Dangerously Irrelevant

Here is the current leaderboard for the ISTE conference keynote crowdsourcing project. I’ll try to post a daily update between now and December 15. Have you voted yet?

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in my 3–minute survey, Why isn’t your school organization making more progress? We had a total of 561 participants. Some charts and tables are below (click on images for larger versions). Also, here are some downloadable files:

• Complete data packet
• Excel spreadsheet
• Word document
• “Live” results page

My online survey software provided some summary data:

The chart below shows the average rank of each item, along with standard deviations. The lower the rank, the more important the reason.

Although Lack of adequate funding emerged as the top reason cited, Ineffective leadership had more top 3 appearances than any other item. I admit that Accountability demands of NCLB came out lower than I expected.

Finally, Jon Becker wondered if maybe some demand characteristics were in play here…

Feel free to do any other analysis you‘d like on the raw data; just leave a link in the comments area for this post so we all can find it. Thanks again to everyone who participated and/or publicized this survey!

The next phase of ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote crowdsourcing project is now live. Go vote!

The top 5 topics were as follows (in order):

1. Effective school leadership for the digital, global era
2. Trends, tools, and tactics for 21st century learning
3. Personal learning with 21st century tools
4. Universal design for learning
5. Why has technology affected so little change on teaching and learning?

This image shows how many votes each topic received:

ISTE has asked us not to campaign for speakers (see highlighted section below):

I understand what ISTE is trying to do, but I think that there’s an awfully fine line between campaigning and explaining. For example, if I say on this blog that I think Chris Lehmann would be a phenomenal speaker for the leadership topic – and that I hope voters give him all 3 of their votes – is that campaigning or explaining? If I say on Twitter that the voting for ISTE keynote speakers is now live and that I voted for Chris, is that campaigning or explaining?

If I elucidate further in the comments area why Chris would be a great keynote presenter, is that campaigning or explaining?

The bottom line is that we all can have a voice now. It seems to me that ISTE is trying to make this voting area a closed space – separate from all of the other conversation spaces that we have available to us – and I just don’t think that’s either logical or feasible. Nonetheless, in deference to ISTE’s wishes, I’ll put away all of the cool electronic campaign buttons for Chris that CASTLE’s technology director, Laura Bestler, made over the past two weeks [sigh] (if you’d like to see them, drop me an e-mail). I am happy that ISTE’s trying this experiment; it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

So please go vote for your choice(s) for ISTE 2010 conference keynote speaker. If you don’t see the name you want, make sure you’re in the right forum and then add him or her to the list. Happy voting!

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. It wasn’t bad because I had poor content or delivery. It was a bad presentation because I didn’t sufficiently account for the needs and understandings of my audience. Let me explain…

I’m in Anaheim, California for the annual conference of the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA), which is the primary association for educational leadership faculty members at large research institutions. In other words, UCEA is the organization for professors that prepare school principals and superintendents. I currently serve as UCEA’s Associate Director for Communications. I’ve been helping UCEA transition from a very static, fairly unhelpful web site to a more robust online presence. This past year we transitioned UCEA to Squarespace and now I am helping them take advantage of its interactive tools and other social media such as Twitter and podcasting.

Yesterday morning I was scheduled to give a presentation to UCEA’s Executive Committee (EC). The EC is the governing body for the larger organization and is made up of 10 faculty from a number of different postsecondary institutions. You can see my presentation below. I shared various statistics and information about the UCEA web site, Twitter channel, and BlogTalkRadio podcast series.

The members of the EC were fine until I got to the recommendations. Then I lost them (at least that’s when I think I lost them). The problem was that I’ve been working with Dr. Michelle Young, UCEA’s Executive Director, and she gets what we’re trying to do. But the EC hasn’t heard from me in a while and to them I might as well have been speaking in tongues. As a group, their level of technology understanding was much lower than Michelle’s, perhaps because I’ve been answering her questions as we’ve gone along.

It was my fault. I know that I need to tailor my presentations to the level of my audience. I’ve done that well in the past – including with the EC – but I forgot my audience this time. The end result was a dissatisfying experience for both them and me. Although some of them said to me later that I did a good job, I know they were being polite.

So now I have to remedy the situation. For some that will mean individual follow-up conversations just to clarify or touch base. For others a series of explanatory e-mail updates will suffice. And I’ll need to roll up my sleeves with a few and start walking them through the same questions and answers that Michelle and I already have navigated. In the end it will be fine, but now I’ve created more work for myself – work I could have avoided if I’d done what I should have yesterday.

