Ed-Tech

ISTEVision has published my presentation at NECC -- Progressive Pedagogy and 21st Century Tools. And here's the the wiki that accompanies the session. Enjoy!

[Couldn't resist Scott McLeod's call for Leadership Day posts...]

So... I'm going to come at this from a strange place. I think most folks in the edu-blog world would agree that trying to affect meaningful change is frustrating, and at one time or another, we've been incredibly frustrated by the pace of chance -- or even convincing others of the need for change.

But let's assume one is in a situation where the obstacles to change have been overcome, and the need for change has been understood -- then what?

I think one of the most important things we can do at that moment is to be very deliberate -- and even dare I say slow -- in how we manifest that change.

Be it technological reform, pedagogical reform, policy reform, I think the road is littered with too many failures because leaders did not allow most people to follow them.

I had the opportunity to meet Ron Sofo - Superintendent of the Freedom Area School District near Pittsburgh. He's been there for decades, and he and I spoke at length about how he took an initiative and rolled it out over several years... about building teacher buy-in, parent buy-in... about building a broad coalition... about listening and changing. And ultimately, about success.

Granted, most of us don't have years to make change happen, but we also don't have the ability to make mistakes because we rushed.

So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion.

• Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to...
  
• Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up.
• Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you.
  
• Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why.
  
• Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect.
  
• Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense.
• Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea. 
• Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a new innovation and then getting everything but the tech side of it right. It took us a year to get our website even close to where we wanted it at SLA, fortunately, we got enough right that folks kept at it.)
  
• Finally, keep communicating throughout the process.
  

There are too many reasons effective innovation seems so hard in education. We should make sure that we, as change agents, are thoughtful and deliberate enough to make sure that we aren't one of them.

Tags: leadershipday09

... but first we have to ask ISTE to include him.

ISTE will be having a moderated debate as a Keynote Panel on June 30th. The six panelists have not been announced yet, and this is a perfect chance to lobby for one of the best voices we have to advocate for the intersection of progressive pedagogy and technology. I have known Gary for several years now, and I've even been lucky enough to be on a panel with him at EduCon 2.1. Gary speaks passionately and eloquently about the schools we need, and his debates at EduCon and with Will Richardson have sparked dialogue long after the events are over.

So sign the petition, and ask (dare I say urge) ISTE to include Gary on the NECC Keynote Panel.

Tags: NECC

This comes from Tom Hoffman who asked for some linkage to spread the word about this.

Harvard has created a way for schools to report and therefore aggregate a list of all the sites getting blocked. They call it HerdictWeb. And Tom has a very good idea:

We'll be doing this at SLA. Who else wants to join?

Tags: filtering

I'm in the K12OnlineConference chat session, listening to Dean Shareski announce all the presenters from the past week, and Dean was noticing how many amazing Maine educators there are who are really pushing the envelope in educational technology.

There are. Of that, there can be no doubt.

But do we think that Maine, somehow, grows better teachers, or is there something systemic that has made it a fertile ground for teachers' creativity with technology?

Remember, Maine has the most extensive laptop initiative in the country. And when teachers have the tools, the time and the training, great things can happen.

Systemic change can work. If we want to change outcomes for kids, let's change the systems and structures -- and assumptions -- under which we currently work.

Tags: 1:1, Maine, laptops

[O.k. -- this too is an insanely geeky post. I promise, I'll write about education theory or EduCon or something like that soon. But for now, I've got my geek on.]

This is a very simple block in Moodle -- my first custom-designed Moodle block -- that makes it very easy to put a link on a Moodle course directly to the related DrupalEd course/group. As with before, this uses the Moodle variable "Shortname" and corresponds that with the "URL Alias" in Drupal. Those have to correspond or this doesn't work. 

And if you are into learning how to make custom blocks in Moodle, this page of Block Documentation on the Moodle.org site was incredibly helpful and important, and I really just used their template.

In <site>/moodle/blocks, create a directory called drupal_link. Then create a file block_drupal_link.php -- here is that code:


Then, create a file called config_global.html -- this is what will allow you to have global settings for the block. The global setting we create here is the root of the drupaled site, so that it's the same for all courses. (You could make this editable, course by course, but I didn't want to because we only have one drupal site.) Here's that code:

Once you do this, you may need to go to main moodle admin page for moodle to recognize the block, but otherwise, you should see the block in the Administration -> Blocks page. Edit the Settings with the root of your DrupalEd install (include the trailing slash), and you should be able to just add the block to any course and have the link show up. It will show up as the name of the course, rather than the URL. I thought that looked prettier.

