Educational Leadership and Technology

A timely call for a dispassionate, unbiassed and "agnostic" analysis of data to discover what it is really telling us, and then acting on this information. Sounds obvious? Then why are we so often misled through our ignorance of good and accurate data analysis? 

Social media strategies devoid of risk management can lead to long days in the court room. Most businesses are not aware of the legal and reputational risks surrounding social media done poorly.  Comments are welcome.

In Paul Miller‘s excellent book, The Digital Workplace, he defines the digital workplace as, “the technology-enabled space where work happens.”  He further states that, “it involves all the tools we use to do our jobs:  email, phone, text, intranet, micro-blogging, Internet, office documents, shared documents, teleconferences, video, software packages, smart phones, tablets, and the cloud.”

The Digital Workplace is about an overall philosophy and approach for managing a very flexible and free organization.  He is referring to the digital workplace as the entire underlying technical infrastructure that allows such an organization to exist.  It is a very broad usage that includes all of the technical capabilities that power a modern business organization and really focuses on a management philosophy rather than on how to use a specific system to implement that philosophy.

Mark Morrell, a noted internet blogger, defines the digital workplace even more generally as, “Work is what you do, not where you go to.”  Again, this definition focuses on an overall philosophy for how we approach work.

For the purposes of this blog series I’m going to focus much more specifically on a digital workplace as a collection of tools and capabilities that allow team members to work much more effectively together, especially in an environment where the participants may be physically separated from their offices, and from each other, by hundreds or thousands of miles.

For the purposes of this blog entry, a digital workplace is an integrated collection of tools and capabilities that allow team members to connect, communicate, collaborate, and conduct all of their required work activities wherever and whenever they may be working.

This was shared by my friend Gretel Patch who has great insight in how to thoughtfully incorporate technology into education. She added her insights to parts of the article:

When we speak of 21st Century Skills (as defined by groups like ATCS and the Iowa DOE), we seem to have an ethereal idea of the skills children need. But how are they measured or assessed? Does it matter that most of today’s 8th grade students can’t pass exams from the turn of the last century? We have given up the need to memorize facts, thanks to the Internet, but we need to do a much better job at synthesis and evaluation than previously required. In today’s world, we can easily “phone a friend” or at least text them. So why do we insist on requiring memorization for finals and standardized assessment? Technology can help us move away from the lower reaches of Bloom and create more dynamic assessments that require the true 21st century skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. Some great examples of student work focused on creation are available here. How are you helping to move the students in your district to become creators and evaluators of information? As we approach final exams and the end of the year, I think it is a create question to reflect on.

Branding has finally reached the snobs who think they are above it.

Every Gen Y-er knows about personal branding, and every Silicon Valley social media maven has one eye on their Klout score. But this year the New York Times declared that branding is a must-do for psychologists.

You can’t make money if you don’t have a brand.

I was thrilled to read this because I have thought for many years that my therapists could benefit from having me help them run their careers. But whenever I ventured into this territory, the therapist invariably did something annoying like reminding me of client-therapist boundaries. Now, though, it’s clear: they should hire me.

Also, in case you think you are not in a field that requires branding, there is now officially nothing without a brand. Because look, even Liechtenstein is rebranding itself as a party room: Harper’s magazine reports that you can rent the whole country for the evening for $20,000.

The thing is that most people don’t want to brand themselves as a party room; they want to be known for being creative. Which makes sense because really, we are all creative – to be human is to be creative. But you have to work hard at it to be good.

Jonah Lehrer wrote a great article about how to be known for being creative. Of course this is before he made the famously stupid, but certainly creative, blunder of manufacturing quotes from Bob Dylan and subsequently becoming a persona non-grata in the journalism field. Lehrer shows that creativity is something that is learned, from practice.

Part of how you learn it is by collecting a wide range of information so that you can put things together in new ways. (Which is why you should always click on the links in my post. In fact, here’s one answering the question, “What does it feel like to have a trophy wife?” How can you not be curious about that?)

Another way to be creative is to look at trends, for how creative people are gaining traction. There are plenty of people known for their creativity who tell you the rules they follow. The well known comic strip author Hugh MacLoed writes some rules he uses for cultivating creativity. Here are three more rules about creativity that are gaining traction.

