Dangerously Irrelevant

The Iowa Technology Education Connection (ITEC) conference each year is fairly small. Despite its size, however, it tends to bring in some really big-name speakers for its keynote addresses. Last year the keynote speakers were Steve Wozniak and David Pogue (I also had a chance to finally meet Dennis Harper, which was super fun for me). This year’s keynotes are Hall Davidson and Alan November.

Below are the proposals I just submitted to ITEC 2008. Hopefully some will get accepted. Hope to see you in Des Moines in October!

Getting your principals and superintendent on board

If the leaders don’t get it, it’s not going to happen. This highly-interactive workshop will focus on some techniques and strategies for getting principals and superintendents to be better supporters of technology integration efforts. Bring your laptop!

Establishing an effective online presence in an attention economy

In an attention economy – when there is more information than people can possibly pay attention to – it’s hard to get noticed. Learn why an effective online presence is now necessary and how to get started.

Why aren’t you having a bigger impact?

Feel like you’re working hard but making less of an impact than you’d hoped? Join us for an interactive discussion about technology, school change, and informal leadership.

(In)Effective presentations

Death by PowerPoint. Everyone knows the phrase and yet dry, boring, ineffective slideware presentations continue to be the norm. Both educators and students can learn how to create and deliver memorable presentations that leave audiences wanting more!

If you’ve been reading Speed of Creativity lately, you probably noticed Wesley Fryer’s nifty phrase: I’m here for the learning revolution.

• Here for the learning revolution
• I officially claim this title for my first book – YET unwritten!

I AM here for the learning revolution! Are you?

I suggested to Wesley that we have a button design contest because I love the idea of all of us wearing these at NECC. He agreed, so this is the official announcement that he and I are hereby sponsoring a contest!

1. Design a button for people to wear at NECC (and beyond) that says I am here for the learning revolution  [no period at the end]
2. You can (and should) use any of these buttons at Absorbent Printing as design guides.
3. You may enter more than one design.
4. Your design must be made available under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike 3.0 unported license and must be in a file format and resolution suitable for printing.
5. Prizes include everlasting fame, a CASTLE mug, a picture of a monster drawn by my 4-year-old, and a copy of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. If the design is suitable for a t-shirt, CASTLE will buy one of those for the winner too. Plus I think Wesley also might have some stuff for the winner.
6. The deadline for submission is May 1. your file or a link to the file.
7. If you have any questions, contact me.

CASTLE will pay for prizes and the buttons. Anyone who attends the Edubloggercon 2008 & Classroom 2.0 ‘LIVE’ session at NECC gets a free button. I’ll pass out the rest during NECC until they’re gone.

So I’ll be sporting at least two buttons at NECC: this one and another nifty one that says I read blocked blogs (designed by Stephanie, inspired by Bud). Awesome.

Happy designing!

Update: See the winning entry!

This comment was left on my blog recently:

I have a personal opinion that many teachers become administrators not to help more students, but because it is easier to … preserve student success fantasies and their own delusions of grandeur as social influencers that simply can’t be maintained in the face of the constant reality of the classroom experience.

How is your school?
Admin response: Great!
Teacher response: well….

I asked the students in our superintendent preparation program (nearly all principals) to respond with some thoughts. Here’s what one said to the other members of the cohort:

Ever had a teacher like Arnie in your building?

When good teaching and effective school leadership align, teachers like Arnie feel like a duck out of water. I am sorry that Arnie feels compelled to paint with a broad brush that all administrators are hapless lemurs (my words, not his). These "Arnie-like teachers" truly represent an all-too-large segment of the teaching and non-teaching population.

Truthfully, his circumstances may be the reality for far too many teachers and schools. His circumstances and experiences, however, are not mine. They are not the circumstances of my staff, my students, or my community. I know in my soul that the 13 of us in our cohort entered into school leadership positions for reasons that could not be any further from the reality Arnie describes above. It must be hard for him to get up in the morning. I feel sad for him and his students. I feel outrage.

I read a recent Education World article which discusses, anecdotally, why teachers chose to become principals. This article, and the stories it tells from principals in the field, is a better match of my personal narrative. I strongly sense it is a better match for your personal narratives as well. I think so highly each of you.

Essentially, we lead for the same reasons we teach; we find ourselves compelled to make life-changing differences for each student we serve. Our strategies and responsibilities are different. We acknowledge a level of commitment that is met with a differentiated compensation package. Our families bear the burdens that our professional obligations demand. Yet we lead because we are compelled to lead; to make the work of our staff, the lives of our students (each and every one individually) and their parents, and the fullness of the communities we live in, better. In some places, we call these schools exemplary. In others we call them first class, or world class education, or 21st century.

