Dangerously Irrelevant

Yesterday it was Facebook. Today it's YouTube. Here's an email exchange between two district technology coordinators...

TC1: I have recently completely blocked youtube in our network. Does everyone block youtube? As soon as I blocked it, teachers started complaining. What other websites can they go to that will serve the same purpose as youtube?

TC2: It is blocked here as well!!! I know there is some good to it BUT it is my responsibility to monitor, block, etc. I do not have time to monitor students all day long every day of every week. We have a product called LanSchool and it is awesome. You can view every student that is logged on at any given time and can take over their computer and shut it down as well BUT I cannot do that every day all day long. The teachers have the same capable to monitor as well BUT they are hired to teach. I will not take the responsibility for what they CAN GET IN TO THAT THEY DO NOT NEED TO!!!

It is very disheartening to read this stuff. The federal government is not asking us to do these sorts of things. So we could trust our teaching staff (and - gasp! - our students) but instead we resort to draconian measures that penalize everyone for the potential actions of a few. As I said three years ago, we need to view school organizations like these as ones that are desperately and inappropriately blocking the future:

I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”

As always, I wonder

"Where is the superintendent in all of this? Why is she or he allowing this to happen?” A superintendent never would allow his or her district business manager [or special education director] to function with minimal or no supervision; yet that practice is all too common when it comes to technology. I hear countless stories from educators that their superintendent is completely hands-off, leaving all technology-related management and pedagogical decisions in the hands of subordinates.

Yet more evidence that schools and policymakers are taking a l-o-n-g time to come to grips with the new world of social media. In the meantime, our schoolchildren suffer...

I just heard from the superintendent of yet another school district that's struggling with whether to allow its teachers to connect with students using Facebook. Here's my reply to her:

Speaking as someone who has a law degree, attorneys (like IT staff) are inherently conservative. The bottom line is that Facebook is just another mechanism to communicate, like the phone and written mail (in fact, Facebook is arguably more public than either of those other two). Do you have policies prohibiting teachers from using those to connect with students and parents?

I've written about this before (and here's a post from Doug Johnson arguing against format bigotry). Other districts - that operate in the same legal and regulatory environments that you do - are figuring out how to make use of social media tools while still maintaining appropriate relationships between students and staff and also doing their best to keep students 'safe.' Why can't your district be one of them?

Finally, if you don't trust your own staff, you've got much bigger problems than whether they use Facebook pages to connect with students...

Hope this helps. Please keep me posted!

The Facebook-as-bogeyman phenomenon has waned considerably over the past few years as more and more 'grown-ups' use it. What used to be unfamiliar and scary is now ubiquitous and comfortable. The hysteria that accompanied social networking when it first came out was downright embarrassing in hindsight. You'd think we would have learned by now that just because a technology is new doesn't mean that it's evil. But, human nature being what it is, perhaps that's too much to hope.

How long will it take schools and policymakers to come to grips with the new world of social media? At their current pace, a l-o-n-g time (unfortunately)...

Image credit: Firewall

I served on a panel, Education in a Digital World, at the Iowa Education Summit today. Here is what I said during my 5 minutes of opening remarks.

Good afternoon,

We have to start with the recognition that digital technologies are transforming EVERYTHING.

Technology is allowing everyone to do more powerful and also more complex work, but that creative power is accompanied by significant disruptive impacts. For example, the same technologies that allow us to have a voice, find each other, and work together also are destroying geographic boundaries. We're seeing to our dismay that offshoring and outsourcing allow everyone, everywhere to compete with each other and with us. In addition to replacing jobs here with folks overseas, jobs also are being destroyed by software. If the Industrial Revolution was about replacing humans’ physical labor with machines, the Information Revolution often is about replacing humans’ cognitive labor with computers. In short, these new tools are radically transforming every single other information-oriented segment of our economy.

Does the workforce preparation that most Iowa schools do reflect our new hyperconnected, hypercompetitive global economy and the impacts of these new technologies? Nope.

