I accidentally posted this too soon, but here is the official version
of this idea (which is bound to change at some point).
What does it mean when you are faced with the following challenge:
The place that you work has given you the freedom to explore different
learning platforms, work with creative people, collaborate on process,
policy, and pedagogy, and the means to not have to say no too often.
The future you see for education is different than what is being planned.
The opportunities to branch out and create your own learning spaces
have never been more numerous or more engaging.
The community you actively engage in advocates for open communication
and documentation of every move forward that you make with your own
learning.
The boundaries on that communication have never been more clear: “Some
meetings are secret.”
The platforms for learning and support that you use are at odds with
“having someone on the other end of the line” when something goes
wrong.
So, what here is a conflict of interest. Can all of this coexist and
not create chaos, unrest or animosity between my job, my network, my
living, and my passion?
(Too vague? Give me a few months, and perhaps specifics will surface.)
Conflict of interest
I won’t buy anything that only does one thing
I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
Sent from my iPod
The cost of not doing anything…
I was in a great meeting this week where we were considering whether
or not to go ahead with a full scale implimentation of the Moodle LMS
for assessment purposes in our district. It was a great meeting not
because of the topic but the way it was being handled.
We were talking about the absolute costs of an open source LMS and of
staying with a custom-built assmessment solution. We were really
looking for a venn diagram moment when one of the curriculum and
instruction representatives said something really smart: “There is a
cost to not doing anything as well. It may not be a dollar cost, but
it will cost the teachers the ability to know more about their kids’
knowledge and it will cost the kids some learning opportunities.”
(Paraphrased by me.)
Too often we do not think about the cost of doing nothing or of doing
things too slowly. Does appathy in the face of huge choices cost our
kids the best learning years of their lives?
So, it got me thinking: What are the costs of doing nothing (or doing
very little) to change school?
Share an idea if this makes you think as much as it has made me.
New Responsibility
I was thinking about waiting until I got a little further into the
project to start blogging about it, but since I made the choice to
start blogging daily, I have really found that this forum let’s me
think through all of the things that I need to.
So the new responsibility is this: I have been put in charge of
administrating multiple moodle installations in our district. The
reason why this new charge I have been given is so strange to me is
that up until 2 months ago, the only “official” moodle installation in
our district was at a high school in parker, which I had little to do
with.
The reason for the shift is nothing short of an economic and
pedagogical perfect storm. Our district had slowly been building the
capacity for more and more teachers to start asking for a way of
teaching and engaging with their students online, and with the failure
of our bond election, the only choice for an LMS was to have someone
who was already working in open source to implement and support a
solution like moodle.
The best part is, however, that no one I have talked to thinks that we
are settling for something. From all of the initial conversations, all
stakeholders believe that professional development, online learning,
and blended learning fit well within a vision of moodle that includes
outside assessments and google apps for communication.
I guess the only reason for this post is to ask for advice. If you
were asked to design and implement learning environments for an online
school, a professional development program, and a blended model
(online and in centers/schools) using moodle, what would you make sure
to do (or not do)?
While I have a definite vision for the way forward, I am not the
smartest person in the room (considering that I have no idea how big
this room is). I want to know more… Always more.
Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity
(All quotations are not exact, but paraphrases of much better words that were in the mouths of the participants – These are notes, but I think that they might have benefit to others, so I am posting them on my blog as well)
I just wanted to use this space in order to make sure that we take note of all of our discussion surrounding how to use twitter and google reader for productivity.
“We don’t want to jump on the bandwagon with all new products. But, where does iGoogle, twitter, and blog feeds fit in our district’s overall vision.”
“Just because things are free, doesn’t mean we should be using them and promoting it.”
“Conceptually, the idea of everything coming to you is very inciting, but we need to look further at it from the Google Reader perspective and Twitter.”
“The real question is where do we spend our time? What is really of value?”
“Television news is too slow. I want to be able to know more about the things that I am interested in. I want it to be hyperlinked.”
“I don’t have enough time to consume things in a serial manner. I don’t want to know what happened yesterday before I know what happened today.”
“White papers are specific enough. I want relevancy and making sure that it is current.”
- Decide on your purpose for using feeds. What information would you like to be able to access that you can’t currently?
- Topics to look at:
- Stimulus and education
- CDE does a good job of talking about the stimulus, but they don’t have a feed.
- Broadband and education
- Virtual Learning Environments
- Making your reading relevant: What are the topics that you would like to come to you?
- http://surfmind.com/lab/msn/opml/
- http://monitorthis.info/
- Google Reader Bundles
- How do you want information to come to you?
- Phone
- Go to http://reader.google.com (on your phone)
- Set up google alerts for terms that you are interested in and have them come directly to your e-mail (http://google.com/alerts )
Condensation
I was at a restaurant this morning with my family and my wife’s
fingers were getting stickier and stickier from the leaky maple syrup
container. After a while she started looking for some water to wash
them off with. Her water cup was empty but the condensation on the
outside was still there so she used it to clean her hands.
I’m not sure why this sparked something in me, but the act of her
using only the water that was on the outside of the glass made me
think of what is happening in many school districts that I see around
me.