1. Being a misfit is something to brag about.
We have entered the age of the misfit. The Economist made a formal proclamation thatbusiness is benefitting from people with Aspergers, dyslexia and ADHD. At least twenty people sent the article to me, which makes sense, because I have all three. So I’m excited for my big moment, where ads for seven-figure job openings specify that the person should have all three of those mental aberrations. And I’m excited that the job opening will be for something where I don’t have to sit in an office all day long being nice to people, since I can’t do that.

2. The starving artist has made way for the SEO artist.
It used to be that there was no way to make money as an artist unless you could wow a gallery owner with your art, or sleep with him. Now, though, artists can take sales into their own hands. James Maher is a great example of this artist entrepreneurship – he’s selling his prints direct, from his site, and he’s so smart about SEO that he told me not to link to his name, but link from the keyword street photography instead.

And look at that photo up top. It’s by Elly Mackay and she calls it papercraft theater. I found her work on the art site My Modern Metropolis, which links to her etsy store, which means she’s getting traction without having to get into the Whitney. Fine art gatekeepers are falling in favor of the long tail marketers, and this means determined artists can support themselves. And we all get to see a lot more great art.

3. Plagiarism is finally getting some respect.
Quentin Rowan is featured in the New Yorker because he applied his photographic memory to maybe-plagarizing a whole book in such an artful way – using an incredibly large number of sources – that it’s hard to get angry at him.

The kids at Stuyvesant, the kids who scored around the top .0001% of all New York City high school students, came up with a really clever cheating ring that got them caught, but also got them enough respect from the school-is-stupid press to give the kids a voice. The tests are stupid – it’s just memorizing. The kids who do best on the tests don’t do best in life. And it’s impossible to regulate cheating these days.

Nick Denton, media mogel and fearless leader of Gawker, pointed out that most publications are reprinting stuff from other publications, and no one seems to care, which is very similar to kids reprinting phrases from the Internet. At least in so far as no one cares.

The only people who care are people whose jobs are to be the enforcers, but we probably don’t need enforcers: if you don’t like it, don’t read it. And if you give kids tests that measure something important in life – like grit and determination - there is no way to cheat.

And that, probably, is what you want your personal brand based on anyway – grit and determination. It seems to me that it’s the core of creativity. And it also seems to me that it’s what we would want most from a theapist that we hire – that they should have grit and determination themselves and know how to help us get it.

So the truth is that the way to be known for your creativity is to work really hard at being creative. That’s the bad news. Because everything worth aiming for is hard work and I wish that were not true. I wish I could sneak in one easy thing and get a lot of credit for doing it.

The good news is that there are things you’re working hard at – like coping with being a misfit and finding clever ways to plagiarize – that you didn’t realize were, in fact, the hard work of achieving recognition as a highly creative person.

New free curriculum by microsoft

Something we focus strongly on at Mt A

love this infographic for digital citizenship!

Your own PL is right at your fingertips!

Useful tips to avoid DBP (Death by Presentation).

Always good to see the current demographics in social.  Facebook continues to be the king, with women, city dwellers, Hispanics and below $30K on the list, via Pew Research.    Hmmm....   ~  D

How did I miss this one, Deb? Thanks for the scoop!!

Interesting but not surprising. I think the older the Gen X-, Gen Y, Millenials and Digital Natives grow, the higher the stats for all ages.

Ed tech is getting to be a big deal in classrooms; part-and-parcel for the digital age. This infographic explores its development in the K–12 classrooms of today and gives some teachers' insights and opinions, and also gives us a glimpse of what the future holds for the tech-oriented classrooms of tomorrow.”

Interesting scoop on different learning channels.

Whole lotta good info here. 

"Stategy-Tactics" with the use of "Tools".  This graphic shows the overlapping nature of information tools available online.

1. Multi-Media Learning Platform

2. Digital Tools for Finding Information

3. Digital Tools for Understanding Information

4. Digital Tools for Using Information

5. Digital Tools to Support Writing

Assignment: What specific tools do you use for each of these Tactics?

What can we add to these circles? Add your answers to the comment section.

I visited this blog to dig a little deeper and find that they have updated their model with pop-up explanations of how teachers of the 21st Century may apply this to their students either in a classroom setting or virtually across the world.

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/digital-differentiation-get-wired.html

It's well worth the visit, my friends, to see the miracle of the internet and it's effect on the modern "classroom."

Warmly,

Susan Daniels

http://crazydreamersdo.com

In the wrong hands, this is just layering over what already is not working. We need something different, full of risk, and creative.