I’m putting EdInsanity away on mothballs indefinitely [insert joke here about how it’s effectively been on mothballs for years…]. Per my last post, I start a new job today. It’s an interim position, so I’m leaving open the possibility that I’ll unpack this blog at some point. For now, though, my focus will be on online learning and higher education. As part of my efforts to build a community around Online@VCU, I intend to create another blog where I write about online learning. If you’re interested in reading what I write there, I’m sure I’ll announce the URL of that new space on Twitter.

[NOTE: I’ve disabled comments globally as part of the mothballing process. (I was also getting a lot of spam lately…)]

Onward…

Photo courtesy of Jason Tester Guerrilla Futures: http://bit.ly/120WSrG

Just when I was getting used to being a tenured, associate professor…

I have agreed to serve my current university, Virginia Commonwealth University, as the Director of Online Academic Programs. ((Yes, that’s correct, I’ll be the DOAP of VCU.)) This is an interim, one year appointment, and I begin, officially, July 25.

As I’ve been talking about this professional move with friends and colleagues, the word that comes up repeatedly is “opportunity.” This is effectively a new position and a new office ((Physically, the office is brand-spanking new. The Office of Online Education is located inside VCU’s newest academic building which formally opens this fall.)) for the university. So, there’s an office and a staff to build. Also, I spent a considerable amount of time in the Spring 2013 semester working as a member of the Strategic Plan Task Force for Online Education. That task force sent a report to the provost that I was proud of and that the provost told me personally was one of the best reports she has read since becoming provost. There are a set of general and strategic recommendations in that report that will need to be implemented, and I will have an opportunity (there’s that word) to work across the university to implement those recommendations.

The most exciting aspect of this position for me is that I will have the opportunity (*ahem*) to work with some incredible people ((I should note that I’ve been very fortunate to work with some fantastic colleagues in the Department of Educational Leadership at VCU for the last 6 years. Truly, I will miss working with those folks on a daily basis moving forward.)). I will be working side-by-side with Jeff Nugent who has become a friend and trusted colleague in recent years. Jeff’s leadership of the Strategic Plan Task Force for Online Education was masterful. I have joked that in his capacity as special advisor to the provost, Jeff has become a cat herder and an alligator wrestler. What’s not a joke is how he has done that work with uncommon grace and skill.  I really look forward to working with Jeff and in partnership with his colleagues in the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Additionally, Jeff and I will get to work with/for our new Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success, Gardner Campbell. I’ve long admired Gardner’s work as an academic and a technologist. If you haven’t seen Gardner’s keynote presentation from OpenEd this past fall, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Jeff, Gardner and I have already had a few forward-thinking conversations and I’ve walked away from each of those with an extra hop in my step.

Though I haven’t been able to find the actual source, the quote “Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity” is attributed to Henry Hartman. I feel like I have been preparing for this leadership position for a long time and there is lots of support for the Office of Online Education at every level of the university administration.   Preparation meets opportunity. Onward.

As President of Teachers College, Columbia University ((NOTE: I am an alumnus of Teachers College, having earned by Ph.D. there in 2004. I did not sign any petitions)), Dr. Susan Fuhrman recently faced criticism on two fronts. First, there was significant criticism (and even a quiet protest at graduation) over the decision to award the TC Medal of Distinguished Service to New York State Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. According to one petition to stop this award,

As Chancellor, Tisch has committed New York State’s public schools to high stakes testing, and has personally advocated for standardized test scores to be used for promotion, school closures, and teacher bonuses. These policies are devastating our schools and the teaching profession.

Additionally, and more directly, Fuhrman was criticized for her role as a member of the board of Pearson, the mega education corporation that generates huge amounts of revenue as a direct result of the emphasis on standards and accountability. Pearson is viewed by many as the enemy of public education.

To her credit, Fuhrman addressed these concerns in a memo to the TC community. Yet, many in the TC community still question Furhman’s decisions as the leader of an institution committed to public education “demonstrated through its commitment to social justice, its respectful and vibrant community and its encouragement and support of each individual in the achievement of his or her full potential.”

