Dangerously Irrelevant

In Iowa we use #iaedfuture to organize our online conversations about education in the state. In Wisconsin they use #wiedu. In the United Kingdom, they use #ukedchat to have similar conversations at the national level. What are other states, provinces, and/or countries using? (beyond the generic #edchat)

I made a publicly-editable Google spreadsheet to organize all of these geography-bound education hashtags. These are different from hashtags for conferences or for particular education topics (e.g., STEM or teaching History). Instead, they're hashtags that allow folks to talk about the present and future state of education in their area, to share ideas and resources, to propose and push back on proposed laws and policies, and to otherwise organize themselves. It's often said that the Internet destroys geography. While that's true in many instances, schooling systems still are primarily organized by geographic regions so boundary-level conversations are still relevant.

I hope you'll contribute the hashtag for your state / province / country. If you don't have a hashtag like these, perhaps it's time to get one started!

I’m in Amsterdam with my colleague, John Nash, for the European League of Middle Level Education (ELMLE) conference. Yesterday I facilitated an all-day preconference with a small group of teachers and administrators on the topic of Preparing Students for What Is and Will Be. Our discussions were fabulous. Today John conducted an energetic Design Thinking workshop that was very well-received. Tomorrow I keynote the conference and also do a session on setting up a RSS reader and making it work for you as an educator. I’m greatly enjoying my interactions with these international school educators from all across Europe.

photo © 2007 Charles Hutchins | more info (via: Wylio)John and I are getting a chance to explore the city as well. In addition to spending a lot of time riding the trams, wandering around, people-watching, and general culture-absorbing, we also have hit a few museums and city hotspots.

The Van Gogh Museum was interesting but I liked the Rijks Museum even better. Imagine my ‘delight,’ however, to see scores of Dutch middle school children in the latter running from exhibit to exhibit, quickly jotting down 2– to 5–word answers in order to fill in blank spaces on worksheets given to them by their teachers. I know this is a common way to do museum field trips in the United States but until that instant I hadn’t given any thought to how universal this practice might be.

Is this a common way to do school-to-museum field trips across international locations?
Do students ever get much from this style of museum visitation?
How do you say ‘worksheet’ in Dutch?

In a critique of the latest PISA results, Walt Gardner said:

Shanghai is hardly representative of China because it is an industrialized center with scores of modern universities. In contrast, the U.S. selected students from both public and private schools across the nation.

photo © 2007 Thierry | more info (via: Wylio)I wonder what American cities would compare to Shanghai. It’s a little difficult because Shanghai is so large. New York? Boston? Chicago? San Francisco? Los Angeles?

Can we think of one or more similar metro areas? If so, how would those students' PISA scores compare to those from Shanghai? Given the relatively-woeful test performance of most urban school systems, I'm guessing that even if we included test scores of surrounding suburban students, it wouldn't be enough to bring the metro area up to the performance level of Shanghai.

For that matter, do many / most of our best school districts perform at a comparable level to Shanghai? As you can see, I've got lots of questions...

Here are some excerpts from blog posts about last night’s opening keynote by Jean-François Rischard for the ISTE conference…

Joanna Bobiash:

The keynote was disappointing. It did nothing a keynote was suppose to do. The speaker only depressed us with the world ending in 20 years and making fun of government. His slides were only words and hard to read in a huge theater. There was no energy or inspiration that came out of this speech. The audience was too polite (for the most part) not to leave and many had trouble staying awake.

Joe Bires:

The ISTE keynote was certainly a case of failed execution (were there any pictures at all and could anyone read that text?). The purpose of an opening keynote is like a leadoff hitter in baseball; to get on base and start something.  He started nothing, except to dampen expectations.  However ultimately it isn’t his fault it’s ISTE’s, you have to have the right person in the lineup at the right time and he just isn’t a motivating opening speaker.

Kevin Bushweller:

The speech was heavy on the global big picture, with charts, diagrams, and lists on a large screen on the stage, but there were not a lot of specifics about how education, and more specifically, educational technology would help solve those problems.

Erik Hilton:

Speaking of old methods, let’s talk about the keynote with Jean François Rischard. I am sure that somewhere in all of those  Power Point slides was a message.  However, I missed it because it was simply not at all engaging.  I was sitting at the Blogger area and I enjoyed the heckling from them much more than I enjoyed the presentation.  It was a strange thing to be sitting in a group of innovators and people who are working in the system, looking for ways to bring it into the 21st century, while the keynote speaker was droning on with an incomprehensible Power Point presentation.  It was an interesting irony, to have the keynote speaker at a conference that seems to showcase innovation and new technology tuned out because it was, well I’ll just say it, a boring presentation.

