Dangerously Irrelevant

David Warlick has blogged often about our need to tell a new story. A story about the technological shifts that are occurring in our society. A story about the impacts that digital technologies are having on our lives, the workplace, and, indeed, our very economies. A story about the future of eduation and what our kids need to know and be able to do in the New Economy. A story that helps people make the move from an education system designed for yesteryear to a system that is designed for tomorrow. This story needs to be told in a compelling way so that it resonates with listeners.

I agree with David. We do need a new story. We probably need multiple new stories, told in different ways to different people at different times in different settings. We need to tailor the new story for different audiences to ensure maximum reception. But I’m also thinking that a new story is not enough. A new story alone will not get us to where we need to be.

I think we also need a BHAG: a big, hairy, audacious goal. A tangible, concrete target that lets us know when we’ve reached some crucial point. A new story (or three or four…) is a necessary component, but I don’t think it will be sufficient in and of itself. I think we need a new story and a BHAG, because the BHAG will help drive action and allocation of resources. A new story tells us what the issues are but it doesn’t necessarily help people know what to do. The BHAG helps people understand where we might go and how to get there. Together a new story and a BHAG will help educators, and parents, and community members, and politicans create the will and the action to move us forward.

I think we’re starting to wrap our heads around what a new story might look like. For example, I know that the presentation set I’ve been delivering lately, which combines diifferent resources and quotes and materials from the blogosphere and elsewhere, is resonating well with folks here in Minnesota. But we still need a BHAG.

So what might a BHAG be? What might be a big, hairy, audacious goal, a target that makes us gulp a little bit but also is focused and achievable? What might be something that would help us accomplish our goal of moving schools, students, teachers, and classroom pedagogy into the 21st century? What might be a goal that is tangible and yet energizing, a goal that grabs people in the gut and serves as a unifying focal point of effort?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I can’t come up with anything better than this:

1. ubiqitous nationwide high-speed wireless Internet access, and
2. a wireless-capable laptop for every student and educator.

I’ve previously blogged about variations of the first component (both here and here), and I think we’re starting to see the revolutionary impacts of giving every kid and teacher a computer, even when those impacts weren’t foreseen or desired at the outset. I think these two in coordination (and you need them both, I believe) are a BHAG worth rallying around. Now of course the question is… what do you think?

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

Wesley
Fryer and Miguel
Guhlin have both ‘tagged’ me to discuss how I blog, think about blogging,
create my blog posts, etc. I’m usually happy to play along, so here goes…

1. Like everyone else, I blog on stuff that crosses my radar screen. My ideas
   might come from electronic sources such as blogs, web sites, podcasts, etc. or
   they might come from more traditional print resources. I probably
   tap into some literature sources that most other edubloggers don’t. For example,
   I not only live in the educational blogosphere but I also live in the world of
   educational leadership academia, research, and practice. Accordingly, I’m
   reading educational administrator practitioner magazines and research journals, attending conferences,
   listening to academic presentations, staying in touch with all of the major
   educational leadership and educational research associations, and so on. Good
   print and/or local resources can be excellent idea generators for blog posts and
   go beyond the same education blogs that we all read.
2. Sometimes I’ll see something that someone else did and feel that I can add
   some value to it rather than just post about it. My recent modifications of Karl
   Fisch’s Did You Know? video and Christian
   Long’s Future of Learning manifesto are examples of this. So is the aggregation
   of various quotes from the blogosphere that I did last September. When I’m
   ‘adding value’ to something it’s because I need it in a different format for my
   own teaching or presentation purposes, not because the original is
   inferior.
3. Finally, I try to be somewhat intentional and proactive about what I blog
   rather than just being reactive. For example, my two series last fall on blogging
   for administrators and gaming,
   cognition, and education were both planned well in advance of the actual
   blog posts occurring. I like to identify areas of need for administrators and
   other educators and then try to create resources that I think will help them. I
   am a strong believer that we
   need to be creating resources for educators to help them in their jobs, not
   just pontificating.