Like Teachers College, the USC Rossier School of Education is widely considered one of the top schools of education in the United States. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. She is a very well-respected Dean of this highly ranked institution whose mission “is to improve learning in urban education locally, nationally and globally.”

USC Rossier and their Dean have engaged in some “interesting” arrangements and partnerships recently that include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. USC Rossier became the first school of education to offer a fully online Master of Arts in Teaching degree.  This degree program is offered in partnership with 2U, the company formerly known as 2Tor, Inc.  The Executive Chairman of 2U, and one of its founders, is John Katzman.  Katzman has a long history in the for-profit education sector, which mostly started when he founded Princeton Review. Katzman recently penned a piece for the Huffington Post in which he outlines his vision for bringing free market choices to education.
2. Dr. Gallagher, the Dean of USC Rossier, recently accepted a position on the new advisory board of Amplify, an education technology company headed by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Schools. Amplify is an education division of the News Corporation which is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is a well-known critic of teachers unions and public education.
3. The Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals (GREAT) Act is a bill that would dramatically reshape teacher preparation  and lower the standards for entry into the teacher preparation market. According to Anthony Cody,

The bill boasts support from the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand For Children, Teach For America, TNTP, NCTQ and many more “reformers.” … This bill reflects groundwork that has been laid by Gates Foundation-funded non-profit advocacy and policy groups such as the National Council on Teacher Quality, which has been highly critical of our nation’s schools of education.

So, USC Rossier and its Dean have strongly associated themselves with individuals and organizations deeply committed to efforts to privatize public education.

On one hand, they should be applauded for not standing still and for engaging in efforts that may not even be in the best interests of the organization itself (see e.g. move #3 above).  On the other hand, while each decision individually may be justifiable, collectively, they start to raise some questions about mission creep.

Ultimately, for me, these developments raise questions I’ve been asking lately about the obligations of leaders of organizations as representatives of the organization as a community with a particular mission.  These questions are related to questions I’ve been asking about whether or not schools of education can or even should be engaged in advocacy work, even if it is clearly related to the mission of the school.

I’m eager to hear from my fellow education professors about this. How would you feel if your school of education and your Dean did what USC Rossier and Dean Gallagher have done? And, to the K-12 educators who might read this (both of you!), how would you feel if your principal or superintendent engaged directly in partnerships with individuals and organizations that you think are in opposition to your own personal and professional values?

Two recent articles caught my attention. It’s hard to read them together and not shake your head.

The First Race to the Top by William Reese, professor of educational policy studies and history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

The testing groundwork was laid in 1837, when a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts named Horace Mann became secretary of the newly created State Board of Education, part of the Whig Party’s effort to centralize authority and make schools modern and accountable. After a fact-finding trip abroad, Mann claimed in 1844 in a nationally publicized report that Prussia’s schools were more child-friendly and superior to America’s. Boston’s grammar masters, insulted, attacked Mann in print, and he returned the favor. In December, some Whig reformers, including Mann’s close friend Samuel Gridley Howe, were elected to the School Committee and soon landed on the examining committee.

Howe masterminded the use of written tests. His committee arrived at Boston’s grammar schools with preprinted questions, which angered the masters and terrified students. Pupils had one hour to write down their answers on each subject to questions drawn from assigned textbooks.

Framing the School Technology Dream by Larry Cuban, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University Graduate School of Education

What helps explain the half-century of promises made in these ads is knowing about the love affair Americans have had with new technologies in life and in schools. Consider the early-19th-century Frenchman who wrote of his travels in America. He said: “Every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them” impressed Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the practical side of this nation in the early 1830s when he toured it with a companion. Americans’ subsequent embrace of steam engines, railroads, turbines, telephones, assembly lines, automobiles, airplanes, and one technology after another right up to the iPhone 5 and beyond is a history of falling in and out of love with the latest device that will “lead to a shorter road to wealth.”

Also, check out the slideshow that accompanies Cuban’s piece.

The lesson here? Hug your local education historian.

The title of this post is also the title of an incredible professional learning opportunity for educators to be hosted by Sabot at Stony Point, a PK-8 independent school in Richmond, VA.

The title is actually a little misleading, as the Reggio Approach is not “new.” A recent piece in The Atlantic does a pretty good job of describing the history of this progressive approach to education.