I gave a bad presentation yesterday. Lesson learned. Reminder received. Time to adjust, compensate, and move forward…

Back in July I said that

I was concerned that we never seem to hold folks accountable for being self-learners.

I also noted that

In many job sectors, employees are expected to keep up with relevant technologies or risk job loss. When do we require that of K-12 and postsecondary educators? At what point do we say to them “No, we’re not training you how to use this. It’s easy enough for you to learn on your own. And if you don’t, we’ll find someone else who can.”

Many of you chimed in and shared your own thoughts on this topic. Apparently, now Dilbert has too:

When will we, as educational systems, redefine the job descriptions and expectations of educators to include their regular and effective incorporation of relevant digital technologies?

Related posts

• If you took away technology
• Slide – Should teachers get to choose?
• Conditions of employment

Why aren’t schools making more progress when it comes to effective implementation and integration of digital technologies? Here’s what K-12 educators usually tell me when asked (list is in no particular order):

• Lack of adequate funding
• Unsupportive state / federal legislators
• Teacher / union resistance
• Lack of professional development
• Ineffective leadership
• Lack of time / space within curriculum
• Accountability demands of NCLB
• Parent / community resistance

I’m curious about your own situation. So I created a 3–minute survey! Simply click, drag, and drop the items to reorder them.

1. Take the survey!
2. Follow the results live!

Survey closes Thursday, November 19. Hope you’ll participate (and pass this along to others)!

There has been a lot of good discussion on my post about the future of books, libraries, librarians, and schools (thank you, everyone). In addition to the comments on the post itself, there are some excellent thoughts elsewhere as well:

• Flat World Library Corporation
• Dangerously irrelevant libraries
• Ten hard questions
• Random questions on future libraries by Scott McLeod

I was struck, however, by something that Erin Downey said in her own post:

What has, does, and will distinguish us from [coffee shops, community centers, and Internet cafes] are LIBRARIANS. Your barista doesn’t know how to help you find a price guide for 19th century china dolls, or figure out what the primary motivations were of the Romantic poets, or locate the best resource for building an addition to your house (as well as getting the right permits for local construction!). We do all that and more on a daily basis without breaking a sweat – we’re trained information professionals.

As I read Erin’s post, she seems awfully certain that librarians will be around and will be essential to the new order. I confess that I’m not that certain.

Perhaps I’m reading her wrong, but her paragraph strikes me as one of absolute certainty in librarians’ worth: Of course we’ll be around in the new paradigm! We’re LIBRARIANS, dammit! We’re TRAINED INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS who are VALUABLE in and of ourselves and also PROVIDE VALUE TO OTHERS. As I read her paragraph, I started substituting other professions in place of librarians: Of course we’ll be around in the new paradigm! We’re JOURNALISTS / TELEGRAPH OPERATORS / BUGGY WHIP MAKERS / TRAVEL AGENTS, dammit! We’re TRAINED PROFESSIONALS who are VALUABLE in and of ourselves and also PROVIDE VALUE TO OTHERS.

I think that the shifts we are now beginning to experience are going to be much more disruptive than we expect. I don’t think that we can take for granted that any current information-oriented profession is going to be around in the new paradigm. I think it’s a safer bet to assume that most of us in information-oriented jobs either are going to be replaced by something new or will see our professions so radically transformed that we may need to give them new labels.

Whether we’re librarians, teachers, administrators, or professors – or newspaper journalists, television producers, radio broadcasters, or magazine publishers – or travel agents, stockbrokers, medical professionals, or postal service workers, I think we need to be more uneasy. We need to be less complacent, less certain. We need to be more proactive and forward-thinking rather than self-congratulatory and self-satisfied.

The professionals in information-oriented fields who will be best able to navigate the seismic transitions that are yet to occur will be those that DON’T take their individual jobs – or even their entire professions – for granted. We all need to be more on edge than we currently are.

Photo credit: Officemate disappears

I have done a lot of work over the years on various data-driven decision-making projects. I've taught courses, given workshops, delivered multi-day institutes for state departments of education and corporate partners, and written book chapters and white papers.

I collected some of the highlights of that work on my new DDDM page here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Resources include some of the products from my work with Microsoft, the American Psychological Association, the Chicago Public Schools, the Minnesota Department of Education, and others. 

