of quality rubrics for various common digital tools. Those content-neutral rubrics could then be applied to relevant student work, regardless of subject area. Obviously these rubrics would have to be age-sensitive; what we’d expect from an 8-year-old would be different than what we’d look for from a high-schooler. Also, there may be certain projects for which the creation of a ‘content-neutral’ delivery evaluation rubric is infeasible because the content and delivery are too tightly intertwined. For many situations, however, I think that these rubrics could be incredibly useful.

We need to figure this out

I think we’re going to have to wrap our heads around this as educators. Our tools for exhibiting our learning are going to continue to proliferate. We can’t just keep assigning the tried-and-true, analog-only solutions that we still see dominating current classroom practice.

I confess that to date I have exhibited a lack of flair for creating these types of rubrics, so I’m not sure I’m the one to look to for examples. Others, I know, have a real gift for making rubrics; at least some of them have to be tech-savvy enough to take this task on. Doea anyone know of folks who are doing good work in this area? Do you have other thoughts on this topic?

Photo credit: Making the grade

Many service jobs will become globalized piece work

 I’m reading a fantastic book right now: Futurecast, by Robert Shapiro. In the section on globalization, Shapiro notes that the first waves of globalization primarily affected manufacturing. Millions of American jobs were 'offshored' in the 1970s and 1980s as global companies set up factories overseas instead of here in the U.S. For all of the current rhetoric about ‘Benedict Arnold’ corporations that offshore jobs, they essentially have to since their competitors are doing so. Few companies can survive in a hypercompetitive global economy when they’re paying labor rates 5 to 25 times that of the competition. FYI, the average manufacturing worker earns between $21 and $25 per hour in the USA, France, and Japan. Contrast that with the average hourly rate of a manufacturing employee in Korea ($14), Taiwan ($7), or Mexico ($3). Or recognize that factory workers in China or India earn an average of less than $1 an hour. It’s easy to see why any manufacturing job that can be offshored probably will be offshored.

Although manufacturing has been an important component (about 20%) of the American economy, the services industries are a much larger segment (about 60%) of our economic productivity. Shapiro notes that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’re going to see this employment sector dramatically impacted by globalization and offshoring due to advances in software. It is now possible to take many complex service jobs and break them up into component parts, much as we did in previous decades for manufacturing work. Once these tasks are disaggregated, it becomes much easier to train lower-skilled workers to do these discrete components of the overall work, facilitated by software. In other words, instead of companies needing highly-paid American workers, developing countries ‘will be able to train millions of their young people to carry out discrete subsets of those jobs’ (p. 103). Corporations ‘can divvy out the pieces of larger service jobs to any number of professional staffs, connected through Internet networks, and then assemble the results in one place’ (p. 104) [again, like in manufacturing]. As you can imagine, the impacts of this on the American economy are going to be quite significant.

Yet another reason to teach our students to be adaptive and for them to spend as much time as possible on higher-level cognitive work (i.e., the kind of work that can’t be turned into piece work).

"Just tell me what to do"

Seth Godin wrote today that:

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: "If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I'm safe."

I think another big reason is that most people spent at least 12 years of their life being deeply socialized in the “just tell me what to do” model.

We know that schools strongly emphasize compliance in the name of order and discipline. We know that the fact-regurgitation model that still dominates schooling mostly leads to the student mentality of “Just tell me what to do to get a B,” rather than “Inspire me to follow my passions and interests and learn more about this on my own.” We shouldn’t be surprised when our graduates take that mentality with them into higher education and/or the workplace.

Great Scott!

A baker's dozen of great Scott blogs…

1. Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams
2. Scott Berkun, Scott Berkun (wrote a fantastic book, BTW!)
3. Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider, Scott Kelby
4. HELLO, my name is Blog!, Scott Ginsberg
5. The Social Media Marketing Blog, Scott Monty
6. Laughing Squid, Scott Beale
7. World in Motion, Scott Erb
8. ISO50, Scott Hansen
9. Higher Edison, Scott Schwister
10. Smeech.net, Scott Meech
11. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?, Scott Elias
12. Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod (yours truly)
13. edu.blogs.com, Ewan McIntosh (technically a Scot, not a Scott)

Not a bad read in the bunch!

Update: I can't believe I forgot to include Scott McCloud.com by Scott McCloud. He was born Scott McLeod, just like me. Embarrassing!

Iowa 1:1 Institute and Iowa 1:1 Network

Iowa’s first-ever conference dedicated solely to P-12 laptop programs, the Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I), will be on April 7, 2010 at the Polk County Convention Complex in Des Moines. Administrators, teachers, media specialists, technology staff, and other educators are all encouraged to attend.

Registration is FREE.

