AssortedStuff

This is a long, rambling post since it draws on several different sources, together with a large mixture of thoughts from last weekend’s EduCon (and I’m not entirely sure I’m making my points :-).

Anyway, let’s start with a post from earlier this week in which Seth Godin asks Who Will Save Us?

He’s discussing ongoing efforts to rescue the publishing industry but it got me thinking about how much has been written around the theme of “saving” public education as well.

And Godin’s warning to media applies equally to us.

If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

Politicians and education “experts” talk a lot about school improvement and reforming the system.

But take a closer look at their ideas makes clear that their overall goal is to maintain the status quo, and make it even quoier if possible.

Evidence of that comes from the article from the Post, also this week, about possible “fixes” to NCLB and especially changes in the adequate yearly progress (AYP) provisions of that law.

Much remains unclear about how Obama would hold schools accountable for results. Experts call it unlikely that the president would seek to junk a results-oriented system that is ingrained in 50 states and the District. In fact, the administration will still rely on those data to compile lists of struggling schools it wants to turn around.

Except that “results-oriented system” doesn’t work. And the administration won’t get rid of it because it’s “ingrained”.

Even worse, that ingrained system, with “results” based entirely on high-stakes standardized testing, has actually made American education worse over the past decade, by obsessively narrowing both the curriculum and teaching methods to focus only the tested topics.

So now we come back to EduCon and specifically to an unscheduled discussion that followed the session I facilitated.

One that boiled down to the idea that the conference gathers together some very smart and dedicated educators for intelligent conversations, but where’s the change to make all these ideas a reality?

Will is asking very much the same thing in his reflections on the weekend.

But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it.

It was a theme that was running around in my head for those three days and one that I heard from others attending, especially those of us who have been part of this event going back to 2007 EduBloggerCon where the idea for EduCon was born.

Ok, what do we do about it? How do we turn lots of good ideas into action?

How do we get our communities to realize that the top down process of teaching and learning no longer works?

That students must take an integral role in both the planning and execution of their own education?

That we need to trust teachers make good decisions for their students and not just follow the script leading to the spring tests?

If you’ve read this far, you probably understand that I have many more questions than answers, and even those need a whole lot more thought.

The ideal would be that this growing EduCon community turns into a grass roots effort to truly change American education one school/district at a time.

Of course, it’s going to take more effort than just getting together once a year to talk and connecting through social media the rest of the time. Maybe the theme of next year’s EduCon needs to be, in the words of the King, a little less talk and a lot more action.

Because it’s frustrating to watch our “leaders” (local, state, national, take your pick) pushing programs to “save” American education when it should be clear that our kids need something better than reinforcing the status quo.

change, education, educon, reform, school

Next weekend I’ll be heading up to EduCon 2.2, the most unique conference I’ve ever attended.

For one thing, it’s relatively small, although with 500 people registered this year, it will be a little more crowed than the first one in 2008 where 75 or so of us showed up, not knowing what to expect.

But the big difference with EduCon is that the sessions, for the most part, are not lecture/demo presentations or hands-on workshops. And it is not a conference about technology.

The concept of EduCon-founder, and principal of the Science Leadership Academy, Chris Lehman was to get a bunch of interested and interesting educators together to have conversations about how we can change schools to better fit the way our students learn and the real world in which they live, as well as to grow networks of people who would continue those discussions long after the conference ended.

I’ll be leading one of those discussions and, while my topic does address technology, it’s concerned with why schools have remained isolated islands of status quo over the past twenty years, while the rest of the world has been fundamentally altered by computers, networks, and communications tools.

My session is titled “Why Has Technology Failed to Bring Substantial Change to American Schools (and what can we do about it)?” and this is the short description, the in-50-words-or-less explanation of the session in a way that will attract an audience.

The authors of Disrupting Class ask “Why haven’t computers brought about a transformation in schools the way they have in other areas of life?”. Excellent question. Join us for a discussion of what we can do to change that situation. Bring any and all ideas to share.

The proposal for this session grew from my growing frustration with American education and the two-faced embrace of techie tools while at the same time rejecting the transformative possibilities they offer.

Schools in the US have spent billions of dollars in just the past decade to buy laptops and software, install networks, connect classrooms to internet, and train teachers.

However, walk down the halls of your average American school, especially high schools, and you’re likely to see a teacher-directed, lecture-demo formatted lesson, with little or no technology use by either teacher or students.

Over the past few years, the most visible example of technology use in the classrooms of our overly-large school district has been interactive whiteboards, devices which chain teaching to standards of the previous century.

Talk all you want about “student engagement” and “interactivity”, these boards are little more than expensive electronic extensions of blackboards and chalk, controlled by the teacher, and locking the learning focus on them, not the students.

Anyway, IWBs are a topic for another rant and only a small piece of the discussion that I’d like to have in Philly.

If you’re coming to EduCon, please join us at 12:30 Sunday afternoon for what I hope will be a wonderful exchange of ideas on this topic.

And don’t think you must agree with the premise to participate. Feel free to let me know that I’m full of crap and that I’ve missed the mark entirely. Bring evidence of my cluelessness, however. :-)

If you’re not able to be at the conference in person, you can still attend and join the discussion online through the generous efforts of Elluminate who will be providing an interactive room for each session.

Links to the Elluminate rooms will be available from the conversations page on the EduCon site.

Now, if they can just keep the snowy weather out of town for the weekend, we’ll be golden.

chris lehmann, conferences, conversation, educon, philadelphia, schools, sla

Since EduCon 2.2 proposals were due today, of course I submitted mine just a few hours ago. Nothing new… I usually do my other homework assignments at the last minute as well. :-)

EduCon is something unique among the many education-related conferences out there.