Also... one silly issue that I'm wondering about. For some reason, the Block name is enclosed in [[ ]] brackets. I don't know why. Any ideas?

Tags: moodle, killer app, drupal, killerapp, programming

[Be aware -- this is by FAR the geekiest post I've written in a long, long time.]

Thought I'd share this for anyone who is trying to use both Moodle and Drupal. We just figured out a quick way to create a link on a DrupalEd Group page to a corresponding Moodle course.

Here's how:

This assumes that a) you have CCK and Computed Field installed

First, give every DrupalEd course an automatic alias that is the same as your Moodle short-course name. (Yes, right now, we have to do that by hand. That needs to change eventually.)

Then, in Content Management -> Content Types -> Course -- create a new field called field_moodle_link (or something like that) and select Field Type -- Computed and create the field.

In the next page that pops up, fill in the Label with whatever you want the label to be on the Drupal Group page. Then I chose "Required" under data settings, but I'm not 100% sure that's necessary. And under Computed Code, enter this:

Make sure "Display this field" is checked, and I use this as my display format:

And then save it.

Once it's saved, click "Manage Fields" and make sure that your new field has a lower numerical value than the Highlighted Content Field, so that it's at the top of the Drupal page.

What I'd like to do eventually, is figure out how to make that link appear in the Group Details block, but I haven't figured out how to edit that. Anyone who knows, I'd love to know.

In the meantime, drop me a note if you find this useful... or make it better.

(And now, off to figure out Moodle blocks. And yes, I'm still a principal, why do you ask?)

Tags: killerapp, drupal, programming

I've really enjoying playing with Drupal the past few weeks. We've done a site redesign at SLA, and now our DrupalEd install is our front page. I've learned a ton about Drupal, and while it does have a steeper learning curve than a lot of other systems, it is insanely flexible and powerful.

I've learned how to configure menus, ported the homework checker from Moodle (the first piece of real interactivity between Moodle and Drupal at SLA), configured a Upcoming Events calendar so that we can have that as a sidebar on the side of our page, posted our Student Handbook in wiki-style format, created a private faculty handbook wiki that we will continue to build together over time, and generally tweaked the site so that it closer and closer to what I want our web site to be. (And as soon as we have a student who is willing to take a stab at designing a sleek custom theme, we'll redesign the look, too.)

As we continue our work with SchoolTool, and as both SchoolTool and I play with interoperability between SchoolTool, Moodle and Drupal, we will move closer and closer to the Killer App that I've been dreaming about. I've no doubt now that Drupal is the absolute right pick as the content management system for that app.

(oh... and just a huge shout-out to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey. He is as patient and available mentor as a person could want with Drupal. If you need a consultant or you have specific needs for a DrupalEd install, hire him. He is a teacher first which means that a) he can teach how to use this stuff, and b) his solutions make sense for schools and the classroom. Without the changes in Drupal that he has made by creating DrupalEd, there's no way I would have seen the power of Drupal in schools. And without his patient mentoring, there's no way we would have been ready to move Drupal to be the front of our website. Thank you, Bill!)

Tags: SLA, drupal, open source, killer app

My latest post over at The Faculty Room is up. It's in response to Scott McLeod's Leadership Day 2008 call, and it's entitled A Whole New School:

What is Good Technology Education Leadership?

(Use back of page if necessary.)

I’ve been grappling with this question because the question itself is so vast that to answer it in a blog post seems somehow impossible.

The simple answer is that good technology educational leadership is no different than good educational leadership; that the choices we make with technology education should be deliberate, thoughtful and in line with the overall educational goals of our organization.

Read the rest over there.

Wharton Professor and long-time digital citizen Kevin Werbach (anyone else here old enough to remember his Bare Bones Guide to HTML?) posts the Ten Challenges for the Network Age on the Supernova 2008 blog. He is using these ten challenges as the framework for the Supernova conference this year, and while I am often wary of education thinking that we just have to take the questions that business is pondering and apply them to education, I've known Kevin through various digital communities for around fifteen years, and I greatly respect the way he considers issues. He does look at these questions from a media / communications lens, and that lens has some powerful ramifications for education as well. With that... here are some thoughts on his ten challenges:

Scarcity and Abundance
(Both are sources of value, yet they cannot coexist.)

For education, clearly this challenge is particularly relevant -- This is probably a blog post or three all to itself. (O.k. -- they all might be.) But I'd define this challenge in this way -- How do we handle the abundance of inputs and outputs available to our students given the scarcity of two major problems in our schools: Allowed / Accepted Channels of Access (number of computers per child, bandwidth, filtering, restrictions on publishing, etc...) and time.

