EARCOS

Just had the first day of pre-conference learning. Attended a full day session led my Harvey Alvy ( an experienced and distinguished Internation educator! ) on the topic of beginning years in leadership.

What an awesome day – lots of time to reflect and talk about current practise… reflection on managing and leading change… promising practise vs. best practise… “The buck stops here”…”the Balcony view”…”visibility as a leader”…”inboxZERO – what a great idea!”…awesome food… networking and meeting leaders form around SE Asia…

Of course, as the IT Director I took copious notes… in my diary. Hmmm… might have to improve the shareability of that!

  

8 )


“People don’t care WHAT YOU KNOW until they KNOW YOU CARE!”
Such a lot to take in – but a fantastic start to the weekend!

"The death of education and the birth of learning"

“The death of education and the birth of learning” –  a memorable and challenging quote to end this excellent and thought-provoking video from Consortium for School Networking(COSN).



This video is a couple of years old now, but still a very relevant statement about challenging our traditional notions of education and the prevalence of “bricks & mortar” entities in education. I wonder if education wuld still rank 55 out of 55 industries. I am hoping that we can at least claim to have outgunned “coal mining” by now!
At my current school we are investigating the development of an “online college” to deliver AP courses both as part of a hybrid solution for our on-site students, and also to reach out to the wider community here in Hong Kong and eventually across SE Asia. It really presents some challenges to our current concept of our “school”!


Exciting times. 
Scary times.

Sue me.

“I’m waiting for the day when a school district gets sued by a parent for not teaching kids to be responsible online … It’s going to happen sooner or later.”
– Jim Klein, Director IS&T, Los Angeles County, California

From this article about web 2.0 and filtering.
Of course it is coming!! If we can sue McDonalds for making us fat then that is not a terribly outrageous extrapolation…

Use the force!

“ ..netbooks act as a force multiplier  – not the force. It is really good instruction that takes the netbook out of the box and makes it powerful…” 
– Dan Maas, CIO Littleton Public School System, Colorado

I read this article today about the introduction of netbooks in a 1:1 laptop environment. There are some very good tenets here – especially about focusing on tools to use instead of operating system. I am still not 100% convinced about the issue of open-source software… if there was also greater focus on web-based tools I would say they were on to a winner!
In particular the quote from Dan Maas struck me as poignant to all of our ongoing efforts to infuse technology into our teaching – if there is not good practise in the first place, then there isnt much to multiply!

Sometimes they go too far.

I just watched an interesting video interview with Nicholas Negroponte ( the co founder of MIT media labs and founder of “one laptop per child” ) who made the bold statement that within 5 years “books” would be a thing of the past. Sometimes he goes a little off the deep end. For instance one claim he made was almost valid:

“We put 100 books on each laptop, so if we ship 100 laptops to an african village then they have 10,000 books”. True mathematically.
But then he said something like “…we are shipping these laptops to villages without electricity!” so technically I guess the equation should read:


(100x books) x100 laptops) – electricity = no books.