I’m both pleased and embarrassed to announce that the results from my second annual Education Blogosphere Survey are now available. Pleased to finally be done and that there were 419 participants. Embarrassed that the gestation almost exceeded that of a human newborn. Thank you, Dan Meyer, for politely staying on my case about this. I hope the results are worth the wait.
Note that I didn’t do anything with the open-response items. Feel free to dig through one of the Excel files and do your own analysis (please let me know if you do!). There are lots of useful resources in the additional information in the database.
As always, these materials are available under a Creative Commons license. Let the conversation begin!
Apparently I sparked a little discussion by a local school board! You’ve got to give them credit for asking the right questions and also being willing to experiment publicly with what to them were new technologies…
Any creative systematic activity undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture, and society, and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications. Includes fundamental research, applied research in such fields as agriculture, medicine, industrial chemistry, and experimental development work leading to new devices, products, or processes.
Greater investment in R&D activity is more likely to result in greater innovation. Sure, you might get lucky; every dog gets thrown a bone sometimes. But more often than not, greater payoffs come to those who invest more in R&D.
Iowa is 31st on the list when it comes to R&D expenditure per capita. We’re not exactly a hotbed of innovation compared to other states, primarily because the only areas that attract significant numbers of creative talent are Des Moines (state capital), Ames (Iowa State University), and Iowa City (University of Iowa).
What’s the situation in your state? Do the numbers surprise you?
Camp McCain . . . fundamentally does not see the Internet as essential infrastructure. . . . Instead, Camp McCain dreams of a competitive market in Internet services, and so if Obama sees the Internet as a road, McCain takes it as a car: something that consumers will buy if they want it. In fact, in 2001, Michael Powell compared the Internet to a luxury car: ‘I think there is a Mercedes divide. I would like to have one, but I can’t afford one.’ Any too-ambitious government project to put a fiber cable in people’s homes, thinks Camp McCain, is likely doomed to failure.
All I have to say about this is that any country that doesn’t see the Internet as essential infrastructure for driving forward its national economy and societal well-being is doomed. Doomed, I tell you! [hat tip to Will Richardson]
It’s easy to find examples of why we need people to translate the world of educational research for practitioners. To most K-12 educators, for examples, paragraphs 5 through 7 of this study summary (which purports to report the instructional value of using interactive whiteboards) are complete gibberish.
The power of transparency
I love being able to peer into the innards of Dan Meyer’s mind and instruction. How many other teachers do we know that would even be comfortable with the thought of opening up their entire classroom curriculum for critique and discussion?
The power of the aggregator
A couple of weeks back, Doug Johnson had a great post about the power of RSS aggregators. I’ve been introducing our new principal cohort to Google Reader. Comment from last night’s class: There’s a whole world out there that I didn’t know about!
The power of prefetching
I like the fact that FeedDemon, the software I’m using as my primary aggregator, lets me read stuff offline.
Finally, make sure you read the responses of Karin Chenoweth and Ben Wildavsky to Charles Murray’s latest book, Real Education. If you’ve forgotten, Murray is the guy who wrote The Bell Curve and believes that poor kids should just be slotted into menial (but somehow emotionally-fulfilling) educational tracks and jobs so that our schools can go back to their business of educating the elites to run the world. [hat tip to Eduwonkette]
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on data-driven decision-making. If the Amazon widget doesn’t load in a few seconds, here’s a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on teaching and learning. If the Amazon widget doesn’t load in a few seconds, here’s a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
The good news from the most comprehensive study ever done of gender and math performance?
‘No gender difference’ in scores among children in grades 2 through 11. [see research summary]
The bad news?
In most states [the researchers] reviewed, and at most grade levels, there weren’t any questions that involved complex problem-solving, the ability needed to succeed in high levels of science and math. If tests don’t assess these reasoning skills, they may not be taught. [see CNN article]
Here are my notes from Monday morning’s CTO Leadership Forum, sponsored by CoSN. The focus was on digital content and the role of the CTO (chief technology officer)…
Ann McMullan, Executive Director of Instruction, Klein ISD, Texas
Clearly, if the superintendent isn’t involved in these conversations (about digital learning], it doesn’t happen. If you don’t have your key central office personnel on board, it simply doesn’t happen.
When will education reach a ‘tipping point’ where digital content becomes pervasive in education? What roles should the district technology leader assume?
It’s different for every district. In some schools it’s already pervasive; in others they’re not even close.
I see districts that are or want to but they don’t have the bandwidth to handle it.
Technology is increasingly becoming part of the curriculum department.
We need to standardize on new equipment that can handle this new digital content.
The greatest limiting factor we have is time. If we want to teach 21st century skills, it’s gotta come out of somewhere. Even when innovative 1:1 situations exist, central office still says ‘just make sure those test scores go up.’
You don’t get rewarded for risk.
No one’s going to thank you for taking care of today if you fail to take care of tomorrow. (Joel Barker)
What is the impact of emerging technologies and critical initiatives such as Web 2.0 technologies on the future role of the district technology leader?