Choice and Coordination
(Users are in control, but don't they need guides to avoid being overwhelmed?)

I love that it's not just education that is struggling with this. Kevin hits on the ultimate pedagogical question of the 21st century (and probably of the 20th, too, but that's another story.) How we help our students learn to navigate the Towel of Babel that is the internet these days is probably one of the most important things we can teach our kids. Smart, ethical use of information is everything. Kids do have more information at their fingertips than ever before in human history. More than ever before, they need teachers, mentors, guides, to teach them how to handle that. It is my contention that as educators realize that they no longer are or need to be the ultimate arbiter of all content in the classroom, what we must realize is that we now have a much more difficult and important job to do -- we must teach wisdom.

Aggregation and Fragmentation
(Network effects mean that the big players get bigger, but at the same time, markets increasingly specialize and personalize.)

Harder to apply this one to education on a "tech" level, but I'll take this one in a different direction. We spent the last century building comprehensive high schools where the big players did get bigger, such that you now have high schools of 4,000 - 5,000 students in many places in our country. (Not just urban -- the "Regional HS" is a staple around here.) Over the past ten years, in our cities, we are seeing the rise of the small school movement (and probably also the charter school movement), where schools do specialize around themes or learning styles or ideas. This movement is, in my opinion, nascent and still very fragile, but it's an interesting moment in time where school admissions are becoming market driven and schools are having to create more and more of a personalized experience for students.

This, of course, is also happening at a time where the big players have gotten bigger and bigger. "Data driven decision-making" (in quotes because I still firmly believe that much of the data schools are using is poor and therefore we're making bad decisions) and NCLB and, sadly, technology, has meant that every test score can now be immediately published. We are seeing, in schools, technology used administratively as big brother, with more and more standardization being pushed top-down from the federal, state and district levels, and sadly, the very tools that could free education are often used to bind it. This is the paradox that we have yet to solve.

Stability and Disruption
(True innovation requires disruption, but disruption can be painful and costly, especially where investment and trust are significant.)

Again, this one hits education right on the head -- perhaps more powerfully and painfully than it does business. As educators, we must be hyper-aware that we cannot be revolutionaries at the expense of our students. One of the very real -- and not all that visionary -- parts of our job is to prepare the kids for college. Therefore, we must be very careful with the amount of disruption we cause because we must still create institutions that are recognized by the very slow-to-change higher-ed institutions that then select our students. This is one of the reasons that we so much more innovation in the urban districts than the suburban districts. Urban districts, by and large, are not viewed as stable, there isn't much investment and there isn't much trust, so disruption is easier, because there's more willingness to take risks.

We must take risks in education. We must challenge the tried-and-true way of educating students, but we must do it thoughtfully and carefully and transparently, because we don't have the luxury of just "going out of business." Every school that makes those choices poorly affects the lives of the students who honored that school with their choice to go there. This is -- as much as any other reason -- we must always, always, always humble ourselves before the enormity of the task in front of us.

Behavior and Rationality
(People don't always act according to models of rationality, especially when connected to one another, but our economic frameworks assume they do.)

People don't always act rationally, and students are people too. Ergo, students don't always act rationally. This is not a shock to any educator or parent. The fact that this translates to -- and is perhaps augmented by -- their behavior online is also not a shock. But it's also true that if we substitute "educational" for "economic" we also have a problem that our educational frameworks assume some level of rationality as well. It often seems obvious to teachers that "If student does this, they receive that." And yet, that very simple causal relationship (think, "Do you homework, do well in class.") is often missed by kids. I'd argue that is because those simple causalities often aren't, but again, that's another blog post.

How this relates to the way schools adapt to the digitial world is simply this -- we no longer have the luxury of assuming that we don't have to teach about this stuff. Every school should and must teach students the idea that "We are the stories we tell." Every school should and must teach digital ethics, teach the idea of creating a deliberate and thoughtful version of ourselves online. Every school should and must challenges students to think about their behavior -- on and off-line -- as if the world depended on it, because, quite honestly, it does.

O.k. -- this blog post is now a LOT longer than I expected it to be, and it's 60 degrees out here on the last weekday of Spring Break. Part Two is coming... thank you to Kevin for challenging me to think and write about this. Suffice to say, if these are your ten challenges, I think Supernova 2008 will be an amazing conference. When are you running one for educators, Kevin?

Technorati Tags: kevin_werbach, Network_Age