In the end, what gets us there is expert-level practitioners and high-performance leadership. “Delusional.” No – data driven. “Fantasy?” No – fact. “Easier?” Give me a break.

I do agree with Arnie on one thing, however. Social influencers do challenge all of us to be resilient, responsive, and rigorous. At least that is how I took his meaning.

Arnie (and his students) would be better served by thinking through the fullness of the basis of his unhappiness. Arnie, walk – no run – to your home computer and click on mywantads.com. Surely there is a second career out there for an erstwhile, want-to-change-the-world teacher who deserves a chance to make a difference in life. “Delusional?” I hope not. "Fantasy?" It’s up to you. "Easier?" As easy as getting up each morning to go to a job that you feel passionate about.

Other thoughts or reactions?

Thanks to @rickscheibner, @abubnic, @rrmurry, @kolson29, @plugusin, @glassbeed, @pmcanulty, @tracyweeks, @NancyW, @RickTanski, @juliafallon, @swvalley, and @rwentechaney, I now have a number of new elementary classroom blogs to show my children’s principal today. What’s with the @ signs? Oh, those are Twitter IDs. What’s Twitter, you say? Well, among other things, it’s a great way to get questions answered. Fast.

I’ve added these blogs to the Blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki. If you know of any other great elementary classroom blogs – ones that have students blogging (as opposed to just teachers) – please add them to the wiki. What’s the Moving Forward wiki, you say? It’s a communal resource for people trying to facilitate change in schools. Check it out.

Thanks for the tweets, everyone!

Bud Hunt posted in Twitter about The Gaming Krib. Here’s the basic premise of the service this company’s trying to sell:

1. It has the ability to shut off families’ electronic media (television, computer, cell phone, etc.). [I’m not clear how it does this]
2. Parents sign up for the service for their wayward children who’d rather play than do schoolwork.
3. If a kid tries to play a game or watch TV, he is told "Sorry, you cannot run game, go online, turn on TV, or use phone until math questions are answered."
4. Kid does math problems and earns time credits for use of electronic media.
5. “Both parent and child happy.”

Check it out, particularly the endorsements (Daniel Pink saying “good luck” is an endorsement?). Also be sure to see the hilarious pictures for Steps 1–3 on the home page.

I like the idea… but for adults. Sorry, Mom or Dad. Too bad that you had a tough day at the office today. You can earn 10–minute allotments of time to watch TV or use the phone, though. You just have to first do the dishes, scrub the toilet, clean out the garage, run your errands, wax the floor, fold the laundry…

My latest roundup of links and tools…

Some really cool posts about Twitter

• Twitter set theory & the wisdom of the group (a must-read)
• 17 ways to visualize the Twitter universe

Reading blogs is like visiting a new city

• I need to think this way about all of the unread posts in my feed aggregator (thanks, Mike Maloy!)

Rethink trust

• An interesting video from an interesting organization (also downloadable)

Zamzar

• Like many others, I am enjoying using Zamzar, a video download / file conversion tool

Lame-o

As someone in a Ed leadership program right now, I couldn’t agree more that it is a waste of time and hoop-jumping to get an administrative license. My professor lectured for two hours to a class of adults on the importance of collaboration in adult education. Lame-o.
– Jethro

A great way to think about the social Web

• No one has ‘forgotten’ or ‘left out’ anything. You just haven’t added it yet. – Alan Levine, Wiki Way (thanks for the tip, Vicki Davis!)

The firestorm subsides

• In case you missed the latest edublogosphere hubbub, you can check it all out here (start at the beginning!). I thought that there were lots of thoughtful replies to Jon’s concerns, but Vicki Davis’ and Ric Murry’s and Tom Hemingway’s stand out for me. I also really liked Wesley Fryer’s reflective post today on his own history and the changes that he’s seen.
• One of my previous posts, Linked, may provide a useful way of thinking about blog ‘superhubs’ as connectors, not inner circles. As the conversation swirl about Jon’s post so aptly demonstrated, getting noticed by the superhubs can bring you into the conversation very quickly and get you a substantial increase in traffic. My experiences with the Did You Know? video and my post about classroom cell phone videos, both of which were picked up by bloggers with far larger audiences than me, bear witness to that truth.

Happy reading, everyone. Like Wesley, I am here for the learning revolution. Hope you are too.

