Josh Allen on 2009-04-06
What a great quote.
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Educational leaders should make their learning/learning environments transparent.
If you can offer great content to the web, nobody will care if your language skills/production skills are a bit "amateur."
So here is the money question: What two things (and only two) would you tell educational leaders are the most important steps they can take to lead change today?
Will Richardson is part of the network of education innovators that includes Jukes, Schrock, Pink, November, Warlick, Vickie Davis, etc. He's fascinating in person and in his writing.
transparency leadership willrichardson will_richardson change
Watch how all of the major cable providers (Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, AT&T) do two things.
1. While your “downstream” connection is 5mb, your “upstream” connection is somewhere in the .5mb range. While you can watch YouTube videos comfortably, it’s still remarkably difficult to upload that same 5 minute video.
2. Each of these companies is testing “bandwidth caps”, i.e. putting a ceiling on the total amount of “stuff” you pull through the connection. A market that used to be “unlimited” across the board is now 250gb, 40gb, etc.
There’s your technical context. Here’s my point. Both of these strategies are attempts at keeping people happy being “consumers” of content instead of being “producers” of content. Watching a YouTube video usually takes less than 3 seconds to begin. Ever try uploading that same video to YouTube? Rethink this now in the context of YouTube’s remarkable growth in the past 3 years. Despite the media companies attempts at discouraging us from being producers, YouTube is huge. They have quickly lost the battle on point #1 above and are gearing up to defend with point #2.
Let’s take a specific assignment you might give to a biology class - create a course wiki on cancer. Over the semester, the students could research and write articles to post to the wiki, comment on each others’ work, and initiate discussions on the more controversial aspects of cancer research and treatment. They could use RSS feeds to tap into articles from the New York Times and compare those to parallel stories from newspapers in other countries. They could search online for cancer experts and evaluate their respective areas of expertise. They could collect a series of annotated and tagged bookmarks, using Diigo, so that others could follow their thinking trail. Using Skype, they could interview an expert or two and perhaps broadcast those interviews using UStream or Mogulus. Some students could create content modules, using Voicethread, embed them in the course wiki and analyze feedback on their ideas from scientists or other teachers at their school. As the semester draws to an end they have a living, breathing portfolio of their work and their understanding. Online - trasparent - for all to experience, comment on, and add to.
Now, as you read the verbs in that paragraph (create, evaluate, comment, research, compare, discuss, analyze, write), it becomes apparent that these activities are vehicles for the active learning and constructivist approaches that most good teachers want to pursue. By making the parallels to educational strategies already approved and acknowledged to be effective, perhaps we can make inroads?
Blog post outlines importance of helping students to learn to lead ethical lives in a transparent world; "contribution counts for more than credentials"
Great blog post by Will Richardson on the value of a leader being transparent with his own learning.
I have more and more of an expectation of the teachers and especially the administrators in our schools to lead transparent lives. The fact that they are veritably “un-googleable” in terms of finding anything they have created and shared and perhaps colla
Great blog post from Will Richardson on the need for schools to become transparent, admins to be transparent to staff in their own learning and the push for schools to educate students on being transparent.
transparency will_richardson change administrators education
Josh Allen on 2009-04-06
What a great quote.
Barbara Lindsey on 2009-04-07
And what academia is fighting against. They are this century's Don Quixote only they don't know it yet.
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