More important than the economic concerns, however, is that digital technologies also allow for dramatic impacts on learning. For example, students and educators now have access to all of the information in their textbooks – and an incredible wealth of primary documents – for free. They have access to robust, low cost or no-cost, multimedia and interactive learning resources - texts, images, audio, video, games, simulations - that can supplement, extend, or even replace what is being taught in their classrooms. Via collaborative Internet-based tools, they can learn from and with students and teachers in other states or countries. They also can quickly and easily connect with authors, artists, business professionals, entrepreneurs, physicians, craftsmen, professors, and other experts.

Students and teachers now can more authentically replicate (and actually do) real-world work through the use of the same tools and resources used by engineers, designers, scientists, accountants, and a multitude of other professionals and artisans. They can share their own knowledge, skills, and expertise with people all over the world. They can find or form communities of interest around topics for which they are passionate and they can be active (and valued) contributors to the world’s information commons, both individually and collaboratively with others.

Essentially, our students and teachers now have the ability to learn about whatever they want, from whomever they want, whenever and wherever they want, and they also can contribute to this learning environment for the benefit of others.

But most Iowa schools do little if any of this. Instead, as Collins & Halverson have noted,

schools have kept new digital technologies on the periphery of their core academic practices. Schools … do not try to rethink basic practices of teaching and learning. Computers have not penetrated the core of schools, even though they have come to dominate the way people in the outside world read, write, calculate, and think.

If we were REALLY serious about educational technology, we would do things like…

• 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;
• we'd teach students how to properly maintain and manage those computing devices rather than removing user privileges and locking down the ability to change any settings;
• we'd show students how to edit their privacy settings and use groups in their social networks instead of banning those networks because they’re ‘dangerous’ and/or ‘frivolous’;
• we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than ‘just saying no’ to Wikipedia;
• we'd 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;
• we'd 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;
• we'd 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;
• we'd 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;
• we'd tap into and utilize the technological interest and knowledge of students instead of pretending that they have nothing to contribute;
• we'd integrate digital learning and teaching tools into subject-specific preservice methods courses rather than marginalizing instructional technology as a separate course;
• we'd 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...

If we were really serious about technology in schools, we'd do these things and more. But we don't.

Look, 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. Our learning will be more networked and more interconnected and often will occur online, lessening our dependence on local humans. Our learning frequently will be more informal and definitely will be more self-directed, individualized, and personalized. Our learning will be more computer-based and more software-mediated and thus less reliant on live humans. Our learning 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. 

Here in Iowa we thus need to begin envisioning the implications of these environmental characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling. We need school leaders who can design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these new affordances. If we are going to create schools that are relevant to the needs of students, families, and society, we need policymakers who are brave enough to create the new paradigm instead of simply tweaking what we've always done.

Here in Iowa we're currently spending less on school technology than we did a decade ago. Of the 40 states that have some sort of online learning options for students, we are near the very bottom in terms of number of students served. We continue to do the same old, same old and try to sprinkle a little bit of technology on top instead of putting these learning tools at the HEART of everything that we do. We must do better than this.

It's 2011. It’s time for us to be serious about school technology. And right now as a state we’re anything but.

Thank you.

We know that teens text a LOT: the average teenager sends 3,339 texts a month. Many adults are worried about the potential negative impacts upon youth of all of this texting. Common concerns cited include lack of face-to-face interpersonal skills, repetitive stress injuries, and an inability to focus.

Like others, I think the texting phenomenon is worth paying attention to and studying. But I’m not sure this recent article has it quite right. Here’s an excerpt:

Dr. Scott Frank, director of the Master of Public Health Program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, has seen the effects of all that late-night texting. In a 2009 study, he found that “hyper-texting’’ teens - those who texted 120 times or more on an average school day - were more than 60 percent more likely to sleep less than seven hours per night and to doze off in class than those who were not hyper-texters.

“These teens were also more than 60 percent more likely to miss more school because of illness and to have poor academic performance,’’ he wrote in an e-mail. “Teens were also 25 percent more likely to report high levels of stress and 40 percent more likely to have symptoms of depression.’’

