Dangerously Irrelevant

I recently spent a wonderful four days in San Antonio, Texas at the UCEA Convention. One of the highlights of my trip was spending time with Miguel Guhlin. Miguel and I had lunch together – he was gracious enough to take off work, drive me to a local eatery, and then bring me back to the convention hotel – and then he surprised me by also attending the CASTLE symposium. For those of you who are interested, here is the web page I made for the convention.

Miguel has blogged his thoughts about the symposium. He also created a podcast of our discussion and then added some additional audio reflections about our session. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his blog post and listening to his reflections. It was fascinating to hear his take on a conversation that primarily involved professors and doctoral students (most of whom, of course, are K-12 educators). Although we did the usual academic symposium thing (a panel of professors talking to and with the audience), we also shook things up a bit. We actually showed two digital videos (gasp!) and used student response system software and "clickers" to facilitate audience interaction and spark conversation.

Karl Fisch, thank you for your Did You Know? presentation. Consuela Molina, thank you for your Digital Kids @ Analog Schools video. We used them both in our presentation and they were big hits. Ten years ago, would I ever have had access to these kind of wonderful resources? Nope. And that’s one of the wonderful things about this Internet era. I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges over the next decade.

Imagine that you’re an English-speaking American citizen who gets swept up by a whirlwind and plunked down in the middle of the Andes Mountains in Peru. You have no idea where you are, you just know that things are different than they were a little while ago. You realize that you can’t stay there – it’s getting uncomfortable (it’s cold!) – but you don’t really know where you need to go. You just know that you have to get moving. You figure that any direction is better than sitting still – hey, at least you’re making progress!

Fortunately you have landed right next to a guide. She knows the terrain fairly well and has a much better sense than you of possible destinations. Unfortunately, she speaks Quechua. Although a few of her words sort of make sense to you, her language is basically unfamiliar and, of course, she has a pretty different world view than you do. She points in a certain direction and begins walking. You follow, not quite sure that this is the way you want to go.

As you come over a crest, you encounter a large group of fellow Americans and a bunch of llamas. The members of the group are milling about, unsure of what to do. Since you speak English and your guide doesn’t, they turn to you for leadership. There are enough llamas for everyone, so you persuade them to follow you and your guide and to ride the llamas instead of walking. You figure that the llamas are better suited for the terrain and that you might get to your destination more efficiently and effectively. A few people in the group have ridden horses before, and of course your guide is quite familiar with llamas. You all set forth on your llamas, following your Peruvian guide toward some unknown place.

Why am I talking about Americans and llamas in Peru? Because I think this is what the digital world probably feels like to a lot of school administrators. For example, although your average principal might be quite savvy on her home soil, she’s usually out of her realm (literally) when it comes to digital technologies. She might have a technology coordinator or media specialist as a guide but she doesn’t really understand the language or concepts of the digital landscape. And yet, somehow, she’s expected to lead a bunch of teachers toward some future destination that’s unknown (and perhaps inconceivable) using tools with which she and others are basically unfamiliar.

Go back and read the first three paragraphs again. If you think my analogy holds up, then of course the challenge becomes… how do we train more administrators to speak Quechua and ride llamas?

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

It’s been about a month since I announced a new CASTLE project: to get 100 new principal blogs up and running within 100 days.

To date we’ve had 43 request for new principal blogs. All 43 have been created; 16 are already active (i.e., the principal has started posting). We’ve also created blogs for two central office administrators that requested them.

Over the next few days we will update our list of known principal blogs to reflect these new numbers. We’ve also found out about a few other principal bloggers that were previously unknown to us, so that’s great too!

Please keep encouraging your local administrators to participate in this project. Blogging can have a number of tangible benefits for principals. The link to the project home page is

• http://principalblogs.jot.com/

If just one principal in your local area decided to try blogging, that would be a great start!

Over at Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech, Dean mentions that he’s "going to be talking to senior administrators tomorrow about beginning to blog. I know that they’ll ask when they’re supposed to find time to blog."

