Generation YES Blog

Stage: A whole new world
You hear an inspiring keynote at a conference, read a book, or see a colleague use technology in their classroom. It clicks with something inside you.

Stage: Connection
You try to understand the role of technology in your life as an educator. Coincidently, you start to see this topic pop up all around you. It seems to be haunting you. You set up a blog reader and add a few feeds. You find a guru whose words help you make sense of the murky picture.

You read books, start your own blog, or change something in your everyday life. You go to an educational technology conference and attend every session.

Stage: Stepping into the void
You implement a project you never would have attempted before. You get more and more into the subject and are amazed that there is such a vast network out there. You add more blog feeds, listen to podcasts, buy books, start a wiki, subscribe to magazines, and join other networks and conversations. You wonder why grad school never felt like this.

You feel renewed as an educator and lifelong learner. Your colleagues wonder what’s gotten into you.

Stage: Firehose
You try too many new tools and join too many networks. You start to resent it when someone introduces something new. You hate your pile of unread stuff. Your blog feeds start to overwhelm you. No one comments on your best blog posts. It seems there is just too much to keep track of, and it never stops.

You get a bit depressed that you are so late coming to the party.

Stage: The big picture overwhelms
You wonder if what you are doing is just a waste of time. You find analogies to the failure of school in everyday occurrences. Your regular friends look at you funny when you start using words like “pedagogy” and railing about the “factory model of education” in everyday conversation.

You find that it’s not just technology-using educators who feel this way, that education reformers have been saying things like this for decades, even centuries.

You are sure that “school” cannot be fixed.

Stage: Ennui
You commiserate with your network about people who don’t “get it.” People who are coming late to the party annoy you. You tire of the clichés that seemed so fresh at first. You say things like, “If I hear about sage on the stage / guide on the side (or digital natives/immigrants, or anything 2.0, or insert your own pet peeve here) one more time, I’ll kill someone!” You meet your gurus and find out they are just human, and maybe really wrong about some things.

You stop going to conference sessions. Someone accuses you of being in the “in” group.

Stage: Renewal
You accept that you won’t ever be able to keep up with the hype machine and stop worrying about it. Your project goes well and your plans expand.

You start to narrow down your areas of interest and explore them deeper.

Stage: Building expertise
You attempt something on a wide scale, collaborating with other like-minded educators. You find renewed energy as you work with students or teachers and see things change. You find books, even some written decades or centuries ago that support your beliefs. You become better able to articulate the “why” of all this. You think about going back to school. You find experts outside of your newly constructed network.

People look to you for advice and expertise.

Stage: The circle of life
You connect with new people in their own early stages and give them guidance as they figure out what you have figured out. You mentor someone. A student says you’ve changed their life. You learn something new and feel that spark. You rededicate yourself to changing what you can. You think that if these ideas can take hold, even if it has to happen one person at a time, there is hope for the concept of school after all.

You use the phrase, “sage on the stage vs. guide on the side” - see someone’s eyes light up and forgive yourself.

Sylvia

PS Of course, this is not a recommendation, aimed at any person in particular, or suggests a linear path. Sometimes I feel like this all in one day! Hope you all take it in the spirit it’s intended and get a chuckle out of it.

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed - What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there…“ How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom - but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

• The rewards of serendipity
• Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
• The importance of socializing
• Choice
• Freeing up time constraints
• Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia

One of the best things about going to conferences like NECC is meeting up with old friends and finding out they are still doing the same awesome things that made them friends in the first place.

Here are a couple of really old friends… Dennis is going to kill me for that, especially since he is looking all svelte these days…

Pictured here are (from left) Dennis Harper, founder of Generation YES, Scott Parker, teacher and tech coordinator from Hill City, Kansas, and Ed Gragert, executive director of the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN.)

Scott uses both GenYES and iEARN in his schools. His GenYES students teach students and teachers how to access iEARN global projects and use them in every classroom and in every subject. I’ve written about Scott before - Longfellow Middle School wins Kansas in the World Award for Excellence in International Education is just one example.