So there it is: nothing earth-shattering. I think the key is to write
passionately about stuff that interests you. If it fires you up, it will fire
others up too and they will find you and stay with you. Remember that you don’t
always need to come up with ‘original content.’ Adding a new perspective to
others’ content or making interesting connections across others’ content also
works quite well. Don’t forget to use all of the tools at your disposal to
publicize your blog: Technorati tags, Feedburner tools, frequent comments on
others’ posts, creative post titles, trackbacks, blogrolls, begging, etc. It all helps.

P.S. Be sure to visit the two links to Higher Edison in the last paragraph above. Good, thought-provoking stuff…

Okay, let me begin by stating that I know several things about this blog post:

1. It's probably going to make some people angry,
2. It's probably going to discourage some people, and
3. I know I've missed some people.

Now that my disclaimers are out of the way, here's what I've got: Will Richardson is more popular than eSchoolNews. Stephen Downes, David Warlick, and Vicki Davis are more popular than Education Week. Wesley Fryer is more popular than the feed from the main TechLEARNING web site. How do I know? Here is my Excel file. Feel free to play around with the data as desired.

Below is a chart of what I think are the top 30 edublogs as measured by Technorati rankings (click on the chart to see a full-size version). I've defined an edublog as any web site or blog having to do with education that has a RSS feed. Web sites like eSchoolNews and TechLEARNING thus are included. If you don't agree with my definition, exclude whom you want and go a little farther down the list in the Excel file.

Did I forget someone? Highly likely. Let me know and I'll add them for next quarter (April 2007). I only joined the blogosphere last August and still am learning my way around. Plus, in case you haven't noticed, the blogosphere is a big place and it doesn't come with an index. With your help I can keep adding to and expanding this list and start tracking the educational blogosphere a little better. For example, there are a bunch of blogs from the education blogosphere survey that aren't in the Excel file. I simply ran out of time and will apologize now for anyone on that list that isn't included. I'll make sure you're in the April report.

Below is another chart showing the movement of a few blogs that I looked at back in October (again, click on the chart to see a full-size version). This list simply represents some of the blogs that had crossed my radar after a mere 45 days of blogging and is not intended to be exclusionary. I include this chart to hopefully give some new bloggers some encouragement. The dark blue line swooping down from the top left is my blog. The orange line with a similar slope is Tuttle SVC. What's the lesson for those who want more readers? If Tom Hoffman and I can move that dramatically in just a few months, so can you. [Note: interpret any declines with some caution: for example, The Thinking Stick dropped dramatically when Jeff Scofer changed its URL in Technorati; it still hasn't caught up to where it was before.]

I'm a professor at a big research university, but this is not a research study. I'm just playing around with some data because that's what I like to do (yes, I'm a data geek). Concerns aside, there is some interesting info here. Over time this will get better and more complete, particularly with your help. Please don't get offended if you got left out: e-mail me your Technorati URL and I'll add you for April. I figure that by the end of the year this should be humming along pretty well. I welcome all suggestions and feedback; I'm trying to be as open and transparent as possible. Happy data exploring.

P.S. I unapologetically admit that I care about my Technorati ranking. Why? Because I'm trying to make change. The bigger audience I have, the more readers I reach directly and the more people I can influence indirectly through those readers. I'm on a mission. Aren't you?

(Seth Godin, The Big Moo, 2005, back cover of dust jacket)

Here’s something if you have a 60- to 90-minute block of time with educators…

100% Proficiency on Old Skills? A Candid Conversation About the Demands of NCLB and Preparing Students for the New Economy

• Step 1 – download the handout (jot a few notes)
• Step 2 – watch Did You Know? (6:05) (become a little overwhelmed)
• Step 3 – see the slides and listen to the podcast (34:20) (challenge the status quo)
• Step 4 – watch The Human Network (1:32) (remain hopeful)
• Step 5 – start discussing
• Step 6 – hand out either the short version or the long version as a take-away
• Step 7 – share widely!

P.S. This presentation is better than the one I did last week.

We’ve started a new initiative we are calling CASTLE Conversations: interviews with interesting people about technology and/or leadership issues. In some ways it will be very similar to the awesome work that Steve Hargadon is doing (and that others are doing). However, we’re mostly going to interview people that have expertise and are doing interesting things but may not have much national visibility.

Happy listening!

