Dangerously Irrelevant

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There are some great conversations going on right now about Marc Prensky’s article, Engage Me or Enrage Me. One is at Dennis Fermoyle’s blog; the other is at Chris Lehmann’s blog. I love these types of conversations because they force us to examine what we really believe about motivation, learning, and good instruction.

I just started reading Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson. One of the first points the author makes is that most good video games are HARD. They’re frustrating. They cause players to think and stew about them even when they’re not playing the game. It’s not that the gaming activity is easy. On the contrary, like a good hobby, it’s that the activity is challenging AND considered worth the work by the player.

We shouldn’t be making our schools fun at the expense of solid intellectual engagement. But making students’ classroom time more fun (or engaging, or whatever you want to call it) will help them learn more. Teachers who say it’s not their job to keep their kids’ attention during class time should, in my opinion, immediately be placed into a remediation program to improve their instruction. It’s not the kids’ fault if their teachers are boring or haven’t put together lessons that interest students (e.g., I just did a study of some high schools in which 68% of over 1,000 students said ‘Most of our work is busy work’). Or, as Seth Godin puts it…

Too often we educators (both K-12 and higher ed) say that ‘We’ve put together a good lesson, now it’s the students’ responsibility to meet us halfway.’ But Godin’s quote puts that belief to the test because it doesn’t hold up very well in the real world. In our own lives we don’t waste our valuable and limited attention span on stuff that doesn’t interest or engage us. To say that kids should because it’s in their best interests is disingenuous and morally dishonest. We have to make the case. Otherwise we deserve the consequences. Alfie Kohn has a wonderful quote in The Schools Our Children Deserve: "Might we have spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was exactly as pointless as we suspected at the time? (p. 1)" [For those of you who might bring up the fact that work isn't always interesting but we have to slog through anyway, I'll point out that 1) no one made you work in that job and/or for that employer, 2) job mobility is way up (people are trading autonomy for job security), and 3) we make students go to school through mandatory attendance laws - they have no choice but to be there.]

Right now I think students go home and are immersed in learning environments (i.e., video games) where the end product is considered to be worth the hard work. Then they go to school and too often don’t feel that way about what they do in their school environment, either because of lack of engagement or lack of perceived relevance. That is the challenge, and that is how I read Prensky.

Side note: Chris used the word gumption in his blog post. The third definition for gumption at Dictionary.com is ‘common sense.’ Using that definition, I’d argue that students that are tuning out of irrelevant or uninteresting lessons are showing a lot of gumption. Unless the teacher or school organization had successfully made the case for why it was worth my time to slog through anyway, I know that’s what I’d do and I strongly suspect that most others would too.

Did You Know? (version 1 and/or version 2) has now been seen by over 10 million people online. This is the post that went viral in February 2007. In November 2007 it was nominated for an Edublog award.

FYI, a new version of this presentation is now available:

• Did You Know? 2.0

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[update: please see my comment below regarding permission rights to use this presentation; also, Karl says that the music is a mix of three tracks from The Last of the Mohicans]

Earlier this month I thanked Karl Fisch for his wonderful Did You Know? presentation. I’ve been playing around with a modified version of his original files and Karl has given me permission to make the new version available to folks. Here it is:

• YouTube movie (online)
• streaming Flash movie (online)

[Because of bandwidth issues, other versions are available here: QuickTime (.mov); Windows media streaming (.wmv); downloadable Flash movie (.swf); AVI video (.avi); and PowerPoint (.ppt) with accompanying audio file (.mp3).]

I shortened it to 6 minutes, 5 seconds by deleting the first few slides (which pertained to his school) and changing the remaining slide timings; added a slide on MySpace; and made a few formatting and wording changes. If you’ve never seen Karl’s presentation before, you should read my post on the impacts it is making on folks in Minnesota and then watch it immediately. More fun from Karl is available on his Fischbowl presentations page. [update: you also might be interested in the other presentation materials I use along with Karl's video]

I’m using the presentation with a variety of different audiences: preservice teachers, district leadership and/or technology planning teams, doctoral students in colleges of education, other teachers and administrators, etc. As we all do so, let’s keep in mind Karl’s e-mail message to me:

I’m glad the presentation is making an impact – that was the idea, of course (although mostly for my own staff, I didn’t know it would take on a life of its own!). I hope that the conversations it starts don’t just stop at conversations, but actually translate into actions for our students.

