Facebook Squatting and other thoughts from ISPRA

Yesterday, I presented at the spring conference for the Iowa School Public Relations Association on using web 2.0 tools to enhance public relations in school districts. A couple of interesting perspectives came out.

First, I was surprised to see, out of the 3 applications that I demonstrated (Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter), Facebook was the application that people were interested in coming into the presentation. In fact, Facebook was the application they were eager to start using (maybe just as soon as I told them it was okay to). And when I mentioned the Salem-Keizer public schools and their use of Facebook to help procure support for a bond issue, I swear I could see the salivation.

To better summarize, blogs were passe, and Twitter was yet undiscovered. But the people in the room were currently engaged in discussions trying to convince their board to create a Facebook Page. Which, given the lack of blogging by school district officials that is out there, it makes me wonder. Blogging perhaps isn't flashy enough? Not reaching the schools publics? Maybe blogging was a technology with so much promise and potential and little that came out of it. And this, of course, is troubling, given that I think all the web 2.0 tools have so much promise and potential.

Second, when showing the audience which local districts were using Facebook, there were some surprised audience members. Some who found out for the first time that they had a Facebook account. One that they didn't create.

This highlights the need for Facebook Squatting, the process where you reserve a Facebook Page even if you have no intentions of using it, because of the fear someone else will take it surreptitiously. The presentation changed course mid-stream (it felt like one of my language arts classes from years past) to a discussion about protecting your digital brand.

And, this is where the panic set in. How do we peruse the entirety of the internet, including Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, and all the smaller networking tools, searching for imposters, vandalism, name-mudding? RSS and mashups are only part of the solution, it still takes a lot of manpower. It was a moment to illustrate the speedy world; people went in with the mindset that they maybe should start learning about some web 2.0 tools to better communicate, and left understanding they had to know about the tools just to protect the district. Once again, it isn't an option for schools to change on their timetable; schools are being forced to change by the realities of the world around them.

Third, despite the topic being jammed into "penalty time" (the presentation went 10 minutes over), Twitter was the eye opener. This was not surprising; I still feel this is the most underutilized communication tool out there for schools. There was general consensus among the group--they liked the potential of Twitter better than Facebook. It allowed for "one-way following". It takes less time to set up and can easily fit within the workflow. It is lightweight enough a technology to be perfect for schools. And the potential for vandalism and libel on the school's account is nil.

More to come from this topic...

Will Richardson

If you are excited about the new world of technology in education, and you are unfamiliar with the work of Will Richardson, I apologize for not posting this sooner. I've mentioned before that Will Richardson is one of my favorite authors and bloggers, one whose thoughts on the read/write web have had a profound effect on my own classroom.

In the discussion about the concept of literacy, Richardson is one of many to point out that we are facing new literacies in our world. He identifies huge shifts the read/write web is bringing about:

1. Content moving from teacher-controlled to student-controlled
2. Classes moving from 1 teacher and time-slot to many teachers available 24/7.
3. Class structures moving from individual work to collaborative work, even outside of the building walls.
4. Teaching moving from lecture to conversation
5. Skills moving from "know what is important" to "know where to find it"
6. Students moving from readers to contributors
7. The medium for student work moving from paper to electronic forms
8. The format for student work moving from text only to multimedia
9. Mastery moving from the test to the product
10. The goal moving from completion to contribution

When I work with educators or teach graduate courses on technology, one of the crucial things for me is the level of acceptance in the truth of these shifts. I have struggled as a professional development trainer in that I can easily provide teachers the "wow" of technology integration. In fact, I rarely fail, and that doesn't say anything about me... it says everything about the natural draw to human interest that is technology. But, I haven't as easily made this connection, that the world of teaching and learning is fundamentally changing, and we as educators have to change with it. Rare is it that I find a teacher willing to admit that the way they currently teach--which admittedly might be very good--will be completely outmoded in a matter of years.