Ed Gragert and Dennis Harper were both named to the 2008 Edutopia’s Daring Dozen list, which has their images staring at each other across the page as if they were plotting to change the world! How did the Edutopia art director know that’s EXACTLY what happens when you get the two of them together?

iEARN was also prominently featured in the NECC Tuesday morning keynote by Jim Carleton And Mali Bickley. We heard that people really enjoyed seeing the variety of student projects that they showcased. Real work by real students and real teachers - what a concept! (You can get the webcast of the keynote here. Note: I have not tried to watch it myself, and I did hear that the site is very slow. Maybe the traffic has eased somewhat.)

Another treat - a podcast interview with Ed Gragert from The Teachers’ Podcast — The New Generation of Ed Tech PD blog. If you’ve never heard of iEARN, take a listen to this. In 20 years, over 20,000 schools and organizations, over 1 million students in 115 countries have participated in iEARN global collaboration projects. Students connecting, collaborating, and changing the world, one person at a time.

Here’s to good friends, old and new!

Sylvia

I got a message today from Carolyn Foote, aka technolibrary on Twitter, with a link to this article in the New York Times - High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom.

I’d almost forgotten that we’d gotten off on an interesting tangent at one of the NECC 2008 EdubloggerCon conversations. It was Will Richardson’s discussion group on Here Comes Everybody, the current bestselling book by Clay Shirky. Will has done a couple of terrific blog posts about this book (here’s one), and recently did an interview with the author.

We were talking about revolutions, and whether education is ready for one, and why is it taking so darn long when it’s so obvious that we need one. My comment was that most revolutions don’t happen for the right reasons, they often happen for disconnected reasons that somehow push a mass of people past a tipping point, or when something happens that shocks people out of behaviors that seem set in stone.

And in fact, my example was that gas prices may well be the catalyst for the educational revolution we’ve all been waiting for; that arguing for a revolution may well be a waste of time, but that being prepared may make all the difference.

Chris Lehmann’s recent blog post, Why Educational Change is Hard (and the limits of “Here Comes Everybody” for schools, brings this up in a different way. He writes, “We have to understand, in ways that Shirky describes, why low-risk mediocrity is almost predictably a better outcome than high-risk success.”

Revolutions stall at the gate because of this. Revolutions are high-risk endeavors. “The devil you know…” (which is such a good cliche that you don’t even have to finish the sentence.) Revolutions aren’t planned by committees of well-meaning citizens. Something unpredictable happens, and then history is written by the prepared and the lucky.

Will gas prices be the tipping point for an educational revolution? Perhaps. Will it be the revolution we want? Maybe. I certainly think it has the potential to deliver the kind of systemic, no-boundaries impact that could shake the basic structure of school as we know it.

Once you mess with the bus schedule, can the bell schedule be far behind?

Sylvia

Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has invited all bloggers to contribute to an annual tradition of his.

On July 4, 2008, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own.

In 2007 my Leadership Day post was:

Leadership Day - Leaders of the Future

Last year my focus was on the leader in every learner. This year I’d like to take a short stab at speaking directly to administrators.

Here’s my speech:

Just do it.

OK, that’s it.

Well really, there’s more, but that’s the gist of it. Technology is a fact of life. Allow it to be part of your students’ lives in ways they can control. Give your teachers time to explore new ideas about pedagogy as they introduce technology. Encourage your teachers to use it in ways that shift agency to the student. Fight the tyranny of the new but don’t get stuck in old ways either. Yes, we all know it’s a crazy, impossible balancing act. That’s the job.

Wake up, smell the coffee, the world is not going to wait for another committee meeting or district re-organization or the next version of Windows before it moves on. Don’t worry about China or economic globalization flat-world whatever, the reason to lead your school into the future is because there is no alternative.

Are you worried about parents? Give your students time and resources to produce creative technology projects that will be so compelling that it’s obvious you are doing the right thing. Your PR to the community is crucial. Calm the crazy ones down but don’t let them paralyze you. Ask parents who “get it” to be allies. I can’t tell you the number of times as a parent I found out too late that my kid’s principal changed good policies because of one unreasonable parent and never told anyone.

