The nice folks at iNACOL asked me to speak this week about student accessibility. I took an angle that wasn’t my usual (IDEA, 504, UDL, blah, blah, blah. Not that that stuff isn’t important but with FireFox accessibility addons and $24 dollar versions of Dragon Dictate, overcoming physical disability and the web have come a long, long, way) and went at it from the point of view that students need access to different kids of schooling options if we’re truly going to educate all young people in this nation.

Here are my talking points from the presentation.

How’d the presentation go? Well, I talk too fast when I get passionate or nervous. My mic cut off at some point because I bumped it. You can’t gauge the reaction of the audience well in a webinar (ok, I can’t you may be stellar at it), but other than one attendee I’m not sure I reached anyone (the other panel members, more-or-less, refuted what I had to say). I’m fairly sure my message didn’t go over awesome.

Just so you know, if you ask me to talk I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about and hide it in what you asked me to talk about.

Consider yourself warned.

Technorati Tags: I’ve never seen a soapbox I didn’t like, You’re really using this as your post this week. Really?, Sunday is right around the corner, hope you got another post in your pocket.

I’m beginning to believe that there is an illusion of power and connectedness in our networks.

Before I go too much deeper into this thought I want to make it clear: I’m not whining, or complaining, or upset, or even disappointed with how things went down this week.

The Story

A friend of mine is embattled in an international custody case. You can read more about that here: Justice for Steffany.

On Monday the webhost of his site, based in the United States, got an injunction telling them to take the site down and they complied. Within hours a Canadian webhosting company stepped-up and got the site backup and running: Nebraska Laughs at Canadian Law: Literally.

Here’s my small part in all of this: I wanted to get this story added to digg so as many people as possible could get exposure to this important issue.

Where do you go when you want something like that to happen? I go to my network.

A Quick Rundown of My Network

In twitter I have 457 followers. Probably 10% of those are junk accounts that I neglected to block, like the 193 that forgot to block me, so let’s say 400 followers. In facebook I have 142 friends. There’s some crossover between the two, so let’s say in the two networks I use the most I’ve got about 500 contacts.

Why I Thought Others Would Care

I figured that the folks that follow me in twitter might be interested in, and concerned about, this story because

1. It involves a child advocacy issue and most of the people who follow me in twitter work with kids.
2. It involves a technology censorship issue, this is something that could happen to any of our personally hosted blogs. If you think that your host is going to stand-up to an injunction for the $9.95 a month you’re paying them, you’re nuts.

I took a shot at facebook because the people in this network, for the most part, are people that I know personally and I thought that if I asked for a little help there I might get it.

How I Went About It

Here are the messages that I sent in twitter:

and in facebook:

Here are the response that I got:

I was able to mobilize 2% of my network.

To those that helped by digging, retweeting, and reposting, I thank you and I don’t mean to discount your help in this effort at all. Sincerely.

Conclusions

What does this all mean for the power of networking?

I know that everyday I pickup something new, or add something neat, from the networks I have in twitter and delicious (and every once-in-a-while facebook). Those things are feeding me and that’s useful if not powerful.

When it comes to mobilization, turning thoughts into action, getting something tangible to happen; perhaps I’ve grossly overestimated the power of the network.

In Somehow Related News

Steve Dembo writes:

Education will never be a trending topic – Teach42.

Technorati Tags: what about iran?, what did you expect with four tweets and two facebook posts?, hey, you just wrote a blog post with out mentioning TED

• Among the Many things we’ve Gotten Wrong
• I’d Rather be Happy

And a post from Mike Hasley in my facebook the other day took me to a conservative pundit (yes, I’m about to bring a conservative on to my blog so brace yourself):

This, along with several TED talks about happiness have me thinking about happiness, specifically my happiness, a lot lately and how it effects school leadership.

Here’s what I can tell you, for sure, I am greatly conflicted about happiness. It’s not something that comes easy to me or at least it’s not something that I work on outwardly displaying.

Here’s something else that I know: my father, also a school leader, is one of the happiest people I know. It is something that he brought to school with him. It is something that he displayed, wore on his sleeve, and shared with those around him both faculty and students. To him, happiness and love went hand-in-hand, and both of those things were given generously within his school (and within his home for that matter). It’s important to note that his schools were successful and places, in retrospect, that I would have wanted to serve.

There’s someone else I know in this business who displays happiness, his school is amazing, and also fosters a place that I would like to serve. His name is Chris Lehmann.

Both of these leaders possess something that I feel that I am not strong in and I need to practice if I am to become a good school leader. That thing is happiness (and perhaps charisma too, but more and more I see those as going together).

In the background I have the same things going on that everyone else does. I have been exposed to this lesson before but I was faced with it again recently in Washington D.C. The Voyage of Life, Thomas Cole.

So, as I muddle through this third phase of life I am going to do my best to find the moral imperative of happiness not only for myself but so that I may serve others better and so that they may find happiness as well.

Note: Dr. McLeod, sorry for hijacking Leadership Day with this post. I’m just about sick to death of educational technology and talking about educational technology when it does not address the true issues of and necessities for school change, when it becomes a shield to hide behind, when it becomes the catalyst for change instead the the hundreds of children we see each day, when we know what needs to be done for schools and know it could be done in a dirt lot, that we spend any more time talking about those two particular words.