Born out of a desire to provide children with an enriching environment, the Reggio schools came to emphasize art and the beauty of the classroom. Children were encouraged to pursue their own projects and to use materials from nature in their work… More than anything, the schools were designed to bring color and activity into the lives of children of war. Teachers who came to the schools after their founding often brought university educations and a theoretical approach to teaching with them, but when applying their training they became eclectic, drawing on a number of thinkers (Dewey, Vygotsky) and testing their ideas to find a combination that seemed to work for students.

Of particular note and interest to me is the involvement of Dr. Lella Gandini, the United States liaison for the dissemination of  the Reggio Emilia approach. Dr. Gandini has written extensively about the Reggio Emilia approach, especially for early childhood education. While the Reggio Approach is typically considered an orientation for early childhood education, the principles of progressive education embodied by the approach are widely applicable to education and learning at all levels. Sabot at Stony Point, the school hosting the event, lives the Reggio Approach from PK-8.

Please consider attending the event described below. It should be a wonderful opportunity to explore a context for teaching practice that may not be new per se, but that may be new to you and others in your community.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: my son attends Sabot at Stony Point. The school stands to generate revenue from this event. But, please know I wouldn’t send my child to the school if I didn’t strongly believe in the Reggio Approach. Therefore, I would promote this event whether my son’s school stood to benefit or not.]

A while back, my edu-colleague Chad Ratliff asked me if I was interested in joining him in an effort to create a space for “independent” reporting and commentary on educational policy issues in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was a terrific idea, and soon the Virginia Education Report was born. We had lots of grand plans for VER, including working with eager interns from UVA and/or VCU to create a go-to, one-stop-shop for education news and analysis for the Commonwealth. We got off to a flying start, but, eventually, the realities of our “real,” full-time jobs kicked in. The space sat inactive for almost a year.

I’m happy to announce, though, that we are bringing VER back to life. We’ve given it a new look and some new (semi-automated) functionality. Right now, the main parts of the site are The Homeroom and The Lounge.

In our Homeroom section we publish syndicated news and analysis about school politics, policy, and research. These articles are mostly syndicated from select newspapers around the Commonwealth. Currently, there are 8 or 9 feeds populating that space, and those feeds cover a decent part of the Commonwealth. There are, however, significant parts of Virginia that are not yet included, especially Fairfax County. As we discover more feeds, we’ll add them.

The Faculty Lounge is our opinion and commentary section, and—like the op-ed section of a newspaper—is editorially separate from our news section.  Here we’ll showcase the informed perspectives of leaders, teachers, parents, students, and other public school stakeholders. We aim to publish pieces that offer nuanced and personal insights into issues facing schools, teachers, families, and education policy.

To those sections, we have plans to add a page that syndicates feeds from blogs of Virginia-based educators. That will take some time to build, and we’ll need a clever name. Perhaps “The Auditorium?” “The Media Center?”

Also, we’ve added the great Rachel Levy to the VER team. She will help develop VER and will contribute semi-regularly to The Lounge.

Please consider subscribing to the feeds from VER. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, too.

If you have ideas and/or you want to contribute in some way to VER, please contact us through the site.

Rick Hess just released the 2013 version of his Edu-scholar Public Presence Rankings. He claims that these rankings are “…designed to recognize those university-based academics who are contributing most substantially to public debates about K-12 and higher education. The rankings offer a useful, if imperfect, gauge of the public impact edu-scholars had in 2012.”

I’m not fond of “rankings,” generally, but I do think it’s important to gauge the “impact” that education scholars have on the field. I’ve written about the limits of traditional “impact factor” metrics and I’ve also written about how scholars ought to consider more modern means of knowledge dissemination. Currently, I’m working on a more comprehensive manuscript about modern scholarly communication specifically in the field of education.

In that context, I’ve long applauded Rick and his colleagues for the idea of public presence rankings; I value public presence for education scholars. That said, I think the implementation stinks. In other words, the approach Rick and his colleagues use is highly flawed. He is very careful and consistent about owning some level of error, but I can’t continue to watch my colleagues tout these rankings and pat themselves on the back when I see serious flaws in the methodology.