In their acclaimed book, Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras note that visionary companies set Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs), bold mission statements that act as powerful mechanisms to stimulate corporate progress. BHAGs are clear, compelling, serve as unifying focal points of effort, have clear finish lines, and often create immense team spirit. As the authors note,

A BHAG engages people – it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People ‘get it’ right away; it takes little or no explanation (p. 94).

Most importantly, BHAGs stimulate action. They create momentum, stimulate commitment, and get people willing to allocate their creative talents and human energies. President Kennedy’s 1961 proclamation that the U.S. would land a man on the moon (and return him safely) by the end of the decade was a classic BHAG. While BHAGs may seem crazy to outsiders, they are seen as eminently attainable by organizational insiders. Visionary companies make the use of BHAGs an institutional habit, a way of life: when one is achieved, another one is created.

Does your technology plan have a BHAG? More generally, does your school organization have a BHAG? If not, what might be one?

I think a lot of folks have been doing some great blogging, so I’m not quite sure what I did to deserve this, but thank you, Christian and Chris. Also, lots of folks have posted nice things about this month’s education blogosphere survey and the accompanying write-up of the results. I’m glad that folks are finding value in what I’m blogging. I’ll try to keep it up – now the pressure is on! Like the rest of us, I wish I had more time to write…

Listen to this post!

I had the pleasure of spending last Friday morning with the Minneapolis Public Schools Technology Planning Steering Committee. Coleen Kosloski, Director of Information Technology Services, gave me the task of energizing the group and giving them some things to think about.

We started with Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? presentation. I then talked for a little over half an hour about the changes we’re seeing in American society, essential workplace skills for the 21st century, Web 2.0, gaming, and other fun stuff. If you’re interested, here are the materials from the session:

• Did You Know?
• My PowerPoint presentation slides
• Podcast of my presentation (35 Mb; 37:40 with intro)

Listen to this post!

Dear Kelly, as usual, your recent post is deeply thoughtful. So is your comment to my previous post. That said, I don’t feel like you’ve quite captured why people are supporting Prensky on this topic of engaging students. For example, in your post you cite this quote from Chris Lehmann:

I used to say to my English classes, ‘Hey, on a warm spring day, I’d rather be outside playing Ultimate frisbee than teaching English, but we all have to be here, so let’s find a way to make it meaningful.’ The flaw in Prensky’s article is that there is a difference between recreation and work.

No one’s arguing against English. What we’re discussing is the importance of meaningfulness and how you get there. It’s awfully difficult to teach in a non-engaging way but still impart meaning. Why? Because you can’t get anyone’s attention. Folks can rail about the injustice of that all they want, but it’s reality.

As I noted in my post, and as any gamer can tell you, good video games are hard work. They also happen to be fun and engaging at the same time. It doesn’t have to be either one or the other. As Jim Collins would say, visionary organizations "do not oppress themselves with … the ‘Tyranny of the OR’" but rather recognize that we can have both at the same time. What Prensky and others are advocating is that we understand that students have the opportunity at home through video games and other technological experiences to do work that is both hard AND engaging. Then they head to school where too often the work is just hard (or perceived as irrelevant) but NOT engaging. But we expect students to do the work anyway, and then we get frustrated because they push back or tune out.

I don’t think anyone is arguing against struggle. I don’t think anyone is arguing that some stuff is ‘difficult and mundane.’ I don’t think anyone is telling kids that life is like a video game or is ‘confusing fun with life skills’ or thinks that we should ‘just let kids play until they’re 21 and then see what happens.’ What we are noting (as do you) is that there are ways of teaching that make the difficult and mundane more interesting, more engaging, and more relevant. There are ways of teaching that go beyond simply blaming kids for their inattention and put more of the ownership for student learning on us. This is a very similar theme to what we’re seeing in the data-driven decision-making arena: schools that take greater ownership of and responsibility for their students’ learning end up with better student learning outcomes than those that simply say, "Well, we taught it. Now it’s up to the kids." The bottom line is, if the kid isn’t learning, your instruction isn’t successful. If you have to be more engaging to make it happen, so be it. That’s part of teachers’ jobs: to be interesting and engaging enough to capture and keep kids’ attention on the learning task and to be able to explain the relevance and meaning of the task sufficiently to motivate kids to work.

