August 7, 2007 
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I’m a judge for Dan Meyer’s 4 Slides contest (entries are due Friday!). But here’s what I’d submit if I wasn’t… [click on each slide to see a larger version]
[photo credits: http://tinyurl.com/yo23zm and http://tinyurl.com/yonwnv]
August 4, 2007 12 Comments
Many of give presentations or deliver training workshops for K-12 or
postsecondary educators. As part of those professional development efforts, we
have a variety of resources and favorites that we use: background readings for
participants, videos that we show, example blogs or wikis that we highlight,
etc.
I’m working on a wiki, Moving
Forward, which I’m hoping can be a good resource for all of
us. Miguel and David and Wesley and Will and Sheryl and Karl and Jeff and John and Vicki and … Each has their own
private list of examples and resources that they use when they present. I’d like
to encourage everyone to contribute at least one resource to the Moving Forward wiki.
To start, let’s focus on blogging:
Please contribute your resources and URLs to the Moving Forward Blogs page.
This is a great way for everyone to create a resource
that can be used by all of us as we work to facilitate technology-related change
in schools and universities. Just one resource or example blog, that’s all I
ask. C’mon, that’s nothing! You can do it!
Feel free to add to the other pages as well. I’ll issues calls for contributions for other sections of the wiki over the coming weeks. If you make a contribution, please add your name to
the contributor list!
August 3, 2007 0 Comments
We are soliciting submissions for a new award
honoring the best research article of the year related to P-12 technology leadership issues. The article
may be published or unpublished, empirical or conceptual, but must be of
publishable quality in a peer-reviewed academic journal and must pertain to P-12 school technology leadership,
administration, and/or policy. Professors, graduate students, and other
researchers in educational leadership,
educational policy, instructional technology, and other fields are
encouraged to submit any article written or
published between August 1, 2006 and August 1, 2007. This award is
co-sponsored by the UCEA
Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education
(CASTLE) and the UCEA
School Technology Leadership SIG.
The award recipient will be formally recognized at a
brief ceremony during CASTLE’s session at this year’s UCEA convention in Alexandria, VA. The
awardee also will receive a plaque and $250 toward conference travel or other
expenses. Submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a five-person committee of
professors and practitioners. Articles should be submitted as e-mail attachments
to Dr. Scott McLeod, Director of CASTLE, at no later than
August 24, 2007.
Applicants will be notified of their status by September 15, 2007.
Please contact Dr.
McLeod if you have any questions about this
award. Feel free to pass this notice on to additional listservs and other
entities that may be interested.
August 3, 2007 0 Comments
A lot of folks have been asking important questions about school leader preparation lately. The most recent issue of AASA’s The School Administrator magazine profiles four key concerns.
Are school leadership programs any good?
Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, angered a number of folks with his 2005 report, Educating School Leaders, which was a scathing indictment of university educational administration programs. In this issue of The School Administrator, he and Diane Dean continue the theme that most school leader preparation practices are out of sync with the needs of schools:
The mission of the field is confused; the curriculum and degrees
awarded have little relevance to practice; clinical experience is weak;
the faculty is overly dependent on adjuncts and insufficiently involved
with schools; admission and graduation standards are low; and research
is of poor quality.
Do we have too many school leadership preparation programs?
In her article, Margaret Terry Orr chooses to focus on the growth of educational leadership doctoral programs and the resultant impact on quality and student selectivity. Orr notes that the growth has occurred mostly in smaller regional universities:
[T]hese programs lack the institutional resources, breadth and
history of other universities to support a doctoral program. New
programs are more likely to start up with fewer full-time dedicated
faculty members and be more reliant upon adjunct faculty. They may be
less able to develop more advanced-level coursework, offer more diverse
specialized course options, support research and research skill
development or have other educational developments in their
institutions that would enrich their content. . . . [As smaller]
institutions expand both doctoral program availability and number of
admissions, access becomes less competitive. But does greater access
diminish the value and quality of the degree?
Should we be skeptical of superintendents who don’t have an education background?
Tim Quinn, managing director of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents Academy, writes about preparing effective leaders for large urban school districts.
Although teachers and principals often are wary of non-educator
superintendents, Quinn notes that running a large district can be
similar to running a large, multinational company:
It takes strong leadership skills to successfully run an entity
as large and complex as an urban school district, much less turn around
one that is low-performing. Most people don’t realize many urban school
systems are as large as the biggest companies in America. The New York
City Department of Education, with a budget of nearly $13 billion,
ranks among the top of the Fortune 500 list in terms of size, alongside
companies such as Sun Microsystems and Continental Airlines. Many urban
districts have more employees and larger budgets than any other entity,
business or government in their city. Urban school district leaders
have a massive scope of responsibility. . . . [M]ost current
educational leadership programs are not preparing leaders – whether
traditional or nontraditional – to handle the realities and complex
challenges of leading an urban school district.
Can school leaders be prepared effectively online?
In the issue’s final article, Patti Ghezzi writes about online doctoral programs for school leaders.