As sincere as I can be, I say to you that these shifts are real, and I see no way a school without a quality digital curriculum meeting the needs of our students much longer, despite the quality of teacher in the classroom. I have to make my move from "trainer in technology" to "trainer in pedagogy". Or, I too will be outmoded as an educational technology specialist.

Using Wikipedia in the Classroom

A teacher once told me Wikipedia is the McDonalds of the digital world. It suffers from being the biggest fish out there, and because of this, is the victim of misinformation and rumors. And while all of its rivals get a free pass, it continues to thrive.

This analogy didn't work for me to well (I loved Supersize Me) but I see the point. Before I even have this discussion with teachers, I get the "Wikipedia? I won't allow that in my classroom. The information is not credible." The rumors out there are too persistent to trust it.

I've wanted to say something like "are you nuts? That's the one sure-fire way to get them to use the site." I once banned kids from reading John Knowles' A Separate Peace, not because I didn't want them to read the book, but because I wanted them to. For years of offering it as a free-reading choice, I'd have vicious stares from students who felt betrayed into reading something "so boring". When it was banned, however, they had to read it. And you thought reverse psychology only stopped working at age 4.

But, to say that would be a little crass. So, here's what I generally say about it. What site do you trust? What site is beyond the need to be critical of what it says?

The reality is, as Will Richardson points out, we are having a great shift in literacy:

In the era of textbooks and printed resources, we could be pretty sure the content had been checked and edited before being published. Reading, for all its intents, was a fairly passive experience. Today, however, readers cannot assume that what they are reading has been reviewed by someone else with an eye toward truth and accuracy. The Web is now a printing press for the masses, and so readers themselves must learn to be critical consumers of the information they consider.

Thus, all sites are essentially important to the learning process, even those that are marginal in quality, for it gives students a chance to discern bias, reliability, timely information, and embedded opinion.

This is not to say Wikipedia is my resource of choice; it isn't. But it is my student's resource of choice. And therefore, as a teacher, I need to instruct them on its uses and limitations, just like I need to do for Google.

One of my favorite thinkers of education, Wesley Fryer, raises many good points (check out his blog entry for a more thorough explanation of these):

1. Have students follow up on the external links listed in the notation section
2. Have students create their own content to become part of the collaborative process
3. Teach students the proper use of quotations
4. Use it to follow breaking news
5. Use it to explore controversial issues

One teacher I had in a graduate course I taught would have added a sixth. Show how fraudulent the website is with required reading about phony experts and contrived entries, and show students examples from the website that are inaccurate. I thought this was, at least, educating them about the website, rather than straight out banning it with no explanation whatsoever. Unless she was secretly going the Separate Peace route.

Definition of Integration

Like many parents, my wife and I ask our kids what they did at school today. When my kids first started school, they would list off "recess, lunch, reading...", things they did every day. They quickly became more sophisticated in their answers, saying things like "Today we had music", or "Today we had an assembly." One of the answers I get about once a cycle now is "Today, we had computers".

When I work with teachers on using technology in education, we use the buzzword "integration". That word has slipped to the likes of "standards" and "rigor" in terms of a word with a watered-down definition.

For most teachers, integration means "use". For a few, it means forced use ("I do it because we're told to use technology..."), but the overwhelming majority of teachers look forward to having students use technology. It provides energy and opportunities for learning... both for student and teacher.

The problem is, "use" of technology is peripheral. It's a side item in the day, a separate chunk of learning circumstances and environment. It is like it is for my kids: first we have reading, then we have computer time. Or, today is the day we get to go to the lab.

This isn't integration. The use of technology isn't seamlessly infused into the learning process. It is an abrupt and conscious shift in it. No student will be unaware when they work on a computer.

