Relax. No, really.

Are Ready for Your Closeup?

2012-01-28T15:34:00.006-05:00

A friend recently asked if anyone had advice about preparing for a Skype interview. He was asking on behalf of an adult friend applying for an academic job, but I'm pulling together a response because it's relevant to students embarking on a college search as well; an increasing number of schools include webcam-enabled interviews as an optional part of their college process. So, here are my ten tips:

1) Know as much going in as possible. Who will you be speaking with? Do they have any kind of digital presence that you could check out beforehand? What kind of time constraints are they working under?

2) Do a screen test. Fire up your webcam in the spot where you think you'll be interviewing, and see what you think. If you know the platform you'll be working with, get a friend to do a dry-run with you and give you feedback on both visuals and audio.

3) De-clutter. A bookshelf in the background? Not a bad idea. But remember that you want your interviewer to be focused on YOU, so you may want to "stage" the space behind you in the interests of that.

4) Dress to impress. You want to feel both snazzy and comfortable. If those two things don't usually go together for you, take advantage of the limited view of your webcam... dress up above the waist, but as long as your feet are off-camera, go ahead and wear your fuzzy bunny slippers.

5) Give yourself something to look at. You'll be tempted, as the interviewee, to look at the visual of the person you're talking with. But in order for them to feel that, you have to look at the camera. Put a Post-It just above your camera with a note that says, "Look here," to remind yourself.

6) Smile early and often. There's all kinds of research out there about how we respond to smiles. It's hardwired; make it work for you.

7) Plan for the 3 things you think you HAVE to say in the interview. Put another Post-It note up near the first one, and write yourself a little three-word reminder, e.g. "Mentor" "Service-Learning" "Philly." Add a smiley face to the second Post-It. (See #3, above.)

8) Plan to listen actively. Think about what phrases you might use in order to draw your interviewer out. "You mentioned something earlier that got me thinking..."

9) Plan for the stumper. If you get asked a a question that is challenging for you, or that you didn't expect, you'll need to buy yourself a little time. Film yourself in that moment so you have a sense of what you look like when your wheels are turning.

10) Think about whether you might want to record yourself. You might find that it won't all sink in on the first pass, and that you'd be grateful, when working on your thank-you note, to be able to refer to some of the points covered with greater specificity. (Thank-you notes are increasingly rare and a good way to stand out in a positive way.)

What did I miss? Got any tips to share?

The Poppyseed Principle

2012-01-25T06:26:00.001-05:00

(image via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license)

I used to work in an office that was just a few flights of stairs and courtyard away from a bagel place. Inevitably, then, on some rushed mornings, a bagel became my breakfast.

On one such day, I went into the bathroom down the hall from my office at about 4pm and was horrified to discover that I had a poppyseed stuck between two of my front teeth. It must have been there for hours!

At that moment, the Poppyseed Principle was born. Ever since then, if I see something that falls into the category of "I'd want someone to tell me," in my life, I try to take a moment to give them a friendly, private (when possible) heads up. It has been an unexpectedly nice way to connect with people; folks have been invariably grateful.

And back in the office where it all began? I switched to sesame seed bagels!

Badge Learning Stories

2011-08-26T06:50:00.006-04:00

I'm participating in a collaborative conversation about the possibilities of Mozilla's proposed Open Badge project, and was inspired their call for imagined scenarios within our fields of interest. (Also inspired by Andy Duckworth's example; thanks again, Andy!) These two accounts are entirely fictitious, and are meant as an extended imagining of how these badges might play out. Enjoy!

Scene 1:

Carmen Pulido started taking piano lessons when she was seven, but taught herself to play the guitar. When the bass player for her fledgling garage band moved to South Carolina, Carmen started teaching herself bass. And shortly thereafter, as the Nilla Woofers ran through a song that sounded depressingly like their last one, she had an epiphany and realized that what she really needed was someone with a knack for arranging. “I bet there’s a badge for that!” said her tech-savvy friend and lyricist Gigi. So they hit up Facebook, and sure enough, the lead vocalist of a band they’d heard and liked on Radcast had an arranger badge posted in his public backpack. They clicked through to the issuing org, and discovered that of the 456 “Stave Master” badges posted that year, 23 were in New Jersey. Now all they had to do was post a badge-ad and start figuring who might be their best fit.

Scene 2:

Alan Brightman had developed a reputation for genius in the kitchen. His swimming teammates had credited his pre-meet power smoothies with at least one win. And whenever the going got tough -- for example, when midterms rolled around -- Alex’s response was to break out the measuring cups and bake up a storm. As Alex’s senior year of high school and its attendant stresses approached, he looked at his school’s elective course offerings and thought for the 100th time that what he really wanted to learn about was food. And then he noticed the paragraph on independent study, which had somehow never caught his eye before. “Any junior or senior student wishing to propose a course which would count as an independent study must first find a faculty member who is willing to serve as a mentor and sponsor to them for the duration of the semester in which the course is proposed.” Unfortunately, the application deadline was only two weeks away, and school wasn’t even in session yet. Alex remembered that when his friend Carl had been thinking about taking flying lessons last year, he had used the school’s Learning Community Portfolio portal to find an adult with a pilot’s license who he could reach out to with questions. Alex wondered if the faculty section of the Learning Community site would display the public badges of Upper School teachers. He logged in and started poking around, wishing that the search function was a little more intuitive. Okay, here was one teacher with a barbecue badge... kind of basic, but cause for hope... Alex kept scrolling...

In my work as an academic matchmaker, I work with some students who have not yet found their "tribes" as learners. For me, one of the exciting aspects of the Open Badge project is the possibilities for transparency.

"Transparency means showing others what's going on inside so that people can be attracted to what you do." — Douglas Rushkoff, http://vimeo.com/24609135

Image credit: photo used via cc license; detail, someone worked REALLY HARD, by rocket ship)

140edu Post-Conference Report

2011-08-19T15:42:00.008-04:00

(photo by @ShellTerrell)

Earlier this month, two RPS students and I participated as panelists at the "140edu" conference in NYC. This conference was the brainchild of Jeff Pulver, an internet communications entrepeneur with a passion for connecting people and ideas, and Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of the inquiry-based Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

The conference was a two-day event hosted at the 92nd Street Y, and the call for proposals included the following statement:

“The changes in the way we live our lives must create change in the way we teach and learn. The real-time web should create profound changes in the way we think about what, how and why students and teachers can do, create and communicate. The very nature of what we consider “school” should be radically different given the powerful reach of the communication tools our students have at their disposal. #140edu is dedicated to exploring and expanding that change.”

The best way to get a quick feel for the conference might be to take a look at the list of speakers. All sessions were designed to be introductory, and each clocked in at 15 minutes, max. I was pleased that my proposal to bring two students and talk about ways in which the internet and its affordances have enabled us to “change our default settings” as learners was accepted, and on Tuesday, August 2nd, I met Niki Kakarla and Mike Fedorochko in NYC after one brief in person planning conversation earlier. (John Miller attended the conference as well; it was so nice to connect with you there, John!)

Here's the video from our session:

(Permalink: http://blip.tv/140confevents/140edu-8-2-11-shelly-krause-5474324)

(I’ve put in a request to get my second “e” back.)

We DID get some good questions and comments, so I was a little disappointed that those didn't make it into the video. Of the questions I remember, my favorite was, "Would you consider these students typical?"

To which I responded something like, "I absolutely consider these students typical in their passion and in their desire to do meaningful work. I think we all want to see ourselves as capable of making relevant contributions to our communities. But I think that Niki and Mike are probably ATYPICAL in the opportunities that have been given to them, and in the opportunities which they have created for themselves."

I asked Niki and Mike if they would take a few minutes to share their thoughts as well...

Niki’s after-thoughts:

“Being a speaker at the 140edu conference as a student was an extraordinary experience for me. As an audience member, I was surrounded by a room full of brilliant people who were all open to each other’s ideas. As a speaker onstage, there were so many enthusiastic people waiting to hear what I had to say. After the conference I realized just how many people wanted to talk about our ideas and how to move forward with them. This was probably one of the coolest things I could have been a part of. I was able to network, learn about new ideas, and meet people from different backgrounds with different perspectives.”

Mike’s after-thoughts:

"Our group spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140edu conference a few weeks ago to a crowd of wonderfully open-minded educators. Being one of the only real students at the conference was both refreshing and disappointing. On the one hand, I was given the opportunity to meet and pay thanks to the hundreds of extremely intelligent and committed individuals working to make the necessary changes in the way we approach education. On the other hand, the utter lack of student input and participation, even amongst such progressive and open-minded educators, was disappointing to say the least. As a rising senior, it's tough for me to come back to Rutgers Prep for my final year and not be envious of the students who have been given the opportunity to learn organically in an environment like that of the much-lauded Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. It is my firm belief that our schools are forcing students to become risk averse, training students to theorize instead of apply, and disenfranchising creativity instead of empowering it. The reality of the situation is that schools, parents, governments, and many colleges are trying to quantify something that is sometimes extremely difficult to quantify. As teachers, I urge you to keep an open mind, experiment with newer and better methods, and recognize and work to mitigate as much as possible the frustration many students feel with their education. I have been extremely lucky to attend a school whose faculty are so incredibly committed, and I simply would not be in my current position without the dedication and influence of Rutgers Prep faculty members. Thank you."

(Back to Shelley again.) I am grateful to have been able to attend and speak at this conference. Committing to presenting helped sharpen my thinking as I tried to figure out how to pull together something that the students and I could be proud to have shared. I’ve been exploring different conference structures over the past few years (I’m interested in the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of “containers” for learning), and it was a treat to be a part of this intense, engaging, and multi-layered experience and conversation. I’ve put in a proposal to facilitate a conversation at another edu-themed conference this fall, and if I get the nod, based on the positive feedback we received at 140edu, I’ll try to once again include students.

(The recordings of the other talks from the 140edu conference are here.)

edcamp Philly 2011

2011-07-29T18:46:00.001-04:00

All but the first of these photos were taken by my friend Scot Wittman (aka @mapographer); it was so great to have someone from my school community -- and an actual photographer, no less! -- with me at edcamp Philly this year!

I've become something of an unconference fangirl.

@mapographer halfway down the stairs
at edcamp Philly 2011

(Chalk helps folks know they're in the right spot.)

(@kjarrett & co. welcoming folks)

Creating the schedule.

(@mbteach, facilitating)

(deciding on our next session;
plus me, in the yellow t-shirt, back left)

I am drawn to unconferences for some of the same reasons I am drawn to Quaker Meeting or a block party. I like the idea of creating a well-designed container for conversation and connection, without determining ahead of time exactly what those conversations will be about, or who will connect. More "hang out in the kitchen," less "sit in your appointed seat in the formal dining room."

I am also perpetually interested in the idea of what is required for these containers we create to feel genuinely inclusive. Watching Heather Gold's recent talk on "Tools for Tummeling" at WordPress reminded me again of the power of acknowledgment. We all want to be seen and recognized for who we are. But inclusivity doesn't just happen. Unconferences have a few structural elements which I believe lean in the direction of inclusivity. Unconferences typically have a non-hierarchical approach to planning and often recommend an explicit decoupling of interest from approval (just because I leave your session to check in on another one doesn't mean that I think what you have to say isn't valuable). These can make unconferences a better container for me than a more traditional conference structure. Unconferences have also helped me more clearly understand the elements of traditional conferences that DON'T work for me. (E.g. I'm supposed to know what I'm going to want to facilitate a conversation about nine months ahead of time?! And there won't be any wireless access?! What?!)

I am very excited to attend an event next week being curated by Jeff Pulver of 140 Characters Conference fame. The testimonials about his past events are pretty compelling. I'm also still a little shocked that I'll actually be speaking. And hoping my students and I can talk fast enough to leave room for some meaningful (if brief) connections with the other folks in the room.

(Our assigned time slot at 140edu
is at 3:45pm on Tuesday, August 2nd.
We'll be talking about "Changing our ringtones:
going beyond 'default' as learners"
And they're going to try to livestream it,
so do follow along at home
if you're not able to make it to the 92nd Street "Y" in NYC.)

Students v. Learners

2011-05-18T13:58:00.002-04:00

Like Scott McLeod, I am struck by the simplicity and depth of this chart from a post by David Warlick:

	Students	Learners
Relationship with educators	Students are employees, required to obediently follow instructions.	Learners are citizens with a vested interest in the learning society.
Relationship with other “Students”	Students are competitors	Learners are collaborators
Motivation	Obligation: Students are culturally obliged to work for the teacher & for compensation (below)	Responsibility: Learners are motivated by an understood and realized “value” in their work, especially when it is valuable to others.
Compensation	Institution defined grades and gateways to college (another institution) and a good job (another institution)	A sense of ongoing accomplishment that is not delivered but earned, and not symbolic but tangible and valuable — an investment.
Mode of Operation	Compliant, group-disciplined, objective-oriented, and trainable	Persevering, self-disciplined, group- and goal-oriented, resourceful, and learning in order to achieve rather than achieving learning.
Why?	Compelled	Curious
Equipped	..with packaged knowledge and tools for recording packaged knowledge — prescribed and paced learning	..with tools for exploring a networked variety of content, experimenting with that content, and discovering, concluding, and constructing knowledge — invented learning
Assessment	Measuring what the student has learned.	Measuring what the learner can do with what has been learned.

Additional questions:

> What assumptions about where the young people in our learning communities fall on this chart do the adults in our communities make?

> What about parents?

> To what extent do we foster opportunities to share our pedagogical philosophies within learning communities?

> Have you undergone a personal transition from a "student" identity to a "learner" identity? If so, was that intentional? Accidental? Counter-cultural?

My Next Job

2011-05-17T22:28:00.021-04:00

A friend with a knack for asking great questions

asked me recently what my next job would be.

Ummm...

My first thought may have been, "Do you know something I don't know?" This was quickly followed by thinking, "I'm still learning new things doing this one!"

Then, trying to go "blue sky," I talked about my desire to help make the hidden shared interests of community members visible. About my interest in creating opportunities for extended conversation. And wanting to be engaged in teaching our students about networked learning and empowered use of the intertubes.

But as I am something of a "slow-burn" thinker, it has taken me several weeks to come up with this fully-fledged description of my imagined next job. Or one of them, at least. :-)

So here goes:

Shelley Krause is the lead curator of her school's Learning Portfolios project. Used for assessment, reflection, and sharing of student & professional learning, Learning Portfolios were first used by the school's art department and students applying to undertake independent study projects, and have since have become an integral part of the way in which the entire school comes together and moves forward as a learning community. Shelley's responsibilities with the project include the following:

> assist with the design and implementation of the "New To Us" learner intake process for new members of the school's learning community

> help coordinate the design and implementation of the school's Learning Portfolio system

> ensure the portability and continued availability of access to projects selected for Learning Portfolio inclusion

> collaborate and guide team and departmental leaders in order to support portfolio-friendly curricular design

> help design and support the processes through which teachers and students select work for inclusion in their professional and learner portfolios, respectively

> keep up-to-date on current trends in ePortfolio design and use; serve as a resource to learners through scheduled portfolio consultations

> teach an elective class in digital presence and networked learning or English

> run periodic Portfolio 101 workshops for school parents

> curate the school's current and archival sets of public Learning Portfolios

> confer with the school's IT group about the evolving software, access, and storage needs of the Learning Portfolio program

(Sounds pretty great, right?

And you might want to check out

some of the portfolio sites I found

while researching this:

Shawnee Mission School District

Carmel High Honors English Projects

I'll let you know

if/when it becomes a personal reality!)

Powerful Learning Experience: 4th Grade Poetry

2011-05-16T21:51:00.008-04:00

Two years ago I got hooked on a project I had assigned myself. A teacher in my building has long led her students in an intensive exploration of the lives of the people living in Appalachia, culminating in student-led tours of all kinds of demonstrations of the depth of their understanding.

I signed up for one of the tours and was absolutely transfixed by the power of the children's imagination. At about the same time, I had been seeing Google- and Slideshare-enabled embedded slide shows popping up in blogs I read. When I read the poems our fourth graders had written in the voices of the people they'd been studying, my immediate thought was for all the people who wouldn't have a chance to marvel at their work, and this is what inspired what happened next.

The students had initially illustrated their poems with drawings, but these had not been converted into a digital format, so I set out to find images that would reflect the strength and deep engagement of the students' language. This in turn led me on a whole exploration of issues of copyright and fair use in the digital age. Once I'd discovered the treasure trove that is the FSA/OWI federal photographic archive, I approached the classroom teacher with my desire to help share the students' work with the wider world, and she helped me think through issues like parent permission and timeline.

Then I hit the internet. I dove into Google Docs and figured out how to generate an embeddable slideshow (not that difficult, as it turned out). I printed out a copy of each of the poems I'd been granted permission to share, and went image hunting. During this process, even though I wasn't able to talk with the students themselves, I felt very much as if I was working collaboratively with them, since their words were providing the starting point for my research. Soon, I was completely taken over by the project. I got up early in the morning, I worked over my lunch hour, I saw images of coal towns in my mind's eye as I was lying in bed at night.

