Dangerously Irrelevant

Check out this comment on Linda Fandel’s Des Moines Register blog today:

"Ames’ Kellogg says she will play basketball at Minnesota"
"Charles City’s Buss says he will play basketball at UNI"

These are two headlines from the DMR [Des Moines Register] today.

Where will Des Moines North Valedictorian attend school? Where are the National Merit Scholars going. Who else got scholarships to attend college… non-sports' scholarships?

Cut the arts??? Maybe a hundred people will be at the school board meeting to complain. Cut the football program… you will have a community-wide revolt.

You want world-class schools on a limited budget… not till the people value it more than sports.

So true, so true…

A few weeks ago we decided to offer a technology ‘boot camp’ for administrators. CASTLE is working with the School Administrators of Iowa to make it happen. For those of you who are interested, here is some information on what we’re doing:

• Promotional flyer
• Boot camp wiki 
• The signs we have all around the room

We started yesterday. Unlike our Transitioning Schools into the 21st Century workshops, which focused on technology leadership issues, the purpose of the boot camp is solely to ramp up school leaders’ technological skills. Our emphasis is on providing a safe space for administrators to learn and empowering them to walk away from the workshop with the ability to actually do this stuff. We’re taking our time, answering lots of questions, and covering whatever we can in the time that we have. We had participants blogging within the first hour yesterday. They were pretty excited!

We’ve got a great bunch of school leaders in this first boot camp. If today goes as well as yesterday, we’ll do a few more next academic year.

Any feedback that you have on what we’re doing would be most welcome. Anyone out there doing something similar? If so, how’s it going?

 Yet another great TED presentation, this one by Clay Shirky:

The 2009 Game Education Summit begins today in Pittsburgh. If you’re not attending, the keynote presentations will be streamed live and also will be available afterward. The summit looks awesome; it’s “the only conference where the video game industry and academics from around the world can come together to have meaningful conversations about the future of game development.”

Wish I could be there! Maybe someone’s liveblogging or there’s a Twitter hashtag for the event?

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week…

LeaderTalk

Sue King discussed her thoughts on wrapping up another school year.

Barbara Barreda noted that we need to rethink learning and curriculum resources when we move to 1:1 laptop programs in our schools.

Angela Maiers wrote about students who read without meaning.

EdJurist

Justin Bathon was busy last week! He wrote about the always-exciting area of teacher pension funds, the digital efficiencies that may come with electronic textbooks, an editorial in The Atlantic about K-12 education, and Senator Harrison Williams. He also highlighted the National Conference of State Legislators’ online bill tracking database and wondered if NCLB is a ‘hostage of fortune.’

In addition, Justin teed off on a news story about student sexual harassment:

The operating assumption here, and it is explicitly acknowledged in the article, is that kids are sexually harassing each other all over the place. Kids are probably exposing themselves everyday, fondling each other, forcing kisses on each other, raping each other. That is the clear modus operandi of all teenagers because they are "hormonally charged." To support these assumptions, she quotes a consultant who would benefit if such was the national perception. We must assume the worst, and that assumption must override any data … because, well, we all know that schools and tennagers are bad, in all cases.

Dangerously Irrelevant

Posting here at Dangerously Irrelevant was light as I was busy with Summer Book Club preparation. I posted two book club updates:

• CASTLE Summer Book Club – Update 2
• CASTLE Summer Book Club – Update 3

I also squeezed in a quick note about why I never let my visitors’ ability to comment on my old posts expire.

Happy reading!

Whew! It’s consumed a lot of my time the past week but I am pleased to say that the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club is off and running! [Okay, more accurately, I should say that it has consumed a lot of the valuable time of Laura Bestler, CASTLE’s technology coordinator. Thank you, Laura!]

How to participate

Thanks to a few last-minute folks, our grand total is 246. Participants are busy introducing themselves (and learning how to comment on a blog!). If you want to follow the action, here are our four discussion groups:

• Group 1 (blue)
• Group 2 (orange)
• Group 3 (green)
• Group 4 (pink)

Even if you’re not an ‘official’ participant and thus can’t post to the group blogs, you still can play along at home by leaving comments (be sure to read the copyright notice in the initial Getting Started post). If you’re interested, each discussion group also has RSS feeds and e-mail subscription options for both the posts and the comments.

Social media

The book club has a Twitter and Technorati hashtag (#castlebc) and a Twibe.

Hope you’ll join us for our live podcast with Dr. Daniel Willingham, the author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, at 12pm Central on July 13!

