Dangerously Irrelevant

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

This is my third blog post as the guest of the week so I thought it was time I introduced myself a little more and talked about where I currently live and work. As you can tell by my accent, I am from Melbourne, Australia but have been working and traveling as an international educator for over 10 years, along with my husband (mathematics teacher) and daughter (just hit the terrible teen years!). Places I have worked are Zambia, Kuwait, Bangladesh and now Qatar. Being our first year in Qatar we are finding our new school, Qatar Academy, challenging in many ways. However I am finding my new position as Head of Information Technology and E-Learning to be a wonderfully rewarding experience with lots of amazing opportunities to contribute to the growth of the school.

I am also responding to Scott’s post earlier today, The World is Spiky, where he shares some interesting insights from Richard Florida’s new book Who’s your city. From reading the words of Florida I think Qatar is in fact a ‘tall spike’ in an unflat world. Definition of this: "the tallest spikes that attract global talent, generate knowledge, and produce the lion’s share of global innovation."
Qatar is an amazing place to be working right now. I found a blog post from last September after just arriving on ‘Sharing an amazing vision in Qatar‘ in which I wrote:

Here in Qatar I work at Qatar Academy, a PreK-12 school now delivering the IBO curriculum across all levels (PYP, MYP and DP) which is located on Education City, a large campus on the outskirts of Doha. However I work for Qatar Foundation
(QF) for Education, Science and Community Development. QF represents
the innovation and creativity of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa
Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar. QF is a non-profit organisation
and was founded in 1995, and Education City is their flagship.

I also wrote:

The
vision and commitment to excellence in education here is amazing. The
money being spent and the rate of development is staggering. QF is the
driving force behind the countries commitment to education and to Qatar
becoming one of the most developed knowledge-based societies around the
world. To do this they are partnering with international educational
institutions, supporting higher research and contributing to community
health and development programs. Her Highness, Sheikha Mozah Bint
Nasser Al Missned, Consort of His Highness, serves as the chairperson
of QF and personally guides the organisation with passion, vision and
enthusiasm.

Since September the pace of change and development has increased if anything. Education City is like a construction zone, with a new academic medical center, a new library, a new convention center, an amazing equestrian center and many other buildings going up….and fast! In a recent article in the New York Times talking about the rush of American universities to set up in global locations it stated:

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses,
particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the
Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

At
Education City in Doha, Qatar’s capital, they can study medicine at
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, international affairs at
Georgetown, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon, fine arts
at Virginia Commonwealth, engineering at Texas A&M, and soon, journalism at Northwestern.

And yet another article from the NY Times:

Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas,
has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes.

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, after a recent trip to Doha commented:

In Doha, since I was last there, a skyline that looks like a
mini-Manhattan has sprouted from the desert. Whatever construction
cranes are not in China must be in Doha today. This once sleepy harbor
now has a profile of skyscrapers, thanks to a huge injection of oil and
gas revenues.

Then there are the other Qatari government initiatives in education from ICT Qatar that include e-Education and the e-Schoolbag program amongst other programs. I visited the new boys school rolling out the e-Schoolbag Tablet PC implementation and was duly impressed. There are many international consultants and educators currently working in Qatar, advising the government and supporting the vision with extra expertise and knowledge.

Qatar is determined to be a ‘knowledge society’ and with that vision in mind are carefully planning their approach to education. Yes, this is the Middle East and there are certain cultural sensitivities (aren’t there any where in the world?) however I am finding a certain liberal attitude and a genuine desire to move forward. At a recent parent-teacher conference (Qatar Academy has about 85% Arabic students) I was pleasantly surprised at the friendly parents who not only wanted to shake my hand (remember that it is not always acceptable for men to shake a woman’s hand here) but also called me by my first name.

So what does this all mean for the rest of the world?……well I suggest you all keep a close eye on Qatar. This is not a flash in the pan, this is a carefully calculated and planned development that is already making waves and impacting around the world. We have Al Jazeera news, we have Doha Debates, we had the Asian games 2006 and we are bidding for the Olympics for 2016. We have a clean city (I have just been to Mumbai and was brought back to the reality of a large, dirty city..what does Florida call them? ‘third-world megacities’), albeit a little sandy some days. Qatar really is a ‘tall spike in an unflat world’ and despite the environmental concerns caused by over-indulgence (thanks Tom for reminding us), it is a beehive for creativity, innovation and 21st century thinking.