• Learn more about the Institute
• Register to attend  (attendance is capped at 500 so register soon!)
• See who else is attending
• Register to present  (no commercial sales pitches allowed)

Also, the Iowa 1:1 Network is growing rapidly. Learn more and join yourself!

Van Meter students wow the Iowa legislature

On January 28, several students in the Van Meter Community School District demonstrated to Iowa legislators the work that they are now able to do as a result of the district’s 1:1 laptop initiative. Sandra Dop, the Department of Education’s 21st Century Skills Coordinator, wrote about the encounter:

When the legislators asked, “So what can we do to get out of your way and let you go?”, I nearly cried.

I will forever be proud to have witnessed it!

Will the legislators follow up their words with action? I can be hopeful, can’t I?

No early impacts on the NEA

Last month I gave an inspired presentation to the Board of Directors for the National Education Association (NEA), our nation’s largest teachers union. As you can see from the NEA’s latest poll of its members, apparently I didn’t have much impact on its thinking, at least at this early stage. There is absolutely no recognition in the survey of the dramatic technological and information-related changes that we’re experiencing. [sigh]

Something's screwy with Feedburner?

According to Feedburner, here are the subscriber numbers for Dangerously Irrelevant for the past 7 days. Either Feedburner’s got a glitch in its monitoring/reporting or people are finally discovering my brilliance (it’s about time!). Anyone else seeing this?

Knowledge and meaning

In case you missed them, here are a couple of slides that Darren Kuropatwa recently posted in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool:

Slide credits

• Knowledge isn’t in our heads
• People construct meaning

School law feeds (and other resources) for Google Reader

This is the message that I just sent my Education Law and Ethics students (the two cohorts are in Des Moines and Mason City, Iowa). Thought I’d share here too…

———

Time to set up Google Reader!

1. Watch this video:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

2. Go to www.google.com/reader. Sign in with your new Gmail account info if need be. Once you’re in, click on the gray ‘Add a subscription box’ (top left). Paste in the first URL below. Repeat for each of the remaining links on the list. When you’re done, you should have 11 ‘feeds’ in your subscription list (bottom left). Click on a specific feed name to see items from just that one. Click on ‘All items’ (top left) to see all 11 feeds mixed together.

• http://www.nsba.org/RSS/MainMenu/SchoolLaw/LegalClips.aspx
• http://www.edjurist.com/blog/ (a CASTLE blog)
• http://educationlaw.foxrothschild.com/
• http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com/
• http://miketully.net/blog/
• http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/
• http://specialeducationlawblog.blogspot.com/
• http://jeffmarcus-specialedlaw.blogspot.com/
• http://www.detentionslip.org
• http://twitter.com/ELAOffice
• http://twitter.com/aimeebissonette

3. My goodness, what have we done? Well, we’ve just saved you time by putting ten school law-related feeds into one place. Now you’ll be up to date on all of the latest school law news and you’ll only have to go to one location (www.google.com/reader) rather than ten! Try to visit Google Reader at least once or twice per week just to stay current.

4. Note that you can add other feeds to Google Reader too! For example…

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/dangerouslyirrelevant (my blog)
• http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/LeaderTalk/ (another CASTLE blog)
• http://www.desmoinesregister.com/rss (click on an orange button, then add that URL to your Reader)
• http://www.globegazette.com/news/ (click on an orange button, then add that URL to your Reader)
• http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/
• http://content.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/index.aspx
• http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html
• http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/index
• http://www.news.iastate.edu/rss/
• http://www.weather.com/weather/today/Des+Moines+IA+USIA0231?lswe=des%20moines,%20ia&from=searchbox_localwx
• http://www.weather.com/weather/today/Mason+City+IA+USIA0541?lswe=mason%20city,%20ia&from=searchbox_localwx

5. Start looking for the letters ‘RSS’ and/or the little orange RSS symbol on web sites. Those tell you that you can add that site’s content to Google Reader, meaning one less place you have to visit separately on the Web. Use Google Reader to ease your personal, professional, and academic lives. See the attached file for ways you can supercharge your Google Reader experience!

6. Get in touch if you have questions / difficulty!

Google Reader Tips (click on image for larger version)

Does ASCD EDge have a chance?

I usually am pretty impressed with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). I find that its books typically are of high quality. One of the best conferences I ever attended was an ASCD conference. I am a long-time ASCD member, subscriber to its SmartBrief e-mail newsletter, and reader of its Educational Leadership magazine and Inservice blog and Twitter feed. In other words, ASCD does good work.

