Dangerously Irrelevant

• Opening up my classes, looking for co-learners: Fall 2009 School Law & DDDM
• Technology boot camp for administrators
• CASTLE Summer Book Club - We have liftoff!  
• Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators
• Help wanted: Model 21st century schools?

NECC - My adventures with Horse & Hound magazine: Florida Virtual School, Achieve3000

A few days before NECC I was invited by a publicist to interview Julie Young, the Executive Director of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), and also speak with the folks from Achieve3000. I accepted because I’ve always wanted the chance to talk with Julie. I had no idea in advance that I would end up having a Notting Hill Horse & Hound magazine-type experience (and, yes, I was Hugh Grant).

Florida Virtual School

I knock on a door and am quickly ushered into a hotel suite. I meet and shake hands with Ben Noel, CEO of 360Ed, as he walks out the door. Then I am offered a beverage, plunked onto a couch, handed a packet of publicity materials, and given 30 minutes to talk with Julie and Andy Ross, VP of Global Services for FLVS. The topic: FLVS’ new online video game / American History course, Conspiracy Code. I’m a little bit disoriented but gamely dive in…

Conspiracy Code runs on a custom gaming engine designed specifically for FLVS by 360Ed. It cost $1.5 million to develop; costs were shared equally by FLVS and 360Ed and spread over three years ($250K per partner per year). Two hundred FLVS students are in the game now. Several other districts are piloting it. Conspiracy Code is designed to be an integrated, full-year course / gaming experience. Students take about 90 to 100 hours to complete the game. They dip in and out of the gaming engine throughout the year, assembling clues and completing missions. The game includes 51 assessments (both oral and written), 270 mini-games, numerous interrogations, 30 ‘agent eliminations,’ and 371 clues. Teachers monitor student progress; each of the 10 missions takes 2 to 3 weeks. Most students spend about an hour a day working for the class, some of which is in the game environment. Historical facts are interwoven throughout the gaming experience and student-teacher discussion. Sometimes the game requires students to do outside research to complete assignments and proceed forward.

• Conspiracy Code Product Overview
• Conspiracy Code Press Release
• FLVS Consipiracy Code web site
• FLVS Presskit
• Education Next article about FLVS

The first evaluation report on the Conspiracy Code is due in a couple of weeks but anecdotal evidence looks extremely promising. The students who seem to like the game the most are the ones who ‘hate history.’ The game requires students to write, create data maps, make timelines, ask questions, make associations, solve problems, etc. Students must apply their knowledge and facts in a number of different ways to be successful. Some ‘barriers’ were put in place to ensure that students didn’t play more than work (e.g., students can’t move forward until they work on their data map, write in their journal, get feedback from their teacher, etc.).

 

The first two teachers were ‘gaming people.’ It still took them 2 to 3 months to get comfortable with teaching this way. All FLVS teachers receive extensive professional development before they’re allowed to teach. The first few teachers will train those that follow. There is a ‘Teaching Online 101’ course plus a separate gaming module for Conspiracy Code.

 

Now that the gaming engine has been built, FLVS will use it for other games/courses; I also suggested that FLVS release it to students to design their own games. The next Conspiracy Code game will target reading and comes out in August. All in all, it appears to be a solid attempt at integrating gaming into the education experience. It will be interesting to see the evaluation results when they come out. FLVS is a data-driven organization and is committed to reworking the game/course as need be to ensure students are both engaged AND learning whatever facts they need for success in the standardized-testing era.

Achieve3000

Throughout our conversation, people are coming in and out of a door to another room in the suite (reporters? other bloggers?). When my 30 minutes with Julie and Andy are up, I’m swooped into that room, replaced by someone else who gets my spot on the FLVS couch. I’m handed another publicity packet, do the quick meet-and-greet, and away we go…

Achieve3000 is a ‘differentiated instruction solution.’ In essence, students are given an article to read on the computer that’s aligned with their reading level. The company recommends a minimum of 1 or 2 articles a week but there are articles available every day if desired. Great care has been taken to avoid stigmatization of low-level readers. For example, even though the article text and corresponding assignments are geared to students’ individual reading level, the overall layout of the article, font size, graphics, etc. all are extremely similar to what other higher-level readers in the class are experiencing. There is little to no difference in reading experience; it’s actually fairly difficult to tell at a glance at what level another student is working. The student reading at first-grade level also is reading the same content as her peer at the ninth-grade level. This allows low-level readers to still contribute to class discussions. All of this is in contrast to schools’ typical practice of having separate books or textbooks – often on separate topics – or pullout programs for struggling readers.

