Be of Use

My wife will tell you I'm a Mac snob and she's right. For the last seven years I've been an avid Mac user and all-things-Apple proponent. I'm a veteran of platform battles. XP drove me nuts. Back then I felt people wanted it because it was easier for network folks to manage and it allowed users not to have to think about much. "Computing for Dummies" I thought in my younger, more smug days. I argued with folks up and down about why we needed the Mac OS, how important iLife was to creating things that register on meaningful parts of Bloom's Taxonomy. I still believe those things are important, I'm just realizing it can be done a couple of different ways. For seven years I lived in a 90% Mac district. We were early adopters of all things iOS as well. Then I moved out of the Apple Orchard on to new adventures this past month. More than one former colleague thought it was pretty funny I'd be moving onto a Windows district that ran a Novell network...

A few things came together today to make me think about the term hacker . The book of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, David Warlick's post Learner as Hacker  and an email from a colleague all caused me to reflect on the term, that to your average person views as a negative thing. The colleague was asking about a friend's email being hacked - just wondering if she had to worry about anything. I didn't think much of it until I came across Warlick's post on "learning as the practice of hacking." Excellent stuff, with a great deal of quotable lines on the parallels between hacking and how we need to prepare students today for life-long learning. When Woz was putting together boards with the Homebrew Computer Club , he thought of himself as a hacker, but then there was no negative conotation with the term. In his letter to prospective shareholders  a new generation of hacker, Mark Zuckerberg writes about the bad rap: The word "hacker" has an unfairl...

On Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog, he shared two excellent posts. One on mobile learning  from Mind/Shift, the other on change  in schools by Larry Cuban. The realist in me knows that big shifts in practice, no matter what the institution takes time. The visionary and parent in me wants change now. Others people's kids and my kids shouldn't have to wait. If we wait, we may just be behind again once we're"caught up"...always a few steps (or much more) behind. The realist in me knows that what some consider "real change" is more just rhetoric that faces an up hill battle no matter the philosophy - like over in Oconomowoc . Something hit me the other day while training on the basics of SMART Board software. I had a nice group of teachers who were trying very hard to improve, but I couldn't help but wonder "are they already too far behind?" Am I training them on decades old software that we should be moving beyond? Did we fail as a tech ...

I'm glad a few years ago I introduced the book 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times  to our administration. It was exciting to have an assistant superintendent interested in changing the conversation for learning in our school district. While I still certainly appreciate the content of this book, I am soooooooo sick of hearing about 21st Century Learning, 21st Century Skills, 21st Century ad nauseam . Isn't there a better way to phrase this for everyday conversation? Perhaps we need to stick with this so everyone hears consistent jargon, but I don't think people overall have the right idea of what it means. I would imagine if we polled our staff or parents they would say its technology or computer skills. That couldn't be further from the truth. If I say higher order thinking skills  I think that's pretty clear (at least to me) of what that means. I worry 21st Century  means the Jetsons or Star Trek to all too many people. I appreciate Tony Wag...

So there is tons of writing and speaking about the evolving role of the teacher. If I hear the terminology "sage on the stage" or "guide on the side"used again I may throw up. I completely believe in this evolution, I'm just tired of hearing the same line about it. A similar sort of catch phrase came up a while back in a department meeting with our technology department. At a conference a colleague of mine said a speaker was talking about using their technology to empower users (in this case teachers) to do things themselves - installing plug-ins, free software or items we have a site license for. "Think of yourself as a facilitator, not an administrator" the speaker said. In technology, teaching, professional development and I'd imagine in many other careers I have no idea about, we need to help people help themselves. As we move beyond may I Google that for you  at the intersections of teaching and technology we need to make sure we don't j...