• Salaries. (In independent schools, most employees do not know how much one another earns. In public schools, salary schedules, open meetings laws, and union rules usually make such information public knowledge).
• White privilege, racism, sexism, economic disparity, and social justice issues as applied to your school.
• Sex and sensuality.
• Spiritual and religious issues.
• Incompetency. Insubordination. Inequity.
• Deaths (especially suicides) within the school community, or incurable disease.

We approach each of these topics with our own emotional baggage in tow. They are laced with legal and privacy issues, and tempered by the care, concern, and love that members of a school community have for one another. When confronted with such issues, people want to do something, but aren’t sure what to do, and often end up feeling inadequate, uninformed, and confused.

If we feel and think this way as adults, consider our students, who lack our emotional maturity and life experience to place perspective on such issues. Enormously adept at reading the emotional state of the adults around them, students react to our nonverbal clues, read more (or less) into what we say and write, and struggle to come to grips with it all.

In a learning community, one would hope that nothing would be off-limits for discussion. Of course, individuals have the right to maintain their own rules of privacy and we must respect them. We must also respect legal constraints.  Yet anyone should be free to at least ask any question, if done in a respectful and honest way. But sometimes even asking the question can mark you as a malcontent, a rabble-rouser, or an insensitive lout.

An example…

Not too long ago, the ISED-L Listserv featured an email thread about the disparity between the salaries paid to heads of schools and faculty. I followed this thread with great interest. I fully agree with those who pointed out that that the demands placed upon the head of school are extraordinary, and have grown at a faster pace than those placed upon most other faculty and staff. The Head can often determine the path of success or failure for a given independent school.

But at the heart of this issue is, I think, a discussion about equity and social justice that is worth pursuing, even though it may make us uncomfortable. When one member of an organization makes 5, 7, 10 times or more than the lowest paid member of the same organization, it raises these issues, and we need to discuss them head on.

Further adding to the difficulty of these discussions is unequal access to hard data. For example, the NAIS salary data is available only to the top five school officials. This puts all other faculty and staff at an unfair disadvantage when salary discussions are underway. I believe that greater transparency by the NAIS with regard to this data would be a significant first step in leveling the playing field of information.

Money is difficult conversation for many of us, but I have found that when I am experiencing discomfort about something it is often a signal that there is some work that I need to do in my own life, something worth examining to discover its source and determine if it is healthy or unhealthy.

What are the areas for tough conversations in your school ? How do you deal with them within the real community, and within your virtual community? Is it easier to talk about hard issues in the anonymous ether of social networks, or is it easier to do it face-to-face with a trusted friend or adviser? And how do we have tough conversations with students who are looking to us for guidance and modeling?

Tough questions, about tough conversations.

Shortly after my wife an I moved to the Bay Area in 1996, we began to notice how much trash was along the highways. After grousing about it for a few months, we found a local Adopt-A-Highway group that was working a heavily trafficked interchange near our home. We signed on to the group, and we’re still doing it.

When we tell people what we’re doing, many times they say that they thought the only people picking up trash along the highway are convicts. And while we do have our convictions, they are not the sort that are handed out by the court. (Clue: white bags along the highway are from volunteers like us; orange bags are from Caltran and may or may not have been picked up by prisoners).

We go out once-a-month. Some months we are traveling and can’t do it, and other months we may get rained out. But a conservative estimate is that we made 10 of the 12 months in a given year, so we’re at about 100 pickups.

Back-of-the napkin figuring also determines that between the two of us we’ve picked up about 1000 bags of litter. What’s in all that trash? An interesting collection of stuff, including the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good:

• Money. Yes, real currency ranging from a penny (which I may or may not pick up), all the way to a hundred dollar bill. Most times, nothing, but about every two or three months at least a dollar bill or two.
• Tools. Yes, I have found hand tools that, aside from a few scratches, are working just fine and some have made it into my toolbox or are in use at my school. Gloves seem to fly off with some frequency, too.
• Wallets. Perhaps stolen, perhaps left on car roofs at the gas station and blown off on the highway, if we find them we try to re-unite them with their owners who are always happy to see them again.