One of the local school districts here in Iowa had an all-elementary-school chorus concert on Friday. At the beginning, the audience was told

Please turn your cell phones off. Please do not use flash photography; we don’t want to startle any of the participants. And no videotaping, please, because of copyright restrictions.

Not safety or privacy or confidentiality considerations. Copyright restrictions.

270 shining little faces on stage, ready to perform. A packed auditorium full of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and family friends. And the deflating message that they get, mere seconds before their children begin to sing in their dulcet voices, is:

Hi, John Q. Public. Thanks for slogging your kid to school, even in the rain and snow, every Wednesday at 7:30am all year for chorus practice. Thanks for getting your kid all gussied up for this huge event. We know that your precious angel is up on stage getting ready to sing his or her heart out. We know that the whole extended family is here to support that little boy or girl. But even though your heart is just bursting at the seams to capture the joy and excitement of this experience and share it with your child and your loved ones, we’d like to invoke ‘copyright protections’ so, too bad, you can’t do that. Have a good concert!

What a slap in the face. And we wonder why the public doesn’t support school bond referenda…

We have some technology funds to spend in my department. The computer lab that we provide for our on-campus graduate students is brand new and, other than some needed software, is in pretty good shape. We have large numbers of off-campus graduate students that never derive much benefit from the university technology fees that they pay each semester because their classes are online or are in remote locations several hours away.

If you were in our situation – with tens of thousands of dollars to spend on hardware, software, online systems/tools/accounts, and other classroom technologies for use by Educational Administration and Higher Education graduate students and faculty – what would you buy?

Dear Jon (and all you other new bloggers),

Following the time-honored tradition of Dear John letters everywhere, I write this because I care about you. I hope that we can still be friends when all is said and done. But it’s time that you faced a few brutal facts.

Fact 1. The world doesn’t care about you

Like the real world, other than your family and friends like me, the blogosphere doesn’t care about you. In the words of Seth Godin,

[They] don’t care about you. Not really. [They] care about [themselves]. If your message has something to do with [their lives], then perhaps [they’ll] notice, but in general, don’t expect much.

They don’t care that you want to be loved. They don’t care that you want more comments or that you want to be in on the conversation. It’s not about you. It’s about them (us) and whether, in an attention economy, you have anything worth paying attention to.

Fact 2. If you build it, they won’t come

Not at first, not for a long time, and maybe not ever. But eventually a few might swing by. For a few seconds. Maybe. And, if you’re adding value, they might stick around. Maybe. Or they might not. If you’re really lucky, they might tell a few friends about you. And some of those people might actually stop by and/or stay. But they probably won’t. They’ll probably go back to watching YouTube videos or reading I Can Has Cheezburger? (Lol).

Fact 3. There are things that you can do to increase your blog traffic

1. Blog about stuff that your audience wants to read
2. Help them find you

That’s it. Okay, that’s not completely it, but that’s 99% of it. Give me a ring if you want some tips about the other 1%.

Fact 4. If you’re nice, some folks might actually help you

Amazingly, many of those cocktail party elitists, despite being busy with their closed conversations, somehow found time to step outside of the inner circle and deign to offer you their thoughts. Vicki wrote you a very nice note. So did Darren. Lots of other folks left you comments and Stephen sent people your way. And of course there’s this tough love missive from me, your buddy who’s been down this path and is willing to share a few unsolicited thoughts that might be useful to you.

As my mother always used to say, don’t forget to write them a thank you note. The path to heaven is paved with graciousness.

Fact 5. You need to be patient

You’ve been blogging for how long? And your audience is how big? Congratulations! You shouldn’t be whining, you should be celebrating! Most newbie bloggers who are trying to grow their traffic would kill to be in your shoes.

I get that you want the buzz, the conversation, the mojo. You’ve tasted the juice and you want more. But it doesn’t work that way. Because it’s not about you.

If you follow the steps in #3 above, your audience will grow. You’ll get a few comments now and then (only a few, now, don’t be greedy). You’ll get a little link love. A few friends – some of whom you’ve never met – will help you. Twelve to eighteen months from now, if you’re still blogging and adding value to others, let’s see how you feel about things, okay?

Until then, keep doing what you’re doing. Blog great stuff. Link to others. Comment on others. Rinse and repeat. Oh, and be grateful that you have a voice and the tools to express it. We love in wonderful and interesting times.

Go in peace, my friend.

P.S. Your belief that the blogosphere may be saturated? Call me when every one of the 4+ million U.S. educators each has a RSS aggregator overflowing with feeds and no time to read them all. Then we can talk.