Question 97 of 365: What are we willing to work for?

I used to tell everyone that I was going to become a teacher. I would tell them that it was the novels that I read in high school that made me first want to do it. I would say that those novels were the ones that I wanted to read for the rest of my life. Whether it was The Old Man and the Sea or The Stranger, I turned to that argument for describing my passion for teaching. I did that for years. Mostly, because it was easy.

I didn’t have to explain any other part of why teaching was so appealing. I didn’t have to go into the way that it made me feel when something I had done caused someone else to learn. I never had to retell each of the times that I had tried to teach someone else and learned something in the process. I could just say that the books were enough, and people wouldn’t go any further. They either totally agreed and really enjoyed the books they read in high school and therefore had no reason to doubt my sincerity, or they 100% disagreed and wanted to have nothing to do with a conversation about them.

And yet, the real answer was always more complicated than that. I worked as a teacher so that I could be happy. I am most fulfilled in my working life when I am helping other people to know more and be able to do more. I am most engaged when there is the ability for improvement. I am tuned in to any kind of revision available, especially within a human being. And reading books was just a shortcut to those moments. I could see the change within the characters and I could then help to create those same changing experiences for my students.

And yet, I don’t do that anymore either. I am willing to work for so much less now. I don’t see daily change within those around me. I am not part of translating characters and stories for others, but rather, I have become a transcriber of the same stories. I am trying to create the same outcomes across the board for adults, which was something that I never expected out of my students.

So, while I am paid more, I am willing to work for less.

This is also why I drink coffee so much now. It is why I go out to lunch. It is why meetings for me are no longer obligations, they are a source of sustenance for me (at least the ones I set up or willingly take part in).

I now take part in a ritualization of going to coffee shops to talk over big ideas with other people. I eat food in order to build out what is possible. I meet with others to prove that sanity is still possible without reading The Catcher in the Rye once a year.

And that is what I am working for now. I am working for a single refillable mug that I can keep on going back to the counter with and having them fill it up. I am working for a panini sandwich, pressed perfectly while I sit with the next interesting person that I can’t wait to collaborate with.

Because it isn’t enough to answer e-mail. It isn’t enough just to finish a project and have someone say good job. It isn’t enough to launch a space that others will use or be “visionary” about your planning. Mentoring and being mentored is what I am willing to work for. Nothing else is good enough when I am not in the classroom. Everything that takes me away from sitting down with someone else over coffee or a meal seems to be wasted time.

Even if I am getting work done by answering e-mail or by sending out tweets or by responding to discussions that are going on in online classrooms, I’m not willing to work for those things alone. I am not willing to work for a piece of technology or a system that can’t see the value in two people sitting across a table from one another and hashing out the world’s problems.

So, here is to hoping that our next paychecks have a lot more mentorship and a lot less e-mail attached to them. Here is to hoping that our work isn’t defined in how busy we are, but in how much we made time to go out to eat with others. Here is to hoping that for every meeting that gets called on a regular basis, you have many more that are held in just one time and space and that give lasting value to the things that are discussed.

That is what I am willing to work for.

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Question 39 of 365: What data points are we missing?

All of the data points matter. The ones that fit neatly inside of your daily life are just as important as the ones that lay way outside of it. The information that causes us to go forward unabated is no less valuable than the stuff that makes us cautious. The problem is, sometimes you do not have all of the data.

Specifically, in terms of the people that I know, there are huge gaps in skill set and experience. While I have access to a great many people through my professional social networks, there is much more that ties them together than separates them. Each of them has more than a passing interest in technology. Many, if not most, have some interest in teaching and learning. And, nearly everyone I associate myself with is working on creating, writing, coding, connecting, presenting or some other productive pursuit. These things that join them all together as “my network” also mean that I am missing out on huge amounts of information and people that do not fit these roles. While I can go out of my way to collect voices that go against my own ideas, even those people will be passionate creators of content, have an interest in learning, and probably care about technology. Those voices are not new data points; they just provide a new outlook on the same data.

I ran into an amazing tool for visualizing all of the data points in my network, and it really brought home just how homogeneous my network is. The tool is called Gist and once you give it access to gmail, twitter, linkedin, and facebook, it will analyze all of your contacts and conversations to see the patterns of how your network acts and reacts. It literally shows you just how important each contact is to your working and waking life. You can adjust this importance if you like, but the default data is pretty telling for me.