Hess does a decent job of describing the way the scores are computed (oh, and Rick, please ixnay the use of the word “rubric;” that ain’t no rubric, sir). My critique is as follows.

Coverage/Inclusion: Rick writes that “…this list is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many other faculty tackling education or education policy. Wednesday’s scores are for a prominent cross-section of faculty, from various disciplines, institutions, generations, and areas of inquiry, but they are not comprehensive.” I get that and appreciate how much work goes into generating this list. But, why do it half-assed? There are some very serious scholars not on the list who should be, and, for that, I think the rankings suffer. Where, for example, is Aaron Pallas? Dr. Pallas is a tremendous scholar who has REALLY taken advantage of various forms of new media to contribute to the educational policy arena. He has his own blog, and has written for Gotham Schools and contributed to the National Educational Policy Center. Also, my colleague, Dr. Charol Shakeshaft, is widely viewed as a pioneer in the field of educational leadership and is very publicly active around the policy issue of educator sexual misconduct. Whenever a case of educators sexual misconduct is written up in mainstream media, it’s highly likely to include quotes or insight from Dr. Shakeshaft.

Also, including people like Tony Wagner doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. He may have a university affiliation, but as far as I know, he doesn’t teach there (or anywhere) regularly. He is freed up to write more. In fact, it would be interesting to note the teaching loads of those on the list. Folks who have a higher teaching load simply have less time to devote to scholarly expression.

Frankly, though, the coverage/inclusion issue is the least of my concerns. As for the metrics included in the formula…

Google Scholar Score: the first three metrics (Google Scholar Score, Book Points, and Highest Amazon Ranking) clearly privilege more senior scholars. I’d bet a decent amount of money that the Google Scholar score correlates pretty highly (and positively) with years in academia. The more time one is in academia, the more articles one writes (for the most part) and the more time there is for folks to cite your articles. A number of folks on the list hit the cap of 50 on this score, and given that the highest total score is 172.9, we see how much weight it ultimately carries. If this is supposed to be a ranking of how present scholars are, I would urge Hess and his colleagues to consider weighting for currency. Consider, for example, the case of Nel Noddings. I am as much a fan of her work as anyone. But, 90 of her 97 points (placing her at #14 on the list) come from the first three categories. She is a prolific writer. Though she’s still writing and churning out books, she’s been retired from the professoriate since 1998 and is much more known as a philosopher than as someone directly involved in educational policy. I’d hardly consider her as someone who is publicly present in educational policy debates these days.

The other major problem with the Google Scholar Score relates to the idea that these rankings are supposed to be an indication of “public” presence. “Public” is an important concept here. A scholar may have a very high Google Scholar score because they prolifically publish oft-cited articles in peer-reviewed journals. However, if those articles are in journals that are distributed by publishers and in databases that are behind paywalls, are they really, truly “public?” To whom are they really accessible? If I were developing a formula to measure “public” presence, I would give significant weight to those who make their scholarship as accessible to the public as possible. I would give greater weight to those who publish in open-access, peer-reviewed journals, place journal articles in open access scholarly repositories, post articles to a personal/professional website, etc.

Book Points / Highest Amazon Ranking: I like that Amazon’s ranking privileges more recent books because, again, I think currency/recency should matter. But, again, these metrics favor more seasoned academics. They also favor historians, philosophers and others more closely aligned to the “foundations of education” than those in ed. policy and/or ed. leadership.

Education Press Mentions / Blog Mentions /Newspaper Mentions: At first, I thought these shouldn’t be separate categories, largely because the lines between journalism and blogging are blurrier than ever. And, if we’re truly concerned with “public” presence and not just presence in the field of education, we should think about what really matters and weight accordingly. Mostly, though, I think these are reasonably quality indicators in the formula. It’s noteworthy that the top four on the list all scored the maximum of 30 on Blog Mentions and Newspaper Mentions.

Congressional Record Rankings: I understand the idea here, but given how few of these folks got the 5 points on this indicator, I’m not sure it’s worth tracking. It’s also pretty unfortunate that so few prominent edu-scholars show up in the Congressional Record.

