Dangerously Irrelevant

Some of you may be interested in Through the Keyhole, my ‘random thoughts’ blog where I put stuff not directly related to K-12 technology and/or leadership issues. Recent posts have covered everything from effective lectures to White House censorship to elite college admissions to bottled water to boiling your family.

Enjoy.

Well said, Indexed.

Send Kim some smelling salts (i.e., comments) to try and revive her. We need her back.

1 year ago: Gaming,
cognition, and education – Wrap-up

The
Wikipedia gap

I don’t know about you, but when I hire someone, or go to the doctor or the
architect or an engineer, I could care less about how good they are at
memorizing or looking up facts. I want them to be great at synthesizing ideas,
the faster and more insightfully, the better.

Please don’t tell me that Wikipedia isn’t a real encyclopedia or one that
can’t be trusted. Perhaps it can’t be trusted if you’re prepping for a
Presidential debate, but it is sure good enough to help me learn what I need to
learn–which is how to quickly take a bunch of facts and turn them into a new
and useful idea.

Here’s what just about every exam ought to be: "Use Firefox to find the
information you need to answer this question:" And as the internet gets smarter,
the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing.

Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.

This
changes everything

This is a story about tools and bravery and marketing.

The tools: when you give a kid a net connection, access to wikipedia and to
the rest of the world, things change fast. Things you wouldn’t necessarily
predict. Like a ten year old who can diagnose his dad’s illness. Or a farmer
that can ask his daughter to find out where to get a new part for the tractor.
Or…

…

The marketing: Everything, even laptops for kids, works its way through the
innovation diffusion curve. That means that most countries, most organizations
and most communities aren’t going to adopt this tool for a few years. It doesn’t
matter if it’s perfect… these things take time. Smart marketing embraces the
curve and doesn’t insist that it must change for this project, right now.

One kid (or five kids) at a time. It’s enough. It’ll happen.

Rural
School Enrollments: Diverse and Rising

After years of shrinking enrollments, rural school populations are on the
rise. Minority students and English Language Learners account for a high
proportion of the increase, and many of the poorest and poorest prepared
children are entering classrooms in states with the fewest resources to teach
them. . . . In the school year 2003-2004, nearly a half of all English Language
Learners (ELL) were enrolled in rural schools.

Poor
People are Moving to Already Poor, Rural Communities

There is a growing body of evidence that rural communities are poor because
poor people are moving there.

Drop
Out Factories

Bill Gates says U.S. schools are "broken." Alvin Toffler calls them relics of
a by-gone industrial age. Now, according to Johns Hopkins University
researchers, 1 in 10 American high-schools is a "drop out factory," where 60
percent of freshman do not even make it to their senior year. What a colossal
waste of human talent. The U.S. has been living off the educational investments
of other countries, particularly China and India, for the past several decades.
What happens if the supply of foreign talent dries up or decides to head
elsewhere?

Education,
Schmeducation

People are creative. We like challenging and creative work. Most of us do not
need to spend more time in educational prisons sitting like a bump on a log in
class or getting ready for the big game, the pep rally or the prom. We need to
be involved in stuff that activates creativity.

Earlier this week I blogged about fighting fearmongering. PREA Prez notes that the next day his district blocked my blog:

[click on image for larger version]

Ironic timing, isn’t it, Doug?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Here is a suggested five-step conversation plan for creating greater interest
in digital technologies by your school administrators…

Step 1. Acrobat

“Can I have 10 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about tomorrow at 3pm?”

The next day…

“I am guessing that you run across things on the Web that you’d like to save
for future reference. I know I do. I often bookmark those in my Web browser but
sometimes they disappear and aren’t there when I return later. I thought you
might be interested in how to capture a web page in the full version of Adobe
Acrobat so that you have it forever in a PDF format. I use this a lot
myself.”

Demonstrate Acrobat…

“Thanks. Let me know if this is something you’d like me to install on your
computer. Also, I know I went through this fast, so I’m more than happy to come
back anytime and walk you through how to do this.”

Step 2. Podcasts

“Can I set up a one-hour meeting with you to go over some technology stuff?”

“Sure. How about next Thursday at 1pm?”

A week later…

“Hi I brought this CD with an
interesting interview I heard with three data-savvy principals in Minnesota.
I thought we could listen to it together and then talk about it.”

Listen to the CD. Have a conversation about the administrator’s reactions
to the podcast and how you can help with some of the data-driven issues raised
in the interview.

“Thanks. By the way, here are a few more CDs with some other podcasts
related to data-driven decision-making. I thought if you liked this one you
might want to have some others to listen to while you’re driving around, working
out, or whatever. Oh, and there’s lots more good stuff like this on the Web. Let
me know if you’re interested in seeing what else might be out there for
you.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the
administrator.

