ijohnpederson

Joi Ito’s TEDxDubai presentation.

Three big nuggets.

1. Failure.
2. Sharing as part of the Internet “stack”.
3. Agile development.

TEDx Dubai 2009 – Joichi Ito from Giorgio Ungania on Vimeo.

David Jakes recently reminded me to review this video. Did you know?™ this was what we all used before Karl Fisch achieved rock star status? True.

Creative Commons video about shared culture.

[Source: YouTube]

I really like #2.

Everything since 1888. On a 160GB external hard drive.

[Source: National Geographic]

Thanks Finn!

“Blended/hybrid courses are courses where 20% or more of the traditional face-to-face classroom time is replaced by online assignments and activities. Students spend less time in the classroom and more time working and interacting online, providing greater flexibility regarding when and where coursework can be completed.”

Simple. A very nice place to start.

[Source: Tonya Joosten]

Your christmas present is at your computer. Open it.

This is starting to turn into a series. Here’s the post-curling food spread from this past week.

This past week the TriState PLP group was introduced to “The Project”. One important design principal in the PLP experience is that details of “The Project” are held back until a few months into the process.  This intentionally causes a bit of angst.  Teachers’ daily lives involve ensuring structure in teaching and learning.  PLP feels a bit “fuzzy” for teachers during the first few months as important groundwork is laid leading up to the culminating experience.

The expectation of “The Project” is that it becomes a truly collaborative effort among participants.  The term “collaboration” is too often thrown around loosely to describe what is more often coordination or cooperation.  Their are times where simply coordinating or cooperating are all you need to achieve a particular objective. 

More co-creation than recitation.

Planning a birthday party requires a bit of coordination.  Running a local food shelf is an example where cooperation between individuals/organizations is necessary.  Collaboration goes another step further.  Blogger David Pollard  helped me frame the subtle lines between coordination, cooperation, and collaboration in his 2005 post “Will that be coordination, cooperation, or collaboration?”

Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively.

Key to the PLP experience is developing community.  Participants need time prior to “getting to work” defining their projects and how they’ll go about achieving objectives.  The process from here on out gets a bit more structured with the intention that groups go beyond simply coordinating activities and/or cooperating with each other.  We’ll drive towards true collaboration.  This will be a process that draws on participants complementary and diverse skills, passions, and experiences.  Success  requires a substantial commitment on the participants part to create something meaningful.  I like to think of it as an improvisational musical experience where musicians bring their talent as audience brings attention.  More co-creation than recitation.

I look forward to our experiences ahead.

“To understand what’s really happening on the Internet, you have to get down beneath the commercial hype and hoopla, which, though it gets 90 percent of the press, is actually a late arrival. From the beginning, something very different has been brewing online. It has to do with living, with livelihood, with craft, connection, and community. This isn’t some form of smarmy New Age mysticism, either. It’s tough and gritty and it’s just beginning to find its voice, its own direction. But it’s also difficult to describe; as the song says, “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.” And it’s next to impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. You have to live in the Net for a while.”

I’ve used it three times this week alone and thought I’d archive it here for simple searchability.

[Source: Cluetrain Manifesto]

Like bowling and golf, the sport of curling features a social element that makes it irresistible to those who play. Curlers shake hands before and after matches, congratulate one another after good shots and often retire to the curling club bar for cocktails to review the night’s events.

via An Olympic Curler Is Stopping By. Come Join In. – NYTimes.com.

If we are going to do this K12 educational technology thing right, it’s time for us as K12 technology folks to get serious about what is “core” and what is “context”.  I’m going to take a play from Dan Meyer’s playbook and put the pressure on school IT departments to be less helpful.

Strictly speaking “information technology” here, what is mission critical “core” infrastructure?
The network leading up to and across the Internet is “core”.  Mission critical.
The SmartBoard deployment is “context”.  Very nice to have.  Popular.  Not mission critical.
Which got more attention this past year in terms of resources?
What didn’t you do because your attention was focused on “context”?

Perhaps that money spent on SmartBoards, installation, training, teacher time, and effort could have been better spent on that wireless project?  Not because “wireless is cool”, but because it’s inevitable that your teachers and students will all be bringing in their own devices during the next few years.  They all need a connection.

Perhaps it’s time to seriously consider ditching your email server, licensing, maintenance, troubleshooting, training.  Not because “Hey, Google does it free!”  Face it.  You know that you’ll never keep pace with that one principal who upgrades her smartphone every year resulting in 5 days of pain configuring calendar sync.  Let the professionals at Google worry about how they do or don’t get along with Nokia rather than focusing on some half-baked janky connector plugin thingy.

While we are at it, let’s look at dumping district support for student email accounts.  They don’t really use email these days anyway.  They all know where to access it where, how, and when they need it.  Take the resources used to support that old initiative and direct them at that policy work that needs to happen.

It’s actually something that you WANT to do deep down inside. Tech folks love to solve problems and please people.

These are the sorts of things I mean by “be less helpful”.  We can’t support everybody that wants the latest SmartBoard software update, push calendar sync to whatever smartphone is on the market, or every student that needs to email their penpal in South Africa.  These are all really nice things.  When it’s your mom you are supporting, it’s really not that hard to do.  It’s actually something that you WANT to do deep down inside.  Tech folks love to solve problems and please people.

There’s a problem when everything is considered “core”.  You spent the last 3 years rolling out SmartBoards and then realized you have a better Internet connection to your house than to your high school.  You figured out shared calendaring and resource scheduling and they discontinued the software.  You trained your staff to use Office 2003 and their new computer at home shipped with Google Andriod.

Last week I met with the Curriculum & Instruction Director from a mid-sized school district.  The school board is pressuring the administration to figure out what they will do in order to stop the approximately 15 students each year from open-enrolling in virtual schools.  These students are “leaving” the community and taking $100,000+ potential funding with them.  There’s “political will” in this district to do something that might reverse this flow and possibly bring in 15 students each year.  What’s holding them back?  Infrastructure.  They are doing a nice job providing laptop carts and SmartBoards each year, but worry that implementing a “virtual school” model won’t be sustainable.  Sound familiar?  It’s because your IT folks are busy synching calendars and teaching after-school sessions about SmartBoards.  Trying to be helpful.

They need permission to be less helpful.

“School is no longer constrained to how far bus can travel in morning. Schools will be last to notice.”

Photo courtesy Dean Shareski.  Flickr Creative Commons.

Christensen (2008) makes the claim that by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught either fully online or in a “blended” fashion, with between 30% and 80% of the interaction happening online. There’s no question that the United States is becoming an increasingly wired society—and as schools increase their bandwidth, there is no technological reason why classes can’t be taught online or become blended, but what will those classes look like? How will they be taught? Who will teach them? Everyone—parents, teachers, administrators, and students—must be willing to rethink many of their basic assumptions about what classes—and schools—can be.

via Chris Lehmann at NASSP – Shifting Ground

Link.

Sounds like a new Web 2.0 service.  It’s not.

NO bullet points. NO slides. Just the greatness in you and the “audience.”

Thanks Heather Gold.