Backwards!

I've read/watched/listened to several items over the last few weeks that are trying to coalesce into a common theme. I'm not sure I quite have what that theme is yet, but I'm going to share anyway.

<1>

The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Cars

Quote 1: Our technology is different, our car is different, and, as a result, our stores are intentionally different.

Quote 2: Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

Quote 3: At Tesla, we will continue to focus on the future and the future of your children, grandchildren and their children.

Questions: Should our schools be intentionally different? Can an existing school transform in such a way? Can we focus that far in the future, or does the institutional imperative to preserve itself override any possibility of that?

<2>

Google Street View Goes Into The Wild

Quote 1: Earlier this week, two teams from Google strapped on sophisticated backpacks jammed with cameras, gyroscopes and other gadgets, and descended to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But this is just the first step in the search giant's plan to digitally map and photograph the world's wild places.

 
Quote 2: This is just the beginning. Google wants to send the Trekker on expeditions all over the world. Team members talk about everything from the Appalachian Trail to Antarctica — and one day maybe even Everest.

Questions: Holodeck, anyone? Combine this with Siri, Google Glass, Wolfram Alpha, etc. - do we just need to rethink everything about school? About learning?

<3>

Monkeys, Flea Jars, Crab Buckets, and Educational Risk-Taking

Quote 1: Yet, all of the new monkeys vigorously enforce the prohibition against trying to get the banana because, hey, that’s how we do things around here.

Quote 2: “Are our classrooms like a flea jar?”

Quote 3: In these schools, whenever an enterprising teacher did something new and excellent that also was perceived to be too far beyond the norm, the other teachers would engage in behaviors that were intended to hold her back and instead re-align her to what everyone else was doing (or not doing).

Quote 4: The challenge for us, however, is that we live in a time of significant disruption. As new information environments, economic realities, and learning landscapes form themselves before our very eyes, transitioning our school systems so that they are relevant for today and tomorrow, not just yesterday, is going to require gobs of innovation and experimentation. Yet we have schooling, policy, and leadership cultures that are extremely intolerant of risk-taking and, indeed, will vigorously intervene to reinforce static processes, mindsets, and behaviors.

Questions:  Sometimes I need to be the flea, but jump when the lid is off. Sometimes I need to be the jar (without the lid), providing constraints and guidance to help my students jump (and achieve "escape velocity" and leave the jar (me) behind). Is school the lid? Is curriculum the lid? Or am I the lid?

<4>

Leaders: Don't Be The Lid

Quote 1: As new hires come on board, the new hires automatically follow this example.

Questions: Can the change really come from within? Does the institutional education jar, almost by definition, have to come with a lid? Is the flea jar a perfect metaphor for Race to the Top?

<5>

Divergent Thinking And A Jar Of Fleas

Quote 1: They're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past.

Quote 2: An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak. When you're present in the current moment. When you're resonating with the excitement with this thing you're are experiencing. When you are fully alive. An anesthetic is when you shut yourself off.

Questions: It's said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. But is it possible that school, by its very nature, is so focused on the past that it's condemned to ignore the present and the future? Is "backwards planning" a stunningly apropos description? Are we figuratively (and sometimes literally) drugging our children so that they don't notice this fact? Are we drugging ourselves?

Like I said, not quite sure I've figured out how this all fits together for me yet. Maybe it doesn't. Or maybe it's just more of my usual education angst. It just seems like if this were a campaign the slogan would be "Backwards!"

Update 11-4-12: Pam Moran leaves a comment that is waaaaay better than this post is.

The Perfect Gift for School Leaders

Looking for that perfect gift for the leaders in your school or district?

Not sure what to get that principal or superintendent that has everything?

Search no more.

Get them What School Leaders Need to Know About Digital Technologies and Social Media (or, if you prefer, the Kindle edition). This collection of short, to-the-point chapters about a variety of educational technologies is an excellent read for those school leaders who understand that technology is an increasingly important component of teaching and learning, but who aren't very comfortable themselves with technology. This wouldn't be a good gift for folks who are immersed in this environment, but for school leaders that want to learn but don't know where to start, this is a great choice.

