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#NESA_SEC 2013 | te(a)ch french

2013-04-22T11:26:45Z

Networking: I had the opportunity to meet Dana Watts and Scott McLeod in person (and attend their sessions). I've been following them on Twitter for awhile and have a bit of a blog-crush on Scott's Dangerously Irrelevant. I also found many ...

The Teat returns: Neoliberals, students first or padding adults’ pockets

2013-04-01T15:54:49Z

Today The Teat returns to discuss neoliberal education “reformers.” Reformers argue that their approach is about “students first”… parent trigger, online courses, universal charters, Teach For America, vouchers, anti-organizing, school closings etc… if you are to believe the “reformers,” all of these efforts are about the students… not about the adults… Who is paying the bills for [...]

Man goes diving in his living room

2013-04-01T14:40:55Z

A man in Bristol, Wisconsin, has the largest privately owned reef tank in North America, and it's in his living room.

99 Percenters and 53 Percenters Face Off

2011-10-12T10:07:34Z

Shared by Scott
99% v. 53%

Two opposing blogs document the complaints of those who object to the concentration of wealth and those who object to people who don't pay income taxes.

The Innovative Educator: We would prefer not to take your tests.

2011-01-17T20:35:00Z

Notes & Resources from Midsouth EduTweetUp & Web 2.0 Smackdown (Jan. 2011). 2 days ago. Cool Cat Teacher Blog · Yes, there are great conversations on Facebook! 23 hours ago. Dangerously Irrelevant · I really liked Race to Nowhere ...

Full Info-Access Testing: Putting 21st c. Learning to the Test

2010-11-19T04:54:52Z

We know that content memorization must no longer the goal of our learning programs; what our goal must be is that students can make the most sense of the voluminous and fast-accelerating quantity of information which will forever be at their fingertips, and about which they must be able to think critically, to select, to evaluate, to apply, and to amend as they tackle challenging problems.

So why shouldn’t our school-tests evaluate our students ability to do exactly this? Why not structure tests appropriately, and then invite and welcome (and require) our students to use their computers on their tests? Isn’t this real world, and real life, preparation?

Radical maybe, but it is happening. In Denmark, for instance.

At five to nine, the room falls silent. CD-roms and exam papers are handed out together. This is the Danish language exam. One of the teachers stands in front of the class and explains the rules. She tells the candidates they can use the internet to answer any of the four questions. They can access any site they like, even Facebook, but they cannot message each other or email anyone outside the classroom.

The teachers also think the nature of the questions make it harder to cheat in exams. Students are no longer required to regurgitate facts and figures. Instead the emphasis is on their ability to sift through and analyse information.

Minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder, says: “Our exams have to reflect daily life in the classroom and daily life in the classroom has to reflect life in society. The internet is indispensible, including in the exam situation. I’m sure that is would be a matter of very few years when most European countries will be on the same line.”

The fine minds are edutopia are inquiring also: should students be able to use technology to access information during tests? At present, only 18% of edutopia readers (admittedly, these readers are hardly a representative sampling of the breadth of values among American educators) vote no; 47% vote maybe, and 35% join me in voting yes.

The comments on the edutopia piece are valuable; check them out if your are as interested in this topic as I am. Mark DeSalvo wrote powerfully:

If the exams are a reflection of real-world processes and applications, then the appropriate tools should be made available and used to their fullest ability. If we bottle up all that we believe is important and dwindle it down to a test measuring something related to god-knows-what, and expect that this end result is what everyone should know and be able to do, then forget technology, not even quality instruction is necessary because teaching to the test gets you there faster.

The tools they are using now don’t compare to what is coming in 5 years and many adults don’t even know how to use the full extent of their cell phones now! Technology is what makes us jump in generations. The reason we are stalled is that “conservative types” cling on to what they consider is the tried and true, back to basics. Nothing wrong with the chisel and stone for publications either, but I sure am glad I’m not a stone mason with today’s information.

Cheating is probably the primary concern of this approach: it is nearly impossible to absolutely block email, im’ing, and other types of online collaboration. But we know students who really wish to cheat can often do so anyway, and my school employs an honor-code integrity system to ask for respectful adherence, and that would apply here too. The most thoughtful and intentional teachers are already working to combat cheating by asking of students they complete meaningful and rewarding tasks which students value in their own right, and are simply too challenging too allow for easy faking whether you really know the stuff.

The question that is begged hereupon is of course whether collaboration is such a sin: surely we want our students to be adept on-line collaborators in every challenge they face. My sympathies are here, but we also do need to be able to evaluate whether individual students are gaining the thinking skills they individually need for success.

Testing must change too: open-computer testing, or open-info testing, or info-access testing, can only work when the tests demand rich thinking, effective analysis of ideas and information and effective synthesis of ideas and information. Fortunately, we do see developing the kind of assessment that does this, which is articulated in pieces like Marc Chun’s article on performance task assessment and Ted McCain’s book Teaching for Tomorrow.

At our school, St. Gregory, we are taking first steps, only really available now that we are a 1:1 laptop school. Dr. Morris is taking this approach on a pilot basis in 10th grade Chemistry, and the early experiments have been very positive. Coming soon on my blog,21k12blog.net, : a video of Dr. Morris and his students speaking about open-info testing.

What do readers think of open-computer testing?

[cross-posted at www.21k12blog.net]

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Design thinking overview: A Prezi presentation

2010-11-13T23:32:00Z

Today my colleague Joanne Marshall and I presented the idea of design thinking as an approach to use in educational leadership to 44 doctoral candidates at Iowa State University.

This is the "prezi" that I developed to give an introduction to design thinking as it's taught at the Stanford d.school. This talk was a prelude to the students engaging in a two-hour hands on workshop called "The Wallet Project." In this project students practiced an empathetic, human-centered design process to develop a wallet for their partner. Why would educational leadership students be building wallets? Well, it about much more than that. It was about new frames for leading. The day wrapped up with a discussion about how design thinking fits with other leadership frameworks, and how the use of empathy, feedback and prototyping can provide new insights on how to tackle problems of process and policy.

This prezi is set so that you may make a copy of this it for your own use. This is the permalink.

In the coming days I'll post some pictures and short video from the seminar.

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5 Considerations for Allowing Students to Use Personal Computing Devices on School Wireless Networks

2010-10-12T02:40:00Z

For the past month, I have been working on trying to develop a procedure to govern student use of personal computers when accessing our wireless Internet. In times of shrinking budgets, we just don’t have enough technology, so we decided that providing students with wireless Internet access for their own personal computers was a means increase total student access to Web resources.

I initially turned to the web to find other schools with wireless access policies and procedures. After examining the procedures and policies of several of these schools, I found that they all contained common components. These 5 common components are vital to any wireless access policy for a school.