The way the article reads, the teens’ stress and depression and illness-related truancy and poor academic performance all seem to stem from the act of ‘hyper-texting.’ But this may be a classic case of correlation versus causation. In other words, perhaps teens that already are stressed, depressed, truant, and/or doing poorly in school are turning to their phones and their friends for validation and support more often than other teens do. As the article itself notes:

But many teens said feeling popular and connected to friends is more important than a good night’s rest.

“When I’m texting someone I don’t feel alone,’’ said A.J. Shaughnessy, a ninth-grader at Boston College High School. “When you don’t have your phone, you feel incomplete.’’

Michael Joyce, 16, a sophomore at the school, said the sound of his phone vibrating on his night table makes him happy. “Oh, good,’’ he thinks as he’s awakened, “someone’s texting me. Maybe someone needs me.’’

Sometimes teens answer late-night calls and messages less out of excitement than fear. In focus groups convened by the Pew Research Center, some teens related stories of friends or acquaintances who became angry or insulted when text messages or phone calls weren’t immediately returned. “As a result, many teens we heard from said they feel obligated to return texts and calls as quickly as possible, to avoid such tensions and misunderstandings,’’ the report said.

It’s hard for me to read that second excerpt and not believe that the underlying root problems are something other (and bigger) than hypertexting.

I think we have to be careful about what we infer and what causal directions we imply. Texting isn’t going away anytime soon. Whatever negative consequences accompany frequent texting, it’s far better for us to be accurately informed than it is to draw mistaken conclusions.

Image credit: The Stig texting IMG_0609

photo © 2008 Eddie~S | more info (via: Wylio)

This morning the New York Times published a phenomenal article on the struggles of parents to

1. keep up with their kids' digital lives, and
2. respond when children's digital interactions turn negative.

There are no easy answers here, but the solution is not for us or our children to withdraw. Withdrawing doesn’t change the behavior; it just removes our ability to know about it. Instead, we must engage with our children and be actively involved in these interactions - not in a behind-their-back monitoring sense but in a caring, responsible adult sense - so that we can help them navigate these new interaction spaces in which we all now live.

I'm going to recommend this article to every parent I know (yes, it's that good), and I suggest you do the same. I'm also going to have my 12-year-old daughter read it and then we're going to talk about it. Check it out. This is important stuff.

Here’s a short video on Internet safety (hat tip to Kevin Honeycutt). Happy viewing! 

Last December I posted the below video, which is about cyberbullying.

Some young people who say they are ‘cutters’ and/or are having suicidal thoughts are leaving comments on the blog post. Of course they don’t leave any contact information, so I don’t have any good ways to reach out to them.

I don’t feel like I should just ignore these comments, but I confess that I’m way out of my league here. Any suggestions you have – or helpful resources for these individuals - would be most welcome. Post wherever you think appropriate (here or where their comments are). Thanks.

Much like the New Jersey librarian who ‘just said no to Wikipedia,’ New Jersey principal Anthony Orsini received national attention for his letter to parents encouraging them to ban Facebook for their children. Here is an excellent rejoinder by Lisa Nielsen:

[Elena Elliniadis, thanks for bringing this to my attention!]

[This is a guest post from Don Watkins, responding to an earlier guest post by Doug Green. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!]

Earlier this week I read web posting about replacing your technology coordinator/director with a building administrator. As a guy who has spent the last twenty-three years serving at a small K-12 I disagree. However, I do understand a growing frustration led by Scott McLeod and many less known names around our country and our world. Getting rid of your technology director and filling that position with a building administrator would only exacerbate the problem. I came to my position in 1987 at a time when most schools had technology coordinators who were re-purposed mathematics teachers many of whom taught a programming class or two, with languages like Pascal. I am not a mathematics teacher and had no experience and only a B.S. in Liberal Arts. What I lacked in experience I made up for with verve and enthusiasm that has remained my trademark. We had about fifty Apple II and IIe computers along with a smattering of Commodores. Since then our department has grown to group of several microcomputer technicians but only one of which is available each day to serve the needs of over five hundred computers, nearly a hundred printers, dozens of software applications, twenty-nine file servers which a year ago were virtualized and now we are even supporting a cloud infrastructure that insures our students, teachers and administrators have twenty-four x seven access to nearly all applications whether at school or at home and even from some java enabled mobile phones.