The most important people in my network according to Gist are all involved in Online Teaching and Learning, more specifically, the online school in my district. While this is not surprising, it means that on any given day, the data points that I get to consider are all working on the same things that I am working on. They are working toward the same goals, bringing only the small differences in their experiences to the table.

So, now that I know exactly just how insular my network is. Here are the following things I would like to add in order to gain a much richer perspective on my own existence:

• A fortune 500 CEO
• Some kids who make up games for fun in the middle of a large metropolitan city
• Professionals who do not speak english (Google has a pretty good translation feature now)
• A cohort of happily retired individuals
• Someone like LeVar Burton (Actor, eloquent speaker, fan of reading)
• People who struggle to understand technology
• Baseball players who toil in the minor leagues for 10 years or more
• People recently divorced (I literally can count on one hand the number of people in my close network that have gotten divorced. While that may be an anomaly, perhaps it has something to do with the number of people in my close network that are children of divorced parents)
• Functionally illiterate people with good paying jobs

And there are lots of other data points that I think would add value to my outlook for technology, learning, and entrepreneurship. While I love that Gist can show me all of the holes in my network, I have not yet been able to figure out how to fill them. That kind of a service would be one that I would be very interested in.

I would like to imagine a world in which I can say that I have all of the data points required in order to speak and act in my own best interest. While I can say that I do that right now, I believe that without hearing the stories and understanding the background of lives outside of my daily existence, I can’t really know what will lead me to greater understanding of education, the economy, politics, or humanity. I feel like those things are worth knowing, too.

Perhaps social networks are structured all wrong for this type of pursuit, though. If I want to find people who are nothing like me; how would I go about doing that? Facebook is set up to connect me with the people that I already know, LinkedIn connects me to people that I work with, and Twitter is a wildcard but it has a specific userbase that mostly fits with my worldview. Maybe it is time for a social network to be created that puts together all of the stakeholders on any given subject, especially the ones that are not traditionally listened to. Perhaps there is room for a network to grow around getting everyone to the table, not just those with an inclination to show up. I want a social network to exist for the simple function of telling the most complete version of a story possible. That is a story I would read.

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Question 37 of 365: What should you do if Google decides to compete directly?

Google competes with our jobs. We are only kidding ourselves if we believe otherwise. All of the knowledge that was known as expertise and was highly valued in a different time is now just a click away from any employee. Google directly competes with our textbooks, our reference books, and our news to a great degree. It competes with teachers for their knowledge, programmers for their ability to create applications, and journalists for their ability to report widely. They have the competitive edge in all of those spaces simply because they get rid of all of the friction. The search bar gets beats a scope and sequence of curriculum, an API beats a proprietary software program, and online syndication beats increasingly lower paid circulation.

Yet, most of us do not see Google as directly competing with our interests. We use Google, and many of us love Google. We filter everything through our Gmail accounts. We use Google Docs to edit and store our important information and presentations. We plan out all of our daily events in a calendar that reaches farther than a daily planner ever could.

We see them as an incredibly useful and “non-evil” company. How is it that we are so comfortable to outsource large portions of our jobs to a service that we continue to find endearing?

I continue to come back to the example of how teaching and learning has changed in the era of Google. Before Google indexed the world’s information, teachers, the library (including the encyclopedia), and other expert “people” were one of the only ways in which to get the knowledge required to earn the grade you wanted. There was no self-paced inquiry driven model for figuring out the dates of when something happened or the cause and effect of a war (without huge dependence on the teacher, books, and experts that is). Teachers occupied classrooms the same as they do now, but they were relied on for the information in a way that can’t be said of today’s teacher.

That means that fundamentally, teaching is different now. It has to be. When Google went head to head with teachers on the basis of their wide breadth of knowledge, Google won. So, they forced teachers to shift their focus to the activity and experience of learning rather than the “stuff” of learning. While this may not be universally true, students come to class with devices in their pockets capable of relaying all of the content for a given class. The teacher must respect that, and find a different place to compete for the attention of students. They must find a new “market” that Google can’t yet compete with.

