Category: Articles

I have been struggling with this blogpost for a couple of weeks now, my thoughts changing with each changing nuance of the story.

I’m not going to go into detail about the current controversy over changes and re-changes to Facebook’s privacy policy. There are plenty of better and more knowledgeable writers who can do that job for me (my personal favorite is Molly Wood’s “How Facebook Is Putting its Users Last” http://news.cnet.com/molly-rants/?categoryId=9823097&tag=rtcol;tags).

Instead I want to focus on an educator’s reaction to all of this, for as maddening these changes are, they provide a great teachable moment where we can break down the wall and talk to students about social networking frankly and un-sanctimoniously.

I’ve never really liked Facebook. I have a very small network of people I know. I check it a couple of times a day, though I seldom write anything but comments about others’ posts. I don’t play games, participate in polls, or use 70% of the additional features. I have always found Twitter or one of my blogs a better avenue for my thoughts.

I have kept a Facebook page for two reasons. First, I have enjoyed the rare occurrence of connecting with old friends. It is a great pleasure to see an invite from a fondly remembered childhood name, and there is no other site or service that has this kind of power (I do recognize that these powers have a downside…but that’s for another day). Second, as an educator I want to say that I participate in social networking so that my comments and opinions are based on experience and not second-had hysteria.

Which is why I found the Facebook changes so upsetting, I have always told teachers and students that social networking is not in itself good or evil, but a tool. Like all tools, if you know how to use it and if you follow the rules, it can improve your life. If you are negligent, sometimes your finger gets smashed. However, the essence of the Facebook privacy controversy is that they have changed the rules without the consent of the user. If a carpenter is swinging a hammer, and suddenly it becomes a chainsaw, someone is going to get hurt!

I know that several big names in tech journalism (including Leo Laporte, who I have always respected) have deleted their Facebook accounts in protest of these changes. This seems to have an effect, as there have been further updates to these changes by Facebook. With a community the size of Facebook, it does seem that the only way one can make a stand is to step out.

Which leads to my dilemma. I would like to delete my Facebook page. I don’t benefit from it very much, and though I have set my privacy appropriately, this is one of the few way that I can speak out (my one voice among 500 million!) in favor of informing people about how their information is used.

However, if I opt out, I essentially say that there is no safe way to use Facebook. To some extent I lose my voice with the vast community of students and faculty who are not going to quit (whether they should or not) by saying that this tool that you use every day shouldn’t be used. The dissonance between this message and the student’s experience doesn’t ring true.

As I analyze this stance, I recognize that we also tell students not to drink or use drugs, which contradicts the experience of many. However, our job as educators is to teach students how to use the vital tools of communication and socialization. At this point it appears that tools of social networking will play a role in this.

So we need to be in this space with them (not socializing with them, but using the same tools in our own worlds). We need to talk about how to use the tools well, and express frustration when obstacles get in the way. We also need to listen to students about their own experiences, not only to point out their mistakes, but to listen for new ideas that are being generated all around us.

A while ago I was speaking to a teacher who was going through a particularly rough time.  I knew that there was no immediate answers for the issues she faced, but I felt confident that these answers would be presenting themselves soon.  Though I’m never particularly good at small talk,the words came to me and I said to her,

“Work with hope.”

As I continued to talk to people through the day, I was surprised to find how often that phrase was appropriate, teachers facing new (or old) challenges, teachers questioning themselves, teachers trying new things.

“Work with hope.”

In the days that followed it seemed that my new mantra applied to every idea I had and every blog I read.  As twenty-first century teachers living through revolutions of content and technique, the one thing that we can daily bring to everything is hope.

“Work with hope”

…because we don’t always know if we are doing the right thing and sometimes we never find out.

“Work with hope”

…because we are challenged by forces locally and globally over which we have no control.

“Work with hope”

…because sometimes hope is all we have.

