Dangerously Irrelevant

The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a number of excellent articles on openness. One that particularly resonated with me was Maria Andersen’s To Share or Not To Share: Is That the Question? (also available in PDF), which addresses the issue of how ‘open’ faculty are with their work and their ideas. Here’s a quote:

Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence. The first factor is the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing. This characteristic is something that is innate to personality, similar to the Myers-Briggs scale of introversion/extroversion. To move a person on this scale would be akin to changing an introvert to an extrovert. On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.

The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community. In my conversations with faculty who openly share their thoughts and content, I asked why they share. Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share — that everyone in education should share. Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.

In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.

I don’t know how many Educational Leadership faculty members are really trying to be thought leaders. I know that I am (which is why I vigorously use social media tools), but I’m not sure that most view their jobs through this lens. As Jon Becker pointed out in his Leadership Day 2010 post, the evidence is pretty clear that even the biggest names inside Educational Leadership academia generally are unknown outside our fairly small circle. It’s safe to say that, for the most part, practitioners and policymakers are completely ignorant of our research, teaching, service, grants, etc. At best, we may have some visibility within our home states through our current students, our alumni, and (possibly) our research projects or centers.

The problem, of course, is that the work of any Educational Leadership faculty member that isn’t easily findable is essentially invisible to the larger world and thus irrelevant to the people who theoretically should benefit from it. This leads to some inevitable questions: Since we’re education professors, what’s the point of our work if it doesn’t impact schools (or at least have a fighting chance of doing so)? Should we be pulling a paycheck if we’re essentially invisible to practitioners and/or policymakers?

Image credit: Something’s missing…

Okay, I think I’ve got this figured out, at least for now…

I use five primary tools to post content and resources to the Web:

1. Dangerously Irrelevant - where I put my longer, hopefully more thoughtful writing and have extended conversations with readers
2. Twitter - where I share resources and converse with others in shorter snippets
3. Delicious - where I bookmark sites that I want to use or revisit later (although I don’t use this as much as I should)
4. Mind Dump - where I put things that I want to capture (e.g., quotes, videos, images) for posterity; my personal archive for stuff that is too short or off-topic for Dangerously Irrelevant but also is too long for Twitter or Delicious (i.e., I want more than just the URL and a few keywords)
5. Google Reader - where I share out items from my incoming RSS feeds that I think will be of interest to others

I’m now using TwitterFeed to feed everything from Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader to Twitter and Facebook. Everything that goes through Twitter also is sent automatically to LinkedIn and Google Buzz. So if you’re following me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Google Buzz, you should see everything that I’m sharing out. And, of course, many of you have put Dangerously Irrelevant and/or Mind Dump in your RSS readers (thank you!).

I could use Evernote for sharing publicly but instead I use it to archive things that need to be more private than Mind Dump (such as meeting notes, my highlights from Kindle books, and the HTML coding for my web sites). I also use other social media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo but I share their content through my five main channels above.

The Shareaholic extension for Google Chrome makes all of this much easier. It also allows me to post items to Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, and other aggregation / sharing sites as desired.

The feeds for Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader all have been run through Feedburner so I can monitor RSS subscribers. I set up TwitterFeed to run everything through bit.ly so I can track how often items get retweeted. I also am using Google Analytics.

For those of you who are interested, here are the URLs and RSS/email feeds for my five main channels:

1. Dangerously Irrelevant (RSS / email) [you also can subscribe to any blog category]
2. Mind Dump (RSS / email)
3. Twitter (RSS)
4. Delicious (RSS)
5. Google Reader (RSS)

And here are some of my other sites, including the folders that I share from Google Reader (so you can read what I do!):

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Flickr (RSS)
• YouTube (RSS)
• Vimeo - personal (RSS)
• Vimeo - CASTLE (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - 1:1 Schools (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Baseball (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Blogs for Busy Administrators (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Blogs That Deserve a Bigger Audience (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - CASTLE Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Education (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Educational Leadership (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Educational Technology (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Higher Education (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Iowa (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Law (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Marketing (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Miscellaneous (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Principal Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - School Law Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Superintendent Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Technology (RSS)

I think I’ve got all this set up so that there’s no duplication in any one place. For a while there, for example, I was posting the same resource more than once in Facebook. If you notice any future duplication, please let me know.

Is there anything I’m missing, forgetting, or also should be doing?

Happy reading!

[hat tip to Jose Vilson, who’s apparently in the same mindset I am these days]

On the Internet, we write ourselves into existence.

That’s a wonderful thing. It allows us to reach audiences that we otherwise wouldn’t reach. It allows us to try on personas - and perhaps to reinvent ourselves - in ways that may be difficult in our everyday, face-to-face interactions.

But it also can be misleading.

Several recent incidents have caused me to revise some of my pre-existing beliefs about a few fairly prominent education bloggers. I now think and feel differently about them than I did just a few months ago, simply because I now have more information and thus a more complete picture of who they are.

I’ve been thinking about this as I get ready to head to the ISTE conference later this week. I won’t necessarily be wary as I interact with my edublogger peers, but I may be just a little less willing to accept things as they appear on their face. Not much, just a tiny bit. Most of the time people are as they appear - face-to-face or online - and I’d rather be a naive, trusting optimist than a negative, surly skeptic. But we have to recognize that we all also have secrets, ones that may remain uncovered because of geographic and/or interactional distance.

That edublogger who’s active in Twitter every evening and has a bunch of followers? He seems cool but maybe he beats his kids.