When I pitched blogging to my kids’ principal, I asked her to imagine being able to send an e-mail to every parent in the community, an e-mail that took five minutes to type, an e-mail in which she could highlight something nifty happening in the school or in a classroom, something that ordinarily parents wouldn’t see but would love to know about. That was a big hook for her, particularly when I also stressed that blog posting was literally as easy as sending an e-mail, that past posts were easy to find (unlike, say, an e-mail listserv), and that she could turn comments off or on as desired (she was worried about having the time to monitor comments to her posts).

That two-minute conversation was enough for her to try it out. I’m pleased to say that she’s finding her blogging voice and also has found much encouragement from parents telling her that they eagerly look forward to her next post. She’s already thinking of other ways to use the blog beside simply pushing out newsletter-type items and likely will pilot a post with comments soon. And thus a principal blogger is born…

As I try to get 100 new principals blogging in 100 days, I have been struck by how many principals have jumped at the chance simply because someone offered it to them. I’ve also seen this in my kids’ school, where I’m setting up some teacher blogs too. It’s as if there’s this large untapped blogging reservoir waiting for someone to jam in the pipe and open the spigot. How many more teacher / administrator bloggers might we have if we simply asked them if they wanted a blog (and could articulate in two minutes some tangible benefits and how blogging can fit in with their already-busy lives)?

Dean, if you’d like, I’d be happy to set up blogs for any administrators in your organization that want them. Best of luck with the conversation.

Gerry Beimler, who is Manager of Leadership Development Programs for the Chicago Public Schools Office of eLearning and one of our School Technology Leadership graduate certificate students, forwarded me this story about the digital afterschool program at North Kenwood / Oakland Charter School in Chicago. Grants from the MacArthur Foundation are facilitating incredible digital experiences for the students in this program, most of whom come from socioeconomically-disadvantaged familes.

The program operates on the assumption that digital technology can be used as a constructive force and, possibly, a necessary force to equip children with the technological literacy skills they will need to be competent in this age of iPods, cell phones, e-mail, computers and countless other gadgets. The program uses cutting-edge educational strategies to introduce middle school students to the creative uses of digital technology. It has existed for only one year, but students in the program are already creating robots, programming video games, transmitting podcasts, recording original rap music and producing digital documentaries.

Read the article – there’s some very cool stuff happening in this program. Now all we have to do is replicate what’s happening in this building after school into the regular school day and across multiple schools and districts. Gerry, thanks for sharing this inspiring tale from Chicago.

The day after Halloween is probably a good day to write about fear.

I just finished reading The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner. In this highly-acclaimed book, Glassner points out that Americans spend vast amounts of time, energy, and mental space fearing the wrong things. For example, airline accidents (22 deaths last year) receive much more media attention than the dangers of everyday driving (43,443 deaths last year) (see NTSB, 2006). We spend billions of dollars trying to curb illegal drug use but spend less than 1 percent of the nation’s antidrug budget on curbing prescription drug abuse, which accounts for over half of drug-related medical issues and deaths (Glassner, 1999, pp. 131–132). Teen pregnancies are labeled as America’s “most serious social problem” despite the fact that teenage birth rates are declining and that the highest teenage birth rates were in the 1950s (p. 93). We are more alarmed about homicides (11th-ranked cause of death) than about heart disease (leading cause of death) (pp. xx-xxi). We spend enormous sums of money responding to public panics over low-frequency incidents like operating table fires or flesh-eating bacteria or the dangers of vaccines or sexual abuse by daycare providers or razor blades in Halloween apples while poverty and low levels of education and unhealthy diets continue to have significantly greater impacts on our daily lives. We worry about road rage rather than drunk drivers. And so on.

In education, we too are often ruled by fear.

In education, we focus on the dangers of online child predators rather than on dropout rates.

In education, we require urban schools to spend money on Internet filtering but not on decaying, unsafe school facilities.

Because of a few isolated incidents, we succumb to the siren song of school safety alarmists and pay for metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs and networked video cameras and drug testing of students in extracurricular activities instead of preschool education.

We would be much better off as a society if we spent less money and attention on sensationalist issues and instead focused on what matters: improving high school dropout and college completion rates, increasing the number of children who arrive at school ready to learn, reducing the growing segregation of students of color and poverty in urban school districts, more equitable school funding, educating children for their future rather then their past…

How much money do we waste on low-frequency, low-impact (but high-profile) issues? I wish that in education, and in America, we were more brave.

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.