This leads to technology being used for technology's sake, not learning's sake. David Warlick has phrased this as "getting past the 'wow' of technology." Sure, learning about technology is important, but this practice doesn't mirror life. When you are at work, do you consciously have "computer time"? For me, the answer is that I used to, back when computers first came around, or when the internet first came around. But now, using the computer is a seamless part of my workflow, as I bounce from using it to using other tools to accomplish my tasks, like face-to-face discussions, the telephone, and resource manuals.

Think of seamless integration this way: a pencil is, for all intents and purposes, a piece of technology. It is used for a great deal of work in school, and that's a good thing. However, my kids don't come home and tell me "we used a pencil today." It's picked up and used and then put down again with out conscious interruption. That's where we need to get with computerized technology.

Now, this isn't the fault of the teacher. I recently showed some teachers Survey Monkey as a way to pre-assess student understanding before a lesson. The teachers were very excited about the possibilities. So, being the killjoy that I am, I raised the question "What would it look like if you tried to use this in your current classroom?" For the elementary teachers, that would require getting all the students up, go down to the computer lab for a 2-minute survey, and then come back. 10 minutes of time lost in the transportation, another 10 lost in the preparation. The secondary wasn't much better, as a student would have to go get the laptop cart from next door and then each student would have to get out a laptop, take the survey, and put the laptop back. The truth is the teachers won't use it. I wouldn't either. Despite its obvious benefits, Survey Monkey is a conscious interruption to the learning process.

This has serious danger to everything we do with teaching technology integration. When Inspiration came out, I loved it. I saw so many uses, and not just of the end-of-term big-project variety. Five minute applications like take the concepts we talked about today and sort them on this venn diagram, and the computer will tell you whether you are correct. But, I couldn't integrate it... it had to be peripheral learning. We can be gung ho about the read/write web, but it will sadly become the latest Inspiration if we don't change our structured approach to integration. We have to get a device in the hands of every student and make this learning seamless.

RSS: a primer

RSS (which stands for Real Simple Syndication, or in some circles Rich Site Summary) is one of the most valuable tools revolutionizing our world today. Fact of the matter is, without RSS, blogs and wikis would not be used even remotely as much as they are. This is significant because most educators have no idea what RSS is.

The word typically used to describe RSS is a "feed". Using a past example, news stations would have a feed from the Associated Press, and anytime the AP had a new story, it would be sent over the wire to the newsroom. This feed always kept the news room up to the minute in national news, even though they couldn't afford to send a reporter out to national hotspots.

With the read/write web, feeds work in a similar fashion. If a website offers RSS and you subscribe to that website's RSS feed, you will automatically get every update from that site sent to you. You can stay current without having to go manually search all of those places. This works for blogs, wikis, podcasts, search engines, delicious tags, you name it.

The key is what is called an RSS aggregator. This is an online tool that brings all your feeds to you for you to browse. Aggregators have different tools, such as sorting features, ranking features, and more. But, the basic premise to all of them is you log into the reader and the reader will show you every new thing that has appeared in your subscribed feeds.

I have used two readers, Bloglines and Google Reader. Google Reader is my preferred choice, mainly because I find myself on Google for many other reasons. For directions on how to set up a Google Reader account, you can go here.

But, how do you use it in the classroom? Well, certainly if you create a blog or wiki, you are already using it. Still, you are missing out on an important 21st century tool that will help you become a better teacher if that's all you do. The top thing teachers can do is use the reader and subscribe to academic feeds in your field. Find blogs that highlight good pedagogy. Subscribe to search tags such as "elementary + math". The benefit for teachers here is that they connect to other professionals. They are unleashing the power of the web, spending more time learning from information out there than searching for it. A growth in the knowledge base will result in a growth of the teacher.

Still, as David Parry points out, teachers not only have to use it themselves, but also have their students use it. He mentions:

The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this. Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found. What RSS does is allow students to make this distinction, to receive content as "bits" easy to scan, and then to select what they want to read.

