Dangerously Irrelevant

I’m a big fan of the videos from Common Craft. I use them constantly in my classes and workshops. Their newest video is Social Media in Plain English:

I also ran across the Mr. Winkle Wakes video today (hat tip to Jon Becker):

The publicity grows regarding our collective ideas for active summer learning with technology. In addition to appearing on the ISU News Service home page and in the Ames (IA) Tribune, I also have been interviewed by both Radio Iowa and WHO Radio. Next Tuesday is Iowa Public Radio: live, between 12:20pm and 12:35pm Central (feel free to call in and ask a question)!

Thanks, everyone, for your contributions!

It’s the end of the school year and it’s time for a new contest. In honor of Mike Schmoker’s classic Crayola Curriculum article…

• What’s the most dismaying / inane / worthless class assignment you’ve seen or heard about?

Last October I blogged about my son’s assignment to write down all the numbers between 1,000 and 2,000. Here’s another dismaying class assignment:

State Floats

• should be the size of an inverted shoebox
• basic box should be covered (paper, paint, tissue, etc.)
• do not have to have wheels
• should include state name prominently displayed
• should represent your chosen state – should have 2 or more items of importance from your state (ex: famous landmarks, crops, products, natural resources, state flowers/birds, etc.)
• should be colorful (may use such items as crepe paper, construction paper, giftwrap, plastic figures, silk flowers, popsicle sticks, cotton balls, foam, styrofoam, cardboard, foil, paint, clay, felt, etc.) – be creative!
• must be accompanied by a 5 x 8 card listing
• state name
• student’s name
• geographic region the state is in
• 3 important things the state is known for
• 1 "interesting fact" about the state

Floats must be completed and ready for “parade” on Friday, May 23.

Presentations

Students will be presenting their floats to all of the other 4th graders. They will be shoring the information from their 5 x 8 cards (listed above), and they will need to give a brief explanation of their float.

The floats will also be on display at the [school name] State Fair.

Your turn. What you got? Deadline for submissions is June 10. Please either comment below or link back to this post from your own blog. Winner gets everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug!

Update: See the winning entry!

I really liked this image of the inverted U from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability so I decided to make my own version:

I’m a strong proponent of data-driven practice, particularly for classroom- and student-level progress monitoring of essential learning outcomes. But, as Morville notes, there are diminishing (and even negligible) returns if one goes too far. We have to know when to say when.

Today we officially topped 60 participants for CASTLE’s first annual summer book club. That’s great! – and many more people than I ever anticipated – but it also presents some challenges…

1. It’s clear to me that we’re going to need to have more than one discussion group. Even accounting for some attrition, if we don’t break up into smaller groups then folks are going to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of comments. I also want to make sure that people have an opportunity to have a meaningful say rather than being the 53rd person on the comment list. Based on my experiences with the online courses that I teach, right now I’m thinking at least 2 and maybe as many as 4 groups.
2. I’ve been playing with Lefora as a potential discussion tool. I’ve also considered blogs and/or wikis. I definitely do NOT want WebCT / Blackboard / Moodle or any other kind of course management system (although Moodle’s the least objectionable of those three). I’d like RSS subscription capability, maybe for both posts and replies. The ability to see what’s new / read / unread would be nice too (I don’t think Lefora has this). I’m not sure what else is out there.

If anyone has any ideas on either of these fronts – thoughts regarding group size and/or what good tools might be for this – I’m open to suggestions. I need to make some decisions soon. Sign-up ends June 1 and we start June 9!

Anything else I should be thinking about? I’m excited to get going!

For those of you who are interested, here are the current standings for BlogBall08, our edubloggers’ fantasy baseball league…

Wow. Could The Age of the Millenials have been any more one-sided? I know the audience for 60 Minutes skews older but this episode was pretty over the top, even for a generation gap story  (hat tip to the Twitterverse). Here are a few phrases from the episode:

• Stand back all bosses. A new breed of American worker is attacking everything you hold sacred.
• Narcissistic praisehounds.
• Safety net or safety diaper.
• The coddling virus.
• While we’re having this delayed adolescence, are we getting behind as
  an economy … because we’re all just playing computer games at work
  while we wait to grow up?

• (and, my favorite…) Praising is psychobabble.

Where is the understanding that every generation is different than those that came before? Where is the recognition of the many talents that the Millenials bring to the workplace? Where is the idea that perhaps these millenials have a pretty keen understanding of their current worth in the American employment market?

Did there have to be so much grumpiness? Are the boomers just reaping what they sowed?

Quick! Name a long term, substantive, sustainable change that occurred in your organization without the active support of your leadership. I’ll wait…

That’s what I thought. Now why aren’t you paying more attention to the learning needs of your administrators?

Postman & Weingartner (1968, p. 23) noted:

Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. . . . The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed -€“ the art and science of asking questions -€“ is not taught in school! Moreover it is not "€œtaught" in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued.

In the news this week, a teacher may get fired because his students thought and acted independently?

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx – virtually the entire eighth grade – refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test. Instead, the students handed in blank exams. Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education. . . . School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella. . . . A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking "actions [that] caused a riot at the school." . . . "They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this," said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. "They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests."

After much deliberation and several delays, Wesley Fryer and I have picked a winner for the NECC button design contest. We had 22 different button submissions. We narrowed it down to 5 finalists, did some rank ordering, and then I made the ultimate call (so blame me, not Wesley, if yours didn’t get chosen). All the submissions were much better than anything I would have designed, so I’m glad that we had the contest!

Kudos to Bill Moseley for having the winning design. As promised, Bill receives everlasting fame, a CASTLE mug, one of the buttons, a t-shirt with his design on it, a picture of a monster from my 4-year-old

(Colin’s the one with the curly hair), and a copy of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Nice work, Bill!

[update: Bill has released this image with a Creative Commons license, saying, "Share it with anyone and everyone. This is about communicating the idea, right? If my image helps, then great!"]

A big, big thanks to everyone who participated. I will bring several hundred of the buttons to your mailing address and I’ll send you a button!