While I work on revising this site, here are a couple of videos in support of Barack Obama. The first is an inspiring music video from MC Yogi, the second is a well-reasoned and powerful argument from General Colin Powell.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

This site is being rebuilt. Please excuse the mess.

Disrupting Class is definitely in my top few from the past few years.  The book has changed the way I think about education and education change.  It has provided a road map for the future.  Models to experiment with, and a clear way to test those models of change.

I want this post to be short and sweet, so here’s a quick list of highlights.

• Christensen defines how businesses are displaced by disruptive technologies in the theory of disruptive innovation: The MiniComputer by the PC/MAC; The SLR camera by the The Kodak point and shoot camera; and the vacuum tube radio by the transistor radio.  Christensen sees that online learning that is customized by the learner style is the future and predicts that “by 2019, about 50% of high school courses will be offered online” (p. 98).
• We should all be offering online courses to our students and testing alternatives in our existing schools is places where there is no competition such as APs and/or classes that are not offered already.
• To truly see the change, we will need to have school created outside the dominant system, such as charter and private schools where schools can be left to experiment and define this new type of schooling, find success and then bring it back to mainstream schools.  His business example is the Toyota Prius that was created in an external business unit and then brought back into Toyota’s factories to be built.

When I look back, a number of books fit in the changing my lens on education: Good to Great helped me see the importance of leaders and structures of successful organization planning; Now, Discover Your Strengths helped me see my strengths and how to best use them; Cluetrain Manifesto and The World is Flat helped me see the power of openness and how Internet communications have changed the world;  In A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink helped me see that the types of skills traditional schools teach are the building blocks, but not the end game skills that our students need; and now Disrupting Class has has given me the lens of effective organizational change.  All of these books provide unique and simple ways of looking at problems, clear and articulate writing that include stories as examples, and significant basis in human development and psychology.

Christensen ends the book by stating,

“These technologies and organizational innovations are not threats.  They are exciting opportunities to make learning intrinsically motivating, that make teaching professionally rewarding, and that transform our schools from being economic and political liabilities to sources of solutions and strength.

Thanks, Clayton Christensen, for inspiring me.  I look forward to testing your theories.  Thanks to Vinnie Vrotny for the recommendation.

For all of you, head to Amazon and pick this one up.

Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.

[I set off a hydrogen bomb on my blog with that last WCYDWT (since redacted, so if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't sweat it). Everything from a lousy audio transcode to Vimeo shutting down my account for violating its TOS. Sorry for the confusion.]

The conversation in my ILC recap has taken a few predictable turns, namely the one where I expect too much of presentations, that I need to lighten up on the presenters. I don't know how to relax my standards or if that's even a good idea. I do know how to distill everything I have ever enjoyed about any presentation into two steps. I don't care what your presentation covers; if you manage these, I will love it.

1. Unless your presentation is billed as "beginner-level" don't include information I can easily Google. What I mean is, while I know nothing about Photo Story, it was painful spending seat-time on a tutorial for adding narration to Photo Story, which is Google's top result for the same query. I can get that anytime¹.
2. Instead, cover the stuff I can't Google, that stuff that makes your presence worth my district's money and my time. Here's an easy outline: a) why Photo Story; what problem were you trying to solve? should I care about that problem? b) what complications did you encounter while implementing Photo Story? how did you overcome them? c) what did you learn?

This particular outline forces you to reckon with audience expectations and puts you in a position to satisfy them. It would have improved fourteen of the eighteen presentations² I attended at ILC³.

1. This was the most dissonant element of ILC. Half the presenters told me not to tell my kids stuff their steroidal smart phones could tell them. The other half were doing the opposite. [back]
2. None of which were about Photo Story, okay? [back]
3. Though this outline is useless if you turn your back to the audience and read aloud from a slide titled "What I Learned." [back]

or: My First Ed-Tech Conference
also: My Last Ed-Tech Conference

I'm back now from the Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose, CA. When I first bumped into Alice Mercer, she said, "This doesn't seem like your kind of thing." She's either right, and I'm just the wrong person for ILC, or else ILC should have stepped its game up in a lot of ways. Obviously, I'm biased toward the latter. Either way, I shouldn't have missed class time for this.