The Bad:

• Beverage containers (bottles, cans, cups), food containers (plates, boxes, wrappers), shopping bags. If it’s associated with food, we find it.
• Styrofoam peanuts (hate em!), along with magazines, books, newspapers, maps, and almost anything else made of paper you might imagine.
• Anything that can come off a vehicle such as hubcaps, shreds of tires (mostly from semis),

The Ugly:

• Road kill.  Yuck!
• Sex toys. (Yes, we’ve found ‘em. One can only hope the driver was not using them at any time while on the road.)
• Cigarette butts by the billions. So many, that we can’t even try to pick them up.

Our group of 10 volunteers has dwindled over the years to just my wife and I, so if you live in the Palo Alto area and are interested in lending us a hand once-in-awhile we could use the help. It’s one way that I feel like I am doing something measurable for the environment. I am especially concerned about the plastics we pick up, which otherwise might end up in San Francisco Bay, where  levels of plastic toxins are already causing cellular damage in some amphibians, fish, and waterfowl.

So next time you see some yellow-vested, Adopt-a-Highway volunteers along the road give a friendly toot of you horn and a wave, or even toss us c-note. We won’t count that as littering!

For powerful examples of adult capacity to multitask, I would cite (without any evidence, other than my belief that it had to be so) the example of airline pilots. Surely commercial aviators  have to be able to handle a dozen different inputs coming at them at the same time. And military pilots, whose carry high-tech munitions and whose ability to deal with a hundred things at the same time or lose their life to an enemy missile or gunfire, have been taught some secrets to multitasking; secrets that the masses could also be taught and passed along to our students.

Okay. So I’m wrong. Not the first time, nor will it be the last.

My pilots theory was publicly blown by two Northwest airline pilots who overflew their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles because they were “distracted.” In the book The Multitasking Myth, handling complexity in real-world operations by Loukia D. Loukopoulos, R. Key Dismukes, and Immanuel Barshi, the authors point out to airline crash investigation that indicate that where pilot error is to blame, multitasking is often behind the error. So if our most highly trained experts can’t multitask effectively, how can we expect children and adults without their training, checklists, and thousands of hours of experience to do any better?

We can’t expect them to better, and trying to teach them the “ten tricks to better multitasking” (assuming they exist) won’t help.

So what are we to do? Perhaps we can start by setting better examples ourselves. In this case, fewer simultaneous actions on our part may speak louder than words. We can engage in non-lecturing, non-blaming discussions with kids about multitasking, and the challenges it presents. We can demonstrate what it means to be fully present for them when they talk to us, not distracted by the phone, TV, iPod, or something else and let them experience the feelings that come from being really appreciated and listened to.

Living in California I see perhaps more than my share of road construction, and every once-in-awhile I’ll run into a road sign like the one to the left: “Use Alternate Route.” Sometimes my reaction is one of irritation, especially if I know where I am going and the most efficient way for me to get there. But I am in a new area with only a vague sense where I am supposed to go, I simply follow the signs and hope that there will be enough road marks along the way for me to stay on track to my destination.

Alternate routes often apply to computer applications as well, but I am continually surprised by people who know only one way to get from Point A to Point B, and are really irritated when there’s a technical roadblock along the way to the point of just stopping what they are doing altogether and waiting for the Help Desk ( a “tow-truck” of sorts) to arrive instead of finding an alternate route.

Take, for example, the simple task of opening a document. Let’s say that a user always opens a document by double clicking on it. And 99% of the time double-clicking works just fine. But when double-clicking fails, they’re stuck, even though several alternate routes are immediately available:

• drag the file icon on top of the application icon
• open the file from the File menu of the application
• right click on the file and choose “Open With” from the contextual menu

For every means of doing something on a computer, there are almost always two or more other ways of doing the same operation. And yet time and again I encounter frustrated users who know only one way and seem fearful of alternate routes, and promptly forget them even when you show the alternate route to be safe, quick, and easy to take. What’s with that?

My unscientific observations have lead me to posit that greater experience leads to greater flexibility and willingness to experiment, and a deeper faith in the fault tolerance built-in to hardware and software that will help prevent users from making drastic mistakes that lead to data loss.

Think back to when you were a teenager. If you were like me, you couldn’t wait to get your driver’s license and once you had it, you were more than happy to borrow your parents’ car to run errands for them, take siblings places, and so on. You just longed to get more behind-the-wheel experience. If you were a two-car family, you didn’t mind too much. The “UI” for the two cars was similar enough that you could easily switch between the two. As you gained more experience. it was no problem to get into any car and drive it competently. You loved driving. The thrill of simply driving around town with no particular place to go was enough to occupy hours of your time. Heck, I even loved reading the car’s manual in the glove compartment while riding shotgun while someone else drove.