Authors, Journalists, Programmers, and any other specialization that Google has put in their sites must do the same. In fact, we must all find markets that Google cannot penetrate if we want to stay employed. The average worker cannot be an information expert, rather she must be an integration expert. She must be able to take the information that Google spits out at her and make sense of it, integrating it into the systems that currently exist in her company. The folks in IT that used to be in charge of setting up calendar, mail and disk images to be maintained and upgraded must find another way to occupy their time. They have to find a way to take what Google can offer and train with it, implement it better, or build on top of it. Even the person that makes things must be able to iterate faster upon the product line because of how easy it is to produce rapid prototypes and harness the power of the crowd to distribute the manufacturing process.

I had a conversation with Ashton recently, my co-founder of Open Spokes, discussing what would happen if Google moved into our space before we were really ready to launch. We talked about how scary that proposition was. However, I realize now that it is only scary if you are so attached to the idea of what it is that you are “selling” that you can’t find a new space to be in. While direct competition with Google can be done, that isn’t really the point. If Google has decided to develop something that competes with your “product”, you must realize that your “product” as you have defined it isn’t your core business. Just as with teaching, the core business of schools isn’t the information, it is the learning itself. When Google moved into the news space, newspapers needed to realize that information can’t be their core business anymore. Their core business must be about the process of connecting individuals with the information and people that are most important to them. If news is to survive, it has to focus on the conversation as much as the content.

So, what should you do when Google comes for you? Pivot and believe in yourself enough to know that your “core business” can never be outsourced. As a person and as a contributor, you will always have value so long as you never stop working toward finding a space where relationships are the focus and not information. I still believe that relationships and the structures we build around them is one thing that Google will never be able to index.

Question 24 of 365: When should you fire your community?

Cultivating a rich and supportive community is one of the hardest and most worthwhile things you can do with your online presence. It is something that usually requires endlessly making contacts and leaving comments. It requires a consistent voice and a steadfast level of interaction. Most of all, a good community requires time. They are not made overnight and anyone who believes that they have found a shortcut to a great community is taking the term “friend” way too seriously.

So, if all of these things are true, why in the world would anyone want to fire the community that they have cultivated and start fresh with a different set of people? Many are afraid of starting over, afraid of making connections with a whole new set of people. This is one of the reasons why people stay in jobs they don’t like or frequent bars that no longer serve a social purpose. We are creatures of habit. And because of this, we are members of habitual communities.

Habitual communities are like legacy software. It is the same thing that we have done for so long that we can’t remember life without it, and it did seem to get us to the right answers and solutions when we picked it originally. We use legacy software because it is easier than making an enormous change, even though it may fit our needs better or revolutionize our learning and working processes. We stay in our community because it has, at one point or another, been “there for us.” It has gotten us through some hard times and it has kept us going on the path that we set out on.

Yet, I would like to make the case that we should be willing to fire our communities every once in a while. We should look at those people providing comments and theories in topics we care about. We should look at them and see if they are really the ones that will guide us into our future. We should look at them and see if they are holding us back.

This is exactly why I am not sure finding old friends on Facebook is a good idea. While it may be fantastic to make contact with people from your past, you are reconstituting a community that you fired at one point or another. You are surrounding yourself with people who may no longer yield any new benefit for where you are headed. They are people that made sense for a given time and space. Trying to recreate that time and space is counterproductive for the one you exist in now.

However, I do not take this process lightly. Firing my community is not something I would be so willing to do without first knowing that there is another community that might take me in. I know that I need the social interaction of other community members on a daily basis to become a better person (both online and in real life). I need them in order to make better decisions and have innovative ideas. But, the people that I follow right now may not hold the keys to where I am headed. They may not continue to nourish all that I can be.

But, where will the new community come from? Who are those people who will, once again, be willing to put in the time and effort with me to create a community together. Perhaps I need to construct a personal ad for my community (in the least creepy way possible), and perhaps I need to craft a Dear John letter to my current community.

Personal Ad for my new community: I am seeking a community of people who are interested in building new things no matter what sector of the world they may exist in. I am interested in open source, lean startups, educational technology, and asking lots and lots of questions. I am looking for people who are interested in communicating about ideas that will change the world. If you are looking for a person who never gets tired of learning something new or creating an interesting workflow out of many diverse ideas and tools, pleas contact me about your community. Thank you.