Technical Requirements for Access

One common component for a wireless access policy are guidelines specifying what technical requirements each personal computer should have. The two most common are:

Un-expired and functioning Anti-virus protection
Wireless Network Access Card with Statement That Prohibits Connecting by Cables

Most schools required working anti-virus in order to prevent network infections, and a wireless card for access. By allowing only wireless access, it protects the integrity of the main school network.

General Guidelines for Use of Wireless Access

Guidelines are needed to ensure that students understand that their use of computers and devices are welcome, but that the teacher and instruction drives that use. Some guidelines to include are:

Clear Statement That Use of Computer or Device Is at Teacher’s Discretion
Use of Computer or Device Must Support Instructional Activities
Use of Computer or Device Must Not Be Disruptive to Other’s Learning
Use of Computer or Device Must Be In Supervised Area of School
Students Must Have Signed an Acceptable Use Policy
Students Are Prohibited from Accessing Other Network Resources Other Than Internet

Consequences for Failure to Follow Guidelines

Only some of the procedures and policies I examined included consequences. These issues are often addressed in a school’s acceptable use policy, but consequences often involve some kind of restriction regarding the student’s continued use of the device.

Procedures for Gaining Wireless Access

Another important component for the wireless access policy are the procedures that must be followed to obtain that access. Usually these procedures involve the following components:

Submitting a Request Form of Some Sort
Submitting the Device for Inspection and for Recording Device Identification Such as Serial Numbers and/or MAC Address

Disclaimers

It is important to include disclaimers in the policy or procedure as well. These disclaimers should make clear the following:

Wireless access is for Internet only.
School technology department is not permitted by regulation to provide technical support for personal computers.
School does not assume responsibility for damage or loss of these computers or devices.

When trying to set up a wireless access procedure or policy, it is vital that the integrity of the school network be sustained, protections are put in place to ensure proper use of network resources, consequences are outlined for subsequent violations of user agreements, procedures developed for obtaining access, and disclaimers are detailed to make it clear the school is not responsible for damage or loss.

Should anyone wish to see a copy of our procedure, just send me an email at john_robinson@nccs.k12.nc.us and I will be glad to get it to you.

Technorati Tags: education technology,policy,procedures

How Technology Will Destroy Our Future…

2010-09-14T13:43:30Z

For the last two summers I was able to study in Geneva for 3 weeks with some amazing people from around the world. Truth be told, many were from Michigan, which is a fantastic place to be when it comes to education, despite news of our budget problems and crippling unemployment. This summer was a chance for many of my fellow graduate students to have a discussion about the convergence of education, web 2.0, and the foundations of democracy. We talked with NGOs, United Nations representatives, and were even privileged to talk with a family from France that had just formed a new NGO dedicated to engaging the youth of France, and ultimately Europe, to become productive members of society.

Apparently, the unemployment rate of people under 30 in Europe is appallingly high, and growing. The problem is, many youth in Europe, and ever-growing in the States, feel disenfranchised, disconnected, and unable to contribute to society. I’m still considered young, and I see evidence everyday of baby boomers and older generations with nervous or apprehensive outlooks of the future. They concern themselves with cultivating new leaders that will carry on what they’ve started, while still trying to preserve what they’ve been toiling away at for the last 30 or 40 years. I’ve talked with people that profess their pessimistic views of the future of our country, and the world. I’ve seen veteran educators that try to stay relevant, only to slip away at the end of the year, in a quick and quiet announcement of retirement.

And in a way, I share their anxiety. Several decades of established protocol, decorum, rules and regulations built upon year after year can often create fortresses of impenetrability around institutions. The older the institution, the closer they are to feeling like a forbidding castle on a high sea cliff with vast armies protecting their domains. And technology is here to destroy that.

With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, entire media empires can be overturned, national politics can be swayed, and historically close-minded institutions can be undermined. Several large educational (and some old) institutions have found ways to thrive in this new digital revolution. MIT has been wildly popular with their OpenCourseWare in iTunes U. Most large universities and colleges in the U.S. now require laptops of their incoming freshmen, and you can earn an entire degree online. And yet, there are still cases where schools still want to defend their domain from the “evils” of the Internet.

The truth is, technology isn’t going to destroy our future, it’s just destroying the past, or rather the notion of what used to be “good” teaching. Case in point, an excellent blog post from John Sowash describes a wonderfully amazing trans-formative experience he’s had with technology in his classroom. Rather than rely on the old model of direct instruction and lecturing to teach his high school Biology courses, he has managed to successfully “flip” his classroom through reverse instruction. By providing lectures via video podcasts, John assigns his students “homework” of downloading, watching/listening the lecture while taking careful notes. His classtime is then filled with what would normally be homework and individual instructional time.

By leveraging the ability to post the least effective form of instruction for students to digest on their own, he has made his class time with them much more valuable, by working through direct application of learning and exercises that are greatly enhanced by having the teacher present. That means no more as students giving up at home when they might have hit a roadblock doing homework.

This is just the tip of the ice-berg. I know a great deal of educators doing tremendously amazing things with technology, and there are more coming into the school systems each year. The future of education as we know it is crashing down upon us, as it is currently being rewritten each and every week. Walls are crumbling, barricades are failing, and the educational experiences of our past, which built the massive lumbering towers of our educational landscape will begin to look more like the spindly legs of a small step stool. Not sturdy enough for any practical job, but good to enough to get us started with the real work of making education truly trans-formative.

Image: ‘Post-Katrina School Bus’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/73207064@N00/88841552

“Disposable Reform”

2010-08-23T21:51:03Z

Steve Hargadon held an interesting interview with Linda Darling-Hammond last week that covered, for the most part, the ideas in her new book “The Flat World and Education” as well as some of her earlier works like “The Right to Learn.” While I was hoping to hear her go a bit more into depth about the role of technology in the reform or transformation of schools, and to also be more specific as to how to get to reforms she says we need, she did articulate a number of compelling ideas around why change is so slow and why it’s so difficult to move the needle on schools here in the US. I’ve snipped three fairly short segments from the full interview that I want to touch on in three separate posts. (Full recording here.)

The first discusses the idea that reforms are hampered by the lack of teachers who can teach in progressive ways, and that replication of successful school models is extremely difficult due to diverse circumstances (some have leadership, money, infrastructure, others don’t) and a political reality that forces us to change course every few years while other countries are going through a steady process of “continual improvement.” She says it’s hard to build a “system of good schools” here. Take a listen:

Here is one quote that’s worth mulling over.

