Rick Hess perfectly captures one of my primary complaints about academia, which is that much of what we do is completely inaccessible (and/or meaningless) to K-12 educators
No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!
I was incredulous to read … the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely … school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on. – Gareth Long
Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] … focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation. – Wesley Fryer
Below are the proposals I just submitted to ITEC 2008. Hopefully some will get accepted. Hope to see you in Des Moines in October!
Getting your principals and superintendent on board
If the leaders don’t get it, it’s not going to happen. This highly-interactive workshop will focus on some techniques and strategies for getting principals and superintendents to be better supporters of technology integration efforts. Bring your laptop!
Establishing an effective online presence in an attention economy
In an attention economy – when there is more information than people can possibly pay attention to – it’s hard to get noticed. Learn why an effective online presence is now necessary and how to get started.
Why aren’t you having a bigger impact?
Feel like you’re working hard but making less of an impact than you’d hoped? Join us for an interactive discussion about technology, school change, and informal leadership.
(In)Effective presentations
Death by PowerPoint. Everyone knows the phrase and yet dry, boring, ineffective slideware presentations continue to be the norm. Both educators and students can learn how to create and deliver memorable presentations that leave audiences wanting more!
I’ve added these blogs to the Blogs page of the Moving Forward wiki. If you know of any other great elementary classroom blogs – ones that have students blogging (as opposed to just teachers) – please add them to the wiki. What’s the Moving Forward wiki, you say? It’s a communal resource for people trying to facilitate change in schools. Check it out.
One of the local school districts here in Iowa had an all-elementary-school chorus concert on Friday. At the beginning, the audience was told
Please turn your cell phones off. Please do not use flash photography; we don’t want to startle any of the participants. And no videotaping, please, because of copyright restrictions.
Not safety or privacy or confidentiality considerations. Copyright restrictions.
270 shining little faces on stage, ready to perform. A packed auditorium full of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and family friends. And the deflating message that they get, mere seconds before their children begin to sing in their dulcet voices, is:
Hi, John Q. Public. Thanks for slogging your kid to school, even in the rain and snow, every Wednesday at 7:30am all year for chorus practice. Thanks for getting your kid all gussied up for this huge event. We know that your precious angel is up on stage getting ready to sing his or her heart out. We know that the whole extended family is here to support that little boy or girl. But even though your heart is just bursting at the seams to capture the joy and excitement of this experience and share it with your child and your loved ones, we’d like to invoke ‘copyright protections’ so, too bad, you can’t do that. Have a good concert!
What a slap in the face. And we wonder why the public doesn’t support school bond referenda…
It’s fun to get comments on a blog post. I know that I eagerly check my Recent Comments section each day to see if anyone has chimed in on what I’ve written. In fact, the feedback can be addictive, sparking the desire to write more and expand the conversation. Those of us who blog know, however, that most of our posts get a handful of comments at best and often get none at all.
In contrast, Will’s post was a veritable vortex. He started a conversation that drew in numerous people and inspired them to participate and to return again later to check in on its progress. A multitude of comments swirled around and doubled back on each other and, like a tornado, new discussion threads were sucked in and incorporated into the larger whole. Will’s post took on a life of its own, a storm of conversation that grew in unforeseen ways. Will was the first to admit that the conversation that occurred was far bigger than he ever could have anticipated at the onset.
How do we capture the impact of a post like Will’s? Well, we can do a simple count of the total number of comments: an astounding 164! Recognizing that online readers rarely have to scroll down more than a few screens worth, we also can note that the total commentary represents 119 screens’ worth of information (at least in my browser). My copy-and-paste of the entire dialogue into Microsoft Word reveals a count of 713 paragraphs over 63 pages (Times New Roman, 12–point font): a total of nearly 23,000 words! Or we can use Britt Watwood’s innovative approach and represent the conversation as a word cloud (below is the one I just made in ManyEyes):
I’m sure there are other ways to think about and represent a vortex-like post. The essential idea here is that a blog post of this nature draws in outsiders and keeps them swirling around the central core (the post itself).
The virus
If Will’s post was notable for the number of comments it spawned on his blog, my post illustrates the other kind of impact that a blog post can have: the ability to spawn conversation and connections in places other than the original blog. Similar to a nuclear chain reaction that continuously sparks additional activity further and further out, a virus-like post captures the attention of others and inspires them to comment, not on the original blog but on their own blogs. In other words, the original post ‘infects’ a few other bloggers, whose posts ‘infect’ even more people, who in turn ‘infect’ even more, and so on. Commenting and hyperlinking is occurring in a variety of different places, many far removed from the original post. In its totality, a rich, complex dialogue is occurring. It’s just difficult to figure out where.
Although conversations that occur across the blogosphere are much more difficult to monitor due to their dispersed nature, Technorati, a blog search engine, can help. After searching for the URL of my post in Technorati, I painstakingly went through the results. I visited each unique blog link, read what it had to say about my post, and counted how many comments it had garnered. I also put the URL of each of those posts into Technorati to see how many links they had garnered in addition to my original post. The table below shows that my original post garnered 88 comments and that 57 other blog posts linked to it. Those 57 posts in turn sparked another 198 comments and another 92 blogs linked to them. If I was ambitious, I could have searched each of those 92 secondary links on Technorati to see which of the 57 were cross-linking to each other, if there was a third level of additional blogs linking to those 92, etc. However, what I did was already very time-intensive so I decided to stop.
