Discussing Little Brother with Cory Doctorow: Take Two

Anne Smith and Maura Moritz's students will once again be discussing Little Brother with author and blogger Cory Doctorow. A different set of students had this opportunity two years ago and it was a great experience (see that post for more details on the bigger picture of the unit), so we're really looking forward to this.

If you're available at 8:30 am Mountain Time on Tuesday, January 31st, feel free to join us in the live stream or the live blog. Mr. Doctorow will be responding to our students' questions live via Skype from London (the stream will be a not-so-great quality webcam-based ustream, but you should at least be able to get an idea what it looks like and hear fairly well), and the live blog is a place for our students to backchannel while the Skype session is occurring. If you do join us in the live blog, we simply ask that you use your real name and make constructive contributions to the conversation.

Update 1-31-12
Here are a few pictures from today and the embedded ustream archive.

Crowdsource My Basement Design

Okay, so this is kind of a silly post that I actually don't believe will generate anything, but I thought it might be fun anyway. We're about to finish our basement and I am not a very visual person, so trying to picture what it might look like is difficult for me. I'm sure we'll get lots of help with that from the contractor and most likely will go with one of the designs they come up with, but I thought it might be fun to see if I could tap into the wisdom of my small crowd.

We currently have a "full," unfinished walkout basement with a wood floor (with some crawl space underneath). We've just finished replacing the furnace, air conditioner and water heater figuring it made more sense to do that before finishing the basement instead of having to go in after. There are two windows and a sliding glass door that lead the backyard. When we adopted Abby we put down the cheapest linoleum we could find in one part of the basement to have a play/craft area for her, and the rest of the basement has just been used for storage.

As you'll see from the pictures, we do have a fair amount of "stuff" down there, but most of it will be gone before finishing the basement. We have lots of empty boxes that we've used as a "wall" to keep the dog out of the storage area, and those will mostly get recycled. We have a whole bunch of boxes of old school stuff, most of which we'll go through and probably get rid of because our philosophies have changed. What will still need to be stored are various holiday decorations, suitcases, and camping stuff (and a few miscellaneous other things).

There are a few things we have planned for the basement area. First and foremost is a bedroom/bathroom combination. This is initially designed for Abby (soon to be twelve) to have a larger space than her currently fairly small bedroom. But it will also be designed for the possibility of one or more of our aging parents to move in with us. Consequently it will need to be designed in an accessible manner, including wider doors and a walk-in shower (no tub). We'd also like it to have a walk-in closet for Abby and/or the parents. It should be large enough to fit a queen bed, a desk, and probably a couple of dressers.

The bathroom should have a sink (probably single), a toilet and that aforementioned walk-in shower, and perhaps a small linen closet. While it will function as a "master" bath for that bedroom, we also want it to be the bathroom for the basement, so therefore we envision it having two entrances, one from the bedroom and one from the rest of the basement.

We also have ideas for the rest of the basement, but they are a bit more flexible. Right now we're thinking a video area (couch and chairs, decently large screen), a mini-kitchen (sink, microwave and cabinets, perhaps with some kind of counter with seating), an area that could be a ping-pong table or a kitchen table if our parents moved in, and perhaps a workout area (big enough for perhaps two machines - treadmill and elliptical, for example). We'd also like to build some limited storage closets in wherever we can.

Here are some pictures (please ignore the junk, it's messier than usual as we just shoved stuff every which way as they were putting in the new furnace, water heater and ductwork) to try to give you an idea of what it looks like right now.

I used both graph paper and the free Autodesk Homestyler to get a rough layout of the basement. Here's the graph paper version:

And here's the Homestyler version:



These are reasonably accurate in terms of measurements, but could be off by as much as a foot or so in any given dimension. The brown rectangular shapes are my lame attempt at indicating pre-existing obstacles, such as the furnace (that's the big one), on-demand water heater (against the wall), support poles, and drainage pipes (the drainage pipes could possible be moved). You can also see the sliding glass door and the two existing windows at the "bottom."

Here's my first attempt at coming up with a layout (as you can tell, I'm not much of a designer):



So, as I said in the beginning, I'm not really expecting much from this post. But, if you're really into design and want to take a shot, I'd love to see your ideas. Create your own online (at Homestyler or somewhere else) and link to it in the comments, or create it with some other software and upload it somewhere and link to it. Or, if you have a finished basement that you really like and think part of it might work for us, upload a picture or two and link to those. (Or, if you did something and you really regret, let us know about that as well.) And, of course, you can always just leave a text comment with your ideas.