Are you worried that kids will be kids and something “bad” might happen? When has something bad not happened along with the good. Mistakes are learning experiences. Do the obvious - backups, necessary security but not more, and then if something happens, fix it. It’s up to you to lead with positive energy, not fear.

Are you wondering about “kids these days”? Don’t - they aren’t that different than we were. They want to be heard, loved, respected, taught, and challenged. Technology is just a part of their world, not a secret handshake.

Students are 92% of the population at your school site - to be a leader, you have to lead 100% of the population, not just the 8% who look like you. A leader understands who he/she is leading, but you don’t have to BE the same as them.

So if it feels better to figure out Facebook or ipods or your cell phone, that’s great. But that’s just part of the equation. It always astonishes me when educators go to conferences to hear student panels, and then rave about how much they learned. Why is this a surprise? YOUR KIDS ARE THE SAME, why aren’t you talking to them? They aren’t geniuses, they don’t have all the answers, but they ARE the answer. It’s up to you to unlock that puzzle.

And for goodness sakes, DO something.

Sylvia

Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog does a semi-annual round-up of edu-blogs, based on Technorati ranking. For the first time, the Generation YES blog made the list of top 50, coming in (drumroll…) dead last in spot number 54. Yes, we are number 54 of the top 50. (I can hear the crowd chanting in the distance… we’re number 54! … we’re number 54!)

Actually, I kind of like the irony of being beyond last. Because as Scott acknowledges, there is precious little on which to base a list like this. Scott looks for blogs with specific tags related to education. Technorati gives a “rank” based on far your blog is from the top of the list, and “authority” based on how many unique blogs link to yours. (Read how Technorati calculates authority) There’s not much else to measure, except of course which blog you personally like to read.

But doesn’t this seem awfully familiar in education - measuring what’s easy instead of what counts? Technorati rankings are the standardized testing of the blog world. And just as misleading.

For one thing, after I finished admiring my unique list position, I quickly scanned it for my favorite education blog - Bridging Differences. It’s NOT THERE. How could this be? I checked their Technorati authority and sure enough, it’s less than this blog. Impossible. That’s simply insane.

This blog is a back and forth conversation between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch. These women write beautiful, thoughtful pieces that show respect for the other while standing up for what they believe. They both have long and distinguished careers creating real change in education, and yet they stand on opposite, equally principled sides on many important issues. In my mind, it’s the best education blog, BY FAR. If you aren’t reading this blog, you are missing something special and important.

It’s so good, I often DON’T read it. What I mean is, when I see the “new post” indication for this blog, I save it until I have the time I know it deserves. I’m never disappointed.

So why doesn’t their blog have a higher Technorati authority? Probably because Deborah and Diane are not consciously part of the blogosphere. They don’t link much to others, they don’t announce new cool things, they don’t jump into the latest who-said-what-first discussion, and they don’t blog about blogging. Their blog is simply a vehicle for a substantive conversation about the most important issue of all — how will we make the world a better place for children.

Essentially, Bridging Differences is not making AYP. Bad, bad blog.

So here’s my thought for the day. Everybody link to Bridging Differences. Read it too. Go ahead, make my day, push me off the list!

Sylvia

Wow2! The Women of the Web discussion last night definitely deserved a double-WOW. Lots of great questions and conversation about GenYES and student empowerment, Seymour Papert, technology integration, project-based learning with technology, and more. The hour flew by, and reading the chat log today it looks like the backchannel was just as informative! Lots of great links and questions.

Here’s the podcast link on the WOW 2.0 website.

Many thanks to Sharon Peters, Dr. Cheri Toledo and Cheryl Oakes for being gracious hosts and expert interviewers. And good thoughts out to Jen Wagner who had to instead attend a funeral for a colleague.

Sylvia

The other day I wrote about the Ed in 08 event I attended in Washington DC last week. Although it was a nice event, I really didn’t get what I expected out of it. I expected more details about their platform.

The Ed in 08 campaign is a plan to get the presidential candidates to talk more about education and create more urgency in American politics for improving education. Their three policy pillars are:

• Higher standards
• More effective teachers
• More time and support for learning

Uh huh, sure - who isn’t for these. But what exactly do these phrases mean? There are a thousand interpretations, and a thousand more implementation ideas.