Results so far seem to be impressive. Expected student growth in a year is 46 lexile points. Students who read one article a week average 102 lexile point gains; students who read two articles per week average 124. The program accommodates Spanish-speaking students (and, soon, those that speak Haitian Creole). The New York City and Miami-Dade school districts (as well as the State of Hawaii) are using Achieve3000. Average gains in one year for ESL/ELL students are 166 lexile points (compared to 27 points expected). Good results also are being seen with students with special needs (see, e.g., the Arrowhead (WI) Schools).

Achieve3000 is working with the Associated Press and now has an archive of over 16,000 nonfiction articles. Next steps for the company are to 1) create a number of specific science units, and 2) identify and/or write articles that target specific career clusters and can be aligned with the WorkKeys job skill assessment program.

Final impressions

My time is up. I’m whisked out of the back room toward the hotel suite door. Julie and Andy are talking with someone new on the couch and I’m soon in the hallway, left at last to collect my thoughts. As I walk toward the elevator to return to my own hotel room, I’m left with one thought: Man, was that strange. Quite informative, but strange nonetheless. Who knows what else goes on in the back hallways, hotel suites, and meeting rooms of NECC?!

Disclosure: I received no incentives from either organization (other than a thumb drive from FLVS that contained the above Conspiracy Code materials) and was not pressured to cover them in any particular way. In short, I believe I was treated much like any media representative, despite being ‘just a blogger.’

NECC - Vendor excess (aka Do pink Cadillacs really sell printers?)

I am by no means anti-corporation. And many companies have been very good to me and CASTLE. And I know they’re an important part of the NECC convention each year. And yet, when I went into the NECC 2009 vendor hall today, I was struck by the sheer extravagance of many of the booths: exhibits two or three stories high, a bistro, a singing Elvis, giant computers hanging from the ceiling like Damocles’ sword, an enormous white cave, a two-part neon-illuminated complex that was larger than my backyard, and more…

I’m not the only one who left a little unsettled:

The Bloggers' Cafe is buzzing and Twitter has been all-#NECC09-all-day.

For the most part, it seems like the educators here are mostly interested in access, connection, and sharing info via Web 2.0.

I didn't find a single booth downstairs that talked about any of those things. [Shelly Blake-Plock]

I can’t quite put my finger on what I felt down there today. A little sick at the waste / uselessness of it all (is bringing a pink Cadillac really going to help OKI sell more printers? do they have data on that?)? A wish for more substance and and genuine engagement and less flash?

Maybe it was just such a sharp contrast to the authentic interactions I felt I was having with folks in the Bloggers’ Cafe. Or maybe my crap detector was just on high alert…

Photo set: NECC 2009 Vendors

NECC - NETS-A Release Celebration

Here are my notes from the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A) Release Celebration here at NECC 2009 in Washington, DC.

• The new NETS-A are a big update from the previous NETS-A. They emphasize change, should be a systemic road map for leaders, and also are designed to be aligned with the recently-refreshed NETS-S and NETS-T.
• Here are the new NETS-A standards:
• Visionary leadership
• Digital-age learning culture
• Exellence in professional practice
• Systemic improvement
• Digital citizenship
• Intel: across countries, the building and/or district leader can either be a huge catalyst or a huge barrier. [Like I’ve said time and time again, “if the leaders don’t get it, it doesn’t happen”]

NECC - No Internet in Blogger's Cafe, NECC Unplugged - WRONG ANSWER

The Internet’s down here at NECC 2009. “Too many people – it overloaded the system” has been the response.

WRONG ANSWER. The convention center knew 14,000 techies were coming. If it couldn’t handle the bandwidth need, it shouldn’t have accepted the contract. Unacceptable response by the convention center.

I asked some ISTE people (staff? volunteers?) here in the hallway when the Internet will be back up and available. They said a reboot was occurring and hopefully everything would be fine in another 15 minutes. I said, “Okay. Well, sorry. I’m sure you’re taking some heat for this.” They shrugged their shoulders indifferently and said, “Oh, it’s no problem. We’re not worried about it.”