“Progressive educational philosophies, that is approaches that are child-centered, that are really focused on empowering forms of learning that allow people to inquire for themselves and pursue knowledge in self-initiated ways as well as in other ways, those kinds of reforms demand infinitely skilled teachers, and our system has never been organized to produce infinitely skilled teachers in sufficient qualities to fuel those reforms over the long haul.”

The other day I Tweeted the question “What % of teacher ed programs prepare teachers NOT to be the focal point of the classroom?” and the responses were telling. Most said 5-10%, and my sense is that’s pretty accurate. No question, we’re not producing “infinitely skilled teachers” who are also “infinitely skilled learners” as well, and that’s exactly what we need to make these progressive philosophies happen in the classroom. It’s not rocket science; if we want students who “pursue knowledge in self-directed ways” and flourish in an inquiry driven environment, we have to prepare teachers to do that for themselves. And we’re not. We prepare teachers to teach, not to learn.

But I also found it striking that she connected our difficulty in sustaining change with what she termed our “disposable culture” here in the US. We try one reform and dispose of it, then we try another and dispose of that one, and then we try yet another. And I can’t help ask, whose fault is that? Throughout our education, we’re give out disposable assignments, have kids work on disposable projects that lead to disposable tests. I mean really, how much of what we actually have our kids do in school is really worth hanging onto in a “change the world” sense? I don’t mean to saddle the current system with causing everything that ails our society, but you have to admit, we own some of that…we reap what we sow.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to put some thoughts together on two of the other topics she brings up, professional development and assessment. Regardless the lack of a discussion around technology and learning networks in much of her writing and discussions, there is no question that Darling-Hammond has one of the clearest voices in articulating the issues we’re facing in education today. Definitely worth listening to.

Free book on the Future of Reputation on the Web and the importance of Understanding Privacy

2010-07-28T12:01:00Z

Daniel Solove has written a new book on the Internet and Privacy, it is called: " Understanding privacy " (yes, not a catchy, but indeed a very clear title). This book is not for free, but the one mentioned below is. In both cases you can buy a book about it :-) or simply discuss it. and it simply does not feel right.

Brought to you by: eLearning Learning

How The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools

2010-08-05T17:00:30Z

The Guardian takes data journalism seriously. They obtain, format, and publish journalistically interesting data sets on their Data Blog, they track transparency initiatives in their searchable index of world government data, and they do original research on data they’ve obtained, such as their amazing in-depth analysis of 90,000 leaked Afghanistan war documents. And they do most of this with simple, free tools.

Data Blog editor Simon Rogers gave me an action-packed interview in The Guardian’s London newsroom, starting with story walkthroughs and ending with a philosophical discussion about the changing role of data in journalism. It’s a must-watch if you’re wondering what the digitization of the world’s facts means for a newsroom. Here’s my take on the highlights; a full transcript is below.

The technology involved is surprisingly simple, and mostly free. The Guardian uses public, read-only Google Spreadsheets to share the data they’ve collected, which require no special tools for viewing and can be downloaded in just about any desired format. Visualizations are mostly via Many Eyes and Timetric, both free.

Data Blog posts are often related to or supporting of news stories, but not always. Rogers sees the publishing of interesting data as a journalistic act that stands alone, and is clear on where the newsroom adds value:

I think you have to apply journalistic treatment to data. You have to choose the data in a selective, editorial fashion. And I think you have to process it in a way that makes it easy for people to use, and useful to people.

The Guardian curates far more data than it creates. Some data sets are generated in-house, such as its yearly executive pay surveys, but more often the data already exists in some form, such as a PDF on a government web site. The Guardian finds such documents, scrapes the data into spreadsheets, cleans it, and adds context in a Data Blog post. But they also maintain an index of world government data which scrapes open government web sites to produce a searchable index of available data sets.

“Helping people find the data, that’s our mission here,” says Rogers. “We want people to come to us when they’re looking for data.”

In alignment with their open strategy, The Guardian encourages re-use and mashups of their data. Readers can submit apps and visualizations that they’ve created, but data has proven to be just as popular with non-developers — regular folks who want the raw information.

Sometimes readers provide additional data or important feedback, typically through the comments on each post. Rogers gives the example of a reader who wrote in to say that the Academy schools listed in his area in a Guardian data set were in wealthy neighborhoods, raising the journalistically interesting question of whether wealthier schools were more likely to take advantage of this charter school-like program. Expanding on this idea, Rogers says,

What used to happen is that we were the kind of gatekeepers to this information. We would keep it to ourselves. So we didn’t want our rivals to get ahold of it, and give them stories. We’d be giving stories away. And we wouldn’t believe that people out there in the world would have any contribution to make towards that.

Now, that’s all changed now. I think now we’ve realized that actually, we’re not always the experts. Be it Doctor Who or Academy schools, there’s somebody out there who knows a lot more than you do, and can thus contribute.

So you can get stories back from them, in a way…If you put the information out there, you always get a return. You get people coming back.

Perhaps surprisingly, data also gets pretty good traffic, with the Data Blog logging a million hits a month during the recent election coverage. “In the firmament of Guardian web sites that’s not bad. That’s kind of upper tier,” says Rogers. “And this is only after being around for a year.” (The even younger Texas Tribune also finds its data pages popular, accounting for a third of total page views.)

Rogers and I also discussed the process of getting useful data out of inept or uncooperative governments, the changing role of data specialists in the newsroom, and how the Guardian tapped its readers to produce the definitive database of Doctor Who villains. Here’s the transcript, lightly edited.

JS: All right. So. I’m here with Simons Rogers in the Guardian newsroom in London, and you’re the editor of the Data Blog.

SR: That’s right, and I’m also a news editor so I work across the organization on data journalism, essentially.

JS: So, first of all, can you tell us what the Data Blog is?

SR: Ok, well basically it came about because, as I said I was a news editor working a lot with graphics, and we realized we were just collecting enormous amounts of data. And we though, well wouldn’t our readers be interested in seeing that? And when the Guardian Open Platform launched, it seemed a good time to think about opening up– we were opening up the Guardian to technical development, so it seemed a good time to open up our data collections as well.

And also it’s the fact that increasingly we’ve found people are after raw information. If you looked– and there’s lots of raw information online, but if you start searching for that information you just get bewildering amounts of replies back. If if you’re looking for, say, carbon emissions, you get millions of entries back. So how do you know what the right set of data is? Whereas we’ve already done that set of work for our readers, because we’ve had to find that data, and we’ve had to choose it, and make an editorial selection about it, I suppose. So we thought we were able to cut out the middle man for people.

But also we kind of thought when we launched it, actually, what we’d be doing is creating data for developers. There seemed to be a lot of developers out there at that point who were interested in raw information, and they would be the people who would use the data blog, and the open platform would get a lot more traffic.