There were some false-starts as I figured out how best to keep track of my research; early on, I found and then lost track of some great images because I hadn't saved the url before moving on. I developed structures and procedures to help encourage more methodical record-keeping, and after a bit I got into a groove. I ask my students every year if they have area of interest or engagement that generates the state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has termed "flow," a state in in which your whole being is involved and you're using your skills to the utmost. Working on this project was truly a "flow" situation for me.

What made this a powerful learning experience?

I was working at the edges of my knowledge
I was inspired by the "raw materials" I had to work with
There was a collaborative energy contributing to the project
A strong desire to help shine a light on others' creative work
A relatively defined window of opportunity (I had my regular work to get back to!)
I was drawing on both my artistic and technical skills
I had the feeling that I had identified & was fulfilling an unmet need

(This is the last of three stories

of powerful personal learning that I wrote up

with an eye towards contributing

to Sam Chaltain's Faces of Learning project.

You could, too.)

Powerful Learning Experience: Shakespeare

2011-05-14T22:01:00.010-04:00

(image via Brian on Flickr)

In high school, after my best friend's parents sent her away to boarding school and my parents didn't, school became a pretty lonely scene for me. Not only because of her absence and my grappling with my lesbian identity in a pre- Gay-Straight Alliance world, but maybe even more so because I was a wanna-be intellectual in a population where, in a typical year, only about 40% of the graduating class would go on to attend a four-year college. Being engaged with the wider world of ideas landed me in a pretty small club. There were sometimes opportunities to take courses at an honors or Advanced Placement level, but it depended on interest and ability -- my senior year, the AP English Literature course that I would have loved to take didn't "run." The rules of regular English let me test out of some of the units I could demonstrate mastery of, so Mrs. McLain found herself writing me pass after pass to the library, where I stumbled upon a video of a PBS special featuring a young Ian McKellen entitled, "Acting Shakespeare." I was absolutely spellbound.

(image by Steve Granitz,

courtesy of WireImage)

I watched the video over the course of multiple days and then, when I'd reached the end, re-wound it and started again. I even created my own index of what scenes appeared at what point in the recording -- effectively creating a "chapter selection" option in a pre-DVD world.

Somehow Mrs. McLain found out how I was spending my "release time," and issued me a challenge -- could I memorize some Shakespeare? She must have known by then that I have a positive orientation towards challenge -- I said, "Sure." It was the only time outside of drama classes that I'd ever been asked to memorize anything. For several weeks, then, I immersed myself in Shakespeare, watching the video during school hours, then scouring the plays at night for selections that I would want to memorize. Mrs. McLain was my spark and the ultimate audience for my memorized soliloquies, but she made sure to leave me plenty of room to make the work my own.

And to this day I can recite satisfying chunks of Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and The Taming of the Shrew.

What made this a powerful learning experience?

Again, a strong and warm connection to my teacher
a move from feeling isolated to feeling connected
a chance to revel in someone else's mastery (Shakespeare AND McKellen!)
"opt-in" -- this was essentially work I assigned myself
challenge
customization
immersion -- I was spending time on this both in and out of school
resonance -- during what was an emotional time for me personally, I was able to engage with art that had strong emotional content

(I am working on several of these stories

of powerful personal learning

with an eye towards contributing

to Sam Chaltain's Faces of Learning project.

You could, too.)

Powerful Learning Experience: Backgammon

2011-05-08T06:48:00.000-04:00

(Photo by Andy Schultz, on Flickr)

In high school, my best friend Claire taught me how to play backgammon. I had never even seen a board before; she had grown up playing her grandparents, and was really good. Once she taught me the rules, we went ahead and stared playing, but she was crushing me with dispiriting regularity – I didn't have a sense of strategy. Then we played the way she'd taught me, with one major change – after each of my moves, she took a moment to tell me what she would have done, had she been in my shoes at that second. I learned fast. I could tell that I was learning because of the increasing number of times that Claire said, "That's pretty much what I would have done." Eventually I even started winning now and then, at which point Claire stopped giving me hints.

For a while, even after that, I could still sometimes hear her voice in my head. In the end, my own experience built on those early games and her advice, and I became a backgammon player in my own right.

What made this a powerful learning experience? Here are some of the elements that seem like contributing factors:

a strong, warm connection to my teacher
learning was in a one-on-one setting
immediate feedback
tapped into my competitive drive
"only a game" = low stakes
lots of little mini-failures on the way to the big success

(I am working on several of these stories

of powerful personal learning

with an eye towards contributing

to Sam Chaltain's Faces of Learning project.

You could, too.)

What To Do When Colleges Say No

2011-03-11T10:49:00.003-05:00

(I always appreciate my friend and colleague Patrick O'Connor's perspective on the world of college counseling. Earlier this week, he took a moment from his work at The Roeper School to share his thoughts on helping students deal with admissions rejections with the members of the NACAC listserv, and he has graciously consented to my posting his thoughts here.)

The Best Advice When Colleges Say No

School counselors know the real March Madness begins next week, when some of the nation's most selective colleges release their admissions decisions. As a pre-game warm-up, let's stick with the facts we'll need to comfort the Class of 2011:

* Most selective colleges are reporting a huge increase in the number of applications.
* This increase is due in part to more American students applying to college, and colleges seeking out more students from overseas.
* Since this also happened last year, many colleges enrolled too many students last fall. They'll have to make up for that, so many colleges will be admitting fewer students this year...
* ...and wait-listing more students. This increase means fewer students will be admitted from the wait list come May-and if they are admitted, financial aid will be scarce.

If none of that does any good, then just say this:

* 850.

No, this is not the high score on some new version of the SAT, and while it may indeed be the number of times Charlie Sheen appeared on TV last week, that (happily) has nothing to do with college.

850 is the number of valedictorians rejected last year from one of America's most prestigious colleges. These students represented the best in their high schools; they did everything they were "supposed" to do-and yet, they didn't even get to the wait list.

Once you share this with your students, ask them how these 850 students felt when they were rejected. Sooner or later, the right answer will come forward-"They probably felt like they put in all of that time and effort for nothing."

And there is the teachable moment.

It had to be hard to be turned down by a school they loved-but did all of that preparation really lead to nothing? Given everything these students had learned, the many ways they had grown, and how they overcame adversity and embraced creativity in making Plans B, C, and Q, did they really get nothing out of it?

If so, they have every right to be unhappy, but not with the college. They should be unhappy for letting the sun rise and set 1307 times from the first day of 9th grade to the day the college said no, never once appreciating all that each of those days had to offer in and of themselves.

They should hang their heads a little to realize, just now, the difference they've made to their classmates, their teammates, and the people they served in the soup kitchen.

And if they look back with a little regret on the many times they blew off a compliment from a parent or a teacher because the goal of college wasn't realized just yet, that's more than OK. They now know it was at that moment that the goal of fully living each day was conquered with a flourish-and understanding that will make each day all the richer at the wonderful college that had the good sense (and room) to take them.

It isn't easy to watch wonderful students work through the dismay and disappointment college decisions can bring, but if we remember the most important part of our work has nothing to do with who gets in and everything to do with who gets it, the disappointment will fade faster than the memory of the teams we had in last year's NCAA pool, and students can move forward with a better sense of who they are, and what really matters. Now that's college counseling.

(Thanks again to Patrick for letting me share this
with the intertubes. Readers, we'd love
to hear your thoughts in the comments!)

Click

2011-03-10T09:08:00.009-05:00

(Image by Denise Carbonell,
used under Creative Commons guidelines)

Our son is definitely the most private person in our little three-person family. He will only wear shorts if they fall well below his knees. He has forbidden us to use the word “bath” in public. It’s an instinctive thing with him. When we first explained the concept of privacy to him – he was probably about three years old then – his affect was one of relief and deep recognition. He might as well have said, “Oh, that’s what you call it!” It was clear that the concept was something he already had an intuitive sense of; he just hadn’t had the language until that moment. Click.

As a third grader, I was passionately curious about codes and secret languages. I invented my own alphabet. (Geek points: I can still recite it!) I taught myself how to fingerspell from the line drawings of the ASL alphabet in our World Book Encyclopedia. But I was never able to find anyone else who cared quite as much about that world, and so I eventually moved on to other things. No click.

My life experience – maybe most people’s? – has included multiple instances of feeling cut off or estranged from the broader stream of life; like many people, I have a deep appreciation and longing for moments of connection. I tell the students in my life that if they blog, I’ll subscribe, so my incoming stream is slowly but surely starting to include the voices of these intrepid young people:

Best life lessons: It’s really is all about who you are with, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. It’s totally acceptable to not have it all figured out yet. You’re never too old to change your life. Career, marriage, and kids are not the end all be all. You’re 56 and want to go abroad with your husband? Do it! We met them in Cambodia. You’re 28 and don’t have a college degree, have been traveling for the past 3 years and want to travel for 3 more? That’s okay! We met her in Vietnam!
(Excerpted from a cross-posted entry of Sarah & Arielle’s. Click.)

I can't even say how much I am glad I did this show. I learned a lot, and some of it was awesome, and some of it made me want to rip my hair out. But I liked it so much that I think I've found the path I want to explore after college.
(Excerpted from Beauty and the Beast. Click.)

As an educator, I am excited about the possibility of helping our students build their capacity for connecting. I love witnessing someone experience that click as they find some of the deepest parts of themselves reflected in the world around them. Especially now that the world around them can be so much more than the world of their family, or school, or hometown.

And I wonder: is it an accident that so many of the examples I come across have little or no connection to institutionalized learning?

Anyway, beginning tomorrow I'll be a worry-free second semester senior. This will be the first time in my life that I will have the chance to learn for the sake of it. No pressure about advancing to the next class or worrying about what college will choose me...they'll make their decisions based upon my first semester. Essentially, I'll be living the good life.
(Excerpted from Welcome to the Good Life. Click.)

What are the necessary conditions for these clicks of recognition, discovery, and engagement? How can we foster moments in which students see, hear, read, feel, or experience something which causes them to think, “Hey! That’s like ME!” Or moments in which they try something new and are surprised to find themselves thinking, “I could happily do this all day.”

Are our learning communities focused on maximizing these clicks? What would they look like if they were?

(As usual, more questions than answers. :-D
This post is accompanied
by a warm shout-out for M.E. Steele-Pierce,
Asst. Superintendent and #edcamp Wonder Woman,
whose recent fantastic post on revolutionary professional learning
effectively bought me the time to work on these musings.
She's @steelepierce on Twitter, & you should
follow her up if you haven't already done so.)

What We Bring

2011-02-08T06:32:00.004-05:00

(Photo by Andrew Forgrave, used with permission,
& it comes with its own fun story, too.)

This year I brought a kind of double consciousness to EduCon. It was my second year of in-person attendance, and this time I wasn't facilitating a conversation, so I was less nervous than I might have been the year before. This greater comfort level allowed me more time to reflect on what others might be experiencing, which in turn led me to put out a call for "Tips for Newbies." I am not generally someone who is prone to social anxiety, and I lived in Philadelphia for 10 years earlier in my life, but I was a little nervous about my first time at EduCon last year; I figured if I had felt that way, there must be plenty of first-time attenders this year who would be feeling even more nervous. I created a Google form made up of just two questions (what advice would you share & who are you?), and then tweeted out a link to the form with a request for help and an #educon hashtag. The response was immediate and gratifying; within just a few days, I had a terrific collection of tips to share with EduCon newbies.

I wanted to try to help folks feel comfortable and confident from the outset, not only for their sake, but for the sake of the overall experience; the more comfortable and welcomed we feel, the more likely we are to be able to let our guard down and truly participate and share in the experiences offered. Or at least that's how I think about it.

I wrote last year about the ways in which EduCon's self-definition & call for conversation proposals change the expectations, perceptions, and experiences of those who attend and/or facilitate conversations there. 2009 was, for me, a year of learning that "the genius is in the conversation," so when I attended EduCon2.2 in early 2010, I expected that it would be difficult to choose amongst sessions. I also anticipated that I might feel intellectually and/or emotionally overwhelmed by the more interactive nature of those sessions. And I was right on both counts. There was too much going on for any one person to take in. By a long shot.

Last year, as it became clear to me that many of those in attendance were already accustomed to sharing their learning journeys in some kind of internet-enabled way, I started to think that maybe all was not lost. The conversations I was so sorry to miss? Someone might share the slide deck and their notes. The people I spoke to for five minutes who I then wished I'd had an hour with? Maybe I could follow them on Twitter. "Will someone be collecting all the post-Educon posts somewhere?" I asked everyone I could think to ask. No, we don't think so, came the responses. But that's a great idea!

So I declared myself the unofficial digital archivist of EduCon and started collecting posts. Initially, I did it mostly for me, although I shared my work out because I am beginning to internalize the idea that if something is useful to me, it might be useful to someone else. Over the course of gathering posts, I became more invested in my collection of posts becoming a community resource. And this year I decided to reprise my role as "totally unofficial digital archivist" even before I set foot in Philadelphia. I was hoping that Liz Davis (@lizbdavis on Twitter) might also reprise her self-appointed role as "curator of the Twitter list of attendees," without which my digital curation of EduCon-related content would have been much more challenging. I checked in with Liz, and I was in luck... like me, she had previously seen a need and taken on the work of fulfilling it, and also like me, she had decided to reprise her role at EduCon 2.3.

Conferences remind me a little of weddings. You think about the big event for months ahead of time, you're all excited to make your little toast and see the people you know, and then with most of them you have these hurried five minute conversations that just end up reminding you why you wish you were spending more time with them. And then you go home. For the educators who have come to look forward to EduCon as an annual re-fuel & re-boot, the built-in limitations of the experience are a challenge.

Based as it is on the premise that conversations & connections are at the heart of what we do as educators, EduCon represents several distinct types of experiences every year. In some cases, newcomers and returnees might was well be attending separate events, as their reflections show. Questions of who is "in" and "out," who feels welcomed or ignored, are part and parcel of any human gathering with the kinds of limitations of space and time that EduCon wrangles with. What I'm trying to do, with my digital archive work, is to put a little stretch in the space-time continuum in order to create more space/time for the conversations that we want to be the heart of EduCon (or TEDxNYED, for that matter). Our time together in physical space may be limited, but our time connected in cyberspace can help us extend beyond those limitations.

I had a great time at EduCon. Then again, I came with baggage. I expected that I would be welcomed, and hoped that I had already contributed in my own small way to the overall success of the event. I came prepared. After having adjusted the previous year to people looking blankly at my name but grinning with recognition once they saw my Twitter handle, I took a page from Tom Whitby's playbook and brought a copy of my avatar photo to tape to my nametag. I knew that I wouldn't be able to take it all in, but I also knew that LOTS of people would be there working to make their own meaning from it all, and that a significant portion of them would make an effort to share their work out with the larger group.

And now, a victim of my own success, I STILL haven't finished reading all the Educon 2.3 reflection posts, over a week after the official end of the conference. It's a nice problem to have. I'll definitely be bringing some new ideas back into my life & the lives of my colleagues.

(My thinking around creating space for connection
has been inspired in part by the work of Heather Gold
and her band of merry tummlers.
Her January conversation with Tom Coates
gave me a chance to hear him say,
"The more you start finding the edges of
your philosophical view, the more you start spotting
how a new technology that comes along can fix or improve
something that's broken or doesn't work properly."
Among other things, EduCon for me
represents a great space for finding
the edges of my philosophical view.
Special thanks to @lizbdavis, @aforgrave,
@chadsansing, @chrislehmann (birthday boy!)
the cast and crew of SLA,
and all the EduCon folks who push my thinking
and share their own.)

Tools for Curation

2011-01-08T10:57:00.005-05:00

Howard Rheingold got me thinking about curation a few months back, and I've been working to expand my understanding of the tools that folks are developing in support of this kind of sense-making.

The tools I've tried recently are Keepstream, curated.by, Prezi, and Storify, and I thought I'd be a responsible digital citizen and share my thoughts about them here.

Here's Keepstream's explanation of what they're about:

Keepstream Tutorial from Keepstream on Vimeo.

Keepstream lets you pull together a collection of web content around any topic you're interested in. Pulling in content from Twitter and Facebook is "drag and drop" easy, while other content is easily routed to your Keepstream account via a bookmarklet. The big positive of this site is its ease of navigation, but I ended up being frustrated by my inability to add sites to collections just by pasting or typing in a url. I also wanted to be able to re-order collections once I'd gotten all the pieces pulled in.

So I started a collection on Keepstream but then shifted over to curated.by (because founder @Basti was doing a good job of listening and invited me to check that out):

Like Keepstream, curated.by seems to start w/ the presumption that folks who are actively engaged in the real-time Web (mostly Twitter, in the current landscape) will ultimately have moments when they want to take a snapshot or paint a picture of a moment or series of moments in the stream. Curated.by held on to me long enough to enable me to actually finish a bundle, mostly because they have a "toss a link in this box" feature right there on the site. (My bundle is of a bunch of the posts & articles that have sprung up around the idea of iPads and learning in recent days.) So, for me, curated.by gets a few more things right... they allow you to drop a url directly into your bundle, in addition to having bookmarklet & Chrome extension options. They enable in-bundle commenting, so that visitors can add value with their perspective. They've also explicitly let us know that they're working on enabling collaborative curation, which seems like a smart move.