In the words of Sheikha Mozah:
"Today we plant seeds, tomorrow we open frontiers, tomorrow is rooted here".

Photo of Doha city skyline, taken late 2007

Animoto of a recent ‘dune bashing’ trip in the desert

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: qatar thomasfriedman richardflorida qataracademy qatarfoundation doha

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’m working my way through Dr. Richard Florida’s new book, Who’s Your City? Many of you may be familiar with Dr. Florida’s previous books, The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. I typically recommend one or both (along with some other texts) to school leaders who wish to learn more about global workforce changes.

Dr. Florida notes that the world isn’t as ‘flat’ as we have been led to believe. Instead, the world is rather spiky. As he describes in his opening chapter (and in his excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly), half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, up from about 3 percent two hundred years ago. Indeed, in industrialized countries, this percentage is around 75%, not 50%. This is societal shift on a massive scale.

So what? Why does it matter that the world is spiky rather than flat? Well, as Florida describes, often it actually does matter where you live (unlike what Friedman sometimes says in The World Is Flat). For example, we are seeing the emergence of ‘mega-regions,’ areas like the Boston-New York-Washington, DC corridor or the Amsterdam-Antwerp-Brussel region that not only are the ‘powerhouses behind national economies; they’re behind the global economy as well’ (p. 24). There are only a couple of dozen ‘places worldwide that generate significant innovation. These regions have ecosystems of leading-edge universities, high-powered companies, flexible labor markets, and venture capital that are attuned to the demands of commercial innovation’ (p. 27).

As Florida notes…

Creative people cluster not simply because they like to be around one another or prefer cosmopolitan centers with lots of amenities (though both things tend to be true). They cluster because density brings such powerful productivity advantages, economies of scale, and knowledge spillovers. Four kinds of places make up the landscape of our spiky world: first, the tallest spikes that attract global talent, generate knowledge, and produce the lion’s share of global innovation. Second are the emerging peaks that use established ideas, often imported, to produce goods and services. Some of these cities, such as Dublin and Seoul, are transitioning into places that generate innovation, but most, from Guadalajara to Shanghai, function primarily as the manufacturing and service centers of the 21st-century global economy. The two remaining types of places are being left behind: third-world megacities distinguished by large-scale "global slums," with high levels of social and political unrest and little meaningful economic activity; and the huge valleys of the spiky world, rural areas with little concentration of population or economic activity. The main difference between now and a couple of decades ago is that the economic and social distance between the peaks has gotten smaller. People in spiky places are often more connected to one another, even from half a world away, than they are to people in their own backyards.

We have to note the clustering effects of the global economy (the ‘centrifugal force’), not just the spread (the ‘centripetal force’). Florida says in his new book that ‘the reality is that globalization has two sides. The first and more obvious one is the geographic spread of routine economic funtions such as simple manufacturing or service work (for example, making or answering telephone calls). The second, less obvious side to globalization is the tendency for higher-level economic activities such as innovation, design, finance, and media to cluster in a relatively small number of locations‘ (p. 19).

I just moved to Ames, Iowa. The state capital, Des Moines, is a small creative center just 25 minutes away. Given his methodology, I’m guessing that Ames and Iowa State University are included in Dr. Florida’s statistics on the Des Moines region. Of all medium-sized U.S. regions (0.5 to 1 million people), Dr. Florida ranks Des Moines as the #1 ‘Best Buy’ region for families with children and #2 for professionals age 29–44. That’s cool for me and my family and my professional colleagues. But the reality is that we’re surrounded by fields. Over 90% of the state is corn or soybean fields (or hog farms).

So what do I tell the rural school leaders with whom I’ll be working? They’re already in communities that are struggling to survive. Do I tell them that, because they live in Florida’s ‘huge valleys,’ that their schools and communities are basically doomed? Or is there a way for them to still be economically productive and viable?

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

Change is a process in a school. Change is neither good nor bad but
just is. Rapid change can cause discomfort and upset. No change can
also cause discomfort and upset. Any educational institution that is
not going through some form of change right now is possible missing the
boat, or at least missing the opportunity to create their own boat and
sail on the sea of individualized, student-centered, technology
embedded learning.