And what actually happened, what’s been interesting about it, is that– what’s actually happened is that it’s been real people who have been using the Data Blog, as much as developers. Probably more so than developers.

JS: What do you mean “real people”?

SR: Real people, I suppose what I mean is that, somebody who’s just interested in finding out what a number is. So for instance, here at the moment we’ve got a big story about a government scheme for building schools, which has just been cut by the new government. It was set up by the old government, who invested millions of pounds into building new school buildings. And so, we’ve got the full list of all the schools, but the parliamentary constituency that they’re in, and where they are and what kind of project they were. And that is really, really popular today, that’s one of our biggest things, because there’s a lot of demonstrations about it, it’s a big issue of the day. And so I would guess that 90% of people looking at it are just people who want to find out what the real raw data is.

And that’s the great thing about the internet, it gives you access to the raw, real information. And I think that’s what people really crave. They want the interpretation and the analysis from people, but they also want the veracity of seeing the real thing, without having it aggregated or put together. They just want to see the raw data.

JS: So you publish all of the original numbers that you get from the government?

SR: Well exactly. The only time– with the Data Blog, I try to make it as newsy as possible. So it’s often hooked around news stories of the day. Partly because it helps the traffic, and you’re kind of hooking on to existing requirements.

Obviously we do– it’s just a really eclectic mix of data. And I can show you the screen, for a sec.

JS: All right. Let’s see something.

SR: Okay, so this is the data blog today. So obviously we’ve got Afghanistan at the top. Afghanistan is often at the top at the moment. This is a full list of everybody who’s died, every British casualty who’s died and been wounded over time. So you’ve got this data here. We use, I tend to use a lot of third party services. This is a company called Timetric, who are very good at visualizing time series data. It takes about five minutes to create that, and you can roll over and get more information.

JS: So is that a free service?

SR: Yeah, absolutely free, you just sign up, and you share it. It works a bit like Many Eyes, you know the IBM service.

JS: Yeah.

SR: We’ll embed these Google docs. We use Google docs, Google spreadsheets to share all our information because it’s very for people to download it. So say you want to download this data. You click on the link, and it will take you through in a second to, there you go, it’s the full Google spreadsheet. And you’ve got everything on here. You’ve got, these are monthly totals, which you can’t get anywhere else, because nobody else does that information.

JS: What do you mean nobody else does it?

SR: Well nobody else bothers to put it together month by month. You can get totals by year from, iCasualties I think do it, but we’ve just collected some month by month, because often we’ve had to draw graphics where it’s month by month. It’s the kind of thing, actually it’s quite interesting to be able to see which month was the worst for casualties.

We’ve got lists of names, which obviously are in a few places. We collect Afghanistan wounded statistics which are terribly confused in the UK, because what they do is they try and make them as complicated as possible. So, the most serious ones, NOTICAS is where your next of kin is notified. That’s a serious event, but also you’ve got all those people evacuated. So anyway, this kind of data. We also keep amputation data, which is a new set that the government refused to release until recently, and a Guardian reporter was instrumental in getting this data released. So we kind thought, maybe we should make this available for people.

So you get all this data, and then what you can do, if you click on “File” there, you can download it as Excel, XML, CSV, or whatever format you want. So that’s why we use Google speadsheets. It’s the kind of thing that’s a very, very easily accessible format for people.

So really what we do is we try and encourage a community, a community to grow up around data and information. So every post has got a talk facility on it.

Anyway, going through it. So this is today’s Data Blog, where you’ve got Afghanistan, Academy schools in the UK. The schools are run by the state, pretty much.

JS: So just to clarify this for the American audience, what’s an Academy school?

SR: Ok, well basically in the UK most schools are state schools, that most children go to. State schools are, we all pay for them, they’re paid for out of our taxes. And they’re run at a local level, which obviously has it’s advantages because it means that you are, kind of, working to an area. What the new government’s proposing to do is allow any school that wants to to become an Academy. And what an Academy is is a school that can run its own finances, and own affairs.

And what we’ve got is we’ve got the data, the government’s published the data — as a PDF of course because governments always publish everything as a PDF, in this country anyway — and what they give you, which we’ve scraped here, is a list of every school in the UK which has expressed an interest. So you’ve got the local authority here, the name of the school, type of school, the address, and the post code. Which is great, because that’s good data, and because it’s on a PDF we can get that into a spreadsheet quite easily.

JS: So did you have to type in all of those things from a PDF, or cut and paste them?

SR: Good god no. No, no, we have, luckily we’ve got a really good editorial support team here, who are, thanks to the Data Blog, are becoming very experienced at getting data off of PDFs. Because every government department would much rather publish something as a PDF, so they can act as if they’re publishing the data but really it’s not open.

JS: So that’s interesting, because in the UK and the US there’s this big government publicity about, you know, we’re publishing all this data.

SR: Absolutely.

JS: But you’re saying that actually–

SR: It’s not 100 percent yet. So, I’ll show you in a second that what they tend to do is just publish– most government departments still want to publish stuff as PDFs. They can’t quite get out of that thing. Or want to say, why would somebody want a spreadsheet? They don’t really get it. A lot of people don’t get it.

And, we wanted the spreadsheet so you can do stuff like this, which is, this is a map of schools interested in becoming Academies by area. And so because we have that raw data in spreadsheet form we can work out how many in the area. You can see suddenly that this part of England, Kent, has 99 schools, which is the biggest in the country. And only one area, which is Barking, up here, in London, which is, sorry, is down here in London, but anyway that has no schools applying at all.

And the government also always said that at the beginning that it would mainly be schools which weren’t “outstanding” would apply. But actually if you look at the figures, which again, we can do, the majority of them are outstanding schools. So they’re already schools which are good, which are applying to become academies. Which kind of isn’t the point. But that kind of analysis, that’s data journalism in a sense. It’s using the numbers to get a story, and to tell a story.

JS: And how long did that story take you to put together? To get the numbers, and do the graphics, and…?

SR: Well, I was helped a bit, because I got, I’ve had one of my helpers who works in editorial support to get the data onto a spreadsheet. And in terms of creating the graphic we have a fantastic tool here, which is set up by one of our technical development team who are over there, and what it does, is it allows you to paste a load of data, geographic data, into this box, and you tell it what kind, is it parliamentary constituency, or local authority, or educational authority, or whatever, however the different regional differentiations we have in the UK, and it will draw a map for you. So this map here was drawn by computer, basically, and then one of the graphics guys help sort out the labels and finesse it and make it look beautiful. But it saves you the hard work of coloring up all those things. So actually that took me maybe a couple of hours. In total.

JS: How about getting the data, how long did that take?

