I would suggest that school boards and provincial leaders have an important role to play by fostering innovation and by modeling the use of the technology. While school boards can never keep up with early adopters we can bring up the rear i.e. the resisters by making the tools available and by incorporating their use into the work environment. Superintendent awareness of the potential of these tools is critical. Innovative projects using 2.0 tools are being denied funding in school boards due to ignorance as much as resistance.
Your presentation this week to Ministry of Education staff here in Ontario was a wonderful opportunity to help leaders gain a better understanding.

I actually put it together as a mini-post over on the OpenAcademic blog: http://openacademic.org/news/cast-down-your-bucket

The relevant links are:
OpenCalais: http://opencalais.mashery.com

OpenID: http://openid.net/

The announcement re Google, Microsoft, IBM, VeriSign, Yahoo Joining the OpenID Foundation board: http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/58342

Cheers,

Bill

RE: “But one thing (again) that has really been sticky from EduConn was the idea that local connections support local culture (as well as a few other things, such as leadership, of course) and vice versa.”

In many ways, this mirrors how the web itself was understood, and developed. Initially, you had large companies creating user silos tied together with an internet connection — anyone remember Compuserve? Then, people fled these companies and started working on the web, and built sites to connect with “the world” — Then, people started building web sites to connect with their Neighborhood Association — sites like Craigslist show the power of micropresences, or sites with an intensely local focus.

I sense the same type of pendulum swing in education — as people get more accustomed to the presence of the tools, the focus will switch to local use. Not surprisingly, this dovetails with work happening around interoperability fueled by open standards, and a safe secure means of maintaining an identity on the web that has grassroots support, as well as support from some of the major players —

For more on the ineroperability/semantic web piece, take a look at OpenCalais. For more on the unified identity, take a look at OpenID. Just this week, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, and Verisign joined the OpenID Federation board.

I’d include links, but I don’t want the comment to get munged by the spam monsters

Cheers,

Bill

“…while change agent may be the desired role of chairs, an underlying culture must exist that permits chairs to act in transformational ways.”

I would suggest that the same is true regarding digital
teaching and learning. Mahatma Gandhi “We must live the change.” I echo Brian’s call to think globally (or flatly, as the case may be) but act locally.

Thanks for articulating so well much of what I felt as I left SLA a few weeks back. I knew going there that I would leave recharged and ready to bring new ideas back with me, and that’s not to say I did not. Rather, what I left with is similar to what you described as “teachers are connecting more and more outside their spaces but, it appears at least, not so much inside their own districts and communities.”

Reading Justin Medved and Dennis Harter, who are guest blogging at Dangerously Irrelevant this week, also makes clear that what is not occurring at the rate we need are the conversations like those that took place at EduCon. Focused discussion on pedagogy and method rather than on tools and technology.

As an administrator, the most success we have had with our staff in adopting these pedagogies is when we find a way to make them personally meaningful to them–something you often speak of. But we still face the same struggle: when the classroom doors close, does the change take shape? Without connecting to other educators, locally or globally, there is no “support group” for teachers and administrators to examine either success or failure.

Thanks for this think aloud.