So, can you help out a design-challenged blogger? I'd love to see what ideas you might have.

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: Participatory Media Education and Civic Education Are Inextricable

From the article titled "Head of State" in the print edition (subscription required, although if you are in a school you most likely have access to it through one of your library subscription services) in the November 7th, 2011 issue of Time magazine:

Whereas US Envoys once filed secret cables to Washington late at night, Clinton has pushed her ambassadors to expand the use of Twitter and Facebook - State now has 192 Twitter feeds and 288 Facebook accounts - and her daughter Chelsea calls her TechnoMom. "We are in the age of participation," Clinton said at her husband's charity even in New York City in September, "and the challenge . . . is to figure out how to be responsive, to help catalyze, unleash, channel the kind of participatory eagerness that is there."

Clinton is trying to ensure these changes are permanent: she requires every diplomat who rotates through the foreign-service institute to get training in social media. (p. 31, emphasis mine).

The United States Secretary of State is requiring every diplomat to get training in social media - sure seems like perhaps we should be doing the same with and for our students. Yet typically social media participation is looked down upon in schools and, in fact, banned outright and blocked by our Internet filters. I'd like my future principal to reflect on the above quote and then lead our faculty in a discussion of whether we are truly preparing our students for their future when we block most if not all social media, much less work with our students to help them unleash the potential power of it.

That reminds me of another quote, this one from the National Council for the Social Studies Position Statement on Media Literacy:

The 21st century world is media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected. We live in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex sound arrangements, and multiple media formats. The multimedia age requires new skills for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating, and distributing messages within a digital, global, and democratic society. The acquisition and application of critical analysis and media production skills are part of what constitutes media literacy. The Internet and the everyday use of social networking technologies, together with the expansive growth of corporate entertainment media and the integration of popular culture, also require us as social studies educators to link participatory media literacy with civic education. (Emphasis mine.)

If the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources, then I'd like to see my future principal engage our faculty in a conversation around whether that is also true of our classrooms. If not, should it be, and what might that look like?

And the money quote cited in that same article, from Howard Rheingold:

“In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable” (Rheingold, 2008, p. 103)

So, in other words, if we aren't teaching participatory media, then we aren't teaching civics. Since we're required to teach civics, I'm hopeful that my future principal would help us as a faculty figure out how best to incorporate that into our classes.

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: 1472 and 2012

One more post that was at least initially generated from my reading of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts. This time it was a passage on p. 205 that resonated that I wanted my future principal to read and consider, but it also sounded a bit familiar. Turns out I had already Diigo-ed it when John Naughton's article in the Guardian he references was first published:

So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment?

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 — i.e. 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

Now it's certainly debatable whether the Internet is going to have a similarly large effect as the printing press, but that's a debate I'd like to see my future principal lead and participate in. (After all, part of the debate will surely be whether the Internet is going to have a much larger effect than the printing press.)

I then somewhat serendipitously came across this complementary post by Mark Pesce and Robert Tercek,

Yet there was a humanity before, a Homo sapiens before sapience.  We can reach back through prehistory, but our reach extends only as far as language.  Before language, our species was like a small child, remembering nothing.  After language we have continuous memory – indigenous Australians claim a cultural continuity going back some 60,000 years.  Language empowers us to express ourselves and know one another’s minds, but also imprisons us within an unbreakable cage that limits our ability to know anything about our pre-linguistic ancestors.  We are so different from them they are incomprehensible to us.  Language has so changed us that we understand nothing of those who do not share language.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Language was among the first human tools – along with stone axes and fire – and definitively the first tool that lived entirely within us, a bit of innovation as much cultural as technological.  In the moment language arrived on the scene, it became indispensable, and once indispensable, we adopted it as innate, favoring those with the greatest linguistic capability, and thereby subtly affecting the evolution of our species.  People who ‘talk pretty’ have broader prospects for success in the world.  They and their children will thrive.

Every claim made for the power of language – as an amplifier of human capability – can also be made for the sudden arrival of hyperconnectivity.  Connected people are more successful, and those most successful at mastering the techniques of connectivity have the greatest successes.  Connection is becoming indispensable, and we have already begun to think of it as an innate capability.  The billion seconds from 1995 – 2026 is witness to a transition from a world in which no one is connected, to a world where being connected and being human is seen as synonymous.