SR: Oh well luckily that data– you know the government makes the data available. But like I say, as a PDF file. So this is the government site, and that’s the list there, and you open it, it opens as a PDF. Because we’ll link to that.

But luckily the guys in the ESD [editorial services department] are very adept now, because of the Data Blog, at getting data into spreadsheets. So, you know they can do that in 20 minutes.

JS: So how many people are working on data overall, then?

SR: Well, in terms of– it’s my full time job to do it. I’m lucky in that I’ve got an awful lot of people around here who have got an interest who I can kind of go and nudge, and ask. It’s a very informal basis, and we’re looking to formalize that, at the moment. We’re working on a whole data strategy, and where it goes. So we’re hoping to kind of make all of these arrangements a bit more formal. But at the moment I have to fit into what other people are doing. But yeah, we’ve got a good team now that can help, and that’s really a unique thing.

So I was going through the Data Blog for you. So this is a typical, a weird day, so schools, and then we’ve got another schools thing because it’s a big schools day today. This is school building projects scrapped by constituency, full list. Now, this is another where the government didn’t make the data easily available. The department for education published a list of all the school projects that were going to be stopped when the government cut the funding, some of which is going towards creating Academy schools, which is why this is a bit of an issue in the country at the moment. And we want to know by constituency how it was working. So which MPs were having the most school projects cut, in their constituency. And we couldn’t get that list out of the department of education, but one MP had lodged it with the House of Commons library. So we managed to get it from the House of Commons library. But it didn’t come in a good form, it came in a PDF again, so again we had to get someone from tech to sort it out for us.

But the great thing is that we can do something like this, which is a map of projects stopped by constituency, by MP. And most of the projects we’ve stopped were in Labour seats. As you know Labour are not in power at the moment. So we can do some of this sort of analysis which is great. So there were 418 projects stopped in Labour constituent seats, and 268 stopped in conservative seats. So basically 40% of Labour MPs had a project stopped, at least one project stopped in their seat, compared to only 27% of Conservatives, and 24% of the Dems who are in power at the moment.

JS: So would it be accurate to say the data drove this story, or showed this story, or…?

SR: Data showed this story, which is great, but the one thing, the caveat — of course, the raw numbers are never 100% — the caveat was there were more projects going on in Labour areas because Labour government, previous government which is Labour set up the projects, and they gave more projects to Labour areas. So you can read it either way.

JS: And you said this in the story?

SR: We said this in the story. Absolutely. We always try and make the caveats available for people. So that’s a big story today, because of there are demonstrations about it in London. You’ve come to us on a very education-centered day today.

But there’s other stuff on the blog too. This is a very British thing. We did this because we thought it would be an interesting project to do. I had somebody in for a week and they didn’t have much to do so I got them to make a list of every Doctor Who villain ever.

JS: This was an intern project?

SR: This was an intern project. We kinda thought, yeah, we’ll get a bit of traffic. And we’ve never had so much involvement in a single piece ever. It’s had 500 retweets, and when you think most pieces will get 30 or 40, it’s kind of interesting. The traffic has been through the roof. And the great thing is, so we created–

JS: Ooh, what’s this? This is good.

SR: It’s quite an easy– we use ManyEyes quite a lot, which is very very quick to create lovely little graphics. And this is every single Doctor Who villain since the start of the program, and how many times they appear. So you see the Daleks lead the way in Doctor Who.

JS: Yeah, absolutely.

SR: Followed by the Cybermen, and the Masters in there a lot. And there are lots of other little things. But we started off with about 106 villains in total, and now we’re up to– we put it out there and we said to people, we know this isn’t going to be the complete list, can you help us? And now we’ve got 212. So my weekend has basically been– I’ll show you the data sheet, it’s amazing. You can see the comments are incredible. You see these kinds of things, “so what about the Sea Devils? The Zygons?” and so on.

And I’ll show you the data set, because it’s quite interesting. So this is the data set. Again Google docs. And you can see over here on the right hand side, this is how many people looking at it at any one time. So at that moment there are 11 people looking on. There could be 40 or 50 people looking at any one moment. And they’re looking and they’re helping us make corrections.

JS: So, wait– this data set is editable?

SR: No, we haven’t made it editable, because we’ve had a bad experience people coming to editable ones and mucking around, you know, putting swear words on stuff.

JS: So how do they help you?

SR: Well they’ll put stuff in the comments field and I’ll go in and put it on the spreadsheet. Because I want a sheet that people can still download. So now we’ve got, we’re now up to 203. We’ve doubled the amount of villains thanks to our readers. It’s Doctor Who. And it just shows we’re an eclectic– we’re a broad church on the Data Blog. Everything can be data. And that’s data. We’ve got number of appearances per villain, and it’s a program that people really care about. And it’s about as British as it’s possible to get. But then we also have other stuff too– and there we go, crashed again.

JS: Well let me just ask you a few questions, and take this opportunity to ask you some broader questions. Because we can do this all day. And I have. I’ve spent hours on your data blog because I’m a data geek. But let’s sort of bring it to some general questions here.

SR: Okay. Go for it.

JS: So first of all, I notice you have the Data Blog, you also have the world data index.

SR: Yes. Now the idea of that was that, obviously lots of governments around the world have started to open up their data. And around the time that the British government was– a lot of developers here were involved in that project — we started to think, what can we do around this that would help people, because suddenly we’ve got lots of sites out there that are offering open government data. And we thought, what if we could just gather them all together into one place. So you’ve got a single search engine. And that’s how we set up the world data search. Sorry to point you at the screen again.

JS: No that’s fine, that’s fine.

SR: Basically, so what we did, we started off with just Australia, New Zealand, UK and America. And basically what this site does, is it searches all of these open government data sites. Now we’ve got Australia, Toronto in Canada, New Zealand, the UK, London, California, San Francisco, and data.gov.

So say you search for “crime,” say you’re interested in crime. There you go. So you come back here, you see you’ve got results here from the UK, London, you’ve got results from data.gov in America, San Francisco, New Zealand and Australia. Say you’re interested in just seeing– you live in San Francisco and you’re only interested in San Francisco results. You’ve three results. And there you go, you click on that.

And you’re still within the Guardian site because what we’re asking people to do is help us rank the data, and submit visualizations and applications. So we want people to tell us what they’ve done with the data.

But anyway if you go and click on that, and you click on “download,” and it will start downloading the data for you. Or, what it will do is take you to the terms and conditions. We don’t bypass any T&Cs. The T&C’s come alongside. But you click on that, you agree to that, and then you get the data. So we really try and make it easy for people. There you go. And this is the crime incidence data. Very variable. This is great because it’s KML files, so if you wanted to visualize that you get really great information. It’s all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it’s CSVs.