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What happened to Ed-Tech Insider? Tom seems to be blogging faithfully but no one else seems to have posted in months?

I hope it’s not dying on the vine. There aren’t that many active education group blogs out there. Here are a few I know about that bring together bloggers from different places:

• TechLearning blog
• Infinite Thinking Machine
• The Pulse

And then there are these that have multiple bloggers from the same place:

• The Quick and the Ed
• U Tech Tips

Any others that folks know about?

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Here are a couple of recent (and great) posts from Seth Godin:

• On becoming the (January 15)
• We tried everything (January 12)

How is your organization navigating the change process? What makes it uniquely worthwhile?

In other words, in a landscape of attention overload, why should people / students / parents care about you and what you do?

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As promised, here are the results of the Dangerously Irrelevant 2007 Education Blogosphere Survey…

1. I made a short Flash video describing the general findings (or you can download the PowerPoint file without my voice narration).
2. I made a privacy-protected Excel file that you can download to do your own analysis.
3. If you just want to read participants’ responses but don’t want to do any analysis, this subset of the Excel file is formatted for easy reading and printing. Just click on the different worksheet tabs at the bottom.

Some info about the survey:

• While the survey was a nonscientific, general request for all interested edubloggers to participate, there are some good (and interesting) data in there.
• Results represent 160 education bloggers. I have no idea how many education bloggers there are total, so it’s hard to know what proportion of the whole these 160 represent.
• As I discuss in the video, it was neat to see fairly strong confirmation that, for most folks, blogs are not, in the words of one respondent, “narcissistic ventures” of self-publication but rather a powerful mechanism for communication, personal learning, and community-building. Blogging to build personal learning networks is as good a meme as any for folks who are unfamiliar with blogs.

Thanks to everyone who participated in and/or publicized this survey. I’d like to do this again next January with mostly different questions. If you have any questions or comments about the survey results, or have ideas or suggestions for next year, please contact me directly or leave them here as a comment.

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

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The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story on CASTLE’s Principal Blogging Project today:

• http://www.startribune.com/1592/story/938355.html
• http://www.startribune.com/1592/story/938358.html

Read it while it’s hot off the press. I think Star Tribune articles are no longer free after a week or two…

Also, not so hot off the press, two of our principal bloggers, Dave Younce and Jason Bednar, were profiled in December in the Chicago-area Daily Herald.

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A couple of days ago Network World had a story on the latest generation of GPS technologies used to track schoolbuses. The Everyday Wireless system that was profiled also has the ability to record when and where students board and disembark the bus.

Is GPS tracking of school buses a rational use of technology to optimize bus routes? Another example of overblown fear? A call for parental action like chipping kids?

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Every week day I receive the ASCD SmartBrief in my e-mail inbox. Usually it’s an excellent overview of some key stories that are happening in K-12 education across the country. However, here’s part of the SmartBrief that I received yesterday:

The SmartBrief blurb was linked to the actual Indianapolis Star article, which described a district’s technology-focused staff development day. It sounds like the actual event was a little more comprehensive than what the SmartBrief made it seem. Thank goodness. For a moment I was afraid there was a district out there that actually thought it was going to bridge the technology gap between teachers and students by teaching faculty how to use PowerPoint!

Interesting how the SmartBrief writer framed it, though…

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To date we’ve had 132 education bloggers submit responses for our education blogosphere survey. If you haven’t yet participated and would like to avoid being labeled a notty-pated hedgepig, there still are a few days left. I’ll shut down the survey early Monday morning Minnesota time. You can go directly to the survey by clicking on the link below:

• Education blogosphere survey

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far and to all of the folks who have helped publicize the survey. I’ve got my work cut out for me if I’m going to report the results next Wednesday!

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Last October I announced a bold new CASTLE initiative. Because of what was clearly a lack of presence by school principals in the blogosphere, we set an ambitious goal for ourselves of getting 100 principals up and blogging in 100 days. Dean Shareski at Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech expressed skepticism that we’d reach our goal. It’s now the 100-day mark – how are we doing?

