Dangerously Irrelevant

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

With the caveat that you should take Klout scores with a grain of salt, I still had fun making this table!

Source: Top 10 most influential colleges on Klout; individuals' Klout scores on Oct. 6, 2011

[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!

I said this to some foundation folks recently:

Any corporation, government agency, worldwide church, school, university, foundation, or other institution that enjoyed the ability to broadcast to the passive masses is going to have to get used to the idea that we now live in a world of conversation, not just dissemination. The information-pushout monopoly died at least 5 years ago. When will organizations adjust to (and design for) the new reality?

photo © 2007 kanonn | more info (via: Wylio)This is highly applicable to P-12 schools, but most educational organizations have yet to take advantage of the power (or recognize the accompanying pitfalls) of social media tools. Here are some questions that are floating around in my head…

1. What will it take to move schools away from their unidirectional postal service mailings, paper newsletters, Friday folders, parent portal updates, e-mail listservs, and/or grainy public television channels and toward something that’s more multidirectional and interactive?
2. Why do parents - even digitally-savvy ones - fail to put much pressure on their local schools to use these powerful communication tools?
3. Are there schools or districts that you feel are doing a good job right now of using social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube) to interact with their relevant audiences (and, if so, do you have any links)?

The latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review has a number of excellent articles on openness. One that particularly resonated with me was Maria Andersen’s To Share or Not To Share: Is That the Question? (also available in PDF), which addresses the issue of how ‘open’ faculty are with their work and their ideas. Here’s a quote:

Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence. The first factor is the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing. This characteristic is something that is innate to personality, similar to the Myers-Briggs scale of introversion/extroversion. To move a person on this scale would be akin to changing an introvert to an extrovert. On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.

The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community. In my conversations with faculty who openly share their thoughts and content, I asked why they share. Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share — that everyone in education should share. Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.

In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.

I don’t know how many Educational Leadership faculty members are really trying to be thought leaders. I know that I am (which is why I vigorously use social media tools), but I’m not sure that most view their jobs through this lens. As Jon Becker pointed out in his Leadership Day 2010 post, the evidence is pretty clear that even the biggest names inside Educational Leadership academia generally are unknown outside our fairly small circle. It’s safe to say that, for the most part, practitioners and policymakers are completely ignorant of our research, teaching, service, grants, etc. At best, we may have some visibility within our home states through our current students, our alumni, and (possibly) our research projects or centers.

The problem, of course, is that the work of any Educational Leadership faculty member that isn’t easily findable is essentially invisible to the larger world and thus irrelevant to the people who theoretically should benefit from it. This leads to some inevitable questions: Since we’re education professors, what’s the point of our work if it doesn’t impact schools (or at least have a fighting chance of doing so)? Should we be pulling a paycheck if we’re essentially invisible to practitioners and/or policymakers?

Image credit: Something’s missing…

Okay, I think I’ve got this figured out, at least for now…

I use five primary tools to post content and resources to the Web:

1. Dangerously Irrelevant - where I put my longer, hopefully more thoughtful writing and have extended conversations with readers
2. Twitter - where I share resources and converse with others in shorter snippets
3. Delicious - where I bookmark sites that I want to use or revisit later (although I don’t use this as much as I should)
4. Mind Dump - where I put things that I want to capture (e.g., quotes, videos, images) for posterity; my personal archive for stuff that is too short or off-topic for Dangerously Irrelevant but also is too long for Twitter or Delicious (i.e., I want more than just the URL and a few keywords)
5. Google Reader - where I share out items from my incoming RSS feeds that I think will be of interest to others

I’m now using TwitterFeed to feed everything from Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader to Twitter and Facebook. Everything that goes through Twitter also is sent automatically to LinkedIn and Google Buzz. So if you’re following me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Google Buzz, you should see everything that I’m sharing out. And, of course, many of you have put Dangerously Irrelevant and/or Mind Dump in your RSS readers (thank you!).

I could use Evernote for sharing publicly but instead I use it to archive things that need to be more private than Mind Dump (such as meeting notes, my highlights from Kindle books, and the HTML coding for my web sites). I also use other social media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo but I share their content through my five main channels above.

The Shareaholic extension for Google Chrome makes all of this much easier. It also allows me to post items to Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, and other aggregation / sharing sites as desired.

The feeds for Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader all have been run through Feedburner so I can monitor RSS subscribers. I set up TwitterFeed to run everything through bit.ly so I can track how often items get retweeted. I also am using Google Analytics.