JS: What’s a KML file?

SR: So, Google Earth.

JS: Okay.

SR: Sorry. So, it’s mapping, a mapping file straight away.

SR: Okay, so one of the things we ask people to do is to submit visualizations and applications they’ve produced. So for instance, London has some very very good open data. If you haven’t looked around the Data Store, it’s really worth going to. And one of these things they do is they provide a live feed of all the London traffic cameras. You can watch them live. And this is a lovely thing, because what somebody’s done is they’ve written an iPad application. So you can watch live TFL, Transport for London, traffic cameras on your iPad.

And you see that data set has been rated. A couple of people have gone in there and rated it. You’ve got a download button, the download is XML. So we try and help people around this data. And this is growing now. Every time somebody launches an open government data site we’re gonna put it on here, and we’re working on a few more at the moment. So we want it to be the place that people go to. Every time you Google “world government data” it pops up at the top, which is what you want. You want people who are just trying to compare different countries and don’t know where to start, to help them find a way through this maze of information that’s out there.

JS: So do you intend to do this for every country in the world?

SR: Every country in the world that launches an open government data site, we’ll whack it on here. And we’re working– at the moment there are about 20 decent open government data sites around the world. We’re picking those up. We’ve got on here now, how many have we got? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. We’ll have 20 on in the next couple of weeks. We’re really working through them at the moment.

And what this does is, it scrapes them. So basically, we don’t– for us it’s easy to manage because we don’t have to update these data sets all the time. The computer does that for us. But basically, what we do provide people with is context and background information, because you’re part of the data site there.

JS: So let me make sure I have this clear. So you’re not sucking down the actual data, you’re sucking down the list and descriptions of the data sets available?

SR: Absolutely. So we’re providing people, because basically we want it to be as updated as possible. We don’t– if we just uploaded onto our site, that would kind of be pointless, and it would mean it would be out of date. This way, if something pops up on data.gov and stays there, we’ll get it quick on here. We’ll help people find it. Helping people find the data, that’s our mission here. It’s not just generating traffic, it’s to help people find the information, because we want people to come to us when they’re looking for data.

JS: So, okay. You’ve talked about, it sounds like, two different projects. The Data Blog. where you collect and clean up and present data that you–

SR: That we find interesting. We’re selective.

JS: In the process of the Guardian’s newsgathering.

SR: Yeah, and just things that are interesting anyway. So the Doctor Who post that we were just looking at is just interesting to do. It’s not anything we’re going to do a story about. And often they’ll be things that are in the news, say that day, and I’ll think “oh that’s a good thing to put on the Data Blog.” So it could be crime figures, or it could be– and sometimes, the side effect of that is a great side effect because you end up with a piece in the paper, or a piece on the web site. But often it might be the Data Blog is the only place to get that information.

JS: And you index world government data sites.

SR: Yeah, absolutely.

JS: Does the Guardian do anything else with data?

SR: Yeah, well what we do is, we’re doing a lot of Guardian research with data. So what we want to do is give people a kind of way into that. So for instance, we do do a lot of data-based projects. So for instance we’re doing an executive pay survey of all the biggest companies, how much they pay their bosses and their chief executives. That has always been a thing the paper’s always done for stories. And now what we’ll do is we’ll make that stuff available– that data available for people. So instead of just raw data journalism, it’s quite old data journalism. We’ve been doing it for ten years. But we used to just call it a survey. Now it’s data journalism, because it’s getting stories out of numbers. So we’ll work with that, and we’ll publish that information for people to see. And there are a couple of big projects coming up this week, which I really can’t tell you about, but next week it will be obvious what they are.

JS: Probably by the time this goes up we’ll be able to link to them.

[Simon was referring to the Guardian's data journalism work on the leaked Afghanistan war logs, described in a thorough post on the Data Blog.]

SR: Yeah, I’ll mail you about them. But we’ve got now an area of expertise. So increasingly what I’m finding is that I’m getting people coming to me within The Guardian, saying, so we’ve got this spreadsheet, well how can I do this? So for instance that Academies thing we were just looking at, we were really keen to find out which areas were the most, where the most schools were, for the paper. The correspondent wanted to know that. So actually, because we’ve got this area of expertise now in managing data, we’re becoming kind of a go-to place within The Guardian, for journalists who are just writing stories where they need to know something, or they need to find some information out, which is an interesting side effect. Because it used to be that journalists were kind of scared of numbers, and scared of data. I really think that was the case. And now, increasingly, they’re trying to embrace that, and starting to realize you can get stories out of it.

JS: Well that’s really interesting. Let’s talk for a minute about how this applies to other newsrooms, because it’s– as you say, journalists have been traditionally scared of data.

SR: Yeah, absolutely. You could say they prided themselves, in this country anyway, they prided themselves on lack of mathematical ability. I would say.

JS: Which seems unfortunate in this era.

SR: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

JS: But especially a lot of our readers are from smaller newsrooms, and so what kind of technical capability do you need to start tracking data, and publishing data sets?

SR: I think it’s really minimal. I mean, the thing is that actually, what we’re doing is really working with a basic, most of the time just basic spreadsheet packages. Excel or whatever you’ve got. Excel is easy to use, but it could be any package really. And we’re using Google spreadsheets, which again is widely available for people to do information. We’re using visualization tools which are again, ManyEyes or Timetric which are widely available and easy to use. I think what we’re doing is just bringing it together.

I think traditionally that journalists wouldn’t regard data journalism as journalism. It was research. Or, you know, how is publishing data– is that journalism? But I think now, what is happening is that actually, what used to happen is that we were the kind of gatekeepers to this information. We would keep it to ourselves. So we didn’t want our rivals to get ahold of it, and give them stories. We’d be giving stories away. And we wouldn’t believe that people out there in the world would have any contribution to make towards that. Now, that’s all changed now. I think now we’ve realized that actually, we’re not always the experts. Be it Doctor Who or Academy schools, there’s somebody out there who knows a lot more than you do, and can thus contribute. So you can get stories back from them, in a way. So we’re receiving the information much more.

JS: So you publish the data, and then other people build stories out of it, is that what you’re saying?

SR: Other people will let us know– well, we publish say, well that’s an interesting story, or this is a good visualization. We’ve published data for other people to visualize. We thought, that’s quite an interesting thing to mash it up with, we should do that ourselves. So there’s that thing, and there’s also the fact that if you put the information out there, you always get a return. You get people coming back.

So for instance the Academies thing today that we were talking about. We’ve had people come back saying, well I live in Derbyshire and I know that those schools are in quite wealthy areas. So we start to think, well is there a trend towards schools in wealthy areas going to this, and schools in poorer areas not going to this.