Compiled and edited by Scott McLeod and Chris Lehmann, this book consists of the following:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Introduction: Chris Lehmann and Scott McLeod
    Foreword: David Warlick

Learning Tools

    Blogs: Kristin Hokanson and Christian Long
    Wikis: Stephanie Sandifer and Vicki Davis
    Podcasts and webinars: Steve Dembo and Wes Fryer
    RSS and RSS readers: Will Richardson and Karl Fisch
    Digital video: Mathew Needleman
    Virtual schooling: Michael Barbour and Rick Ferdig
    One-to-one computing: Chris Lehmann and Pamela Livingston
    Open source software: Tom Hoffman
    Educational gaming: John Rice

Interlude: Social media is changing the way we live and learn: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

    Social bookmarking: Dean Shareski and Mary Beth Hertz
    Online mind mapping: Carl Anderson and Richard Byrne
    Course management systems: Scott Floyd and Miguel Guhlin

Interlude: See Sally research: Evolving notions of information literacy: Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson

    Online office tool suites: Diana Laufenberg and Mark Wagner
    Twitter: Alec Couros and Kevin Jarrett
    Online images and visual literacy: Kim Cofino and David Jakes
    Mobile phones: Liz Kolb and Sharon Tonner
    Social networking: Ewan McIntosh and Jeff Utecht   

Afterword: Christopher Sessums

(Full Disclosure: I do not receive any compensation from the sale of this book. The entire compensation for my contribution was two free copies of the book. Well, and the opportunity to co-author a chapter with Will Richardson: priceless.)

Iowa, Did You Know?

Scott McLeod and XPLANE just released an Iowa-specific version of Did You Know?, premiering at the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday. Even though it's somewhat Iowa-centric, I still think it is very useful as a conversation starter in your district, wherever that might be.

Nice job Scott, XPLANE and Iowa. Join the conversation at iowafuture.org (and, of course, at the Shift Happens wiki).

Did You Know? 4.0: The Economist Media Convergence Remix

The Economist Magazine is hosting their third annual Media Convergence Forum in New York City on October 20th and 21st. Earlier this year they asked if they could remix Did You Know?/Shift Happens with a media convergence theme and use it for their conference. Scott McLeod and I said sure, they got XPLANE to create the presentation, and the result is farther down in this post. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the Forum, as I’m already missing school a few days this fall and I just couldn’t justify missing a couple more (it was very kind of The Economist to invite Scott and me), but it looks like an interesting event.

A few anticipatory FAQ's about this version.

1. It’s the first one that I’ve been part of that does not have a specific education focus (although I certainly think the media convergence ideas discussed in the video have great relevance for education). The idea behind the original (and subsequent) presentations was to start/continue/advance the conversation around certain ideas, so I see this hopefully doing the same thing around media convergence (and, selfishly, it will hopefully get some of the folks attending The Economist’s Media Convergence Forum to perhaps focus on some of the education ideas in the previous DYK’s). And, given the Creative Commons license on the previous versions, folks are not limited to remixes that only talk about education.
   
   
2. They decided to designate it version 4.0 even though there have been only two previous “official” versions. But the Sony/BMG remix that is currently the hot version is typically referred to as version 3.0, so who are we to argue with the wisdom of the crowd?
   
   
3. I should not get much, if any, credit for this one. I sent along a fair amount of statistics for their consideration, and certainly provided some feedback along the way, but otherwise didn’t have nearly as much to do with this version. Laura Bestler, Scott McLeod’s graduate assistant, did most of the research for this one, and of course XPLANE did all the graphical work. (I should, however, still get most or all of the blame if you don’t like it, since I started this whole mess.)
   
   
4. Like the previous versions, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, so you’re welcome to use/modify as you see fit, as long as you follow the terms of that license.

Finally, an observation. In a recent email Scott McLeod wrote, “It’s amazing, the legs this thing still has.” I would have to agree. The various versions have been viewed well over 20 millions times (my guess is that with downloaded versions and audience showings it’s probably closer to 30 million times, but 20 million would be the safe number). It’s been shown to audiences large and small, educational and corporate and everything in between. It's been shown to the leaders of our national defense and to incoming congressmen. It’s been shown by university presidents and kindergarten teachers, televangelists and politicians, folks just trying to make a buck and those trying to save the world. And this week it even made an appearance in Nancy Gibb’s essay in Time Magazine.

What does it all mean? (Well, besides the self-referential and now self-serving answer of “Shift Happens.”) I think the fact that a simple little PowerPoint (some folks would say simplistic and they would be right – it was meant to be the start of a conversation, not the entire conversation) can be viewed by so many folks and start so many conversations means that we live in a fundamentally different world than the one I (and most of you reading this) grew up in.