WRONG ANSWER. Indifferent to the Internet needs of the 14,000 techies who paid a boatload of money to attend the conference and who have expectations about access to the Web? Unacceptable response by ISTE.

Remember – your organization is only as good as the people who interact with your clients or the public…

UPDATE: I am pleased to announce that the Internet is back up again. Thanks, ISTE. Everyone, cross your fingers that it lasts!

NECC - You want coverage of Malcolm Gladwell? We got it (both good and bad)!

Count ‘em: Four, yes four, CoverItLive sessions for Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote at NECC 2009 in Washington, DC:

• Kristin Hokanson
• ISTE Connects
• TechChicks
• TeachPaperless

If you can’t figure out what Gladwell talked about after looking at all of these, there’s no helping you!

The Twitter hashtag for Gladwell’s talk was #necc09mg – you can read everyone’s comments there or at #necc09. Most tweets were restatements and note-taking. Many were positive. Some weren’t. The pushback already has begun. Personally, I love what is happening now that everyone can have a voice, but I also have to note that this is one reason why academics are very reluctant to embrace social media. They are NOT used to having much pushback on their ideas, particularly from “the masses!”

 

NECC - Constructivist Celebration

These are my notes from the 3rd annual Constructivist Celebration, hosted by Gary Stager at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.

Gary Stager

• 150 participants here today
• See constructivistconsortium.org/books for constructivist teaching resources
• Tags/hashtags = constructivist celebration, constructivist consortium, #ccdc09
• Good ideas are incredibly fragile, bad ideas are timeless
• Regardless of what we’re asking educators, the level of resistance is relatively constant over time (so why not ask a lot more of the rest?)
• Computers are knowledge machines that allow you to go further than you could go on your own
• Educational computing is about software, not hardware, because software ultimately determines what you can do
• The only question we should be asking about computers in schools is “what are students doing with the computers?”
• Are the students programming the computer or is the computer programming them?
• Who has agency in the learning process?
• microworlds.com - design video games, not just consume them
• Getting the computer to do something it doesn’t already do is an important life skill
• Elements of an effective project
• Purpose
• Time
• Personally meaningful
• Complex, including serendipity
• Connected
• Discipline
• Reflection
• Shareable
• Access and constructive materials
• “Can you build an amusement park for kids?” is a more authentic, meaningful question/project than “Martin Luther King had a dream. What dream do you have?”
• Questions worth asking
• Is the problem solvable?
• Is the project monumental or substantial?
• Who does the project satisfy?
• What can they do with that?
• Less is more
• A good prompt is worth 1,000 words – if these are in place, you can do lots more than you expected
• A good prompt, challenge, problem or motivation
• Appropriate materials
• Sufficient time
• Supportive culture (including expertise)
• Maybe we should be adopting an artist’s aesthetic more often – is the work beautiful, thoughtful, personally meaningful, sophisticated, whimsical, shareable with a respect for the audience, enduring? does it move you? (we should ask more: “why should anyone have to sit through that crap?”)
• Good project-based learning (PBL) has a fighting chance of being enduring
• Technology matters
• When students come back years later and say “Remember when we … ?”, they never finish the sentence with “used all of those vocabulary words in a sentence” or “studied so hard for the state assessment” – it’s invariably some enduring project that they remember

Melinda (Lindy) Kolk

• Learning happens when children make things
• If students can text message their friends to get the answers, we’re asking the wrong questions
• Let’s focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction
• More than one right answer
• Collaborative
• Student-centered
• Requires high-level thinking

Peter Reynolds (author of The Dot and Ish)

• Great teachers notice kids
• Great teachers are not about managing data, they’re about loving kids
• Great teachers have an idea first and notice it later
• It’s not a tiger, but it’s ‘tigerish’ – the ‘ish’ concept tells the world ‘back off, I’m trying to figure this out, and right now this is the way I do it’ – gives us some room to play, experiment, LEARN
• Expose kids to big ideas and encourage them to have big ideas
• We often ask ‘what do you do?’ – we should ask ‘what’s your misssion?’ – adults often have trouble answering this – the sooner we ask that of kids, the better
• The best children’s books are wisdom dipped in story – they move you somehow
• There are so many kids out there that don’t get captured by the testing camera
• Be brave about your own artwork and be nice about others’ artwork

NECC - Thumbs up for unconferences!