My own focus on educational technology has taught me well that certainty is a luxury we can no longer afford.  Preparing students for an unknown future requires bold leaps of faith and confidence that even our missteps are somehow part of the journey.

I became superintendent at a time when Catholic education (and education in general) is facing more challenges than ever before.  However, immense challenges provide a daily opportunity to work with hope.

In the Catholic calendar we are now in the Easter season.  There is no better time to kick off a new blog about our work as educators of hope.  I hope in the time ahead to share my own reflections and ideas I learn from others, a lot about technology, but some not.

I thank you for entering on this journey, and I welcome your comments.

It should be no surprise to anyone that it has taken me so long to write this post.  With the whirlwind of activity in my life, I feel lucky that I have finally had a chance to sit in a Starbucks and write (my favorite place for blogging).

Beyond the external chaos, however, I have been working to define for myself exactly how to approach writing here.  This is a personal blog.  My bosses know that I write here, and I invite anyone to read it, however, this is not an official outlet of the Diocese or the Schools Office, nor do I want it to be.  On the other hand, the reality is that I am Superintendent 24/7, and I need to be sensitive to that reality anytime I write or speak publicly.

On the surface this doesn’t seem like a huge problem.  Those who have read my blogs, Twitter posts, or (very rare) Facebook updates know that my writing is oriented toward teaching, greeting friends, and joking with colleagues.  There is noting in my posts that I would mind seeing on the jumbotron at Angel Stadium (though fans might find this confusing!).

However, I do express beliefs and concerns about the current state and future of the educational system that are sometimes revolutionary and challenging (and to be honest sometimes ill-considered and wrong headed).  I do not want readers to interpret from this that my decisions for schools will necessarily be rushing in these directions, or to think that I am expressing policy or any opinions beyond my own.

So as I start writing under a new hat I will be more careful to separate speculation from fact, opinion from decisions.  I want to continue to envision new vistas in educational technology, but this is only one aspect of my professional persona.

I know other superintendents blog on educational topics, and I would love to hear your comments, and everyone else’s thoughts on this situation.

Those who follow my blogs might have noticed that I have been somewhat behind in articles and podcasts (particularly the latter).  I have been neglectful of my digital world because of a whirlwind of activity in the corporeal one.

Without going into too much detail, in the past month I have been asked to leave my position as Assistant Principal of Mater Dei High School to become the Superintendent of Schools for the Diocese of Orange.  The suddenness of this possibility, decision, announcement, and transition has been staggering.  Leaving Mater Dei after 28 years in only a few weeks time is frightening and heartbreaking.  However, I am excited about new opportunities and challenges in my new position.

What this will mean to my digital life is unclear.  I intend to keep up the Shifting Platforms blog, and I hope to get back to providing podcasts and screencasts on To Tech as Jesus Did before long.  I hope to continue building my network of other school leaders on Twitter, and, let’s face it, I’ve never been good with Facebook, so no change there.

Though I will be dealing with  a broader range of schools and issues, I am hopeful that I can bring my experience and the great things that I learn each day to schools and to teachers in my diocese and beyond (one of my chief concerns that was addressed during this process was my need to continue presenting at conferences and workshops).

So as I shift from one platform to another, I look forward to sharing with you the shifting paradigms I find as well.

Or to quote my favorite poem from Tennyson:

Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Sometimes I am jarred into awareness of the difference between my world and that of the average (do I dare say normal?) educator.  Working with social media, Twittering, reading and writing blogs, listening to tech podcasts, and playing with new gadgets really does give one a different perspective and a different set of daily assumptions.

But Google Buzz, Google’s new foray into the Facebook/Twitter social media space,  may have pushed me over the edge.  I opened my Gmail last week to see Buzz added to my inbox menu.  I had heard about this new service on Buzz Out Loud that morning, so I was anxious to get to it.  I watched the short video that Google posted on the site and moved into my Buzz page…and the gears (not Google gears, my brain gears) ground to a halt.