But for many people, that love of experiential learning, discovery, and sheer joy of teenage driving did not translate very well to the world of computers. Many approach computers warily, not wanting to spend any more time with them than is needed. Or they see computers simply as utilitarian machines to get from Point A to Point B, with no reason to go exploring, or even to try alternate routes. Where did their sense of adventure go? Have we made computers into the anti-car experience?

Perhaps that just means I’m a slow learner. I hope not.

But recently I was thinking about user interfaces and why it is that some people are able to sit down at a computer and start using an unfamiliar piece of software right away, while others struggle for hours and hours, and may eventually need step-by-step cheat sheets to survive. The traditional response is that some UI’s are simply more intuitive than others. Well if that’s the case, does that mean that certain users are lacking in intuition? I don’t think so. After all, intuition is supposed to be instinctual, perhaps even primal. So an intuitive interface means that everyone should be able to use something right away.

A quick Google search disabused any illusions I had about my thinking as original. UI guru Bruce Tognazzini talks about this on his web site, and points to a 1997 article by his former colleague Jeff Raskin entitled Intuitive Equals Familiar that describes the problems with using “intuitive” to describe human interfaces. A better term, he argues, is “familiar,” as “Intuitive = uses readily transferred, existing skills.” A UI that allows users to mimic previously learned tools or skills allows for easy transfer of knowledge.

So if UI designers are introducing an entirely new product line, they are best served by using analogs.

Recently, I have been reviewing electronic book readers from Amazon and Sony. As a new type of electronic device, the UI designers for these products have attempted to mimic the book experience how people use real books: page turning, underlining, highlighting, and writing in margins. Digital rights management rights (DRM) is stricter than in the analog world, so there’s some things you can’t do with an e-reader. For example, you can’t Xerox a page, or easily lend the book to a friend. And book burning takes on a whole new meaning!

Fast forward 10-20 years, when a whole generation of children may know books primarily through digital readers, or another fifty years when paper books are found only in museums and libraries. The new “analog” is the e-reader. Will UI developers still be relying on the original book as its paradigm for e-reading, or will e-readers evolve gradually (or suddenly) to an entirely new experience that would be unfamiliar to someone from 2009? Perhaps reading in 2059 will occur in 3D space, supplemented with sound and other sensory inputs. Perhaps readers will be “jacked-in” through a neural implant that transfers information to the brain more efficiently than what the human senses could process alone.

What will be the  intuitive/familiar UI for computers and other devices in fifty years?

The reason for this is that I recently got a my chance to use one for a couple of weeks, borrowing the one from our school library. To my disappointment, the Kindle suffers from many of the same shortcomings I pointed out in my review of the Sony Touch Reader, namely the lack of color and no backlit screen. I’m afraid this is a fundamental shortcoming in all e-readers. We may have to wait until Apple releases its long-rumored netbook-tablet-Kindle-Killer before we see something better.

But the Amazon has it’s own unique foibles as well. The side buttons are, for me, incorrectly laid out. The bottom right button is next page, the bottom left button is also next page. Hmm. Previous page makes more sense to me. But no, previous page is above the next page button on the left side of the screen, opposite the Home button on the right side of the screen.

While I am sure that I would quickly adapt to this idiosyncratic layout, it just seems to me that it’s not just unfamiliar, it’s unintuitive.

You evoke most of the commands and move the cursor around the screen with a small joystick aside the keyboard. I found the feel of the joystick to a bit sharp; I’d prefer rounded edges.

Hi marks go to the Kindle for it’s long battery life. I’m 90% done with my book and the Kindle is still well charged. This is much better than the better life I experience with the previously mentioned Sony Touch. The screen refresh rate is also better than the Sony, and I like the fact that I can get the definition of any word by quickly navigating to it with the cursor. But the Sony’s touch screen is a big advantage for highlighting text.