The sign of a good unconference is when every session you attend goes over time, people don’t want to leave, conversation pushes into the next scheduled session, etc. EVERY session I attended today was like this. Awesome (and thank you, Steve)!

Now, how do I get this format as part of the annual educational leadership professors conference?

NECC - Edubloggercon, Web 2.0 Smackdown, Chicks That Click

NECC ‘09 and Edubloggercon ‘09 are underway! We had a quick intro from Steve Hargadon, then broke into sessions. I stayed for Vicki Davis’ Web 2.0 Smackdown. Here are the tools and resources that people showed:

• Vicki Davis, demonstrated Diigo Lists.
• John Costilla, demonstrated QR Codes.
• Rushton Hurley, demonstrated FreshBrain.
• Lisa Thumann, demonstrated Google Labs Similar Images Search.
• Angela Maiers, demonstrated CompFight, FlickrStorm. and Wibe7.tv.
• Kristin Hokanson, demonstrated CoverItLive.
• Jane Krauss, demonstrated a “thinkspace” for those of us who help others with Web 2.0.
• Adam Frey, demonstrated Wikispaces tags.
• David Jakes, demonstrated Fur.ly and Issuu.
• Scott McLeod, demonstrated Twoogle, Twitalzyer, Retweetist, and David Pogue’s article on typing expansion software (EVERYONE should be using this kind of software!).
• Leigh Zeitz, demonstrated Woot!
• Wes Fryer, demonstrated the K12 Online Conference and EdTechTalk.
• Lee Kolbert, demonstrated Tag Galaxy.
• Maria Droujkova, demonstrated TinEye.
• Chris Chater, demonstrated Noteflight and JamStudio and the Opus09 Ning.
• Jim Gates, demonstrated the WolframAlpha Firefox extension.
• Chad Lehmann, demonstrated the iPhone app Bump.
• Craig Nansen, demonstrated Tinypaste and Today’sMeet.
• Kevin Honeycutt (via Skype from a train in Missouri), demonstrated his new Web 2.0 keychain and album.

I’m now in a small break-out discussion regarding the lack of female students’ interest in technology / computer science careers (and also science, math, etc.)!

Recent publicity for me and CASTLE - Edutopia, T.H.E. Journal, Fort Dodge Messenger, ISU Talk About IT & College of Human Sciences

Thought I’d share some recent publicity that CASTLE and I have gotten. I’ve been sitting on some of these for a while and wanted to get them all out so I can focus on NECC ‘09!

Edutopia

Quick: Name ten excellent Web sites related to the grade level or subject area you teach.

Scott McLeod, coordinator of the educational-administration program at Iowa State University, recently posed that question on his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant. Many of the comments his readers left echo McLeod's assertion that the Internet delivers "a paucity of high-quality online resources for educators."

McLeod and others don't deny the abundance of online resources teachers have at their fingertips. The challenge is sifting through all that stuff to find what you need -- and then knowing how to incorporate the gems into your curriculum. 

Read more…

T.H.E. Journal

SCOTT MCLEOD SAYS the great sin in the way professional development is provided in this country is one of omission. On his blog, McLeod, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University and the coordinator of the department's Educational Administration Program, writes, "Most of our school leaders have received no training whatsoever when it comes to 21st-century schooling."

It is not totally their fault, he says. Few higher ed programs for administrators even have a course dealing with digital technology, and if they do, the course generally covers basic software, not leadership. Neither school districts nor professional organizations offer workshops in the area either. As a result, no movement can be made toward 21stlearning environments: When leaders are clueless about technology and the impact it can have in classrooms, they are powerless to change their school or district into one that provides tech-enabled instruction for students.

Read more…

Fort Dodge (IA) Messenger (this link might expire?)

In a world where so much revolves around technology, high school students often only have the opportunity to use technology as part of their in-school learning process for an average of 30 minutes per week.

That is something that Scott McLeod, associate professor of educational leadership at Iowa State University, would like to see change in Iowa classrooms.