People work hard when they find meaning in the task. This is true in school. This is true in life. Yes, there’s some mundanity in life, but I think it’s tough to argue that mundanity is a desirable aspect of schooling, one we should be arguing to retain. If the task to be done today is mundane but will pay off for kids later, it’s our responsibility as educators to explain that to kids in such a way that they buy into it. Just telling them it will be good for them later, and then getting frustrated because we don’t get buy-in, doesn’t cut it. Again, that’s our fault, not theirs.

You note in your comment that the lecture and note method is out of style in most classrooms. I wonder if most people would agree with you. I know from the hundreds of schools that I’ve personally visited that worksheets are by no means out of style. I know that teaching the same thing to all kids, regardless of whether some kids are ready for it or whether some kids already know it, is still predominant. I see a lot of teachers that are seemingly trying hard to engage kids but still haven’t found the magic formula. When this happens, it seems that we have two choices: keep trying to figure out the answer or blame the kids. And while many teachers keep plugging and keep looking for new solutions (including those that involve technology and/or gaming), many begin to blame the kids. It’s these latter educators that I think all of these Prensky advocates are arguing about. I love this recent Seth Godin post: "We’ve ‘tried everything,’ by which we mean we’ve tried a few things that everyone else has done as long as they didn’t involve doing anything differently from what we normally do." For many educators, he hits it right on the head.

All of this has always been true. What is different now (and why Prensky’s article is so salient) is that until recently kids didn’t have anything to compare teachers’ instruction against except other teachers. Now they have these high-powered learning environments called video games that are purposefully designed to keep kids’ brains in their own individualized zones of proximal development. The subject matter may be questionable, but the intentional cognitive engagement that is occurring is not. Personally, I’m not certain that most teachers can ever compete against that. But we have to try if we’re going to stay relevant to students. We can’t expect them to pay attention to us just because we want them to. Discarding rigor or difficulty is not the answer. Finding the right balance of engaging activities (or technologies) to ensure student attention is the answer. Again, to come back to Seth Godin’s quote in my previous post, it’s not the kids’ fault that we don’t have their attention. It’s ours. How do we know when we’re successful? Not when we say we are but when the kids’ actions show we are.

I’ve read your post and your comment each half a dozen times now. I don’t know if we’re that far apart but I wanted to at least note where I think we may differ. Maybe you’ve been blessed with a good teaching staff. Maybe you see less of this because you’re a great administrator. From your blog writing, I’m guessing that this is true. But there still are a lot of teachers who blame students for their lack of engagement and their lack of learning. They may not be the majority, but there are enough of them to be concerning (to me at least). I can’t quite tell if you’re okay with that or not (for example, you note that at age 14 it’s awfully hard to get kids to respond to anything). I’m willing to say that it’s our fault, not that of the students, and that we have multiple examples (including Chris Lehmann’s own school) where middle and high schools have found ways to keep adolescents meaningfully engaged with course content. And, yes, in some of those schools they’re recognizing that technology is not a prerequisite but can be a powerful helper.

You asked what in my own life I’ve found useful from my schooling experience. I was fortunate to have enough good teachers in my life (both K-12 and higher ed) to

1. instill in me a love of learning and a loathing of seemingly-meaningless work;
2. motivate me to become an educator myself and serve others;
3. challenge me in engaging ways to become a better thinker and writer;
4. show me that school should be about more than just "babysitting;" and
5. help me see that good teaching is not about the teacher but about the learner.

Here’s what I’m struggling to see: Why are folks arguing so hard for
boredom? Why are folks arguing so hard for mundanity and slogging
through? Why can’t we escape ‘the Tyranny of the OR?’ In my own life I’ve found that the more my work is also recreational, the more I like it. It’s not that I’m engaged in recreation instead of work. It’s that my work becomes more recreation-like (i.e., fun, engaging, interesting). If people work at it, align things right, and maybe get a little lucky, the difference between recreation and work can be awfully slim and life can be rewarding and energizing. There’s tremendous power in being in a job that seems like play because you like it so much!

Thanks for your thoughtful extension of the conversation. I am highly enjoying your blog and appreciate your willingness to think both deeply and publicly about leadership issues. We need more principal bloggers like you. I don’t know if any of us are adding anything new to the discussion, but I’m guessing that those of us who are having the conversation are probably learning at least a little bit.