Dangerously Irrelevant

Kathy is a teacher. She has a basket.

Kathy puts all of her favorite things in her basket and takes it everywhere so that they’re close at hand. Because she’s a dedicated science teacher, she keeps her notebook of great teaching ideas in the basket. Whenever she needs a new inspiration, she pops open the notebook and takes a look. She has a video player in her basket, loaded with favorite science videos to show her students. She’s got science articles and magazines and other things she wants to read in the basket too, along with some games and other teaching resources. She’s even got in her basket the last few letters from her friend who teaches science in California and had shared a few tips for Kathy.

Kathy doesn’t just use her basket for professional purposes. She also loads it up with things that are related to her hobbies and personal interests too. Kathy loves to make outfits for her pug dogs, so she always has a couple of sewing patterns in the basket. She likes to experiment in the kitchen, and her recipe book is in her basket. Kathy’s latest interest is photography; she’s thrown a couple of books into her basket that are helping her improve her shutterbug skills. The most recent photos of her nieces and nephews in Nebraska are in the basket, as is the latest fan magazine of her beloved Detroit Red Wings hockey team.

Kathy’s basket is MAGIC. Every day it refreshes itself with NEW sewing patterns for her pug dogs [how 'bout that?!]. When her sister takes more pictures of the kids, they automatically appear in Kathy’s basket too [amazing!]. When she opens her teaching notebook, there are new teaching ideas in there also [what?! you're kidding, right?]. New information about the Red Wings, new recipes, new science articles and videos, new photography tips, new letters from her California buddy, new resources – they all magically and effortlessly appear in the basket [unbelievable!].

Kathy’s basket is magic. It never runs out of room. The more that gets put in there, the more it expands [okay, now I really don't believe you].

Kathy’s basket is magic. It weighs nothing, which is why she can easily carry it everywhere. No matter where she goes, her basket goes too – full of the stuff she likes and needs, all in one place, accessible anytime, anywhere.

Kathy loves her basket! [uh, yeah, wouldn't you?]

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Kathy has a magic basket. It’s called a RSS reader. And you can have one too.

Paul Bogush pushed back (in a nice way) on my recently-popular post, If you were on Twitter. First he wrote about how most educators are too busy to be involved in social media. Then he wrote about all of the wonderful things that happened during the time when he wasn’t on Twitter. Because he’s a good writer, Paul evoked all the right feelings in my heart and head. Of course I want to spend time with my wife and kids instead of being on Twitter. Of course I want to read books and take walks in the woods and get my job done, all instead of being in front of a screen. But even though there are only so many hours in a day, it’s still a false dichotomy. As I said in my comment to Paul’s first post,

there are countless educators who are finding ways to tap into the connective and learning power of social media while simultaneously having healthy, balanced personal and professional lives. In other words, you do not have to be superhuman to do this stuff. We find time for what we think is important…

All of this time balance stuff aside, I believe that there’s a bigger issue worth considering. Let me explain…

Although there is a lot of noise out there on the Web, it’s hard to argue that there is little learning value in social media. There are numerous ways in which teachers and administrators could be using blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online videos, podcasts, online slideshows, and other social media tools to advance their own practice. Whether it’s subscribing to other innovative educators’ feeds, interacting and sharing resources with global colleagues, or consuming and using high-quality peer-created resources, there are myriad teaching ideas, lesson plans, Web resources, conversation spaces, technology tools, reflections on practice, and other pedagogical fruits that are ripe for the picking by online-savvy educators. Peer-to-peer online learning networks can help educators sort the wheat from the chaff and curate what’s relevant and powerful.

The barriers to using social media as learning tools usually are more mental, emotional, or logistical than technological. Most of the time we can teach people how to use these tools (or they can pick up the basics themselves) in just a few hours of focused learning.

In an era in which the possibilities for ongoing professional learning are numerous and significant, I wonder how long will it take us for us to start expecting educators to use these social media tools. It’s been 30 years since the advent of the personal computer and we’re still struggling to get teachers and administrators to integrate digital technologies into their daily work in ways that are substantive and meaningful. Meanwhile, we now have a bevy of powerful learning tools available to us that can advance our own professional learning (and, of course, make our technology integration and implementation efforts more efficient and effective).