McLeod was the keynote speaker Tuesday afternoon at the Iowa Central Summer Science Institute at Iowa Central Community College, where he addressed a group of 25 high school and college science instructors on how they can implement technology in the classroom and why it is so crucial for students to be able to develop workplace skills and remain engaged in their course work.

Read more…

ISU Talk About IT

See the original here…

ISU College of Human Sciences

See the original here… (pp. 18-19)

Happy reading / viewing!

Walking out on bad presenters

I walked out of a 2–hour workshop last week. I actually really wanted to know the information that was to be presented, but the workshop facilitator did such a terrible job that I left after 35 minutes. My graduate assistant said the next day, “I heard you walked out on that workshop.” I replied, “Did you hear anything else about it?” She said, “Yeah, I heard it was pretty bad.”

I find myself having less and less patience for people who waste my time in unproductive meetings, boring presentations, workshops that don’t meet my needs, and so on. Even when I’m extremely interested in the topic, a facilitator’s structure and/or delivery can ruin it for me. I don’t leave right away. I try to stay mentally engaged and I give the facilitator a chance to right the ship. But if it’s clearly a lost cause, I’m usually out of there (if I can’t leave, then I start quietly checking my e-mail / surfing the Web).

I have worked very hard over the past few years to ramp up my presentation skills, both in terms of content and delivery. I try to apply that learning to the various aspects of my life, whether it be teaching, consulting, or just holding meetings. I ask myself questions like “Do we really need this meeting or activity?” and “What is my audience doing at this stage?” and “How are my students or participants feeling right about now?” In other words, I try my utmost to think intentionally and purposefully about the impact of what I do on others’ valuable time. Is it too much to expect others to do the same?

But, Scott, it’s rude to walk out on someone (or check your e-mail). Not any more rude than it is to fail to deliver a learning experience that meets the group’s needs rather than your own. It’s one thing to waste your own time. It’s another to waste the time of five to twenty to hundreds of others. Shame on you.

But, Scott, aren’t you worried about your reputation? I’m willing to stand up for quality presentations, meetings, and learning experiences. I think that collectively we would be better off if more of us left more often. We’re captive to our own ‘politeness’ (if that’s what we want to call it) and we suffer countless wasted hours as a result. If folks walk out of one of my presentations, that lets me know that their needs aren’t being met. Rather than taking it personally, I’m glad that they’re going somewhere else that is a better fit for them. If walk-outs happen in large numbers or on a frequent basis, that lets me know that I need to something differently.

But, Scott, maybe the facilitator didn’t know how to do any better. So? How is that my problem? Why shouldn’t the responsibility be on presenters, facilitators, and instructors to do a better job? Why should they get to waste our time rather than improve their skills? What’s their impetus for change if we passively acquiesce to their ineptitude?

P-12 students usually don’t have the chance to walk out of poor learning experiences (wouldn’t it be interesting if we gave every student a red ‘I’m disengaged’ card that she could lay on her desk every time she was turned off or tuned out?). But we adults do if we’re brave enough to stand up for quality learning experiences. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not investing my walk-out last week with any huge societal significance. But larger battles start one principled stand at a time… Care to join me?

Photo credit: Not my cat, but cute enough.

P.S. On a related note, my proposal submission to address the issue of bad academic PowerPoint got rejected by the reviewers for the annual educational leadership professors conference. Ugh.

Opening up my classes, looking for co-learners: Fall 2009 School Law & DDDM

Some of you may have noticed that I have two online courses coming up this fall. Here’s what I’m thinking…

I’ve been reading Jeff Jarvis’ superb book, What Would Google Do? (which I’ll be writing more about soon). Over and over again, he stresses the importance of openness, transparency, collaboration, collective action, co-learning, co-creation of knowledge, and giving up control in this new Internet era.

So what would that look like in a graduate-level course? I’m not quite sure but I want to find out. I’m taking my two most popular educational leadership courses - School Law & Data-Driven Decision-Making - and offering them online to anyone, anywhere who wants to take them.

