Hello from NH!

Quick post between sessions from the Blogger Cafe at NH Reach for Stars Conference. Great fun to be here to do this. Able to put some names to faces of folks in the Bloggasphere. No disasters at home w/ wireless techs (yet). Go Jaime GO! Fix that thing finally!

Good Discovery Streaming presentatation, so so Senteo, going to Virtual Field trips next.

Blogger Cafe is cool!

More on the D Word and Freedom to Blog About Your School

A couple of posts back I was posting on the student who got suspended and banned from running for class secretary for calling her administrators douchebags in her blog. This month's Connecticut Magazine (connecticutmag.com- but don't bother there is little current content online) has a column by long time Connecticut journalist Larry Bloom the sheds more light on the circumstances. Pardon me as I summarize (and really Larry & Company - let folks read you online).

Last spring Avery Doninger, was class secretary of her junior class at Mills High in Burlington CT, and active in extracurricular activities. According to Bloom, one of the activities was Jamfest, an annual competition of student bands. The students wanted to hold the Jamfest on April 28 in the auditorium, but the faculty member required to run the equipment was not available. The administration told the kids to change the date, or hold it in the cafeteria, not an ideal spot. The students countered with a proposal that an outside professional be hired to run the equipment. Four students sent out an email to many local homes urging citizens to lobby the Supt. on behalf of their plan. The Principal met with Avery and expressed her displeasure. As Bloom puts it, proper ways to address conflict resolution did not include urging taxpayers to pester the administration. In the local press it was reported that at that point the Principal canceled the Jamfest. Bloom reports that she did not and quotes Avery's answer in the subsequent court hearing that the Principal left open that the Jamfest might happen but not on April 28 and the fact that the Jamfest was held on June 8. Nevertheless that evening Avery in her Livejournal wrote that the concert was "canceled by the douchebags in the central office" and urged her readers to complain to the Supt to "piss her off more".

When the Principal learned of the post she told Avery she had to do three things - apologize to the Superintendent, show her mother what she wrote and drop out of the election for class secretary for the senior year. Avery agreed to the first two, but refused to comply with the the third. The Principal following school policy that all candidates had to be endorsed by the administration, removed Avery's name from the ballot, and we are off to the lawyers. Avery became a cause celeb with T-shirts supporting her being banned and of course she was the landslide write in candidate, but those votes were not allowed. The kid gets it, she know she was rude but she feels she was unfairly punished.

And now it is all about the legal principals and Internet rights, and free speech, and the impact of student speech on schools and ACLU and pro bono, and fund raising dinners. But I think I like Bloom's conclusion that for all their experience in dealing with kid issues far more troublesome than this the administrators have allowed this to turn into an expensive public pissing match.

The Stupidest Guy In The Room of 140Characters

This my response to Jen Wagner's post on Friendship and 140 Characters

Fascinating conversation. My reaction? OK, once again, I venture into the realm where people write sonnets and I am going to sound all - blah, bub-blah, bub-blah, me-too, bub-blah, me-too.

How do I sort through all the thoughts posted, reconcile the conflicting themes in my heart and head, and tease from the conversation the nuggets of brilliance that resonate with me and mold them into coherent response? Here goes:

1) Sorting The Constant Flow. That is an idea that resonates. Since I started blogging socially 3 years ago and professionally 2 years ago, I think that is a large a part of what has been happening to me. My attention has turned outward to a bigger wider world of ideas that I would not be a part of unless I had taken those steps. It is a cascade of new ideas that I am finding difficult to keep up with, never mind choosing the pieces I need to weave into my professional practice. Recently (maybe in the WoW2 chat room) somebody referred to “gulping from the fire hose of ideas”. Going from reading blogs to actively participating in Twitter is like going from the garden hose to the firehose. In reading blogs I could pick up an idea here, and idea there. With Twitter, it is a constant flow, in real time. Really smart people, talking in real time to other really smart people and posting links about what they are checking out. The pace of new ideas has grown exponentially. I found I had to rethink and redesign my delicious tagging system to help keep track.