In a small school district with meager resources I took it upon myself to learn all that I could and along the way I earned a Masters in Educational Psychology with an emphasis on Learning and Technology. I became a hypercard programmer, taught students to keyboard and write using word-processing software. We used FredWriter which was free and an alumni (who is now a Facebook friend) donated 5.25 inch disks which had FredWriter on one side and a data disk on the other. While I attended the State University of New York at Buffalo enroute to the M.A. I met Dr. Douglas Clements and with the aid of my wife a third grade teacher at the time instructed elementary students in Apple Logo and a special geometry curriculum written by Dr. Clements and his colleague, Mike Battista. In the early 1990's we had our first local area network using Lantastic and I had to learn a bit about star topologies and running cable. A few years later we put in category 5 ethernet when everyone around us was putting in IBM Token Ring. Research and hard work saved our district tens of thousands of dollars initially and if you factor in not getting taken in by the Token Ring crowd we saved the district from cost of rewiring. I was an early adopter of both Windows NT and Windows 95 and we became the first school district in our area to move in that direction at a time when everyone else was using OS/2 Lanserver and Novell. This too saved tens of thousands of dollars. We were early adopters of so called "white box" open architecture computers which were custom designed and made from quality components.

My efforts have always been to knock down walls and to build bridges to places of opportunity for our students, our faculty, our administration and our community. I see my role and those of my fellow technology directors and now technology integrators, curriculum directors, curriculum specialists as people who can and do encourage innovation. We owe this to our various constituencies. We do not serve them well when we accept the status quo. When someone tells me that this or that can't be done I make it my business to prove them wrong.

Ten years ago we were forced by fiat to filter in order to comply with E-rate. I railed at the idea of having to filter and it was during a conversation with a vendor of a particular filtering product that the salesman, who was no doubt tiring of my soapbox lecture about the first amendment, suggested that I build my own filter with Linux. I accepted his challenge and bought my first copy of Suse Linux from Amazon and proceeded to hack my way to a filter eventually using open source products Squid and Squidguard to fit the bill. At the same time I encountered stiff resistance from IT traditionalists upstream who insisted that I was treading in dangerous ground. I called SLD and made sure that I was not breaking the law and kept moving forward. Eventually we began to use Red Hat and later Fedora Linux with Squid and Dansguardian another open source product that created a great filter. The upstream skeptics were silenced and others followed my lead.

The experience gained with filtering led me to an exploration of Linux in much greater detail and now a liberal arts guy with no computer science in his background began building Linux servers in closets and using hardware that no one else wanted. Eventually I was able to secure some special legislative funds from the late New York State Senator Patricia K. McGee who rewarded my entrepreneurial initiatives and granted us sufficient funds for a couple of us to get more advance professional training in Linux and other open source tools. My Linux training and my love of design led me to open source web systems using Apache, MySQL, PHP and eventually to PhpBB, WordPress, Drupal and now Moodle. Long before I laid eyes on Drupal & Moodle I could see how PhpBB could be used for student learning. From my earliest days I have loved learning and sharing what I learn with others.

A few years ago one of our previous superintendents asked me to examine how we could excite student on the edge. Many of these students were very bright by virtue of their IQ scores but remained listless in traditional classrooms. Around that time too my daughter introduced me to text messaging and so another epiphany occurred and I began to see a connection for learning and teaching using cellular phones. At a time when many of my peers in both the teaching and administrative ranks disdained cell phones, I was looking for ways to connect them to student learning. This journey has led me to an integration of cell phones, web applications using WordPress, Drupal and Moodle and student learning.