I know some folks would dispute that, and that’s an interesting conversation in and of itself, but if you buy that – if you buy that on so many levels the world is a fundamentally different place – then it just begs us to ask the question of whether schools have similarly transformed from when we grew up. If your answer to that question is no, as I think it probably is for a large majority of you, and if you see a problem with that, then what should we do? What is my responsibility, and your responsibility, for making the changes we believe are necessary? What are you willing to step up and do?

Here’s the presentation. Source files will be uploaded to the wiki shortly.

We Can Do This. We Should Do It.

I'm way behind in my "personal professional development through RSS" (i.e., I have a lot of unread items in Google Reader), but luckily I took the time to read this post by Scott McLeod. Scott embeds two presentations given by Dr. Richard Miller, the Chair of the English Department at Rutgers University.

I'm also going to embed the two presentations below (the second one is in two parts), and I think it's well worth your time to watch both of them, particularly if you teach Language Arts, but really if you care about education at all. After each presentation I've pulled a few select quotes that really resonated with me.

The Future is Now: Presentation to the RU Board of Governors

We're living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history.

Do you agree? If so, what implications does that have for the way we teach Language Arts? What about other subject areas?

This is the room we're particularly proud of - the Collaboratory.

OK, when I build my school, I'm so going to have a Collaboratory. Actually, every room will be one. Perhaps that should be the name of the school?

To compose, and compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression, at written expression, you have to also excel in the use and manipulation of images. That's what it means to compose.

Shades of "The Yancey." Note that this is additive - no one is suggesting that words don't matter, that what we traditionally think of as "writing" is no longer important, but that the very nature of composition is more complex now, and that our instruction, our pedagogy, our learning spaces need to reflect that.

This is all building towards a larger vision of the humanities for the 21st century.

. . . In the New Humanities what we imagine at the center is this collective, collaborative kind of composition.

Social construction. Social composition.

The real function of the humanities is to engage in the art of creativity - moment by moment - to improve the quality of the world we live in.

I'm certainly not a linguist, but doesn't that get back to the root of "humanities?" And have perhaps some of our academic treatments of the humanities forgotten the human part that should be the center of our work?

That's writing in the 21st century. It's multiply authored, it's multiply produced, and that's where English is going.

Is that where English is going in your school?

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This Is How We Dream (Part 1 and Part 2)

It has never been a more important moment for this profession, or for people who take reading and writing seriously.

Do you agree? If so, what implications does that have for your school? Your classroom?

I spent my time understanding writing as a solitary activity . . . I'm a person of the book.

Writing (composing) is no longer exclusively a solitary activity. And we need to expand our definition of composition beyond only text and beyond only a specific medium (book, research paper, academic journal).

An assignment for a class I taught for first year students called Creativity and Collaboration.

This is a class I'll be offering in my new school (The Collaboratory).

Ideas don't belong to us individually, but they belong to us as a culture. And that we as educators must be in the business of sharing ideas freely.

Shades of Pesce.

The limits and restrictions are largely ones we put on ourselves.

No excuses.

This is a way to push ideas into our culture. Why wouldn't we be at the front edge of that?

Yes, why wouldn't we?

We do not have a pedagogy on hand to teach the kind of writing I'm describing. It needs to be invented.

Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. The best way to figure out what composition should look like in the 21st century is to co-create it.

We can do this. We should do it.

We should get started.

Did You Know? - Music Industry Remix

A while back Scott McLeod, Jeff Brenman (who did the Slideshare version) and I received an email from someone at Sony BMG Music Entertainment asking us if they could remix the various versions of Did You Know? for a meeting they had coming up. We said sure and they came up with this and gave us permission to link to it. (It takes a little while to load - sorry, can't figure out how to embed it. you'll have to follow the link).

Here's the written description:

The following adaptation of the original "Shift Happens" presentation was created by Sony BMG Music Entertainment. The video, presented by Richard Sanders, President of Sony BMG International, was shown on 4 May 2008 to 150 of the company's top executives gathered in Rome for Sony BMG’s annual Global Management Meeting. As part of Sony BMG’s mission to improve the music experience for consumers living in "exponential times", the video illustrates the demand for change.

No words of wisdom here, I just thought some of you might find it interesting.

Update: That link no longer works, but you can find it on YouTube, or download a high quality version (mp4, 41.9 MB). As with all remixes of Did You Know?/Shift Happens, it's Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licensed, so you're welcome to use it under that license.

It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated (again)

Update 12-9-07: I'd like to thank the Academy . . .


