Dangerously Irrelevant

Since the past four have been so successful [last year we had 114 posts!], I am putting out a call for people to participate in Leadership Day 2011. To paraphrase what I said four years ago:

Many of our school leaders (principals, superintendents, central office administrators) need help when it comes to digital technologies. A lot of help, to be honest. As I’ve noted again and again on this blog, most school administrators don’t know

• what it means to prepare students for the digital, global world in which we now live;
• how to recognize, evaluate, and facilitate effective technology usage by students and teachers;
• what appropriate technology support structures (e.g., budget, staffing, infrastructure, training) look like or how to implement them;
• how to utilize modern technologies to facilitate communication with internal and external stakeholders;
• the ways in which learning technologies can improve student learning outcomes;
• how to utilize technology systems to make their organizations more efficient and effective;
• and so on…

Administrators’ lack of knowledge is not entirely their fault. Many of them didn’t grow up with computers. Other than basic management or data analysis technologies, many are not using digital tools or online systems on a regular basis. Few have received training from their employers or their university preparation programs on how to use, think about, or be a leader regarding digital technologies.

So let’s help them out.

How to participate

1. On Friday, August 5, 2011, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs, wants, resources, ideas, etc. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own. If you participated in years past, post a follow-up reflection. Whatever strikes you.
2. The official hashtag is #leadershipday11
3. TO ENSURE THAT I FIND YOUR POST, please add your info to the online spreadsheet AFTER you post. This will allow me to mention and directly link to your post when I do my summary post(s) a few days later. Everyone also will be able to see the complete list of submissions. If you want to link back to this post or leave a link to yours in the comment area, that’s okay too!

Some prompts to spark your thinking

• What do effective K-12 technology leaders do? What actions and behaviors can you point to that make them effective leaders in the area of technology?
• Do administrators have to be technology-savvy themselves in order to be effective technology leaders in their organizations?
• What are some tangible, concrete, realistic steps that administrators can take to move their school organizations forward?
• What are some tangible, concrete, realistic steps that can be taken to move administrators themselves forward? Given the unrelenting pressures that they face and their ever-increasing time demands, what are some things that administrators can do to become more knowledgeable and skilled in the area of technology leadership?
• Perhaps using the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A) as a starting point, what are the absolutely critical skills or abilities that administrators need to be effective technology leaders?
• What strengths and deficiencies are present in the NETS-A?
• What is a technology tool that would be extremely useful for a busy administrator (i.e., one he or she probably isn’t using now)?
• What should busy administrators be reading (or watching) that would help them be better technology leaders? What are some other resources that would help them be better technology leaders?
• How can administrators best structure necessary conversations with internal or external stakeholders regarding technology?
• How should administrators balance enablement with safety, risk with reward, fear with empowerment?
• When it comes to K-12 technology leadership, where do we need new knowledge, understanding, training, or research?
• What are (or might be) some successful models of technology leadership training for school administrators?
• How might preservice preparation programs for administrators better incorporate elements of technology leadership?
• When you think of (in)effective K-12 technology leadership, what comes to mind?

Here are the ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT posts from the past four years

• Leadership Day 2007 - Summary
• Leadership Day 2008 - Summary
• Leadership Day 2009 - Summary spreadsheet
• Leadership Day 2010 – Final list, some highlights, summary spreadsheet

A badge for your blog or web site

I hope you will join us for this important day because, I promise you, if the leaders don’t get it, it isn’t going to happen.

Checklist

• Post on Friday, August 5, 2011 about effective K-12 school technology leadership.
• Add your info to the online spreadsheet so I know where to find your post.
• See others' posts.
• Publicize as desired using the #leadershipday11 hashtag.

There’s a lot of stuff that comes through my Twitter stream. In addition to independent tweets, there also are my posts from here and Mind Dump, my Delicious bookmarks, things that I share from Google Reader, posts from the other CASTLE blogs, and so on. So I wasn’t surprised to get a message recently that said something along the lines of “I’m overwhelmed by your tweets. Do you have a ‘best of the best’ channel?”

Today I’m launching McLeod Reads (@mcleodreads), which is intentionally designed to highlight not only my own best writing but also the best of what I’m reading from others. I’m a huge fan of Flipboard and Instapaper. I also sometimes use systems like Scoop.it, paper.li, Zite, Readability, TweetedTimes, or Read It Later. My overarching goal for this initiative is to highlight things that I want to read using these tools.