Although school systems and traditional university programs tend to be
skeptical about the quality of online leadership preparation programs,
participants often claim that their coursework is more rigorous than
anything they’ve done in face-to-face graduate study:
One critic, Thomas Glass, a professor of educational leadership
at University of Memphis who tracks superintendent trends, believes
online programs run by online colleges cannot prepare educators for
executive-level positions in a school district. “They are definitely
second class or third class.” . . . Leaders at the institutions now
offering online doctoral degrees say their programs are as rigorous, if
not more so, than programs at bricks-and-mortar universities. They
contend their electronic classes emphasize practical skills and
applicable research over education theory and say their instructors are
practitioners who understand the public education landscape better than
tenured professors who may be decades removed from working in school
settings. . . . Dolly Adams, a lead teacher for gifted education in
Richmond, Texas, who is working on her Ed.D. in educational leadership
[says,] “You’re not sitting in a lecture listening to a professor who
likes the sound of his voice.”
As the new coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University,
I obviously am concerned with effective leadership preparation
practices. If you are too, I encourage you to read one or more of these
articles. Then, since there’s no discussion area at AASA, come back here and give us your two cents. There’s plenty of fuel here for discussion!
P.S. In addition to these four interesting articles, you also should
make it a priority to track down a copy of Joe Murphy’s phenomenal
article in the April issue of Phi Delta Kappan regarding the disconnect between university educational leadership programs and the needs of practicing administrators.
August 2, 2007 8 Comments
Yesterday evening a major bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River in the middle of rush hour. I’d like to thank everyone who checked in to see if my family and I were okay. We’re all doing fine, although we’re still anxiously checking on friends and coworkers.
As you can see, the bridge (red X) is very close to my office (green arrow).
It’s a terrible, terrible thing… My thoughts are with those who may have lost friends or loved ones.
August 1, 2007 24 Comments
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
Back in January, when I had been blogging for five months but was still a blogosphere fledgling, I am embarrassed to say that I made a post that purported to present the top 30 edublogs as measured by Technorati rankings. The more time that passed since that post, the more chagrined I became at how laughably naive I was (I only analyzed 66 blogs!). So I decided to try again…
Step 1: Define the size of the education blogosphere
This in itself is a challenging and important task. No one knows exactly how big the education blogosphere is because it’s both dispersed and hidden. Here’s how my two phenomenal research assistants, Jenni Christenson and Eric LeJeune, and I tackled the issue:
Then we had the joy of finding and eliminating duplicates. Ugh.
Technorati lists 14,854 blogs with a tag of ‘education.’ It lists 23,807 blogs with a tag of ‘school.’ James informed me that Edublogs alone is hosting over 50,000 educator blogs, most of which are private and classroom-oriented. As you’ll see, we didn’t get anywhere near that many URLs.
How many edublogs are there? Over 50,000. How many are in this analysis? Over 3,600.
Step 2: Rank the blogs we found.
This was easier. Jenni and Eric copied each blog URL into the search box at Technorati.com and then entered into our spreadsheet the blog’s Authority (i.e., how many blogs have linked to it over the last 6 months) and Rank (i.e., overall rank among the tens of millions of blogs that Technorati monitors; lower is better). For example, at the time we checked, Patrick Higgins’ blog, Chalkdust, had an authority of 40 and a rank of 153,160. Many blogs had an authority of 0 or had nothing listed at all for either factor.
Step 3: Sort and present the results.
After doing a lot of cleanup (eliminating more duplicates!), we sorted by rank and authority. Here are some example results (click on the images to see the full-size charts)…
As you can see, Inside Higher Ed is the most popular edublog on our list according to Technorati’s Rank feature. Rounding out the top 30 is Infinite Thinking Machine.
If you look at the Authority of the top 204 edublogs, you’ll see the classic long tail distribution. The top blog, Inside Higher Ed, had nearly 2,400 other blogs link to it over the past six months. In contrast, the blogs near the end of this graph only had 45 blogs link to them. About two-thirds (2,542) of the blogs on our list had 0 blogs link to them in the last half year. Only 264 averaged more than 5 external links per month.
Caveats and disclaimers
Next steps
If you want to play with the data yourself, download the Excel file. Please link back to this post or send me your findings so I can see what you come up with!
I’d like to do this twice a year, so the next time should be in January 2008. As the list grows bigger, it gets more unwieldy and time-consuming. If you’d like to lend a hand, get in touch. If you have any suggestions for how to expand this analysis or do it differently, please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
8/1 Correction: The data for Education Week, The Fischbowl, and eSchoolNews were erroneously omitted. The two graphs above, as well as the downloadable Excel file, have been updated to reflect the data for these two sites.
We can't let educators off the hook
Do most educational games suck?
Should students be allowed to use cell phones on all assignments and assessments?
My thoughts on a proposed social media policy for school employees (Part 2)
5 great slides about technology, learning, and change
Congratulations, Drs. Cox, Grundmeyer, Sauers, and Urich!
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