Students need to use RSS aggregators as a 21st century tool to be ready to digest the huge quantities of information the internet churns out everyday. They need to use it to learn the essential skill of shifting from "scanning" to "reading", as Parry points out. The aggregator is the tool that makes that happen.

Parry has another good point:

One of the most frequent complaints of students who have been required to blog for class is that they feel as if what they are writing does not get read by anyone except the instructor. By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs; every student in the class will get the class “newspaper” with headlines and synopsis of each student's writing, allowing them to scan all of the posts at once, and then decide which ones are most relevant, and select them for close reading. Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post, so that students can post to a blog and continue to follow up on the comment thread. Again, this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continous conversation rather than static paper design.

This, in a nutshell, is how teachers should be teaching writing in the 21st century classroom, as a continuous process for a larger audience. RSS makes this process possible. A class fully utilizing RSS would start with a common writing activity where students would need to respond to a question... let's say, "What do we need to do to help the environment?" Through RSS, all students could then quickly scan other students ideas for thoughts that shape their reading. A step in the assignment would be: "Now that you have listed your initial thought, incorporate into your post what another student has said, either modifying your thought or refuting the other student's assertion." Students would have to become good readers in order to become good writers.

Read/Write Web - Drawbacks?

Like most things in the world the read/write web has its drawbacks in use in education.

Actually, no it doesn't.

I know, that's a strong statement. But it is the truth. It's not a matter of "the good outweighs the bad, so use it", it's a matter of "there is no bad, so we are crazy if we are not using it". Some of the benefits are well-stated, being free, collaborative, easily accessible, flexible and a medium for communicating your thoughts beyond the walls of your classroom. So, let's look at the common reasons why not to use it:

1. It requires technology, which a resource-strapped school doesn't have.
2. It increases the chance for a student to misuse it, via libel or cyberbullying
3. It exposes students to the outside world, which at the worst could be predatory, and at the least could be critical
4. It creates information overload
5. It creates a bunch of unreliable information
6. It takes time to create web 2.0 lessons

Looking at these critically-
1. It requires technology, which a resource-strapped school doesn't have. Web 2.0 allows for the flexibility to get around resource limitations. No computers in the classroom? Students can use computers in the labs? No computers in the school? The library or home will suffice. Web 2.0 requires no special software and aren't that intensive to run (as opposed to gaming or photo-editing programs).

2. It increases the chance for a student to misuse it, via libel or cyberbullying. Excellent! Not that misuse by students is good, but rather because I as a teacher can help students learn to avoid it.

The thought that schools can't push technology because of cyberbullying makes really no sense. It's like Holden Caufield trying to keep students from swear words. The truth is, people are often mean, both in the real world and in the digital world. How do we teach students to behave correctly in this environment? If we avoid some of the darker realities of human beings, pretend they don't exist, it often does more harm. The way to have students counteract bullying is to show them exactly what it is and talk to them honestly about its effects.

3. It exposes students to the outside world, which at the worst could be predatory, and at the least could be critical. To deny using web 2.0 out of fear of predatory people is lazy. There are privacy features and anonymity features that can take that out of the equation. But to deny it because it exposes student to critical review is awful. We are in the business to help students prepare for the world, to make them realize that their thoughts are valued and that they "have a place at the grown-up table". How do we do that when the only audience a student has is the teacher and the recycle bin?

Exposing students to criticism will help students become more resilient and confident in their abilities. Giving them a venue to speak with others and learn from others is authentic. It is one of the best features of the tool.

4. It creates information overload - As Clay Shirky points out, that ship already sailed with Gutenberg. Once the printing press came out, there was no way we would be able to read everything that was available.

Shirky mentions what we truly have is that our filters for determining which information is important have been broken. We need to find new filters.

This is the definition of "21st century skills"... this is what students need to know in our classroom. How do you determine the quality of information? If we don't use web 2.0, we have no method for developing that skill. Students filters are never threatened if they have one textbook to use as a source. And then when they are in the real world, they are weaponless.