That edublogger with 20,000 subscribers and a heart of gold online? She seems great but maybe she’s cheating on her spouse. Or a cutter.

That charming, effervescently cheery and witty edublogger that everyone loves to hang out with at the conference? He seems wonderful but maybe he’s embezzling funds. Or a kleptomaniac. Or a drunk driver.

As you head to the ISTE conference later this week, or simply interact with folks online, I leave you with the thought:

Can you ever really know that edublogger beside you?

Update: I'm not as pessimistic as this may read. I'm just thinking out loud here...

Image credit: In order to exist online we must write ourselves into being

The parents rise up! Check out this video starring Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green. It already has at least a million views.

Wait. Did I mention this was made by an elementary school PTA?

Civic Enterprises has released its latest study, Raising Their Voices, concerning America’s dropout crisis. What resonated with me the most was the voices of the students in the report. Here are some samples:

“To me, high school is like elementary and middle school. It’s all the same. We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.”

“If you just fight your way through it now and get through school ... eventually it will be interesting when you get into your career field.”

“I’m going to be honest: school is really, really boring. I hate coming here.”

Issue 1: Student boredom

I hate coming here. If you just fight your way through it. The same thing over and over again. These are pretty damning words. They also are pretty common. As the report noted, many students view high school as something that must be tolerated as a stepping-stone to [something] better (emphasis added). 

When’s the last time your school organization asked its students how interesting and engaging their classes were (and then took their responses seriously)?

Issue 2: Meaningful community discussion

The researchers brought together students, parents, and teachers in four different communities to collaboratively discuss the high school dropout program in their local area. In each case, individuals remarked that this was the first time that teachers, parents, and students had been brought together to talk about any issue, including the dropout crisis (emphasis added).

When’s the last time your school organization had teachers, parents, and students (and, yes, administrators) in the same room talking candidly and safely about important issues?

Issue 3: Disconnects between groups

The report noted that:

while dropouts cited boredom as the leading cause for dropping out, many educators we surveyed did not see this as the central cause. In fact, only 20 percent of teachers saw a student’s lack of interest in school as a major factor in most cases of dropout. More than twice as many believed students were making excuses for their failure to graduate. . . .

Additionally, although students said that higher expectations would have mitigated the factors leading to their dropping out, only 32 percent of teachers agreed that we should expect all students to meet high academic standards and graduate with the skills that would enable them to do college-level work, and that we should provide extra support to struggling students to help them meet those standards.

These disconnects exist everywhere, of course. No organization is immune from them. But perception shapes reality. If students say they’re bored and teachers just think students are making excuses and don’t reflect on their own instructional practices, the problem never gets solved.

When’s the last time your school organization intentionally worked to uncover and then meaningfully address existing cognitive, emotional, and perceptual disconnects between groups?

Wrap-up

The Raising Their Voices study was conducted on behalf of the AT&T Foundation and the America’s Promise Alliance. The report illustrates the kind of conversations that can occur when you bring disparate groups of school stakeholders together. It also shows that disconnects between groups can be effectively bridged through structured dialogue and a spirit of mutual respect. The report includes recruiting instructions and a sample discussion guide to help schools set up their own local focus groups. As school leaders, we should do this more…

Happy reading!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Here's another envisioning of the forms that traditional print publications are going to take as tablet eReaders and computers become more prevalent. This one is from Penguin Books and shows what some interactive experiences might look like for younger children. 

Previous installments in this series were:

• Yes, this is the future of magazines (and newspapers and books and ...)
• The future of magazines, part 2

Thanks to Fast Company for leading me to this video. Happy viewing!

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!

Sports Illlustrated offered its thoughts on what an electronic version of the magazine might look like. Now Wired has done the same. As the iPad and other similar devices permeate society, will we still call these magazines?

Roger Wilcox, principal of West Cedar Elementary School in Waverly, Iowa, has a burgeoning YouTube channel that he’s using to communicate with his local community:

Here are three superintendents – Pam Moran, Phyllis Harrington, and Marcus Newsome – who also are using YouTube to get their messages out:

This stuff is easy

Given how easy it is these days to post online video (think YouTube QuickCapture and a webcam, Flip cameras, etc.), I’m baffled that more administrators aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to speak directly to their communities on a regular basis. Forget newsletters, e-mail listservs, or blogging; just turn on the video camera and start talking!

There are numerous benefits to being in regular communication with internal and external stakeholders. The use of online video to connect, explain, build goodwill, create enthusiasm, be transparent, share student work, highlight teacher excellence, tell a story, etc. is a powerful but untapped possibility for most school leaders. Videos don’t have to be polished or professional. Simple, honest, direct communication usually is more meaningful, anyway.

Dive in! 

School leaders, take the plunge: Turn on the webcam or Flip camera and start talking from the heart. You won’t regret it.

[P.S. Teachers can do this too. Dump that paper classroom newsletter. Instead, start a weekly broadcast to your families!]

Update: Dave Meister is off to a good start with this!

Judy O’Connell asked if the video below is the future of magazines. Yes, absolutely. Maybe not by 2010 or 2012 but sooner than we think. And for newspapers and books too. And, to a lesser extent, maybe we’ll even start seeing more interactivity and/or multimedia embedded within scholarly research, government or policy center reports, and other manuscripts.

If ‘news’ is becoming more of a commodity every day, perhaps it’s this sort of added value from which publishers will make their money. I know I’d pay for something like this from my favorite periodicals.

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for the tweet that led me to this. Happy viewing!