• When will we start incorporating the use of social media learning channels into the broader definition of what it means to be an education professional?
• When will we renorm the education profession to include the expectation that teachers and administrators will use these tools to advance their own practice? 
• When will we view educators that opt out of the use of social media for professional learning as an aberration rather than the norm?

In other words, will we ever stop saying that whatever print publications we may subscribe to, a few professional development days spread across the year, and occasional and sporadic attendance at conferences sufficiently satisfy our obligations to be learners of our craft?

Image credit: Internet open

Well, I finally wrote the article I always wanted to write: a letter to my 3,000+ faculty peers in Educational Leadership preparation programs all across the country about how our collective inattention to technology-related issues is an embarrassing indictment of our lack of relevance:

• Are we irrelevant to the digital, global world in which we now live? [PDF] [UPDATE: A HTML version is now available too!]

Regular readers of this blog will recognize some of the language that I used in my broadside against my own profession. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite:

We also are witnessing the early adolescence of a vastly different global economy. For instance, the rapid growth of the Internet and other communication technologies has accelerated the offshoring of jobs from the developed world. Complex corporate global supply chains locate manufacturing work wherever costs are lowest, expertise is highest, or necessary talent resides. Geographic or product niche monopolies disappear in the face of Internet search engines. Micro-, small-batch, and on-demand manufacturing techniques facilitate customized, personalized production. Whatever manufacturing work remains in developed countries is high skill, is high tech, and, more often than not, requires greater education than a secondary diploma. The low-skill industrial system that was the backbone of the developed world’s economies in the previous century is increasingly a bygone memory.

Like manual work that is non-location-dependent, knowledge work also is frequently done cheaper elsewhere. Service jobs are increasingly fungible, able to be located anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection. Ongoing workflow and final products are exchanged at the speed of light via e-mail, instant messaging, and other corporate networking tools. The same technologies that facilitate interconnected global conversations also facilitate interconnected global commerce. As was done in previous decades for manufacturing work, the next two decades will see many complex service jobs broken up into component parts. Once these tasks are disaggregated, they will be done by lower-skilled workers who can do these discrete components of the overall work, facilitated by software. In other words, many high-paying service jobs will turn into globalized piece work. Since the service professions represent over three-fifths of America’s economy, the impacts of this are going to be quite significant.

AND

If every other information-oriented societal sector is finding that transformative reinvention is the cost of survival in our current climate, schools and universities shouldn’t expect that they somehow will be immune from the same changes that are radically altering their institutional peers. We shouldn’t pretend that these revolutions aren’t going to affect us too, in compelling and often as yet unknown ways. And, yet, for some reason we do.

As long-existing barriers to learning, communicating, and collaborating disappear – and as what it means to be a productive learner, citizen, and employee shifts dramatically – it’s worth asking how we as educational leadership faculty and programs are responding. Are we doing what we should? To date the evidence is pretty clear that most of us are not.

AND

Can we as educational leadership faculty do better? Given the scale and scope of the transformations occurring around us – and their power and potential for student learning – we MUST do better. It’s embarrassing to consider how little we’ve done to stay relevant. A learning revolution has occurred and – given the attention we’ve paid it – it’s as if many of us didn’t care.

AND

We know, simply from projecting current trends forward, that in the future our learning will be even more digital, more mobile, and more multimedia than it is now. It will be more networked and more interconnected and often will occur online, lessening dependence on local humans. It frequently will be more informal and definitely will be more self-directed, individualized, and personalized. It will be more computer-based and more software-mediated and thus less reliant on live humans. It will be more open and more accessible and may occur in simulation or video game-like environments. And so on. We’re not going to retrench or go backward on any of these paths. We thus need school leaders who can begin envisioning the implications of these environmental characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling. We need administrators who can design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these new affordances. We need leaders who are brave enough to create the new paradigm instead of simply tweaking the status quo and who have the knowledge and ability to create schools that are relevant to the needs of students, families, and society.