The essential idea for a virus-like post is that much, if not most, of the conversation is swirling around outside the original blog.
Closing thoughts
Two types of blog posts. One that generates conversation on-site. One that sparks discussion out in the wild, wooly world of the Web. Is one kind of post better than the other? Nope. But together, these two kinds of posts illustrate the powerful and interesting connections that can occur across geography and time if we choose to take advantage of the affordances that these technologies lend us.
Take a look at the seven YouTube videos below, all taken by student cell phone cameras in classrooms. Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for filming and posting these?
Update: As of October 2010, I now have about 22,000 subscribers to this blog. Alter my calculations accordingly…
According to Feedburner, I currently have about 2,100 subscribers to my blog. While that’s obviously not a huge number compared to many other blogs (see my Technorati rank, which is slightly below that of the TechLearning blog), let’s do the math for a minute…
Let’s say I average 4 posts a week for 50 weeks a year. 4 x 50 x 2,100 readers equals 420,000 person contacts each year. In other words, through my blog I have the opportunity to have 420,000 interactions with my audience every twelve months. These are folks who have actively sought me out and are voluntarily reading what I write (which, by the way, still blows my mind). Over 10 years, that’s over 4 million opportunities for me to spread my message to others, assuming that my current reader totals don’t improve at all (which, obviously, I hope they do).
Now, let’s compare this with a journal article. According to the information sent to me by the editors, the most prestigious peer-reviewed educational leadership research journal, Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ), has approximately 160 individual subscribers and 1,630 institutional subscribers (i.e., libraries), for a total of about 1,800 subscriptions. Because EAQ serves folks interested in a broad range of educational leadership issues, at best only a small fraction of the individual readers will be interested in an article on technology leadership-related issues. This also is true for anyone doing a literature search for a research article or dissertation. For argument’s sake, let’s say that each technology-related EAQ article might have 60 readers a year, or 600 readers a decade (this is probably quite generous): a very rough ratio of one-third of the subscription total. [Note: this is obviously not very scientific. I’m engaging in some very loose back-of-the-envelope calculations here. There’s probably a better way to come up with a more accurate estimate.].
Now of course faculty don’t publish in only one journal. An unbelievably productive faculty member might publish 5 to 10 articles a year, each in a journal with roughly 500 to 5,000 individual and institutional subscribers. For this example, let’s assume the faculty member is super-productive and is publishing in journals with the widest reach. Using the same rough ratio I used for EAQ (i.e., about 1/3 of the subscription numbers over a decade), 10 articles per year x 10 years x 5,000 subscribers x 1/3 = 166,667. Again, I think this is quite optimistic. Few faculty members are this productive and, even if true, it’s pretty likely that readership of a faculty member’s articles is nowhere close to this total.
Okay, let’s review:
blog = 4,200,000 person interactions per decade
journals = 166,667 person interactions per decade
The blog wins hands-down from a numbers perspective, even assuming what I think is probably the absolute best case scenario for the peer-reviewed journal path. If we also consider
the ability to hear back from people via blog comments (i.e., to have a true conversation about what’s written);
the ability to easily search the content of the blog via Internet search engines (unlike research databases, which typically allow you to only search within article abstracts, not full articles);
the greater availability of blogs to the public generally and educators specifically (particularly since most K-12 folks rarely read peer-reviewed journals);
the ability of popular blog posts to be spread through other bloggers and tools like Digg to even larger audiences;
the ability of blogs to handle multimedia content (i.e., graphics, audio, video); and
the superior connectivity of blogs compared to journal articles (i.e., direct hyperlinks to other resources versus footnotes);
the case for a blog seems even stronger.
So this raises the question… Why would anyone who wishes to actually reach educators and hopefully influence change in schools not be blogging?
Every time you interact with a customer, you’re engaging in marketing. Doesn’t matter if you’re instituting a policy, gaining some data, delivering an invoice… it’s a marketing interaction.
… When you yell at a classroom full of kids because one kid misbehaved, that’s a marketing decision.
A middle school librarian in New Jersey has gotten some media attention for her anti-Wikipedia campaign:
Linda O’Connor regards Wikipedia the same way former first lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against drugs. . . . She put up a sign saying "Just Say No to Wikipedia" over the computers in the school library. . . . Wikipedia is blocked on all computers in the Warren Hills Regional School District.
I’m highly skeptical.
If the district is going to take a principled stand against Wikipedia because some information is biased or incorrect, is it also taking out all of the encyclopedias (which research has shown, on average, to be as inaccurate as Wikipedia)? Is it removing all of the news magazines and newspapers? The article makes a big deal about how school librarians preview materials before they’re placed on the shelves, but I can guarantee you that librarians and media specialists do not have time to screen every word of every incoming publication. They miss errors and biases just like the Wikipedia community does. Also, it’s ludicrous to pretend that the school library vetting process is free of bias. Oh, and I challenge you to find a school library that doesn’t have old, outdated (and thus inaccurate) non-fiction and/or reference materials on its shelves.
This is all of a bunch of hooey. This shouldn’t have even been a story. When is the Associated Press going to run this story?
Schools teach kids how to wisely and appropriately navigate 21st century information channels
Or this one?
New Jersey school district blocks kids from using one of the most important and powerful information resources in existence because of mistaken beliefs about inaccuracy and bias
Or maybe this one?
Wikipedia is an amazing contribution to the body of human knowledge. New Jersey school district says ‘No thanks.’
Or is it asking too much of the newspaper press to avoid bias by showing the other side of this issue?
