Dangerously Irrelevant

I love the ending of this 60–second video! Are we?

Hat tip: Jeff Ronneberg

Just thinking out loud here… Should colleges, universities, and/or P-12 schools be required (or encouraged) to indicate on student transcripts that a particular course or program is partly or wholly online?

There could be codes. For example:

• Wholly face-to-face
• Face-to-face with some online aspects
• About equal time online and face-to-face
• Online with some face-to-face aspects
• Wholly online

I'm not sure this is a good idea. But maybe it is. What's the obligation, if any, to be transparent about the delivery of the learning experience?

Image credit: Internet

Here’s a comment I just left over at another blog:

Thank you for your thoughtful extension of the conversation at my blog. I always appreciate when others express their misgivings about my posts because it forces me to clarify my own thinking and message.

I don't think the answer to everything in education is technology. But I DO think it's important for schools to be relevant to the age in which they operate. Given that we now live in a digital, globally-interconnected era, I think schools owe it to their students to be up with the times. And we don't do that by having our kids spend 90+% of their time in lecture-, textbook-, and notebook paper-driven learning environments. The gaps between how we learn in the real world and what schools do has never been greater. Those gaps continue to increase every year, as the pace of change inside school is dwarfed by that outside of school. What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.

You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).

The jab at my advisory board membership is undeserved, particularly given that I have yet to receive a dime from any corporation for that type of service.

Finally, I'll note that the post in question was not a poke-in-the-eye aimed at teachers but rather the educational system as a whole. As school leaders, we have much greater influence over 'the system' than classroom teachers do. And it behooves us to make some radical changes quickly if schools are not to be completely irrelevant to the needs of students, families, and society.

Image credit: 25/365

The Economic Policy Institute’s new report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, cautions against heavy reliance on the use of test scores in teacher evaluation.

Authors of the report include four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association; two former presidents of the National Council on Measurement in Education; the current and two former chairs of the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences; the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management; the former director of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center and a former associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education; a former and current member of the National Assessment Governing Board; and the current vice-president, a former president, and three other members of the National Academy of Education.

Thought I’d share these two videos from the launch of the Spirit Lake (IA) Community Schools new 1:1 laptop initiative. Fun!

Many of you have never seen these parodies of the old Monster.com commercial… Happy viewing!

Teacher Movie (Marco Torres & Lesley University)

Administrator Movie (Wes Fryer & University of Central Oklahoma)

The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a number of excellent articles on openness. One that particularly resonated with me was Maria Andersen’s To Share or Not To Share: Is That the Question? (also available in PDF), which addresses the issue of how ‘open’ faculty are with their work and their ideas. Here’s a quote:

Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence. The first factor is the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing. This characteristic is something that is innate to personality, similar to the Myers-Briggs scale of introversion/extroversion. To move a person on this scale would be akin to changing an introvert to an extrovert. On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.

The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community. In my conversations with faculty who openly share their thoughts and content, I asked why they share. Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share — that everyone in education should share. Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.

In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.

I don’t know how many Educational Leadership faculty members are really trying to be thought leaders. I know that I am (which is why I vigorously use social media tools), but I’m not sure that most view their jobs through this lens. As Jon Becker pointed out in his Leadership Day 2010 post, the evidence is pretty clear that even the biggest names inside Educational Leadership academia generally are unknown outside our fairly small circle. It’s safe to say that, for the most part, practitioners and policymakers are completely ignorant of our research, teaching, service, grants, etc. At best, we may have some visibility within our home states through our current students, our alumni, and (possibly) our research projects or centers.

The problem, of course, is that the work of any Educational Leadership faculty member that isn’t easily findable is essentially invisible to the larger world and thus irrelevant to the people who theoretically should benefit from it. This leads to some inevitable questions: Since we’re education professors, what’s the point of our work if it doesn’t impact schools (or at least have a fighting chance of doing so)? Should we be pulling a paycheck if we’re essentially invisible to practitioners and/or policymakers?

Image credit: Something’s missing…

From Will Richardson:

A new video from New Brunswick, in the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) style. Well worth a watch! 

Three months ago I posted about my 6,000th Twitter follower. Apparently I’m already up to 7,000. I’m not sure what to make of that rapid growth, but thank you, Mrs. Abbott (@teacherabbott) for being one of my tweeps!

Now I owe TWO people a CASTLE mug!