Technorati Tags: Moses, can you really be happy and end your post with that? Really? Not a lot of smiles there. Here, think about the episode of King of the Hill where Peggy gets a job subbing a health class and practices saying “penis” by breaking down the word “happiness”. Happiness. Happ-i-ness. Ha-penis. Penis. Yeah, that’s a much better ending.

#leadershipday09

Here is a member of the generation after mine talking about how he feels about video games: Top Ten “Oh S**t” Moments in Gaming.

Let us keep in mind that:

1. I have never felt the way that this guy does about any game I’ve ever played
2. I haven’t played a single one of those games. Not one.

Chances are that neither have you. This is part of the native/immigrant discussion that doesn’t come up often. It may be bigger than any of us think.

My Personal History with Video Games

I’ve burned a lot of time playing video games:

I spent an inordinate amount of time making this time line. If you see a “+” near the bottom there’s more information there. If you click the images many of them have comments, some of them have links to audio and video from the games.

Did I mention that I’ve spent a lot of time playing video games. I did? Yeah, I have.

A Game Changing Game

Braid

I am a misfit in the world of first person games. The first first person game I played, Medieval, gave me headaches. Actual pain in the head and eyes from playing a game. This didn’t stop me from finishing Medival and getting all of the chalices though. Why? Connection? Emotion? I’m a dork? Hard to say. Anyhow, Braid brought me back to a warm safe place where as I child I’d hide. And pray for the thunder. And the rain. To quietly side-scroll me by.

Braid’s game-play is genius, there are puzzles which I love in video games, and then there’s a story. More-or-less it’s “Our Princess is in Another Castle”, wait, it’s nothing like that at all. It’s an amazing story that I won’t ruin for you here, but it’s all about meaning. All of it. The whole game, maybe even before you press Start.

Then came Passage. This is the shortest video game I’ve ever played. It’s also the video game that’s come the closest to finding me emotionally. It’s amazing that 8 bits (4 bits?) and five minutes can do a better job of reaching me than Disney has in the last 15 years. It also has more meaning than anything Disney has done in the last 15 years, but that’s another post for another time or maybe just a quick jaunt over to this comic: Pixar vs. Disney.

Seeing it in Action

My daughter is four this summer. We’ve just finished playing Rolando and Rolando 2 on my iPhone. She played a few of the simple games on the iPhone herself, but the lite version of Rolando hooked her and got me to buy the paid version of both. For the record:

1. She’s good. I’m on the low end of gaming at best, just look at my gamer score, for the record my wife owns me at Mario 3 and I secretly may have never finished the game. The daughter completed nearly half of the Rolando 2 boards on her own. They’re easy, but not that easy. It’s a hard realization that she’ll soon, most likely very soon, be owning me.
2. She’s finished two multi-level games before she finished her first chapter books. If we want to get real honest about it; she finished these games before she could read a single word.

I grew-up with video games that looked like this:

My daughter is growing up with video games that look like this:

It’s not hard to see how emotion and meaning will come into play for her, in the world of video games, for better or for worse.

EduTwist

School for her will look more or less like it did for me and the sad fact is that it will probably have as much emotion and meaning for her as it did for me.

Technorati Tags: Hey, Moses. You know that you can write blog posts that aren’t based around TED talks, right?

But I liked the retweet better:

Once a week, from here until the first week of January.

Here we go.

Technorati Tags: into the narcissistic – er i mean reflective – void i go, twitter is for sissies

via: http://dump.com

Which is directly related to this:

via: http://gapingvoid.org (seriously, buy the book Ignore Everybody)

Which begs RAISES the question:

What is the real point of what it is we do in education?

Technorati Tags: when you are tired of contemplating your navel think about this for a second

Inside of our echo-chamber this is something that is taken as a given.

This video calls a lot of that into question:

Many of the people in that video were of high school age, or not much older. No one in that video could explain what a browser, a piece of software that allows you to access webpages, is.

How much do our kids really know about technology?

I have a nephew who’s fifteen, he owns on the PS3, he can text faster than he can type, he’s got a MySpace page and tweeks the heck out of it. He doesn’t use Google Docs, he doesn’t find Zotero useful, he’s not making and editing videos for his classes, twitter, to him, is dumb. He doesn’t know how to do any of these things because he doesn’t have to.

Educational technology in his world is using PowerPoint once or twice a year, watching a teacher use a SMART board at the front of the room as not much more than a projector, and something that give his parents the ability to check his grades daily if the teacher remembers to manually upload grades and if his parents feel like checking that often. That’s it.

When school for him looks like it did for me, like it did for his father, like it did for his grandfather, and really only looks different than it did for his great-grandfather, then the common technology knowledge that this kid needs to know for school is nill.

Why? Because educational technology is steam-punk. We’re not shining up shit, we’re coating it with gold. And you know it.