What will be in the McLeod Reads stream? As you might imagine, there will be a lot of stuff related to schools, technology, and/or leadership. But there also will be stuff related to social media, higher education, economics, politics, graphic design, law, publishing and journalism, ebooks, photography, and so on. Sometimes it will be a short blurb or quote that I think is especially noteable. Much of it will be longer-form reading like you might see at Longreads, The Browser, Longform, The Essayist, The Long Good Read, Give Me Something to Read, or The Atavist (you know, the stuff that you can really sink your teeth into).

So two Twitter feeds. What you see on @mcleodreads also will come through @mcleod. But most of what you see on @mcleod will never appear on @mcleodreads (i.e., no bookmarks, no unfiltered ‘bot’ tweeting, and no random conversations).

Will Richardson has his Instapaper feed. Carl Anderson has his Ed Tech Feeds twitter account. This is my attempt to create a purposeful, carefully-curated feed of some great reading. To start, I’ve loaded it up with some older posts and some things that caught my eye this morning (so apologies in advance if you’ve already seen much of what’s there now).

To see the unfiltered stream of what I’m sharing, subscribe to @mcleod. To see the unfiltered stream of what I’m reading, check out my shared feeds. But if you’re interested in a more curated experience, subscribe to @mcleodreads and try it out. Let me know what you think (good or bad). And we’ll see how this experiment goes.

Happy reading!

[UPDATE: And the winner is… Suzie Linch, who submitted Nathan Barber’s blog, The Next Generation of Educational Leadership. Congratulations, Suzie!]

Just a quick update... Six days after announcing my goal of identifying 500 school leadership blogs, we’re up to 402 submissions. Removing duplicates, that’s a total of about 330 school leadership blogs so far.

As I noted in my previous post:

I know that many of you will contribute out of the goodness of your heart. But, because 500 blogs is a very ambitious goal, I’ll sweeten the pot a little. The kind folks at Lenovo are going to let me give away a Lenovo m90z all-in-one desktop computer to anyone in the world who submits a school leadership blog using the form below. I’ll choose at random from all of the submissions. You get an extra chance for each blog you submit; the more you enter, the better your chance to win!

The form is below. The deadline is May 16. I’ll clean up the list of contributions and share it back out so that we all can make good use of them. Thanks to everyone who already has submitted an entry. If you know of a principal or superintendent or school administrator association who is blogging, your assistance would be greatly appreciated!

[UPDATE: And the winner is… Suzie Linch, who submitted Nathan Barber’s blog, The Next Generation of Educational Leadership. Congratulations, Suzie!]

Does your local principal or superintendent blog? Do you read the blog of your local, state, or national school administrator association? Know of other blogs that are of interest to school leaders? I’m trying to collect 500 school leadership blogs in the next 10 days. Sure, there are some lists but they all need updating:

• CASTLE’s blogs for busy administrators
• Moving Forward: Principal / school blogs
• Support blogging: Principal blogs
• Support blogging: Administrator blogs
• Developing an RSS feed for principals

I know that many of you will contribute out of the goodness of your heart. But, because 500 blogs is a very ambitious goal, I’ll sweeten the pot a little. The kind folks at Lenovo are going to let me give away a Lenovo m90z all-in-one desktop computer to anyone in the world who submits a school leadership blog using the form below. I’ll choose at random from all of the submissions. You get an extra chance for each blog you submit; the more you enter, the better your chance to win!

FYI, the m90z is a pretty sweet machine (Lenovo sent me one to review first). The huge touch screen is very responsive. It would be a great home or classroom computer; my kids have taken to it like ducks to water. Here are a few pictures so that you can see what you might win and here are the technical specifications. Also, over the next few days check out these blogs for additional opportunities to score a m90z:

• Bud the Teacher (May 8–12)
• Kikolani (May 9–13)
• Geeks to Go (May 10–14)
• Chad Lehman (May 11–15)

The form is below. The deadline is May 16. Thanks in advance for helping out. I’ll clean up the list of contributions and share it back out so that we all can make good use of them!

