Dangerously Irrelevant

A technology director in Indiana asked me:

What are the ‘best’ designs you are seeing for a ‘traditional’ computer lab setup? I am looking for a lab design that allows for collaboration and team work and yet is flexible enough to move if need be (it would be a desktop lab with hard-wired connections to the network). What are you hearing or seeing? Any innovative designs?

Got any suggestions for him?

The authors of Blown to Bits, an absolutely superb book on life ‘after the digital explosion,’ note that

There is a difference … between ‘public’ and ‘readily accessible.’

Public records such as real estate transfers, birth records, and business transactions often contain sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, mother’s health information, credit card numbers, voter registration, fingerprints, professional occupations, and the like. While these data technically always have been available to the public, the difficulty of sifting through the paper records made large-scale aggregation and use nearly impossible.

What happens when those public records get digitized, however? What happens when public databases become easily accessible? What happens when paper records are turned into searchable text via optical character recognition and/or tagging? Or, as the authors, note, what happens when all of this public information gets merged with commercial marketing databases?

As the IowaLandRecords.org controversy here in Iowa shows, we need to do some tough thinking on this topic. Just how ‘public’ do we want our public records to be?

A few useful resources

• Arias, M. (2007). Internet access to public records v. privacy: What a complex clash to unravel.
• Bermann, S. (2006). Privacy and access to public records in the digital age.
• Center for Democracy and Technology. (1995). Public records: Access, privacy, and public policy.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center. (2007). Privacy and public records.
• Levitt, C. (2002). Regulating the availability of public records online.
• Levitt, C. (2005). How public are public records?
• Neave, M. (2003). International regulation of the publication of publicly accessible personal information.
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. (2006). Public records on the Internet: The privacy dilemma.

Many of us don’t think much about the back of our business cards. I think they’re an opportunity. Here’s what it says on the back of my card:

… and they all crossed their fingers, hoping … despite little to no investment in their leaders … despite making conscious, intentional decisions to keep it out … that somehow their students and staff would be prepared for the digital, global world that surrounded them …

The End?

I’ll probably word this a little differently next time, but I think this gets my message across that we need to better invest in our leaders and that we need to recognize that schools must be critically engaged in the preparation of digital citizens / workers. I always hand out my card with the back facing up so that the recipient at least sees that there’s something there.

What’s on the back of your business card? What could / should be?

This semester my preservice administrator students are creating a wiki that hopefully will become a helpful resource for high-poverty rural school districts. In particular, they’re trying to locate resources that are helpful for educators working to increase the academic achievement of economically-disadvantaged rural students. If you know of any good resources in this area, please leave them here as a comment. Thanks!

About a month ago, I posted my annual Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist and wondered (again) if schools had made any progress since the previous year. This year I also invited readers to fill out an online survey rating their own school organizations. I am pleased to announce that 125 of you took me up on the offer. Here are the results!

As you can see from the mean responses for the items on the checklist, participants rated staff development and principals’ understanding lowest of the ten items (note: clicking on each image gets you a larger version).

While participants felt fairly positively about their infrastructure, I thought that the modes show quite clearly that we have a long way to go in other areas:

I also looked at the distribution of responses within each item. For example, over 70% of the participants gave low responses to their district’s technology integration-related staff development.

I also plotted the responses for each item individually. As expected, the staff development item had the most skewed distribution. 

Finally, I calculated simple correlations for the items. The strongest correlation (.726) existed for the technology plan and vision items (Q8 and Q10).

Here are the results in various downloadable formats. These results include a number of additional charts.

• PowerPoint
• Acrobat PDF
• Excel (raw data)

Feel free to use the results to spark some conversation in your school organization. If you want me to host this online survey for your school or district, let me know!

Years before we had ‘Good is the enemy of great,’ we had Seth Godin in Fast Company:

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat. . . . In the face of change, the competent are helpless.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to change … to reinvent … or to redesign. No, it doesn’t take time; it takes will. The will to change. The will to take a risk. The will to become incompetent – at least for a while.

See also my implementation dip post from last year.

Three great questions

I especially like the last of these three questions from Rodney Trice. We should be asking teachers and principals that question more often (and just that directly).

• How do you intend to bring the global community into your classroom?
• How will you prepare students for a future that is relatively unknown?
• How you will eliminate the racial predictability of achievement outcomes in your classroom?

This just in: Teenagers play video games!

All kidding aside, the latest report from the amazing Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that kids – even girls! – are up to their eyeballs in video games.

We’ll stick to the tried and (not) true

Nope, sorry. iPods are not allowed. Back to the old way. Too bad it doesn’t work as well. Gotta do it anyway. Oh, and I love how the music players are categorically, by definition, a ‘distraction’ (if not in actuality). Who needs reality when we have these little educational policy fantasy worlds that we can create for ourselves?