Prezi seems at first glance like it doesn't belong on this list. It's a presentation tool, right? But so much of what I do as I prepare to present is curation, and Prezi's non-linear orientation gives it a huge advantage over all three of the other tools mentioned in this post if what you're wanting to share is a cluster of related ideas, rather than a straight-line list. Automatic embedding of Tweets isn't there for Prezi, but auto-embed of YouTube is... what I really want is auto-embed of everything, which is part of why Storify is getting a big thumbs up from me today. Here's how they explain what they're doing:

Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.

Storify is closer to my ideal curation tool than any of the others I've tried so far. It's in private alpha, but I asked nicely and received a DM'd login key within a day or so. The things that make Storify a winner for me are 1) drag-and-drop re-ordering of content (I can just toss everything on the table and THEN start thinking about what I want to lead off with) and ease of adding stuff into my stories, through bookmarklet, typed url, Google search, or auto-embed of Tweets, Flickr images, FB content, YouTube videos, and RSS feeds! (More on why that last one is so exciting to me later.) A input box in between each new piece of content enables the would-be curator to signal his/her intentions or provide additional context/commentary. I'm having enough fun creating a story there that it's not done yet... "sticky" = a good sign.

If you're wondering whether you should care about curation and how important it might be to your life going forward, you might want to check out the recent Jonathan Fields post Is Content Curation the New Black? (As is so often the case, the conversation in the comments is terrific as well... and now I know about PearlTrees & Scoop.it, which I guess I'll need to check out next!) Mashable just did a post on curation tools, too!

Hey, developers working on curation tools, here's some closing feedback from one avid amateur curator and archivist.

1) Give me choices. Don't assume you've figured out all the possible uses for your tool... instead assume that you haven't! Let me put it all on the table and figure it out.
2) Give me control. I can imagine curation situations in which I'd want to open up and ask for collaborators as I'm working, others where I'd want to enable comments once I've finished a first pass, and still others in which I'd want my work to stand alone. Could I do all that with your tool?
3) Let me mix it up. Nobody wants to look at a thousand collections, bundles, or stories that all look the same. We need to be able to make our curated materials visually distinctive, for both our sake and the sake of the folks we hope will engage with our stuff. If a collected/bundled/storified site doesn't come w/ a pre-fed image, I might want to snag one. How about font control? And I'm pretty sure everything doesn't have to be so straight-line... but more on that another day.

(Thank you for taking the time to read this;
would love to hear your thoughts on curation
and these or any other tools...)

Pocket Essay Editor

2011-01-07T15:10:00.005-05:00

I finally finished my long-promised pocket essay editor. (Clicking on the small "square within a square" icon above will allow you to see the slides in full-screen and control the rate at which you move through them.)

Hope folks like it!

(If you have some oft-shared writing tips
that you think might have been good additions,
I'd love to hear them.)

iPad Test Drive Impressions

2011-01-04T12:39:00.006-05:00

(Our boy actually fell asleep clutching his "loaner")

Our school recently purchased a classroom set of iPads, and I was offered the chance to take one home on loan over the break. This post reflects my impressions of that experience...

First impressions: Pros

+ There’s an app for everything!
+ Installing those apps is ridiculously easy
+ Dragon Speak has come a long way since the last time I played with it
+ Aweditorium seems like a great way to discover new music
+ the iPad’s touch-based interface is fun and intuitive (I don’t have an iPhone, so it’s all new to me)

First impresssions: Cons

- There’s an app for everything! (I’m feeling swamped by all the choices)
- The touch screen is constantly smudged
- It’s hard to wrest it out of our kid’s grasp
- Printing seems like it might be a hassle (of course this could be a good thing, if we're trying to be mindful about printing)
- I miss the haptic feedback of a real keyboard (although of course someone has already solved that problem for me, for "just" another $100 or so)

Further thoughts:

The iPad was introduced in April of this year; by July there were 10,000 iPad "apps" available for download. There are now over 325,000.

Similarly, there are thousands of online applications designed to help folks harness the affordances of the internet to move beyond consuming to creating and sharing. (See http://zoom.it/llz2 for a sampling.)

So how does a tool like an iPad fit into our hopes for our students? Beyond the possibility of it supplanting textbooks, how might we use it to support the development of curious, collaborative, intrinsically motivated and ethical lifelong learners? And if we could develop some apps of our own (we probably could), what would those look like?

Once you get over the not-inconsiderable cost hurdle and actually OWN an iPad, does the combination of the convenience of having an “always on” relationship to the ‘net, as well as the personalization available through all these applications (and the relatively low cost of most individual apps) make for lowered barriers to curiosity and connection?

We are still at the very beginning of figuring out what we could do... everyone has what the Buddhists call "beginner's mind" when it comes to the iPad, by definition. There are already some pretty interesting applications out there:

Christmas concert using iPads as instruments:
http://blogs.rockingham.k12.va.us/lpike/2010/12/iphoneipad-concert/

Using the iPad for formative assessment of student learning:
http://www.russgoerend.com/2010/12/in-early-september-i-wrote-post-about.html

Virtual frog dissection:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSGukqXfrkY

Still, some Mac-loving & generally tech-positive edu-folks are struggling w/ the decision of whether or not to get one:
http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/1972
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/06/buying-stuff-wont-fix-your-or-my.html

Then again, as one of my online connections’ father likes to say, “"If everybody says it is a good idea, you're too late."

In closing (phew!), here are a few resources I found that might be helpful to folks who go ahead and "take the plunge":

How to get started: http://www.rexblog.com/2010/12/25/22166

Another “getting started” post: http://justanotheripadblog.com/ipad-tips-tricks/getting-started-with-the-ipad/

Apple’s own “App Store” link right on the main screen of the iPad is a good jumping-off spot

App Shopper’s list of top 200 FREE apps for education:
http://appshopper.com/bestsellers/education/free/?device=ipad

The Teach With Your iPad Wiki:
http://teachwithyouripad.wikispaces.com/

iPad resources for administrators: http://www.mhric.org/ipad.html

(This post was cross-posted on an internal
school Moodle site designed for in-community sharing
around professional development experiences.
I'm grateful for the opportunity
to be a part of this wave of innovation in learning,
and looking forward to continuing to share
and listen to others' perspectives!)

The Alumni Notes Version

2010-12-16T06:30:00.004-05:00

(Alumni Notes)

I had a fantastic time participating in a combined Twitter chat last night, with folks from both the Parentella (mostly parents) and CampusChat (mostly counselors) communities chiming in.

One of the things I love about these chats is the free-ranging nature of the discussion, even though that can also sometimes be a real challenge. I am grateful to both Amanda (of Parentella) and Kelly (of Smart College Visit fame) for their work in making it happen, and am still trying to wrap my brain around all of the interesting perspectives that were shared last night.

Several "take aways" for me came a few hours later (have I mentioned that I'm a slow thinker?), as I continued to muse about the stream of comments that were related to what parents can do in support of their children achieving excellence.

Of course I thought of this Erich Fromm quote: "Few parents have the courage & independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success."

So one question is, what kind of excellence are we talking about?

It being mid-December, I also started thinking about students dealing with disappointment in the college search process (and in life), and that led me to thinking about the true-life stories we parents tell our children.

If you're a college graduate, do you remember the first time you read the alumni notes section of your school's alumni magazine? I do. I remember the sinking feeling I felt as I mentally compared my life's accomplishments with those of the people who had sent in descriptions of their triumphs. They were running their own companies, being named to advisories boards, welcoming beautiful children to the world, publishing novels... I was just trying to learn the admissions ropes at UPenn!

Of course then I quickly realized... it's only the people who are having amazing years who submit their class notes to the alumni magazine. Not too many people sends in a class note that says, "Spending every other weekend in NH with my ailing mother while struggling to make both ends meet since my partner lost her job in the economic downturn."

Do the true-life stories we share with our children represent the "alumni notes" version of our lives? Or do we let them see our struggles, too? Have your children seen you work and work at something that doesn't come easily to you? Have they seen you receive bad news and bounce back? Have they witnessed you clawing your way back up from a knock-down? Are we modeling persistence and resilience? I wonder.

(Cross-posted over on But Wait, There's More!
Kelly has already posted
takeaway tweets and a transcript,
so go check that out, too!)

Writing in Beta

2010-11-27T09:24:00.005-05:00

can one of my lovely followers read my college application essay! please! I have to write another one...but... http://tumblr.com/xycs2vccmless than a minute ago via TumblrAshten
ashten_mae

This is how some of us write, now.

1) Pull together a beta draft.
2) Post it publicly.
3) Call for reviews & feedback from folks in your community. (Will they be able to approximate the perspective of your ultimate end-reader?)
4) Re-write as needed.
5) Repeat until satisfied or deadline is reached. Hit submit.

I'm thinking about how this is different from how this used to go...
1) Ashten has followers.
2) She can communicate with her followers on an anytime/anywhere basis, as long as she's connected to the internet and they're willing to grant her their attention.
3) From the beginning, Ashten's thinking about her essays is deeply intertwined with her thinking about her eventual readers.
4) Her process is transparent, and an interested reader could presumably see the evolution of her thinking/writing.

What do you think?

(Looking to embed a Tweet
in a post of yours? I used Blackbird Pie.)

Mind the Gap

2010-11-22T18:13:00.006-05:00

Photo via spin'n'shoot on Flickr

Today has been declared a Day of National Blogging for Real Education Reform. When I think about education reform, I think about the gap between what we say we hope for our students, and the environments that so many US students find themselves in. (I saw the sobering documentary "Race to Nowhere" earlier this week.)

As a college counselor, I consider my primary role to be that of talent scout. My work with young people has led me to an ever-firmer belief that every student has gifts, but that not every school community is well-positioned to help them uncover, activate, and deepen those gifts.

I think every school could benefit from a community-wide conversation about what it is we hope our schools will be for the students they serve. If we believe that we want our students to be engaged, ethical, effective and reflective lifelong learners (hattip to @alfiekohn and @willrichardson), what does that mean for how we expect them to "do" school?

The students who I feel have been best served by my school are those who have been met and seen as the deeply individual human beings they are. There are few gifts that compare with the gift of being known. Learning communities that can adjust to meet individuals where they are (and celebrate them for that!) can be incredibly powerful.

I spend more time thinking and reading about these issues than most people I know, and yet I consider myself to be just barely informed. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from others, grateful to be working with young people at an exciting time in their lives, and grateful for the space to be a reflective learner myself.

I am looking forward to spending some of my upcoming free time learning from others' thoughts on this topic. I hope you might do some reading there as well.

What Kind of Shoes?

2010-11-10T06:48:00.003-05:00

Photo by Kaje, via Flickr

As a learner, what shoes do you wear?

I'm asking this question because I recently had a conversation with a colleague that caused me to ask it of myself.

The conversation began with my explaining that I would be taking advantage of an upcoming opportunity to attend another colleague's presentation on differentiated math education.

The colleague I was talking to looked confused. "Why would you be going to that?" he asked. "You're not a math teacher."

Taken off guard, I went for the simplest answer. "Because I'm the mother of an elementary school student," I said. (Who happens to be a little math head, although I didn't mention that.)

On further reflection, I realized that my answer had been incomplete. Because the truth was that I would have been interested in the presentation independently of the subject matter, because the presenter is a friend and I'm curious about what interests him. I missed an earlier opportunity to hear him give this particular presentation, and I was happy for the chance to support him by catching it the second time around.

Taking this line of thinking even further, there would have been a good chance that I would have given up some of my professional day off to attend a presentation by a colleague no matter WHO was giving it, or WHAT the subject matter was, because I've been thinking for several years about the pros and cons of different styles of presenting/ tummling/ communicating, and am in fact gearing up to pull together a proposal to present at NACAC in 2011, so a little more grist for that mill is always welcome.

All of which has led me to the realization that, as a learner, I think I don the mental equivalent of hiking boots. Strong, flexible, amphibious, all-terrain hiking boots. Well broken-in.

I read somewhere that most people's musical tastes are relatively fixed by the time they're 30 years old, and I thought to myself then, "Not me."

I was born curious, and I am determined to stay that way. My orientation towards new information is the orientation of a hiker faced with a new trail... let's get out there and explore!

Do I sometimes turn back? Sure. Have I stumbled? Absolutely. But good luck to you if you think you're going to be able to figure out in advance which trails will lure me. Much of the time, I don't even know.

How about you? Do you wear the mental equivalent of shoes designed for jumping? For quick turns? For long distance running? For cross-training? Do you follow a map, depend on GPS, feel your way, look for the creeks, whack your way through with a machete, follow in someone else's footsteps?

I wonder what my students would say. And I'm curious about you, too. As a learner, what kind of shoes do you wear? How do you navigate your way through the world?

(The presentation was really cool, by the way...
see Kevin Merges' Prezi here, if you're curious.
And a hat tip to the thought-provoking
and ever-engaging Heather Gold.)

Collaboration

2010-09-15T07:13:00.001-04:00

Photo via the Tape Artists on Flickr

What are the essential ingredients of successful collaboration?

I was talking to a friend/colleague in another school yesterday about the challenges of collaboration. "I'm worried that the Moodle site we've set up for faculty will just become a depository for documents," he said.

I had to say that I thought it was a valid concern. He was asking me for input and advice, and in that moment I confessed that I didn't really have any.

Those of us who have witnessed or participated in the unbelievable opportunities for collaboration that our new connectivity has enabled are sometimes at a loss when it comes to conveying our enthusiasm. We may sound like we're excited about the technology, when what really gets our hearts pumping is what we can DO with it.

Earlier this week, I watched in amazement as elementary school principal George Couros "thought out loud" about elementary classroom blogs in a Google Doc and then invited his personal learning network to chime in. You could literally watch the page fill up with great ideas; I wished I'd set up a screen capture for future show-and-tell. George is also enabling collaboration at the macro level, setting up his teachers with blogs and aggregating the blogs' RSS feeds into one big happy bundle.

So here's what I want to share with my friend after further reflection (have I mentioned that I'm a slow thinker?):

You're right. Creating a Moodle site (or a hashtag, or a wiki, or a Google Doc, or...) probably won't cause collaboration to spontaneously flourish. Collaboration is like diversity... one of those goals that is worth striving for, but that requires more hard work than many people realize or are willing to acknowledge.

I think that establishing technological supports can be a critical component of lowering the barriers to collaboration. But the bigger barriers are the human ones. Think about the times in your life when you were part of a successful collaboration. What are the conditions that allowed that to flourish? Here's what I came up with.

A shared goal (you need something to collborate ON!)
A willingness to share (information hoarders are not comfortable collaborators)
A conviction that both you and others have something worth contributing
A sense of trust amongst the participants
An environment in which collaboration is valued and appreciated

What am I missing?

(Shout outs to @gcouros &
@joshcook for their inspiration.)

Inspired by Listening

2010-08-19T21:31:00.002-04:00

I was fortunate enough to land in Elizabeth Peterson's (aka @eliza_peterson and @inspired_clsrm) workshop on active listening at ntcamp (New Teacher Camp unconference) earlier this year, and then I hit the jackpot: I got a "freebie" copy of her resource book for K-8 classroom teachers (and I would argue, involved parents), Inspired By Listening.

After the conference Elizabeth asked me if I might take a moment to let folks know how I liked the book, and after wrestling briefly with the challenge of containing my enthusiasm within the bounds of 140 characters, I decided to go old school and write an actual post.

So, first off, I am keeping this book. I am not a music teacher, or even primarily a classroom teacher, but as the singing parent of a piano-learning musical boy, I decided pretty quickly that this book was going to stay on my shelves rather than gracing someone else's. I have reached the point in life where I'm not actively looking to add to my collection of hard copy books much (small house!), but I make exceptions for great reference resources and poetry. This book stays.

Here's why.

The book represents the collected wisdom of a skilled practitioner. Elizabeth has DONE these activities, with all kinds of kids in all sorts of settings, and it shows.

The book is grounded in an assumption that we all have so much to learn from listening, and specifically from active listening, listening in which we engage both our emotions and our intellect. I couldn't agree more.

The book is a great combination of theory and practice. The lesson plans and worksheets would help any K-8 teacher see ways to integrate active listening and music into their days, and Elizabeth's explanations are great for those of us who trend towards the theory-wonk end of the spectrum.

To me, this book represents a welcoming and open invitation for teachers to make a passion-based connection with their students. Which is something that another teacher I admire has been thinking and writing about lately as he prepares his proposal to lead a conversation at EduCon 2.3.

I love it when the strands of my PLN start to weave together!

So there you have it. If you teach, and love music, and want to share and kindle some of that passion with your students, you should treat yourself to a copy of Inspired By Listening.

