Be of Use

When I decided to blog I made the call not to give it a tech-centric name because I was at a crossroads in my career. I was smack dab in the middle of graduate school, getting my administrative certification and becoming a principal seemed like a potential career option. While my path didn't lead me in that direction it has veered me off the track of solely technology integration - coordinating data and assessments. For the first time in my professional life I'm looking at how I can help teachers assess student work, or meet the Common Core changes, rather than evangelizing why they need to embrace 21st Century Skills development...communicate with Web 2.0 tools...or something of that nature. It's refreshing. I think Krista Moroder's post on focusing on learning  helped to make me conscious of the importance of remembering why we're in education. She blogged more about this just the other day . I have no doubt I had lost site of that, lost in the world of wireles...

Over break I kicked the tires on Udemy for the first time. Being that Big Data and Personalized Learning are my current obsessions I choose Educational Big Data and Learning Analytics as my first class. Above is a video from that class - I was surprised I had not seen it yet. Warning - it is put out by Ericsson - but they aren't selling broadband plans with it ( at least not directly). There's plenty of good sound bites in here, but Sugata Mitra's line toward the end jumped (19:07) off the screen at me - "the teacher needs to step back and say, 'today's topic is this, now open your notebook and figure it out.'" An exciting (at least for me) and simple statement on his vision of education. I have hear and read a lot about holding  students and adults responsible for their own learning. Frankly I think that there's a lot of focus on student learning and not near enough on teacher learning. This statement certainly asks the learner to own it....

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...

I'm wrapping up Jay Cross's Informal Learning , a book I started between semesters this winter and picked back up after wrapping up my last final at UWM. The New Social Learning   and Personal Learning Networks   started to reframe my thinking on what we need professional development to be - learner centered, flexible, online, informal...not top down, large group, "formal" classes or sessions. I think that this change is obvious, especially in light of the push for Professional Learning Communities that help create job-embedded learning opportunities for staff. But it's not an easy sell, at least for me, to the powers that be. They seem to not know anything else, other than the tried and true after school session, workshop or mashed together credit-worthy professional development class. Development opportunities, some think, need to have a date on the calendar or event, with a stopwatch keeping track of the time. Could their be a more top-down approach to lear...

I've done a bit of an about face since my last post on my next learning steps as I wrap things up at UWM in a couple of weeks. Last post I was thinking about my next program. Now I'm looking forward to the freedom of learning independently. The books we had for classes were great, but I know over these 20 months my personal reading has suffered...how could it not at six credits a semester? I've been kind of jealous of my wife's personal reading of late. I'm one 20 page paper away from that. The worm turned for me about a week ago when something switched in my head. I asked myself, why do I think I need to pay someone $2000 a class to learn? Before UWM I learned quite a lot from books and blogs. I bet I could again! I've been pretty faithful to my favorites - Blue Skunk and Dangerously Irrelevant , but I haven't done much online reading beyond that. With new initiatives coming for 2012-2013 I need to more deeply explore Edmodo communities and see what othe...

The pitch has been made for a 1:1 initiative starting in 6th Grade. So now, the tough part of "how do we pay for this?" Thankfully, that's not what I have to figure out. Once that gets figured out (multi-million dollar project in the middle of a recession - no big deal...) we have a ton of work ahead of us. There is so much out there that has been shared about 1:1 initiatives. Not the least of which has been on  Dangerously Irrelevant of late with two wonderful guest posts on how they've done this. In our planning to plan I'm taking to heart a short post from Scott McLeod last week New technologies vs new behaviors Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors. - Clay Shirky,  Here Comes Everybody , p. 160 I visit many schools that have 'new technologies,' but not enough of them also have 'new behaviors.' It's time for us educators to raise our game (leaders, I'...