Step 3. Online videos

“Can I set up a one-hour meeting with you to go over some technology
stuff?”

“Sure. How about next Friday at 10am?”

A week later…

“Hi. I have a few online videos I wanted to show you. None of them are very
long but they’re all really good. Some of these might be great discussion
starters with our staff.”

Watch some or all of the following online videos together (make sure
they’re not blocked!):

• Teacher
  movie
• Administrator
  movie
• Introducing the
  book
• Did you
  know? 2.0
• A vision of
  students today
• The machine is us/ing
  us
• Information
  revolution

Have a conversation about the issues raised in the videos, how they might
be useful with school initiatives, etc.

“Thanks. By the way, here’s a link to some other videos that may be of
interest. You might be particularly interested in the administrator’s guide to
cyberbullying. Oh, and there’s lots more good stuff like this on
the Web. Let me know if you’re interested in seeing what else might be out there
for you.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the administrator.

Step 4. Sheetfed scanner

“Can I have 30 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about next Wednesday at 2pm?”

A week later…

“Hi. I wanted to show you this thing. It’s a sheetfed scanner. What you do is
you insert it between your keyboard and your monitor. Then, anytime someone
hands you a document that you want to save, you stick it through the scanner,
give it a title and some keywords, and click on save. This saves the file as a
PDF document on your hard drive. Anytime you need it again, you can open up the
software and pull up the document by doing a quick search on the title or
keywords. Then, best of all, you can throw the paper away! This is a great way
to stay organized and reduce all of the paper that’s laying around your office.
I use this all the time in my own work. Would you like to see a quick demo of
how it works?”

Demonstrate the scanner and software. Highlight how quick it is to scan
and save, and how easy it is to retrieve scanned documents.

“Thanks. Let me know if this is something you’d like me to install on your
computer. Also, I know I went through this fast, so I’m more than happy to come
back anytime and walk you through how to do this.”

Step 5. RSS [Note: I've changed my mind somewhat regarding this recommendation]

“Can I have 30 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about next Tuesday at 9am?”

A week later…

“Hi. I know you’re interested in woodworking and hiking. Plus you’re always
raving about those pugs of yours. I wanted to show you something.”

Show RSS in Plain
English. Then show the administrator the RSS aggregator you’ve
created for him, with feeds already set up for woodworking,
hiking, and
pugs
(replace with whatever the administrator’s interests are!). Show that you’ve
also seeded the aggregator with some
administrator-oriented blogs too, so that the aggregator can be
used for both professional and personal interests.

“Thanks. Here’s the URL for the aggregator. I showed you how to open up posts
in both the aggregator and the original web site, but let me know if you have
any difficulty. I’ll leave this for you to play around with for a few weeks. By
the way, if there are other web sites that you visit regularly (e.g., CNN, USA
Today, The New York Times, ESPN), they probably have RSS feeds too and we can
add those into your aggregator. Let me know if you’d like to make any changes or
additions to this.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the administrator.

And so on…

Conversations like these can go a long way toward facilitating administrator
buy-in and support for technology initiatives. Too often technology workshops
and demonstrations focus on student or teacher needs and neglect the very real
needs that administrators have for professional growth and increased efficiency
or effectiveness. The key is NOT to show administrators what you think is
cool but rather what will be USEFUL to their own learning needs and day-to-day
work. Remember that the most important person in your administrator’s life is
herself. Once she’s engaged personally, then you have a much better chance of
getting her interested in what teachers and students might do with digital
technologies. Until you’ve set the hook, much of this will be abstract to her.
Create opportunities to make digital technologies concretely real for your
administrators. Help them feel in their gut that this stuff is useful and
powerful.

Hopefully this five-step conversation plan will spark some ideas regarding
your own work with administrators. If so, please share with the rest of us!

One of the biggest things standing in the way of student technology usage in schools is adults’ fear.

Over at the Blue Skunk Blog, Doug Johnson posted a message from our mutual friend and Internet safety guru Nancy Willard that described all of the fearmongering that she’s seeing as she travels the country. In the comments to Doug’s post, John Pederson said that there’s no ‘sticky’ message to counter the fearmongering.

So Doug’s sponsoring a contest. Come up with the best ‘sticky’ message and win a prize from Doug. All submissions are due November 1 so get yours in soon!

From Karin Chenoweth at the Britannica blog:

Everyone in a school knows that some teachers are effective and some aren’t, but in most schools there is no organized way to ensure that students who get weak or bad teachers still learn what they need to learn. That’s not his fault, or the fault of any individual teachers who work hard; it is the fault of the way schools have been organized for generations.

and

[T]he essential issue at the heart of the controversy is whether schools should be asked to organize themselves to have student learning be at the center of all of their activities. I say they should. But the fact is that relatively few schools have done it.