Over on Ryan Bretag’s blog, Matt Landahl said:

I watch principals or superintendents who tweet or blog a lot, and often I wonder what they could be doing in their building instead of that. In the blogosphere or twitterverse, there is a lot of self congratulatory back slapping in the education administration world with people who tweet and blog, but truth be told, the people running really tough schools (i.e. inner city, struggling to make AYP) don’t have time to do it.

What do you think? Are administrators who blog and Tweet self-absorbed and self-indulgent, gorging themselves on the Web and enhancing their own reputations at the potential expense of their school organizations? Is it true that administrators who are running ‘really tough schools’ can’t (or shouldn’t) blog and Tweet?

Image credit: Fentons! Yum!

It's spring training for Major League Baseball and that means it’s time for another season of edublogger fantasy baseball! Last year’s champions were Harold Shaw, Vinnie Vrotny, and – for the first time ever in more than 10 years of playing fantasy baseball - me! (we had enough participants for 3 leagues last year)

Same rules and league settings as the three previous years. A trophy for the winner(s). Friendly banter, potential bragging rights, and loads of baseball fun could be yours!

If you’re interested, complete the BlogBall11 online registration form no later than March 23, 2011. [UPDATE: BlogBall11 registration is now closed.] First come, first serve. You must have an active education blog to participate. We'll make as many leagues as we can fill. Opening Day is March 31!

[sorry for the delay on this; it’s tough to type with a broken elbow!]

Hi everyone,

If you type www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org into your browser, you’ll see that Dangerously Irrelevant has a new home! I’m now hosted at BigThink, which is dedicated to deep thinking on important issues. If you’re not familiar with BigThink, I encourage you to check out the site a bit. It has video interviews with Nobel Prize winners, articles and other resources from global experts, special series on various issues, a number of different topical blogs, and lots of other cool stuff.

I’m delighted to be BigThink’s new (and only) education blogger. When we were discussing the potential move, I told the BigThink folks that sometimes I wasn’t very “deep” or “challenging” and that I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be “brainy” often enough to justify their choice. They said that they liked what I’d been doing and didn’t want me to change a thing. They also promised me that I wouldn’t lose any of my current subscribers and would get exposure to a whole new audience. That sounded okay with me, so we’re off on a new adventure!

For those of you who are regular readers, thanks for sticking with me. You shouldn’t see any major changes in your RSS reader or e-mail subscription (if you do, let me know ASAP!). You may have to set up new credentials to leave blog comments since it’s a new web site (sorry). For those of you who are longtime readers of BigThink but new to my blog, we’ll see if we can get you up to speed as quickly as possible.

As always, I greatly appreciate your readership. All my best.

SCOTT

P.S. I have a second big move to announce very soon. Stay tuned!

Image credit: Jumping off Mt. Evans

Goodbye, Mark.

I don’t say this lightly. I am an extremely strong advocate for free speech and for open discussion. In 4+ years – and despite numerous wide-ranging and contentious dialogues here at this blog (many of them sparked by my own stupid statements) – until today I have never blocked or deleted a non-spam comment or commenter. But you are now the first person I have blocked as a commenter. Here’s why…

You’re mean, you’re arrogant, and you’re rude. You go out of your way to belittle others and, for some reason, you’ve decided that my blog is the place to spew your invecture. I’ve received numerous private e-mails about your online behavior and I’ve read far too many of your personal insults. I’ve repeatedly asked for civility from you and you’ve just masked your vituperation with more-generalized ad hominem attacks which fool no one. By all definitions, you’re an Internet troll.

Most importantly, however, I’ve watched many of my readers try to engage with you. Folks I really respect have tried desperately to have meaningful, productive dialogues with you. All to no avail. So, forced to choose between you and the members of my learning community, I pick them. Hands down.

It shouldn’t have taken me so long to decide this. Torn between my deeply-held convictions about open dialogue and my unease with your comments, I defaulted toward openness and discussion. But Bill’s recent statement resonated deeply with me and helped me realize that it’s time to put a stop to you:

I'm tired of seeing your unproductive angst and negative personal attacks in the places where I'm trying to learn.

I want to give people a platform for dissent. I believe strongly in the Hegelian dialectic. But in the end it’s my blog. It’s my party. It’s my and my readers’ learning community and you’re the jerk that’s ruining it. You’ve redirected too much of our time and energy in nonproductive directions. You’ve contributed nothing to our learning and I’m pretty certain that you’ve caused other of my readers to disengage. You’re an energy suck, a psychic vampire. I’m tired of it and I’m tired of you. You can have your own community and be as vile and mean-spirited and righteous as you like. But not here. Not anymore.