2) People Like Me / The Stupidest Guy in the Room. Twitter has provided a view into other professional’s lives. They all do not do exactly the same job as me but as others have tweeted I have found that lots of other tech educators are like me. They have their computers on beyond work hours. They work hard at their jobs in the hours beyond work. They try to balance family and technology. I am not nuts to do what I do. There are people like me out there. Lots of folks are puzzled, confused and trying to make sense of all of this stuff, and working hard outside of school to try new things and work it all out. They are thoughtful, wise, kind, and funny.

In my pond, I am often seen (with respect to technology), as the “guru wizard” who reveals the “magic things” that happen inside the box and out on the web. I am not smarter than anybody else, I am just a teacher who has chosen to get paid for paying closer attention to technology. And yet the blogoshpere and twitterverse have shown me that there is so much more happening with people who are sharper than me, who have wrapped their brains tighter around the salient ideas, and are moving in directions that I never could have imagined. It is as if I have gone from swimming in my pond to stepping into the water at a large lakeside beach. I am in just up to my ankles in the cold water, and there are people doing backflips off the raft. I am standing there wondering how, and if I should walk in up to my waist. I know I am at an exciting place to swim, but will I ever be able to get to the raft? Sometimes it is an exciting, challenging, anxiety provoking thought to realize that you are the stupidest guy in the room.

3) Twitter Manners / Friendship. This is the most intriguing part of Jen’s discussion and replies. It is a social give and take that makes a lot of Web 2.0 all work. It is like a virtual staff room as some have said. That is hard for me. I am terminally shy in real life and perhaps more so in a virtual environment. In my real staff rooms I am the quiet guy reading the paper. I am a listener and lurker in SL and in live chat areas. I read blogs but comment only if I have something really unique to say. I am flattered when folks follow me on Twitter, and I always add folks as followers (on a recent This Week in Tech podcast – Jason Calacanis (Mahalo.com) talked about the value added of web geek, Robert Scoble w/ a following of 6500+ twitters, and who always allows folks to follow him and follows all people who follow him, by saying that he could parlay that into value for anybody who hires him. He has a social roladex he can exploit easily by tweeting about a site he likes and driving web traffic. Essentially saying that social network contacts like Twitter can be monetized).

However after you are following somebody, and a bunch of folks are following you what is the correct behavior for tweeting? Miguel Guhlin said that he looks at Twitter as the ebb and flow of human contact and enjoys the casual updates. He looks to the person’s blog as a way to understand more about them and what they are into. He tends to do the follower/followee by checking to see if the person is an educational blogger to help narrow his focus. That seems reasonable (however, it is cool to follow people like Veronica Belmont, and there are people I only know by tweet that I have come to respect).

Should I then limit my tweets to educational matters? Do you tweet at the personal level, and then blog at an intellectual level? Am I the ultimate bore when I tweet all weekend long about football, or my running, or doing my chores? Is this just my poor social skills that I am throwing myself out there saying – look at me? Look at what I am doing? Anybody?

It is a curious mix in the twitterverse. I agree with most of the folks on friendship. I have been socially blogging long enough to know that electronic “friendships” do come and go. People that I got to “know” a little bit at a personal level stop blogging or stop commenting on my blog (my social blog revolves mostly around cycling and sports).
Is this different at a professional level?

Most likely I will see you at a conference and we will introduce ourselves, or we will have an exchange online that will lead to another exchange, kind of like in real life. If that blossoms, it blossoms. I do not need intimacy to feel that what I learn from you in Twitter/Ning/Blogs/SL is valuable. And maybe that is my social shyness talking. I am not going to Skype/contact you unless I have a reason, and it is ok if you blow me off.

4) Addiction/Distraction. This is bothersome to me as is the whole wired 24/7/365 nature of where we are going. Part of the power of Twitter is its addictive nature. I am not sure of how it is much different than IM, except for this sweet spot in time there is this group of tech ed folks who have gravitated here. Is it just trendy like mySpace giving way to Live Journal to Facebook to Ning? Will it be Twitter to Pounce, to Jaiku to back to Twitter for the edtech community? It was for Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech Folks.