I hope these are useful to you. Happy reading!

WHO TV (Des Moines) aired a special report, Are we too connected?, on last night’s news broadcast. Among others, they interviewed me and Dr. Michael Bugeja, Professor and Director of Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication.

I have interacted with Michael a couple of times. He’s a very good guy and a fun guy to talk with, but he’s also a nationally-visible technology critic who is interviewed often by the media. His technology skepticism is probably understandable given that his entire profession is struggling to reinvent itself because of the impacts of these new digital tools, but it’s also at least a little ironic given that he utilizes multiple web sites to publicize his work. He and I often fall on opposite sides of technology issues. I really need to read his book, Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age.

Here are a few quotes from the special report:

All this really does is send a message that someone somewhere else is more important than the place we are and the person we're with. [Bugeja]

That's not a loss of connection, that's a gain of connection compared to where we were before the technologies existed. [McLeod]

There's a time and a place in society for all manner of communication. Former platforms define those areas with real boundaries. But this has no boundaries. It blurs the boundary between home and work, between school and home, between church, temple, mosque and school. It blurs everything. Why? Because it's programmed for revenue generation. ‘We want to make money off you at any time of the day.’ [Bugeja]

Happy reading!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

October apparently was ‘Library Month’ for me. I was the keynote speaker for the Minnesota MEMO conference and did a breakout session for the Iowa Library Association (ILA) conference. I also brought Dr. Mike Eisenberg to Iowa for three days to talk with school administrators about technology and information literacy. As a result, I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on books, reading, and the future of libraries and librarians…

Random questions

1. What constitutes a “book” these days? When books become electronic and thus become searchable, hyperlinkable, more accessible to readers with disabilities, and able to embed audio, video, and interactive maps and graphics, at what point do they stop becoming “books” and start becoming something else?
2. The Amazon Kindle e-reader currently allows you to annotate an electronic book passage with highlights and your own personal notes. Those annotations are even available to you on the Web, not just on the Kindle device itself. As Seth Godin notes, there hopefully will be a day when you will be able to share those notes with others. You’ll also be able to push a button on your e-reader and see everyone else’s notes and highlights on the same passage. What kind of new learning capabilities will that enable for us?
3. If students and teachers now can be active content creators and producers, not just passive information recipients, doesn’t that redefine our entire notion of what it means to be information literate and media fluent? Are our librarians and classroom teachers doing enough to help students master these new literacies (for example, by focusing on student content creation, not just information consumption and/or interpretation)?
4. The Cushing Academy boarding school in Massachusetts may be the first school in the country to have its library go completely electronic. In addition to using library computers, students now check out Kindles loaded with books. How tough would it be for other schools to move to this model (and what would they gain or lose as a result)?
5. When books, magazines, newspapers, reference materials, music, movies, and other traditional library content all go electronic and online - deliverable on demand - what does that mean for the future of the physical spaces known as “libraries?” Mike Eisenberg said to me that we already should be taking yellow caution tape and blocking off the entire non-fiction and reference sections of our libraries. As content becomes digital and no longer needs to be stored on a shelf, with what do we replace that now-unused floor space: couches, tables, and cozy chairs? computer stations? meeting space? And if we head in these directions, what will distinguish libraries from other institutions such as coffee shops, community centers, and Internet cafes?
6. Our information landscape is more complex than ever before. We still need people who know how to effectively navigate these intricate electronic environments and who can teach others to do so. But does that mean we still need “librarians” who work in “libraries?” Or will their jobs morph into something else?
7. How much of a librarian’s current job could be done by someone in a different location (for example, someone in India who answers questions via telephone or synchronous chat) or by computer software and/or an electronic kiosk? I don’t know the answer to this question – and I suspect that it will vary by librarian – but I do know that many individuals in other industries have been quite dismayed to find that large portions of their supposedly-indispensable jobs can be outsourced or replaced by software (which, of course, means that fewer people are needed locally to do whatever work requires the face-to-face presence of a live human being).
8. Can a librarian recommend books better than online user communities and/or database-driven book recommendation engines? For example, can a librarian’s ability to recommend reading of interest surpass that of a database like Amazon’s that aggregates purchasing behavior or a dedicated user community that is passionate about (and maybe rates/reviews) science fiction books, and then do so for romance, political history, manga, self-help, and every other possible niche of literature too?
9. If school librarians aren’t actively and explicitly modeling powerful uses of digital technologies and social media themselves and also supporting students to do the same, should they get to keep their jobs? And if they are doing so individually (which is what we want), what’s their responsibility to police the profession (and lean on those librarians who aren’t)?
10. There is no conceivable future in which the primacy of printed text is not superceded by electronic text and media. If that future is not too far away (and may already be here), are administrators doing enough to transition their schools, libraries, and librarians / media specialists into a new paradigm?