Go spit your vitriol somewhere else. Goodbye and good riddance. Oh, and for the record, I feel deep pain for the students whom you supposedly serve and for whom you have so little regard.

Image credit: goodbye

Larry Cuban says:

Teaching, then, whether in graduate schools or kindergartens - in elite universities or slum schools - binds all of us together. In teaching we display our views of knowledge and learning, we advertise our ideas, how we reason, and how we struggle with moral choices whether we intend to or not. To teach is to enlist in a technical, morally based vocation...

Now change that to:

Blogging, then, whether in graduate schools or kindergartens - in elite universities or slum schools - binds all of us together. In blogging we display our views of knowledge and learning, we advertise our ideas, how we reason, and how we struggle with moral choices whether we intend to or not. To blog is to enlist in a technical, morally based vocation...

Edubloggers, do you see blogging as an extension of your teaching? If not, should you?

On the flip side, do you see teaching as an extension of your blogging?

Image credit: In order to exist online, we must write ourselves into being

[Hat tip to Larry Ferlazzo]

Well, 2010 is over; hope it was a good one for you. For those who may be interested, here are a few statistics about this blog from the past year…

Overview stats

• 24,887 Feedburner subscribers (plus another 886 e-mail subscribers)
• 268,975 visits
• 177,437 unique visitors (64.64% were new visitors)
• 491,102 pageviews
• 152,999 Compete traffic rank
• 153,974 Alexa traffic rank (USA)
• 393,504 Alexa traffic rank (global)
• 20 PostRank Education
• 5 Google PageRank

2010 posts that had the most unique pageviews last year

1. Tools for school – Digital document annotation on an iPad, iPod Touch, or laptop (5,218)
2. If we were really serious about educational technology (4,682)
3. 12 videos to spark educators’ thinking (4,562)
4. We can’t let educators off the hook (3,097)
5. Videos - I hate my teacher (2,828)

Earlier posts that had the most unique pageviews last year

1. Video – Did You Know? 4.0 (8,200)
2. Don’t teach your kids this stuff. Please? (4,601)
3. Bolman & Deal frameworks (4,193)
4. Gone Fischin’ (2,813)
5. Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators (2,769)

2010 posts that generated the most comments

1. We can’t let educators off the hook (139)
2. Should students be allowed to use cell phones on all assignments and assessments? (82)
3. Educators need learning advocacy, not technology advocacy (72)
4. If we were really serious about educational technology (64)
5. Why don’t we care about the Hindu kid? Or the Jewish employee? (62)

2010 posts that were shared the most on Twitter

1. If we were really serious about educational technology (352)
2. 12 videos to spark educators’ thinking (316)
3. Calling all bloggers! – Leadership Day 2010 (249)
4. We spend 80% of our classroom time on the skills needed for 10% of our jobs (153)
5. We can’t let educators off the hook (143)

2010 posts that were shared the most on Facebook

1. If we were really serious about educational technology (222)
2. We spend 80% of our classroom time on the skills needed for 10% of our jobs (78)
3. Video - Race to Nowhere trailer (54)
4. We can’t let educators off the hook (53)
5. Struggling with your dissertation? and Reclaiming the language [guest post] (50, tie)

Visitors who left the most comments (not including those who didn’t leave their full names)

1. Mark Hauck
2. Jerrid Kruse
3. Carl Anderson
4. Russ Goerend
5. Gary Stager

I’m big in… (countries)

1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Australia
5. India

I’m big in… (cities)

1. New York
2. Sydney
3. Chicago
4. London
5. Minneapolis

Top traffic sources

1. Google / organic (23%)
2. Direct (22%)
3. Feedburner (11%)
4. Google / referral (4%)
5. Twitter (3%)

Browsers used by visitors

1. Firefox (35%)
2. Internet Explorer (31%)
3. Safari (17%)
4. Chrome (12%)
5. Other (5%)

Operating systems used by visitors

1. Windows
2. Macintosh
3. iPhone
4. iPad
5. Linux

It was a great year for me on the blog front. Thanks, everyone, for being loyal readers, active commenters, and helpful co-creators and sharers!

[oh, and check out Mind Dump; you might like that too!]