In the same way my 16 year old has to have her AIM up when she works, I now find that Twitter is up on my laptop all the time when I am at home. Somehow I “need” to see what everybody is saying, is doing. Why is that? Two months ago I did not “need” that. I have had a Twitter account for a while. I did not use it until I caught some of the buzz.

It is a distraction. It is funny as I sit here writing away on this Sunday the “tweets” are flying by about the post and replies. No less than 6 times have I stopped to checkout what others are saying about 140 characters. A couple of times I have almost stopped because I thought somebody had already said what I was currently writing about much better than me. I could never open up Twitter if I had “real” work to get done.

I could never connect to it at work. I have enough trouble keeping up with incoming emails disrupting my workflow. There is an organizational guru who says that you should only check your work email twice a day. Once about 10AM, and another about an hour before you go home. I am seriously thinking that I will adopt that rule for December and just concentrate on the to do list for the day. I can’t imagine if I had Twitter popping up all day.

So I get to the end, without the profundity I desired and probably saying everything that others have said in different words. But, the conversation struck chords in my mind and it is now out of my head and on a page. I believe the writing helped me to put some form to my thoughts and I think I will return to this conversation in my head soon, now with some type of frame to hang it on. Thanks for listening.

Cross Posted in Life in the Fast Lane

School Board to Use Local Blog to Share Information

This morning's Norwich Bulletin contains an article about a local school board submitting information to a local blog to share information with the community. I am in a nearby town and I share some of the frustrations about trying to understand the issues and decisions of local elected officials when living in a rural area with sparse local media coverage. Part of my involvement in local politics in an earlier period in my life was based on my perception that in small towns, with limited media coverage it is a hard to find out what is happening in your government, without the government making extraordinary efforts to "get the word out".

Decision making becomes a closed loop between people who only talk to themselves. Does the Internet and Blogosphere democratize the process by providing current, up to date information or just place the spotlight on those with an ax to grind? The town in question is not without political and budget controversy in recent years (as it is with most towns in our area) so parts of the blog have a clear political edge. Yet some of it seems to be pure information, and it is easy to navigate back and forth to pick up on the flavor of local politics, as I am doing this Sunday morning from the comfort of my easy chair.

I remember two signature conversations in my political career. One where a member of the opposition party told me that he was voting for me because he noted that the leaders of the town council and the school board were all close friends and he did not want decisions about his town "being made by a bunch of guys sitting around a Friday night poker table, drinking beer". A second conversation concerned the nature of business on the Planning and Zoning Commission where it was noted that in the old days "most of the (land use) decisions were made on the steps of church after services on Sunday". Do blogs contribute to an open flow of information or do they provide a easy platform for extreme views that fracture consensus and hinder decision making?

A Contrarian View of Education 2.0

There are times in the headlong rush to pronounce that the world flat and our kids are round, that I have a disquieting feeling in the pit of my stomach. We pick up the pace as teachers to engage in all the new tools because the kids are there, and we are behind, and we are sending them into a world of global competition, and if they are not willing to view the world as a 24 hour market place where some kid on the other side of the planet can beat them out of their profit margin if they don’t move at the hyper warp speed, they won't be ready.

In the vanguard of Education 2.0 are the cries to embrace whole cloth anything that connects, to get our kids there, drop the filters, just teach them responsible practice, advanced practitioners vs. the IT department, rage against the machine, bring down the walls, the world is flat for heaven’s sake!

It gives me great pause. And every once in a while that pause, that disquiet in the pit of my stomach gets a little validation from the people I read and respect. I sense that somewhere lurking back here is a bit of reservation. Can it be that they like me think that we have to introduce our kids to this brave new world, but with a great deal of wonder at where it is all taking us?

Let me explain further by way of a story. I went to my dentist. In catching up with news he and I and the assistant began talking about my job, and kids and Internet safety. He allowed that the was very strict with his kids. To control their access to the computer and the Internet he had some type of lock box device where you literally had to have a parent with a key to allow the kids to use the computer.

Now I know him, and his kids. He and his wife (his partner in the practice) are the absolute salt of the earth. They are the parents you always see volunteering at the school, in the booth, at the concession stand. They have a dental practice in a old mill town. They, for the longest time, held their rates and bent to the insurance company whims to keep with the guidelines so folks with dental insurance would not have to pay out of pocket.