Your own copy. :-)

(Thanks to @andycinek, @rkiker, @geraldaungst,
and all the ntcamp attendees,
@Eliza_Peterson and the #temt crew,
and @mcarls and the EduCon gang.
Such inspiring folks out there!)

Paydirt

2010-08-04T06:51:00.006-04:00

(Candid academic advising shot from
Stonehill College's First Year Experience blog.)

What do you do when someone asks for your opinion of a college? Recently I connected with a mother who was curious about Stonehill College. What did I know? Here's the email I fired off:

Smallish, Catholic-affiliated, known for personal attention & accessible faculty. They have been making great strides towards offering more & better housing (the "knock" on Stonehill at one point was that they didn't have enough).

Construction photos from new dorm: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27102&id=100000192345675

Catholic roots translate mostly into a social justice /service orientation, see commencement speech:
http://www.youtube.com/whystonehill#p/a/f/1/bPt74PXsj20

Some of the more popular majors include business, psychology, and the social sciences. They're also pretty serious about athletics (DII):
http://stonehillcounselors.blogspot.com/2010/06/stonehill-wins-presidents-cup.html

See also http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=stonehill&s=all&id=167996 for some good statistical information.

Definitely worth checking out...

Stonehill's coherent social media presence helped a lot. Their Twitter stream led me to their First Year Experience blog, which in turn led me to a stream of candid orientation photos and reminded me to check YouTube & Facebook. Their website is serviceable, if a little text-heavy in spots, (and hey, how about some social media callouts on the front page?), but the main thing that mattered to me was that I could pull together a student-specific, multi-media Stonehill snapshot pretty easily. Which means I could help move this mom from caring about my opinion to working on her own.

Paydirt.

(Thanks to MS for asking the question!)

Top 10 Reasons I'll Be at NTCAMP

2010-07-23T21:31:00.008-04:00

10) I used to live at 4732 Cedar Ave. Boys Latin is at 5501 Cedar Ave. 'Nuff said.
9) We will be starting off the ntcamp day with a panel discussion that features the creators and brainpower behind #edchat. (My heroes.)
8) I'm pretty sure there's going to be a great session on active listening.
7) In my experience, unconferences are characterized by enthusiastic, welcoming energy. I love that.
6) Summer is a great time for those of us who work in schools to try out & take in some new ideas.
5) Sounds like there's going to be an amazing session on assessment.
4) It's fun to be in on the ground level. (This is the first iteration of ntcamp.)
3) Apparently there's going to be a fabulous (I hope!) PLN-boosting session called "Talent Swap."
2) I'm already looking forward to telling people that on the hottest day of the year, I drove SOUTH.
1) I've planned a long-overdue dinner with ProfessorKim afterwards!

(I can't believe the fact that it's all FREE didn't make the top 10!
Still, that's pretty great.
I'm so looking forward to seeing and meeting folks there
and/or connecting with them about it going forward.)

New Tool in Town

2010-06-25T14:36:00.005-04:00

Well, it's not perfect, but Supermatch does get some critical things right, in my opinion. Here's the review I promised of this new tool from Hobson's.

Right off the top, Supermatch puts individual searchers in the driver's seat with a left-hand sidebar of 19 different possible variable clusters that one might consider to be important to a successful college search. A few of the ones towards the end trend towards useless because they're not dependably quantifiable. "Liberal Leaning," "Party Scene" and "Great College Town" all seem like the sort of thing I'd want to assess on my own... too subjective to be included in this kind of search. Similarly, while I'm all in favor of students assessing the extent to which a campus feels LGBTQ-friendly, the Supermatch search doesn't seem to be tapping in to the good work that is already being done in this field, relying instead on "Data collected from the community of users on CollegeConfidential.com and confirmed by college admissions experts." Not inspiring of confidence, at least not to me. I would rather have had some more ability to sift through student demographics, something to help me look for socio-economic and/or regional diversity, maybe.

But the bulk of the search operators work largely as intended, and the addition of the ability to weight factors as being "must have", "very important" or "kinda important," moves us in the direction of a truly personalized result. "Location" smartly lets the searcher pick a region, individual states, or some combination thereof, and the "Campus Setting" option set is one of the more robust I've seen, breaking the known universe down into six categories instead of the more typical three or four.

The inclusion of a graduation rate category is a great idea, but the execution is flawed, so far... instead of being able to use a slider bar or two to identify the range of graduation rates within which you'd be willing to work, you're given a toggled choice (either you care about going somewhere where most students graduate or you don't). Similarly, the "Gender Mix" button doesn't really allow you to investigate the gender mix at a school (for that, you'd need another slider bar that let you indicate the range you'd be willing to work within, e.g. my school must have at least 60% women)... it just lets you search for either co-ed or single-sex institutions. I am hoping down the line that more search organizers allow searchers to specify a range of acceptable answers, rather than offering up pre-defined boxes. CampusCompare has the right idea here with its flexible search options for categories like "number of students" and "tuition range." And in the next version can we please specify Division I, II, and/or III when using a sports search? (The CollegeBoard's MatchMaker gets this one right.) Students who are hoping to play at the DIII level are not going to want to torture themselves with not-actually-an-option DI schools.

The most important missing search functions from this and many other college search tools are the ones related to financial aid. Average amount of indebtedness, percentage of students receiving aid, degree to which 100% of demonstrated need is met, and other quantifiable snapshots of what kind of financial support students are receiving would be a game-changing addition to most existing search tools. Which is why I keep coming back to the NCES College Navigator. While somewhat graphically challenged in comparison to some of the shinier private sector options, it still has some of the most robust data on graduation rates and financial aid. As a friend of mine once said, "How long, and how much?"

Other factors to like about Supermatch include the ability to re-weight your criteria on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface, and the "view map" option which is great for those of us whose primary school geography lessons were lacking. In an ideal world, search results would be more portable, too... printable and/or downloadable. I hope the folks at Hobson's keep tinkering, and I'd love to know what you think. If you have a second to give Supermatch a whirl, go for it, then tell them your ideas for Supermatch 2.0...

Choices

2010-06-18T10:00:00.006-04:00

(Image via Orin Robert John on Flickr)

Last fall, I surprised myself - and an audience of hundreds! - by telling US News & World Report's Bob Morse that "we want to roll our own," when it comes to college rankings.

A few weeks ago Bob shared information about how the 2011 rankings will change.

I'm not sure he heard me back in September.

Tinkering with the methodology behind the rankings will never address the fundamental flaw at their core: college rankings represent an outsourcing of judgment.

Given the range and complexity of the variables on the college side, and adding in the incredible range of student diversity, it seems clear that it would be difficult for even a small group of well-informed students or parents to agree on a common standard for what makes one college "better" than another.

Sure, there are variables that many people would agree are important. But individual decisions about which of those variables are critical, and which are the most important, need to be just that... individual decisions.

I think information in the public interest around the college search process should be about helping to raise better questions, rather than trying to provide answers that have been judged useful by someone other than the student.

Which is why I'm thrilled to hear that the Education Conservancy's plan to work with the ConsumersUnion (better known as the people behind Consumer Reports) seems to be moving forward.

Now if we could just get the folks over at the National Survey of Student Engagement to put their data into searchable, sortable database format...

Whose List Is It, Anyway?

2010-06-10T16:48:00.003-04:00

I had a wonderful time presenting at the annual New Jersey Association for College Admission Counseling earlier this week.

I was assigned the very first timeslot, 9am on a Monday morning, and so wasn't sure what to expect in terms of attendance and energy, but the folks who showed up filled the room and brought their "A" game with terrific questions and suggestions.

I ran out of both business cards and handouts, and achieved my goal of leaving plenty of time for conversation. Fun city!

Here's my slidedeck:

Whose List Is It, Anyway?

View more presentations from Shelley Krause.

If you have questions or would like to request a .pdf version of the Energy Audit or Recommended Resource list, just say the word! And if you were there in the room with me on Monday, thank you again.

Show & Tell: Alive & Well

2010-05-25T06:19:00.005-04:00

Here's Yoon Soo Lim (aka @DoremiGirl on Twitter) getting ready to rock the room at EdCamp Philly this past weekend.

I loved so much about this conversation.

I loved that Yoon talked about being scared. She remembered what it was like to contemplate moving towards a more student-centered pedagogy, and didn't gloss over the energy it took to get past that fear.

I loved that shared her discoveries with an enthusiasm that couldn't help but be contagious. She talked about some cool tools (e.g. JamStudio, ccmixter, xtranormal), but they weren't the stars.

The stars were her students, and the creativity she had helped unleash in them. In their fifth grade holiday song-writing. (And yes, she sang us a few bars.) And still more students in their seventh grade teaching guitar basics movies.

I loved that the spirit was one of enthusiastic show-and-tell, and although I've said this before, I'm saying it again today... who decided that show-and-tell should be restricted to the kindergarten set, and why do we let that terrible decision stand?

@DoremiGirl says: When fun is in the classroom, creativity is in the classroom. Every kid brought their own perspective, and it was great!less than a minute ago via webShelley Krause
butwait

What if our learning environments tapped into this spirit all the time? Check out EdCamp Philly organizer Kristen Swanson's great post expanding on this idea. And if you hear of someone in your area talking about organizing an #edcamp, stand up and wave your hand around.

(I wonder if @DoremiGirl & @TeachPaperless
managed to connect at EduCon2.2?
THAT would have been a fun conversation...)

If We Build It

2010-05-24T06:33:00.005-04:00

Top: Christine Miles, Kim Sivick, Dan Callahan
Middle: Mike Ritzius, Hadley Ferguson, Ann Leaness, Kristen Swanson
Bottom: Nicolae Borota, Mary Beth Hertz, Kevin Jarrett, Robert Rowe

As of Saturday, these folks are my new heroes. They are the people who took Saturday's EdCamp Philly from "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." to "Let's do it!"

This group picture, organizer & presenter Dan Callahan reports, was taken early in the morning, just before the event got started. My guess had been that it was an end-of-event photo, because they certainly would have had a lot to smile about at that point.

I think it's telling that they were this happy just IMAGINING the day that was about to unfold.

EdCamp Philly was, by all accounts, a smash success. Conceived & designed as an unconference, it brought together 200+ edu-enthusiasts who shared and learned together on their own terms in the space and with the support that the organizing team had put in place.

The schedule (as it was created on the spot!) is here: http://bit.ly/edcampphlsched

The organizers' "how to" wiki is here (there's already talk of EdCamps springing up in NYC & FL): http://edcamp.wikispaces.com/

If you want to toss a little rocket-fuel into your Twitter tank, you would do well to starting with these organizers (listed beneath the photo above) and presenters, whose twitter handles are listed in this post.

I'll try to post later today on some of my gleanings from individual sessions, but in the meantime, here's what my brand-new-to-unconferences-and-happily-tagging-along friend KD had to say about the day:

"The energy was just so positive and inviting. There was no sense of anyone being better than anyone else... everyone was just there to learn and support."

Here was someone else's "take" as reported on Twitter:

Colleague just said in discussing #edcamp with her "so it was an unstructured, unconference that was unbelievable"...#wellsaidless than a minute ago via EchofonBrian Carter
briwcarter

Sounds pretty great, right? So thank you again, EdCamp Philly organizers.

Recommended Resources

2010-04-28T06:49:00.003-04:00

Cigus Vanni and I had a great time presenting yesterday at Villanova (what a beautiful school!), and we promised the folks in attendance at our session that we'd make our "Recommended Resources" list available to them online, since the idea handing out a printed copy of internet resources seemed somewhat non-sensical. :-)

So, without further ado, here are our Recommended Resources.

I am going to continue to work on making this blog a place where folks can turn for information about the ever expanding universe of online tools and resources relevant to the college search, so let me know in the comments if there are particular needs or questions that you'd like to see addressed.

Raising the Standard

2010-04-24T07:23:00.003-04:00

(Earlier this week, Patrick O'Connor offered what I thought was a compelling piece as well as an interesting offer to the readers of the NACAC listserv. I'm reproducing it here in its entirety to help get the word out.)

Colleagues, I write in the spirit of Patriots Day on a topic near and dear to my heart-the training of school counselors in the fine art of the college selection process. As a quick redux, of the 600 counselor training programs in the US, less than 40 offer a class solely dedicated to teaching counselors how to help families with college decisions-and of these 40, only 1 requires the course. For Michigan counselors, this means our counselors have an average 643 students waiting for them on their first day of work, asking for something they understandably cannot deliver-knowledge-based advice on how to go about picking their next school.

With apologies to my mates across the pond, it's clear the Redcoat of lack of training isn't coming - rather, it's been here for quite a while and taken up residence in our profession. The question is, when will we get on our horse and ride to improve our profession and help the students we so revere?

The answer is, today.

Hiring policies are made by local school boards, and school boards are elected by the citizens of the district they serve - and each one of you lives in a school district. It's easy enough to contact your school board president, share this information with them, tell them that, in your professional opinion, this puts both counselors and students at a disadvantage, and urge them to make this addendum to their hiring policy:

"The district agrees that no individual may be hired as a school counselor or for the purpose of college advising who cannot produce evidence of having completed a classroom-based course or course of study focusing exclusively on counseling in the college selection process that is at least 45 clock hours long."

This opportunity doesn't exist just for public school counselors - in fact, one could argue that if someone from a college admissions office, community-based organization, or private school made this plea, it would, sadly, be given more weight than the voice of the district's own employees. That's not right, but it's the way things sometimes are.

Understanding this kind of step takes support and encouragement, I'm willing to offer both in a tangible way. If you need help talking to your school district, e-mail me; heck, it's April, and my students have colleges to go to, so I have a little time...

...but wait, there's more. If yours is the first US district to report success in passing such a policy, I'll send enough copies of College is Yours for every sophomore in the high school of your choice. And if your district gets tricky and says "OK, but if we pass this policy, that means you'll have to take the course,", I'd be happy to have you take the college counseling class I teach for free - and if you want to go somewhere else, I'll reimburse you the cost of my class to help pay your way.

If we hire 200 new counselors nationwide each year, each with a caseload of 500 students, and it takes a counselor 10 years to be relatively good at college advising, that means 250,000 students graduate with college advice that isn't great.

I really wish that all we had to do was our jobs, but due to some astonishingly entrenched policies by graduate schools, we literally can't just do our jobs, so we have to fix this. Now.

Riders up, and tally ho.

(Patrick O'Connor is
the Director of College Counseling
at the Roeper School
in Birmingham, MI.
This letter is reproduced with his explicit permission.
If you're providing college counseling
in a US high school, what kind of training (if any)
did you have that supports you in that work?)

Wiki Progress Update

2010-04-23T06:31:00.004-04:00

I'm pleased to report several satisfying developments in the land of the College Lists wiki. In every case, the good news results from someone else's hard work, which to me is one of the critical elements of a successful wiki... in an ideal world, wikis are a classic example of "many hands make light work."

So, here's the good news:

Scott Doughty, of the excellent Pennington School, has effectively "adopted" the wiki page that tracks which colleges and universities "super score" the ACT (meaning they take the highest result on each individual section and combine them). You can see his work here.
Sherman Wilcox at the University of New Mexico has been independently maintaining a list of colleges that accept ASL as fulfilling their language requirement. So the wiki page on that topic now links to his page.
And, while this isn't news, it bears repeating... Barry Beach continues to do terrific work keeping our Art, but not an art school and Colleges of Art pages. And Lee Waldrep (aka Dr. Architecture) continues to do great work on several architecture-related pages on the site, here and here.)

So that's the news from the wiki; more next week after my PACAC presentation with the amazing Cigus Vanni, I'm sure!

Pop Quiz!

2010-03-05T00:05:00.005-05:00

Imaginary Pre-Assessment

How do the statements below resonate with you?
1 strongly disagree
2 disagree
3 neutral or no strong feeling about this
4 agree
5 strongly agree

(Note: I could create a form that feeds into a spreadsheet and make a real quiz of this, but for the moment I'm more interested in the questions than anyone's answers... feel free to answer in your mind as you go, though... or chime in down in the comments!)

__ I would be happy to spend some time working to learn about opportunities for integrating more technology into my teaching, but where will I find the time? What should I give up?

__ Learning needs to be relevant in order to be lasting.

__ My students are so far ahead of where I am, technologically speaking, that I don't think I could ever get "out in front" and truly teach them.

__ Absolutely students need to learn about how to engage and create with digital media. Where does that show up in our curriculum map?

__ I think that in order to be a great teacher, I need to be a great learner. Digital and social media are not really a part of my life as a learner.

__ I think that in order to be a great teacher, I need to be a great learner. Digital and social media have transformed my life as a learner.

__ I think that in order to be a great teacher, I need to be a great communicator. The skills I've developed as a teacher have been honed over years and years of practice. I'm not sure how helpful it would be to have me floundering at the front of the class.

__ We need to get our heads out of the sand. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.

__ Young people's involvement in the digital world has increased exponentially in recent years. Someone needs to help them understand the dangers inherent in these new contexts.

__ Young people's involvement in the digital world has increased exponentially in recent years. Someone needs to help them understand how their engagement could move from a primarily social orientation to a learning orientation.