Reactions from librarians

I posed these questions in both my MEMO and ILA presentations, explained in more detail my thinking about each one, and gave participants time to talk with each other after each question. I even told them up front that they wouldn’t like some of what I said but that I had nothing against librarians and was just asking questions that I thought the profession should be discussing. Reactions of the few librarians from whom I’ve heard have been interesting…

Librarian 1 (I received this one indirectly)

[Scott spoke] to the Iowa Library Assoc conference this past week and he really was quite negative about the future of libraries and librarians with the technology shifts.

Scott is speaking a great deal for our School Administrators of Iowa and also to principals/supts through the AEA’s this year and I’m worried for the future of our profession in times of tight budgets with folks like Scott out speaking to leadership and not promoting the role that teacher librarians can play with technology AT ALL.

We had Mike Eisenberg here in Iowa this past week also speaking to administrators … which I think is a good thing … along with Scott McLeod … which may NOT be a good thing. The topic was information literacy, but in speaking with those in attendance at these Iowa meetings, I heard that the role of teacher librarians was not at all highlighted, and in in fact, I heard there was a bit of librarian “bashing” by administrators in attendance. (Now this is just hear-say as I wasn’t there to hear these presentations)

Now, I agree with you that teacher librarians need to be stepping up to the plate at this time and demonstrating the role that we can play with these 21st century tools, but am just wondering how we compete with loud, negative voices like Scott McLeod in Iowa? You know us polite Iowa librarians, we just kept quiet during Scott’s session and did not argue with him!

Librarian 2

I’m the librarian that said you scared the #### out of me! It’s kind of settled in now and I’m reviewing my job duties and seeing what I can do to stay “relevant” and to be a viable information contributor. Thank you for the thought provoking presentation!

Librarian 3

I want you to know that I have had a few of my professors writing me today about you.  They said that after having a few days to think about what you said, they are REALLY happy that they heard you speak. And that you spoke at the ILA Convention to the librarians there. Librarians and teachers alike need to hear the message of change. I also sent them the link to your blog and guess what… think you have some new followers now too.

Librarian 4

I had the opportunity to listen to you present at the ILA Conference yesterday. Your presentation was very unique compared to the speech you shared with the twelve laptop initiative schools earlier this month…. As a leader in [my] district and a huge supporter of the advocacy of information literacy skills, I feel that you underestimate the role of a good teacher librarian. I see the evolution of technology advancing and embrace what opportunities it provides myself, my fellow educators and our future citizens. You see, I was selected by my district to represent them at the 1-to-1 meeting and have been asked to attend [some of your future workshops] because of my leadership and my active role in the integration of technology. And, yes, I am their teacher librarian.

Being curious, I would like to know more about your work with teacher librarians. I’m afraid that you may have assumed the role of a teacher librarian as being one of ‘holding back’ the age of information. That is very far from the truth. Currently, we live in a world where both print and electronic information are accessible to all. My role is to support both realms and the patrons who use the material. While open access may soon be upon us, I know that I must help students and staff while this evolution is taking place. I know the importance of being visionary and open-minded while at the same time being grounded.

I would challenge you to collaborate with me and learn more about my role as a teacher librarian. I think the role of libraries and librarians is evolving. And, I feel that a good teacher librarian is the ‘Ace’ in an administrators back pocket! What other position in a school district revolves around information access, collaboration with students and staff, all while taking on a role as an educational leader in learning? Instead of demanding teacher librarians to ‘get out of the way’ if they are not welcoming technology, maybe we need to look at the role a librarian can play. Their opportunities to support the learning environment can become an asset. Some librarians just need to know in what direction to lead. I hope in the future you consider the value teacher librarians have in this ever-changing world. I know that I am thankful for the opportunities I provide the students at [my district], and I would like to think that they feel the same about me.

Suggested reading

If the topic of the future of libraries and librarians interests you, I highly encourage you to read the recent article in School Library Journal, Things That Keep Us Up at Night, by Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson. It’s caused quite a stir in the school librarian community…