• It matters a great deal if “higher standards” means “more tests” or “national standards” or “punishing children”. In the printout of the 25 slide PowerPoint they handed out, there is only one bullet point that addresses this, “The next president must lead a national effort to create more common, rigorous standards that are benchmarked to the world’s best performing countries.”

• It matters a great deal if “more effective teachers” means “blowing up schools of education” as one speaker put it, or merit pay, which is another idea that sounds good but always ends up badly, or some other secret agenda. You can’t just wave a magic wand and pretend that effective teachers will appear out of nowhere.

• It matters a great deal if “more time” means more of the same, or if there is some coherent plan to make something different happen in that extra time.

As they say, the devil is in the details, and anyone who has lived and worked in the virtuous-sounding “No Child Left Behind” era knows that slogans and empty platitudes aren’t policy. Judging from the examples most often used at the Blogger Summit, what they are talking about is KIPP Academy. If that’s what they mean, they should just come out and say it.

I don’t understand how Ed in 08 expects people to get on this invisible bandwagon. If they are calling for national standards, or a national test, let’s hear it. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of empty words.

Sylvia

Last week I had a last minute opportunity to be in Washington DC for a day. It happened to be a day that Ed in 08 was having a Blogger Summit “…to discuss how the Internet is changing the discourse of education reform, and how those changes are affecting the 2008 presidential election.”

Before this event, I’d read a little about Ed in 08 - it seemed to me to be a lot of money to promote very little. They use a lot of vague words — “strong” schools, the need for “reform” without explaining what that means, “fixing” schools, and lots of scary statistics about kids, jobs and the economy.

What is Ed in 08?
Ed in 08 is a campaign run by an organization called “Strong American Schools” as an advocacy effort aimed at elevating discussion during the presidential election about the need for education reform. According to their site, “Strong American Schools is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, have provided grant funding for Strong American Schools. Our budget is estimated to be up to $60 million.”

Newt Gingrich
I was interested to hear Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as the lunch keynote. I’d heard him speak before, and even though his politics run more conservative than mine, he is a good speaker, and has interesting ideas that don’t come out of the usual political mill.

He actually seems to have spoken to teachers and children and thought about the consequences of policies. It was refreshing to hear a conservative who does more than spout scary statistics, “get tough” rhetoric and vague feel-good slogans. He talked about how top-down mandated curriculum stops creativity and relevance in the classroom. He made some good observations about the need for authentic assessment. Although there were some silly parts about how anyone involved with education can’t be part of the solution, his speech was the highlight of the day for me.

Ed in 08 - Missing in Action
What I did expect was to hear more about the Ed in 08 agenda, but that didn’t happen. The organizers seemed to have been so concerned that the audience would hate a hard sell that they decided to have no sell at all. They also seemed to have forgotten that if their aim was to get education bloggers talking and writing about Ed in 08, they needed to give us something to write about.

What I would have liked is to have a panel where the ideas were really discussed. If they really believe that teacher merit pay works to improve schools, where is the plan, the support, the research, or anything substantive? How would you solve the problems of what to base it on and how do you stop people from gaming the system? And more importantly, teachers consistently report that money is not a motivating factor in their career choice. Why is merit pay even being discussed as a solution? Is this just another rich-guy sound bite?

If they were worried about being fair and balanced, they could have brought in people on both sides of the issue and had a real discussion.

But instead, there was a string of panel discussions and presentations, none of them about Ed in 08. The oddest one was a panel of journalist bloggers who talked about blogging. I guess we were then supposed to blog about the bloggers blogging.

Less Talk About More Time, Please
The lamest speaker was an author who has written a book about how schools need a longer school day. His speech was about how he’s written a book about how schools need a longer school day. It needs to be longer because children will learn more. In their longer day. Because we need more time. To do more things. In a longer day. (This went on for quite a while, but you get the picture.)

There was precious little detail about what exactly happened during the extra time, but plenty of scary facts and statistics about how far behind American schools are and how dumb American children are. It’s amazing how much time there is for research meant to scare and how little time there is for research that supports the foregone conclusions.