Obviously we’re not doing as well as we had hoped. As the chart above shows, we’ve had 54 principals request a new blog. We’ve set up all those blogs, 5 in just the past few days. Of the other 49 principals, 25 are actively blogging (if sometimes infrequently) and 24 have never posted. I said in my comments to Dean’s post that I anticipated this project would be interesting. Here are a few thoughts on what has occurred so far with this initiative:

1. Reaching principals has been a challenge. Most principals are not active readers in the blogosphere and we have neither easy access to nor the budget for advertisements in the print publications that they do read. Nor do we have easy access to principals’ e-mail addresses for electronic communications. We thus are dependent on others to help us spread the word about this project. To date we have seen clear ‘bumps’ in the number of requests that we get after each online update and/or conference presentation that we’ve done.
2. We have discovered a few principal blogs that we didn’t know about. As word of this project has spread, principals have been e-mailing us their blog URLs. Right now we know of 21 principals who are blogging that did not start because of this project. You can access their blogs at our list of known principal blogs (they’re the ones in red). It’s possible that there are other principals using tools like edublogs, November Learning Communities, or blogging software provided by their school districts and we just don’t know about them.
3. Although we haven’t yet done a systematic survey of our active principal bloggers, my informal interactions with these folks have been uniformly positive. Several have been quite surprised at the positive reception that their blogs have received from parents and community members. Also, apparently several have been just dying for someone to offer them the opportunity to blog. As soon as we made the offer they not only started to blog quite frequently but also began asking for header graphic, clustr map, and myChingo modifications. They’re really getting into it! It makes me wonder how many other principals would jump at the chance if they just knew about our offer. The principals that began blogging because of us clearly are finding value in doing so.
4. We have encountered difficulties with district and/or personal e-mail filtering systems. A significant percentage of our principals have not been able to receive the invitation e-mail from TypePad to set up their guest account because their districts block anything to do with TypePad. Others are finding that the TypePad invite goes straight into their junk mail folder. Either way, they never receive the information they need to get started. We also have heard from a couple of district technology coordinators and/or principals that they would like to do this but can’t because of district restrictions on usage of outside tools.
5. I passed out cards with information about the project to nearly every attendee at the big educational administration professors conference in November. The idea was that we could reach local administrator and preservice administrator populations across the country through the professors that work with them. Although I can’t say for sure, I’m fairly certain that we received only a handful of blog requests as a result of that work. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my educational leadership faculty colleagues at other institutions are not supportive of the project or perhaps they don’t understand the potential of blogs enough to make it worth forwarding our information to their local educators.
6. We’ve also set up blogs for five central office administrators. They were interested in blogging and asked, so we said sure!

So has this project been a success? No and yes. No if we judge it by our initial ambitious goal of getting 100 new active principal blogs within 100 days. Yes if we recognize that we’ve already doubled the number of known principals in the blogosphere.

Here are our next steps:

1. I’m going to track our requests for another 50 days and report out on how we’re doing. After that the project web site and our offer to create free blogs for principals will remain open but I’ll quit reporting on our progress. Why the additional 50 days? I still am hopeful that we’ll get some more folks to sign up because…
2. Earlier this week we sent out informational e-mails about the project to every state educational technology director in the country. We also sent out e-mails to the executive director of each state’s superintendent association, secondary principal association, and elementary principal association and have notified CoSN, ISTE, SETDA, and others about the initiative. We asked these folks to pass the word along to their membership. We’re already starting to see a surge of requests as a result.
3. Because word of mouth is the best advertisement, we will ask our active principal bloggers to tap one of their local peers and suggest that he or she start blogging too. Our active bloggers are in the best position to describe the benefits that they’re seeing from blogging. Other principals will be best persuaded by one of their own who’s already doing this.
4. We also will get some testimonials from our most active principal bloggers and put those up on our project web site. Maybe hearing from other principals will help persuade a few folks who hear about the project but are undecided.
5. If I can find a spare moment, I would like to write a brief article on principal blogging and submit it to a print publication that principals read. I think we would get some additional requests if we could get an article written up and published. This won’t happen within the next 50 days, though, both because of my schedule and because practitioner magazines don’t turn stuff around that quickly.
6. I will continue to present about the project, either live at conferences or virtually via videoconferencing, as much as I can (first folks have to ask!). I have a couple of presentations coming up that may net a few requests.

We’re open to suggestions, comments, or other feedback that anyone has for us. We are extremely thankful for all of the support and publicity folks have given us to date. I am confident that eventually we will reach our goal of creating 100 new, active principal blogs. It just may take us longer than we had hoped.