I liked this piece commenting on Gaping Void cartoonist/author Hugh McLeod's decision to give up Twitter and Facebook and refocus on blogging "Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end." It is indeed harder to keep up a good blog!

But even if you're not a blogger, future buzz writer, Adam Singer, says some things that have application in education.

Produce content and accrue digital equity in a way that is platform agnostic so inevitable (yes, inevitable) changing user preference isn’t disruptive to your art, business or blog...Remember, it’s the creativity that matters, not the tools.

In schools, the users are students and their families. The business folks--or artists, I prefer!--are the teachers, mainly, though we can talk about the school overall as the business, too. In any case, what this means is that teachers and schools need to stop fretting over "Are we a Mac or PC school?" or "What apps should we deploy?" Those are questions for the user to answer.

I have a few thousand books in my personal library. That's more than I will read in the remainder of my lifetime, a friend pointed out to me. That's neither here nor there, I said. It's a great comfort to know there is more to human knowledge than I could ever read in a dozen lifetimes read. My unread books keep me humble.

Here's a beautiful bookshelf to remind one of the beautiful imbalance between what we each know and don't know: http://www.designtaxi.com/news/350334/A-Bookshelf-to-Remind-You-of-Your-Growi...

Dan Mayer, in characteristic style, walks through what starts out as a simple geometry problem but becomes increasingly challenging. Just when his students think they have the matter sorted out, he slides around a few lines and their theories bend an break. Back in teacher's college we called this creating cognitive dissonance. Thomas Kuhn says it's the stuff of paradigm shifts.

I found this great graphic on Michael Smith's PrincipalsPage Posterous blog. It's darkly amusing.

And it points to an often overlooked but extraordinarily heavy of obligation schools everywhere--not just Michigan:

There are in normal circumstances just two occasions when the state deprives people of liberty. One when they break the law and are sent to jail. The other when they are school age and are sent to school. In the first case, we say it's for *our* own good; we take the malefactors out of circulation and have them pay back the debt to society--us. In the second, we say it's for *their* own good.

Regardless, it is an extraordinary thing to take away someone's liberty, whatever his or her age. The criminal has a hand in his or her own fate. The student does not and is, well, innocent in the broadest sense of that word. The debt falls on our side in this case, and it is a large one to repay.

Not a day goes by in my teaching when I do not have this in mind. Often I am terrified by the thought.

Eric Marcos (@mathtrain) and Scott McLeod (@bigthink) are talking here about giving students more face time with their devices.

I couldn't agree more.

Last year I ran a 3:1 program at Think Global School. That's right: an iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro for every student. Students were required to have their iPhones with them at all times. We'd set up a couple wireless in our new dorms (TGS is a traveling school) log in and that was it. The web is the network. It is a lightweight, mobile and exceptionally powerful setup requiring almost no maintenance.

The irony, I found, is that more technology is less disruptive than less technology. Sure, found my students went gaga over all their new toys when we first handed them out. But I let them play more or less unrestrained for a couple weeks and the excitement wore off quickly and everyone got down to business. By third term, I wasn't even telling my kids want to bring to class: all I'd say was be prepared to do some writing today and they would come with whatever they felt most comfortable with--MBP, iPad or even pen and paper.

After a year of running a maxed-out tech program I can find no sound pedagogical, social or practical reason for restricting the use of tech devices. Telling students what devices they can use and when is like telling them what brand of pencil they can use and when.

(screenshot from my iPad, hence the error message)

I've been using Alan November's Digital Learning Farm for nearly three years. It was core school practice when I ran THINK Global School. Making students (allowing them to be!) contributors to their own learning changes the way they engage in the classroom; I see significantly higher order thinking, generally, for using it.

One of the regular jobs on the Digital Learning Farm is that of official researcher, a student who sits with a computer or smartphone connected to the web ready to look up information on the fly as the class needs. Snapify, a handy Chrome extension, will make the job of the official researcher that much easier. Users highlight a word or click on an image marker and click "Snap It" Snapify then opens a search box with results from the main search engines such as Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google News and Google Maps.

Facebook Messenger is a new standalone group messaging mobile app built off Beluga. Did you get that? FB Messenger is a standalone app. To date, every other FB feature has been bundled inside the platform. I am not a FB fan and normally do not pay much attention to its feature development. But I will admit, this new FB Messenger, um, app? caught my attention.

Beluga CEO, Ben Davenport, rightly points out that messaging is a core mobile experience and in that speed matters. The standalone app linked to FB's own SMS service bypasses the bunch of clicks you'd need to get into FB itself.

This move looks very user-friendly and, well, Apple-y to me. Apple sees an app-based Internet where Google (especially) and, until now, Facebook see a web-based Internet. The departure is significant.

Read the details of the new Facebook Messenger here.

It's encouraging to see tech talk move to discussing about how to bring mainstream users online. Just over a year ago I drew the diagram above for a professional development workshop I gave at the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools. This is a normal adoption curve for just about anything from Twitter to political campaigns. The gaps indicate that the methods you use to get one group onside won't work for the next group to the right. There is a particularly big change in tactics needed when moving from early adopters to the mainstream users. At the time, we were all stuck trying to figure out a way across the gap.

Maybe we forgot to consider giving folks some time as a method. And maybe we forgot to consider how tech marketing, by Apple in particular, has helped make tech attractive and exciting--cool, even--for mainstream users.

Anyway, only a year has passed and I am impressed by the changes a short passage of time brings. There were noticeably more administrators at Alan November's Building Learning Communities conference this year than the previous year. And I read more and more posts like Rob Diana's here calling on developers to take down barriers to adoption, not add yet more of the features that make tech wonks excited: Be Disruptive Without Making It Seem That Way.

I am happy to see schools be more self-reflective and self-critical than I've ever known them to be in my 52 years. I attribute this to the way the web is taking down the walls of brick-and-mortar schools and opening to them up to the outside world. Transparency is a good thing, mostly. This self-reflection is especially visible where I work in the Independent Schools Association of British Columbia (ISABC), a collection of private schools led by forward-thinking heads and IT departments. The phenomenon make this the most exciting time to be in education since perhaps Dewey asked the profession to reconsider how it carries on. The link below takes you to a great infographic illustrating the change in work styles over the past decade or so. The study didn't look at education in particular--it doesn't really work to have teachers work flextime (or does it?!) But the point is, industries seem to be moving to increase flexibility, which to me means to increase compatibility with the way people, rather than the industry itself, work best.

How has or will your school move to increase flexibility?

The Difference in Workstyles, Then and Now, Thanks to Telecommunication

I think the data mashup is the practice of future classroom learning. Yes, it's important to learn to manage the flow of data from the internet firehose, but that is trivial work. If Sir Ken Robinson, and Northrop Frye before him, are right that we need to pay more attention to cultivating the imagination and creative spirit, then we need to learn to play with that data and make something out of it. It is the essence of creativity to take two known things and turn them into a third, new thing says Sweden's creativity maestros, Fredrik and Teo Haren. See David Rumsey's way of creating new knowledge out of old maps (http://theok.typepad.com/digital_signposts/2011/08/oldmaps.html) or Splendor, the work of two interface design students at FH Potsdam, for examples of creative mashups.

So I want to make it easy for my students to play with data. Stephen Wolfram made his computational engines so we could play with facts and figures. I want the same--a tool that eliminates the "trivial calculations"--for the data I work with as a literature and philosophy teacher.