I’m looking for teachers and administrators who want to dive in deep, wrestle with thorny problems, and challenge their thinking regarding these two important school leadership topics. I don’t know yet what directions we’ll go; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet what topics we’ll cover; we’ll determine that together. I don’t know yet how we’ll demonstrate our learning; we’ll determine that together. The point of this is that I’m not going to be the omniscient, omnipotent faculty member dictating course structure, sequence, assessment, etc. This is a joint exercise in learning and I need participants who are willing to be active co-learners.

I’ve taught these classes online before with great success. I’ve prided myself on being a student-centered instructor. But it’s time to take my teaching to the next level. Am I a little uncertain about this? Absolutely. But a little healthy instructional tension will be good for me and my students both.

More information on the two courses - including tuition costs and how to register - is here. Both classes should be excellent options for educators who need relicensure credits, are exploring the idea of graduate-level coursework, or need to take an outside course for an existing graduate program.

Hope some of you will join me; please feel free to also pass this along. We start at the end of August!

Where are our academic superstars going to college? Who knows?

Check out this comment on Linda Fandel’s Des Moines Register blog today:

"Ames’ Kellogg says she will play basketball at Minnesota"
"Charles City’s Buss says he will play basketball at UNI"

These are two headlines from the DMR [Des Moines Register] today.

Where will Des Moines North Valedictorian attend school? Where are the National Merit Scholars going. Who else got scholarships to attend college... non-sports' scholarships?

Cut the arts??? Maybe a hundred people will be at the school board meeting to complain. Cut the football program... you will have a community-wide revolt.

You want world-class schools on a limited budget... not till the people value it more than sports.

So true, so true…

Technology boot camp for administrators

A few weeks ago we decided to offer a technology ‘boot camp’ for administrators. CASTLE is working with the School Administrators of Iowa to make it happen. For those of you who are interested, here is some information on what we’re doing:

• Promotional flyer
• Boot camp wiki 
• The signs we have all around the room

We started yesterday. Unlike our Transitioning Schools into the 21st Century workshops, which focused on technology leadership issues, the purpose of the boot camp is solely to ramp up school leaders’ technological skills. Our emphasis is on providing a safe space for administrators to learn and empowering them to walk away from the workshop with the ability to actually do this stuff. We’re taking our time, answering lots of questions, and covering whatever we can in the time that we have. We had participants blogging within the first hour yesterday. They were pretty excited!

We’ve got a great bunch of school leaders in this first boot camp. If today goes as well as yesterday, we’ll do a few more next academic year.

Any feedback that you have on what we’re doing would be most welcome. Anyone out there doing something similar? If so, how’s it going?

Video - Clay Shirky: How mobile and social technologies can make history

 Yet another great TED presentation, this one by Clay Shirky:

Shirky notes that we are living through "the largest increase in expressive capability in human history." Wait, isn't it a function of K-12 schools to help students be effective communicators in the media of their time?

2009 Game Education Summit begins today!

The 2009 Game Education Summit begins today in Pittsburgh. If you’re not attending, the keynote presentations will be streamed live and also will be available afterward. The summit looks awesome; it’s “the only conference where the video game industry and academics from around the world can come together to have meaningful conversations about the future of game development.”

Wish I could be there! Maybe someone’s liveblogging or there’s a Twitter hashtag for the event?

CASTLE Round-Up - Week of June 8

This is a quick round-up of what happened on the CASTLE blogs last week…

LeaderTalk

Sue King discussed her thoughts on wrapping up another school year.

Barbara Barreda noted that we need to rethink learning and curriculum resources when we move to 1:1 laptop programs in our schools.

Angela Maiers wrote about students who read without meaning.

EdJurist

Justin Bathon was busy last week! He wrote about the always-exciting area of teacher pension funds, the digital efficiencies that may come with electronic textbooks, an editorial in The Atlantic about K-12 education, and Senator Harrison Williams. He also highlighted the National Conference of State Legislators’ online bill tracking database and wondered if NCLB is a ‘hostage of fortune.’

In addition, Justin teed off on a news story about student sexual harassment:

The operating assumption here, and it is explicitly acknowledged in the article, is that kids are sexually harassing each other all over the place. Kids are probably exposing themselves everyday, fondling each other, forcing kisses on each other, raping each other. That is the clear modus operandi of all teenagers because they are "hormonally charged." To support these assumptions, she quotes a consultant who would benefit if such was the national perception. We must assume the worst, and that assumption must override any data ... because, well, we all know that schools and tennagers are bad, in all cases.