Of course, I blame the media. 🙂 Google’s 2 minute video was colorful and lively and did everything but explain how to use Buzz or what to use Buzz for!  The commentators in the morning weren’t much more help.  “It’s like Google Wave light,” many suggested.  The only problem with this is that I tried Google Wave and decided that I didn’t know how to use this or what it was for either.  I had made my peace with waiting f0r the platform to develop or waiting until I needed something that my current tools didn’t do.

So I took a few feeble stabs at setting up my Buzz page.  I associated my Twitter and Picasa feeds and followed a few people that I knew.  Then the next day the security concerns broke (rather exploded).  I’m not as concerned with these as others, and I was pretty sure they would be worked out soon (it appears that they have).  Frankly my concern wasn’t that people were getting too much information from me, but that my pathetic Buzz page was a list of my Twitter postings and nothing else.

I’m always fighting with teachers who insist that they don’t have time to learn about new technologies and new media, but Buzz even pushes my buttons.  I wonder what it is for, how to use it, whether it is redundant to what I am using already, whether it will gain enough traction to be a productive tool, whether Google will pull the plug and have it disappear just as I get used to it, whether it is safe, whether I have sold by soul by agreeing to the terms of service.

Am I alone with this, or are there tools that send you over the edge?

This week the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place in Las Vegas.  While I was unable to attend (despite my begging!), I have been able to follow the progress, as virtually no tech blogger or podcaster has talked about anything else.

Though not specifically targeted toward education, this show can reflect changing realities of our lives, and these trends will change our future students.  So school planners need to keep fingers on the CES pulse (to be fair, CES doesn’t always hit the mark, last year the most heralded device was the Palm Pre, a lovely idea that was DOA by the time it rolled out).

So the cliffnotes version of CES this year had two main themes, 3D and Tablet machines.

I’ll deal briefly with 3D.  I don’t see this as having any effect on classroom instruction for years.  Although the potential of interacting with virtual realities is intriguing, widespread availability of these tools for schools seems at least a decade away.  3D television, whether it catches on or not (and I don’t think it will), seems to be an entertainment gimmick, not an educational frontier.

The tablet, however, is a tool indirectly gunning for the educational market.  There really is nothing new to this device.  Earlier prototypes  have existed for over a decade, most famously the Apple Newton, and products that have come to market have been near universal failures.  These newer tablets (I am speaking of the products I have seen and not the rumored Apple tablet which may be made of pixie dust and the dreams of little children) are smaller, lighter, and more powerful.  They seem to be a great possibility for school use joining ebooks and netbooks as solutions for content delivery.  So why am I not smiling?

There is a pattern in the history of tech development and adoption that when you have two or more products competing for the same space, this can delay rather than speed the adoption of either.  A perfect example of this is high definition video players.  The HD and BlueRay formats battled for more than a year before BlueRay finally emerged as dominant.  Yet looking sales during this time showed people staying away from the purchase of either format.  In fact, by the time that a single format emerged, much of the public had convinced itself that they didn’t want it, and online streaming video (even in high definition) had more time to catch up.  Though current BlueRay sales are better, they still lag behind the sales of conventional DVDs.  Two products competing for the same space slowed progress.

In the same way I see upcoming battles in the “second device” space.  Netbooks, e-readers, tablets (and smartphones) are probably not replacements for a desktop or a full laptop, but they have amazing functionality as a flexible mobile platform.  Unfortunately, most people won’t want to purchase or carry more than one.  Each will have advocates and critics, and schools will be fearful of moving in a dead-end direction.

I’d be interested if you see a similar challenge, or if I am making problems where there are none.

BTW, we are going full-speed ahead with out netbook plan…tablets be damned!

Before I start this post, I’m noticing on the TV that car holiday commercials go on longer past Christmas than ads for any other product…hmmm,

But to the point.  This morning I was listening to a podcast talking about privacy settings in Facebook in light of last month’s mass reset debacle.  As I thought about this, it occurred to me that this is exactly the kind of thing we need to be sharing with students.  Instead of ignoring their life in social networks and pretending it doesn’t exist, we need to be encouraging of good habits and providing real guidance (not hysteria) about risks.

