Dangerously Irrelevant

Yesterday CASTLE’s 1to1 Schools blog topped 700 subscribers. Woo hoo!

Remember that CASTLE has a growing family of blogs related to educational leadership issues. In addition to 1to1 Schools, our other blogs are:

• LeaderTalk (group blog that aggregates the voices of school leaders; hosted by Education Week),
• Edjurist (school law),
• SchoolFinance101 (school finance and policy),
• Virtual School Meanderings (online learning),
• Educational Games Research (gaming in education), and, of course,
• Dangerously Irrelevant (technology, leadership, and school reform)

There are lots of good things happening on these blogs. For example, SchoolFinance101 has been on an absolute tear lately regarding Race To The Top and other policy issues. Educational Games Research just reviewed Do I Have a Right?, a serious game intended to help American students learn their Constitutional rights. Virtual School Meanderings is reviewing virtual schooling apps for the iPad. Edjurist recently compiled a list of online school law resources for administrators. The latest posts at LeaderTalk concern abandoning the summer break, professional development, and the IBM Selectric repair man. And so on…

This fall we’ll launch a group blog on social justice and educational leadership issues. If you’re interested in being a contributor to that or any of our other blogs – or if you have a suggestion for a new educational leadership blog that we should start – drop me a note.

Happy reading!

Two years ago CASTLE hosted its first-ever online summer book club. We had over 105 individuals sign up to read and discuss Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Last year we had our second online summer book club. Over 246 people signed up to read and discuss Why Don’t Students Like School? This year we’re going to have our third online summer book club, but it is going to be very different than what we’ve done before.

1. We’re going to run two discussion groups. One for Iowa and one for the rest of the world. You must be an Iowa educator to be eligible for the Iowa group.
2. We’re going to read two books instead of one: Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling and The Future of Management.
3. Our discussions are going to be synchronous rather than asynchronous.
4. Because of the discussion format, our groups are going to be smaller (no more than 9 individuals plus me) and thus are going to involve an application process.

Why the changes in this year’s book club? Well, we had a very productive conversation when we talked live with each other in February 2009 here on campus about Seth Godin’s Tribes. More importantly, however, our first two book clubs were marked by widespread lack of participation (although we had great conversations with those who did participate!). In other words, people registered and bought (and even liked) the books, but rarely or never participated in the conversations. We ended up doing a LOT of logistical work for a relatively small number of actual participants. So this year we’re going to try something different…

Are you interested in participating?

Here are the guidelines for participation in this year’s book club:

1. You must commit to reading BOTH books and participating in BOTH synchronous online conversations. Our conversations will occur on July 15 (Education Unbound) and August 12, 2010 (Future of Management). The World group will meet online from 5:30pm to 7:00pm Central. The Iowa group will meet online from 7:00pm to 8:30pm Central.
2. You will need a webcam. You also will need a headset with a microphone OR regular computer / media player headphones plus the microphone that’s built into your computer. No matter what, you should have headphones (to avoid audio feedback). You should learn how to use these BEFORE the first online conversation. We don’t want to spend our time troubleshooting your equipment!
3. After each online conversation, we will ask you to submit a 2– or 3–paragraph written reflection summarizing your thoughts at that point. That reflection will be due within a week of the conversation.
4. If you participate, you are granting CASTLE permission to a) make a video recording of the online conversation, and b) publicly release on this blog both the video recording and your written reflection under our typical Creative Commons license.
5. We reserve the right to give your slot to someone else if you have trouble with these guidelines.

Are you sure you’re interested?

If you’re still interested in participating, please complete the online application form. Applications are due by 6:00pm Central on Sunday, June 20. You will be notified about your application status by 9:00am Central on Wednesday, June 23.

• CASTLE Summer Book Club 2010 application form

Please understand that we are going to have to make some difficult choices. We anticipate more applicants than we have eligible slots and extend our regrets in advance if you are not selected.

If you have questions, please leave them as a comment to this post. We’ll answer them in the comments area so that everyone can see our replies.

Happy reading! Looking forward to talking with you this summer!

CASTLE’s 1to1 Schools group blog gets more popular every day. Over the last three days it has passed the 500 subscribers mark. If you’re interested in issues related to 1:1 laptop programs and you’re not reading the blog, you should be!

We’re also adding some more authors over the next few weeks. If you’re a practitioner in a 1:1 school and are interested in writing for us occasionally, drop me a note!

For those of you who haven’t noticed (yes, I’m talking to you, RSS subscribers), Dangerously Irrelevant now has a new look! I finally made the switch from TypePad to WordPress. Let me know what feedback you have about the new design…

I owe a HUGE THANK YOU to the folks at Foliovision. Alec Kinnear and his team were unbelievably fabulous from the very start. They were always responsive, incredibly patient with all of my questions, and did a great job of soothing my fears as I pondered the switch to the new platform (Are my internal links all going to work? What’s going to happen to my Feedburner feed? Am I going to lose all of my RSS subscribers?). The process couldn’t have happened more smoothly and I couldn’t be more happy with their work. They even sent me a shirt as a thank you!

