Dangerously Irrelevant

[Warning: long post]

My ongoing notes from the 2012 SAIS/MISBO conference in Atlanta, Georgia… These are from a keynote panel of independent school leaders who discussed 10 critical new leadership skills postulated in Bob Johansen’s book, Leaders Make the Future.

Steve Robinson, President, SAIS

• It’s a VUCA world (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, & Ambiguity). What is the impact of a VUCA world on independent school leadership?

1. Maker instinct. Reggie Nichols, Piney Woods School, Piney Woods, MS

• Ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.

2. Clarity. Doreen Kelly, Ravenscroft School, Raleigh, NC

• Ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot yet see.
• There is a difference between clarity and certainty. Certainty is expressed in rules. Clarity is expressed in stories and narratives.
• What is a problem and what is a dilemma?
• “What we permit we promote”

3. Dilemma flipping. Colleen Glaude, The Westminster Schools, Atlanta, GA

• Ability to turn dilemmas – which, unlike problems, cannot be solved – into advantages and opportunities.
• We must love the process of puzzling, not just putting the puzzle together

4. Immersive learning ability. Dana Markham, Pine Crest School, Fort Lauderdale, FL

• Ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments, to learn from them in a first-person way. 

5. Bio-empathy. Damian Kavanagh, SAIS, Atlanta, GA

• Ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from its patterns.
• Our competition is not the private school down the street. It’s the misunderstandings of parents and communities about what we do as educators.

6. Constructive depolarization. Suzanna Jemsby, The Galloway School, Atlanta, GA

• Ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down – and bring people from divergent cultures toward positive engagement.
• What is the food most commonly consumed by teenagers? Not pizza, hamburgers, chips, or chicken fingers. Rice (put on your global hat!).
• What we’re talking about here is grace.

7. Quiet transparency. Cliff Kling, Jackson Academy, Jackson, MS

• Ability to be open and authentic about what matters – without being overly self-promoting.
• The days of the ‘rock star leader’ are over. Teams, not individuals.
• Leaders will increasingly have to be open about everything that they and their organization do, whether they want to or not.
• Check out the Online School for Girls

8. Rapid prototyping. Keith Evans, Collegiate School, Richmond, VA

• Ability to create quick early versions of innovations with the expectation that later success will require early failures.
• Fail early, fail often, fail cheaply. ”Small bets out of sight”
• Rapid prototypes have lifetimes measured in days or hours. Pilots take much longer.
• Rapid prototyping emphasizes 1) trial and error mentality, 2) experience in the field rather than massive advance planning, and 3) maximizing our learning by prioritizing speed of learning
• This mindset runs counter to key leadership values in independent schools, such as 1) leaders do extensive planning (don’t plan it, try it), 2) leaders cultivate democratic participation to build consensus (not necessary for small bets), and 3) leaders mitigate risk and promote success (we need a comfort level with failure)

9. Smart mob organizing. Chris Angel, Hammond School, Columbia, SC

• Ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic media and in-person communication.
• We all have mobs we can organize and leverage.
• We need to teach students how to have a productive online presence. 

10. Commons creating. Paul Ibsen, Providence Day School, Charlotte, NC

• Ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit all players – and allow competition at a higher level
• We have new abilities to do this
• Goldmine sessions at conference are great ways to do commons creating 
• Shared opportunities and shared problems save time

My own closing thoughts

Small pilots (okay, prototypes!) are non-threatening and powerful. Iterate often. Learn. Iterate yet again. Learn. Iterate yet again…

Digital technologies are magnifiers and amplifiers of our humanity. They extend the reach of our human voice. They increase a millionfold our capacities and inclinations to find, connect, and share with others. They boost exponentially our abilities to collaborate with others, do meaningful work, and contribute to the overall good.

Can you exercise human voice without digital technologies?
Can you find, connect, and share with others without digital technologies?
Can you collaborate with others, do meaningful work, and contribute to the overall good without digital technologies?

Sure. We did so for millennia. But in the digital, global world that we now inhabit, decisions to marginalize technology are intentional relinquishments of potential and power. In the digital, global world that we now inhabit, decisions to ignore technology are willful disconnects from community, society, and the way the world works.

In schools, we are supposed to be empowering children. We are supposed to be preparing our students to be not just competent – but hopefully adept – in today’s and tomorrow’s information environments, work climates, and learning landscapes. But instead of recognizing and seizing the affordances that these new tools provide us for learning, teaching, and schooling, we pretend that our students can be masterful WITHOUT learning how to use digital technologies authentically. Or meaningfully. Or powerfully. And by doing so, we do our students a horrible, sometimes shameful, disservice.

