Educational Insanity

Yes, you’re at the right place. I gave the blog a bit of a makeover. I started to feel like the old template was a bit dreary. This new theme is called GenkiTheme developed by Ericulous. Apparently, Genki means “cheerfulness, vibrancy and vitality” in Japanese. So, it certainly contrasts with the last theme. Other benefits of this new look:

• The posts are a bit wider, and I’m definitely using more of the screen with this templated.
• I like the tabs on the left that move while you scroll; people will think I’m a code monkey or something cool and nerdy like that.
• I LOVE how the dynamic WP Cumulus teg cloud (see “What I’m Writing”) looks here (even if it is a little small). It was at the very bottom of the page in the previous iteration and I don’t know that anyone saw it.
• I’m able to include my picture/avatar on here. As those who follow me on Twitter know, this is becoming part of my “brand.” I’ve been told by people who know me and who’ve seen the avatar that this is EXACTLY what I’d look like if transported to South Park.
• This theme/template is “widget ready.” To the non-bloggers out there, all that means, among other things, is that it is MUCH easier for me to add things to the two sidebars on the right. For the prior theme/template, I had to fiddle with the CSS and pretend I knew something about PHP codes (I don’t).

That said, the real reason I switched is probably because I’m terribly busy again and in the absence of time to write anything substantively meaningful, I figured I would at least make a cosmetic change.

Hope you like it.

I’m starting a new weekly segment here that I’m calling What I Learned This Week, which will hereafter be dubbed WILTWeek.  Most of what I do with this blog is about sharing my learning, but in this segment I will make that learning more succinct and explicit.  I hope this segment will serve as a reflective exercise for me as well.  So, starting today, every Friday, i will try to construct a WILTWeek post.  On, then, to the very first WILTWeek…

• I LEARNED that my strong belief in the importance of high-quality pre-K, especially for kids from low-income families, is well-founded. [hat tip: Eduwonkette]

• I LEARNED a few simple but reasonably useful (at least for me) tricks for PowerPoint presentations from Jen Wagner.

• I LEARNED about Doug Downey and his extraordinary analysis of which schools are REALLY failing during the standards and accountability era.

• I LEARNED that Eduwonkette’s blogging buddy and occasional guest contributor Skoolboy is none other than the man who served as my dissertation chair (Dr. Aaron Pallas, Teachers College, Columbia U.).  Awesome!

On April 16 of this year, I wrote a post entitled “You say you want a revolution?“  In it, I wrote of true visions of the future of education, with particular reference to writing by Dale Mann and a white paper by Roger Schank and Kemi Jona.  I often ask my students to read the Schank/Jona paper to get them thinking about the possibilities for the future of education.  Mostly, my students have visceral reactions and think the ideas in the paper are outlandish and unrealistic.

Outlandish?  Maybe.  Unrealistic?  Nope.  In fact, I just learned that the VOISE Academy opened a week or so ago in Chicago.  It’s billed as a hybrid school, combining computer-based learning with face-to-face socialization opportunities.  As described, the school sounds a lot like what Schank and Jona suggest.

Well, as it turns out, one of the board members of VOISE Academy is…Kemi Jona!

It will be interesting to see how things go in that school.  I’m sure someone will be studying the school; nothing happens in Chicago without somebody studying it.  Some academic colleagues of mine have built entire research agendas around Chicago school reform.  For now, though, I wish VOISE had a better website. It’s a little hard to believe that this particular school launched with such a basic and incomplete website.

For months now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to develop an online community to enhance our programs within the Department of Educational Leadership at VCU.  Currently, each course has its own Blackboard space.  We also send lots of e-mails to students, though sadly we don’t even have good e-mail groups in our e-mail client (that’s pathetic, I know).  So, communication across courses, across programs, and across the years is impossible.  It’s a sad state of affairs, and I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out the best way to establish an online community for all of our students, faculty and even alumni.

I suppose my biggest problem is that I’m looking for the perfect one-stop solution.  I’m very familiar with Ning and I’ve been playing around with various wiki systems that work nicely as places for collaboration and communication.  Those are fine ways to create a single online community.  One problem for me, though, is that our department consists of many different groups, cohorts, etc. Here’s a graphical representation of our department:

I want each group, cohort, etc. to be able to communicate privately with each other, but to also be a part of the larger community.  So, I could, for example, setup a department-wide Ning and then setup each cohort as a group.  However, the groups within Ning don’t have the full functionality of Ning (e.g. they can’t setup their own document repository or a separate page for anything, really).  And, the groups are not private.

A second problem is that I want to be able keep track of activity with an RSS feed.  But, as you may know, private spaces (Ning, Wetpaint, etc.) don’t allow for RSS feeds.  This limitation also stops me from setting up a Ning or Wetpaint for each group, cohort, etc. and then setting up a department-level aggregate page via NetVibes or Pageflakes (a la Steve Hargadon’s approach here).

So, where am I?  Right now, I’m leaning towards a department-level Ning as the hub of our online community.  From there, I could setup groups for each cohort, group, etc. with a link to a private wiki for each cohort, group, etc. (leaning heavily towards WetPaint for that).  In the absence of RSS feeds, I’ll have to subscribe to each site via e-mail and then setup routing rules so that my inbox doesn’t get flooded.  It’s also going to be a naming nightmare.  But, that’s my best current solution.

If any of you smart people have better ideas, I’d be more than happy to hear them.  Thanks in advance!

This coming Tuesday will be my 3 year-old son’s first day of preschool.  I’m as excited as I am petrified.  I feel REALLY good about the school we chose, and I hope he likes it as much as my wife and I do.  That said, this is not a post about separation anxiety or even about the immediate issues of preschool.  Rather, the first day of preschool has me thinking beyond these next two years to the point in time at which he is scheduled to begin his formal K-12 schooling experience.

Like every other parent I know, I want the best for my child(ren).  And, as a professor in the field of education, I feel comfortable that I can navigate the schooling possibilities and provide opportunities for my child(ren) that are at least acceptable.  That I am a learner in the field of education, however, is causing me problems.

You see, as I’ve spent time with the folks that comprise my personal learning network (i.e. those that I follow on Twitter, those who feed my aggregator, and even those that I’m privileged to learn with as students in the programs in which I teach), I’ve come to see what IS possible.  I’ve come to see many examples of extraordinary, creative, learning-first educators and the incredible learning experiences they have facilitated for their students.  As a result…

I want my child(ren) to play and learn with Logo and Gary Stager.

I want my child(ren) to explore literature with Christian Long and do it “beyond school” with Clay Burell.

I want my child(ren) to have teachers that play guitar and sing, and connect their students to others around the world like Paul Bogush.

I want my child(ren) to work with Clarence Fisher to explore and re-examine what it means to be literate.

I want my child(ren) to do math differently with Dan Meyer.

I could go on.  The examples are plenty.  Thus, clearly, the bar of my expectations is through the roof.  Damn you, PLN!

If Clayton Christensen and his co-authors are right and/or if I become enterprising enough, I suppose there may be a way for me to develop such an individualized distance learning program for my child(ren) with the very best and most creative educators.  But, for now, my only hope is that the educators my child(ren) do get to work with become learners as I have so that they too can learn from the incredible folks I’ve mentioned above.