Sessions don’t involved being lectured at or about playing with the coolest new tools. It’s all about the “opportunity to discuss and debate ideas” dealing with just about anything to do with education and learning.

Anyway, my little proposal borrows ideas from the book Disrupting Class, in which the authors note that we’ve spent a lot of money on computers for classrooms while getting very little change.

In the book Disrupting Class, the authors make the observation “While people have spent billions of dollars putting computers into schools, it has resulted in little change in how students learn.”

They also ask “Why haven’t computers brought about a transformation in schools the way they have in other areas of life?”

Excellent question. Certainly there are plenty of answers, including this one also from Disrupting Class “…the way schools have employed computers has been perfectly predictable, perfectly logical – and perfectly wrong.”

But the focus of this session will not be about placing blame. Instead let’s discuss what we can do and what is being done to change things. Come join us for a discussion centered on these ideas and bring any and all ideas, whether from your personal experience or elsewhere. Invite your friends and colleagues who aren’t attending EduCon to be part of the conversation from wherever they are.

With any luck, the program will see fit to include that in the agenda. I did a session at the first iteration of EduCon and it was a great experience.

If you haven’t made your plans to attend EduCon, do it now. If you’re not able to come to Philly in January, watch for how to participate from wherever you are through a variety of back channels.

conferences, educon, philadelphia, proposal

For the opening panel discussion at EduCon 2.1, the question on the table was “What is the Purpose of School?” and variations on that question were in the air all weekend.

Sorry, despite all the very smart people in the building, I never heard anyone come up with the definitive answer.

However, Seth Godin, who is supposed to be a marketing guru (he is fun to read), also offers his take on the same question: What is school for?, a “starter list” of 27 items.

Some are straight out of the vague mission statements written by many schools (“Become an informed citizen”), some are brutally honest (“Give kids something to do while parents work”).

Godin’s list is meant to be provocative, of course, but he’s certainly right about one thing.

This is a discussion we as a society need to have.

Certainly it needs to happen before we spend any more time and money on shuffling-the-deck-chairs-type school reform.

educon, reform, schools, seth godin

During his session at EduCon, Bud Hunt tried to make the case that hyperlinks might be adjectives.

At the time I wasn’t convinced (more likely I didn’t understand :-), but in this post he offers some good examples of the concept.

Aside from that, the discussion about writing for the web that Bud lead was a highlight of last weekend.

[Hopefully videos from this and other EduCon sessions will be posted soon]

educon, writing process

At EduCon this past weekend, we had lots of conversations about social networking and personal learning networks, and especially about how to bring our students, colleagues, bosses and others into the mix.

However, I’m not sure wikis, Twitter, live blogging, Ning, Skype, and the other tools we were using are the right ones to introduce newbies to the concept.

I’ve been thinking about all this as I finish tomorrow’s presentation for some of our librarians here in the overly-large school district.

The session is advertised to be about managing information overload using Google Reader and Delicious (feel free to rummage through at my resource page).

But these tools are more than data containers. Their sharing capabilities make them entry-level social networking tools based on concepts (subscriptions and bookmarks) that, hopefully, are easier for beginners to grasp.

Anyway, that’s the latest angle I’m trying. We’ll see how well it works.

I wonder what the next stage in the process of succumbing to network addiction should be?

delicious, educon, google reader, social networks

Before I can go to sleep (and while the pills are beating back my headache), I need to post a couple of thoughts on this weekend’s EduCon 2.1.

None of this will be about the actual content of the discussions. I need to spend some time reviewing the archives and my notes, not to mention the posts and tweets by other members of the group.

After the excellent experience last year, I was a little worried that the sophomore event might suffer from growth.

That’s what happened to EduBloggerCon, the NECC pre-event that was a wonderful meet-up with 70 people in its first year. When the numbers jumped to 200+ the second time around, it was more like another day of conference sessions than a collection of discussions.

The same thing didn’t happen to EduCon.

Chris and his planners did a great job of growing the number of participants, adding some additional structure, and still keeping the conversational feeling.

Something else that’s been running around my head most of the weekend, is that I need to do some additional work on my personal network.

At a minimum, that probably means rebuilding my aggregator and Twitter feed. It will probably also include some re-evaluation of what I’m doing with this space.

Anyway, that’s enough reflecting for tonight. More EduCon thought dumping later.

In the meantime, the dates for EduCon 2.2 have already been set for January 29 – 31, 2010, again in beautiful Philadelphia (sorry to whoever tweeted about a change in venue to the Bahamas :-).

If you’re at all interested in the reform of public education, plan to join us. Better yet, be part of planning the weekend.

conference, educon, philadelphia

That was the topic for the panel last night at EduCon and I’m not even going to attempt a summary of the discussion. Too many good thoughts in too little time.

Hopefully, a video will be posted sometime soon so you can see for yourself and I can catch what I missed the first time.

However, one common thread jumped out at me during the conversation.

All the distinguished members of the panel who spoke tonight are very successful people who seem to have gotten where they are in spite of school (at least when it comes to K12) rather than because of it.

They all spoke of one or two teachers who turned them on to their particular field or of other pivotal experiences that were outside the normal process of what we call “school”.

None of them spoke lovingly of the lectures they sat through, homework assignments, or the standardized tests they had to take.

Just a thought to start the day.

educon, schools

Last week Chris stealthly posted some basic information about the 2009 of Educon, version 2.1, to be held once again at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

The dates are January 23-25 and, as with the inaugural edition last January, he’s inviting the world to help with the planning.

The first Educon was a great experience and I’m very much looking forward to the next one.

conferences, educon, philadelphia