A year ago our high school principal gave me an opportunity to return to the classroom that I had been gone from for five years due to administrative overload. He asked me to consider teaching a class that would teach students what not to do with Facebook and cell phones. I asked to think about it for a few days. A bit less than a year ago I began to write a curriculum that was influenced in part by a trip to NECC 2009 in Washington, DC and some of ISTE's materials including Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey's book on "Digital Citizenship in Schools." I spent last summer reading their book and many others, following tweets from my personal learning network on Twitter and Facebook and writing a curriculum that is a work in progress. I finally learned a bit more about using Moodle including how to build your own Moodle server in our virtual server cloud. Now, in addition to my technology director duties I teach two classes each day of truly amazing young people who have animated my life in a way I never dreamed possible. They have encouraged me along with my personal learning network to continue to grow both personally and professionally. They are eager to learn and love our class times. Their is a waiting list for my classes. We emphasize digital citizenship and students are encouraged to blog each day and to use their cell phones for educational purposes. I'm indebted to many including my personal learning network of Katie McFarland (@katiemc827); Rick Weinberg (@rickweinberg); Mark Carls (@mcarls), Liz Kolb (@lkolb); Steve O'Connor (@steveoc) and many more whom I follow on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

What all of this has taught me is never to accept status quo and always to keep pushing ahead for the sake of those we serve, the students and staff of our respective school districts. Putting a building principal into a position like this one with little or no preparation could be a disaster. A technology director ought to be a bit of a rebel, a diplomat, and a life long learner. Today's technology directors have to work together with curriculum directors and technology integrators to make sure that today's students are really being prepared for the twenty-first century. Today's technology directors must be agents of change, they have to envelope pushers but at the same time they have to work with other professionals who can shape curriculum. No one can do everything and certainly not everything well without help. We are bridge builders who should be familiar enough with the building blocks that underpin our networks. We have to be open to change too. Just today a technology integrator friend was expressing some frustration from an IT guy who told him that DropBox couldn't work on their network. What the IT guy isn't saying is that he fears that someone can put a rogue file into the network by way of DropBox. While that's possible it is no excuse for not opening DropBox so teachers and even students can use it. I know that the IT guy is blowing smoke and already I told my friend and fellow technology integrator that we're going to try it on our network and that we will be able offer empirical evidence that will allay the other person's fear.

The nuances of technology direction and management are many and unless the particular building administrator has some keen interest in technology there would be nothing in their professional background either as a classroom teacher or a building administrator that would prepare them. I can say this because I have now completed half of the coursework at a local university that will lead me to administrative certification. Until now, and I can only speak for my own State of New York, no one has picked up the ball. Since the inception of computer technology into schools which began in the late 1970's now there has been no real standard for technology director or coordinator. Some like me are designated as teachers although like me we have functioned as de facto administrators. Many of us are ten or sometimes eleven month employees when in fact we ought to be twelve month employees and many like me find themselves functioning in a "no man's land," where we are mistrusted by both teachers and administrators. Generally, we are highly principled, ethical and driven individuals who are charged with managing chaos. One of my best friends and a fellow technology director has a quote from Dante's Inferno taped over his door, "abandon all hope ye who enter here."

Today's technology coordinators/directors should be grandfathered into administrative positions. Higher Education and State Departments of Education need to prescribe a program of study and certification for technology directors and it ought to include much of what I've studied in my administrative course work, but in addition to that it ought to include a special track that emphasizes technology skills and that ought to include network planning and implementation, technology visioning and planning and it ought to include curriculum integration too. Education needs geeks but we need a special kind of geek who is one of us.

Don Watkins, Technology Director
Franklinville Central School
Franklinville, NY
@don_watkins
http://www.linkedin.com/in/donwatkins
http://www.tbafcs.org

[This is the text of an e-mail I just sent the 7 board members for the Orange County (FL) Public Schools.]

Dear OCPS School Board members,

Greetings from the freezing state of Iowa!

I read with interest the recent Orlando Sentinel article on educators, students, and social media. Before you forge ahead with any policies that target any specific technologies (whether they be cell phones, messaging formats, or online social media tools), I would encourage you to read my short blog post on this:

• No Facebook for you!

The key point of the post is that tools and technologies both change and actually are irrelevant to the underlying issue of inappropriate teacher behavior. If you feel as a board that your existing policies are insufficient (and I would be surprised if what you need already isn't in place), I hope that at least you will not frame them in terms of specific technologies (per my reasoning in the blog post).

I would be happy to discuss this with some or all of you if so desired. All my best.