5. It creates a bunch of unreliable information - Just like #4, this is the reality of the world. We have to arm students with ways to determine reliability of sources. And in all honesty, it is about time. We have relied on the belief that our math books are all-encompassing, our language arts anthologies are of the utmost merit in literary selection, and that our history books are correct. They aren't. They are fallible. When have we had students check their assumptions of the textbook? We are setting them up to be naive. And once again, web 2.0 is the tool to bring this to the forefront.

An interesting sidenote: Wikipedia is often attacked as being without scholarly merit because of the nature of its compilation (it is created by lay people for pete's sake!). Is it susceptible to inaccurate information? You bet. But it is even more susceptible to swift correction of inaccurate information. A good activity with your class... inject a rogue piece of information on a page that will be well-traveled. Make it knowingly wrong. See how long it lasts before someone edits it. A week? A day? When we tried with "Arthur Miller" and "Salem Witch Trials", they were edited out before the end of the period. While Wikipedia might have inaccuracies, I know the World Book will have inaccuracies, in anything that has changed since its last publication. Which place is the best to source for election data, for example?

6. It takes time to create web 2.0 lessons - Good. We have an over-reliance on the worksheet masters that are used every year anyways. Nothing will be a better use of your time, in my opinion.

But even the central premise there isn't correct. If you compare the amount of time it used to take to create technology integration, web 2.0 is saving time. I used to have students create web pages for their research projects. This would require the use of Adobe GoLive, which would take quite a bit of instruction time. No reason to do that anymore. Web 2.0 takes the intensive learning curve out of the equation, meaning the benefits of technology are immediately accessible to students. It can take less than 10 minutes to show students what blogs are and how you want them to use blogs in your classroom.

What this all boils down to is that the read/write web is the world we live in, just as literacy is the world we live in. And just as we correctly say that literacy should be infused in all classrooms, not just language arts, the read/write web should be infused in all classrooms, not just the computer applications class.

The key is, as always, proper teaching. It means using the tool and all the "warts" as learning opportunities to foster correct use and growth. This requires professional development, but it is essential. To back down from web 2.0 because of "drawbacks" ultimately shortchanges students for the 21st century.

How to Use the Read/Write Web

The term "web 2.0" has reached the point in my life where it has become a glittering generality that makes me roll my eyes (sort of like "rigor and relevance", "higher standards", or "maverick"). You find people who haven't the faintest idea of what it means parroting it as though they do. There is a clamor for using web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and yet, there are no qualifications, no best practices, no "when using web 2.0, do this, not that" instructions to help teachers. As long as you're blogging, you're doing good!

Well, that's nowhere the truth. Using web 2.0 tools needs careful thought to create deep learning like any other strategies. It should feature sound professional development, not one-time exposure. And, it requires reflection afterwards, to seek continuous improvement. Speaking from experience, you are almost certain not to get it right the first time you use web 2.0 in the classroom.

This is mainly true because it is not a fully researched implementation. There haven't been control-based studies of n>1000 looking at the implementation effects of blogging on reading comprehension. But, while that it is true, it is a beautiful thing! A better-researched integration, by definition, is not cutting edge.

So, when addressing how to use the read/write web in your classroom, I start with this. Conduct your own research. Don't skew it. If, after trying out blogging, your students aren't improving in your targeted areas, this isn't a bad thing. Blogging, like other web 2.0 tools, is so adaptable that you can refine the instruction without scrapping it. Here is a breakdown of the steps:

1. Identify your targeted outcomes - This can be more than one thing (it should be a few, at the least), but they should be specific outcomes. If you don't have an idea of what you are trying to improve, of course, then you are going to have more problems than just integrating web 2.0... your whole instructional methodology would be suspect. Still, this is where you start.