Like teachers, administrators, and media specialists, educational leadership faculty have a voluntarily-assumed (and paid) responsibility to be relevant to the needs of children and education today and to prepare administrators as best we are able for tomorrow. Our professional priorities must be aimed at preparing our graduates for the world as it is and will be. Otherwise, what are we here for? In other words, who’s going to prepare these school leaders if we don’t?

Please share this widely

Want to help further my cause of fostering technology-savvy school leaders? Share the Summer 2011 issue of the UCEA Review with any Educational Leadership faculty members that you know. I also think the article is good reading for most practicing administrators; in 4 short pages it sums up much of what I think principals and superintendents should be thinking about right now regarding 21st century schooling. Other great reads in the issue include Matt Militello’s article on technology integration challenges (p. 15), Jon Becker’s article on open access (p. 17), and the interview with John Nash (p. 12), one of my CASTLE co-directors.

All thoughts, reactions, and suggestions regarding my article are most welcome. The ironies of publishing my piece in a print / PDF medium are not lost on me, but sometimes you have to put your writing where your intended audience can find it.

Happy reading!

Here’s a graphic from the new Center on Education and the Workforce report, What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors, that shows median earnings by undergraduate major.

As you can see, education is the second most popular undergraduate major.

And then they graduate.

And we give them crappy working conditions.

And we put them at the bottom when it comes to future earning potential.

And we vilify them politically and in the media.

And we blame them for all of society’s ills.

And then we wonder why we can’t get good teachers to enter or stay in the profession (and why they’re leaving at even faster rates than they have before)…

Image credit: Money, money, money

Chris Lehmann and I submitted our book to the publisher yesterday:

McLeod, S., & Lehmann, C. (Eds.). (in press). What school administrators need to know about digital technologies and social media.

photo © 2008 George Eastman House | more info (via: Wylio)We’re really excited about this book. Take a look at the chapter contributors below and you’ll see why [and before you ask, yes, there were many others that we could have asked and, yes, we had to make some difficult author/topic choices given the space limitations of a printed book].

The book is intended to help administrators

1. gain a basic knowledge base,
2. think critically about some key issues, and
3. get some concrete suggestions for instructional and organizational uses of various digital technologies.

Chris and I will keep you posted as this gets closer to print!

—-

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction, Chris Lehmann & Scott McLeod
• Foreword, David Warlick

Learning Tools

• Blogs, Kristin Hokanson & Christian Long
• Wikis, Stephanie Sandifer & Vicki Davis
• Podcasts and webinars, Steve Dembo & Wes Fryer
• RSS and RSS readers, Will Richardson & Karl Fisch
• Digital video, Mathew Needleman
• Virtual schooling, Michael Barbour & Rick Ferdig
• One-to-one computing, Chris Lehmann & Pamela Livingston
• Open source software, Tom Hoffman
• Educational gaming, John Rice

Interlude

• Social media is changing the way we live and learn, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach
• See Sally research: Evolving notions of information literacy, Joyce Valenza & Doug Johnson

More Learning Tools

• Social bookmarking, Dean Shareski & Mary Beth Hertz
• Online mind mapping, Carl Anderson & Richard Byrne
• Course management systems, Scott Floyd & Miguel Guhlin
• Online office tool suites, Diana Laufenberg & Mark Wagner
• Twitter, Alec Couros & Kevin Jarrett
• Online images and visual literacy, Kim Cofino & David Jakes
• Mobile phones, Liz Kolb & Sharon Tonner
• Social networking, Ewan McIntosh & Jeff Utecht
• Afterword, Christopher Sessums

If we were really serious about educational technology, we would… [here are 10 to get you started]