And here are some Twitter responses…

Ross Rogers:

Michael Richards:

Finally, David Wees, Ryan Berardi, and Peter McAsh asked if perhaps the audience’s reactions were overdone, too harsh, or should have been directed more privately to ISTE rather than blogged and Tweeted publicly…

Ryan Berardi:

Peter McAsh:

David Wees:

This year's keynote was awful.  The way the presenter talked, the disconnect between what he talked about and what most of us are here for, and the use of his PowerPoint slides was just horrendous.  Here's a mindmap, created by @dwarlick (click on it to open the full image in a new window). . . . I'd like to say that the response from the audience, while probably accurately describing his presentation, was a bit harsh.  Maybe people on Twitter on the #ISTE10 channel were expressing concern about their own presentations tomorrow.  My recommendation to them, don't follow #ISTE10 during or shortly after your presentation if you have any self-esteem at all and want to keep it.  I'd love to have seen a few more supportive folks, but the typical crowd mentality of "okay he's down now let's jump on him" cropped up yet again and pretty much everyone was negative.  Let's try and avoid this kind of negativity for each other's presentations in the next few days, shall we?

Any other thoughts regarding the opening keynote speaker? Are David and Ryan right? Are we creating an environment at ISTE that’s too tough on presenters?

Conference organizers usually strive to have participants leave upbeat and energized at the end of the conference. I violated that rule on the last day of the ASB Unplugged conference in Mumbai, India. 

Each of the February TEDxASB speakers had 3 minutes to speak to the audience. Scott Klososky’s segment with an American School of Bombay student was particularly awesome and I hope someone captured it on video.

In both of my two leadership workshops, I kept hearing variations of the same theme from the international educators in attendance. One participant summed it up:

I'm not sure you appreciate how far along are most of the schools here today. We're far from average in terms of our implementation of technology.

When it came to my 3 minutes, I just couldn’t keep quiet about this. So I said something like the following:

One of the participants in my morning session said that I didn’t appreciate how far along you all are and that you are way above average when it comes to integrating technology into your instruction. And yet, from my conversations with many of you over the past few days, it’s very clear to me that there still are many things you’re not doing.

For example, most of you have yet to put a computer in every kid’s hands; that’s why you’re here at this 1:1 conference. Most of you have yet to incorporate online courses into your curricula in any kind of substantive way. Few of you are teaching students to be empowered - not just responsible - digital citizens in our new information landscape. Few of you have a staff full of educators that are modeling active participation in that landscape. As far as I can tell, none of you has robust student assessments at every grade level that target higher-level, more cognitively-complex thinking and doing and being. None of you has moved to a truly personalized learning environment for every student, one in which students’ progress is facilitated and perhaps assessed by technology and is organized around student competence and completion rather than age and grade level.

So some of you are sitting there in the audience feeling pretty good about yourselves. And you should. You’re blessed with wonderful financial resources, fantastic facilities, and amazing faculty. But for those of you who think I don’t appreciate how far along you are, all I can say is that I'm not sure you appreciate how far you still have to go.

Thank you.

I’m still second-guessing my decision to use my final statement in this manner. Despite tempering my negativity with a fun follow-up Animoto of the conference, I still think I might have violated one of the cardinal rules of conferences…

This likely is my final post about my trip to India. Here are my previous posts:

• Notes from India – My TEDx talk
• TEDxASB and TEDxNYED – Getting YouTube channels into iTunes
• Notes from India – Pictures and Tweets from ASB Unplugged and Mumbai
• Notes from India – Educators as risk-takers

One of the highlights of my time at ASB Unplugged this year was the opportunity to participate in TEDxASB. Here is my TEDx talk, Are schools dangerously irrelevant?. Other than saying ‘divergent’ instead of ‘convergent,’ I think I did okay.

Other TEDxASB speakers were Doug Johnson, Bruce Dixon, Scott Klososky, and Helen Barrett. 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

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.

The American School of Bombay (ASB) in Mumbai, India is hosting a 1:1 laptop computing conference in February 2010. While the conference is aimed at other international schools, it should be an excellent learning opportunity for anyone who can attend. I attended (and keynoted) ASB's first conference two years ago, brought my buddy, Dr. David Quinn, and had an absolutely wonderful time. I met a bunch of really great international educators and learned a lot about effective 1:1 programs. I highly encourage you to try and attend; Mumbai's a fascinating city! The conference is a collaborative effort of ASB, the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation (AALF), the Laptop Institute, and the NESA Center.

If you'd like to submit a proposal to present, the deadline is September 5. The deadline to register and attend is November 15. More information on the conference – including how to register and/or submit a proposal – is at the ASB Un-Plugged Ning.

CASTLE will be sending three representatives to the conference. We're going to make sure we're there in time for the preconference with AALF, which looks totally amazing. ASB is the best 1:1 school I've seen to date; I'm looking forward to seeing how much progress they've made since my last visit. I'm heading up the leadership strand of the conference. Vicki Davis, Julie Lindsay, Doug Johnson, Scott Klososky, and Helen Barrett will be leading conference strands too. Hope to see you there!

Related posts

• Sharing the global stage: Musings on Mumbai
• Musings from Mumbai: Fostering a climate of innovation in the middle and high schools

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See also my other slides and the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool.