Dangerously Irrelevant

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to this blog via e-mail or my RSS feed. I also am on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Ken Pruitt has posted three great questions for school districts:

1. What are the 21st century skills we want our teachers to model?
2. How can we provide consistent and relevant training to 200 teachers?
3. Will adequate resources encourage teachers to integrate technology into their curriculum?

The second question is a classic dilemma for school systems. Most still haven’t found a good answer to that one.

I love question 3!

Check out this excerpt from Michael McVey’s post at LeaderTalk. So very, very sad…

‘I read that the prestigious University of Chicago Business School will accept four-slide presentations
from applicants to their program. Just as I was about to lament the
technology gap between Colleges of Education and Business Schools, a
few lines deep in the article caught my eye:

Rosemaria
Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions for
the school’s full-time MBA program said, "The slides will be printed
and placed in each applicant’s file for review, which means all the
bells and whistles such as Flash, video clips, embedded music and
hyperlinks won’t be considered in the evaluation process," she said.
"This clearly levels the playing field for everyone."

‘I
began to feel a little lightheaded. What the Business School was doing
not only leveled the field, it flattened it, cropped it, and sucked the
very creativity out of it. This, I believe, is the pitch-black and
dizzying chasm, the point at which the world of the digital native
meets the world of the digital immigrant and they stand in stark
contrast to each other.

‘This is the difference between a butterfly in the wild and one
pinned to a board in a display case. As a method of gauging the
creative energy of an applicant to your program, making a four-slide
presentation might be a good start. However, when you evaluate this
creativity based upon two dimensional screen captures devoid of the
very creative energy you sought to assess, you might as well have
students submit their test scores and forego the technology charade.’

Come back next Wednesday to find out more…

[Photo credit: http://tinyurl.com/ajbch]

If you haven't seen these three films from Common Craft, I think they are great introductions for educators, parents, and others who are not familiar with these interactive Web 2.0 technologies:

• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
• RSS in Plain English

You'll notice that the links are to the dotSUB versions of the videos (thanks, Wesley!). dotSUB is a fantastic new service that uses volunteers to create video subtitles in different languages. I just uploaded Did You Know? 2.0 to the site. Awesome!

Earlier this month I featured a
report from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) as my
Report of the Week. Although I know that each of you
usually reads every comment on this blog (hah!), Beth Allen of the CWA left
a later comment that I thought was worth bringing to the forefront:

Hello all.

I am very interested in the challenge of articulating the vision as well.
I work with the Communications Workers of America, on the Speed Matters project,
which Scott kindly highlighted as a Report of the Week.

We are in the initial stages of gathering real stories about how
universal, affordable broadband can make a real difference. Our research shows
that even people who don’t want broadband for themselves have a vague idea that
it is important for kids and schools and the future of education. We need to
move from the abstract to the specific.

We are interested identifying educators who would be interested in
talking about their vision of what they could do if every child had home access
to a computer with a real high speed connection (think FTTH [fiber to the home]
with speeds of 30 mbps or more).

We are also interested in getting kids to imagine the future – what would
they do or invent if everyone in the United States had a real high speed
connection. It might be the world’s most awesome video game. It might be a video
phone system so that they could communicate with their grandparents who live far
away.

If any of you are interested in participating in one of these projects,
drop me a note at http://www.speedmatters.org/contact.html

Anyone willing to talk with Beth? If so, drop her a note! For what
it’s worth, Beth, here is what I’d talk about:

The Personal Democracy
Forum has outlined a six-point technical agenda that it believes
presidential candidates should support:

1. Declare the Internet a public good.
2. Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access
   nationwide.
3. Declare a "Net Neutrality" standard.
4. Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” our goal should be “Every Child
   Connected.”
5. Commit to building a connected democracy.
6. Create a national tech corps.

More detail on each of these is available at the Forum’s web site. You also
can sign on as a supporter of these principles.

From Wikinomics (p.
47):

[T]his is the first time in human history when children are
authorities on something really important.

Think about that for a minute, because the implications are huge. The authors go on
to remind us that

Today young people are authorities on the digital revolution that is
changing every institution in society. . . . While their parents were passive
consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry
for interaction.

This week we are featuring the Thailand for School Leaders Program. Ten school administrators from California have ventured around the globe to lead, learn and share with an international flair. Each is participating in an International Leadership program (and most also completing an independent study program for the Professional Administrative Credential, Tier II, from the University of California, Irvine). As leaders, educators and world citizens; each is participating in a professional development adventure of international experience and professional leadership self-reflection. What better classroom for 'world-class leaders' than the world?

What are you doing as a leader to positively affect the global community?

The International Leadership Program in Chiang Mai has been a wonderful experience for us as it has allowed us to escape our Californian school setting and reflect on personal successes, barriers and areas of needed experience in educational leadership. We have had the opportunity to observe and interview leaders in a country that values education and has similar visions for their children.

A very enriching experience …we were able to seek out and interview Thai leaders who are at the forefront of impacting their educational vision and surprisingly their response to: What are you doing to positively affect the global community?...was very similar to that of our own.

Being from opposite sides of the world, from different cultures and lifestyles, we were glad to learn that they have similar concerns. They too are teaching their children about environmental conservation, appropriate uses of technology and cultural appreciation, all of which positively affect the global community.

As leaders we have a responsibility to make our children aware of the impact and effect they can have on the world as an individual, society, or nation. We all have the choice to be involved in affecting the globe in a positive way.

It is refreshing to speak to educators across the world and realize that the world really is a small place, after all. Hopefully, others too are striving towards the same vision.

Paul Birkeland, Assistant Principal, Los Angeles Unified School District
Emily Kirkpatrick, Assistant Principal, Roseland Elementary School District
Support in Chiang Mai, Thailand by R & G Services

Some of you may remember that I’m headed to Iowa State University in about a month. I ran across a story on its news service last week about Chad Harms, a professor in the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, who has been doing research on how online sexual predators ‘groom’ their child victims and how their online communication can be coded to detect predatory behavior. Read the story and follow the links. This looks like interesting stuff, particularly if you could automate the coding so that it could be done by computer software.