• show students how to edit their privacy settings and use groups in Facebook instead of banning online social networks because they’re ‘dangerous’ and/or ‘frivolous’;
• teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than ‘just saying no’ to Wikipedia;
• put a robust digital learning device into every student’s hands (or let them bring and use their own) instead of pretending that we live in a pencil, notebook paper, and ring binder world;
• photo © 2006 Michael Surran | more info (via: Wylio)integrate digital learning and teaching tools into subject-specific preservice methods courses rather than marginalizing instructional technology as a separate course;
• understand the true risk of students encountering online predators and make policy accordingly instead of succumbing to scare tactics by the media, politicians, law enforcement, computer security vendors, and others;
• find out the exact percentage of our schools’ families that don’t have broadband Internet access at home rather than treating the amorphous ‘digital divide’ as a reason not to assign any homework that involves use of the Internet;
• treat seriously and own personally the task of becoming proficient with the digital tools that are transforming everything instead of nonchalantly chuckling about how little we as educators know about computers;
• recognize the power and potential (and limitations) of online learning rather than blithely assuming that it can’t be as good as face-to-face instruction;
• tap into and utilize the technological interest and knowledge of students instead of pretending that they have nothing to contribute;
• better educate and train school administrators rather than continuing to turn out new leaders that know virtually nothing about creating, facilitating, and/or sustaining 21st century learning environments;
• and so on…

What else could we add to the list?

If we were really serious about [educational technology issue], we would [?] instead of [?].

It’s almost 2011. Isn’t it time for us to get serious about educational technology?

If you’re like me, you have trouble keeping up with all of the great videos that are out there. I love it when others help me separate the wheat from the chaff.

For my column this month for the School Administrators of Iowa newsletter, I listed a dozen videos that I thought would help spark educators’ thinking about the changes that are occurring around us. None of these are videos that we already have used in the technology leadership training that we’ve done statewide for principals and superintendents. 

School leaders and/or educator preparation programs could show these videos to practicing or preservice administrators and teachers, school boards, or community members to maintain a heightened sense of urgency for change. I usually recommend to administrators that, every time they’re face-to-face with a group, they show a video or share something they recently read or learned. They also could, for example, assign one of these videos as ‘homework’ ahead of a meeting. The important thing is to keep sharing how our world is changing and to keep discussing what it means for our educational practice.

Here’s my list, in no particular order:

1. Sir Ken Robinson, Changing education paradigms (11 minutes)
2. Sugatra Mitra, The child-driven education (17 minutes)
3. Clay Shirky, How cognitive surplus will change the world (13 minutes)
4. Chris Anderson, How web video powers global innovation (19 minutes)
5. Dean Shareski, Sharing: The moral imperative (25 minutes)
6. Henry Jenkins, TEDxNYED (18 minutes)
7. Daniel Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (11 minutes)
8. Dan Meyer, Math class needs a makeover (12 minutes)
9. Jeff Jarvis, TEDxNYED (17 minutes)
10. Lisa Nielsen, Response to principal who bans social media (4 minutes)
11. New Brunswick Department of Education, 21st century education in New Brunswick (6 minutes)
12. Charles Leadbeter, On innovation (19 minutes)

Happy viewing!

Image credit: iPod Nano 3rd generation

Many organizational web sites are simply online brochures: static entities with a few pages of information. They’re not interactive. They’re not updated. Once you’ve read the text and seen the images, there’s rarely a reason to come back later. This is particularly true for web pages made by individuals, small businesses, and, unfortunately, schools.

Institutions like universities and larger corporations seem to do a better job of updating their Web content and making their sites more interactive, thus increasing the likelihood of visitors returning later. The reason they can do this, of course, is that they have more money, training, and other resources at their disposal. A small business owner (or a teacher or  secretary who’s the school webmaster) who knows little about web design but knows that she needs a web site may be hard pressed to do more than simply upload a few basic pages.

Similarly, a teacher that’s being asked to integrate technology into her lesson may be challenged to go beyond very basic implementation. She might have access to Google Docs, for example, but she simply has her students use the service to download a pre-designed document, fill in the open spaces, and either print it off or upload it back to the class Moodle site. She might have a class blog, for example, but her students use it simply to upload their typed text instead of handing in their written text on notebook paper. In other words, she doesn’t know how to go beyond this ‘electronic worksheet’ model and take advantage of the affordances of the new technologies. She’s basically replicating previous practices - only with more technological bells and whistles - instead of doing something differently because the technologies now allow her and her students to do so.

The challenge for school leaders, then, is to move their teachers beyond what Bernajean Porter calls ‘adapting uses’ and into ‘transforming uses.’ Another challenge, of course, is that school leaders may not be very technology-savvy themselves and thus don’t really know how to help their teaching staffs move in this direction.