In
the international school world change often comes in measured doses
lasting for the length of a contract (2 years minimum usually). Change
can be personality driven, more rapid and possibly more adhoc in this
realm of education given the desire of individuals to want to make
their mark and then move onto another international school and start
the process again. For the vast majority of expatriate teachers the
results of visionary new programs and curriculum implementations will
not be fully seen by the instigators, as they will be long gone, with
new teachers and administrators in place trying to move forward with an
altered vision, a newly tweaked plan and new enthusiasm. This is not
abnormal and yet it can be frustrating for the school as a whole as
programs come and go and initiatives are sparked and then put out.

A colleague lent me a book last week called "What’s worth fighting for in your school?"
Published in 1996, it talks about the culture of a school and
transforming schools into better places. It got me thinking about how
teaching can be a lonely profession and that building the culture of
collaboration is a challenge. It also got me to thinking about how now,
12 years later, what has changed are the tools that we now use to
foster collaboration but not necessarily the conditions under which
collaboration, risk-taking and change can successfully take place. So
what are these essential conditions for success within a school that
are worth fighting for in the environment of 21st century learning?

At a recent conference, the  ECIS / ISTE IT Leadership conference,
in Prague other IT leaders along with ISTE leaders Don Knezek and Lynn
Nolan, discussed essential conditions for successful change and how
these can be extrapolated into a leadership action plan. This is my
summary/interpretation and what I think is worth fighting for in my
school:

• A shared vision:
  what has shifted in education over the past five years and how has
  technology advanced and supported this? Proactive leadership can bring
  together a school community to share a vision for transforming learning.
• Strategic planning:
  systemic and aligned with a shared vision for school effectiveness and
  student learning through the infusion of technology and digital
  resources
• Understanding learning and leading in a digital age:
  It is through better understanding of how learners have changed, how
  the learning environment has changed, how the curriculum has changed
  that we can best plan for effective reform across the school
• Professional learning communities:
  now this is one I am already fighting for. Encouraging conversations,
  supporting adoption of new techniques, encouraging sharing of ideas,
  resources and best-practice
• One-to-one computing:
  mobility and ubiquity is the only way to go but this needs to be
  supported through funding for devices and for professional development.
  Not everyone yet sees the value in having a computing tool in hand
• Online learning community:
  for students, for teachers, for administrators and for the wider school
  community. This can be fostered through supporting technologies
  including Web 2.0 tools. However the tool is insignificant (to an
  extent), it is the interaction and potential for continuous improvement
  and perpetual learning that is the ultimate promise here
• Team-based professional development: Social learning and community-based exploration of new ideas for learning
• Sustainability:
  OK, this is a big one. We need to build in sustainability so that valid
  programs are able to survive leadership and other changes. At the same
  time we need to build in flexibility so that plans can be tweaked if
  needed to cater for changing technologies, local emphasis etc.

I was reminded coincidently today of a video a student in my class in Bangladesh created for the Horizon Project 2007.
If you overlook some poor technical quality, ESL spelling and grammar
and actually absorb the message this video has a lot to say about
change, where we have come from with educational technology and where
we could be going. Called ‘The Future is Now‘, it was part of the ‘User created content’ section of the project.

From the book again:
"What is worth fighting for is not to allow our organizations to be negative by default but to make them positive by design"

What do you think is worth fighting for in your school?

Julie Lindsay, Guest blogger

Technorati Tags: horizonproject2007 donknezek lynnnolan iste ecis

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

My
life as an international educator is bursting with exciting
opportunities and experiences. Being a guest blogger for Dr Scott
McLeod is one challenge I have been looking forward to. As a leader in
educational technology I blog about my own journey in the classroom as
well as interactions and collaborations with colleagues around the
world and try to make sense of the changing learning landscape.

Recently I have had the opportunity to attend in person conferences in Madrid, Prague and Mumbai. I have also been able to attend virtually a number of online events/conferences, in particular EduCon 2.0, where I was Skyped in by George Mayo to discuss global collaboration and the amazing CUE 2008 this past weekend where I was Skyped in by Steve Hargadon to a session discussing Web 2.0 in Education.  I have been reflecting on what it means to be a 21st century conference attendee and presenter at, as it is being called, Conference 2.0.
Gone are the days when information is only delivered via the conference
presenter and only at the conference. Gone are the days where
information is uni-directional and non-conversational. Gone are the
days when information is delivered via hard-copy handout and boring
bullet-points on a ubiquitous slideshow.