__ We are living in an age in which students can find teachers anywhere, anytime. The days of "silo-ed" content are over.

__ We are dealing with a crisis of attention. Multi-tasking doesn't work. If we don't get a handle on this, our students will lack the skills necessary to undertake any serious sustained work.

__ The new technological fads come and go so quickly that it's pretty much impossible to figure out which ones would be worth teaching.

__ Increasingly, both students and their teachers see the challenges facing the world as multidisciplinary, and the need for collaboration great. Over the past few years, the emergence of a raft of new (and often free) tools has made collaboration easier than at any other point in history.

__ Education should not be about entertainment value.

__ We need to meet students where they are and go from there. Where they are is online.

What questions would you add?

(Pencil image via Flickr.
Some of the questions are lifted directly from the 2010 Horizon Report.

Hattip to @Agins213 and @jswiatek, who got me thinking.)

Are They Ready For Their Closeups?

2010-03-02T14:54:00.017-05:00

Image via Tom Rydquist on Flickr.

There's been a lot of talk within the college counseling community recently about student video submissions as a part of the college application process. First came the NYT article about Tufts, followed by some "ahem"ing by folks familiar with similar efforts at George Mason, Vassar, and St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Many of the initial responses from counselors have been cautionary in tone. Some counselors are concerned about the inherently public nature of such submissions (at least as they've so far been configured). Others wonder about a possible opportunity gap... won't videos from students with access to more professional equipment and software give those students an unfair advantage? (For a different perspective, those folks might want to listen to S. Craig Watkins' recent keynote at the Diversifying Participation conference at UCSD, entitled "Living on the Digital Margins: How Black and Latino Youth are Remaking the Participation Gap.")

Here's what I think.

Part of why we worry so much about the possible downside of applicants posting away on YouTube is that we know deep down that we're not teaching them the skills they'd need to be more savvy users of the available channels of communication with admissions offices. How many students know how to de-couple their "approved for admissions consideration" content from their "this is is messing around last Friday" content? More importantly, how many of the students who had that knowledge would think to deploy it at the critical moment? How many high school students have access to mentors or coursework that address the challenges and opportunities of digital storytelling?

Some of the adult concern about students' work in these digital environments also stems from the cultural divide that exists between those of us who are learning what it's like to live our lives in digitally permeable ways, and those of use who have never known anything else. If you're an American high school junior right now, you don't really remember a time before the internet. Your cellphone is your lifeline; you spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on your cell phones than you spend talking on it.

No school that I know of is requiring video submissions for its general undergraduate admissions review. (There are of course film programs that have been requiring video submissions for some time.) And video as a part of the admissions process is not new in and of itself; we frequently received VHS tapes from candidates back when I was reading applications in the '90's. What's different now is that schools are inviting these submissions, and that some of them are living online, rather than in a padded envelope in a pile in the admissions office's mailroom.

When I worked in admissions, I used to say that every question a college asked in its application served a dual purpose. It was what it seemed to be, a request for information. But it was also a message, communicating to the student some element of the institution's self-concept.

So what message are colleges that invite video submissions sending? Ben Jones (Oberlin College Vice President for Communications and former Director of Communications for MIT Admissions) discussed the evolution of social media in a recent keynote address at the 2010 EdSocialMedia conference. In his address, he references the idea that you need to meet people where they are, sharing an image of how, when you're throwing a party, no matter how hard you try to get people to hang out in the living room, the party always gravitates to the kitchen, "where the guacamole is." I have a friend whose intuitive understanding of this law of human attraction has led him to tear down the wall between his kitchen and dining room in every house he's lived in as an adult, usually before he moved in.

Colleges inviting video submissions might be seen to be saying, "We value your ability to create meaningful, shareable digital content." Students might also be hearing, "We understand that you want to be seen as more than just a test score. And we also know that online is where you live."

So do I think colleges should keep thinking about the best ways to find and connect with the kinds of students they're looking for? Absolutely. And do I think that video should be part of the mix? Sure thing. After all, some of those students might grow up to be rock stars...

(Hat tip to @ben_jones, @scraigwatkins, @henryjenkins,
my partner-in-counseling Sherry Riggi,
and the folks at colleges and universities who are
tearing down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room.)

After EduCon2.2

2010-02-08T06:31:00.002-05:00

SLA's Core Values
Originally uploaded by rorowe8

I first started imagining attending EduCon over a year ago.

Sitting on my couch at home with a terrible cold, I watched the EduCon2.1 tweetstream scroll by and made a promise to myself to try to make the trip to Philly the following year.

I've tried at least once before to answer the question of why this conference stood out for me as the "must attend" event of 2009.

I'm better prepared to answer the question now.

From the beginning, EduCon stood out. The call for session proposals explicitly sets out a different set of criteria than most speakers have dealt with before - you have to be ready to describe how you will NOT be standing at the front of the room lecturing - so right from the get-go, the framing of the work ahead is less hierarchical, more collaborative.

Once you get there, EduCon stands out because of the "all hands on deck" feeling that infuses it. From the parents smilingly staffing the registration table to the labcoat-wearing students of Science Leadership Academy (SLA), the feeling of pride in a shared enterprise is powerful.

SLA stands out because of the intentionality and shared vision of the students and teachers. I spoke with several SLA students over the course of the weekend - Patrick, Hannah, Hector, and one other great guy in the library whose name I'm sorry to have forgotten! The perspectives they shared with me were simultaneously deeply individual and plugged in to a collective understanding, something akin to what we Quakers might call, "the sense of the Meeting."

Because SLA is a charter school, students must apply to attend. The application process includes a review of the applicant's academic records and an interview. Every student I spoke with talked about the interview, to which they were asked to bring a piece of work they were proud of, and in which a current SLA student asks most of the questions. Every student at SLA has an answer to the question, "Why are you here?" Several of the students also mentioned with gratitude the "be who you are" ethos of the learning community at SLA. It was a pleasure to connect with them.

I was also successful in meeting SLA's college counselor, Karina Hirschfield, who at first I thought I might not be able to connect with because every time I swung by her office she was -- surprise surprise -- counseling students! Eventually the stars aligned and we were able to have a terrific conversation about the joys and challenges of helping students find their next academic home. I met SO many people who I'd previously only "met" online, including one who, when I made the distinction ("I don't think we've every actually met in person!"), said, "I'm not sure I would have even thought of that."

Folks like me with Twitter handles that don't conform to their physical world name quickly discovered that adding our Twitter names to our name badges helped speed up the connections.As a former Philadelphian, I was able to crash with friends both nights rather than stay in hotels, which made me feel like I was living out the old Girl Scout song, "Make new friends, but keep the old..." :-)

The official conference conversations (and most really were conversations, rather than simply presentations) at EduCon2.2 were wide-ranging and full of enthusiastic imaginings. David Jakes engaged a room full of educators on the question of what makes a space conducive to learning. Zoe Branigan-Pipe & Ben Hazzard had us all thinking about how to let big ideas infuse our lesson planning. Lisa Thumann & Liz Smith expertly mixed music and motion into a session in which we shared our thoughts on filtering and "Getting to the Good Stuff." Christian Long's students from "The Alice Project" wowed everyone who heard them with their lucid and eye-opening first-person reporting on a high school English class "turned upside down." Shelly Blake-Plock's "ears open" session on the relationship between free improvisational music and networked learning was fun and fascinating. There were 76 conversation sessions in total, and they were all live-streamed via Elluminate. (Thank you, Steve Hargadon!)

This meant that the students of SLA took a leadership role in making sure that as much of the learning that happened at EduCon2.2 was archived as possible. Every session had a student moderator who was troubleshooting audio and video so that the conversation leaders could focus on their conversations. This extraordinary effort at archiving the shared work of the attendees went a long way to alleviating the frustration that inevitably bubbled up as I realized that every session block offered multiple sessions that were super-enticing to me. PLUS, it meant that my folks could check out my session from the comfort of their snowbird digs in Florida! :-)

Ah, yes, my session. I never know what to say when people ask me how my session went, because I'm always so intensely "in the moment" that it all kind of seems like a dream afterwards. But I can say this... I had a "dream team" of people in the room with me. A current counselor, would-be counselors and administrators, a current high school student (hi, Mike!), a mom of a college student, high school teachers, and a University vice-provost were all gracious with a Prezi newbie and generous with their time and thoughts.

And I cleverly snuck a few pictures while they were busy working away:

Created with flickr slideshow.
So.

For me, EduCon2.2 helped bring home the power of purposeful engagement, both because of the culture of engagement at SLA, and because of the deep level of engagement asked of and given by the participants.

EduCon2.2 gave me a chance to think out loud about some great questions about learning and schools alongside other people who brought their own commitment to learning to every interaction.

I left with a new set of questions and a desire to enact change in the way we think about our work as educators.

And I confirmed something about myself: lifelong learners are most definitely "my tribe!"

(Warm thanks to all the great folks
I met and shared time with at EduCon2.2 --
hope I'll see you again next year!)

Wishlist

2010-02-02T14:50:00.003-05:00

I'll be sharing post-EduCon2.2 thoughts as soon as I can get them together, I hope! (Lots to process.) Meanwhile, a friend of mine in a college admissions office recently asked me for advice about the "For Counselors" section of his school's admissions office web site. In truth, I don't spend much time on these sites, but it seems that I have managed to pull together some opinions about what should be there anyway. So here's my wishlist:

1) at or near real-time access to information about the status of individual applications, from receipt of materials to release of decision
2) one-stop downloadable shopping for any and all relevant forms (application forms, major codes, arts supplement cover sheet, athletic inquiry form, scholarship supplemental essay form, etc.)
3) reports from selection committee... a brief overview of the decision-making process at your school, including the top 10 things you with every counselor would know (two-page letters are killing us, a picture of the kid helps us make the connection, whatever), a one-page summary of the most recent incoming class, info about your transfer process if you have one
4) a complete and up-to-date listing of your office staff and their responsibilities, both regional and otherwise (reads apps from MT, CO, CA, and IA; also serves as the liaison to the Physics department). Bonus points if you include head shots, bios, emails, and phone numbers.
5) information about any special opportunities available to counselors (our formal counselor overnight program is slated for such-and-such a date, counselors traveling over the summer may request information about staying in the dorms overnight here, apply for a chance to be a "fly on the wall" in committee here, etc.)
6) information about any special opportunities available to students (our special engineering overnight program for underrepresented minority students is happening on such-and-such a date...)
7) The big picture... tell us that your trustees have charged a committee with strengthening first-to-second year retention and that another committee is finalizing a proposal for that long-awaited nanoscience major. Let us know what special summer opportunities are available to students on your campus.
8) an up-to-date list of the subscribable content streams your institution is currently generating (RSS feeds, Tweetstreams, Google calendars, Flickr accounts, you name it).
9) Bonus points: a special page just for homeschooling students/families.
10) What am I missing?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Creating A Space

2010-02-02T06:32:00.007-05:00

My work with young people locates me in a place full of longing and possibility. I work as a college counselor, and my students often find that the idea of leaving one community for another is fraught with emotion. Some students yearn for a kind of belonging they have yet to experience, while others crave the relief of relative anonymity. But none of them wants to feel alone, I think.

I watch and listen as my students try to imagine themselves into their unknown futures. Sometimes, I edit their questions in my mind. They ask, "What college can I get into?" and I hear, "Do I want to go to college?" The classic "What do I want to be when I grow up?" becomes, "Who do I want to be?" or even, "Do I have to grow up?" But this kind of imaginary cut and paste results only in my altered version of their story, when what they need is the space to create more fully realized version of theirs.

* * *

I am heading off to EduCon2.2 this weekend after having missed last year's gathering due to illness. Several members of my school community attended a Building Learning Communities conference and came back raving about it, but I'm not sure I've managed to lure any of them to EduCon2.2.

"Why do you want to go?" someone in my school community asked me with an air of puzzlement. I think they were trying to figure out where I fit into this picture. I am not a classroom teacher. I am not a school leader. My job title does not have the word "technology" in it. Part of my excitement about EduCon stems from a desire to define myself in terms of what I am rather than what I am not.

I say to my students, "You be you." I ask them, "When are the times you've felt most fully alive?" I feel as though in reaching out in search of community, I am listening to my own counsel. I am discovering that I am a member of a school community who also wants to be be an active member of multiple learning communities. Even if I haven't met a single one of the hundreds of EduCon2.2 attendees prior to this weekend, the lure of that community of learners has been a powerful one for me. Chris Lehmann and the SLA community have worked so hard, not only to share their learning, but to then create a space in which others can share theirs.

* * *

So I'm heading down to Philadelphia on Friday, unsure of what to expect and excited by the prospect of happily exploring a space so full of energy and possibility. In actively following the threads of my interest, I am trying to model what reaching out to connect with one's tribe looks like. And this spring, when a junior I'm working with lets on that he's both excited and nervous about the prospect of college, I'm going to smile and say, "Can you say a little more about that?"

Trying to open up a space.

(Cross-posted over at
Teach Paperless;
thanks to Shelly Blake-Plock
for the work he does to create a space.)

Talent Scouting

2010-01-13T23:48:00.002-05:00

As a college counselor, I'm interested in the work of talent scouts. (I am interested in any activity that results in an individual's gifts, passions, and talents being discovered and supported.) I stumbled across a Robert Scoble year-end interview of venture capitalist Rich Wong, and immediately realized that venture capitalists belong to the talent scout tribe. (So does Scoble, for that matter!)

Here is Rich talking about his internal heuristics around assessing a pitch. This reminded me a little bit of an Einstein quote Dan Meyer shared in a presentation, also in December: "The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill."

If I were still in the business of reviewing college applications, a perspective like Rich's might make me wonder how we could assess prospective students' ability to "frame up" a problem. Because wouldn't THOSE be interesting people to invite to join a learning community?

Here Rich shares some of his thoughts on assessing an entrepreneur's social reputation. Again, thinking about the work of college search and fit, this makes me think about how a college could "read" a student's associations to get a better feel for the kind of campus contributor they might be. College admissions offices are probably most accustomed to thinking about this question within the realm of extracurricular involvements. Some of the current thinking runs along causal lines: "HS debate champ = college debater." What about the kind of reputation scoring Rich talks about here? Are there young people who have pushed their network skills in the direction of their learning, and if so, what do they look like? Would an admissions officer know how to find or recognize them?

Turning that assessment vector around, how might a student's perspective on a college community change as that student seeks out different windows on that community's activities? As we move towards increased transparency of both social connections and of learning, how is what we do changed? (What kind of Hawthorne effects are going on?)

Lots of questions, no definitive answers... the usual!

Genius in the Room

2009-12-29T10:55:00.008-05:00

I'm thinking about the conversation I'll be leading at EduCon2.2 in Philly later this month. Earlier this year, I helped to moderate a panel presentation at the National NACAC conference, and although I felt that it went well, I have since found that my thinking about presentations is changing.

One thing that struck me about the largely positive feedback we received on our NACAC session was how unconnected I felt to the individuals giving the feedback. We were in a room with over 200 attendees (in fact, some would-be attendees were turned away!). We were only able to carve out a few minutes for Q&A, because, no matter how hard you try, limiting multiple speakers to a set time limit is a doomed task. (After all, speakers are speakers in part because they like to talk!) So although there was some productive exchange, we spent the bulk of our time in a modified "sage on the stage" set up.

But the best learning situations I've ever been in have always had a more conversational feel. And 2008 and 2009 for me have been the years of learning that the genius is in the room. So, faced with a conference at which I'm likely to not know the people in my room, what can I do to go beyond "ice breaking" and move towards "thought revving"? EduCon's stated preference for genuinely interactive and conversational sessions is part of what made me so excited about trying to lead a conversation there.

I'm hoping that having the folks in my room start off with a little focused sharing about what they already know and what they're curious about will serve as a kind of rocket fuel to our conversation. I spent the better part of a half hour this morning playing around with the fantastic diagram creation tools on creately.com; I am looking forward to printing off multiple copies of a handout based on the diagram above. And I can't wait to meet the people I'm going to be learning with later this month!

(Hattip to my friend Circe,
who encouraged me to write about
my desire to make more space
for conversations...)

Yeast

2009-12-09T06:34:00.001-05:00

(Image via Rob Jones on Flickr)

How do you get started, when you're writing a letter of recommendation? Recently, a colleague put out a call for assistance as he prepared to talk with teachers about writing effective letters of support. Did anyone have any lists of helpful adjectives, he wanted to know?

Initially, this made sense to me; I remembered the lists of action verbs that circulated amongst my friends during résumé-writing season in college. But then, as I thought about the letters of recommendation that had been the most helpful to me back when I was reviewing applications, it occurred to me that a list of adjectives might lead to the worst possible outcome... letters of recommendation full of long, unsubstantiated adjectival strings.

So instead of adjectives, which when left unexplicated can sit there like lumps, I shared the following list of story starters.