By now it’s clear that digital technologies are here to stay. By now it’s clear that they’re having transformative impacts on everything around us. And yet we hesitate. We dig in. We resist and we rationalize and we make excuses for ourselves and our institutions. And every day that we do so, the gap widens between our practice and our reality. Every day that we do so, our youth lose another opportunity to be better prepared for our present and their future.

Educators, policymakers, professors, and parents: Our lack of vision and our limited understanding of our technology-suffused landscapes are holding back our children. Why don’t we care more?

Bigstock image credit: Tired girl with many books

Sometimes I read things like this post from George Couros and am uplifted that some educators are working hard to transition their schools into a digital, global era:

Take a twenty minute period in my life as evidenced below.

I read a blog post found in my Reader feed, which leads me to a link on YouTube, that leads me to a quote, which leads me to the person who stated the quote, to find a link on their Twitter profile, only to find another article on something that I would have never found myself.

I could go on from there, and I eventually will, but it is just amazing how one item, leads to another, and another, and so on.

That is how learning should be: continuous, connected, and meaningful.

And then I have exchanges like the one I had yesterday (excerpts are below) and am reminded about how far we still have to go.

No recognition that our knowledge environment is completely technology-suffused… No recognition that at what is apparently a great school, students could do amazing and powerful things with technology…

If the best use of the technology at our disposal we can imagine is the evolutionary filmstrip and the evolutionary Scantron, our failure will be epic and tragic.
- Chris Lehmann (via Joe Bower), in reference to YouTube’s announcement that it is piloting a multiple-choice quiz feature

Download this file: png pptx

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

Image credit: Navy Hill School

A blast from the past: a PSA produced in 1995 by 5th graders in Helena, Montana. Seventeen years later – because of insufficient quantities of computing devices, draconian filtering and blocking systems, differential student usage and access, inadequate bandwidth, adult fears, and many other issues – many of our students are STILL asking how they can get on the Internet at their school…

Normally this is where I’d say ‘Happy viewing!’ but it’s sort of depressing to think about my second sentence above.

Last week I had the pleasure of doing a 1-hour webinar for Schoolwires on the topic of Why 1:1? The archive of the session is below. As is typical, the best part of the webinar was the discussion (starting at 27:00) as 1:1 guru Pamela Livingston and I responded to a number of questions from participants. Good stuff!

Check out Schoolwires’ entire webinar series. Past webinars have featured Jon Bergmann, Julie Evans, and Alan November. Happy viewing!

Here’s a video about “digital natives” and active learners from Blackboard. Could be an interesting discussion starter…

Happy viewing!

Apparently it’s video day here at Dangerously Irrelevant! Here’s a recent video, Bridging Our Future, in which Intel envisions the future of education. Happy viewing!

There’s a grand tradition of using students in videos to advocate for changes in learning, teaching, and educational technology. See, for example, A Vision of Students Today and No Future Left Behind and I Need My Teachers to Learn and You Can’t Be My Teacher. Continuing the trend, here’s a video from Pearson called A Serious Talk: Kids Demand Next-Generation Learning. Happy viewing!

Last fall I demonstrated a couple of augmented reality (AR) apps to some of my workshop participants at the NESA Leadership Conference in Athens, Greece (yes, we were there during the riots). One of those apps was Aurasma, which allows you to connect digital content with real-world objects. No company-provided cardboard squares to lose, no special paper to print, no what-the-heck-are-these QR codes – just the ordinary objects around you. For example, imagine that you point your iPhone at a picture of a platypus and the Wikipedia platypus page pops up on your screen. Or imagine your students pointing their iPads at a drawing of a DNA helix on the walls of your science classroom and the Crazy Plant Shop genetics game launches. Or imagine a mother at your school’s Parent Night pointing her Android phone at her kid’s 3D clay sculpture and a video pops up of her daughter discussing her art. Or imagine a diabetic student pointing his smartphone at his school lunch and the nutrition menu appears, complete with carbohydrate counts. Or …

I think the ability to connect virtual content with real-world objects holds a lot of learning potential, particularly if we teach kids how to create their own real-world AR objects (and the background content to which those objects link). What ideas do you have for how AR – particularly AR linked to real-world objects – might be used for learning and informational purposes?

Oh, and for your viewing pleasure, here’s Matt Mills explaining in his TED talk how Aurasma works. Happy viewing!