Finally, even if the Kindle addressed all of my technical and human factors concerns, I’m still troubled by their content policies. You have to convert PDFs to work, and I want an e-reader to read any e-text I have purchased without any DRM issues getting in the way. So if I but a book from the Sony store, Barnes and Nobel, Borders, or my favorite independent bookstore, Kepler’s, I want to be able to read it any any electronic device of my choice. I don’t think this is asking too much. And, if I want to lend a copy of my purchased book to a friend, I should be able to do so. I’m willing to give up my copy of it on my local device—just as I would in the analog world give my friend a paper copy of a book. But as it is an electronic copy, and as my friends sometimes forget to return my books, I should also be able to electronically retrieve my copy from my friend and erase their copy. Friendship does have its limits, and authors have their rights.

In the Unites Stated, children under the age of thirteen are prohibited from using most online services by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. So by law, children 12 and under are not using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al. Hmm.

Facebook Users by Age and Gender. No One Under 13. Yeah, right!

Most school’s Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) read like laundry lists of what students are not supposed to do online. Keeping such policies up-to-date is a nightmare, for it seems every over month some new use of the Internet comes along that the policy doesn’t cover.

The result is is that the AUP gets longer and longer. Students, who tend not to read such policies anyway, continue to use and innovate as new online services become available, and schools wring their hands and issue more rules.

Schools and parents are caught in the middle of all of this, wanting to abide by the law and do what is right for their students and children. It is in the area of determining what is “right” where controversy takes root. For some, what is “right” is black and white, with no shades of gray, no negotiating based on the individual differences between and among children. It’s simply easier to have a one-size fits all set of policies and procedures.

But educators are supposed to take individual differences into account in their teaching, and most do every day. Teachers realize the need to vary instructional approaches based on a multitude of factors, and many do it with such great grace and ease that we may not even notice.

And yet when it comes to school policies, it seems as if many school administrators stop being educators and become, what? Cops? Judges? Executioners?

Clearly most school administrators don’t want to cease to be educators at any point in their role within the school, including the enforcement of school policies. But it is hard to show any flexibility without being accused of favoritism. I understand the allure of “one size fits all” and “zero tolerance” policies. They just don’t make sense.

So it is that we come to the point of this whole post: What should schools do about students and their presence in the online world?

Most schools have media policies determining the circumstances under which a child may be identified by name in publications, including online publications. Identifying a child by name, especially when accompanied by a photo, is generally considered to be verboten unless permission has been granted by the child’s parents or legal guardians. The idea is to prevent strangers from using such information as means to approach the child for purposes of abduction or worse. Who can argue with that?

But has the online world turned this practice into a relic of the past?

Millions of photos, complete with captions, are on Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and MySpace. While many are available only to the poster’s “friends,” the definition of  friend varies widely among users, and friends of friends may still have access to this information. Once children reach the age of 13 and legally have access to these sites, many of them may post captioned or tagged photos of themselves and their friends, which may or may not be available to the general public.

Added to this are the officially sanctioned photos in events covered by the press, including the arts, athletics, and all forms of public events, academic fairs, and other competitions—all of which end up on media web sites. “Security through obscurity,” at least when it comes to keeping images of oneself private, is becoming increasingly difficult, perhaps even impossible.

My advice to educators is not to throw out all of their policies and guidelines, but to engage in a discussion of their relevance in the face of new technologies and social norms. Don’t despair about there being nothing you can do when, in fact, these changes represent a wonderful opportunity to engage parents and students in deep and meaningful conversation about the changing landscape of privacy and anonymity.

1. Invitations to meetings in the calendar view are too subtle. I mean really, do you expect me to see that tiny question mark?
2. I like that you add email addresses automatically for me. That’s cool. What would be even cooler, would be to scan the message for additional address-like data (like that in most signature files), open a window in my contacts, and add that data too, allowing me to edit as needed.
3. When you add a new document folder in Google Docs, the list should automatically refresh to reflect the new alphabetical order.
4. There’s no way for end users to see who is in an enterprise-wide email group, so what we do is to maintain a separate Google doc which, of course, needs to be updated every time we make a group address change. We shouldn’t have to do that. Let the administrator determine who has rights to view the members of an email group.
5. In Google Sites, you should offer a report to the site owner about dead links, and automatically fix links to other Google sites within the enterprise if and when they change.
6. While you’re at it in Google Sites, allow the webmaster or users to tag individual pages, to then crate tag clouds.
7. All, and I mean all, of your K-12 Google docs customers would benefit from a better calendar. Start with allowing the administrator to setup a daily schedule for the school that can be toggled on-and-off by users so they can easily schedule events by time of day or by period of day.
8. Any color (labels, calendars, and so on) would benefit by being able to control their transparency. Solid color are not only passé, they hinder multiple calendars within the same view.
9. Google To Do lists are lame. See Remember the Milk for some ideas about getting it better.
10. Appreciate the fact that we can upload PDF documents into Google Docs. Now, make them editable!