That said, I confess that I am a little skeptical about the long-term chances of ASCD’s new online community, ASCD EDge. As you can see below, it’s a very sophisticated and comprehensive site. The ASCD Web team clearly has put a lot of thought and effort into the community. But I am not sure that educators need another freestanding social networking space. I know that I already have trouble staying on top of the ones in which I’m currently enrolled (on a side note, there are WAY too many good Ning communities out there!). I know that others find it difficult to keep up as well.

The social networking dilemma: Use someone else’s service or build your own

The challenge for an organization like ASCD that wants to tap into the benefits of social networking for its members is that it has two options:

1. Create a visible presence in someone else’s social network (e.g., a Facebook community), or
2. Create its own social network.

ASCD has decided to go with Option 2. In order for ASCD EDge to be a success, ASCD has to persuade large numbers of people to spend time in its online space rather than one that appeals to both educators and non-educators. Personally, as much as I like ASCD, I’m pretty unlikely to put my status updates and blog posts and photos and videos and discussions in a place other than Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or some other more general space that has larger network effects. I’m guessing that most other folks will be hesitant as well, particularly if other educational organizations like NASSP, NAESP, and AASA, etc. decide they need to create their own proprietary social networks too.

I don’t know how many active EDge members ASCD needs to consider this community a success. It may be that it only needs a few hundred or thousand to justify the time and expense. If anyone call pull off a proprietary social network for educators, it’s likely to be ASCD. It will be an interesting experiment to watch over time and I hope that ASCD regularly reports out membership numbers, levels of activity, unique user visits, and other usage statistics.

Screenshots from ASCD EDge (click on images for larger versions)

 

Recommendation

I will close with one suggestion for ASCD, which is that it resets all subscription options (see, e.g., below) so that their default status is unchecked rather than checked. If we want to sign up for these communication channels, we will. Until then, ASCD should assume that we don’t want more unsolicited e-mail rather than that we do.

You need leverage (aka "Why I blog")

Seth Godin says: 

If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen.

I’ll be making this argument when it’s time for me to go up for promotion…

Hey, AERA! Most researchers are terrible presenters!

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the world’s largest educational research organization, recently adopted some ‘important changes’ to improve the quality of its annual conference. As AERA notes, the purpose of the changes are to ‘enhance the quality of the Annual Meeting as a forum for communication and dissemination of new knowledge.’

Take a look at the document. Notice anything missing? I do. It’s any recognition whatsoever that the vast majority of the presentations are horrendously painful, characterized by terrible PowerPoint, boring monotone delivery, inadequate pacing, and a lack of emphasis on the needs of attendees rather than presenters.

If AERA is going to focus on improving the quality of its attendees’ conference experiences, shouldn’t it at least pay some attention to the elephant in the room, which is most researchers’ poor presenting skills?

Unemployment in Iowa

[Cross-posted at the Iowa 1to1 Network]

As the following chart illustrates, more Iowa workers were employed in May 2008 than in any other month in the past two years. Since then, Iowa has lost 65,700 jobs and gained 7,000, for an aggregate total of 58,700 jobs lost. The Construction and Manufacturing sectors represented about 20% of all of the jobs in Iowa in May 2008, but have represented nearly 60% of all the job losses since then. In other words, those two sectors are hemorrhaging jobs at a rate of about 3 times their representation in the state economy. Most other sectors’ losses have been roughly proportionate to their representation in the Iowa economy. Two sectors, Financial activities and insurance and Educational and health services, have actually seen employment gains since May 2008.

What implications do these data have for us as educational organizations?

[Click on image for larger version]

Transform the instructors first?

Here’s a short Twitter conversation that I had with Mary Zedeck on Wednesday:

I’ve been thinking about the question that I asked Mary. I wonder how many P-12 teachers or postsecondary faculty have had transformative experiences using technology. In other words, how many of them have personally intersected with some of the world-changing and paradigm-shifting possibilities that are out there? And for those who have, how many of them really understood what happened (i.e., how many recognized the bigger implications of the event that they personally experienced)?

Can we realistically expect educators who have not personally had (and understood) transformative technology experiences to create such experiences for their students? If not (and I’m guessing not), what implications does this have for our preservice and inservice training efforts?

ISTE 2010 keynote - Jeff Piontek named as winner

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on ISTE’s process

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

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

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

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

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

This stuff is easy

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

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

Dive in! 

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

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

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

Will Richardson says:

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

and

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

New feature: What would you like to see me write about?

I added a Skribit widget to Dangerously Irrelevant yesterday that allows me to take input from blog visitors about what they’d like to see. Here’s what it looks like on the blog (widget is on left-hand side):

Here’s what it looks like on the back end (click on image to see larger version):

Will this be of use to our community? I guess it depends on how much visitors use the widget. I think it has potential but only time will tell!

Given that my primary blog themes are technology, leadership, and school reform, what would you like to see me write about?