Where, Oh Where is November Weather?

 Hi. 

It's 7:09 a.m. on November 5, 2022 and it's 66 degrees of the Fahrenheit here outside my 2nd floor window beyond my desk. This time tomorrow, it'll be 6:09 a.m., as Daylight Savings Time sweeps in to give us an extra hour of sleep, or have us up an hour earlier, whichever way we roll. Here's a Ventusky grab built around a search for my specific address. I like Ventusky, like, a lot.

According to the Googly, the current temperature is 5 degrees above the average annual monthly high.

Average monthly temperatures for November (highlighted)

Another search return from a site called whereandwhen.net, sadly neglecting the capitalization of November, makes the comparison more drastic:

So, what's the happs?

I don't really know, but the folks at the Cumberland River Compact (the mighty Cumberland is about a football field away from my home in The Nations Nashville neighborhood) share some interesting discussion and links to resources to learn more. I highly recommend the read, and also spending some minutes of your own investigating the state of your home's change patterns due to global warming. If you're a denier by inclination, you may ignore this. That said, the length of time you (and our children) have to do so is dwindling by the day. We get an hour's slack tomorrow, but of course that will change back in the springtime. See ya.

Rethinking, Recommitting

A quick update on my employment situation. I had a very sincere chat with my Principal last week after meeting with my Lead Principal the week before. Talking with her had led me to better understand the very large budget cuts experienced by Virtual School for the coming year. District Leadership has changed, support for our growth has waffled, and money is tight. That helps me to look at the coming year as one of change in my relationship to this project, but not its termination. As of now I am looking at a half-time position as v-teacher for the academic year 2016-17. The hours will be flexible, contact with the middle schoolers I taught this year will continue and expand, and I will hopefully be making positive differences in those young people's lives.

I was thankful for the chat and just wanted to share it here. If and when our enrollment justifies it, I am confident I will be offered the full-time position, perhaps even a version of my current position, once more.

Change is.

All that said, I am looking for work to supplement my greatly reduced income and I am certain I will find it. Keep me in mind, whether it's a teaching position or something you think a personable, honest, principled and educated senior can do--hopefully something that will contribute to community. I have a few ideas and I've sent out a few feelers, but please keep your ear to the tracks for me. Networking can't hurt, can it?

 My best to you and yours. Carry on!

Daniel Pink in Nashville

Hey ya'll.

I set up a CoverItLive blog post this a.m. in the hopes that I would be able to use it during Daniel Pink's talk to teachers at the Ensworth School inservice kick-off this a.m. I had the best of intentions.

After arriving at the Ensworth High School campus to learn I was mistaken about the location (the inservice keynote for both schools was held at the K-8 school, duh) I trucked on in toward downtown and got into the talk just about 8 minutes into the presentation. There, before me, in the Ensworth School "Frist Hall," were a few hundred teachers in rows of chairs with Pink dwarfed by a good sized projector screen bearing his powerpoint. There was--I promise I'm not making this up--a single seat left at the far right of the backmost row. I sat.

As far as I could see, there was not a laptop open in the room. That discouraged me from pulling mine out, as well as the educated guess that if there were a wireless internet connection connecting to it would be more hassle than breeze. So I did manage to fire up my trusty Dell Axim and hit the "record" button. I don't know yet if I'll use any of the audio but it'll serve to help me recall just a few key points I want to share out.

For anyone not paying attention yet, Pink's book A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future, is certainly in the runnin--along with Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations--for the techbuzzbook of the year. If I heard either of those titles cited in a conversation or presentation at this summer's NECC2008 once, I heard them cited dozens of times.

I haven't seen Shirky yet, though I will (I did share his TED Talk with my Web20forUS! workshop participants earlier this summer). But I had to encroach on my (and my family's) last day of summer before our own inservice tomorrow and go see this man. My bottom-line recommendation? You do the same if you have a chance.