Dear John letter for my current community: I am so sorry, but things just aren’t working out. I thought that I was interested in learning about the newest and best podcasting, blogging and presentation tools for the classroom, but I no longer have much interest in tagging those for later reference. I now find that many of your links and recommended readings are somewhat recursive and never really seem to provide the case study analysis that would move the conversation along. If you are a person in my current community who is also interested in building new technologies, learning platforms and ideas; I think there may be a place for you in my new community. However, if you are still only interested in having conversations about how to use Google Docs in the classroom, I think it may be a good time to part ways. While I still want to know that people are putting the technology to practice in high schools around the country. I am just not satisfied with the stories of teachers learning about Delicious or RSS for the first time. My community can’t be about wondering what the next big thing will be. It must be centered around actually building the next big thing.

Question 22 of 365: Farmville practices Ghetto Testing, why aren’t we?

I had never experienced the term Ghetto Testing until I read a blog post about how the FarmVille creators use it. One of the biggest parts of Ghetto Testing is to track interest and support for a new feature before actually building it. This means that before a single line of code is written, they throw up a link within the game that allows for people to sign up to be a part of that feature as soon as it become available. This is their way of testing interest. If enough people click on the feature, they will actually build it. If it is something that most people could care less about, they will go on to their next idea.

This seems to be entirely different than everything I currently do. Essentially, I create learning objects before anyone has said that they want them. I create courses that people have said that they want but that they are not intimately involved in developing. I produce blog posts that do not have a specific audience, and there is surely no way that I have of asking others for which direction I should be going in. Certainly, I get feedback in comments, but that is only after I have written out my first version.

So, this idea of Ghetto testing has really got me thinking about just how few iterations we really get as teachers or as workers. As teachers, at most we get to teach a single topic 4 distinct times a year (within a given unit of study), and most likely, we probably only get to teach it once or twice. The ability for a single lesson to be tested and iterated upon comes around so rarely that we are likely to either simply do what we did last time with a small adjustment or completely start from scratch.

But, what if students were able to gauge interest, and better yet, value in each discipline as they went through the curriculum. What if we could do a heat map test on which topics have the most interest from our students. What if we could build those items out only after we knew that it was something that they would use. Especially in terms of the way that they would like to learn a given topic, if we were able to present the materials in 10 different ways and we gauge the ways in which the majority would like to see it presented. We wouldn’t have to build all 10 ways, but probably just the top few. Then we could do some A-B testing to see which one was truly more effective.

Yet, we don’t do that because we have no mechanism for iteration. We only do A-B testing if we are forced to do action research. If there were some way of doing this on a large scale, some way to receive instant feedback on how we should be creating the curriculum, we could actually differentiate in the ways we say we should. Perhaps this is why I believe so much in hybrid programs. If we can allow students to choose their own adventure and then let them support those features that we haven’t built yet by simply being our beta testers, there would be so much intense buy in for doing well and actually making educational choices that would impact their learning.

And what about business… What if it were possible to do Ghetto testing with projects that you were working on. What if we gathered the early adopters for every new initiative in a company simply by engaging them in the process of self-selection. If CEO’s have the captive eyes of their employees, what would happen if they didn’t build the agendas for meetings but rather gathered the input from their interest in certain topics. It could change the ways in which people build new products, and the ways in which they create corporate culture.

Now, the blog post that started this line of thinking made sure to point out that you can’t always have the same people being the testers and you should try to test out too many unbuilt pieces at once. But, I don’t think that it would be a problem to release pieces of Ghetto testing within our own environments.

The question I am now faced with is “What do I want to NOT build today”? What should I put in front of people and let them make a decision based upon their interest? While the wisdom of a crowd is not absolute, creating something new (learning or a product) requires us to always analyze the data about the best way to introduce something that will (at least in the long run) be beneficial to them. Perhaps game developers have a point here… Boring is not an option, and people are interested in being a part of the learning/development process.

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.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Bigger than pedagogy

The last two posts that I have written have talked about ideas vs. Tools. I didn’t realize it until after I had written them that I had not used the word pedagogy once. I was speaking of ideas in education, concepts, schemas for how learning works now.
 
