It's been about five weeks since I set off on my goal to cut out internal email and it looks like I've settled in to a 90% reduction in the emails I send out. 

In my new routine I check my mail shortly after I get to my desk and make a list of the people I need to reply to using iOS Reminders. Then I get out of my chair and go talk to those people. There's no particualr need to use Reminders--a piece of paper would do equally well for a checklist. But the app gives me some stats which tell me I've had 84 such face-to-face chats since the beginning of January and I have 11 on deck for today and tomorrow. So, let's call it five hallway chats a day.

It might be more efficient to hit "reply" on these emails, but it's no where near as enjoyable. Actually, I think we see a false efficiency in throwing emails back and forth. That was the whole reason for trying to cut out internal email in the first place. Sure, we can close off a particular issue with a single reply. But I'm not sure that does much for building capacity in the overall system. Indeed, I think it's counterproductive. I'm banking on the idea that more face-to-face time builds more trust which in turn fosters professionalism. (see The Perfect Communications App)

scroll to browse the list of sessions or click to go to the website

I'm very excited to be part of the team putting together the first-ever, collaboratively built professional development day for members of the Independent Schools Association of British Columbia, the organization that represents the top independent schools in the province.

On February 10, we have more than 450 teachers and administrators from 22 schools coming together to present and participate in more than 60 sessions at two venues: Brentwood College School on Vancouver Island and my own Mulgrave School on the mainland.

It's a remarkable event:

• It's self-organized--ISABC put a call out for presenters who spoke up and offered their passions and expertise and then participants voted with their feet to create a schedule of sessions.
• It's all volunteer--presenters and participants are giving their time to make this happen and that shows a fantastic commitment to their profession.
• It's celebratory--with almost all the presenters in-service teachers from the participating schools, the event has brought out the incredible breadth of talent that exists in our schools
• It's collegial and collaborative--the school heads and ISABC are showing the rest of the country what a forward-thinking group of schools can do. 

We've also created an open Google Doc for each of the 60 or so sessions. Here's the template we're using.

This is where presenters and participants can add ideas, comments and resources before, during and after the event itself. The docs form a user-generated record of all the sessions and will remain open indefinitely so everyone can continue to build on the results of the day.

We'll be tweeting the event under the hashtag #isabcpd12. I can hardly wait.

 9 Great Articles about The 21st Century Education

These are good articles but only one of them, 21st Century Pedagogy in Teaching, even hints at establishing a purpose for education and then not until half way through the piece in a daigram that lists "learning to be" as one of UNESCO's four pillars of education. 

All this "What?" and "How?" in the nine articles goes nowhere until we can clearly articulate an end for education. 

Corning has thrown down its updated vision of the future of touchscreen technology: A Day Made of Class 2.

Amazing imagination. 

So why aren't we doing the same in edcuation, making big picture visions of what is possible? 

We in education talk a lot about what is broken, an affliction of modern thinking said G. K. Chesterton: we only know good because we have a withering knowledge of evil. We don't talk so much about what is possible except in narrow, disconnected ways as, for example, how to collaborate using Google Apps and how to make iBooks. 

So we have nothing to move towards. Instead we move away from and that is not at all the same thing.

Time to start drafting a new story for ourselves...

 Source: Gizmodo

"In 2011, manufacturers shipped 487.7 million smartphones and only 414.6 million computers--that's desktops, laptops and tablets. Combined."

A couple things coming out of this read:

• 487.7 to 414.6 is better than parity: my students are very likely to have at least two devices of their own, or two if they bring their smartphone along with their school-issued device
  
• so it seems silly to be banning or restricting smartphones instead of exploiting them--they're capabilities and their ubiquity--in schools.
  
• It's worth noting, too, that in 2011 manufacturers shipped nearly a billion devices. In one year. Give those devices a lifespan of say, two years. Before we feel like upgrading again we'll have at least 3 billion newish devices floating about. That's a lot of processing power. I want as much of it as I can get in my school.

Read Rick McManus in Read Write Web: Get Ready for the World of Connected Devices

I had a couple conversations of the past week with teachers and admins talking about their 1:1 laptop programs they're building and I have said to them that this is a narrow vision. Building a 1:1 program is building for today, not tomorrow. And by the time the buildout is complete it will be yesterday's architecture. We should be thinking 2:1 or 3:1 (smartphone, tablet and laptop.) Even this, as a picture of the future of education, is limited. The world of the "internet of things" is right around the corner.

(download)

Click here to download:

from-punya-mishra-the-sweet-spot-in-educational-technology-kaxAkGBmbFdeIxrDznJA.zip (1.25 MB)

 Punya Mishra's work from 2008 has surfaced at the III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight being held in held February 1^st – 3^rd, 2012. Alas, I'm not there. Next year maybe. So I'm following along as best I can: Ismael Peña-López is pushing our some good notes. like these on Mishra's presentation.

I've had Mishra's diagram on my doodle wall in my office since I started in my new post as Driector of Education Technologies at Mulgrave School back in September. It's one of the drivers for my reconceptualizing how we use tech. I particulaly like Mishra's thinking on technology in education: his Venn diagram isn't so breathless as most postings on the subject and he understands the distinctions and relationships between what and how we teach. Moreover, he is careful to place all of that in a larger context which is where we answer why we teach. This will emerge in the next couple years as the central question in education.

OK, I never bought the idea that school is about readying people for a career. It is, but only as secondary thing. Education is about something much, much bigger. But for interest's and argument's sake, let's take workplace prep as our schools' raison d'etre. It follows that we ought to be looking at the workplace to get an idea of what we are preparing our students to take on.

Not only are jobs changing, the definition of a job is changing, according to enterprise research firm, Berson and Associates. They predicted a "borderless workplace will drive new talent and learning strategies in 2011." They continue to push the idea in early 2012 saying we've seen the end of the job as we know it. 

... "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how today's workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a regular basis. And this shift has redefined what a “job” actually is.

Source: Berson & Assoc. 

So, what does this mean for schools? Are we preparing students to take on jobs, or roles?

I think, inherently, schools understand the idea of roles. A lot of classroom practice, at least at my school, looks like what Berson & Associates describe as the best practices of high-performing organizations, i.e. they focus on results and expertise and not position, they reward continuous learning and so on. So we ought to be in good position--I think we're agile enough, to use the industry term--to make changes without calling for dramatic cultural change, just maybe some subtle shifts in thinking.

Nevertheless, there's something nagging at me. I want to take this to our working group looking at so-called 21C skills and see what they think: Are we missing something?