Throw da bums out!

After attempts to bring in turnaround experts didn’t work, the state of Maryland is increasingly leaning toward completely restructuring schools that are academically unsuccessful. State schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick says:

We are very comfortable being more aggressive about this. We have seen much better results [when the staff is replaced].

Blog like a farmer

I ran across an old post by Mike Sansone, one of my Iowa blogging buddies. I really like his metaphor that blogging should be like farming.

Scorecards

I bet parents and community members would really like to see scorecards like this one (maybe with different data) for their local schools. I know some schools and districts already do this. Hopefully they use line graphs rather than tables of numbers. Could you tell the essential story of a school district with 10 key, well-done graphs? I bet you could!

No writing in journalism class?

Check out this excellent article about the NYU journalism student who got in trouble for blogging about her class. [hat tip to Tim Stahmer]

I got no money, honey

Did you catch Edutopia’s advice on how to innovate without extra money or support?

Spend hours on content you can find with Google in 3 seconds!

One of my favorite things about Wes Fryer is his ability to highlight the ridiculous. I also enjoy his irreverance (“Behold! I hold aloft the holy words!”), particularly when I have the same experience at my kids’ school.

Speaking of Google…

Finally, I’m digging Google Chrome. it’s now my default browser and I’m using Firefox less and less (and I love Firefox). Chrome is much faster. I also like that each tab is a separate process; I have yet to have a browser hang…

Apparently I sparked a little discussion by a local school board! You’ve got to give them credit for asking the right questions and also being willing to experiment publicly with what to them were new technologies…

Imagine you’re a new MBA student at Lehigh University. After a little while in your program, you’re ready – like any good Internet citizen – to share your experiences with others so that they can make informed choices about their own MBA programs. You look around at the various choices on the Web for sharing your point of view and find, much to your dismay, that none of the existing options resonate with you very well. What to do?

Well, if you’re Tony Powell and his buddy Jake, you create your own review site, The University Review. You do this in your spare moments (apparently MBA studies leave you with lots of free time?), tinkering with the database and interface. And, slowly, people begin to find your site and leave their reviews. Excellent!

In his book, The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain notes that

Ideas like free Web-based e-mail, hosting services for personal Web pages, instant messenger software, social networking sites, and well-designed search engines emerged more from individuals or small groups of people wanting to solve their own problems or try something neat than from firms realizing there were profits to be gleaned. (p. 85)

That’s why I’m rooting for Tony and Jake. They have a good idea – well-executed – and they’re having a blast just goofing around with the site. They’re trying to provide a valuable service rather than make a ton of money and they’re extremely open to user feedback. For example, I suggested that they include the option to rate universities by program of study. A short while later, the site had incorporated the official United States Department of Education program codes into the university review page. Once the database of user reviews gets big enough, users will be able to search by program (Which Educational Leadership programs get the highest ratings by their own students?).

Will Tony, Jake, and The University Review survive the rough-and-tumble world of the Web? Who knows? They’ve got some stiff competition from sites like Students Review, College Prowler, and College Grader. But their emphasis on good design, their receptivity to user feedback, and their passion for providing value to others make them a pretty decent bet. Mosey on over to Tony and Jake’s site and review your own university (Go Tribe!). You’ll be glad you did.

There’s more to the story…

Apparently Tony and Jake have caught the innovation bug. They’re looking for the next great idea and are willing to see if they can create it:

We are really enjoying being in the Ed Tech space. It’s a great community, full of wonderful people, and it’s a place where we can provide value. Because of that, we’d like to build something else useful for members of this community. In fact, we’d like to continue building tools in this space as long as we can. To that end, I was wondering if you have a ‘dream application’ or something that’s missing from this space, or something that can be improved. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them. Hopefully we can continue to contribute to the community, and we’re looking for the best way to do that.

Got an idea for Tony and Jake? and share your thoughts!

Angela Maiers asked “What advice do you have for those just starting?” Here was my response:

Start with a RSS reader. Seed it with a few select feeds of interest (some professional, some personal). Read. Read some more. Read some more. Click on a few hyperlinks in what you're reading. Leave a comment or two. Return to see if anyone responded to your comment. Read some more. Click on some more hyperlinks. Leave some more comments. Start to participate in the conversation. Read some more. And learn the power of the interactive, social Web…

Also check out David Truss’ new video, which is making the rounds of the edublogosphere:

As I said over at Angela’s blog, the video is extremely well done and, as a techie, I like it a lot. But I also know that there are going to be LOTS of people whose reaction to David’s video is going to be

I DON'T WANT to be that connected.

I’ve added David’s video to the Moving Forward wiki. See also Nathan Lowell’s video, Welcome to Your World!