"From [this student's] first days in my class, I knew..."
"I can tell when [this student] is engaged because...."
"I have particularly noticed [this student's] growth in..."
"When [this student] is absent, ....."
"The first thing I think of when I think of [this student] is the time...."
"The kinds of questions that interest [this student] are..."
"As a learner, [this student]..."
"One day, when we spoke outside of class, [this student]..."
"Sometimes I wonder if [this student]..."
"I can easily imagine [this student]..."
"One thing that really stands out about [this student] is..."
"At our school, [this student] has a reputation for..."
"It seems that [this student] draws strength from..."
"When I imagine [this student] in college, I see..."
"I will never forget the way [this student]..."
"College professors who see [this student's name] on their roster can expect..."
"Although you might not think so at first, [this student]..."
"Ten years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that [this student] had..."

What do you think? Got any great student story starters to share in the comments?

(Hat tip to the excellent Patrick O'Connor
at the amazing Roeper School
for the hand he played in inspiring this post.)

Looking for a Way

2009-11-11T06:23:00.004-05:00

A recent post to the NACAC listserv included this plea:

Hello,

I am working at a high school and I am looking for a systemic way to increase SAT scores. Does anyone have any suggestions or methods that have worked in their schools to raise their SAT scores, more specially, in the critical reading section?

Thank you,
(name withheld)
Guidance Department

I'm going to refrain from commenting on the grammatical errors in the query, since we all make mistakes, and go straight to the heart of the matter... what form does "guidance" take at the secondary schools you're most familiar with? Would you want your son or daughter attending a school where "raising SAT scores" was somewhere near the top of the guidance department's "to do" list?

I wouldn't.

The more research is done, the clearer it becomes that standardized tests "do nothing to indicate how a student might enhance a school's intellectual community, nor do they predict whether a student will be successful in a college classroom." (Wake Forest Provost Jill Tiefenthaler)

If students feel that their standardized test results are not on a par with their in-school academic accomplishments, one response is to throw time and money at the problem of increasing their scores.

Another response is to help the students strategize about ways to highlight their strengths while simultaneously seeking out schools that are moving to broaden their definition of "success."

We all take our cues from the families we work with, and of course at the end of the day, these decisions are family decisions. As a parent and an educator, though, I'd select "B"... would you?

(Photo credit: via Flickr,
originally uploaded by Sami Paige)

StudentAid.com

2009-10-05T21:59:00.002-04:00

An overview of StudentAid.com ... love the "free to families whose family income is less than $40,000" feature.

NACAC After-Thoughts

2009-10-03T13:00:00.005-04:00

Image credit: Judy Baxter, via Flickr

Our own session (I'll touch on others' sessions in the next post)

I was so excited that I forgot to take a picture of my own session at NACAC, but this is probably a pretty close approximation. (Seen one conference room, seen 'em all!) The room was full (I found out afterwards that people were actually turned away, sorry about that!), and I think we did a good job of laying out some of the opportunities and challenges that exist for counselors using online tools as they work to help their counselees develop college lists.

I made some great connections. Maxine Grossman of Campus Compare reached out to me before the conference, and even though we didn't manage to talk in Baltimore, we've talked since. The fabulous Shaun McElroy (he of internationalcounselor.org fame) was able to attend our session, and so got to hear the shout-out I'd promised him. And I had a great conversation with Jeff Whorley of StudentAid.com (I have a feeling it was just the first of many).

In the session itself, Scott White made some great points about the necessity of being familiar with the full landscape of available tools. He also made a good case for using different data for different ends, and I know I wasn't the only one who appreciated his observation that this process, while not overly complex, is seriously nuanced. Elise Miller and Robert Morse talked with some specificity about the tools they're responsible for (College Navigator and U.S.News' site), Lloyd Thacker (of the Education Conservancy) passionately exhorted us to reflect on the values that shape our questions, and Cigus Vanni closed with a heartfelt endorsement of the importance of sharing our collected wisdom.

The Q&A was terrific, and in particular I wish I could remember the name of the counselor who pushed through her nervousness to share a GREAT analogy that has helped her frame differences amongst schools. "When you're getting ready to undertake a voyage," she said, "there are multiple methods of transportation available to you. What if some colleges are like a train station, while others are like a carpool. Neither better by definition. But certainly different, and with different strengths." (If this was your observation, leave a comment so I can make sure you get credit.)

There were, as there always are, things that I would have done differently. I'm already thinking about what I might want to try to pull together for next year. But in the meantime I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with a wide range of people on a topic that has become important to me: how do we leverage existing technologies in support of our students making the best possible college matches?

Links From Our Session

2009-09-25T22:31:00.007-04:00

People always want to know, "How did it go?" and I often feel as if I am unqualified to address that question. Here are the facts, anyway: we filled the room, we filled our timeslot, and we managed to have a little time left over for Q&A (always a big goal of mine).

Here are the links we referenced in our panel this afternoon (and the whole slidedeck is available here):

College Board search: http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com
College Lists wiki: http://collegelists.pbworks.com
Shaun McElroy's blog: http://www.internationalcounselor.org
College Navigator: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator
Naviance: http://www.naviance.com/
College Search Tools: http://bit.ly/collsearchtools
U.S.News: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges
Education Conservancy: http://www.educationconservancy.org
University Accountability Network: http://www.ucan-network.org
Voluntary System of Accountability: http://www.collegeportraits.org
NACAC's Knowledge Center: http://www.nacacnet.org/KnowledgeCenter

As for how it went... I can always think of things that I'd do differently next time, but I think it went well. Were you there? What did you think? What was the most helpful "takeaway," and what marks do you think we missed? I'd love to hear your feedback...

Session D405: College Search 2.0

2009-09-24T22:03:00.001-04:00

(image: "Curious Roy" by Fazen via Flickr)

Hey there.

It's Friday night in Baltimore and I am feeling curious (thus the gratuitous cute kitty pic).

Tomorrow is our session here at the national annual conference of NACAC.

FRIDAY: 2:00pm – 3:15pm
D405. College Lists 2.0
Room 327
Explore how searchable databases, wikis, blogs and other Web-based tools can assist in advising the college-bound student.

* Shelley Krause, Rutgers Preparatory School, NJ
* Scott White, Montclair High School, NJ
* Elise Miller, National Center for Education Statistics, DC
* Cigus Vanni, Cherry Hill High School West, NJ
* Lloyd Thacker, The Education Conservancy, OR
* Robert Morse, U.S. News & World Report, DC

How will it be? Only time will tell. But you can count on a full report here soon. I am so grateful for this opportunity to share my thinking and learn from others as we think out loud together.

Lifting the Fog

2009-09-16T06:28:00.002-04:00

(Image: "Mystic Island" via Flickr)

I'm thinking a lot about all the various search tools that exist out there for students and families as I get ready for a presentation later this month.

Preparing to explain my thinking to others has led me to realize how little I understand my thinking!

So slowly, over the last few weeks, I've come up with a draft of a scoring rubric, which in my world would allow an ideal college search tool to score a 25. Here's how I'm breaking it down:

DATA (8 pts.)

(2) Is the list of schools included comprehensive?

(2) Are the must-have variables there? (majors, size, distance from zip, selectivity)

(2) How's the number of useful variables?

(2) Any advances in quality or uniqueness of variables?

USER EXPERIENCE (8 pts.)

(2) Sortability and/or adjust as you go factors?

(2) Intuitive navigation & decent help?

(2) Looks good?

(2) Save/export info option?

TRANSPARENCY (4 pts.)

(2) user-driven (as opposed to "we know best")

(2) data source? if info collected, how used?

BONUS (5 pts.)

"Best in Class" in any of the categories = 1 pt.

Site designers seem to understand that counselors and/or parents exist = 1-2pts.

Plus any other stuff that just seems worth mentioning/ rewarding

(Highest possible score = 25)

My bet is that I'll have some changes to this after the conversation at NACAC. And then, if I can find the time, maybe I can actually run some of the tools from the College Lists wiki through to see what kind of scores they earn!

Henry Jenkins on New Media's Implications for Teaching and Learning

2009-09-08T06:21:00.000-04:00

more about "Big Thinkers: Henry Jenkins on New Me...", posted with vodpod

Just a little over 8 minutes. Pass it on.

Perfect Storm

2009-08-26T06:18:00.005-04:00

In today's dispatch from the future, we look back on the factors that combined to give the 2009-10 school year the nickname many students of the history of learning in the US now use to refer to it: the Year of the Perfect Storm.

Image via El Brujo+ on Flickr

H1N1 & Budget Cuts

Largely ineffective efforts at curbing the spread of "second-wave/early-onset" H1N1 flu and the resulting hysteria meant that hundreds of American schools were closed for weeks at a time in the fall and winter of 2009-10. The economic downturn had already meant cuts to summer schools and professional development budgets. These circumstances left more administrators, students, parents and teachers than ever before actively seeking out (and at times creating) next-wave ways to facilitate learning.

See this article: USC Undergraduates develop summer education site in response to summer school cancellations

Parents' (and students') increased resistance towards student debt

With more American adults struggling with debt and employment insecurity, parents and students were thinking differently about the realities of taking on more debt in support of a college education. (See Drowning in Debt and Debt Slapped for examples of the kind of information that was available to students and families in 2009.)

US families continued to choose to homeschool their students at record rates.

Families were making this decision not only for religious reasons, but increasingly out of a general sense of frustration with other available options. Through widening social networks, more parents in 2009 knew someone who had made the decision to homeschool one or more of their children. ("The estimated percentage of the school-age population that was homeschooled increased from 2.2 percent in 2003 to 2.9 percent in 2007." ~ National Center for Education Statistics)

Greater transparency of information with an increased focus on outcomes

Families experiencing greater economic pressures were increasingly interested in evaluating their "return on investment" when thinking about education. See Teens Reveal College Choice Tipping Point, which states in part, "Given the prevailing economic winds, and considering the fact that prospective undergrads (and their parents) have demonstrated increasing practicality in their decision-making over the past several years, it’s no wonder that graduates’ career placements weighed so heavily in 2009 college-choice decisions." Responding to increasing questions about "what does this commitment of time, money, and energy get us," colleges began to shift their marketing efforts away from trumpeting the strength of their incoming students to sharing the successes of their graduates. (See PurchaseSUNY's tweets here and here, for example.) And college search engines prepared to include new variables such as "average net cost" and "percent of students graduating within four years" to their searchable databases.

More on-the-ground reporting and sharing at both the secondary and college level served as an accelerant to change.

Finally able to break out of their siloed existence in individual classrooms, learning professionals all over the world created high-powered, self-directed professional development for themselves and in collaboration with the members of their personal learning networks. (See http://www.classroom20.com/, http://teachersteachingteachers.org/, http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/, and http://todaysmeet.com/teachpaperless, for example.)

And that ends today's lesson in learning history. Comments? Questions?

(This post partially inspired
by Shelly Blake-Poch's on-the-ground report, Twitter Has Arrived,
on his fabulous Teach Paperless blog.)

Lose the Training Wheels

2009-08-16T18:52:00.009-04:00

Ways to assist a young person who wants to learn to ride a bike: Project confidence. Enjoy your own bike rides. Install training wheels. Spend time watching other kids riding. Smile encouragingly. Talk about caution, responsibility, and freedom. Model caution, responsibility, and freedom. Practice patience. Take the training wheels off. Promise to keep your hand on the seat. Run alongside. Yell words of encouragement. Start on a straight road lined with soft grass. Apply bandaids and kisses as needed. Require the donning of long pants. Put the training wheels back on. Tell true-life stories about your own learning. Allow breaks. Test the brakes. Watch for signs of returning confidence. Take the training wheels off again, this time for good.

~ ~ ~

This afternoon a friend told me the story of her daughter, many years ago now, falling in love with a school for the performing arts in another state and ultimately moving away to attend there. She made arrangements to stay with the families of several other students in order to make it work. As a sixteen year-old. Trying to imagine making that decision, I said, "It must have been so hard to say yes to that."

"I didn't say yes," my friend responded, "At least not at first. I tried everything I could to talk her out of it; I even dragged her back and re-enrolled her in the school in our town after I visited her at the school she wanted to attend. But two friends of mine sat me down and said, 'You have to let her go,' and they were right. So I did."

~ ~ ~

I am so fortunate. My learning network is well-stocked with thoughtful, courageous people.

In the past few months I've read several blog posts that resonated with me. Each dealt with the idea of supporting children's development as learners in a slightly different way.

In the first, Vicki Davis (aka coolcatteacher) tells the story of a white water rafting trip which she then relates to her goals for the students she works with:

We have got to come to grips with how to take children from walled gardens to a point where they can safely operate in public places before they graduate from high school.

In the second, author Maya Frost (The New Global Student), responds to articles on college search consultants by making an impassioned case for "breaking the cycle of learned helplessness":

When we rely on expensive services to prep kids for top schools, we are telling them that they can't possibly compete in the real world without our assistance — and our money. Parents who want their kids to be able to get great jobs they love after graduation (without their help) are better off teaching their kids how to flesh out an idea, research the heck out of it, and follow the thread that leads to the most thrilling and fulfilling opportunities.

Parents: If you are considering paying for college help, consider what you are saying to your son or daughter by hiring a consultant to do what most families handle without assistance. Think about how you might spend that money in a way that could give your student more opportunities to develop confidence, relevant skills, a clear sense of direction and flaming enthusiasm.

The biggest problem with learned helplessness is that it's contagious and hereditary. Stop the cycle now, and your kids will have a much brighter future.

Finally, just last week I read a post on parenting by C.C. Chapman over at Digital Dads:

What I’m getting at is that you need to make sure that your kids realize that the only way to succeed in life is to always work hard, to be strong willed and be the best you can be at whatever it is that you are passionate about. Yes, there are going to be plenty of people standing in your way, telling you no and gates set up to block them. But, I hope and pray that everything I’m doing with my kids is raising them to be a gatejumper who chases their dreams with every ounce of their soul.

I am interested in how these ideas play out in the real world. Most parents I know would agree with the idea that parenting is all about supporting their children's growth towards independence, but different parents are going to do very different things when confronted with the imagined reality of assuring some kind of "advantage" for their own son or daughter, or with the soul-gripping terror that can accompany the prospect of actually letting go.

Every choice we make is a reflection of the best information we have at the time, as seen through the values we hold. If I am reflective and transparent in my work with students and my work as a parent, will it help me "maintain course" as I move forward?

I want to be thinking, "Will this choice help move this child (student) towards a life oriented towards life-long learning, ethical and deliberate decision-making, and love?"

Or, more simply:

Will this choice move us all towards the day when the training wheels come off?

(Cross-posted at But Wait, There's More!
Hat tips to @sassafrasmama,
@yggiz, @coolcatteacher,
@mayafrost, @jonathanfields,
@cc_chapman, and Malcolm Gladwell)

More Show and Tell

2009-08-13T07:08:00.001-04:00

This Frontline video (~ 20 minutes) explores the role of technology in two different public schools:

What struck me about the first school ( Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx ) was the vision and determination of the principal, as well as the movement of surveillance from physical behaviors to online actions.

The second school's segment (Chatham HS, NJ) gives more of a feel of the tension that exists between old and new ways of doing and thinking.

My students cited SparkNotes' college search engine as one of the ones they were using this year. Why? Because it's a brand they're familiar with.

(Hattip to Martin Ruiz (aka @MartinRuiz),
who tweeted out a link to this video with
the #hackedu hashtag a few days back.)

Personalize Your Learning

2009-08-10T14:02:00.004-04:00

In college counseling, my quality of life is largely defined by the number of students I work with. The smaller the number, the better. Not because fewer students represents less work, but because fewer students means greater opportunities for truly individualized attention.

I enjoyed watching this 8 minute video at lunch today:

School of One Video from NYCDOE Teacher Development on Vimeo.

What do you think? Can we use differentiated assessment and creative thinking about all the different ways we learn to explode some of our existing assumptions? Or is the concrete just too thick?

We Interrupt This Program

2009-08-08T13:43:00.007-04:00

Real posts will resume at some point, I assure you.

But in the meantime, I'm staring at a deadline for the slidedeck that will accompany our presentation at the National NACAC conference in Baltimore in 2009.

So...

... I am currently very busy familiarizing myself with the wonders of Chartle.net

Lovely, isn't it?

Danger, Will Robinson!

2009-07-01T14:16:00.004-04:00

Image via Duane Romanell on Flickr

Do you remember Robby the robot on the TV show Lost in Space? And how charmingly his arms would flail about as he warned of impending doom?

I've been seeing Robby a lot in my mind's eye in the past few months.

First there was the KnowledgeWorks Foundation 2020 Report. Then HASTAC's Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. And now The Opportunity Equation: Transforming Mathematics and Science Education for Citizenship and the Global Economy.

I'm trying to keep up.

"This 2020 Forecast illuminates how we are shifting toward a culture of creation in which each of us has the opportunity – and the responsibility – to make our collective future. People are creating new selves, organizations, systems, societies, economies, and knowledge." (2020 Forecast)

"The university model of teaching and learning relies on a hierarchy of expertise, disciplinary divides, restricted admission to those considered worthy, and a focused, solitary area of expertise. However, with participatory learning and digital media, these conventional modes of authority break down.

Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to admission. While it has never been confined solely to the academy, today's opportunities for independent learning have never been easier nor more diverse." (HASTAC's Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age)

"To lead a revolution in math and science education, teachers themselves need opportunities to experience powerful math and science learning." (The Opportunity Equation)

As I read these reports, I feel a conflicting swirl of emotions. Excitement, and concern that there are nowhere near enough school-based folk who "get it."

This is where Robby comes in. The last event in my life that called to mind his panicky, ineffectual, arm-waving response to perceived danger was the arrival of Judith Rodin as the Ivy League's first female president in 1994 when I worked at UPenn.

The reactions of staff on campus to the announcement of her selection were striking. The overwhelming majority of people I knew were thrilled, especially after they had a chance to hear her speak about her vision for Penn. A small but agitated minority of folks were doing their Robby impressions.

These were the people, I figured out, who were afraid that the new Penn wouldn't be a place where they would feel at home. Most of us were excited. (And the women, especially, were sporting ear-to-ear grins.) But a few folks were verging on arm-waving panic. We were confident that our work would continue to add value to Penn in a demonstrable way. The "Robby" folks? Suddenly worried that they might be irrelevant.

I am so grateful that reports on the future of learning are exciting to me. And I hope you're feeling that way, too!

Appalachian Poems

2009-06-19T11:38:00.003-04:00

Here's what I've been working on in every spare moment for the past week or so. Just sent the link (http://tinyurl.com/RPSpoems09) out to all the parents. Very satisfying.

Hacking Education

2009-06-14T20:50:00.005-04:00

Image via Jake Bouma on Flickr

Time magazine recently ran a piece referencing the Union Square conference re: Hacking Education earlier this year, and the way in which that conversation was enhanced via Twitter.

For those folks trying to catch up, here are some relevant posts:

Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson's initial post, Hacking Education.
Fred's thoughts, post-gathering, are at Hacking Education Continued.
See also Jon Bischke's Manifesto, which he put up just before the meeting.
Two months later, Brad Bradshaw posted a detailed re-cap as well as a link to the transcript. There's a reading list up, too.
Recently, Alex Krupp performed a mitzvah by curating and archiving some of the tweets that were flying around during the conference.
And here's an American HS student talking about why he feels our educational system is failing.

Add links in the comments or tag away in Diigo or delicious with #hackedu... I'd love for more folks who are in schools to be a part of this conversation. (Someone made this point before me, but of course I can't remember who now... Vicki Davis, the @coolcatteacher, maybe?)

(And how are YOU hacking education?)

Outsourcing Judgment

2009-06-02T20:57:00.003-04:00

Image: Anthony Turba via Flickr

I received an email last week that read, in part:

I am writing to you to find out if you have a sense of how the individual leadership programs listed in your link are viewed by the colleges. I am doing this research because I am often asked by parents if these programs are worth the cost and I would like to be able to give them honest assessments. I am certain that they all provide great experiences for students who are well matched to each program, and I recognize the importance of this. However, in these economic times I also want to provide accurate information to parents who are making decisions not only for the sake of providing good leadership experiences for their children, but also for the sake of investing in extracurricular experiences that the colleges believe are valuable.

This is a counselor trying to walk a line, pushing back against the weight of a question that pervades many students' high school experiences here in the US. The elephant-in-the-room question is, "What will the colleges think?"

As a college admissions officer, what I looked for in students' extracurricular commitments was impact and intiative. I liked it when I could see that a student truly felt that what they had done had made a difference, in their life and/or in the lives of others. And I was impressed when I could tell that a student had expended some serious thought and/or energy in pursuit of their goal. Finally, because I was familiar with the process of putting together a class in selective circumstances, I cared – maybe more than I should have – about students having successfully competed for inclusion in a selective program.

But I don't think there's a summer program in the world that could all by itself make enough of a difference in a student's candidacy for university admission for consideration of "the question" to be the driving factor.

As an educator, I want to help promote my students' moving towards the thoughts and behaviors I associate with lifelong learners. When faced the "what will the colleges like" question, I think we need work hard not to teach them that outsourcing judgment is a "go to move" when they're facing a decision about what's best for them.

Okay, I'll 'fess up. I've got a copy of USNews & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" on my desk. I pull it out almost every day. But I use it more as a reminder of facts – how many undergraduates does the University of Rochester have? – than as a source of expertise. To someone like me, up to my eyeballs in instantaneous information about any program or school I'm investigating and busily helping to curate the information as it washes over the transom, the much-discussed rankings seem like a kind of lazy collective shorthand, a one-size-fits-all answer to all those folks who ask, "But is it a good school?"

What makes a strong summer program strong? What makes a good college good? And who do you want answering those questions? Call me a wild-eyed idealist, but I think the individual students' votes should carry the most weight here. Some day in the not-so-distant future, they're going to be making decisions about which city to move to, which candidate to vote for, which company to invest in... and as they live their way towards that future, I want to help them build the skills that will be the foundation of their own judgment. Including discerning when it does and does not make sense to trust someone else's. And as much as students (and parents!) sometimes crave the easy clarity of someone else's thinking, I don't think we're helping them when we let them off this particular hook.

What do you say when you get asked "the question?"

(Thanks to the counselor who asked the question,
to Dan Meyer of dy/dan,
and to Barbara Diamond of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation,
whose post today got me thinking about this in new ways.)

Math Wars

2009-05-21T21:55:00.009-04:00

tracks via duesentrieb on Flickr

A curriculum director in a public school district in the US recently posed this question on the NACAC listserv:

...we are preparing our math curriculum to reenter our program evaluation cycle which is a 3 year research and design process yielding a revised curriculum. As we prepare for this endeavor the "Math Wars" have re-emerged in our communities. Specifically, there is a desire, beginning as early as the 6th grade to place students in tracks or on a path to exit from high school with the minimal course exposure being Calculus 1. The motivation for this track is college admissions. I have a large, and vocal group of middle school parents arguing their students will not be prepared and accepted by competitive colleges and universities if they do not graduate with Calculus 1.

My questions/concerns include:

1. Is Calculus 1 an appropriate course to establish as the norm for a high school senior?
2. From your perspectives what are the advantages and disadvantages to this goal?
3. What role does Calculus 1 play in college admissions and readiness?

I've seen students for whom Calculus was an appropriate choice in the junior year (they went on to take multivariable calculus as seniors), and students for whom Calculus would have been a disastrous senior year choice. My sense is that the parent energy around this issue is born out of anxiety or fear. As parents think about the progress of their students through school, they want to imagine a future without limitations. For many of them the college search and application process will represent a re-shaping or narrowing of options, and so the underlying question of "but will this prevent him from getting into the very best colleges" threatens to drive everything.

Doesn't any good curriculum represent a range of choices? Could we say that Calculus would be the most common senior year choice for students who are strong in (or strongly engaged by) math? Is Calculus in the senior currently the "norm" in the district? (I'll confess the term makes me a little nervous.)

No parent believes that their student is one of the ones for whom Calculus would prove insurmountable, but the folks designing the curriculum have to keep those students in mind.

In my (small, independent, K12) school, I could produce a list of the colleges where students who had not completed Calculus had been offered a space. For that matter, I could produce a list of the colleges where our students with a documented learning difference had been offered a space. It's possible that neither list would do anything to assuage parent anxiety, although I would know that each college name listed represented a happy ending.

In general, colleges look for students to continue to challenge themselves as they move through their curricula, particularly in the five academic "solids" (math, English, history, language, science). But for every college where the level of competition would make gaining admission more challenging for a student who hasn't taken Calculus, there are five more where the achievement of a solid grade in Precalculus senior year would be something an admissions officer could point to as evidence of this student's readiness to "hit the ground running" in college.

Parents want us to tell them, "This curriculum will make it possible for your student to attend the most selective schools in the country." What we should be telling them is, "Every student will have access to the opportunity to take Calculus. More importantly, this curriculum will support your student's desire to challenge him/herself. It will make it possible for students to deepen their passions, shore up their weak spots, and explore new territory. It will support their developing self-awareness, and will enable them to develop the skills and habits necessary for life-long learning."

A girl can always dream.

(How would you approach this challenge?
Kind of wishing I was a curriculum designer.)

Whose Choice Is It, Anyway?

2009-05-16T22:11:00.006-04:00

I read the recent Washington Post piece by AP Latin teacher Jane Miriam Epperson Brinley about the anticipated effects of the College Board's decisions to do away with the Latin Literature exam with a sense of deja vu. We'd been talking about this very thing in my school ever since the initial announcement. The immediate and powerful effects that the cancellation of a nationally standardized test can have are not suprising to anyone who works in an American high school. Secondary schools throughout the United States use the Advanced Placement curriculum for their most challenging courses; the courses are supposed to cover college-level material, and the exams are nationally standardized. As Epperson Brinley says, "Because AP exams set the standard of academic quality for college-bound students, high school curricula are often reverse-engineered to prepare students for AP tests." And as a commenter on the NACAC listserv noted, "In large part, parents don't sign their children up for courses which have no national testing to submit to colleges."

I believe that most teachers who teach at the AP level find the curricula rigorous and engaging, if sometimes confining and less flexible than they would like. My argument today with Advanced Placement is not primarily about the curricula (I'll leave that to folks who are actually teaching a full load of academically rigorous coursework), but about the conversation. By signing on to someone else's definition of "what we should be learning" (which is what a curriculum is, after all), are we in schools bowing out of a conversation about what is worth teaching and learning?

When I was studying the history of US educational reform in graduate school, one of the things I came to believe was that any reform effort that engaged a significant slice of people in the school community – whether it was smaller class sizes, mixed-age class groupings, extended school days, or anything else – anything that got people thinking and talking about their shared enterprise was a good thing.

In a secondary school where the educational enterprise is tied to the students' ability to successfully win places in the colleges and universities of their choice, AP curricula and exams offer an alluring "stamp of approval." Only a handful of secondary schools have opted out of this by-now traditional path.

But if, as teachers, we are also modelers of learning, what does it say about us that we are unwilling or unable to engage in an ongoing conversation about what our students need to learn today, and how that might differ from what we thought they needed to learn last year, or the year before that. If high school continually marches towards the holy grail of "college prep," which in turn is dictated by a set of assumptions and understandings about "what colleges want," where does that leave us?

This is the time of year when high school juniors all over the US are thinking about their senior year course selections. We'll be telling them that they need to challenge themselves, continue to make progress in the courses colleges consider to be "academic solids" (English, science, math, history, foreign language), and of course if they've taken AP-level courses in the past, they'll want to continue to do so. Some of the students already have a sense of what kinds of learning they hope to pursue in college and beyond. Others have no idea. But the definitions of success and the prescription for achieving it aren't nearly as individualized as they could be if we weren't taking our orders from external agents.

If we want students to experience themselves as independent, co-creators of knowledge, I'm feeling like we need to get out in front and start treating both ourselves and them that way. I'm sure that in most cases the AP tests are just the "nets" that help great teachers shape their shots. But I'd love to see what a curriculum that is a collaborative on-the-ground effort – taking into account student, teacher, and community perspectives – looks like. Increasingly, students of all ages and interests have the ability to connect with teachers and curricula that do speak to their interests and passions. Our relevancy in schools depends on our ability to be a part of that connection.

(This post was substantially informed by my reading
of Jeff Thompson's recent post, "It is the test! Or is it...",
which in turn was a response to a post by Dr. Scott McLeod.)

Leave A Trail

2009-04-23T06:23:00.004-04:00

Image: One Way by James Traceur on Flickr

I had the great fortune to hear Will Richardson speak this week. (You can see notes – mine and his – here.) As a parent and educator, he shared with us this desire for his children:

I want my kids to be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways.

In the room with me were 50 or so other members of the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools (NJAIS), some (most?) of whom were probably already familiar with and/or open to Will's ideas. The audience was highly engaged, and one of the themes that threaded through our questions for Will was "How can we get everyone else on board?"

I've been thinking about that question ever since. (Will says that the question of "how do we move forward" is a common one within his communities.... "everyone is looking for the lever.")

Will's friend Clarence Fisher is a classroom teacher who "gets it." A recent post on his blog highlighted the power of global connections, and over the weekend, in a post entitled Where Are We Headed, he asked "How are we building the classrooms and learning these kids [current kindergartners] need?"

The list of K12 schools that "get it" with regards to 21st century skills gets longer every day. Scott McLeod ("Dangerously Irrelevant") is helpfully collecting names of schools that are successfully integrating innovative practices on his movingforward wiki, here; add your school if you think it qualifies! Public School Insights is also sharing a wide variety of success stories here.

But I get the sense that the vast majority of educators who "get it" are still lonely in their buildings, and maybe struggling with impatience. (Did you read Steve Dembo's post, "Is Joining a PLN bad for morale?")

Social media rock star Chris Brogan recently offered some advice about how to get from point A to point B within a business context in his "Get on the Right Side of the Fence" post, and that's the point at which my thinking started to crystallize.

We need complete stories, not just happy endings. We need case studies. We not only need to see that evolved schools exist, we need to know how they got there.

So keep learning out loud, everyone! Do not turn back.

And leave a trail, please.

Bloodhound image via J-Dub on Flickr

Scarcity vs. Abundance

2009-03-17T06:26:00.004-04:00

Images: Virgin Dune & Waterfall, by H. Saber & fireramsey, via Flickr

Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail," is thinking and talking about a cultural shift, away from a presumption of scarcity to one of abundance.

(There's an even better, longer version up on Pop!Tech here.)

The implied tension between these worldviews is palpable in schools, where we are feeling both; Bill Farren has a great post up about this over at ed4wb entitled Schools In An Age of Abundance.

Bill says, in part:

The implications are interesting, especially as they pertain to schools. If we look at most schools today, we can see that they are still operating under (and often locked into) a model of scarcity. From the bookshelf space in the library to the information that is doled out by professors with limited office hours, we notice that the information, services, and availability to connect with others comes in quantities that are meager compared to what we experience outside of these institutions.

Bea Fields' recent post - Should Teachers Incorporate Texting and Twitter Into the Classroom? - addresses this tension right at the micro level. No matter how we try to kid ourselves about our ability to multi-task, attention is finite. Yet the information available to us is limitless. How do teachers manage the potentially disruptive presence of "the great out there" in our classrooms? At the University of Chicago Law School, the decision was to limit access to the internet during class. A Georgetown professor tells his students they may not bring their laptops to class, and explains his thinking here. Of course that wouldn't necessarily have any effect on texting and tweeting, both of which can take place with only a cellphone connection. My personal instinct would be to figure out ways to periodically throw open the windows and see what the breeze blows in. But then I don't have to worry about covering a previously established set of curricular content areas.

Outside of education the backchannel is here to stay, and there's lots of good thought going into how to make the best of it, notably Olivia Mitchell's "How to Present When People are Twittering"... Not surprisingly, "just tell them they can't open their laptops" doesn't appear a viable solution when dealing with adults. The latest Chronicle article on the subject also touches on the question of when we start treating students as adults. The comment stream raises additional questions about differences between disciplines and about the point at which teachers/professors can/should assume that students are capable of accurately performing the cost-benefit analysis of dividing their attention.

What do you think? What are the variables that matter?

What Will It Take?

2009-03-16T11:31:00.006-04:00

What will it take to move our schools forward towards the goal of developing graduates who are not only digitally literate, but digitally fluent?

Earlier this month, Scott McLeod made a great case for the importance of curricula that support the development of 21st century skills, a robust system of online learning, access to relevant technology, investing in leadership. These are all "supply side" strategies, things that schools and school systems can think about as they work to get themselves out from behind the eight ball when it comes to the changing landscape of education.

I'm wondering today about the demand side. Also earlier this month, Ewan McIntosh asked the question, "Is education's transformation just down to the teachers?" Ewan recommends focusing on broader listening (which of course goes straight to my Quaker heart), and on considering widening the conversations to include not just changes to curriculum and assessment, but to pedagogy itself.

Until relatively recently, most US schools could comfortably assume a level of parental engagement that stopped at the school door, with the pro-forma exceptions of "Back-to-School Night" and "Parent-Teacher Conferences." Unless, of course, your child is struggling or bored, in which case you might push for more regular contacts and updates. Or, I guess, if you're one of those folks (bless you) who pour time and energy into your school's PTA/O.

I predict that this "arms length" relationship, where it is still the norm, is about to get cozier.

What I'm remembering is the time, not so long ago, when applicants for university admission could absolutely count on no admissions officer ever accessing their MySpace or Facebook profile. Ten years ago, no freshman applicant needed to think about what a stranger would learn about them if they happened to be "Googled." Why? Because the wave of those technologies hadn't crested yet. People working in admissions offices didn't have MySpace or Facebook pages; they were totally off the institutional radar. "Google" hadn't yet become a verb.

Now, the young people who populate admissions offices know all about Facebook, MySpace, etc. because they themselves use those sites. They know to Google someone else's name because they periodically Google their own. And their dean just signed up for LinkedIn, finally.

