A few days ago, Gary Stager sent out a bunch of tweets (on Twitter, for the uninitiated) about an Edward Tufte seminar he had attended.  In responding to my response to one of his tweets, Stager wrote: “any info lit pundit/keynote without a thorough understanding of Tufte’s work is a Ginsu Knife salesman not a serious educator!“  I told him that I agreed and that he should add the word “leader” to his list of info. lit pundit/keynote.  In other words, as I continue to explore what it means to be an educational leader in the 21st century, one set of competencies that, to me, is clearly more important than ever before is the ability to speak and persuade with the aid of visual presentations.  However, that doesn’t mean supporting a speech/presentation with the standard (typically awful) PowerPoint presentation.  In the technologically-advanced world in which we now live, if you combine the brilliant ideas of someone like Tufte with Web 2.0 tools, the ability to craft incredibly appealing and powerful presentations is easier than ever.  Furthermore, in the information age, where data and information are more available than ever, the possibilities of representing data in aesthetically-pleasing and meaningful ways are nearly endless.

As one example, I point you to a website I’ve been touting via Twitter for about a week now.  Fivethirtyeight.com is a blog developed by a couple of data analysts who originally worked as baseball analysts.  They’ve taken many of the analyses and approaches they used to analyze data from baseball games and used them to make projections of the presidential election (and other federal elections).  In a nutshell, as I understand it, the projections are based on a sort of meta-analysis of polling data from various polls.

The formulae or algorithms they use are certainly complicated, but the way they present the data is what is so interesting…and SO simple!  First of all, believe it or not, the site is built on a basic Blogger.com template (free!).  Second, they write that the graphs are designed in MS-EXCEL 2007.  I don’t know what they use to create the maps like the one below, but it’s not that difficult to get an outline map of the U.S. and color in some states.  You could probably do it with something as basic as MS-Paint.

I create a lot of images in PowerPoint these days (just insert an image or clipart into a blank slide and save it as a picture file; that’s it).  The graphic design capabilities added to PowerPoint 2007 are excellent.  You don’t have to be a trained graphic artist to create powerful digital images anymore!

I know a bunch of folks decry or bemoan the use of tag or text clouds, but that’s mostly because it’s hard to find real pedagogical value in them.  But, as visual representations of data, I think they can be very powerful.  For example, in keeping with the presidential election theme, here’s a text cloud representing Michelle Obama’s speech from the DNC last night.  From this picture of the text, you get a really good sense of the foci of her speech.

How did I do that?  Not exactly magic.  I found the text of her speech on the Internet.  Then, I copied and pasted it into a free service called TagCrowd.  TagCrowd generates the HTML code for you to use in your own website (NOTE: it didn’t work for me and I had to do a quick workaround, but nothing fancy).  That’s it.

For our new Ed.D. program in educational leadership, I’m going to insist that we work with our students on presenting or representing data.  Next time you have to make a presentation to your school board or your superintendent, please consider the power of visual imagery and the free and easy ways we now have to (re)present data.

Tags: data, graphic, presentation, Stager, TagCrowd, Tufte, Twitter

Last week, all of the major deadlines for my summer work came and went.  Wednesday through Friday was like a blur, but when all the dust settled I realized that I could now focus on the coming academic year.  Furthermore, I felt like I was now free to consider the next phase in my professional life.  Obviously I don’t know what the outcome of my tenure application will be, but I know that VCU is stuck with me for at least two more years.  And, now that I’ve lived in Richmond for a full year, I feel personally settled.  So, while I have some ideas, I don’t yet fully know what is in store for me over the next couple of years.  However, to start that reflective process and this next phase, here’s what I did over the weekend:

• I cleared the inboxes of my two e-mail accounts to zero.
• I completely cleared my RSS aggregator (I had reached 1000+ in Google Reader; apparently it doesn’t count higher than 1000)
• I paid all of the outstanding (meaning unpaid, not “awesome”) bills sitting on my desk.
• Finally, last night, I washed all of my work-related clothes.

I think that last act was symbolically important.  It represented (literally and figuratively) a clean start for me as the new academic year kicks off.

So, for all of you educators out there, I wish you a fresh, clean start to the school year.

Haven’t been writing/posting here much.  Had to prioritize putting together my tenure portfolio.  Having rid my shoulders of that weight (literally and figuratively), I look forward to writing more here.  For now, I thought I’d let you know what I wrote about my blog in my tenure narrative.  First, I began my section on “scholarship” with the following quote from Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry:

In scientific inquiry, every conclusion reached, whether of fact or conception, is held subject to determination by its fate in further inquires…The conditional status of scientific conclusions (conditional in the sense of subjection to revision in further inquiry) is sometimes used by critics to disparage scientific “truths” in comparison with those which are alleged to be eternal and immutable. In fact, it is a necessary condition of continuous advance in apprehension and in understanding.

Then, in making the claim that a blog can be a form of scholarship, I wrote:

Since January 2008, I have explored a new mode of publishing. As a blogger at Educational Insanity (http://edinsanity.com), I have come to firmly believe that I am engaging in a relevant and important form of scholarship. Consistent with Dewey’s theory of inquiry and my beliefs about scholarship, I use my blog as a space to make knowledge claims; assertions that are conditional on their fate by further inquiries. Those inquiries come from peers, most of whom are educators in one form or another. In other words, blogging affords a pure form of peer review. The “blogosphere,” and especially the “edublogosphere,” is wonderfully rigorous and relentless in its review process; knowledge claims without sufficient warrants are regularly challenged. Blogging, for me, is very much a scholarly endeavor and satisfies me as a public intellectual.