Just as we now see being verbal and being human as synonymous, hyperconnectivity is adding another layer of richness and depth to our experience.  Where we can observe the sudden explosion of depth in the human record, eighty thousand years ago, so our children’s children’s children’s children will look upon this billion seconds as a second explosion, another sudden quickening, before which the ‘dumb’ and disconnected generations of humanity will seem incomprehensible and inhuman.

I definitely want my future principal - and really all principals current and future - to be discussing hyperconnectivity. Do they agree, or disagree? (Or, more likely, how much of it do they agree with and which parts don't they buy into.) If connected people are more successful, what does that imply for our schools? Is hyperconnectivity really indispensable, an amplifier like no other; is it really changing what it means to be human similar to the way language did?

My next principal will (hopefully) be at my school for the next half billion seconds until 2026. (I know statistically it's unlikely for a principal to stay that long, but since our current one has been here for 27 years I'm hopeful the next one will last for at least half that long.) Isn't this going to be one of the two or three critical questions they (we) are going to have to address during their tenure?

 Flickr cc: Dean Shareski 

Come Be My Boss

Wanted: Chief Learner, Arapahoe High School

Qualifications: Desire and ability to change the world.

Timeline: Principal Selection Process (pdf)

More Info: Job Posting (closes 2-10-12)

Drawbacks: One (at least) hard to deal with employee.

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: This new economy tilts toward publicness.

Again from Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts, a quote I'd like my future principal to ponder (p. 137):

"Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive," says entrepreneur Sam Lessin. "Now the opposite is true: You have to pay a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy." You pay for privacy in the effort and hassle it takes to manage privacy settings. You also pay in the opportunity lost if you choose not to be public and social. On the other side of the ledger, you can be rewarded - with attention, influence, information, deals - if you reveal yourself. This new economy tilts toward publicness. (Emphasis mine.)

What opportunities might schools (students, teachers, administrators, communities) be losing by choosing not to be public and social? How are our fears possibly getting in the way of preparing our students to be successful in an "economy [that] tilts toward publicness?" As my future principal, how are you going to help our staff - and our students - understand the new privacy and the new publicness?

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: Isolation Costs Too Much

I'm currently reading Jeff Jarvis's book Public Parts. I'm not that far into it, so I don't know yet if I'd recommend my future principal read the book, but this quote from p. 45 is one that I'd like that person to ponder:

"Businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products." Now "they are changing into networks of business units whose assets are called relationships and capabilities." Turning that perspective into an investment strategy, I'd bet money on start-ups that put relationships at their center so they can disrupt old, closed industries (later we'll look at what social car companies and airlines look like; imagine, too, the social store, restaurant and school). I'd buy the stocks of companies that know me well and play well with others. I'd short the companies that build walls around themselves. In a linked world and a relationship economy, isolation costs too much. (emphasis mine)

I'd like my future principal to ponder, and lead the staff in discussion around, the idea that an isolated school, a non-social school, a "closed" school that isn't actively reaching out to others and building those relationships (including letting students build those relationships as an integral part of their learning), is a school that is ripe for disruption. I think they should also lead a discussion about how well such a school would be preparing their students to live, learn and work in a networked world.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: What To Tell Your Twelve-Year-Old

(This is part two in a possible series. See this post for an explanation of the future principal part of the title of this post.)

I found these two recent articles from the Economic Revolution column in The Denver Post pretty interesting. They're written by Dave Maney who, in his own words, attempts to "connect the dots to our economic future." This sums up the thrust of the two articles:

The prescription for the last few generations has been: Work hard in school, get into a good college, pick a career field with lots of demand, and success will follow. I'm pretty sure that's what my parents told me, and it served me well. But I'm afraid it's largely misguided advice now.

While I don't believe that education is solely about preparing you for future employment, I do believe that's part of our mission. I also believe that many of the current batch of reforms are being made in the name of economic success and competitiveness, yet they seem to fly in the face of what I see happening. (Which, of course, is probably why these two articles caught my eye, since I agree with much of what he says. It's always dangerous to read too much into something that confirms your own bias, but here goes.)

I particularly like how he attempts to state his "ten big ideas," but then also tries to frame them in terms of how he would begin a conversation with a twelve-year-old. For example, one of his points is:

In this tumultuous time, I wouldn't trust anyone's traditional prescriptions for success. (Nor mine for that matter.) It's incumbent on everyone to think for themselves, to observe, to interpret, to plan and to course-correct.

 And he frames it for a twelve-year-old as

Starting point for your 12-year-old: "School's important, but being able to think for yourself is more important. We should talk about how people learn to do that."