Then, he showed a video and lo and behold, teachers and students talked about projects, hand-on learning, teachers discussing student work, teachers planning together, and administrators talking about all the fabulous things they do in their schools. Huh? Where did that come from!

Apparently, all that’s needed to improve schools is a couple of extra minutes, and then, lo and behold, everyone starts doing everything differently. 42 minutes – you get test prep, 43 minutes and **ding** everyone turns into a constructivist. I just found it completely naïve to assert that schools that can’t find the time during a normal school day to even attempt hands-on project-based learning, or can’t arrange for teachers to talk about lesson planning for 5 minutes will suddenly start doing these things for no other reason than there’s more time.

Teacher Bloggers in the Trenches
Anyway, a good part of the day was a a “teacher/bloggers in the trenches” panel. They talked about what their blogging has meant to them, their students, and the community, and showed how complex the subject of education is. There were no simple answers or feel-good slogans coming from these teachers. It was a terrific discussion that actually belied much of the rhetoric about kids that had gone before. By the way, please check out these great blogs (those that still exist!)

• Kilian Betlach - California teacher blogging (for now) at Teaching in the 408
• Will Okun - Teaches English and photography for Westside Alternative High School in Chicago. He writes about education and teaching as a guest blogger for nytimes.com. He also operates a photography website (www.wjzo.com) that features portraits of his students and their families
• Dave Ash - a Nevada school board member whose blog was shut down
• Dan Brown - wrote a book about his experiences as a rookie teacher. Blogs at the Huffington Post - here’s his overly dramatic post about the Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit.

What I Learned at Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit
At the end of the day, I have to say that I know nothing new about Ed in 08 that I can share with you. But so it’s not a complete waste of time, here’s what I learned:

• The Palomar Hotel in Washington DC is really nice.
• The food was much better than most education events. Thanks, Gates and Broad Foundation.
• Newt Gingrich is not just another right wing crackpot and I’ll pay more attention to what he has to say from now on.
• Alexeander Russo of This Week in Education is a really big guy, much larger in life than his blog profile photo. Here’s what he said about me in his blog, “They’re [sic] a woman here Sylvia Martinez with her laptop pointed towards the podium — she’s ustreaming the event (live streaming video). Very cool.” I guess that’s my 15 minutes of fame

More about the Ed in 08 agenda tomorrow…

Sylvia

P.S. I’m 0 for 2 this week with ustream.tv, a combination of pilot error and lack of a good mic/camera. Apparently there are good videos of the Ed in 08 events that will be posted soon. The Gingrich speech is worth listening to.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately among some edubloggers about their feeling that educators who blog have formed a community akin to an invitation-only cocktail party, that some “elites” deliberately exclude or insult newcomers, and that there should be rules to follow when blogging, Twittering, or participating in the various social networks that support educators as they experiment with new tech tools. I’m not even going to try to link to examples of this, it’s just fuel on the fire.

I’m no expert here, but my spidey sense tells me there’s something else going on. I think it’s “passion fatigue.”

Educators who felt their professional selves rekindled by technology, especially Web 2.0 technology jumped into communicating this passion to others. As time goes on, though, it gets harder to maintain that heightened sense of mission, especially when you just don’t see anything changing around you. Or worse, you start to see the enormity of turning the massive institution called school in any direction, much less the one you want. You start to wonder if your life’s work is all just so much spitting into the wind.

It’s so much easier to pick on little things, point fingers, proclaim rules, and jump into fights you wouldn’t tolerate in real life. It’s the virtual equivalent of library shushing. I’ve done it, I admit it, I’ve poked my nose in where it doesn’t belong and made comments that I shouldn’t have. Maybe I shouldn’t even say this, since someone is going to think that I’m complaining about them. But honestly, I’m not. Blog however you want. Comment however you want. Twitter, don’t Twitter, really, I’m not your mother.

I aspire to be both optimistic and realistic, do my best, and not give in to trivialities. Some days that happens. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” I hope that spirit carries me forward.

Sylvia