Tags: blogging, Dewey, scholarship, tenure

At the end of his article about an innovative offensive scheme called the A-11 being implemented by one high school football team in California, ESPN.com’s Michael Weinreb writes: “And while I do not know if the A-11 can challenge all our assumptions, or if it is merely a lark, I do know that it accomplishes one very important thing: It reminds us that nothing in the universe can ever remain static. Not even football.”

So, clearly, Weinreb has never considered the institution of public schooling.

That oversight notwithstanding…

Just before I launched this blog, I wrote over on LeaderTalk about an ESPN article by Gregg Easterbrook where he explored a different innovative football strategy: no punting or rarely punting.  Easterbrook pointed to research and simulations that rather clearly demonstrated the benefits of a no-punt or rarely punt approach.  Yet, he could only find one high school team that was willing to adopt the strategy.  Why the reluctance in the face of compelling evidence/data?  As I wrote in the earlier post, Easterbrook offers two reasons: “First, ‘because that’s what we always do.’ Second, because if coaches order fourth-down tries that fail, they will be blamed, whereas if coaches order punts, the players will be blamed for the loss.“  More succinctly, coaches are risk and blame averse.

Now, we have Weinreb’s report on the A-11, a radical offensive strategy in football.  Weinreb wonders about the viability of the A-11, but does not directly speculate on why coaches will or will not adopt it.  Rather, more philosophically, he writes: “The dominant paradigm has always tended toward conservatism; in the previous century, it took several decades for the forward pass to gain acceptance. Change is frowned upon, even as it is surreptitiously embraced by coaches, who will plagiarize almost any scheme that might potentially save their jobs.”

Conservatism as the dominant paradigm…change is frowned upon…save their jobs.  Sound familiar educationalists?

If you want to see what the A-11 looks like in action, check out the following video:

Tags: education, football, innovation

As the result of a quick Twitter back-and-forth, I told @JeffNugent and @mcglaysia that I would write a blog post about the research linking technology integration and student achievement.  A couple of points before I get into it:

• I have been the lead investigator on many (maybe a dozen or so?) studies aimed at examining the relationship between technology integration and student achievement.  These studies ranged from small studies (one or two schools) to federally-funded, statewide investigations.  So, I have a pretty decent practical understanding of this body of research and how the work gets done.  Some day I’ll write about the politics and the nitty gritty of this sort of work.  For now, though, I’ll just say that the old joke is more true than it is funny: “educational research is like sausage.  If you like to consume either one, you don’t want to watch it being made.”
• This pool of literature is deep and getting deeper all the time.  I can’t possibly get to everything.  In fact, I’m only going to cover those with which I am most familiar.  That means, I’m not necessarily presenting the “best” research; just those that I know of and that I think are reasonably respectable.
• The Ed. Tech. Action Network (ETAN) has done a decent job of summarizing some of the research.  You can find their page with lots of links here.
• Finally, I’m not terribly proud of my work in this area.  I know that advocates of ed. tech. say that we MUST show positive student achievement effects to move the policy agenda forward.  But, for me, student achievement, especially as typically measured in these studies, is not even close to the most important outcome we need to be considering when evaluating the impact of technology in education.  I’m much more interested in outcomes such as student engagement and student learning (as distinct from student achievement).

Anyway, onward…

*The study that’s getting the most attention and that is politically loaded is one that is still being undertaken.  Mathematica, Inc., along with SRI, two of the major independent research firms in the country, have been contracted to conduct The National Study of the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Interventions.  The project’s website contains all the information you need to know about the study, including the first report which was issued last year.  So far, after one year, according to the press release issued at the time of the release of the report, “On average, after one year, products did not increase or decrease test scores by amounts that were statistically different from zero.”  So, no link between tech. and achievement.  But, that was after one year. The next report should be out soon.

*I’ve been pleased with the amount of attention the West Virginia study I co-lead in 1998-99 has received over the last decade.  The report from that study documents fairly significant positive relationships between the use of computers and student achievement.

*Harold Wenglinsky has done some significant work in this field.  His first major study, conducted in 1998 while he was at ETS, demonstrated that under the right conditions, the use of computers in schools was positively related to math achievement.  More specifically, “higher mathematics scores were related to adequate access to computer technology (hardware, software, and overall infrastructure) in conjunction with teachers trained in technology use and the use of computers to learn new, higher-order concepts.”

*The USEiT (Use, Support, and Effect of Instuctional Technology) study, stands out to me for its high quality and for the quality of the many reports that have been disseminated from that one study.  Take a look, particularly, at Reports 10 and 13.  Of the many findings coming from that study, the researchers discovered that “students who reported greater frequency of technology use at school to edit papers were likely to have higher total English/language arts test scores and higher writing scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) than students who did not.”  I still use some of the scales that the USEiT researchers developed for my own work.

*Finally, and more recently, Missouri’s eMints program has been well-documented and thoroughly studied.  There’s an entire page of research reports, including the most recent analysis of student achievement.  eMints has been consistently positively associated with student achievement.

There’s more; gobs more.  If you cross-reference the works I’ve pointed to, you’ll be well on your way to collecting a critical mass of the work that’s been done in this area.

Tags: achievement, education, research, technology