If you’re considering your own move from TypePad, I recommend Foliovision highly; they’re one of the few places that specializes in that service. If you just want a new web site or need search engine optimization (SEO) help, I’m sure they’re great for that too. I still can’t believe they did what they did for the price that they charged me. There’s no way they made money off me. Did I mention they’re in Bratislava, Slovakia. I’ve never met them!

I’ll be rolling out some new features (as well as reviving some old ones) over the next few weeks. Stay tuned (and thanks for being loyal readers)!

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!

Just a few weeks after publicizing our first-ever Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I), we already have over 300 people who have registered to attend on April 7. Our registration is capped at 500, so if you’re interested, sign up soon! Oh, did I mention that attendance is FREE?

Angela Maiers has agreed to be our keynote speaker. It looks like Wes Fryer will be coming to do a few sessions. The CASTLE staff will be in action as well.

What else are we doing that day? Well, how about a couple of Web 2.0 Smackdowns, a TweetUp, and a variety of role-alike conversations for teachers, administrators, and board members? And some space set aside for an ‘unconference.’ And, of course, lots of good sessions from 1:1 laptop districts in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois. And whatever else we come up with…

Stay tuned. Hope to see you in Des Moines in April!

Iowa’s first-ever conference dedicated solely to P-12 laptop programs, the Iowa 1:1 Institute (I11I), will be on April 7, 2010 at the Polk County Convention Complex in Des Moines. Administrators, teachers, media specialists, technology staff, and other educators are all encouraged to attend.

Registration is FREE.

• Learn more about the Institute
• Register to attend (registration is now CLOSED)
• See who else is attending
• Register to present  (no commercial sales pitches allowed)

Also, the Iowa 1:1 Network is growing rapidly. Learn more and join yourself!

Some of you have noticed that CASTLE has a new blog: 1to1 Schools. We’re excited about this new venture, which is meant to highlight news, stories, videos, and other resources related to elementary and secondary 1:1 laptop programs.

1to1 Schools is a group blog. For example, check out Nick Sauers’ series on using John Kotter’s 8–stage change process as a model framework for schools that are considering 1:1. Or his post on banning boredom, not laptops. Nick and I also have been on the road with our Flip camcorders, making videos of educators who are involved in laptop programs (see, e.g., our chats with Wynn Draper-Bryant and Marge Beatty).

Pamela Livingston, author of 1-to-1 Learning: Laptop Programs That Work, recently had two posts about an international survey of students in 1:1 programs:

• Part 1
• Part 2

She also wrote recently about how laptops are NOT for listening.

Blair Peterson, another occasional contributor, has noted that we should be prepared for the expected opposition to laptop programs.

The blog is a work in progress - and like many new blogs we’re still working on finding our voice - so if you have suggestions. If you’d like to be a contributor (or know someone else who’d be a good writer for us) please let us know that too.

Happy reading!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

CASTLE has been doing a great deal of technology leadership training for the School Administrators of Iowa, some of the Iowa Area Education Agencies, some of the Minnesota Service Cooperatives, and other school organizations across the country. One of the discussion activities that we’ve been doing lately asks session participants to think in groups about the impacts that the Internet and other digital technologies have had on various sectors of our society:

• newspapers, magazines, and the news industry
• banking, money management, and personal finance
• television, movies, and video
• maps, travel agencies, and the travel industry
• radio, CDs, and the music industry
• medicine and personal health
• reading and books
• how we communicate, connect, and share with each other; and
• universities

[Download these slides: ppt pptx]

This is not an exclusive list - for example, it doesn’t include the postal service or politics / political campaigning [or real estate agents] - but it does include many of the major sectors in our society that are information-oriented. In other words, they’re societal sectors and activities that, at their heart, are all about information and knowledge in one form or another.

In groups, participants can quite easily identify that ALL of these societal sectors are undergoing major, radical transformations because of digital technologies. Information-oriented societal activities are being reshaped in significant ways, and it’s just getting started as digital tools and environments continue to advance at a rapid pace.

Characteristics of our new digital information landscape

If asked to describe the ideas or themes that cut across all of these societal changes, participants can identify the general characteristics of our new digital information landscape. It is

• open
• more accessible
• more convenient
• more immediate / real-time
• networked
• connected
• shared
• collaborative
• interactive
• individualized
• empowering
• flexible
• adaptive
• less dependent on “experts”
• rapidly-changing
• more comprehensive
• searchable
• often crowdsourced
• creative
• multimodal / multimedia
• more efficient
• often less expensive
• global
• less dependent on geography
• technology-suffused
• less dependent on physical media
• and so on…

These apply to us too!

The challenge for us as leaders, of course, is that P-12 schools also are information-oriented institutions. At our hearts, we too are all about information:

• information mastery
• knowledge transmission and transference
• organizing and accessing information
• making meaning
• etc.

Because of this, schools shouldn’t expect that they somehow will be immune from the same changes that are radically altering other information-oriented societal sectors. We can’t continue to pretend that these revolutions aren’t going to affect us too, in significant and as-yet-unknown ways.

How many of the big ideas / cross-cutting themes above describe your school? Does the daily work of your school organization reflect our new digital information landscape?

Many of you have been participating in and/or following the conversations for this year’s CASTLE Summer Book Club. 

I am pleased to announce that my interview today with Dr. Dan Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia and author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, is now available as either streaming audio or a downloadable podcast.

Happy listening!