We can see the water, the life giving liquid inside, but we have to
settle for the small beads collecting around the outer edge.
We know that the bandwidth that is needed to fully share with one
another the media, ideas and resources of our district is available.
It exists for businesses and other entities out there, but in
education we are stuck with the runoff from those large high speed
pipes.
We need a straw, but we are stuck licking at the glass.
(The preceding metaphor is stretched pretty thin, but I did want to
get it out there just in case someone else found it useful.)
I’m not sure why this matters…
I just got word that the Chief Information Officer for Douglas County
Schools (my school district) is now on Twitter
(http://twitter.com/rmweldon). Allong with both McCains, I am the
third person he is following at the moment. I guess I’m not sure why
it matters, but there is this small part of me that is happy to know
that.
Not that he is following me, but that he is following someone… that
he sees the platform as one that is worth exploring. I don’t expect
many tweets or that it becomes his main platform for asking questions
and getting answers, but I guess it does matter. It matters because I
can now ask him questions. It matters because he is a part of my
learning network now (because I am following him too).
So, I guess if you are reading this, please give him a warm welcome.
And Randy, if you ever read this, I look forward to learning from you.
Too busy to work on workflow
The other day I was working with the principal of our online school on
creating a workflow for contacts, email, and calendar that would allow
her to add, read, and create from anywhere, meaning more productivity
for her.
I am pretty convinced that we need to be addicted to creating a better
workflow for ourselves, but that is a longer blog post. The reason for
this one was that Chris Lehman left a comment on my last post
expressing that he had a similar idea of people who were just too
busy. His post is right here:
And here is my comment on it:
http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?url=archives/361-Hardest-Working-Teacher-Syndrome.html
I recognize that this happens everywhere. I love that you have a
better name for it, though. (The hardest working teacher in the
building syndrome)
I know that you were talking about teachers when you wrote it, but I
really think that admin and IT need this post quite a bit.
The lack of help, support, and sharing that goes on because we are too
busy is truly troubling. Taking time to recognize that busy (or hard
working) is no excuse for not sharing what you are working on or
taking time to see what others are working on.
I think recognizing that an addiction to finding a workflow that
actually works is not optional anymore. If a teacher or admin is “too
busy”, their workflow is probably out of whack. That doesn’t get
talked about enough in our conversations. We just assume that others
aren’t duplicating efforts all over the place because we don’t.
If everything (our learning) is connected, nothing is out of place,
meaning that we don’t have to add more, we just make it flow better.
What is it now?
There is a syndrome that I see from many of the people that I work
with, and at many times, it I can be guilty as well. It happens when
someone asks a question or has a request of you. They have a simple
thought that they would like to discuss with you, but instead of
answering, you put it off or say that you don’t have time for their
tangent. You talk about all of the other things that you have to do
and you just don’t have time for their little project.
While this may be strictly true, you are shutting any opportunity to
advance your relationships with those people who ask or your skills
with the tools that are required for the request.
I know this sounds that I am advocating for dropping everything you
are working on to fix other’s problems, and I guess I kind of am.
If we have programs in schools that are called drop everything and
read for kids, I think we may as well have programs in schools called
drop everything and help for adults. I believe that if the culture
within a school or online space is based upon helping others to be
better or to know more, it is the only way to truly institutionalize
life-long learning.
When I shut people and their unique requests for help out (or put them
off indefinitely) I find that I stagnate. It take some going out to
help someone else in order to truly lean something new about what I
need to work upon.
I guess that I learn more and more that all learning is connected.
Even if I am not researching online schools when I am helping someone
to forward their email, it doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually end
up helping in the long run.
I guess all of the things in my brain really do have a long tail, and
it isn’t until it wraps around something important that I notice.
Making moving easy…
Every night this week and last I have been packing. I have been
packing up my family to move us to someplace better, with more room
and more possibilities (and more than one bathroom). This move has
gotten me thinking a lot about what to keep and what to let go of.
Without extending a metaphor too far out, it has also gotten me
thinking about how to move an entire school or even a district from
digital learning systems that they currently use, to ones that have
more possibility and room to grow.
And, what can we leave behind in this move. When you move from an
email based system of communication to a feed and “friend” based
system of communication (twitter, facebook, or even project wikis),
what is no longer neccessary?
When you move from a server based architecture for storing learning
objects to a cloud based repository, what is gained and what is lost?
The specifics are becoming more and more clear to me as I pack things
up. As I pack up our assessments for the online school, getting them
ready to move again, we can leave behind proprietary formats. We need
to be able to plug them in anywhere and reuse them for many purposes.
As I pack up all of our content, I realize that we can leave all html
pages without an edit button on them.
And, as I try to put all of our tools and resources for collaborative
and connected learningn into their box to be ported over to a new LMS
or to new PD spaces, I am realizing that there is no box big enough to
hold all of them.
Every tool must be allowed to connect to others, just like every
person must be able to connect. If there are tools that do not
connect, they will be packed away permanantly and placed under the
stairs.
Well, I am off to pack some more, but I will continue to think about
what can and can’t be thrown out when we make big shifts in education.
I hope to return to this theme soon when I figure more out.
