And that’s partly what I’m afraid of.

Life is also too easily and quickly filled with regret. We hold on to big ideas and dreams and hopes that we play around with in our minds thinking of the someday that will come when we have time or motivation or the right circumstances to realize, only to let the short seconds of “one day I’ll do that” pile upon us without taking any action until the seconds turn themselves into years and weigh more than we can move.

And that’s also partly what I’m afraid of.

And then there’s a life lived with passion. Or without it. Of filling our parades and our short seconds doing what we know we don’t really have any interest or desire to be doing. But we do it anyway. Because as Alan Watts reminds us, we’ve been told and taught that sometimes we just have to “go on doing the things we don’t like in order to go on doing the things you don’t like doing.”

This is where I disagree with Dean. At least in part.

Because I find myself more in agreement with Watts. The video is three minutes and nine seconds that you won’t regret having spent if you let it play through.

“But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there.”

I’m not sure there’s a person in this world who loves every aspect and is passionate about every single detail of the job they work. That’s reality. There are tough parts of every job, but that doesn’t preclude us from finding a way to bring our passions into what it is we’ve chosen to do. I absolutely agree with Dean that working to support a family, survive, and contribute in some way are incredibly important.

However, there are too many options available to each of us that still allow us to follow what fulfills. Because if you are working a job that makes you miserable and makes others miserable to be in your misery, what’s the point? That doesn’t mean you have to exclusively work in the areas of your passion, but you can find yourself a situation that is satisfying and gratifying in its capacity to allow you to work your passions into what you’re doing.

Teaching our students about capturing the joy in life, about marching in the parade instead of watching it pass by, about choosing to follow and pursue passions which fulfill, about moving when the seconds haven’t yet turned into years of regret- I’m not ready to give up on those things yet.

It also isn’t meant to be anything more than an honest question that I’m trying to find an answer to. I’ve long considered not even writing it for fear that people will misunderstand or misconstrue the question.

But, my inability to find a satisfactory answer in the discussions I have with myself is finally leading me to ask.

As a working, adult professional, I use less than 10% of the math I was exposed to in high school. What does that mean?

I’m sure a similar statement can be made about other content areas, perhaps with a variation of the actual percentage, but still. We spent four years learning content in high school that most of us can no longer remember and don’t use as a part of our profession and hasn’t proved necessary for our success.

It makes me think of two pieces by Alfie Kohn. One, where he states ten truths we shouldn’t be ignoring.

In the second, he details a very interesting observation about the result of a standardized assessment question for a Massachusetts high school math exam.

His quote from Deborah Meier is compelling. “No student should be expected to meet an academic requirement that a cross section of successful adults in the community cannot.”

So, what’s the role of content as it’s presented in today’s education?

Why did I spend four years in high school, and then several more in college learning math that I’ve long since forgotten?

Think back on your high school and college courses. If you were to take the final exam today, how would you do? What does that tell us?

What should it tell us?

I get to tell stories as part of my job. Hopefully, you do, too.

I think, sometimes, people forget the power of human story. Or, at least, we forget the power of telling our stories. Especially in education.

There are so many incredible events happening each and every day in and around our classrooms, and as pressed as we all are for time in the present landscape of learning, I hope we can find more time to tell the stories of what we’re getting to be part of. The successes we see in our students. The celebrations we share with our school families. The connections we’re making with our communities.

The video above is an example of that. It’s something I’m proud of.

And, I think it’s just fine that we admit that. When we’re proud of what we’ve done. We can celebrate that. We can share that. It’s not bragging or flaunting or self-aggrandizing.

We are facing too many competing storytellers who are working to take charge of the message of education and tell a narrative very different and very much in contrast to the great experiences happening in our classrooms each day for us not to find a way to share the good we’re seeing around us.

Committing ourselves to sharing the good also compels us to create the good. It helps encourage us to keep providing those opportunities that we know our students need in order to understand they are part of something important. That they are doing something important. That they are someone important. And that we’re creating opportunities that are good enough to be worth sharing.

I hope you make the time in whatever job you find yourself working to share your stories. We all need the chance to hear them.

Recently, the OLPC organization took boxes of tablets, carefully and tightly taped up, and dropped them in two remote villages of Ethiopia. There were no instructions. No teachers. Nothing but a group of first grade-aged students for whom the tablets were intended. Students who couldn’t read, couldn’t identify the single form of a letter, had never before seen any kind of technology.