2. Generate your baseline data - This should be difficult to do. If you are looking to improve the ability to correctly answer questions on a standardized test, then you need to rethink your integration of web 2.0. More likely, if you are looking to integrate web 2.0, you are trying to develop collaboration, reflection, problem-solving, and argumentation skills, and these aren't easily quantifiable.

I would accomplish this by giving a small test over a short story right at the beginning of the year. The test would have two short essay questions requiring the student to create a paragraph that integrates their thought on several different topics. Using my rubric, I'd generate my baseline data (the scores of students at the beginning of the year tended to be 2 out of 5).

3. Determine an integration tool and technique - There are so many possibilities that this post can't cover them all. But, some starter ideas:

• Students create reflective blogs based on individual free-writing questions posed by the teacher to provoke thought
• Students generate a persuasion podcast to try and convince an audience of a particular viewpoint
• Students collaborate through a wiki to create a study guide for the course
• Students participate in a blog forum, commenting on the teacher blog as well as other participant comments
• Students produce a screencast presentation, explaining how to do something computer related, such as navigate a website or post a movie to youtube
• Students post and share photos on Flickr to demonstrate visual literacy of a topic, like emotions or "the 6 pillars of character" or cultural diversity
• Students use Google Docs to peer edit a fellow student's composition
• Students use geotagging to create a slideshow of elements (such as pictures or places in a novel) in Google Earth

For all of these, a teacher will have to adapt the integration technique to the specific curriculum they are teaching. In time, I hope this blog has an opportunity to highlight some specific applications that teachers are currently using in Iowa.

4. Teach - Or, perhaps I should say, let the students learn. Introduce the basics of what they need to know, and then let them learn how to use the tool effectively.

5. Formatively reflect - The first time I started using blogs in the classroom, I had no idea the draw to avatars (the image that goes with the blog). Live and learn. I saw that in the future, I needed to provide them a set amount of time (10 minutes) to personalize their account, and at that point, all personalization had to be done outside of class time. I never had an issue after that mental note.

6. Gather data - This, along with step 2, is where educators usually fail. We will learn about new techniques, try them out, even learn from our mistakes. Yet, if we have to demonstrate if the technique truly worked versus an unchosen alternative (giving them worksheets), we rely on subjective observations only. In my case, I monitored the student writing and kept samples of it for parents as well as administrators. Which leads to...

7. Share your data - Most educators can't get to this step. During parent-teacher conferences, I would talk about blogging and show parents the technique via a laptop at the table. Then I could produce their first writing sample and then subsequent ones to talk about growth (or lack of growth).

8. Reflect on the implementation - The data will give you true confidence in your teaching or drive you to make changes. Both are great things. The thing that isn't great is having no data to see if what you are doing is making a difference. It subscribes to the glittering generality (hey look! I'm using web 2.0! It has to be good!).

My point to all this is, like anything else we do in education, we have to see if it works instead of assuming it does. I'm wary of what web 2.0 is becoming in education, a supposed failsafe that allows misuse. And I'm equally wary of the "researched-based" tag that educators sometimes hide behind. I'm confident in its utility because I have measured its use.

The read/write web - a primer

I'll refer to web 2.0 and the read/write web quite a bit in this blog. Here's an overview of what they mean:

What is it? Tim O'Reilly defines it as:

...the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

While that definition is the standard, it's too dense. For educators, there are some basic features of it.

• It is free (for all intents and purposes), which in the computer world means it is "open"
• It is internet-based, meaning it is "accessible"
• It uses rss and tagging. This makes it manageable to use, which gets referred to as a "push" technology (it comes to us, the consumer, instead of us having to go to it).
• It also allows people to easily make and share web content (the "write" portion of the read/write web)
• It creates opportunities for feedback, meaning it is "collaborative".