Eventually, parents and teachers like me, who are following the latest thinking with regards to digital citizenship, 21st century skills, great tools for teachers, and personal learning networks via our RSS feeds won't be such a tiny little minority. We're going to turn those "who can bring in cupcakes for St. Patrick's Day" room parent listservs into, "Who wants to join the school's working group around new communication competency standards for our middle school students?" discussion threads.

This is going to be an "I Want My MTV" moment for me, I think. A series of them, in fact. How about you?

(Thanks so much to thought leaders like
Scott McLeod and Ewan McIntosh.
I used to read their work
and understand what they were saying
about three months later.
We're down to two weeks!)

Sugata Mitra at TED

2009-03-11T06:38:00.001-04:00

Some fascinating tests of self-organized learning
(like most TED videos, this one is about 20 minutes long):

(Who are these people at PlopQuiz?
The blog is so interesting.)

Enjoying Dennis Littky

2009-03-10T10:50:00.005-04:00

I've been enjoying the energy and ideas of Dennis Littky this week:

The video is about 10 minutes long. For more the Big Picture schools, hop on over to http://www.bigpicture.org/

Following Up

2009-02-27T16:30:00.001-05:00

Image: Michael Hartford via Flickr

Vicki Davis' post today on the rise of applications with semantic awareness again raises the question of how our digital trail will be judged by others and who we will be, digitally.

Many of us who actively participate in creating digital content have had a moment in which we were surprised – and then not surprised – to find that someone knew something about us that we didn't expect them to.

We're used to our digital trail being disparate and a bit obfuscated... lots of different sites, passwords, comments, images, etc. etc., each in its own little "slot." When the pieces get connected despite that, it sometimes takes some getting used to.

Teenagers have been accustomed to adults being somewhat "mindblind" to their digital trail, since much of it is generated in spaces (they think) adults don't frequent or understand.

But as tools like Typealyzer become more sophisticated and ubiquitous (and as the age of social media partipants continues to rise), there's a good chance we're all going to be deepening our understanding of just how public our shared information is. And the background checks offered by companies like Intelius may begin offering some very different types of background information.

And if you were the dean of admissions at an art school, and someone offered you a product that, based on the latest digital mining techniques, could give you a detailed analysis of a student's visual style without the student submitting a formal portfolio... well, would you be interested?

What about information that claimed to help you assess how an individual student typically responds to challenge?

Colleges already enable students to create "admissions application activity accounts" as early in their college searches as they wish; will they also be looking to collect less explicitly relevant information at some point? Seems like it's getting easier by the day.

Gary Vee thinks that all this information is going to make it easier for people's true nature – good or bad – to show through. What do YOU think?

(Hat tip to Vicki Davis, aka Cool Cat Teacher,
for getting me thinking about this again.)

What You're Looking For

2009-02-19T07:06:00.002-05:00

Image: by Kiri, via Flickr

This is what you're looking for.

If you're working with young people, or the parent of a young person, you are NOT looking for the ways in which they conform to the expectations or demands placed on them.

You are looking for moments like this. When, amidst the detritus turning to loam, a seed planted who knows how long ago becomes a tiny, fragile flower all its own. Chances are that it will look like no other flower you've ever seen.

And when you see this, it's your job to keep it growing.

Forget test prep. Forget expensive summer programs. Think sunlight. Think early morning rain.

Because the path to who we are each meant to be is unknown until it is traveled. And supporting young people to explore what matters to them, what excites them, what intrigues, and what moves them... is the best investment in their future that any of us could make.

(Hat tip to Scott McLeod,
whose post today
got me thinking about this again.)

What's YOUR Definition of Elite?

2009-02-03T06:45:00.001-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell on selective admissions... some interesting points here. (But go get a sandwich or something... this is about half an hour long.)

Merit Scholarships

2009-01-12T22:24:00.003-05:00

Image: Noah Wesley, via Flickr

I'm always on the lookout for resources related to merit scholarship opportunities; here's what I've got at the moment:

The annual report of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, downloadable from their site. (The 2007 version (a .pdf document) is here.)

The SallieMae scholarship search engine is here: https://smscholarships.com/

A colleague in another school recommended The A's and B's of Academic Scholarship. (I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.)

USNews' list of colleges offering the most merit money is here.

The Council of International Schools website has an Excel spreadsheet with helpful scholarship information here. (Link is to the US list; the site also includes UK and Canadian resources.)

Another site which lists scholarships with known criteria is guaranteed-scholarships.com

The bookmark I typically use for these kinds of resources is "scholarship"... you can see more of my tagged pages over here on del.icio.us.

Who Will You Be?

2008-12-23T13:50:00.009-05:00

Public relations blogger Lauren Vargas has a wise and thought-provoking post up today about Choosing the Path of Humility. She says, in part:

How can you determine who is true? The wisdom of realizing one's own ignorance is a tough pill to swallow...for anyone. There cannot be authenticity without humility.

Take responsibility. This does not mean take the limelight...sometimes it is best to step aside and shut-up.
Be accountable.
Admit sometimes others are right.
Ask for feedback. Follow through on such feedback.
Recognize others.
Treat others with respect.

Like many admissions-related bloggers, I have been following the recent "Facebook Gate" story as uncovered by Brad J. Ward of SquaredPeg and Butler University.

Most people's reactions to the story (which you can catch up on here, if you need to), seem to fall into two broad camps:

1) This is terrible, how could they think this was okay, what can we do to prevent this from happening again?! or

2) Relax, it's only Facebook.

I'm interested in the tension between the two world views implied in the comments.

Earlier this year, I attended the NJAIS conference, and the conversation in one of the sessions turned to the concept of digital citizenship. Again, there was a split, with some folks feeling that students were MUCH too free with their personal data, and others feeling that this increased transparency was just part of the water our students swim in, and that it is we who need to adjust our perspective to keep up with the times.

When Facebook first started, no one was writing articles about college admissions officers checking Facebook pages, because no admissions officers had a clue about what Facebook was. Now many admissions officers have Facebook accounts of their own, and so of course it's a logical next step that a few of them might take their curiousity about the students whose files they're reviewing over to Google or Facebook.

So. Here's a question.

To what extent can current high school students count on a "youthful indescretion" defense when and if some of the "digital tattoos" (as John Palfrey of Harvard's Berkman Center called them on NPR's Here and Now today) they've inadvertently created for themselves follow them into adulthood?

Were you horrified when you saw the pictures of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau that surfaced via his Facebook account earlier this month? Or did you shrug and chalk it up to "Hey, we've all been there... guess he's learned his lesson?"

When I worked in college admissions, I used to say that admissions was a point at which people became data. What is the point at which one's digital trail becomes a part of one's reputation? Does that point vary from industry to industry, from person to person, from situation to situation? Will any of the young interns who created multiple Facebook Class of 2013 groups this year ever be asked to account for their actions by a potential employer or associate?

In a universe populated by infinitely revisable yet sometimes indelible online identities, what will authenticity look like and how important will it be?

Who will you be?

(Image: flyzipper via Flickr)

Christmas Comes Early

2008-12-17T06:27:00.005-05:00

Image: Sarah Parrot via Flickr

One of the online tools I was sad to see disappear this year was mycampusvisits (no link because it's defunct), a site that was trying to aggregate information about campus open houses for prospective students.

I loved the idea of sending my juniors to a website with the instructions to "find a school to visit!" (Visits are still so critical to this process.)

Today, counselor Mark McGrath at Lawrence HS here in NJ sent me a link to the NJSCA's Counselor Desktop.

I'm hereby nicknaming him "Santa" McGrath... what a treasure-trove of linkety goodness!

I was especially pleased to see that someone has been taking the time (was it you, Mark?) to aggregate information about NJ College and University Open Houses! And DE, MD, and NY! And Pennsylvania!

Okay, it seems a little silly to get this excited about tables, let alone tables whose data is now largely out of date. But I'm quite pleased, thinking about the possibilities of these tables in the future. Let's hope they get updated. And stay tuned...

Update: Mark confesses. Yes, he's the one who pulled together all that info. And he'll be doing it again over break. Yay, Mark!

Another Project

2008-12-16T16:04:00.004-05:00

Image: "Database 2" by Tim Morgan via Flickr

[Sung to the tune of "White Christmas:"]

"I'm dreaming of a small database..."

I've almost completed our proposal for the 2009 NACAC conference. (Scott was right. They extended the deadline.)

Now, after emailing back and forth with Steve Hargadon (he of Classroom 2.0 fame) and reading Chris Brogan's post on building small social networks from earlier this week, I'm thinking about "mashing up" a few ideas.

How about I re-imagine tools like the fabulous Jane Hart's Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter and try to start up a directory that is specific to college counselors who are active in a social media kind of way?

How great would that be? Watch this space.

Transparency and Search

2008-12-12T06:57:00.010-05:00

I had a brief conversation with Kim Clark of US News & World Report yesterday, and now this fantastic demonstration of Apture's multimedia platform has got me thinking.

The video is about 3.5 minutes long, and details the way in which Apture "gives content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages. Readers can then access these items without ever leaving the page, providing them with a deeper and more meaningful web experience."

This first example is about bringing more transparency to government, a goal I can wholeheartedly support.

But since what I was talking with Kim about is what we college counselors REALLY want in a college search engine, of course my next thought was about transparency and the college search.

Transparency is an important part of what I want in a search experience. If I'm looking for a school, I don't want to be tied to someone else's (often hidden) algorithm; I want to build my own. Rather than adhere to another's idea of what constitutes "highly selective," I'd like the opportunity to define for myself what kinds of numbers go into that equation. Rather than accept the College Board's definition of "mid-sized," I'd like a chance to define my own range of number of undergraduates.

Maybe not every time. Sometimes pre-defined criteria can be a handy shortcut. But I'd like the option to do some fiddling around the edges.

So. Point and shoot? You bet. But also, manual controls, please. As many as you can serve up. Including things like average amount of student indebtedness upon graduation, first-to-second-year retention rate, NSSE data, and other factors that sometimes don't make it into the college brochures.

How about you? If you were designing a college search engine from scratch, what would you want?

(Hat tip to Lawrence Lessig,
who featured this Apture video on his blog recently,
and who will be moving back East soon!)

"Prep," but to what end?

2008-11-23T19:22:00.008-05:00

I like this piece (about 3 minutes) on the skill sets our students are likely to need right now in order to navigate our changing cultural landscape.

Thinking about this, coupled with quotes like David Warlick's below (from 2006!), has pushed me to join the growing group of schoolfolks who are wondering... to what extent are secondary schools and colleges truly preparing students for the world that awaits them. And/or, to what extent are we preparing students for the role of lifelong learner?

What am I doing about this? In the words of Alice Peacock, I'll start with me. I'm trying to educate myself. I've got an RSS reader feeding me a steady stream of thoughts from some of the folks who are out in front on this. I'm learning to blog. I'm working on learning to podcast and make the occasional video. And I'm thinking about how to present at NACAC next fall in such a way as to connect with more people in my current field who are looking to expand their learning networks.

(Hat tip to Scott McLeod
of Dangerously Irrelevant.)

Parent as Coach

2008-11-12T06:38:00.001-05:00

Image by Sara Petagna via Flickr

Last year I had the opportunity to "shadow" a high school lacrosse coach for a portion of the day. It was an eye-opening experience. The work of a coach – discovering and then strengthening the focus, skills, drive, and desire of the students they work with – seems never-ending. And their opportunities for influence are potentially on a par with those that parents have.

Every year, parents of freshman and sophomores ask me what they should be doing to help prepare their students for college. And every year, I am reminded that the students who fare best in this process are those who come to it having spent some serious energy on self-reflection.

I want to say to them, "The game will come. Now, it's time to practice and test your skills in a friendly environment. Maybe push yourself a little. Or try a new game altogether."

Now Cool Cat Teacher's recent post has got me thinking about the ways in which we can all benefit from having learning networks, in addition to mentors and coaches.

And there's the question of readiness. What could coaches tell me about the difference between working with a ninth grader as opposed to an eleventh grader? Is there a conceptual threshold, a point at which helping students seek out coaches and mentors and/or develop networks is developmentally appropriate?

Crystal Ball Gazing

2008-11-04T06:54:00.000-05:00

Image: bb_matt via Flickr

When parents think about their children's futures, what do they see?

The essentially unknowable nature of the future has become even more opaque in recent years, or at least that's the contention.

Students, we're told, are essentially preparing for jobs that we don't even know exist yet.

How does that change our work as college counselors?

Should we be spending more time helping students to identify their learning styles, core competencies, unique passions, and possible deficits?

If yes, where does that time come from?

I've been re-reading Stephen Downes' excellent post on Things You Really Need to Learn and thinking about how those ideas might apply to the college search process.

What are the things students really need to learn about colleges as they try to determine which schools represent the best "fit" for them?

What are the things students need to know in order to assess a school's ability to prepare them for the great unknown?

And how will they learn these things?

What Would It Take?

2008-10-18T20:07:00.008-04:00

Image by Brian Talbot via Flickr

Three things and a question.

While camping with a group of parents, some of whom had adopted trans-racially, I learned that some folks were starting "bridge the gap" advocacy groups to see what they could do, in partnership with teachers, to help put a dent in the achievement gap that still exists for so many students of color in America. The parents who belonged to such a group were practically evangelizing about it, and the parents who didn't looked as if they might go home and start one.

In talking with my friends who are mothers of black male adolescents, they (in particular) seem almost desperate for a way to counter the anti-intellectual, "I'll just play great basketball" stance that seems like the culturally ingrained "go to" aspiration for their sons.

When talking with a representative of a college admissions office about their special campus visitation program for multicultural students recently, I found myself thinking, "What I want is 120+ YouTube videos, each 2 minutes long, and each one featuring a different African-American young man who has "made it" – in a way he defines for himself." The only criteria being that it can't be a way that is solely defined by athletics.

Would it help? What would help? I know there are access programs and summer camps and what all, but clearly whatever we're doing is not enough. In my experience, a student's ability to imagine themselves into their as-yet-unknowable future is a critical ingredient in their successfully heading into productive citizenry as an adult. I know that the tangible barriers to academic achievement are only too real for many students. But I think this internal, invisible wall is just as real, and no less critical. Who are the thought leaders in this work, and how can we help them? Where is the network working on this?

CCK08: Necessary Preconditions?

2008-10-01T11:08:00.005-04:00

Image: genvessel, via Flickr

In reading and commenting on some class participants' blogs today, I found myself paying particular attention to the comments on Sarah Stewart's recent post. Folks there were talking of both their longing for connection and dialogue, and their frustration with connection and dialogue gone wrong. There were also some interesting comments about the inherent implied tensions between "learner-directed" learning and "teacher-directed" learning. All of which got me thinking: if networked connections are the lifeblood of learning, what are the necessary preconditions for those connections?

Here are the things that come to mind for me:
a shared means of connecting
a willingness to fail
a willingness to be wrong
a willingness to seem unknowing
trust in the other nodes of the network you're trying to build
some degree of cognitive discomfort ("The intent of sense making is to increase the cognitive comfort of an individual by reducing confusion and chaos." - G. Siemens, Connectivism: Learning Theory or Pasttime for the Self-Amused) (hat tip to marialetizia for the excerpt)
a perception of relevance

What comes to mind for you? What am I missing? Do you think there are constants, here, or is everyone's list different?

CCK08

CCK08: Working the Network

2008-09-24T21:14:00.008-04:00

Image by Raphael Schmid via Flickr

I heard a story once about the first wave of immigrants to the US after the Iron Curtain fell. Some of the former Eastern Bloc citizens, after making their way to the land of plenty, headed back to wherever they came from. They found the choices too bewildering. I have no idea if the story is true. But it sticks in my mind.

I imagine those folks standing in the middle of the detergent aisle at Shop Rite for the first time. And I think, "I know what that feels like."

It's email. And the internet. And cell phones. And cable TV. And iPods. We are swamped.

I remember when it was possible to be caught up with lesbian fiction. Seriously. It was the early eighties, there wasn't that much of it, and I was in school, so I had time to read it. All of it. And then at some point, that was no longer possible. I had to start depending on other people's reviews to get a sense of what I might want to read next. I needed a network.

In my work life, it was probably the NACAC listserv that brought the power of networks home to me. I don't know how many members National Association for College Admission Counseling has, but the listserv is a high-traffic situation. Today I think my daily digest had 32 messages. Most of which weren't anything I needed.

But. I sent along an answer to someone else's question. I tweaked some content in the College Lists wiki.

If I ever DO need to tap into the experience of a large group of people who are thinking about the same kinds of academic matchmaking challenges I am, I know where to find them.

This is a bounded network. It's comprised of folks whose membership is synonymous with their membership in a pre-defined group. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good.

What I see happening, down the line, is my filtering capabilities increasing dramatically, so that I'm able to tap into some less obvious, less formal, but no-less-helpful networks. Less and less about the needle in the haystack. More and more about tending to the nets and letting them do their thing. What do you think your future holds for you?

Image by Pandiyan via Flickr