What happened is simply astounding.

Six and seven year old kids who had never before encountered any form of written language were demonstrating obvious emerging literacy skills within weeks. Without the interference help of adults.

“I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

As stated, there’s a lot more we need to learn about this story. But there’s also a lot we need to learn from it.

Because it raises some serious questions. Questions I think we need to take some time to answer.

1. Why don’t we give kids more credit for their natural capacity to learn?
2. What if we’re the ones getting in the way?
3. Can we finally put to rest the silly digital immigrant/digital native nonsense?
4. Why does there remain such a fascination with teaching kids very specific technology skills in our schools today?

It’s intriguing to compare the new approach OLPC is taking with the tablets to the approach they took in Peru. Reading through the reflections on the failure* in Peru brings to the surface two immediate observations. The hardware/software wasn’t ready for the task. And the adults continued getting in the way. The second point, to me, is the most salient. Read through each section of Patzer’s observations, and you see how often the breakdown happens in the way the adults try to move the students through a pre-determined way to learn with the device.

I believe the second experiment is working because nobody is there trying hard to figure out how the new technology should fit into the old model of teaching and learning.

And nobody is trying to frame the learning experience through superficial content that the kids just don’t care about.

Because learning isn’t putting content in little boxes to be handed to kids one after another only to have the boxes thrown away quickly after the handling. To be forgotten in an effort to remember the next in the long line to which they can’t see the end.

It’s letting the kids discover what’s in the boxes. And how to get it out of the boxes. And why the boxes even matter in the first place.

It’s setting a goal, establishing an environment to realize the goal, and trusting in the capacity of human potential. Student potential.

And sometimes, it’s just getting out of their way.

*I encourage you to read Gary Stager’s comment below providing more details and his perspective on the Peru “failing.” I think it’s an excellent perspective and merits further thought before we accept that program actually failed.

I received an email this week from a good friend asking for help that extends beyond my capacity, and I’m hoping that there are some people somewhere who can step in and provide some guidance and assistance. Because it could mean the world to some students.

The situation:

My friend started teaching three sections of a senior English class this year for students who have recently exited the ESL program but aren’t yet ready for a remedial-level general education classroom.

There is no curriculum for the course, and the only real feedback and guidance my friend is getting from within his department is, “you’ve got to give them blowoff movie days once every couple of weeks to keep them motivated.”

Many students in the class live with extremely challenging life circumstances that do not leave them motivated to engage in the class or the process of learning to be literate. Some of them very much resent that they are in school at all.

After two months of trying to find answers and working to create meaningful learning experiences, my friend is growing exasperated. Because it isn’t working.

So, the question. Does anyone have any resources, contacts, insights, ideas, or any other way to help my friend? I give him great credit for admitting he needs help.

I hope we can get that for him.

That’s good. And bad.

What’s the opposite of an echo?

In the sense it’s usually discussed in regards to thinking, the opposite of an echo amongst ideas is typically diversity. People often advocate for diversity of thoughts, ideas, and discussions. Hang around the same people with the same ideas talking about the same things and you risk entering the echo chamber where the same ideas are espoused and echoed around by everyone in the group. Or, you run the risk of groupthink.

So, people talk a great deal about diversity. I know I’ve advocated for introducing and entertaining as many different perspectives and ideas as possible when building programs or making important decisions. But, I’m starting to rethink that a bit.

I started listening to David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know this week, and chapter 4 discusses the notion of scoping diversity. The idea brings us back to the echo chamber. Weinberger doesn’t encourage us to entirely abandon or bemoan the presence of echo.

As Weinberger indicates in the chapter, there is a balance needed for diversity. It isn’t desirable to have too much or too little. There is a point where the right amount of diversity helps a group “work together and make itself smarter, as opposed to either falling into groupthink or falling apart because people just disagree too fundamentally.” I keep coming back to those last eight words.

In our great haste to flee the echo chamber, I fear too often conversations fall apart because we’ve run too far in the opposite direction. You see it all the time online. In politics. In discussions about education.

Try it. Go talk to someone with the opposite political affiliation as yours. Go talk religion with someone with an opposite worldview. Go convince a PC person they should become an Apple person. Go tell iPads to become netbooks.

You won’t get anywhere, and almost always, neither will the conversation.

This is why committee work is often such a challenge. We convene a group that is so divergent, the conversation can’t get past the first step from the gate. You need some degree of commonality. You need some amount of echo.