But how to do this?  If I were a classroom teacher, I could talk to my classes, but as an administrator, I have more limited access to students.  Much of this stuff doesn’t obviously fit into the curriculum of a specific subject, and though I know many of the teachers at my school talk about it, it isn’t organized and it doesn’t reach all the students.

But what if we produced a short weekly segment to be shown as part of the daily student telecast?  I picture this as a blend of news, demonstrations of tools, and common sense security and privacy tips.  I’d like to get a team of students to collaborate with me and to do most of the actual presentations.

These clips could then be posted on the school blog for parents to see and to encourage reasonable discussion and Q&A.

Is anyone else doing something like this?  I would love your ideas and comments.

Like many of those whom I read and admire, I spend much of my time moving between excitement and frustration and terror.  As I read the ideas and plans of the wonderful digital education community, I’m always seeing new possibilities as the digital vision becomes more and more a reality.  Yet facing the realities of my school and myself, I’m frustrated by the long distances and enormous hurdles between today and tomorrow.  Likewise I am sometimes overwhelmed by fear of unintended and misintended consequences.  After all, when children and their future are the laboratory, a disastrous experiment can not be wiped up and washed down a drain.

That being said, I still wonder whether we are serving them with the current curricular skills taught in schools.  Too much of the subject matter and accompanying skills seem to be designed to serve the needs of our generation, and again I worry whether we teach the world we learned because this is how we understand education.  We teach them how to make buggy whips because that’s what we learned because we’ll always need buggy whips.

What started me thinking about this today was reading a few assignments for high school term papers.  The term paper is one of the sacred cows of the high school experience.  It is generally a miserable experience for students to research and write and for teachers to teach and grade, and there are very few if any life applications for these skills short of research itself.  With these qualifications, one would think that this buggy whip would be well on its way toward extinction, but parents, teachers, and in an odd way students hold to this totemic rite of passage as an educational bootcamp.

I want to be reasonable about this, I’m certain (at least somewhat certain) that at some point in history someone learned something from this experience.  However, the way the research paper is assigned and taught ignores several essential shifts.  Research and note-taking skills are based on a model of information scarcity rather than information ubiquity (and why would anyone write something on paper cards that could be bookmarked and made instantly available?).  Similarly the lengthy paper presenting the totality of others’ ideas (in the student’s own words) besides being a template for plagiarism is also based on an information scarcity model.  finally the paper itself is dissimilar to the bulk of writing done in the professional world.  In an average day I write thousands of words, most of these are emails, some are articles and blogposts, some are responses to other’s blogposts (in fact, I wonder if the paper assignment itself is on it’s deathbed, but that’s another day).

Yet a suggestion that this buggy whip be abandoned is greeted with fear and disdain.  Teachers and parents are fearful that something will be “lost” with the disappearance of this dinosaur.  Some sneer that the rigor of the educational process is being lost.  Some retreat to the last refuge of the educational traditionalist, “They’ll need this for college.”

To all of these objections I want to shout, “Shut up, voices in my head!”   I understand the fear and I feel it.  What if we make these changes and we BREAK A GENERATION OF KIDS?

Still it’s no longer possible for me to embrace the teaching of 20th Century skills.  We need to teach students skills (including research and writing) that they will actually use in the way they will use them.

For example, I wish someone had taught me how to bring a blog post to an effective close, but I never learned this, so I guess I’ll just stop…

I invite your comments.

I’m not particularly inclined to write self-revelatory prose here, but my experience yesterday related directly to the issues I discuss in this website, and the insights I took from it have some broader applications.