So it gives you extra stories or extra angles on stories you wouldn’t think of. And I think that’s part of it. And I think partly there’s just the realization that just publishing data in itself, because it’s interesting, is a journalistic enterprise. Because I think you have to apply journalistic treatment to that data. You have to choose the data in a selective, editorial fashion. And I think you have to process it in a way that makes it easy for people to use, and useful to people.

JS: So last question here, which is of course going to be on many editors’ and publishers’ minds.

SR: Sure.

JS: Let’s talk about traffic and money. How does this contribute to the business of The Guardian?

SR: Okay, it’s a new– it’s an experiment for us, but traffic-wise it’s been pretty healthy. We’ve had– during the election we were getting a million page impressions in a month. Which is not bad. On the Data Blog. Now, as a whole, out of the 36 million that The Guardian gets, it doesn’t seem like a lot. But actually, in the firmament of Guardian web sites that’s not bad. That’s kind of upper tier. And this is only after being around for a year.

So in terms of what it gives us, it gives the same as producing anything that produces traffic gives us. It’s good for the brand, and it’s good for The Guardian site. In the long run, I think that there is probably canny money to be made out of there, for organizations that can manage and interpret data. I don’t know exactly how, but I think we’d have to be pretty dumb if we don’t come up with something. I’d be very surprised. It’s an area where there’s such a lot of potential. There are people who don’t really know how to manage data and don’t really know how to organize data that– for us to get involved in that area. I really think that.

But also I think that just journalistically, it’s as important to do this as it is to write a piece about a fashion week or anything else we might employ a journalist to do. And in a way it’s more important, because if The Guardian is about open information, which– since the beginning of The Guardian we’ve campaigned for freedom of information and access to information, and this is the ultimate expression of that.

And we, on the site, we use the phrase “facts are sacred.” And this comes from the famous C. P. Scott who said that “comment is free,” which as you know is the name of our comment site, but “facts are sacred” was the second part of the saying. And I kinda think that is– you can see it on the comment site, there you go. “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” And that’s what The Guardian’s about. I really think that, you know, this says a lot about the web. Interestingly, I think that’s how the web is changing, in the sense that a few years ago it was just about comment. People wanted to say what they thought. Now I think it’s, increasingly, people want to find out what the facts are.

JS: All right, well, thank you very much for a thorough introduction to The Guardian’s data work.

SR: Thanks a lot.

New Jersey Police to Shame Drunk Drivers on Facebook

2010-08-13T18:36:01Z

Facebook in privacy shock--but this time Mark Zuckerberg isn't the perpetrator

The police force in Evesham Township, a small town in New Jersey has, for the past six months, had a Facebook page. And on it go the mugshots of people caught breaking the law: a car thief, shoplifters, and even a child pornographer have all been named and shamed on its wall. It's a two-way thing, though--residents can post information up there as well. It's just announced that it's adding DUI perpetrators to the list, but there's a storm brewing over--you guessed it: privacy.

Bernard Bell, a law professor at Rutgers University, reckons it's inappropriate behavior from the cops. "There might be a potential defamation claim where posting a picture and information was negligent and the suspect isn't a public figure," he told the Courier-Post. The guilty-till-proven-innocent argument doesn't quite work, however, as all the information posted on Facebook is already in the public domain--but it could be evidence that Facebook is going to end up as the go-to site on the Internet. Another police department, Gloucester Township, is currently considering the idea.

The Police-social media love-in isn't exactly new--after all, Facebook status updates seem to be the norm for the dumber members of the criminal fraternity, and Plod is wising up to that. Traffic cops in Delhi, India, are also using the site to flag up bad drivers, listing bad drivers' registration plates, and encouraging people to send take pictures of violations in progress and post them up on the wall. This is followed up by a leisurely issuing of a ticket.

The litigious nature of the U.S. means that Professor Bell's claim will probably be tested out at some point or other. However, judging by some of the messages of support for the police, and the page's 4,778 fans--it's worth checking out, if only for the comments beneath the photos. "I saw Vince yesterday and i told him to stay outta trouble. I guess he didn't wanna listen.. lol" says one of the comments beneath a guy booked for driving under the influence of laughing gas.

Unlearning Teaching

2010-08-18T12:04:21Z

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be ‘consumed’ and fed back by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and to make errors. The teacher is in there experimenting and learning from the instructive complications of her errors alongside her students, rather than moving from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock.

I love this vision of teaching from Erica McWilliam, articulated in her 2007 piece “Unlearning How to Teach” (via my Diigo network). I know the idea isn’t new in these parts, but the way she frames it really resonates. And it speaks to some important aspects of network literacy and the teacher’s role in the formation of and the participation in those student networks. At the end of the day, as she suggests in the quote above, we have to add value to the process, not simply facilitate it. Here’s another snip that gets to that:

A further point here – if we consider the student’s learning network as a type of value network, then, we must also accept that such a network allows quick disconnection from nodes where value is not added, and quick connections with new nodes that promise added value - networks allow individuals to ‘go round’ or elude a point of exchange where supply chains do not. In blunt terms, this means that the teacher who does not add value to a learning network can - and will - be by-passed.

I think that’s one of the hardest shifts in thinking for teachers to make, the idea that they are no longer central to student learning simply because they are in the room. When learning value can be found in a billion different places, the teacher has to see herself as one of many nodes of learning, and she has to be willing to help students find, vet, and interact with those other nodes in ways that place value at the center of the interaction, meaning both ways. It’s not just enough to add those who bring value; we must create value in our networks as well.

Another interesting point in the essay suggests that because of our emphasis on knowledge in the schooling process, we are actually creating a more ignorant society. I greatly admire Charles Leadbetter’s work (If you haven’t read “Learning from the Extremes” (pdf) you need to), and this somewhat extended quote really got me thinking:

In a script-less and fluid social world, ‘being knowledgeable’ in some discipline or area of enterprise is much less useful than it was in times gone by. In The Weightless Society (2000), Charles Leadbeater explains the reason for this by exploding the myth that we are becoming a more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. Leadbeater’s view is that we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that we have a much less intimate knowledge of the technologies that we use every day than our forebears had, and will continue to experience a growing gap between what we know and what knowledge is embedded in our manufactured environment. In simple terms, we are much more ignorant in relative terms than our predecessors.

