I’ve enjoyed starting to use Tumblr, a moblogging tool with some more capabilities than Twitter and the cleanest, easiest interface I’ve seen. It doesn’t integrate with WordPress (yet?), so it’s in my blogroll below. Its title is “In the Moment: Hailstones from the Infostorm.” I use it for those quick items that strike me as funny, pithy, or otherwise engaging that I don’t want to or can’t use Twitter for.
Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Good news for independent schools:
In response to requests from schools, NAIS is extending the deadline for
Stories of Excellence submissions to Friday, April 11. They’ve had a
wonderful response so far and would like to extend a special thanks to
schools that have already submitted outstanding examples of teaching and
learning with technology. For more information about the Stories of
Excellence, to view case studies, or to submit a case study, please go
to:
http://naisnet.ning.com/group/storiesofexcellence
You don’t need to be “cutting edge” to be excellent. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn a little bit if you feel what you’re doing matters to kids and uses technology in creative ways. Let me know if you need help navigating the Ning site!
Posted on April 4th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Looks like we beat noted tech writer David Pogue to the punch on the Flip camera. Way to go, Lab School! We have about 50 of these in the building.
http://tinyurl.com/2mdgtd
Posted on April 4th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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@ Educause regional in Chi, higher ed tackling many issues we do in K-12, uisng web 2.0 tools in teaching, risk/reward of using web apps.
Posted on March 18th, 2008 by
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NAIS, CoSN done, Educause midwest regional next week, learning and traveling lots
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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at CoSN: Int’l Symposium reveals whole world wrestling with 2.0 power, opportunity, challenges, some remarkable successes
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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at CoSN in DC, Chris Dede: “Kids are experts in knowing when they’re bored.”
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Last week, four colleagues and I gave a talk about transformative pressures emerging technologies exert on independent schools. Our goal was to educate school leaders about some options for navigating change well in different areas of their schools.
Preparing for the talk brought me in touch with some resources about change, and especially changing behavior around collaboration and cooperation. I thought I’d share two of these resources with you.
The first is a TED lecture by Howard Rheingold.
Part of understanding Howard’s talk is understanding a problem in game theory called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma. This site does a nice job of helping one work through the problem and possible solutions.
After you’ve examined these, think about the way your school or organization is structured and the way decisions are made. In what ways are they like or unlike the Prisoner’s Dilemma? Are you catching rabbits or hunting mastodons? What can we learn about navigating rapid change by studying resources like this? I’m eager to hear your comments.
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Big fun wiki: obsoleteskills.com
Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Dueling with inevitability is, well, inevitable when managing IT. There is a relentless logic to many technology developments, which I suppose is, well, inevitable when dealing with zeroes and ones. You can see the endgame coming, and you’re still amazed by the speed with which it arrives.
So there is a choice to make. Do you see inevitability as a problem or an opportunity?
Example: New operating systems make much loved older software obsolete. New operating systems are inevitable. So is obsolescence. Is there really a point to hanging your head and wishing the vendor had made a different choice? Or railing against the forces of entropy? Why not seize the opportunity to reexamine the goals you had for using the software you did, evaluating whether or not those goals were met, and coming up with new, more ambitious goals that reflect recent changes in the educational landscape, and then seeking out new means to achieve them?
Example: It’s inevitable that every student will eventually bring a computing device of his or her own to school every day (most do already, but we pretend it doesn’t really matter since the phones don’t quite look like a computer yet and they mostly keep them in their pockets because they get in trouble if they don’t). We can see this as a classroom management problem, or an opportunity to rethink what we do in classrooms while we still have a chance at grabbing some initiative (the clock is seriously ticking on this). Better yet, we can cut to the chase and make it possible to equip the students with a device that’s specifically built and configured to help us take advantage of a common tool kit, carefully selected as one set of means to achieve the renewed, shared goals we have.
There is an old Monty Python clip that shows a hitchhiker climbing into a car that stopped to pick him up. He sits down, closes the door, and looks over at the driver only to find it is a crash test dummy. The camera cuts to the look of terror on the hitchhiker’s face and then cuts to a long view as the car crashes into the inevitable wall.
It doesn’t have to be that way with technology. Even in the face of inevitability, there is always a choice to be made about how we respond.
Posted on February 15th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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