So, web 2.0 really is a collective noun for a bunch of tools that all feature these attributes. These tools are different, despite their common attributes. There are some situations where the one tool is useful, and some for others. Here are the most commonly used:

1. Blogging - which you are currently looking at. It is an online journal which allows commenting from viewers
2. Wikis - An online collaborative document that people build together. The most famous example is Wikipedia, but there are many uses outside of making an encyclopedia-like reference tool.
3. Podcasting - Basically an audio blog. It is an audio recording, whether that it is a radio show, music, a parody, a debate, or whatever spoken activity.
4. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - A protocol that allows a person to subscribe, meaning you don't have to go check for the latest entry... it will be pushed down to your computer. This applies to blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, and social bookmarks alike.
5. Aggregator - A program that collects your RSS feeds so that you can quickly read all the new entries
6. Social bookmarking - A tool that allows you to put tags with your online bookmarks, and therefore share tags with other users.
7. Social networks - While Myspace and Facebook are common examples, there are many other uses of a community of users pursuing common knowledge (Nings are good examples).
8. Photosharing - Posting photos for others to see and comment, such as Flickr.
9. Videosharing - Same as above, but for videos, like Youtube
10. Geotagging - Putting geographical information, such as latitude and longitude, in a tag with items. People who geotag photos often share them via Google Earth.

There are many more uses of web 2.0 technology... this is just a primer. But it provides the terminology most used in the educational field.

Events, Pt. 3

Yep… I’m still going here. I’ll limit myself to 6.

5. Two Books - There are two books that I have read that have shifted my view of education into the next gear. One, without surprise, is The World is Flat by Friedman. I find that if an educator has read the book and is making this list, the book finds its way on it. The other is just a little more obscure to the average person, but equally unsurprising: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. That book gives a practical summary of web 2.0 technology and their application in the classroom. But more importantly, it talks about the philosophical shift in teaching, as we go to the “read/write web”. He outlines several shifts in the way educators must think. This was one book that, immediately after reading it, I designed and offered a graduate course to educators based on it.

I’m sure in future posts I’ll highlight the important thoughts I see in these two works, as well as others (I make no pretense that when I make this list in five years, there will be different books on it). However, there are some things that stand out apart from the specific content in the books. One is that they create for me the sense of urgency. We can’t sit and wait… we must change now. The second is the networking element. Before Will Richardson, I knew nothing about the community of 2.0 educators out there. Using him as a starting point, I’ve connected to many others with many ideas.

6. Schwinkie

This too will need some explanation. Schwinkie is a former student of mine. Schwinkie isn’t his real name. I could have used a generic fake name, like Tom or Fred, except that I have had a Tom and a Fred, and they would think I was talking about them. So I have to use a name that I will never come across. For that, I look back to my clever students. As my wife was pregnant with our second child, I offered students extra credit to come up with a name to name the child. One came up with Schwinkie. Seriously. She liked the sound of it. That would never fly in Scrabble…

So, we’ll call this student I had Schwinkie. Actually, it could be any student. This is a student who our school was not serving, who was at risk for dropping out. Schwinkie was doing things which just didn’t make sense… staying up to study until 2:00 in the morning, and then sleeping in until noon the next day and missing the test, stuff like that. Schwinkie was also acting out to get attention. In fact, Schwinkie would have been out of school already, had it not been for the work of Dwight Laidig, perhaps the best teacher I have ever seen in connecting to the un-connectable.

At any rate, this isn’t a fairy tale. Schwinkie is still a student, a junior this year, and still at risk for dropping out. We’re hopeful he will make it through, but we haven’t got the panacea to share with you on how we did it. As a principal at this school, in visiting with Dwight and our Dean of Students, it really helped me realize the magnitude of the need to find alternative forms of education. We have to do more, to find other options. We have lived in a static world of the educational structure, and we haven’t progressed nearly as fast as I thought we would on NCLB.

I really like Schwinkie… I spent a lot of quality time with him in my office (I’ll let you imagine the circumstances that led to those). I really like Dwight… I think he is an amazing educator that I wish I could have supported better. And because of this, it has changed my view.