So, what’s the takeaway? That’s what I’ve been turning over in my mind. What does it mean for us? I think there’s something very important in Weinbergers four heuristics. Having had a little time to consider it, here are a few of my own reflections.

1. Diversity is good, but to move an idea forward with a group might require accepting the idea there might be a “right amount.”
2. It’s ok to have some echo in the chamber. We might be preaching to the choir, but many times the choir needs to hear the preaching just like anybody else. Or, at least, be in the same building to be able to hear the preaching.
3. Consider diversity when creating a committee. Or, setting goals for the committee to accomplish. It’s a waste of time to hope the committee can advance an idea like how to use technology in learning if many in the group don’t see the value of using technology in the first place.
4. It’s ok to let a conversation go when you realize it’s not going anywhere. Some people call this a taffy pull. A whole bunch of talking with nothing getting done.
5. Use human moderators in the process to find some commonality when the chasm between positions is too great or to introduce differences when the echoes start getting too loud.
6. Sometimes, too much diversity will make an issue fall apart.

It still doesn’t feel quite right to admit there’s such a thing as too much diversity. Or, the wrong kind of diversity. I’m not sure why that is.

Perhaps I’ll convene a committee to figure it out.

Image courtesy of TimOve

I believe, however, that many districts end up taking a hyper-conservative stance on this issue. Social media, when used well, can prove an excellent communication, and even learning tool. Districts concerned about their staff using the service can satisfy the eDiscovery requirement by using a service like this or this.

District also get very nervous about all the “what if” scenarios when thinking about staff, students, and parents interacting online. I’ve talked about it before, but I’ll say it again, interactions between teachers, students, and parents are paramount to the profession. We should seek out all viable options to make these interactions as effective as possible. Districts shouldn’t enact policy that precludes the use of social media. Just be smart, and set policy that reinforces the policy already in place regarding professional practice and behaviors. I’m pretty proud of what our board adopted last year. I think something like this is a great approach.

This past week, we sent out an email to our staff inviting them to use social media and reminding them about guidelines that can help them as they consider using social media in their practice. The letter is below. It’s encouraging to hear the positive reports and see the links from teachers using the medium starting to roll in.

—————

Good Afternoon,

We’ve had a number of staff inquire about the possibility of utilizing social media to increase communications within the classroom. We welcome you to make use of these effective communications tools, and we’d like to help you successfully implement their use in your classroom with the following guidelines.

The board of education passed policy specifically related to social media last spring. You can read the policy here. The policy essentially reminds staff to keep all interactions between students and parents professional, public, and appropriate. All of the current policy regarding teacher interactions and professional behavior apply when utilizing social media.

Also, if you post any photos of students, please check that they have a media release on file, and do not use their last names associated with their photos. Please read the entire policy to get a complete understanding of the expectations for the use of social media as a learning and communications tool.

If you are using Facebook, please set up a specific fan page for your classroom that parents or students will utilize for communications. Inform your building principal and send me a link to your page, so we can provide you with any support needed.

We encourage you to utilize the disclaimer language found on the district’s Facebook page to inform your audience that you will be actively monitoring and moderating any and all postings on your page. You can find the language here.

Inform an administrator immediately if any inappropriate interactions take place on your site. We will help support and guide you through the proper response to any interaction that is in question.

We also encourage you to connect with others both inside and outside of the district using Twitter. To find out more about the district’s use of Twitter, including a listing of staff currently utilizing the service, click here.

We also welcome you to view our video about Twitter in D123 to find out more about how it all works. https://vimeo.com/36647045

Please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions about social media and its use in our district. We plan to offer additional educational opportunities throughout this school year to help you better understand and utilize social media with your students and as a communications tool for parents.

With all these great minds in one place, I have a bit of a wish list that I hope, selfishly, will become reality.

1. Let’s try to really start figuring out what it means for education to have the level of access to information and technology that we now have.
2. Let’s remember creativity.
3. Let’s stop fighting about the device (I’ll do my part as well).
4. Let’s stop talking about new ways to do old things that weren’t really all that good when they were the new ways.
5. Let’s figure out how to give up the worksheet. The analog sort and the digital.
6. Let’s write more.
7. Let’s figure out a new narrative for education. I think starting with Godin’s piece is a good place for us to start.
8. Let’s stop letting major companies and their incredibly successful marketing teams tell us what to do. Especially with learning.
9. Let’s just sit and talk about some stuff we really love and care about.
10. Let’s make something.
11. Let’s remember what Gary Stager recently reminded me to remember. As Alan Kay so aptly stated, “The computer is an instrument whose music is ideas.”
12. Let’s be courageous enough to listen to ideas that aren’t our own.