Therefore, a brief preface of ILC's good stuff and then my best advice for the presenters there. If you're reading this and you presented at ILC, obviously I'm not talking about you, or your session, etc., and hopefully you all realize by now that I reserve my harshest criticism for myself.

Preface

It was nice meeting Collette, Rushton, Alice, Gail, and some other folks; CUE organized the conference well, with the right number of sessions per day (five) at the right length (an hour, though some presenters didn't earn ten minutes); the catered lunch was fine, just fine.

That Said

In order to earn one seat-hour from a few dozen people, your presentation needs either:

• a compelling personality behind it;
• expertise, the sort of expertise DFW wrote about, the kind that has such a tight conceptual grasp, it can explain itself from any side, from any angle, from a macro- or microscopic lens;
• a compelling narrative, something with an antagonist, with obstacles to overcome, even if they're just stubborn network administrators; this is why I pinned my talk on math methods (back in the day) to a fictional student and gave her a photo;
• illustrative, complementary visuals; video, PowerPoint, handouts, makes no difference to me so long as they're pretty and useful;
• empathy for audience expectations, the sort of clairvoyance where you know what your audience is wondering, what it's waiting to see.

Fourteen of eighteen presentations I attended couldn't manage one of those.

There was the usual PowerPoint plague, presenters standing for thirteen minutes stock-still in front of a bulleted slide, that flat text often describing a highly visual concept¹, those bullet points often disregarding basic mechanical English².

As a guy who teaches compulsory Algebra to kids who have hated Algebra, I don't see how fourteen presenters managed to blow a scenario where an audience volunteered to attend their sessions. Where the audience is interested in the session (provided the presenter didn't falsely bill it). Where the audience is pulling for the presenter. Where the audience is eager to be dazzled, fed, or inspired.

ILC was like walking into eighteen car dealerships, pockets bulging with cash, declaring to every salesperson, "I'm here to buy," and discovering that fourteen of them couldn't close the sale.

Equivocations

I don't mean to be overly particular but what I saw this weekend was visual- and verbal illiteracy at a high level. I saw fourteen educated professionals put styrofoam on a plate, convinced it was steak. I want no part in that sorry transaction. I want to produce and consume the best I can while I still can.

I'm speaking at CMC-North in Monterey this December on how not to ruin entire classes with visual illiteracy. I realize it'll serve me right to have some punk kid out there in the audience, snarking about me on his blog and on Twitter.

All I can do is hold myself to this same standard.

Promoting Quality

If you're cool with some profanity and if you're even a little invested in the state of online gaming, check out this presentation from NY Tech Meet-Up. It did more to inspire, educate, and illustrate in five minutes and change than did the median presentation at ILC 2008.

NY Tech Meetup Presentation from Charles Forman on Vimeo.

1. There is no excuse for describing student video production with text bullets. Show video! [back]
2. ie. If you're going to shame yourself with bullet points, they should read (eg.) "Noun; Noun; Noun; Noun" not (eg.) "Noun; Noun; Noun; Past-Tense Verb." [back]

Martin Krzywinski's Lexical Analysis of 2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates:

Please notice that Krzywinski didn't just copy and paste some text into Wordle's entry window and assume that the largest words somehow, magically, constituted theme. Wordle was one tool deployed in the service of much deeper analysis.

Previously Sniping:

1. Hackwork
2. Correct Me If I'm Wrong

Downes on the amateurish state of digital video online:

To me, what we are seeing reminds me of the early days of HTML, when some web pages were just awful. We rarely see that any more - not because people became better HTML programmers, but because the tools made HTML programming unnecessary. The same will be true of video.

This would be true if video production's tallest hurdle were technical, as it was when all these competent writers found a way past HTML programming with blogging. Rather, video's tallest hurdle is creative. Cheap hardware and simple software won't matter a bit if you don't know where to put the camera or where to put that edit.

Stephen's outlook on digital video struck me as overly sanguine last November. A year later, having completed just ten videos with dy/av, I can report that no form of creative expression has been so difficult, or so satisfying.