Klout scores: I’ve been fairly critical of Klout and other services attempting to measure “influence” through social media. They are fairly opaque, VERY easily gamed, and don’t take into account network theory and metrics from social network analysis that do a better job of gauging “influence.”  Also, I’d have the 4th highest Klout score of anyone on the list (I’m not on the list at all, BTW… my Klout score alone would put me in the top… 158!). But, I spend a lot of time using social media for developing and maintaining “personal” relationships, many of which are also professional. Any “influence” I’ve developed through social media by chatting about Duke basketball (#GoDuke) should probably be discounted. I think it’s important to include social media presence and activity in the public presence rankings formula, but I’m certain that Klout scores are not the best way to do that.

Related, Hess et al. do not include the maintenance of a scholarly blog in the formula. That’s a huge oversight. “Blog mentions” is included, but not blog posts. I’m a huge fan of the way folks like Bruce Baker and Sara Goldrick-Rab use their blogs to disseminate their knowledge and ideas. Bruce, in particular, is doing an INCREDIBLE job of informing the public about very complicated educational finance issues through his blog. He makes complicated matters very accessible through narrative and slick data visualization. They are also both very active on Twitter (Bruce and Sara) sharing their work, the work of others, and engaging in lively debates on key educational policy matters. This MUST count if we are considering scholars’ public presence. Some of this may be reflected in their Klout scores, but I’ve already pointed out the weakness of that metric and Hess et al. give it very little weight in the overall score. Bruce and Sara rank #40 and #60 respectively, but they should rank MUCH higher on this list, in my opinion.

Before I sum up, I also want to point out a problem inherent in relying on the search(es) necessary to generate these data. I don’t envy whoever did all of the grunt work of doing these searches, but search is not as simple as plugging a name into Google. I, for example, am a particularly problematic case. Different results are generated for “Jon Becker” as for “Jonathan Becker” as for “Jonathan D. Becker.” Also, a search for @jonbecker yields some interesting results.  There is some attention to this as Hess writes that “[o]n a few occasions, a middle initial or name was used to avoid duplication with authors who had the same name.” But, for each of the searches, it should be clear that they searched all possible mentions of an individual.

In sum, I like the idea of the edu-scholar public presence rankings. I don’t, however, like how they are done. Mainly, I think they are not as inclusive as they could be in some cases and too inclusive in some ways, they privilege senior scholars (and especially those who’ve written lots of books), don’t privilege accessible scholarship, and don’t emphasize enough expressions on scholarly blogs and Twitter activity.

There’s more to be said and I hope you’ll weigh in on the comments and that Rick and his crew consider this critique as they approach the 2014 edu-scholar public presence rankings.

Nate Silver has received LOTS of attention in the mainstream media and among those I follow on Twitter. Forget the pre-election bashing of Silver, the post-election range of opinions on Silver’s work is unbelievably dramatic. Either “America’s Chief Wizard Nate Silver Had the Best Election Night of Anybody…” or “Obama’s big win does not mean Nate Silver is a towering electoral genius.” And, everything in between. All of this has caused lots of discussion about “big data” and the merits of quantitative approaches to political analysis.

On top of the conversation of Silver’s work comes an article from TIME called “Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win.” It’s a fascinating inside look at how the Obama administration embraced data mining and data modeling techniques to gain advantages in the campaigning process. After sharing this article on Twitter, I faced a little resistance, including from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci who stated that this sort of reliance on data-mining “…isn’t  great for democracy.”  Others, including David Parry, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, echoed this sentiment.

From that TIME article it’s own, or even in combination with the hype around Nate Silver’s work, one might conclude that our democracy is in trouble of being overrun by “number crunchers.”  Problem is, it’s not that simple. It never is.

Surf the web for a tiny bit longer and you’ll find this fascinating article in the New York Times about President Obama’s meetings with presidential historians.  Over a few dinners with these historians, he asked pointed questions that would yield narrative responses from which he could learn.

That was why the president seemed to relish those dinners, the historians surmised: they were an antidote to the cable television news shows and moment to moment political wrangling he disparaged. Each time, he would go around the table, asking the largely left-tilting group how he was doing and what he could learn from the men they had studied, according to interviews with eight biographers who attended.

