Dangerously Irrelevant

It’s spring training for Major League Baseball and that means it’s time for another season of edublogger fantasy baseball! Last year’s champions, Vinnie Vrotny and Rick Heitmeyer, have their trophies and hopefully will be back to defend their titles (we had enough participants for 2 leagues last year). I shall return as well, hoping to improve on my annual late-season collapse.

Same rules and league settings as the two previous years. A trophy for the winner(s). Friendly banter, potential bragging rights, and loads of baseball fun could be yours!

If you’re interested, complete the BlogBall10 online registration form no later than March 21, 2010. First come, first serve. You must have an active education blog to participate. We’ll make as many leagues as we can fill. Opening Day is April 4!

Yesterday was the TEDxNYED event in New York City. Many of us watched the LiveStream online.

Last week was the TEDxASB event in Mumbai, India. I had the pleasure of both attending and speaking.

Both events had some great speakers (I’ll let you decide if I was one of them!). Other TEDx events do also, and many of the videos will be uploaded to the TEDxTalks YouTube channel for others to see after the fact.

I wanted to get the TedxTalks YouTube channel into iTunes, but didn’t want to download each video individually. Could I get the YouTube RSS feed into iTunes? Yes, with RSSHandler! [click on image for larger version]

Simply put the URL of the YouTube feed into the box, change the format to MP4, and click on the Generate button. Voila! A feed that you can put into iTunes as a podcast subscription. You can do this for any YouTube user’s video channel. Awesome!

Hope this is helpful. Happy viewing!

For those of you who are interested, here is the Flickr photo set for ASB Unplugged, a February 1:1 laptop conference for international schools that was sponsored by the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India. You may recognize a few edublogger faces like Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Doug Johnson, Kim Cofino, Susan Sedro, Nick Sauers, and others!

And here is the Flickr set of the pictures I took of India while I was there (these also are intermingled in the ASB Unplugged set above). I also took some video.

And here is the Flickr set of the pictures of India that I took two years ago when I was there for the inaugural ASB Unplugged event. I also took some video.

Finally, here are all of the Tweets from this year’s conference:

• Twitter search for #asbup2010
• Google spreadsheet of Tweets

Rethink Learning Now asks:

Why don't schools with the biggest challenges have access to the biggest talent?

Answer My answer:

Because as educational systems we allow individual teacher preferences and/or union seniority systems to trump what’s best for kids.

If the Number 1 school influence on students’ success is the quality of their teachers, the fact that we often (usually?) give our most disadvantaged students our least-qualified instructors is an indictment of all of us.

Many districts across the country are laying off teachers right now. This would seem an especially critical time to ensure that the kids who need the best teachers get them. Instead, prepare for another summer round of the ‘dance of the lemons’ (or ‘pass the trash’). Shame on us.

[hat tip to Carolyn Foote for the video]

I got an e-mail from the folks at 60second Recap about their service. They use video trailers to summarize - and/or interest students in - great works of literature.

Check out the new book trailer for Night by Elie Wiesel. Do you think the trailer will make more students interested in reading the book (I thought it was interesting that they said “watch to find out,” not “read to find out”)? Also, here’s a complete series of videos for George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Many more are available at the site.

What do you think of these videos? Are these viable alternatives to the venerable CliffsNotes or the more recent SparkNotes or eNotes? Do these types of services fill a valuable function for students? If so, would it be more valuable for students to make these themselves?

I just returned from ASB Unplugged, a 1:1 school laptop conference hosted by the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India. If you can imagine nearly 300 educators from international schools all across the world – all talking about technology integration and implementation, effective instruction, and empowering leadership within the context of 1:1 laptop programs – then you probably can guess what a great time I had. I was in charge of the leadership strand of the conference. Jamie Fath and Nick Sauers, whom many Iowa educators know from the Transitioning and Boot Camp training that CASTLE is doing with the School Administrators of Iowa, accompanied me. The conversations that the three of us had with the international educators were extraordinarily robust, meaningful, and insightful. My time in India sparked some thinking about educators and risk-taking…

Part 1: International educators are risk-takers

One of the things from the conference that resonated with me was the international educators’ willingness to take risks. If you’ve been teaching the same thing in the same school for the past 15 to 20 years, it may seem like a fairly big deal when someone then comes in and asks you to start integrating this technology stuff into your daily teaching practice in a meaningful way. On the other hand, if you’ve already packed up your entire family and headed off to work in Nairobi, Kenya – and then Caracas, Venezuela – and then Budapest, Hungary – and then Doha, Qatar – and then Shanghai, China – you’ve already taken the enormous risk of repeatedly uprooting your entire lifestyle and adjusting to a new school, city, and country. For international educators who already have proven themselves as risk-takers, being asked to pull technology into their educational practice may not seem as big a deal.

So I think one of the biggest assets these international schools have – even more than their globally-minded students and parents and their tremendous financial resources (tuition often is upward of $30,000 per student) – is that they have buildings full of educators who already have established themselves as risk-takers. It seems to me that a school full of people who are willing to try things – to ‘give it a go,’ if you will – is extraordinarily well-poised to be successful in a rapidly-changing climate such as that in which we now live. The challenge for those of us who don’t work in such schools is how we create this kind of learning climate within our own organizations.

Part 2: Wouldn’t Google’s CSI event be a good model for educators?

Google has an annual event called Crazy Search Ideas (CSI), for which employees bring their most offbeat ideas about Internet search to the table for vetting. This is a classic technique to foster innovative brainstorming. Why don’t schools do this? I’m sure that front-line educators have plenty of out-of-the-box ideas that might potentially be breakthroughs for school organizational and/or instructional logjams. Until we find ways to empower school employees’ risk-taking and innovation – and then scale successes to the larger school system – we’re never going to become the true learning organizations that we need to be.