When I coached their kid in Little League they went out of their way to thank me at the end of the season, and a couple of days later there was a card in the mail with two tickets to the local minor league team’s game. I knew them as parents long before I ever knew that they were local dentists.

Their kid was “pulled up” to play major league at age 8 because we were short and my head coach saw her play and wanted to “grab her” so she would be on his team for the next three years (without having to go through the league draft). She was a great kid, tough as nails, but in over her head against 12 year olds. She had such passion. I can still see her in the catcher gear, three sizes too big going behind the plate because nobody else would do it. And I remember when she came back to the bench in tears, because she was so mad at herself that she struck out. I tried my best to tell her what a great player she was that all she had to do was grow up into it. It was with little effect. She did not like striking out, and it upset her that she was not better. She was not being a baby, she was mad, that she could not perform at the level required to succeed.

This child gets little or no Internet access because her father wants it that way. And you know what, I think that’s OK. In fact I think that is great. Far from being fearful that this child will get beat out in the flat world, I am fearful that she will go out and become part of it. I don’t want her out here flitting from one job to the next, and pulling out her Blackberry and iPhone to stay connected to the stock market in Uzbekistan. I want her and her passion and her drive to stay right here in my community. I want her and other kids like her to be just like her Mom and Dad serving the community, filling places on local boards and commissions, or the church council, or running the hospital charity softball tournament. When I am 80, I want to be looking up at her at the other end of the mask and drill, owning her parents practice, replacing the fillings her mother put in and admiring her father’s work in making my crowns 30 years past.

I wonder that if we chase the flat world, we will never be deep with roots that anchor us and our families to the RL community (rather than a virtual community like SL)?

I am reminded of a story I heard about the life of Henry David Thoreau. In his time in New England, to be considered to be a “polished” young gentleman, you had to have traveled to Europe for study and culture. If you didn’t you were looked down upon. When at a party, the poor Thoreau was asked if he had yet “done the continent”, Thoreau supposedly replied, “No, but I have traveled widely in Concord.”

And then I am reminded of an old Stan Rogers song about the demise of Canadian Maritime fishermen and the Atlantic fishing industry –

“So, what’s now this romantic boy,

Who laments what’s done and gone!

There was no romance on cold winter ocean,

And the gales sang an awful song,

But my father’s ship knew of wind and tide

And my blood is Maritime,

I heard an old song on Fisherman’s Wharf,

Can I sing it just one time?

Can I sing it just one time?”

Cross posted in Life in the Fast Lane

A third of this a third of that....

Does anybody else divide the school year into thirds? It is easy for me as we have three semesters and report cards just went out Friday. Next week we have 1/2 days as classroom teachers conduct parent conferences, and then we are off for US Thanksgiving. As a school district it feels like we are all taking one deep breath and saying "Phew". It is catch up time for me. Nobody is starting anything new, and I can look at my to do list and support tickets and clear the decks. Doing my special holiday backups that get archived off site, and generally pausing and taking that look back, and that look ahead.

I will do that look back and look ahead more formally at school, but in a general sense, the year with all of its frustrations feels good so far. Things that have not moved for years are moving ahead under our new IT structure (with lots more things to settle) but at least we are moving. Our new voice and video conferencing has great promise. My small steps that are introducing Web 2.0 tools are out there but not yet finding traction, but that will improve. The things that have not gone well are fixable, and with round one done in the new Progress Report system, we can attack the serious problems there in the next two months. The good thing is that some things went bad, very bad, so that the rumblings that came out my mouth months ago, are now all very clear and upfront in the minds of the people who should have been listening. Even though the last few weeks have been painful and stressful and could have been avoided with better planning and tighter management attention, the fiasco certainly seems to have focused folks attention. While we do not seem to do well at planning and thinking through problems, we are very familiar with crisis management and picking up the pieces after calamities. It seems to be a preferred management style, that I hope we can get away from.

This is my first attempt...

This is my first attempt to post a blog entry from my Jott account. listen

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