Your Digital Identity

Many of you know that I consider George Couros a "must follow" (both his regular blog, his visually-oriented blog, and his twitter feed). Below is his slideshow on digital identities for educational leaders. As you run through the slides, reflect on this question: "How can we as reform-minded school superintendents help principals, teachers, students, or other stakeholders in the educational community understand how to properly engage, safely communicate, or learn while on the web or within online educational communities if we don't engage ourselves?" The Networked Educational Leader-Day 3 (Digital Identity)

View more presentations from George Couros

The result of genuine engagement on the web (in the form of a digitally-oriented PLC) is a digital identity. My recommendation is that you have a three digital applications you use to engage on the web. For me, its my blog, my Twitter feed, and my Diigo social bookmarking account. For you, your three could include a Facebook page (social media page), a Plurk micro-blog, and a Digg content sharing account.  Many have more than three means of engaging in the " digital stream," some have less. I would encourage you to begin your journey of developing a digital identity by starting with three different modes, each with a different purpose.

District Administrators in Digital Darkness

Last week I had the privileged of being invited to and presenting at the District Administration Magazine's Leadership Institute Summit; I was asked to speak about social media. My thesis? You guessed it: To "lead it," superintendents need to "get it," meaning that district administrators today can choose to amplify their organizations through the use of digital-age tools, or remain in digital darkness. To extend the metaphor using Scott Klososky's "high-beam leadership," I encouraged my colleagues to start to "lead with their brights on" by developing personal learning networks through twitter.


After viewing the slideshow, what reactions do you have? To what extent do you agree with my thesis that superintendents need to understand digital-age tools in order to effectively lead their organizations in this age of ever-present technology?

Let me introduce you to David Rushkoff

Winner of a Neil Postman Award and a professor of Media Studies at NYU (and a colleague of Clay Shirky), David Rushkoff is a figure with increasing authority on the influence of the web and how it can both transform and inhibit the transformation of the human experience. In his latest book he provocatively asserts that we either digitally engage and direct the web or remain complacent and allow the people who have mastered the web to direct us.



After viewing this short lecture by Rushkoff, do you think we as educational leaders are "operating in a binary medium" of educating our nation's children? How do we guide reform to "an analog system," built separate from the legacy systems of the industrial age? What are the deep embedded "biases" of our medium of educating children? How can we as school district administrators reform our system to instill capacity in children to solve the biases of tomorrow? (And not for the dying, archaic systems that now decay in disaggregation.)

The Digital Age and the District Administrator

Recently, I developed a course, entitled The Digital Age and the District Administrator, in order to assist superintendents in acquiring tech-oriented skills. The course is possible because of a unique partnership between Viterbo University and CESA #4.  It's been a remarkable experience, and it has reinforced my strongly held judgement that school district administrators have the full capacity to learn, utilize, and lead with digital-age tools. Below are my somewhat zealous essential questions for the course and the local news coverage that we earned. What is happening in your area to assist school administrators in developing the technology skills and dispositions needed to "lead with the brights on"?


Essential Questions:

1. How does technology help schools and society tap human resources of talent, goodwill, and productivity?

2. How does embracing new media allow us to explore highly engaging but low cost opportunities?

3. In what ways does new media allow society to aggregate talent and effort, producing a dramatically different social, working, and learning environments?

4. To what extent has access to information significantly changed the landscape of learning, working, and socializing? To what extent has the  boundless opportunities to produce information changed the landscape of learning, working, and socializing?

5. What responsibility to we have to students to help them prepare for “workplace 3.0”?

6. How does our limitless capability to communicate change our notions of collaboration, contribution, space and time, and authority?

7. To what extend does the media culture of re-tweeting, re-scripting, re-combining, cut and paste, embedding, sharing, and open source challenge or complement copyright, academic rights, plagiarism, publication credit, and permissions to reproduce materials? 


8. How do we an environment of inquiry that engages the learner and optimizes learning through technology?

Credit: Acknowledgement, recognition, and praise must be given to Scott McLeod (of CASTLE) and Jeff Utecht for inspiring this course and pioneering the way for leaders to teach leaders about digital-age tools.

Technology and a Community-Based School District Vision

With the political chaos of Wisconsin forcing administrators to make tough decisions and engage in difficult and emotional conversations, I've had to reflect on our school district's vision more than I typically do (sometimes even on an hourly basis). A bit more than a year ago, I facilitated a "reculturing" of our school district's vision and purpose. I did so by harnessing what academics call the "collective intelligence" of our community, utilizing a conversational process called World Cafe. Below, you will find a "capzle," which is a Web 2.0 tool that captures all the artifacts and components to the process, from the presentations I used with my school board, to the community invitations I distributed to welcome stakeholders as partners in the revision of the school district's vision.

Because the concept of vision development and vision articulation holds a prominent place in both the ISLLC Standards and the Key Work of School Boards from the National School Boards Association, most district administrators are well aware of its place in day-to-day decisions, strategic planning, and fiscal resource allocation. To what extent, however, do most district administrators understand how school district vision development and articulation relate to a clear and multifaceted understanding of digital-age tools, such as Web 2.0? The smart and incisively executed use of social media and other internet-based communication tools can intensify an administrator's ability to communicate vision and assist others in vision alignment. In other words, to what degree can district administrators continue to work toward accomplishing a school district's vision without a meaningful understanding of technology?

You may view the a "capzle" of the process here.

Ahead of the "Game"

Let me introduce you to James Paul Gee, a researcher on how gaming and learning interface. A pioneer in researching (and explaining) how gaming can change how students learn, retain, and apply knowledge, Gee has asserted that gaming can create spaces of "passion affinity," where students naturally construct meaningful knowledge through problem-based and contextualized learning experiences. After viewing the video (below) and reading over some of his philosophy about gaming and learning, has your mind changed at all about the appropriateness of video gaming in classrooms? To what extent do educational leaders need to understand gaming well enough to understand the potential learning that can result from gaming?


James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

For more information, follow Henry Jenkins' interview series with Gee here.

Google Docs and the 2nd Grade

I could go on about the attributes of Google Docs, how they epitomize the Web 2.0 standard of "anywhere, anytime, with anyone." I could go on about how they motivate kids to engage in academic activities that they normally wouldn't do. I could also lecture on about how all kids, even elementary kids-without all the fully developed digital dispositions-can use Google Apps with purpose.

I could do all those things, or I could just show you a picture of my 2nd-grade son at home, writing a fiction short story on a Google "Word" Document, while his teacher gives him real-time feedback in the shared document, at 6:30 p.m on a Thursday night.