What successes have you had in helping school administrators understand this issue? What techniques and strategies have you implemented that help principals and superintendents assist their classroom educators in moving beyond ‘electronic worksheets?

Image credit: Come back soon

Steve Dembo said:

I don’t see it as teachers spurning technology, or choosing not to take advantage of those new ideas and tools. I think most teachers don’t even realize that there’s a decision to be made. It’s not a matter of choosing the red pill or the blue pill… if you don’t know that there are even two pills available as options.

… A teacher that has never heard of Blabberize or Glogster or Prezi, has never been introduced to the new world of online applications that are available to them. They likely don’t follow blogs or listen to podcasts. They have probably never been to an EdTech conference or seen a TED talk. In short, they’re just ordinary, average educators who aren’t aware that there’s a whole other world that they have easy access to… if they just ‘take the blue pill’.

… I’m all for conversations about ‘big’ change. And yes, I agree, it’s not the technology, it’s the pedagogy. However, I also think that you need at least a minimal base to build from before you can have those conversations. And the vast majority of the educators in this country do NOT have that base yet.

Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.

Darren Draper said:

the large majority of teachers that I know are very caring individuals that believe firmly in life-long learning. Most love teaching because making a difference in the lives of our youth can be the most rewarding profession on the planet. Most love kids, love community, and want to share. It’s not that they don’t want to try new things, it’s not that they’re lazy, and it’s not that they’re incapable. Rather, it’s that their priorities don’t always line up with those of other progressive educators in and out of the blogosphere. I’m not saying it’s right, but I am trying to describe the reality that so many in the blogosphere seem to misunderstand.

Darren also said:

Those content to lurk but still hesitant (or unable, for whatever reason) to contribute.

The fact of the matter is that there exist a very large number of effective educators that are simply not able to contribute in any significantly recurrent amount to online discussion. All told, it’s not that they’re incapable of participating and it’s not that they’re unwilling. Rather, this group maintains perceived silence online because their professional priorities prohibit them from spending the time or energy required to provide plausible contribution.

To which I say, NO, WE CAN’T LET EDUCATORS OFF THE HOOK. Whether they’re teachers or administrators or librarians or education professors, they have a voluntarily-assumed, paid responsibility to be relevant to the needs of children and education TODAY and to prepare graduates as best they are able for TOMORROW. ‘Professional priorities’ must be aimed at preparing students for the world as it is and will be. Otherwise, what are educators there for?

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.

Look, it’s not like those of us who now ‘get it’ were born with this knowledge. We weren’t like this at the beginning. At some point in our personal histories we were the same as these educators that for some reason now get to be labeled as ‘unable’ to do this. Unable to do this? Poppycock. At no time in the personal computer / Internet era has this technology and social media stuff been easier to initiate. It’s not like back when you needed to know computer coding. Want to use a wiki? Click Edit; type; click Save. Want to leave a comment on a blog? Click on Comments; type in your name, e-mail, school web site, and comment; click on Save. There isn’t an educator alive who ‘can’t do that.’ They engage in similarly-easy activity every time they search or order something online.

The reason many of us now ‘get it’ is because we realized that the world is changing, we recognized our responsibility to our students and schools, and we dived in and learned as we went along. Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity – that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.

If you’re a teacher / administrator / librarian / education professor that somehow ‘doesn’t even realize [yet] that there’s a decision to be made,’ should you even be working in a school or university? Don’t our children and our school systems need and deserve someone who’s in a different place than you are? It’s one thing to still be a learner; heck, we’re all learners with this technology stuff. It’s another to opt out or not even recognize the choice. If we look at what our kids need, shouldn’t we replace you with someone else? 

It’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.

We can’t let educators off the hook. Not a single one. So keep that fishhook firmly wedged in their mouths. Keep tugging them along on the line. Keep scooping them up in our nets. Feed them tasty tidbits if need be. Do whatever it takes to make this happen. But insist on them doing the same.

Image credits: My fish hook; Slide – Should teachers get to choose?

I found this video at the Serious Games Market blog. It’s worth reading the full post.

Is this idea of creating classroom/school simulations to improve teacher/administrator preparation a good one? Are there some possibilities here? I think there might be…