Technorati Tags: how’s necc going?, come on a wiki page for his algebra class would make all the difference, he throws a mean curve ball and during his life i’m fairly sure that’s going to be more useful than twitter

Anyhow, awhile back I was planning a trip to DC and because my wife is the smart one in the relationship I picked a flight which landed not once, not twice, but three times before it got it it’s destination. I realized this well after booking the flight about four days before I left and was trying to figure out how it could possibly take eleven hours to fly from Vegas to DC. As I was working out the ways to kill all of that time I decided to take some TED talks with me. One of the TED talks I took was this one:

There’s so much of this presentation that you can reframe in terms of education.

People think that it is my job to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary and to keep the bad words out. But the thing is, I don’t want to be a traffic cop.

Let’s just start right there. As a teacher, administrator, educator, what do people think your job is? Why do that instead of what you want to do in this business (unless, of course, that’s what you want to do in this business)? I don’t want to decide who the bad kids are and who the good kids are though.

I had no desire to be a cop when I came into this business. As soon as I stopped trying to be one, as soon as I realized that it isn’t the job of public education to be the gatekeeper, the better off I was in working with kids.

There’s this guy, Victorian Era, James Murray first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary … he’s really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today. When a guy who looks like that, in that hat, is the face of modernity you have a problem. James Murray could get a job on virtually any dictionary today. There would be no learning curve.

Take a moment of how many teachers who have learned nothing in the face of modernity, both young and old, who in fact have done worse than that and have openly opposed modernity, and could get a job at virtually any school today. Not to mention how there would be there would be no learning curve for them whatsoever.

What about computers? What about computers? … Computers don’t do much else but speed up the process of compiling dictionaries. They don’t change the end result.

Computers have done, quite factually, nothing to change the face of education. Well, unless you believe what Promeithan and their shill Marzano have to say about their SMART boards.

What a dictionary is is Victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion. It’s steam-punk..

This quote does a lot for me. I love, and have mentioned before, what Papert had to say about to say about strapping technology and computers on to what we are currently doing in education, but the connection to steam-punk, something I find facaniting and funny, is something that will stick and if you’re trying to make a point and have the inclination to make a whole steam-punk school please send pictures.

Then she drops three quotes about online dictionaries that apply directly to online schools

What about online dictionaries? Online dictionaries must be different..

Online dictionaries, right now, are paper thrown up on a screen. This is flat. Look at how many links there are in the actual entry. Two..

Online dictionaries replicate all of the problems of print, except for searchability and when you add searchability you take away the one advantage of print which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things that you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult..

If you replace “dictionary” with “school” in any of those three quotes it pretty much works.

Paper is the enemy of words and books are not the best shapes for dictionaries.

As schools are, most likely, not the best shape for learning.

Oh boy, people are going to take a way my beautiful paper dictionaries. No. There will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars and they became the predominate form of transportation we didn’t round up all of the horse and shoot them. There are still going to be paper dictionaries, but they are not going to be the dominate dictionary. The book shaped dictionary will not be the only shape that dictionaries come in.

So, we’re not talking about burning schools, as we know them today, to the ground tomorrow but we have to talk about how schools need to change and what they need to look like and what our students need to learn most effectively (and if you’d like to know about more of what I think about that read what Paulo Freire found with the learning time-lines for adult learners and literacy).

Erin finishes with these two quotes:

If we’re not worried about directing traffic and if we’ve transcended paper and if we’re worrying less about control and more about description then we can think of the English language as being this beautiful mobile … then we didn’t break it’s just in a new position and that new position can be just as beautiful.

What if stopped worrying about the things we are currently locked with in public education (specifically control) and realized that learning can (as well as should) be a beautiful mobile and that changing it is not breaking it we can get to something truly beautiful.

What I’m really hoping for is that my son, who turns seven this month, I want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in. This is what dictionaries used to look like. I want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape because it wasn’t useful enough. It wasn’t really what people needed.

This is, indeed, what I hope for my own daughter. Not so much with dictionaries because that’s not my passion, but with schools.

Technorati Tags: holy smokes that was a long one moses, dude it was a TED talk not your presentation, until i’ve got something like that to say i’ll never give another presentation

I’ll state right up front that I’d rather be happy. I’d rather that my students be happy.

One of my favorite poems takes it a step further:

it’s like being sick all the time, I think,
coming home from work,
sick in that low-grade continuous way
that makes you forget what it’s like to be well.

we have never in our lives known what it is to be well.

what if I were coming home, I think,
from doing work that I loved and that was for us all,

what if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets,
knowing they were in accord, not set against us,

what if we knew the powers of this country
moved to provide for us and for all people–how would that be–how would we feel and think and what would we create?

Karen Brodine – Deconstruction Site

What if our schools served this purpose? What if schools were there to help individuals, all individuals, achieve happiness? What would those schools look like and how would we feel and think and what would we create?

Technorati Tags: poems and socialism, you on the right – take a minute to suck on that, turns out I am a commie-pinko-bed-wetter after all, no I don’t like ketchup on my hotdogs

Not Bullshit:

Further not bullshit:

Time for us to fight back, reclaim ourselves, reclaim our children.

Technorati Tags: good luck growing up without needed anti-depressants, might as well reclaim the term “feminist” while we’re at it, we can do this