Yesterday I was presenting my “Shifting Platforms/Shifting Paradigms” talk at the CLMS/CLHS conference in San Diego. Though I had limited time, I was lucky enough to attend Alan November’s opening keynote before my session time. His talk was exciting and inspirational, and though I worried that a few of his points were similar to mine, I felt that my talk was actually a great (if less expert) companion to his.

I went to my assigned room, set up, and waited…and NO ONE CAME!

Well, it didn’t turn out as badly as that, as I started to pack up with my tail between my legs, a couple of people came in, and we sat down and had a good conversation, roughly following the outline of my original talk (I did skip the small group breakout however).

I’m not posting this as a public licking of wounds (well, maybe just a little bit), nor am I suggesting that the conference attendees should have come to my session.  Rather, I came to a couple of realizations about this new world that I’m attempting to enter.

These may seem completely obvious to those of you who have been attending and speaking at conferences over time, but I write them as advice to myself as much as others.

First, for breakout sessions people want skills more than big ideas.  The “Shifting Platforms…” talk is pretty good, but it was the same type of territory explored in the keynote.  In a brief walkaround I noticed that the largest and most enthusiastic crowd was in a session dedicated to exploring Google Wave (if no one showed up, I was going to go in there myself!).  People need to be inspired and given food for thought, but they want concrete takeaways as well.  Luckily the two new presentations I’m writing have a much more concrete “hot button” angle, so I hope to address this.

Second, people attach to presenters as much as to topics.  Beside the issues with the general topic, people didn’t come because they didn’t know who I am and whether listening to me would be worth their limited time.  In part this is a function of time and experience, but it is also a function of direct networking.  I was not able to get to the conference until immediately before my session.  I might have had more success if I had come the night before and talked to some people about what I was doing.  I can’t forget that this is a people business, and if I make a PowerPoint, they won’t necessarily come.

Humbled by the experience (and who can’t use a bit of humiliation now and then?) I hope I can learn the lessons it brings to me and focus on giving people what they want and not just what I want to do.

As any of you who have heard me speak or read my posts know, I’m currently going through a “crisis of faith” regarding PowerPoint.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use is regularly and I know that it ultimately will have a place in my toolbox,  However, I worry that PP has become a Trojan Horse that never opens up.  It was a wonderful way to hook teachers and teach them to become comfortable with their classroom technology.  It was easy and only a small shift from what they have been doing for years.  In the early years it was also a great attention grabber for students.  I believed and hoped that as people became more comfortable with the platform, new uses and paradigms for instruction would emerge.

Well, if that’s happening, I’m not seeing it.  Rather it appears that we (and I include myself in this as just as guilty of non-innovation) are sitting on a PowerPoint Plateau (going to do something with that title in the future).  Even students have caught on with audible sighs as they see the beginning of a new set of slides that have to be copied into their notebooks.  I heard a teacher say “OK, has everyone finished copying from this slide before I go on…” and I knew that the PowerPoint innovation balloon was filled with lead.

In the midst of my despair I was reading a list  (which I can’t find at the moment, but if I do I’ll link it) of tools for teachers and I discovered prezi.com.  I spent an afternoon experimenting and I think that I may have found a multi-use tool that can break some of the PowerPoint malaise and help us to re-examine classroom presentations.

To fully understand the program I suggest that you go to the site and look at samples which are more effective than words, but in short, Prezi uses a single page rather than discrete screens.  Navigation moves from place to place within the page instead of following the direct outline.  The program encourages you to use space, size, and format to build relationships between the various element of the talk.

Prezi is free (with limitations of storage space and a small watermark in the corner of the presentations) or subscription based.  Presentations can be run on the web or downloaded and run in a flash format locally.  The Prezi page can have a preset order or can be navigated by mouse (a great solution to the “prestacked” determinism of PowerPoint).

Now could we fall into the same trap down the road, perhaps, but I am enjoying the challenge of losing my PowerPoint bearings and rethinking my talks as I move some into the new platform.

This may be a platform that could do that rare feat, encourage a new paradigm.