To be a leader in
education today means to be a contributor, not a passive onlooker. A
‘conference’ opportunity is to be embraced for all of the dynamic
cross-links and flowing ideas it brings. Let’s use Web 2.0 tools and
what ever else we can online to enhance and extend the experience and
learning.

So what does a Conference 2.0 look like? On one level
it has presenters who have set up learning experiences and objects
ahead of time including posting resources online and organizing virtual
input via Skype and chat etc. Let me tell a story here and then give
credit to some great colleagues out there who are already writing about
this in a more succinct way than I am.

My experience at the ASB Unplugged
conference in Mumbai, India recently highlighted the need to be mobile,
online and interacting at different levels. Connected to the WLAN and
therefore with connectivity to the world (the only way to be at a
conference!) I was able to ‘moblog’ to our school Ning (mobile blogging, or blogging on the run, a phrase coined by David Warlick I believe), Twitter,
Google Chat and search for resource URLs as presenters mentioned
them…all at the same time. In one session I remember Twittering with Kim Cofino, who was also attending a conference in Berlin, Germany, while at the same time chatting with Vicki Davis, who was also at a conference presenting on our Flat Classroom Project and more in Illinois ICE
and wowing the crowd with her exemplary style and sharing her latest
Zoho online material with me, while continuing to blog and interact
with people back at Qatar Academy via the Ning and also with people
around me re the current presentation in Mumbai.

What I really
missed in Mumbai was what is called a ‘backchannel’ where the audience
(real and virtual) can chat about the presentation. An effective way to
do this is to have the backchannel (using a tool such as chatzy.com)
projected onto the screen so the whole room can see what is being said
(including the presenter) and react to it as needed. This method was
also used by Karl Fisch, although using slightly different tools, for his fishbowl sessions with students and guests discussing Pink’s ‘A Whole New Mind’ recently.

What
I also miss at non-Conference 2.0 events is the use of RSS as the glue
to bind us all together. Once again David Warlick leads the way with
his hitchhikr.com conference
aggregator. I need to know where I can find other blog posts, images,
etc tagged for the events I am in. I need to know what the tagging
standard is so I can use it. I feel this still has not caught on with
educators around the world as it should have done.

I am in awe of the recent blog post by Steve Hargadon detailing his views and experiences with Conference 2.0 ideals and thoroughly  recommend his new wiki Conference 2.0
where, in typical Steve style he has provided a valuable resource and
service for everyone to use when attending/presenting at a conference.
Describing this wiki he states:

Web 2.0 has provided a number of
opportunities for new collaborative events to take place at and around
conferences. The events can enhance participants’ connections, dialog,
and engagement. Here are a number of these activities that can be
planned specifically for educational technology.

A recent blog post "The Ultimate Conference Attendee" by Will Richardson, although a little esoteric, has similar sentiments.

So,
it is true, the global stage does await every real and virtual attendee
at a conference. There are opportunities to foster and continue
conversations, make connections, squeeze the essence out of each
session and breath life into the topic. Is this information overload?
Is this too geeky for the average conference goer….well yes, maybe it
is however let’s lead the way, let’s set the standards internationally
and move beyond the static, dry, hard-copy handout, non-Internet based
session that does not deserve to exist in the Conference 2.0 mode.

Julie Lindsay, Guest blogger

Technorati Tags: georgemayo stevehargadon conference20 asbunplugged davidwarlick twitter kimcofino vickidavis karlfisch willrichardson

We’ve had an incredible run of guest bloggers here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Many thanks to Jason Dyer, my latest guest, who sparked a lot of conversation and gave us much to think about regarding the intersections of math and technology.

My next guest is Julie Lindsay, the Head of Information Technology at Qatar Academy, who also somehow finds time to blog regularly at E-Learning Journeys. I had the pleasure of meeting (and making a podcast with) Julie at the ASB Unplugged conference in Mumbai, India. You can learn more about Julie by visiting her wiki. As you will see, she’ll offer a rich international perspective to our discussions next week.

You can see the contributions of all of my guest bloggers by clicking on the Guest Bloggers category. If you’re
interested in being a
guest blogger yourself, let me know!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Take a look at the seven YouTube videos below, all taken by student cell phone cameras in classrooms. Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for filming and posting these?