At some point I would like to figure out a new word, though, for what I would like to see happen in schools. Pedagogy is too small and idea is too large. Pedagogy is all about the art and science of teaching. It is about best-practices and research in the classroom. And ideas are simply the supporting structures that allow us to carry on a conversation.
 
What I would like is a word that describes an understanding of connected learning, a word that explains the use of a tool for all stakeholder’s learning, not just the student’s. I want a word that keeps a network in focus at all times to show that learning is not an isolated act.
 
Well, I will be thinking about this for a bit, but what I would love to know what your word for what you would like to see within people in education. Do you want them to know the pedagogy? Do you want them to have a schema? Do you want them to just get a clue?
 
I’m interested in moving this conversation along.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

A list of tags…

The EdTechTalk delicious site has a wealth of relevent tags. It has so many in fact, that it may be THE resource for tags about Educational Technology and learning in general. I love being able to select different tags and find out what other people are categorizing within this rather large community. However, what if you wanted to use those tags somewhere else? What if you wanted to add those tags to the choices in your own blog or search according to those terms?

What if you wanted to categorize all of your ideas according to what the community has deemed worthy of their time? Well, I did want to do that. I wanted to use the common tags of our community, so I have made all of the tags in EdTechTalk (at least up until today) into a comma separated file for easy import into anything I would like to use them for.

Here is the file: edtechtalk-tags

Pedagogical implication: I think that it really makes sense for us to start using the same words to talk about learning. Coming together on a group of tags that we would like to use for aggregation purposes is something that we have neglected too long. The community is far enough along to put get into a discussion about just where we want our folksonomies to go. We need to take ownership of terms like elearning and make them more specific. We also should be teaching our students to come together on terms to use so that all of their work can not only be found later, but also grouped according to topic, theme, or even skill level.

Think about if we had a way to group student work according to a self-reflected score (of effort, of achievement, etc.). What if we could use exemplars and organize them according to the tags that they have self-selected.

Where else should we go with our community of tags?

Anything that can be archived, should be.

I was teaching yesterday using xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/profile/horizon) and edmodo. I found myself trying to justify why I wanted to archive all of the learning going on in the room. As if somehow there were people watching and asking why I was doing what I was doing.
 
I waited, but no one asked the question.
 
In the end I want people to challenge my thinking. I want other teachers to ask what the virtue of chronicling all of the thoughts of students is. This is what I would have said, if anyone had put my pedagogy to the test:
 
Learning is not tangible. It isn’t something that all students just come to and recognize easily. It must be made visual and reflective. It must be made into an object to be manipulated. If we are not archiving everything for our students (or if they aren’t doing it themselves), how will they ever be able to say “I can use this.” If it we don’t save our students thinking, how can we ever know that it really happened? How can we know if they or we did a job woth doing?
 
Learning is not for a day or a class period. We need to stop treating it like it were.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Guest Teaching 12.05.08

Cores 1-4:

1. Discuss-on:
2. Brainstorm ways in which you would like to “reframe” A Christmas Carol:
3. 
4. Well, let’s talk about how we will be reframing A Christmas Carol using animation and microblogging.
5. First, XtraNormal will allow us to completely create the scene, choose the characters and their actions, and even add background music, all without having to record a single video frame or sound file. Let’s take a look.
6. Next, Edmodo will allow us to have some conversation around what we are creating and learning. It will allow us to all think out loud without having our thoughts become too entangled (or having it get deafeningly loud in here). It is the way that we will honor the process of creation and not just the product at the end.
7. The conventions of microblogging are as follows:

• Write down exactly what you are choosing to do with your project (which scene you are using, which characters, etc.)
• Write down why you are making the choices you are making (why put Scrooge on a beach, etc)
• Write down questions that you have about your project (why is Scrooge so angry; does he have to be in our reframed version?)
• Reply as much as you can to others.

As for the requirements for the movie, please use the following guidelines:

• Have no fewer than 5 dialog exchanges.
• Do not copy and paste words from the book/play. Rethink the dialog so that it is appropriate for the scene that you have created.
• Block out the entire scene before you click Action!
• Don’t forget to have tell your microblogger what you are thinking.