I look forward to the talks, the thinking, and the work ahead the next five days. I hope you do as well.

For many years the MacBook has been a workhorse for students and staff in many school districts. In January of 2011, the MacBook was still Apple’s second-best selling laptop. Then, over the summer, they discontinued the model for consumers. That was very concerning.

However, they still offered the model for education. I met with our Apple reps in December to begin discussing the refresh of our teacher laptops, all of which are MacBooks. I expressed my concern about the MacBook going away, and they assured me that there was no indication that was going to take place. If it did, they promised, there would still be plenty of stock remaining once an announcement was made to purchase the units we needed for our refresh.

This past week, I received the email I knew was coming. The MacBook was dead. As our reps promised, there was an end of life inventory left, but those units were going to go quickly, so anybody who wanted/needed any had to act immediately. Which, for anyone trying to work outside of a budget purchase cycle, is impossible. I asked if they could reserve the necessary units for our purchase, and they said they could not do that. They needed a PO immediately, which we simply weren’t in a position to do. As I was frantically trying to work out the means for us to make the purchase, I got a second email. All of the end of life stock was gone.

So too might be their focus on education.

Here’s where things get infuriating. The new solution for schools is an “education-priced” MacBook Air. For $999 when purchased in bulk.

The MacBook Air comes with a 64 GB hard drive (welcome to 2001), 2 GB of RAM (non-upgradeable), 1.6 GHz processor, no ethernet port (to connect to ethernet costs an additional $29 for a USB dongle), and no optical drive. All of these are significant steps down from the MacBook specs. And, we could get the MacBooks in bulk for $849.

So, we get to pay $150 more per unit for a whole lot less. Awesome.

The MacBook Air is an excellent computer for road warriors. Which, our teachers are not. We are now expected to pay a premium for the portability of a device that we don’t need to be ultraportable. Our reality is that we need much more than 64 GB given all of the multimedia work our staff has now started engaging in. We also need an optical drive as our staff use theirs literally every day. We need the ethernet port as that helps us balance the load on our wireless given that we are 1:1 in grades 5-8 and are looking to add grades 3+4 next year.

When I expressed this to our Apple rep, he explained that while he understood, the position of Apple has recently been to encourage schools who don’t favor the Air to look at the MacBook Pro. Awesome, again. So, we now have to spend $250 more per unit. Yes, those units would have the functionality we need, but we’re not in a position to spend $1,100 per device for all our staff members. That would be $62,500 more for the purchase. That’s significant.

What are you doing, Apple? Because by all rights, it looks like you’ve worked very hard to force us away from using you in our institution.

We’re starting a focused effort in my district to get our teachers connected on Twitter. The effort is more than just getting people to superficially use social media, but rather, it’s to help our staff see how powerful the experience of connected learning can be. This isn’t new, I know. Learning happens largely through connections.

The difference is in the way it scales.

I’ve been on Twitter for almost three years now. Looking back over that time, I simply can’t believe how much I’ve gained from the connections that Twitter helped facilitate. I look over the list of people whom I now connect with regularly on Twitter and easily 98% of those individuals I never knew prior to utilizing the medium. Many of the ideas we are implementing in my district have come from the ideas of those whom I’ve had excellent discussions with on Twitter. Even some of those I’ve had not so excellent discussions with.

I believe our staff can find the great value in the connections found within the medium. Because it’s the people that comprise the tool. That’s the value. The people. The ideas. The connections. The conversations.

So, if you see any of our people stumbling their way through that disorienting first stage of adoption on Twitter, please offer them a hello. A condolence for having to associate with me. And, a thought or two to keep them coming back.

And, hopefully, you can bring along a few of your people as well. Because it’s the testing and interrogating and discussing and negotiating of our ideas that help us all become better at the craft we ply. And for that, the more, the merrier.

Share. Connect. Learn. I wish that on you all.

*If you have any resources, links, ideas, etc. that might help us along our way, please feel free to leave them the comments below. Also feel free to add your Twitter name and what you do as that will help us compile a list of people on Twitter outside of our district.

**Special thanks to @pegkeiner and @LFedtech for all the great ideas, input and patience with the project.