Many bloggers don’t allow comments on old posts. After two weeks or 30 days or whatever, visitors lose their ability to leave comments. This is done mainly for spam protection, I believe.

In contrast, I don’t let my comments expire. Here are two reasons why:

1. Bolman & Deal frameworks: 49 comments to date. Two in June 2007, 47 in June 2009.
2. A taste of honey: 37 comments to date. Twelve in February 2009, 25 in April 2009.

In both of these instances, a professor or principal had his graduate students and/or staff use one of my blog posts as a discussion area. The dialogue for both has been excellent.

I’m happy to serve as a conversation space for people. In the end, that benefits them and me both. Them because they may not have another space readily available for easy discussion. Me because it allows me to see how people are thinking about and interacting with my content.

I want folks to find and be engaged with my past content, not just my current posts. That’s why I have a link to my “Top Posts” and why I include a search box, categories, a featured posts section, and other features on this blog. I’m guessing that at least some of those graduate students and educators also looked at some other content while they were here. A win-win all around…

Photo credit: Friday March 20, 19.01.23

[Update: If you registered, please check your junk mail / spam folders. Many of you who thought you had not received an e-mail from me later found my message in there...]

Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club has closed. We have 238 participants this year, including myself. Whew! Participants come from the following countries:

• Canada (6)
• Malaysia (1)
• Singapore (1)
• United Kingdom (1)
• United States (229)

I have divided us into four discussion groups. Last night I sent an e-mail to all participants that confirmed their registration and notified them of their group number. They will receive another e-mail this weekend that includes the URL of their online discussion area. The links to the four discussion areas will be posted here as well. Our conversations will be public and anyone can join us on an ad hoc basis as desired.

We start on Monday!

Mark your calendars

Dr. Daniel Willingham, author of the book that we’re reading, Why Don’t Students Like School?, has graciously agreed to do a live podcast with me on July 13 from 1pm to 2pm Eastern. Questions will be generated from our book club participants.

Related posts

• Our discussion timeline for the summer
• Some FAQs
• Another update

Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club closes this Wednesday at midnight. To date we have 159 participants, which blows the doors off of last year’s total of 125. A week ago we had 81 participants, so we’ve effectively doubled the size of the group in the last seven days. Awesome!

We’re reading Why Don’t Students Like School? by Dr. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia. I selected this book despite the fact that my alma mater, The College of William & Mary, is a fierce in-state academic rival of UVA so you know the book has to be pretty good! Sorry, those of you who have asked for a Kindle version…

Stay in touch as you have questions. I’ll see some of you online starting next week! 

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week… 

Edjurist

Scott Bauries discussed how the No Child Left Behind Act has introduced some new angles into school finance equity lawsuits. Scott also shared some initial thoughts about the burgeoning movement toward national curriculum standards.

Justin Bathon highlighted some issues related to a parent’s request to read the Bible in her son’s kindergarten class.

LeaderTalk

Kimberly Moritz wants to know: Why do we do it this way? She answers: Fear of reproach is how we end up closing the doors to our classrooms and offices and doing the same things year after year.

Mark Stock also asked a question: What does school reform look like when the National Education Association agrees with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?

Ryan Bretag said, “In this day and age when content is available anytime, anywhere, and to anyone, classrooms can no longer be tethered to the content-driven, physical spaces defined by 20th Century methodologies.”

Jayson Richardson highlighted some generational differences. Apparently I’m part of the Nike Generation.

Dennis Richards noted that 98% of kindergarteners were classified as geniuses when it came to divergent thinking (which is what you do when you are not forced to conform…).

Dangerously Irrelevant

I gave an update on the CASTLE Summer Book Club and I posted three quotes from Richard Longworth’s absolutely brilliant book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism:

• Any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced
• They are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost
• Biosciences will hire no dropouts

I also wrapped up my series of quotes from Michael Port's The Think Big Manifesto:

• We are the biggest obstacle
• We are squandering the gifts of the universe
• Get comfortable with discomfort

Finally, I reinstated the Not So Irrelevant feature of this blog, which I use to highlight various links of interest from around the Web. School administrators are busy. Hopefully I can steer them toward some online resources that will be informative and helpful. This time I’m limiting my selections to just 5 links per day. Last week I posted 25 links:

• Not so irrelevant 015
• Not so irrelevant 016
• Not so irrelevant 017
• Not so irrelevant 018
• Not so irrelevant 019 (I think this one’s the best)

Happy reading!