What’s on your mind about Google docs?

I suspect we have talked about this before, but we’re looking for a new calendaring program that:

1. will easily schedule resources, meetings, and parent conferences
2. will automatically find open meeting times & reserve needed resources
3. is cross-platform, and web based
4. will automatically adjust to schedule changes as they are made
5. will send meeting changes and to-do list reminders via email, SMS, or Twitter
6. will allow for meeting agenda and other documents to be attached to in the invitation
7. is very user friendly
8. is available 24 x 7 x 365
9. supports a variety devices both online and off-line, with automatic synchronization
10. has flexible, easy to use security, with various levels of permissions to allow access to certain events by role
11. is compatible with ical and other web calendaring standards
12. prints a range of attractive, easy-to-read formats
13. allows for secure access by administrative assistants
    
14. allows for easy analysis of meeting and task loads and responsibilities by individuals and groups, and FINALLY
    
15. is free, with high quality technical support and, low maintenance, and requested features added in a timely manner.

Aah. The holy grail of calendars. A fortune awaits the company that can create one, though point #15 suggests it will be a very, very small fortune.

Over my career, I have tried a range of calendaring solutions in search of the perfect system, including Meeting Maker, Outlook, FirstClass, CalendarMaker, Web Event, Google Calendar, and iCal. In some ways these are all great programs. But in some fundamental way, each of them also sucked.

The companies that make calendaring software focus their products on individuals and businesses. Schools are a secondary market, and they don’t understand us.

To start with, schools operate in two different time spheres: (a) the time observed by the rest of the world and (b) school time. School time is normally meant to be class periods. Such as a period 1, period 2, period 3, or period A, 1A, nap time, math time, reading time, block 1, block 2, and so on. No one outside of the school has any idea how these times correlate to real world time, and even those inside of schools often have to rely on cheat sheets to make the translation. Think of these different time spheres as our equivalent of the metric versus the English measurement system.

So right out of the starting gate calendaring programs made for the real (metric) world are incompatible with time as observed in the school world.

But wait, computers are smart. Can’t they bridge the gap? A computer can instantly convert metric to English units and back in measurement, why can’t a computer convert between different time spheres?

Computers could do this of course. But there’s this niggling little problem of no two schools using exactly the same class schedule. Plus schedules change, often by the day of the week—and let’s not forget special schedules that are used for planned events such as assemblies and sports, or unplanned events such as school closings or late starts do to weather.

So now the problem has become much more complex, because you must allow the end user to be able to enter the information peculiar to their school’s schedule, with the ability for it to be instantly updated, with these updates recalculating real-world time, checking for conflicts with people’s schedules and resources, and then synchronizing across devices.

It’s enough to make even a Google engineer weep.

Schools are not likely to change to real-world time anytime soon (pun intended). This leaves us at the mercy of benevolent calendar makers who will listen to our plea and come to our aid. If I had to bet on who that might be, I would lay my money on Google (who has a burgeoning number of K-12 schools using their Google Apps for Education) or Rjenda (a new company that has taken assessment calendaring to a new high).

I’m curious to know what readers may think not only of the list of 15 requirement for school calendars that I listed above, but also what solutions you have found that work best for you.

1. school superintendents or heads of school could be paid no more than 3x that of the lowest paid school employee?
2. someone designed a school from the ground up having never set foot in one before?
3. the ratio of students to teachers was no more than three to one?
4. educators were free of all copyright or patent restrictions?
5. teachers, students, and parents regularly visited one another’s homes?
6. if school administrators were elected by the faculty?
7. no school could house more than four hundred students?
8. students called teachers by the first names?
9. teachers were not allowed to use PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress or similar presentation tools?
10. mastery was the important variable for student learning instead of time on task?
11. faculty and staff had to demonstrate current knowledge and skills in their field very few years?
12. faculty and staff could take fitness classes along with the students?
13. college of education professors had to regularly teach in K-12 schools?