But Leadbeater makes a further point about our increasing relative ignorance that is highly significant for teaching and learning. It is that we can and must put this ignorance to work – to make it useful – to provide opportunities for ourselves and others to live innovative and creative lives. “What holds people back from taking risks”, he asserts, “is often as not …their knowledge, not their ignorance” (p.4). Useful ignorance, then, becomes a space of pedagogical possibility rather than a base that needs to be covered. ‘Not knowing’ needs to be put to work without shame or bluster… Our highest educational achievers may well be aligned with their teachers in knowing what to do if and when they have the script. But as indicated earlier, this sort of certain and tidy knowing is out of alignment with a script-less and fluid social world. Out best learners will be those who can make ‘not knowing’ useful, who do not need the blueprint, the template, the map, to make a new kind of sense. This is one new disposition that academics as teachers need to acquire fast – the disposition to be usefully ignorant.

As a parent, and I know I keep coming back to this lens more and more these days, I want my kids and their teachers to be “usefully ignorant.” It’s the basis of inquiry, and that type of learning can’t happen unless we give up this notion that we can “know” the answer and that it can be tested in a neat little short answer package. The world truly is “script-less”, and the more my kids are able to flourish with “not knowing” the more successful they will be. Just that concept will require a lot of “unlearning” when it comes to teaching and schools in general.

So how are you unlearning teaching?

A P20 Presentation to KASA with Dean Mary John O'Hair

2010-07-26T16:31:04Z

Dean O'Hair and I presented on P20 to the Kentucky Association of School Administrators last Thursday at the Galt House in Louisville. As always, I recorded it for later viewing and, remember, you can subscribe to all my lectures on my iTunes channel.

Content is No Longer King: Curation is King

2010-07-17T17:22:48Z

"Content is King" -- no longer. Today, the world has changed. "Curation Is King." Ok, I hear all the content-makers sharpening their knives to take me on. I'm ready. First, why content is dead: Content used to be the high quality media that came out of the very pointed end of the funnel. Articles in the New York Times. Movies from Miramax. Thursday night comedy from NBC. Books published by Simon and Schuster. Creative folks wrote pitches, treatments, ...

Amid the silly Videos and Spam are the Roots of a new Reading and Writing Culture

2010-06-07T15:58:14Z

“Does the Internet Make you Smarter” is the title of an article by Clay Shirky, published by the Wall Street Journal Online.

I wasn’t that satisfied with the title after I read the article, since I seem to have “gotten out of it” something different. The tagline,

Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture

seemed to be more fitting as to what what point Clay Shirky was trying to make in the article…but maybe that is only what I read into it…

Shirky’s article spoke to me. While reading it, I seemed reassured that we are on the right path. All new media and all new innovations NEED time to be experimented with, to find their niche, to develop norms and guidelines to “use it for good” and for learning. It is not something that happens naturally or instantly. Shirky gives several examples from history that make the point that with the onset of new media, there will be a tsunami of “mediocre materials” until “higher level projects” emerge.

It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

On the different token, I am experimenting with new forms of “learning” from/through different media. I blogged about “Learning from a Book“, as I took Curriculum21 by Heidi Hayes Jacobs apart and remixed my understanding as visuals.

With Shirky’s article, I chose to use an app called “Sundry Notes” on my iPad and take notes, quotes, insert clipart, highlight and arrange ideas in sequence that made sense to me. This process of “taking the article apart” and re-arranging/re-mixing it helps me to digest, make sense of and connect concepts.

What if we allowed students to take books, units, articles, or lectures apart and re-mix them with and in media that make sense to them?

A hierarchy of failure worth following

2010-07-21T10:07:36Z

Shared by Scott
How are we failing? Are we failing in the right ways?

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.

FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.

FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.

FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.

FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.

Children Are More Likely To Own A Cell Phone Than A Book, Study Says

2010-05-26T16:27:17Z

Almost nine-in-10 pupils now have a mobile compared with fewer than three-quarters who have their own books in the home, it was disclosed.

The study by the National Literacy Trust suggested a link between regular access to books outside school and high test scores.

Is the Internet Making Us Smarter or Dumber? Yes.

2010-06-06T18:08:18Z

Is the Internet making us smarter or dumber? The Wall Street Journal put together a couple of provocative essays this weekend looking at that question: one from Nick Carr, whose most recent book “The Shallows” argues that the Internet is making us less attentive and in general less intelligent (Wired has an excerpt here), and the other from Clay Shirky, whose latest book “Cognitive Surplus” argues that the Internet is on balance a good thing for both individuals and society. So who wins this debate? Arguably only the reader, who might find something worthwhile in both viewpoints. Certainly neither one wins by a landslide — primarily because both of them are right.

To be fair, Carr’s essay is the most pointed, in that he refers to scientific studies that show the brains of multitasking Internet users change as a result of their behavior, and says that such changes are making them less intelligent (at least according to some definitions of that word). Among other things, they are described as being weaker in “higher-order cognitive processes” such as “mindfulness, reflection, critical thinking and imagination” (just how someone measures a quality like mindfulness or reflection isn’t clear). The scattered and shallow thinking of Internet users is contrasted with the virtues of book reading, because Carr’s says the written page “promotes contemplativeness.”

Shirky’s piece has less obvious research in it, and more of an impressionistic take on what digital media is doing to us as a society. His main point is that a tool like the Internet — just like its closest relative in terms of disruption, the Gutenberg printing press — brings with it both the good and the bad, and the two can’t necessarily be untangled from each other. The increased freedom to create that the Internet brings with it, he says, “means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible.” In other words, Shirky argues that we will become smarter as a society, if not individually.

More on WWDC

But Carr’s conclusion isn’t just that the Internet is making us stupid — in an interview with The Atlantic, he says that while there may be benefits to the new digital age of media consumption, it will make us “less interesting,” presumably because we won’t be having as many contemplative moments. This reminded me of my friend Paul Kedrosky’s recent essay at The Edge about the benefits of the Internet on his thinking process. In it, he argued that while he was concerned about the impact of the Internet on his ability to “think big, deep thoughts,” he had come to the conclusion that it was on balance a positive thing, because of the way it allowed for more “collisions and connections” between ideas — some of which inevitably led to new ones. As he wrote:

The democratization of connections, collisions and therefore thinking is historically unprecedented. We are the first generation to have the information equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for ideas. And if that doesn’t change the way you think, nothing will.

Anyone who has spent much time on the Internet — especially using tools such as Twitter or any other social media outlet — can probably sympathize with Carr’s comments about how has felt himself becoming more distracted by ephemeral things, more stressed, less deep. And the idea that multitasking is inherently impossible is also an attractive one. But are these things making us dumber, or are they simply challenging us to become smarter in new ways? I would argue they are doing both. To the extent that we want to use them to become more intelligent, they are doing so; but the very same tools can just as easily be used to become dumber and less informed, just as television can, or the telephone or any other technology, including books.

So is the Internet making us smarter or dumber? I would say the correct answer is yes. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user rstrawser