Dangerously Irrelevant

Posting here at Dangerously Irrelevant was light as I was busy with Summer Book Club preparation. I posted two book club updates:

• CASTLE Summer Book Club – Update 2
• CASTLE Summer Book Club – Update 3

I also squeezed in a quick note about why I never let my visitors’ ability to comment on my old posts expire.

Happy reading!

CASTLE Summer Book Club - We have liftoff!

Whew! It’s consumed a lot of my time the past week but I am pleased to say that the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club is off and running! [Okay, more accurately, I should say that it has consumed a lot of the valuable time of Laura Bestler, CASTLE’s technology coordinator. Thank you, Laura!]

How to participate

Thanks to a few last-minute folks, our grand total is 246. Participants are busy introducing themselves (and learning how to comment on a blog!). If you want to follow the action, here are our four discussion groups:

• Group 1 (blue)
• Group 2 (orange)
• Group 3 (green)
• Group 4 (pink)

Even if you’re not an ‘official’ participant and thus can’t post to the group blogs, you still can play along at home by leaving comments (be sure to read the copyright notice in the initial Getting Started post). If you’re interested, each discussion group also has RSS feeds and e-mail subscription options for both the posts and the comments.

Social media

The book club has a Twitter and Technorati hashtag (#castlebc) and a Twibe.

Hope you’ll join us for our live podcast with Dr. Daniel Willingham, the author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, at 12pm Central on July 13!

Why I don't let my comments expire

Many bloggers don’t allow comments on old posts. After two weeks or 30 days or whatever, visitors lose their ability to leave comments. This is done mainly for spam protection, I believe.

In contrast, I don’t let my comments expire. Here are two reasons why:

1. Bolman & Deal frameworks: 49 comments to date. Two in June 2007, 47 in June 2009.
2. A taste of honey: 37 comments to date. Twelve in February 2009, 25 in April 2009.

In both of these instances, a professor or principal had his graduate students and/or staff use one of my blog posts as a discussion area. The dialogue for both has been excellent.

I’m happy to serve as a conversation space for people. In the end, that benefits them and me both. Them because they may not have another space readily available for easy discussion. Me because it allows me to see how people are thinking about and interacting with my content.

I want folks to find and be engaged with my past content, not just my current posts. That’s why I have a link to my “Top Posts” and why I include a search box, categories, a featured posts section, and other features on this blog. I’m guessing that at least some of those graduate students and educators also looked at some other content while they were here. A win-win all around…

Photo credit: Friday March 20, 19.01.23

CASTLE Summer Book Club - Update 3

[Update: If you registered, please check your junk mail / spam folders. Many of you who thought you had not received an e-mail from me later found my message in there...]

Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club has closed. We have 238 participants this year, including myself. Whew! Participants come from the following countries:

• Canada (6)
• Malaysia (1)
• Singapore (1)
• United Kingdom (1)
• United States (229)

I have divided us into four discussion groups. Last night I sent an e-mail to all participants that confirmed their registration and notified them of their group number. They will receive another e-mail this weekend that includes the URL of their online discussion area. The links to the four discussion areas will be posted here as well. Our conversations will be public and anyone can join us on an ad hoc basis as desired.

We start on Monday!

Mark your calendars

Dr. Daniel Willingham, author of the book that we’re reading, Why Don’t Students Like School?, has graciously agreed to do a live podcast with me on July 13 from 1pm to 2pm Eastern. Questions will be generated from our book club participants.

Related posts

• Our discussion timeline for the summer
• Some FAQs
• Another update

CASTLE Summer Book Club - Update 2

Registration for the 2009 CASTLE Summer Book Club closes this Wednesday at midnight. To date we have 159 participants, which blows the doors off of last year’s total of 125. A week ago we had 81 participants, so we’ve effectively doubled the size of the group in the last seven days. Awesome!

We’re reading Why Don’t Students Like School? by Dr. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia. I selected this book despite the fact that my alma mater, The College of William & Mary, is a fierce in-state academic rival of UVA so you know the book has to be pretty good! Sorry, those of you who have asked for a Kindle version...

Stay in touch as you have questions. I’ll see some of you online starting next week!