Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Something Rick Schwier, my grad advisor and fellow posse member said years ago that stuck with me. Education doesn’t do a very good job of documenting or discussing failures.

Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks recently sent out a memo admitting mistakes he has made in the directing his company.

…I have provided you with a list of some of the underlying issues that I believe we need to solve, let me say at the outset that we have all been part of these decisions. I take full responsibility myself, but we desperately need to look into the mirror and realize it’s time to get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience. While the current state of affairs for the most part is self induced, that has lead to competitors of all kinds, small and large coffee companies, fast food operators, and mom and pops, to position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.

You can read the specifics in the memo itself but it struck me that he was able to identify specific decisions that he felt good about at the time but later saw they weren’t the right ones.

Looking back I’ve made a pile of mistakes and hopefully learned from them but I don’t often document them. If there’s one overiding mistake I make but hopefully less than I used to is my tendency to walk too fast. I do that even with my kids, I constantly have to slow down. (Isn’t there a song about that?) My tendency is to jump quickly from one idea to the next without recognizing the need to process. I did document it here. This certainly isn’t the only mistake and while it’s not very specific, it’s helpful to others and to our own learning to document and examine our mistakes.

I’ve never seen a school or school district or government come out and admit their mistakes. Seems odd that in an age of transparency, or at least a shift towards more transparency that educators are reluctant to admit mistakes. Maybe it isn’t so odd but shouldn’t we see someone out there bold enough to admit to their errors? Can someone point me to some? Can you be so bold as to post your own errors?

Technorati Tags: starbucks, schwier, mistakes, educationalreform,

I purchased Visual Communicator about 2 years ago and used it sparingly. It’s a great product for creating vlogs and video presentations. I cracked it open again to create a video newsletter for our school division. I had real difficulty using a webcam and configuring the green screen. I then used my DV camera to capture and after turning off all the auto settings, was able to get a fairly good image. I’d like to regularly create these for our teachers and students. Cheaper than printing newsletters. More effective? You be the judge.

I’m still deciding between Revver and Youtube. I like Revver’s picture but Youtube seems to play better. Do you notice any difference?

This is short of a response to Kelly’s tag for me on leadership. I haven’t responded to all the tags I’ve been given not because I don’t want to but often I’m not sure I can really contribute much. I want to respond to this one because to me it’s very reflective of my beliefs about teaching and learning.

What’s working well?

Patience and Persistence. I’m learning over time to keep knocking on the door of change but understanding it won’t happen tomorrow.
What brings you great pride and joy?

When people take ideas and run with it. Tom Woodward takes my reference to flash face and immediately finds a use for it. On a more local scale, seeing folks like Kathy Cassidy develop leadership and recognition for her efforts.

How have you made a difference for good in the lives of those you serve?

Those who I’ve helped lead to removing the walls of their classrooms by embracing the opportunities afforded by the tools of web 2.0 have demonstrated and expressed how student engagement has increased.

What brings you quiet satisfaction?

Hearing others talk about the need for change in schools.
What have you learned over the last few months?

I need to rely on networks and groups. Stephen Downes explanation of this has made it clear to me we need both. Our groups help us focus on specific tasks and challenges, our networks help us find ideas, answers, challenges, criticisms often not found in our groups.

How can you use this information (above) to move your organization forward?

Continue to represent myself as a learner first a teacher second.

Let’s see if any of these folks are interested in responding: Will Richardson, Stephen Downes, Sandi Kitts, Catherine Hiltz, Steve Dembo , Alec Couros and Rob Wall

Fuzzy Zoeller is perhaps best known for his racist remarks made during the 1997 Masters golf tournament when he made some derogatory remarks about Tiger Woods. He claimed he was misunderstood. Tiger forgave him but the comments made haunt Fuzzy. Now Fuzzy is upset because of some comments made on wikipedia. He wants to sue.

Fuzzy and his lawyers don’t seem to grasp how wikipedia works. The comments made against him have been removed but like many wikipedia articles may return. Wikipedia does a great job of identifying pages that are controversial, have been vandalized, or aren’t very good. If everyone sued every malicious item posted on wikipedia or the internet for that matter…..well you complete that sentence.

Fuzzy you just can’t do that. Maybe you should do what Tiger did back in ‘97….forgive. Or better yet, go change the article yourself.

Update: I see USAToday has referenced my post as well as included links to the official legal documents.

A Canadian music company, Puretracks, is making the move to eliminate DRM from some of their music. Full story. For most of us, this is a major step in allowing consumers to use our music however we wish. The BareNaked Ladies have been long advocating this move. After spending countless hours trying to figure out how to get itunes music/books in other formats, this will help.

This is a presentation I gave on Feb. 20th at our annual Teachers’ Convention. Normally a 2 day convention but shortened to one this year, this session was the last session in the day right before a 3 day break. With that in mind, I decided not to offer anything too taxing on the brain. So 43 Things is stolen from the website of the same name but simply is a collection of resources I feel are essential in a digital lifestyle. Most of this will be stuff many of you use but there may be one or two things you’ll take from this. All the links are embedded in the slides displayed below and you can click on them as well.

 

 43 Things: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (589)

I called this podcast Naked Conversations because much of the content centered around the book by Scoble and Israel. It was a talk given to various members of Western provincial teachers’ associations. These are the folks who work with large provincial teachers’ associations on things like teacher contracts, grievances, rehabilitation, teacher advocacy, pensions and overall teacher welfare.

After some controversy about posting this, I’ve chosen to take edit out the audience portion and simply post my own voice. Not quite as powerful, but hopefully beneficial. (Thanks Anna for the encouragement.)

The focus of this talk was more suited to a business perspective rather than education and so the tone of the presentation was different from what I’m used to giving. As I drove up I listened to the podcast of Will and Rob Mancabelli. I know included at least 2 ideas from their presentation into mine and I’m not sure if I gave them credit. Not even sure if I needed to …after all I know that very little of my presentation is original thought but I digress.

Also, here are two one minute videos that I showed demonstrating the ease of blog posting and subscribing to content.

 

 Podcast 23 Naked Conversations: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (679)

I love NFL Films. They can make the most boring, insignificant game seem like an epic battle. With great cinematography, authoratative voice overs (Gene Hackman, Alec Baldwin, Lawrence Fishborne, to name a few) using well crafted scripts and adding the perfect sound track, to me it’s storytelling at its best. Even if you’re not a football fan, you have to marvel at the mastery of their form.

Recently the produced America’s Game, chronicling the past 40 Super Bowl Champions. I didn’t miss one episode. Yes, I’m a huge football fan but when you look at the craft of storytelling, it just doesn’t get any better. I love the emotion of the individuals recalling events that happened years ago. In many ways the elements of these stories are quite reproducible. No fancy graphics or effects. Just a great story. I guess winning 92 Emmy’s should tell you something about quality.

If you’re a football fan but do not get the NFL Network, you might have missed this. I’d suggest buying the DVDs or buying them off itunes for $1.99 an episode. If nothing else, kids need to see examples like this to see what digital stories can be.

Technorati Tags: digitalstories, NFL, AmericasGame, NFLfilms