Shift to the Future

Many of us resist change.  We like our comfort zone.  However we are changing constantly as that is just part of living.  One of my co-speakers at the symposium Moving Educational Technology from Enhancement to Transformation held yesterday said that as soon as we speak, we change.  How true.  Change is inevitable so why do so many of us try to resist it? At the symposium I spoke about Transformative Change .  We crowd sourced ideas from the participants on what they can stop, continue, and start doing to increase success in shifting to majority adoption of innovations in their classroom, school, or district.  Y ou can view the audience contribution here along with my co-speakers audience feedback on What Transformation and Ecologies of Learning . Organizations and individuals have a choice to embrace change, grow, and become more than they are today.  Alternatively, they can fear and resist change and ultimately become less useful and potent...

Once upon a time, people who could learn to read, write, and calculate were deemed competent to participate in the democracy, work in a factory, and live the good life.  Don’t you just long for the simplicity of that era?  Some days, I think I do.  Our fast paced world where “ [c]hange is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be nearly continuous ” ( Present Shock : When Everything Happens Now) is not simple, and old competencies are the very basic minimum requirements to prepare a person to fully participate.  Our world has changed dramatically since the days when learning was simple and slow. Competence (or competency ) is the ability of an individual to do a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviors that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviors in individual employees. A key responsibility I have in my role as CIO is to develop and lead an IT group.  Overall, I am impresse...

Day 1 at the World Future Society has come to a close.  Today I attended an all day workshop “Organizing at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy”.  The speaker was Brian Robertson from Holacracy One with the motto, “Liberating the soul of organizations”. You know how after lunch during a full day workshop the afternoon seems to drag on, you get sleepy,…  well that didn’t happen today.  The entire group (12 of us) were totally engaged past 5pm the scheduled end time.  It was really that good. So what is Holacracy.  Disclaimer: my one day exposure to this “movement” doesn’t qualify me to speak intelligently about it but I’ll give you my take on it.  Brian Robertson talks about it using a software engineering metaphor: it is a new operating system for organizations or a fundamental upgrade to the core organization.  The organization gains new capabilities and capacity that all processes can leverage.  It is a practice, not just a model ...

Last year I had the privilege of facilitating a learning team consisting of a small group of school principals.  Learning teams in our District are learning structures designed to support action research.  These principals had recently purchased tablet PCs and had the following question: “In what ways will my leadership skills be improved by my learning the various tools of my tablet?”   They are leaders of elementary (K-5) and middle (6-8) schools. Learning teams are a very important method for our teachers and principals to experience embedded action research of their own design.  I presented their story at CUEBC in October 2009 .  We have over 1/3 of our educators who’ve chosen to be on a learning team and around 41% of all learning teams have a learning with technology focus.  I talked about technology leadership in a previous post and I think this group of Principals exemplify learning and leadership. Role of Principal and Technology They see the...

I remember the days when we all talked about creating or updating our technology plans.  Those in K12 will remember carefully taking stock and calculating student to computer ratios.  We’d strive to meet targets like 3:1 at the secondary level and 6:1 for elementary and compare and contrast our respective Districts accordingly.  Essentially technology use in schools was mostly focused on computers, mainly in labs, and software, often of the edutainment and “drill and kill” variety.  Such was the way of tech in schools for 20 years… Around 2004-5 our School District started to look more critically at the use of technology.  We observed, especially in elementary schools, use of technology that seemed to be more about entertain or rewarding kids rather than being connected to classroom learning.  I worked with a colleague of mine, @gary_kern who facilitated elementary and middle school educators in a process to develop a technology for learning plan.  ...