Perhaps these articles could be part of the basis for a good discussion led by our new principal about our current assumptions about what our students are going to need to be successful in the workforce. As a bonus article, we could add in The Career Of The Future Doesn't Include A 20-Year Plan. It's More Like Four:

The particulars of Hasler's young career can appear exotic and, yes, flighty. But his essential experience--tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all the while--resembles the pattern that increasingly defines our careers. According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s. This decline in average job tenure is bigger than any economic cycle, bigger than any particular industry, bigger than differences in education levels, and bigger than differences in gender. (Since women are more likely to interrupt their careers for child rearing and caregiving, their average time in a job is even shorter than a man's.)

Hmm, reminds me a bit of this.

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: Old School or Bold School?

My longtime principal (more than 25 years at our school) recently announced he'll be retiring at the end of the school year, which means we'll be looking for a new principal. (I'd link to the job posting, but it's not posted yet. (Update: Position is posted.) While I don't have any direct say in the hiring process, I've naturally been thinking a bit about what qualities I would want in a new principal as well as what questions I'd ask in the interview process if I were part of it.

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much the past year or so. That's for several reasons, not the least of which is that both my day job and my personal life have been somewhat overwhelming. But it's also because I haven't felt like I've had that much to add to the conversation. I felt like I needed to come up with some original thinking to make it worthwhile to hit the publish button, and I just didn't feel like I had that much original to contribute. Thinking about hiring a new principal, however, has made me want get back to my earlier blogging style which was much more of a link-blogging effort, linking to other interesting items and occasionally adding a thought or two of my own.

I think it might help me crystallize my own thinking in terms of what I'd like to see in a new principal.  Now, I'm not naive enough to think that my future principal is likely to be reading my blog, but stranger things have happened and perhaps some other folks out there (either current or future administrators) might find some use in it as well, so here goes.

So the first item I'd like my future principal to read (and think about), is Will Richardson's latest for District Administration: Are You an Old School or a Bold School?

Right now, we need bold schools, not old schools. By that, I mean we need schools to take serious steps to not only reinvent themselves, but to step out and advocate for a new, more meaningful definition of what learning means for our students, one that goes beyond simply “higher student achievement” or “increased student performance.”

Bold schools are places of questions, not answers. When much of what we currently think is important for our students to know is just a few taps on a phone or a Google search away, our central mission can’t be to deliver and test for content mastery. Instead, it must be to develop deep dispositions for learning by supporting sustained inquiry into both the content and context of whatever subject students are tackling. 

I would like my future instructional leader to read this short article, and then lead our faculty in a meaningful discussion around some of the issues it raises. This, of course, would need to be in the context of a larger staff discussion surrounding the purpose of school, and the purpose of our school, but I think it would be a good starting point.

In our current age of data-driven, accountability-above-all-else schools, I'm realistic enough to understand that our new principal will need to be able to navigate in those waters. But is it too much to ask that we also get a principal that has a bold vision for what our school can become, that can not only retain what is great about our current school (and there is much that is great), but can also lead us to someplace better, to reinvent ourselves and create, as Will says,

[S]chools [that] are steeped in cultures where everyone, both educators and students, are seen as learners first.

I want both my new principal and my school to be bold. I think our students deserve nothing less.

Let's Put It to the Test

For years in various forums (blog posts such as this one, professional development sessions, speaking engagements) I've been saying that state and federal legislators should be required to take the standardized tests that they make our students take. They should take them under the same conditions that our students take them and then publicly report their results - and their thoughts after taking the tests and seeing the results. (I've also suggested that high school educators be required to take each others' final exams, but that's another blog post.)

As successful adults and leaders in our society, surely they would be up to the challenge, right? And surely the results would prove their hypothesis, that the skills measured by these tests are both necessary and sufficient to be a successful adult and contributor to society, right?

Well, it looks like one school board member at least had the same idea. This article in the Washington Post is trending in my Twitter stream today:

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

Yep. He goes on to say,

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

. . . "I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.” 

So, again, I renew my call that all state and federal legislators, as well as all education reformers that use standardized tests as the primary measurement of how successful schools are, to take the mandated state tests in your area and then publish the results. (As a bonus, I think all education reformers should be required to send their children to the same types of schools they are designing for other people's children, but that's also another blog post.)

There's a difference between standardization and high standards; between recall and application; between testing and accountability; between schooling and learning. I fear that many of our so-called leaders have forgotten this. Perhaps it's time for them to walk-the-walk and be held accountable on the same tests they are requiring of our students.

Update: The hashtag for this is #takethetest