Pink, an economist by training and a writer by inclination and talent, brings a unique self-admitted left-brain perspective to his prediction that right-brainers will forge the economies of the future. The key foundation of his theory is that education designed for "Routines, Right Answers, and Standardization" is insufficient to prepare today's learners for a future economy whose defining contexts will be "Novelty, Nuance, and Customization." In great detail, he explained from his economic perspective how "Routine" will no longer be of value to future citizens of America, and that "that kind of work is disappearing from America. It races to the cheapest cost provider."

Pink projected beyond the phenomenon of mid-level routine white collar outsourcing (citing a NYTimes article from this very morning) to its racing through India, its current repository/provider, down to other cultures--Malaysia, Vietnam, the Phillipines. He painted a picture of the future informed by Google's recent declaration that their ideal employee may be a "non-routine savant." Here's the reference Pink drew from; here's what Google's looking for now (an important qualifier, that word, "now"), workers with:

... analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

... a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don't like it.

... [who are] team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations.

... passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

Rosenburg, Jonathan (2008, July 15). Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning. The Official Google Blog, Retrieved 2008, August 12, from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/our-googley-advice-to-students-major-in.html

Lest you feel the talk was just a matter of pointing out problems without offering suggestions for solving them, I must add the bullet points Pink worked from toward the end of his talk:

• Experiment with new metrics (seek out ways to measure what is important, not just what is easy to measure)
• Tear down walls (between academic disciplines)
• Multi- (...task, ...disciplinary, ...cultural, ...everything)
• Infuse Arts Education throughout all curricula
• Get real about STEM (not routine, real--multi- and artistic)
• Promote and defend autonomy (for innovation without catering to the past)
  

There's much more, of course, to Daniel Pink's talk, and I won't attempt to summarize it all here. Suffice it to say that A Whole New Mind is on my reading list. I hope you add it to yours.

Cheers from Nashville, with thanks to the administration at Ensworth School for having the foresight to assign this text to their teachers. What remains to be done by the teachers will bear watching: Pink spent some time exhorting them to experiment, citing the independent school's unique position out of the constraints of public education bureaucratic policies as key to their potential for change. I'm not sure that particular school is one that will be leading it, for a number of reasons. I'm not even sure my own independent school, a school with a very different history and philosophy of multiculturality and inclusion, is ready to embrace change on the scale Pink encourages.

Whomever leads it, change must come. Comments?

My RSS Feeds on Education are Achieving Consensus!

Interesting, or at least it is to me...

I use Netvibes to aggregate my RSS feeds. It's a cool tool that I would love to share with you, so here it goes on my list of "to be created" instructional videos. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I have been struck this week with how posts from so many of the education-related bloggers I follow (or "arse"=RSS, according to one particular German-British friend of mine) via my Netvibes interface are reflecting rather dramatically on how they are personally striving to re-examine the relevance of their own teaching practices, toward incorporating social networking, Web 2.0, and as-yet-unimagined new technology tools rekindle the relevance of education.

Vicki Davis, "coolcatteacher" blogger, starts with a poem, and cross-posts at the TechLearning bloggers' outlet. She argues that blogging is not the "death of writing," as many old garde have argued, but its evolution, and continues, warning about changes to come, that "...as we move forward to a society that can send and receive education any place any time from anyone, the best teachers will become SuperTeachers and the worst schools, districts, and teachers may find themselves completely without a job."

Sandy Wagner, "Ed Tech Administrator" blogger and head of a 5000 student school district in western NY, describes a student panel whose work resulted in his realization that "our students had anywhere from 60 to 600 contacts on their 'friends' lists. They are spending upwards of two hours a day communicating using these tools. More importantly, students said they would like to be able to contact teachers using these tools."