Yes, President Obama’s team learned a whole lot from the quantitative data they were collecting and analyzing to help his re-election campaign. At the same time, though, the President was collecting qualitative data in the form of historical narratives to help him help our country. He wanted to know, among other things, what lessons could be learned from the past about communicating a vision for our country.

It feels to me like there is a lot of either/or thinking in my worlds these days. This seems particularly true around issues related to data. I wrote about this 6 years ago (!), when applying the ideas in Michael Lewis’ book (now movie) Moneyball to education. Then, I wrote:

Most baseball purists and old school baseball people fervently opposed this sabermetric orientation.  They argued that you couldn’t judge a player by crunching numbers.  You had to watch the players play, get to know them as people, etc.; in other words, make value determinations by scouting the old fashioned way.  The numbers were cold and unreliable, they’d say.

Sounds familiar, right? I went on to write:

The popular sports media would have us believe that sabermetric analysis is an opposing paradigm to traditional baseball scouting methods.  But, the fact is that sabermetric analysis has been used by the A’s (and now many other teams as well) as a complement to more traditional methods of scouting and player valuation.  It is not as if the A’s have fired all of their scouts and hired all statisticians; their scouting department includes a few number crunchers in addition to all of the scouts who do what they’ve always done… Like sabermetrics in baseball, (statistically oriented) DDDM is a complementary approach to professional judgment in education.  They are epistemologically different approaches, but they are not mutually exclusive. 

Folks, Nate Silver is not the face of a soulless future where decisions are made exclusively by robo-analysts. His methods and those used by the Obama administration during the re-election campaign, are merely additive to our decision-making repertoire. Let’s please stop this “either/or” thinking around data and think more in “both/and” terms.

On multiple occasions, a friend or family member not in the field of education has asked me for my opinion of Khan Academy. Maybe they saw Sal Khan on 60 Minutes or a teacher has introduced my friend or family member to KA.

My response usually goes something like this: “I have a few concerns about KA. First, I wish Sal Khan would tone down his rhetoric. He has created a huge set of open educational resources and made it available for free. For that, he should be commended. But, he has neither invented something particularly new, nor is he about to ‘revolutionize’ schooling as we know it. A little humility and recognition of those who have come before him in the field of both math education and educational technology would be nice. Second, I’m concerned that Sal Khan is “posing” as an “expert” in areas where he has little formal training. He’s moved on from math to other subject areas, and I don’t understand  why he’s given so much legitimacy. Finally, I know of quite a few math educators who I greatly respect who have serious concerns about the pedagogy of KA and also about some of the content. There may be good uses of KA (such as, perhaps, having kids watch videos looking for possible errors), but I would like to know more about the implications of KA for learning math before fully embracing KA.”

So, the last two concerns boil down to Khan’s credibility with respect to what Lee Shulman called pedagogical and content knowledge.

Yesterday, on Twitter, I wondered allowed if the criticism of Khan Academy would be muted if this was, say, Bertrand Russell instead of Sal Khan. In a larger sense, I was asking: “What if the world’s foremost experts were creating tutorials and sharing their content knowledge with everyone for free?”

Well, guess what? They are. See e.g. Coursera, Udacity, edX, etc.

The criticisms of these so-called xMOOCs have been loud and clear (at least among those I interact with online). I have some of my own concerns about these companies, too. But, I have been thinking a lot lately about these MOOCs and framing them as open educational resources rather than just courses. Today, I began my foray into a Coursera course on Social Network Analysis (SNA). I’ve learned a decent amount about SNA, largely on my own, but the depth of my knowledge is pretty limited and there are gaps in my understanding of SNA. Now, I have an opportunity to learn more about SNA from Lada A. Adamic, an associate professor in the School of Information and the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. She’s a prominent expert in social network analysis employed by one of the great research universities in the United States; she is doing some really interesting work in the field. I get to take a course taught by her. For free. On a subject I’m really interested in. So, what’s the problem exactly?

We can quibble with the quality of the learning experience. I’m only a couple of videos in and I can already think of tweaks I’d make to the platform. And, maybe I’ll get tired of the didacticism after a while. But, for now, I’m pretty excited about this opportunity. I’m not going to fret about MOOCs destroying higher education as we know it. I’m not going to wring my hands about the loss of humanity from learning through a machine. I’m not going to look this gift horse in the mouth.