To block it. (joking!)
If you throw it all wide open, you run the risk of one incident causing everything to be shut down.
But we cannot be reactionary anymore. We have to avoid the ‘New York Post’ syndrome. We’re so afraid of the one bad thing that we miss all the good things that could happen.
What is the worst consequence of your best idea? These tools give kids control of their own education!
What role does district technology leadership play in closing the gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces? What needs to change in teaching styles and instructional delivery of a school district in order to enable effective learning of 21st century skills?
We covered this up above.
Getting past the overwhelming emphasis on test scores.
When are we going to stop assessing students on fact regurgitation and instead assess them on their ability to find and interpret information?
We have to get back to trusting teachers.
If we assume that digital content will evolve from our current model of ‘electronic text books’ to newer modes of learning objects and collaborative work spaces, what does that mean for the future of student access in our supported networks?
Textbooks are not going to go away. They will not be substantively replaced by digital content.
Most of my group saw digital content existing primarily as a supplement to paper textbooks, even 30 to 40 years from now. [sigh]
Chris Lehmann asked me, ‘Why are people still paying for content?’ I replied, ‘So we don’t have to think about our instruction.’
The Congress on the Future of [Digital] Content
Some findings from the May conference…
Overall vision
Visionary leadership
Stakeholder involvement
Rigorous content and curriculum
Ongoing professional development
Assessment and data to individualize instruction
Content that is engaging and flexible. Students are increasingly producers of content.
Curriculum and teaching strategies: alignment, scope and sequence, assessment, 21st century skills, problem-based learning.
Support for effective use of content: Ongoing, more money, more tech. Some vetting is still necessary.
America’s Digital Schools 2008: 1:1 is growing rapidly!
Barriers
Insufficient access to technology in schools and at home
Loack of ongoing professional development
Insufficient funding for content
Old curriculum and NCLB
Vetting and adoption process
No alternative business models
Intellectual property rights
Fragmentation of market
Complexity of transactions
The Vail, Arizona district has gone completely to digital content?
All adoption processes should enable adoption of digital materials and promote flexibility of content selection.
Districts in Texas are paying for paper textbooks to get the accompanying digital content. They then also pay to store the unused textbooks.
Recommendations
Flexibility
Educators should be the ones driving the selection of content. They need the ability to ‘chunk’ (select only pieces of) content during the selection process.
Professional development
Outreach / public relations
The public does not yet understand the need to move to a different model of instruction. We need to help them reframe their mental models of what ‘school’ is.
In the end, someone has to pay for a different model.
A Chicago Public Schools survey showed that 70% of its students had better technology access at home than at school.
Many of you know that I occasionally try to wrap my head around various aspects of the education blogosphere. In the past I’ve written about hubs and superhubs. I’ve also sometimes attempted to identify and quantify some of the most popular edublogs:
Below is my latest attempt. I made a few changes from last time, which I describe after the table. Authority and rank are from Technorati as of June 2. Clicking on each blog name will take you to its Technorati page.
This time I only included blogs that predominantly post about P-12 education. No higher education blogs. No blogs that are mostly about training, software tools, or other topics with an occasional P-12–related post. No education news channels that happen to have an RSS feed. Just ‘pure’ P-12 blogs. I was on the fence about four blogs on the chart; those are marked with an asterisk. I included blogs 51 to 54 in case you think those four should not have been included.
I gave up monitoring the several thousand blogs on my previous list. There were just too many to catalog and also too many newcomers. There are over 100,000 edublogs!
I feel fairly confident about the accuracy of this list. I considered listing the top 100 but was not as confident about blogs 70 to 100 because I kept finding new ones in that range.
If I missed you, I’m sorry. Please let me know for next time. If you don’t like or disagree with my selection criteria, feel free to make your own list. It would be interesting to compare yours with this one.
The very notion of what constitutes a ‘top’ edublog is very personal and individual (see, e.g., posts by Stephen Downes and Peter Rock as well as the numerous comments regarding my last two attempts). Also, Technorati has a number of issues, but no one has yet suggested a more viable alternative. There are many, many great blogs not on this list. While a number of people are finding value in the blogs in this table, some excellent writing is occurring on blogs with lower authority. Read and write blogs for your own reasons rather than worrying about the numbers.
Other lists of top edublogs
Other attempts have been made to catalog the top edublogs. Of note are the following:
Only 19 of the top 50 blogs in the chart above are on Alltop Education. Interestingly, I also discovered that at least 9 of the blogs on Alltop Education have an authority of less than 26, meaning that they have less than one inbound link per week.
Blogs with big gains in authority
Take heart, bloggers who want more readers / links! As the chart below shows, a number of the blogs on this list had large gains in authority over the past 11 months. Some of the top blogs (including Students 2.0, Angela Maiers, and Eduwonkette) didn’t even exist a year ago.
Final thoughts
As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts or reactions regarding this post. I am deeply honored that so many of you choose to read my blogs, appreciate any and all feedback, and look forward to the conversation!