Part 3: Assessing educators’ willingness to take risks

I’m working with an ISU honors Psychology student, Hana, to identify assessments of individuals’ proclivity to take risks. What we’d like to do is run some educators against the assessment(s) to see if they’re more likely to be high or low risk-takers. We may even do some comparative work where we also assess professionals in other industries. If your school or organization might be interested in participating in this project, please drop me a note in the next couple of weeks.

Ordinarily we bloggers don’t repost someone else’s entire blog post. But I just had to for this recent post by Seth Godin, It's easier to teach compliance than initiative. Read it and weep.

Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat.

Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It's difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it's a huge pain in the neck to do reliably.

Schools like teaching compliance. They're pretty good at it.

To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset.

Of course, now that's all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

Iowa State University held its second annual ComETS symposium a couple of weeks ago. Faculty, professional staff, and a few outside folks gathered together to talk about technology integration and implementation in higher education.

Building a community of practice through blogging

Below is my 10–minute ‘lightning strike’ presentation, Building a Community of Practice Through Blogging. I didn’t have my ‘A game’ that day and wasn’t as energetic a presenter as I usually am. I also spent too much time on the ‘creating a listening station’ portion and not enough time on the ‘participating in the conversation’ portion. That ratio was supposed to be 50–50, not 75–25. Despite all that, I think that the presentation came out pretty well and is a solid introduction to RSS and blogging communities for academics. Here’s a quote from my talk:

Most academics have yet to realize the power of social media. . . .

The reason we go to academic conferences is for the conversations. It’s not for the research presentations because you know how good those are. And it’s not to access the papers because we can get those in other channels. It’s to be around other people and have those conversations in the hall and after the sessions and at dinner and so on that solidify our relationships with people. Well, now we can have those conversations year-round. All we have to do is choose to be part of the conversation.

Extreme presentation makeover 

My faculty colleague, John Nash, also gave a lightning strike presentation titled Extreme Presentation Makeover. He took some slides from our rejected UCEA presentation proposal and went to town. [Note to self: always present before John, not after, because he’s a hard act to follow!]. He also has a blog post about his presentation. Here’s a quote from his talk:

The other thing that we generally fail to think about when we give presentations is a call to action. What is it that you want someone to do after you’re done?

All of the symposium videos are available at the ComETS symposium web site and also are being uploaded to the ISU YouTube channel. 

Charting our course: Exploring 21st century learning

Our keynote for the symposium was Malcolm Brown from Educause. Here are my notes from his talk:

"Improvement in postsecondary education will require converting teaching from a 'solo sport' to a community-based research activity." – Herbert Simon

Technology predictions v. course charting

The pace and scale of Internet change is unprecedented, so it's very hard to wrap our heads around it. 

Every second 1,157 videos are uploaded to YouTube.

2.2 million e-mails sent every second

What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers' Decline

iTunes has many academic lectures / lessons

So does Academic Earth

I love this line from the Kaplan University video: "?"

Funny thing about paradigm shifts: If we knew what the next paradigm was, we'd already be there.

Where is the student in all of this?

The opportunity is in increased student engagement [Do most profs at research universities really care about increased student engagement? If so, they haven't really showed it to date.]

How we learn, National Academies Press

Discussed the impact of the printing press

The 3 Cs of mobile computing

1. Content – delivery, anywhere anytime, ebooks, etextbooks, etc.
2. Collaboration – language learning, formative assessment, first-hand data collection, etc.
3. Community – student authors, leveraging messaging, enhanced polling, etc.

Angela Maiers: We haven't invited our students to be creators or co-creators of content.

Malcolm just cited quick penetration of clickers as examples of higher ed moving more quickly on the tech front

'Some' is not a rebuttal

Expanding from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be

I think that all colleges and universities should have technology communities like ComETS at ISU and at University of Wisconsin-Madison. I said to Jim Twetten, who’s heading the ComETS efforts here:

I like ComETS because it's an opportunity to learn from other ISU educators, both faculty and professional staff, across campus who are doing interesting things with digital technologies. The annual ComETS symposium gives us an opportunity to intersect face-to-face in a variety of different ways. The ongoing ComETS listserv connects us and allows us to share and discuss in between symposia. We're off to a good start. Now the challenge becomes: how do we expand from those that already are technology-inclined to those that need to be? The latter group is much larger than the former…

You can see some backchannel conversations from the symposium by searching for the Twitter hashtag: #comets. Happy reading!

Just a quick post to note that registration for our Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I) on April 7 is now closed. We hit our mark of 500 attendees last week despite doing very little publicity.

I’m excited. This conference has grown very organically (we’ve used Edubloggercon as a model; thanks, Steve Hargadon!). It’s going to be a great day!

[This is the text of an e-mail I just sent the 7 board members for the Orange County (FL) Public Schools.]

Dear OCPS School Board members,

Greetings from the freezing state of Iowa!

I read with interest the recent Orlando Sentinel article on educators, students, and social media. Before you forge ahead with any policies that target any specific technologies (whether they be cell phones, messaging formats, or online social media tools), I would encourage you to read my short blog post on this:

• No Facebook for you!

The key point of the post is that tools and technologies both change and actually are irrelevant to the underlying issue of inappropriate teacher behavior. If you feel as a board that your existing policies are insufficient (and I would be surprised if what you need already isn't in place), I hope that at least you will not frame them in terms of specific technologies (per my reasoning in the blog post).

I would be happy to discuss this with some or all of you if so desired. All my best.