Jeff Whipple, prolific commentator at his "Whip Blog, musings about technology and education," points out challenges by writing, "Certainly the ability to build a global learning / work network will be a valuable tool in the next few years. My concern lies in the methods students used to generate traffic. Global citizenship will require not just connectedness, but value to that connectedness. Students soon found that more traffic can be generated by questionable content that content of redeeming social value. What do they learn from this? Where do we start the discussions of digital citizenship when the biggest library is but a click away from the world’s largest arcade, the world’s largest “TV/movie/music” store and the world’s largest porn shop?" I discovered Whipple's post, which you can read here (and should, since it talks about one educator's use of social networking to measure their grade by traffic on their websites) via David Warlick's commentary on it at David's 2Cents Worth blog.

It's all interconnected, ya'll. It's all common sense. It's not just some "kool-aid" radical trend. It's the way things are going. As Vicki opines, we are the teachers, we are in the best positions to help our students cope with what Ian Jukes calls "information overload." Let's all go out of the locker room, onto the playing field, and make a difference--one infused with kindness and love of learning...

Happy Holidays to you all, and to all a good day...

Agony and Ecstasy

So, the agony is in all the shortfalls one has regarding actual instruction and affect. The ecstasy is the good stuff (though the agony has its place in that queue). I'm doing a day long workshop tomorrow on aspects of Adobe CS3, an opportunity located by my Technology Director and supported by my school administration, and I'm reeeeeallly excited to be going. We just purchased Adobe CS3 and I want to know how to lead my teachers to places where they'll use it.

Today (the Ecstasy) I facilitated a fabulous interactive videoconference offered by the Vanderbilt Virtual School, a program about classical music featuring a chamber orchestra called Alias. Wonderful. Marvelous. Underappreciated and underutilized by the tens of thousands of classrooms across the nation that might have benefited from the chance to ask questions of professional classical musicians: The agony.

This week, my kids are all creating holiday cards for homeless folks and retirement village residents who may otherwise not receive anything loving or celebratory from friends or relatives, since--guess what--there are a lot of our fellow humans in the world who have neither. This will be facilitated by technology (.jpg files created in Powerpoint and the freeware Drawing for Children program) and by the local radio station Mix 92.9. I only hope they will utilize our kids' work even though some of it may not fit their "Christmas" mold. Our kids, in our eclectic, diverse, odd, inclusive, wonderful, one-of-a-kind independent school, will be creating "Holiday" cards. Sure, many will be Christmas cards, but we will provide Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, and other cards as well. By the end of the week we'll have over 300 of them that I'll print and deliver to the station. Wish us luck. In the long run, of course, it's all about the process, now, isn't it?

Today I also witnessed and archived some fabulous presentations from the freshman class at the School for Math and Science at Vanderbilt, using ustream.tv, and I hope that those experiences will inform my presentations in San Antonio come summer, at NECC2008. Wish me luck.

Peace to you and yours as we barrel into the holiday season. Remember balance, and strive, ever, for that.

The "Big Conversation"

I thunk anyone interested in what I thunk might be interested in this, the first draft for an Enrichment Team newsletter I drafted tonight. I rewrote it for submission (interesting term) to my administration, then more or less completely rewrote it before I sent it off. But this forum is larger and I have faith it can absorb the first draft. Interestingly enough, or not, the print newsletter-posted article may lead people here. Ah what a tangled internet we weave! Here goes...


The "Big Discussion"
by Scott Merrick, Lower School Technology Coordinator

Those parents who may not be aware of the USN Lower School Technology for Learning webpage might add this resource to your set of tools to keep in touch with what’s going on with your child’s education: http://usnlstech.blogspot.com/. I have a serious interest in keeping up with the "Big Conversation" about what is needed to prepare our children for the world they will inherit from us. My developing knowledge about this conversation informs what is brought to the curriculum in our computer lab. It’s kind of a loop, actually, assuming one can stand back and look at it that way. Much of the larger conversation I keep track of and participate in through my main personal/professional blog at http://scottmerrick.net/. Here’s a picture of the "Clustrmap" that notes the global locations of people who have read that blog since just since April 2007:



In an era when lots of energy in the public schools seems to be going into, as Jeff Uctech notes, preparing our children to be experts in filling in circles with number two pencils, I believe we teachers need to be skating on the outskirts of perception and collaboration. Uchtech elaborates, "Standardized tests don’t allow a teacher to walk on the side of chaos in fear that what they might teach, what may be a different way of learning, will not be acceptable when filling in circles." http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=500

Our children’s lives when they are adults will be far different from ours, of that there is no doubt. Assuming that we are, as we like to think we are doing, educating the future leaders of our society, the future architects of our culture, I believe we owe it to them (and to those they will lead and for whom they will design) to expose them to the amazing colaborative tools that are being developed at such a rapid pace that no one can really keep up with all of them. They really need to "learn how to learn," because we do not know the facts they’ll need. We can’t.

That’s why what Chris Dede (along with others) calls "distributed knowledge" may be the key concept our students will need to grasp and embrace if they are to lead in a future we cannot even imagine. Long ago, to paraphrase David Warlick, our great-grandparents needed to memorize everything in order to access it, or to have it on the shelf in their library. If it was not in a book they had read and had purchased, information really wasn’t of much use. An expert on any topic might be three days’ communication time away from them. Today, because of email and Web 2.0 (anyone else using twitter.com?) an expert’s response may be only seconds away. You no longer need to "know" all the facts: You do need to know how to 1) find the facts, 2) discriminate between valuable, authoritative, and valid facts and those that are insubstantial or unreliable, and 3) be able to assimilate valid information into a useful format for whatever task you need it for.

Seems simple. It’s not. Many educators are just starting to sort it out. In the course of that, many of us are teaching on a day-to-day basis and trying to make sure that we’re doing the best we can. Be patient with us. Support us. And trust that we care and that we will proceed with both caution and informed instincts.

U.S. Students Below Average in Science and Math

From THE Journal*, a favorite source for current trends, a report that I'll add to my resource bank for an upcoming presentation in San Antonio about university outreach to K12 schools. Go read the article, and what's up with Canadian science education that places it in the top 5? Mind you, results are based on one of my favorite whipping-boys, standardized testing. But still...

And in math...

See the line at 500? That's the international median line. Clearly, something's wrong with the long-running argument that the poor performance of our students in science and math is "urban myth."

We clearly need some work here. My sense is that there are a passle of well-meaning educators out there working as hard as they can with out-dated tools and restrictions to teach kids content and skills, but if they were to be set free to innovate and energize the imaginations of their students, engage them, draw them into the larger context, "performance" would follow. What we need is teachers who are knowledgeable in both the current collaborative learning technologies and in ways to make sure that new ones don't fly under their professional radars. Wheels turning again...

*Nagel, Dave. "U.S. Students Below Average in Science and Math." THE Journal December 200712 December 2007 1,2. 12 December 2007 .

A Vision of Students Today, from Michael Wesch

Michael Wesch is, as David Warlick notes today, "at it again." Wesch (a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University) created the worldwide noted YouTube video "Web 2.0--The Machine is Us/ing Us," a digital ditty that earned him, among other noteriety, a 2007 WIRED magazine "Rave Award."

I thank David for the quick heads up on this one, via my RSS feed of his 2 Cents Worth blog. I took the time to post it here in part because it actually brought me to tears. I'd be interested to see your responses commented here.

Here's the link to Wesch's page containing the video, entitled "A Vision of Students Today," in turn embedded from YouTube.

(Not available at USN--blocked for bandwidth issues)

"Educational Change -- an Oxymoron?"

This post is actually posting to a post about a post. A meta-post?

Tom March put up what he calls a "little rant" at infinitethinking.org Tuesday about a New York Times op-ed piece by David Brooks. I want you to read the NYTimes piece, of course, but I want you to do so by way of March's very brief review of it.

Then go enjoy Brooks' remarkable little prose all about "the Sacred Order of the External Mind," It's good for a few chuckles, as well as its fair share of thought provoking moments, especially in combination with March's take on it. My own read is that Brooks is being not "a bit tongue in cheek," as Brooks describes it, but rather incredibly sarcastic. What do you think?

Have a minute?