For those of you who are interested, here are the URLs and RSS/email feeds for my five main channels:

1. Dangerously Irrelevant (RSS / email) [you also can subscribe to any blog category]
2. Mind Dump (RSS / email)
3. Twitter (RSS)
4. Delicious (RSS)
5. Google Reader (RSS)

And here are some of my other sites, including the folders that I share from Google Reader (so you can read what I do!):

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Flickr (RSS)
• YouTube (RSS)
• Vimeo - personal (RSS)
• Vimeo - CASTLE (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - 1:1 Schools (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Baseball (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Blogs for Busy Administrators (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Blogs That Deserve a Bigger Audience (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - CASTLE Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Education (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Educational Leadership (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Educational Technology (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Higher Education (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Iowa (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Law (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Marketing (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Miscellaneous (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Principal Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - School Law Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Superintendent Blogs (RSS)
• Google Reader folder - Technology (RSS)

I think I’ve got all this set up so that there’s no duplication in any one place. For a while there, for example, I was posting the same resource more than once in Facebook. If you notice any future duplication, please let me know.

Is there anything I’m missing, forgetting, or also should be doing?

Happy reading!

[hat tip to Jose Vilson, who’s apparently in the same mindset I am these days]

On the Internet, we write ourselves into existence.

That’s a wonderful thing. It allows us to reach audiences that we otherwise wouldn’t reach. It allows us to try on personas - and perhaps to reinvent ourselves - in ways that may be difficult in our everyday, face-to-face interactions.

But it also can be misleading.

Several recent incidents have caused me to revise some of my pre-existing beliefs about a few fairly prominent education bloggers. I now think and feel differently about them than I did just a few months ago, simply because I now have more information and thus a more complete picture of who they are.

I’ve been thinking about this as I get ready to head to the ISTE conference later this week. I won’t necessarily be wary as I interact with my edublogger peers, but I may be just a little less willing to accept things as they appear on their face. Not much, just a tiny bit. Most of the time people are as they appear - face-to-face or online - and I’d rather be a naive, trusting optimist than a negative, surly skeptic. But we have to recognize that we all also have secrets, ones that may remain uncovered because of geographic and/or interactional distance.

That edublogger who’s active in Twitter every evening and has a bunch of followers? He seems cool but maybe he beats his kids.

That edublogger with 20,000 subscribers and a heart of gold online? She seems great but maybe she’s cheating on her spouse. Or a cutter.

That charming, effervescently cheery and witty edublogger that everyone loves to hang out with at the conference? He seems wonderful but maybe he’s embezzling funds. Or a kleptomaniac. Or a drunk driver.

As you head to the ISTE conference later this week, or simply interact with folks online, I leave you with the thought:

Can you ever really know that edublogger beside you?

Update: I'm not as pessimistic as this may read. I'm just thinking out loud here...

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

The parents rise up! Check out this video starring Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green. It already has at least a million views.

Wait. Did I mention this was made by an elementary school PTA?

Civic Enterprises has released its latest study, Raising Their Voices, concerning America’s dropout crisis. What resonated with me the most was the voices of the students in the report. Here are some samples:

“To me, high school is like elementary and middle school. It’s all the same. We’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.”

“If you just fight your way through it now and get through school ... eventually it will be interesting when you get into your career field.”

“I’m going to be honest: school is really, really boring. I hate coming here.”

Issue 1: Student boredom

I hate coming here. If you just fight your way through it. The same thing over and over again. These are pretty damning words. They also are pretty common. As the report noted, many students view high school as something that must be tolerated as a stepping-stone to [something] better (emphasis added). 

When’s the last time your school organization asked its students how interesting and engaging their classes were (and then took their responses seriously)?

Issue 2: Meaningful community discussion

The researchers brought together students, parents, and teachers in four different communities to collaboratively discuss the high school dropout program in their local area. In each case, individuals remarked that this was the first time that teachers, parents, and students had been brought together to talk about any issue, including the dropout crisis (emphasis added).

When’s the last time your school organization had teachers, parents, and students (and, yes, administrators) in the same room talking candidly and safely about important issues?

Issue 3: Disconnects between groups

The report noted that:

while dropouts cited boredom as the leading cause for dropping out, many educators we surveyed did not see this as the central cause. In fact, only 20 percent of teachers saw a student’s lack of interest in school as a major factor in most cases of dropout. More than twice as many believed students were making excuses for their failure to graduate. . . .

Additionally, although students said that higher expectations would have mitigated the factors leading to their dropping out, only 32 percent of teachers agreed that we should expect all students to meet high academic standards and graduate with the skills that would enable them to do college-level work, and that we should provide extra support to struggling students to help them meet those standards.

These disconnects exist everywhere, of course. No organization is immune from them. But perception shapes reality. If students say they’re bored and teachers just think students are making excuses and don’t reflect on their own instructional practices, the problem never gets solved.

When’s the last time your school organization intentionally worked to uncover and then meaningfully address existing cognitive, emotional, and perceptual disconnects between groups?

Wrap-up

The Raising Their Voices study was conducted on behalf of the AT&T Foundation and the America’s Promise Alliance. The report illustrates the kind of conversations that can occur when you bring disparate groups of school stakeholders together. It also shows that disconnects between groups can be effectively bridged through structured dialogue and a spirit of mutual respect. The report includes recruiting instructions and a sample discussion guide to help schools set up their own local focus groups. As school leaders, we should do this more…

Happy reading!

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]