[Image credit: AJC1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/7566869868/sizes/z/in/photostream/]

[NOTE: it may ultimately be that the subtitle of this post is “…or how I am justifying my attendance at the Bammys.” If this post sounds defensive, maybe that’s where it’s coming from. I don’t know; you make the call.]

One of my mentors once taught me about “honoring the occasion.” I think it was in response to a question about what I was supposed to wear for a meeting, but he told me that it’s important to “honor the occasion” by dressing in a way that’s “expected” even if it wasn’t consistent with how I preferred to dress. I was young. ((I’m old now.))

When I first got an email invitation to the Bammy Awards, I laughed. My gut reaction was that there was no way that I was going to some award ceremony based on engagement with social media. I didn’t fully understand what the Bammy Awards were, but I was so humored by it that I forwarded the emails to a couple of people I respect and consider friends to tell them that I had been invited to this ridiculous thing and that there was no way I could possibly go. (( If you don’t believe me, I can produce those emails for you.))

Well, one of the people I forwarded the email to said that he was going because he saw that people like Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling-Hammond were being honored and that this could very possibly be a good professional networking event. I was intrigued. Then, I learned that Dr. Pam Moran, a woman I consider a friend and a dear colleague, was a finalist for an award for superintendents. I contacted Pam and learned that she planned to attend. Finally, I tried to learn as much about the event as possible. At the core, this was the Academy of Arts and Education starting an event to honor excellence in education. I’m down with that premise. So, I decided to go, mostly to honor the occasion.

Some other notes and an effort to clear up some confusion:

*I don’t know how I got invited and others didn’t. As best I can tell, some folks asked Eric Sheninger to invite 100 or so educators who are active on social media, the so-called “education Twitterati.” That’s a ridiculous title. But, I don’t think Eric did anything wrong. He was put (or put himself, I don’t know) in a tough spot to have to invite a finite number of educators. Quite honestly, some of the anti-Bammy banter on Twitter sounds like a lot of jealous whining. Remember when I wrote this post a hundred years ago? ((That’s still one of my most commented upon posts)) We’re humans; we get jealous when we’re excluded from social events.

*Ah, the social… I don’t pretend that my attendance at the Bammys was anything more than a professional networking trip and a chance to see some good friends. I didn’t learn a whole lot like others claim to have done. Also, my wife has a good friend from college who lives in the DC area and by traveling up there as a family, she was able to spend some time with her friend as well.

*Money: the event itself was free for us. But, we had to pay for travel and lodging. If DC weren’t 100 miles away and an easy shot up I-95 (as easy as traveling through Northern VA can be), I probably would not have gone. I would not (and probably could not) have used university travel funds for this event.

*Money (part two, the corporate kind): the event was sponsored by Bam! Radio and there were a few other corporate donors. ((Including some outfit called ZipSlip that I’d never heard of that paid for drinks after the event; I could have done without that little corporate interlude)) Their presence was limited to a little signage and a shoutout by one of the hosts. I have all kinds of reservations about corporate involvement in education, but I’m also a realist. Another of my mentors once told me that no funding is clean; it could all be traced to something or someone unsavory. And, in public education we rely on lots of funding sources. So, as long as we’re transparent about it, that’s all I can hope for. ((This from a guy who once worked on a huge evaluation research project of a life skills curriculum that was funded by… Phillip Morris)).

*Awards: yeah, yeah, I’m generally opposed to awards, too. But, if you were there and saw and heard the guy who won the award for school maintenance manager look and speak so proudly about his job, you’d have been hard-pressed to deny him that recognition. Also, I have no problem with awarding lifetime achievement awards, especially to folks like Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond and John Merrow. Most of the other awards were silly; the nominating/voting process was never made clear. If they do this again, I’d suggest some major revisions. ((Takes off professor hat…))

So, yeah, maybe I’m feeling a little defensive as folks I respect are taking to Twitter to mock the Bammys and those that attended. But, honestly, in the end, I think it’s important to honor the occasion, and friends ((Pam was robbed; she shoulda won the award for best superintendent.))