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The 2007 Edublogs Award nominations were announced over the weekend. They have expanded to 14 categories this year – I encourage you to check them out – there are again quite a few blogs that I haven’t looked at before. Vote early, vote often.




Yes, this blog was nominated again this year, this time for Most Influential Blog Post (for Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher? – I did not see that one coming). Much like last year’s nomination, I feel honored to be in such good company. Also much like last year’s nomination, I think I might rank my post as #5 out of 5 in the category (but at least it’s in the top five!).

Don’t get me wrong, I think we’re doing good stuff around here and the conversations around that post were helpful as we explore how best to meet the needs of our students. But the other four posts in this category are stellar – I encourage you to read them:

• Gone Fischin’ - from Scott McLeod’s blog Dangerously Irrelevant. (OK, I might be a little biased about this one.)
  



• How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci - from Kris Bradburn’s blog Wandering Ink.
  



• How to Grow a Blog - from Konrad Glogowski’s Blog of Proximal Development.
  



• The Ripe Environment - from Ben Wilkoff’s blog Discourse about Discourse.

Now, I will admit that it’s nice to see that three of those posts have a Colorado connection (mine, Scott’s and Ben’s) – apparently we have an outsized influence on the world (well, at least the edublog world). That fits in nicely with this year’s New Year’s resolution.

Thanks to all of you who nominated the post, whoever you are. Don’t forget to vote (and more importantly, check out all the thought-provoking blogs)!

20 To Watch

Well, since Scott outed me, I suppose I should link to the NSBA’s “20 to Watch.”

This is certainly a nice honor, but like the article in the paper the other day, it feels a little strange. Since most of what I do is simply write about what other folks are doing, either in my building or elsewhere, I’m not sure I’m real comfortable being the one singled out. So, if you’re a teacher in my school, or if you’re someone who I’ve written about previously, consider yourself “one of many to watch.”

And congrats to the other folks on the list, especially Scott and Gary Stager, the two other folks that I "know."

Update 10-24-07: NSBA has added podcasts for a few folks. They interviewed us over the phone and then edited them way down. Here's mine (or direct mp3 file 3 minutes, 2.75 MB) - not as bad as I feared.

Did You Know? 2.0

I blogged previously that XPLANE had offered to make the original Did You Know/Shift Happens presentation more visually appealing. Well, it’s now finished, and you can view it below. For me, this really isn’t a "sequel" to Did You Know, it’s just different. Some folks will prefer the original, some will prefer this version, some will dislike both. For me, it’s just another attempt to create a conversation, so I hope that it does.

XPLANE’s goal was to make it more visually appealing than text on a PowerPoint background, thinking that by adding some graphics and animation that it could convey the message to more folks (particularly folks whose first language is not English).

I (and Scott) had two main goals. First, I wanted to make it less us (as in U.S.) versus them. That wasn’t my intent in the original, but it certainly could be interpreted that way. It still includes some of the U.S./China/India statistics, because we felt those were indicative of the "shifts" that are occurring, but it avoids words like "we" and "they." But we want all kids to be successful, whether they are in the U.S., India, China or somewhere else. We believe these ideas and conversations should be occurring globally, and we hope this helps contribute to that conversation.

Second, one of the (many) weaknesses of the original is that it didn’t ask anything of the viewers, or direct them to any resources. (In my own defense, that’s because it was just for my staff and I was doing the follow-up. As I’ve talked about previously, I had no idea that it would spread like it did . . .). This new version asks some questions at the end and directs folks to a wiki with some additional information (the wiki is still a work in progress, but we'll get there eventually). The wiki is not intended as a "one-stop" resource, just a fairly simple jumping off point for folks that would like more information. Hopefully they will be drawn into the conversations that we all have been a part of over the last few years. (I wanted to ask even more questions – I may blog those eventually – but it would’ve made the presentation way too long – at over 8 minutes, it’s already pushing it).

If you find it useful, please use it however you’d like (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license). The YouTube version is embedded below, there's a Google Video version, and you can download a high-quality version in several different formats (just enter your name at the prompt) as well.



Thank you to XPLANE for some truly excellent visuals and animations, and to Scott McLeod for all his work and support. Frankly, I’m a little tired of the presentation, but I still passionately believe that we need to reexamine formal education as it’s currently being experienced by our students and that we owe it to our children to do everything we can to improve. If the presentation draws even a few folks into asking questions and getting involved in the conversations either locally or globally, then I’ll consider it a success.