Dancin' With Myself

       I don’t know if any of you have been following particularly closely, but my blog entries seem to regularly wander into 80′s pop music. I’ve cited Devo, Re-Flex, Talking Heads, and here I am with a line from Billy Idol. But as always, this isn’t about music. In this case, it’s about writing, something one wouldn’t normally associate with the bad British rocker with the bleach-blond tangle and the Elvis-like snarl.

       In the early days of social networking, most online participants were pretty self-consciously anonymous. This tendency was equal parts self-protection and self-indulgence.

       The former was a natural reaction — if you had no idea who anyone really was online (and a lot of people were pretending to be someone else for very suspicious reasons), the best defense was to not be yourself, either. The latter, of course, was a way of getting something for nothing — if you couldn’t be yourself, it was fun and exciting to re-create yourself as someone else — older, smarter, better-educated, even a completely different nationality or even gender. In a real sense, it was “dancing with yourself” – you were creating a personna with which you could play. It was a perfect reflection of the overwhelming majority of the social-networkers back then — tweens, teens, and young adults, who were, in fact, trying to create themselves in real life at the same time. But it was a great deal more self-serving, a little less purposeful, and a whole lot more self-indulgent.
       There’s nothing really wrong with all that. But the overwhelming majority of “dancing” we do in our professional and educational lives is with someone else. That is, we select a partner, and we coordinate our moves and steps to fit what that partner is good at, or interested in. We certainly have our own flair, abilities, and personna, but that doesn’t solely define the purpose, or even the character, of the dance.
       Writing is like that — when we write, we certainly want to be creative, skilled, individual, maybe even flashy. But in so-called real life, we’re most likely writing for a purpose, and that purpose requires that we attend to someone else — our audience. If we’re writing an advertisement, we have to know who might want the product, and leverage their other interests to create this new one. If we’re a newspaper reporter, we should know the reading habits and abilities of the audience of our report. If we’re simply applying for a job and writing a resumé, we’ll have no chance of winning the job unless we incorporate our future employer’s interests into our story. We do this by opening up, watching, listening — stepping out of ourselves enough to become aware of the person we hope is watching us, to learn what they’re like, what they want, what they hold as important.
       As teachers, we have to be aware that writing online brings with it some challenges. Our students have their own habits — habits they developed long before we (or any other adult, for that matter) decided to watch. They will tend to be brief, and will feel justified in purposeful misspellings and Internet slang. But even more important, when writing online, they’ll naturally stop caring about audience, since the audience can be, well, anyone and everyone. The results at best self-indulgent, disconnected, and at worst, embarrassingly inept and even, perhaps, insulting. If you don’t know your partner, you’ll be constantly in danger of stepping on toes.
       This is not to mean that online writing in a social context has no purpose, or can only produce terrible results. All writing (on or off line) takes place in a social context, but good writing is self-aware, consciously recognizing that context, and leveraging it for increased effectiveness. Like all things in education, there has to be a “smart person” in the room, guiding and critiquing the student to focus outside of himself. With such guidance, the student will improve, as will the massive amounts of content almost all young people produce online every day.
       Dancing with someone else is almost always a lot more enjoyable, as well as being much more valuable. Besides, I really can’t say I ever liked that Elvis-like snarl….

Will the Real KySTE Please Stand Up?

[Editor's Note: This posting was in anticipation of a "President's Talk" at KySTE 2012, the March conference of the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education.]

       I couldn’t resist a little research. The quiz show “To Tell the Truth,” from whence the title of this entry comes, had a simple format – three contestants attempt to convince a panel of celebrities that each has a single, specific profession, usually a very odd or interesting one. Only one, of course, is the real deal, the other two being impostors, making up what they didn’t actually know about their “chosen profession” in an attempt to throw off the panel, who would then attempt to guess which was the real professional. The quiz show was immensely popular, and has the distinction of having at least one original episode produced in all of the last 6 decades (according to Wikipedia). It ran for an astounding 24 full seasons.
And while I was on it, in preparation for our annual conference, I decided to do a little research on KySTE. KySTE isn’t quite as old as “To Tell the Truth,” but, as an organization, it is nearing the end of its second decade. One thing that KySTE has not done well is document itself, kept good historical records. I had a few names, and they produced a few more. As folks responded to my queries, I began to get a sense of this organization’s historical roots.
        Like a lot of Kentucky education initiatives, the original Kentucky Association of Technology Coordinators (KATC, the precursor to KySTE) owes a lot to the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), passed in 1991. That act, amongst other things, established the Kentucky Education Technology System (KETS). KERA noted the importance of education technology, and the Kentucky Department of Education was charged with KETS’ implementation. KDE had focus groups in the early days of KETS, bringing together education technology professionals from across the state. KATC was formed, according to some of the early players, at the encouragement of Lydia Wells Sledge from KDE, as a response to, and watchdog of, this process.
        KERA also divided the state into 8 regions, and established the Regional Service Centers to help support school districts in their ability to implement KERA, and the reforms it instituted. The 8 Regional KETS Engineers (KDE employees) met with their regional district constituencies, a structure and habit which outlived the Regional Service Centers themselves, and served as the basis for the 7 regional technology organizations (plus Jefferson County Schools, large enough to be its own “region”) which still exist today.
       Hence, the historical origins of KATC (and hence KySTE) was as a service to district tech coordinators, in coordination with regional structures serving the same population at the regional level, as they attempted to implement and make sense of the goals of KETS – specifically the systems (email, student records, etc.) and infrastructure (wiring, Internet access, etc.) that KETS specified.
       But that isn’t the whole story.
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The Mission of KySTE... (Kentucky Society for Technology in Education) is to empower the educational community in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to infuse technology as an integral part of the educational process through advocacy and leadership, promoting educational excellence and supporting technology-based innovation.

        According to some of the earlier players, the seeds for a larger vision for KATC existed right from the start. In the mid-2000’s, two years of bylaws work, a name change, a mission statement, and affiliate status with the International Association for Technology in Education (ISTE) culminated in the formalization of a very much expanded vision. The mission statement itself (see at right) implies that technology is a change agent for how the broader business of education is done. As a direct result of this vision, KySTE’s membership, and the attendance at its yearly conferences, has grown exponentially, through the addition of a lot of other education professionals – most notably classroom teachers – who share in this vision, and implement it with students through their own practice.         KySTE seems poised, as is education technology in general, to move into the mainstream, to have a seat at the table of all meaningful discussions of education reform and change. This shift can also be seen at the regional level in some of the regional organizations’ meetings, and in the work of many district technology leaders. But, of course, any expansion of work and vision brings the possibility of historical connections becoming lost or frayed.
       In its very recent history, KySTE has taken two huge steps in attempting to widen its role. It has applied for true 501(c)(3) status, which allows it to receive tax-deductible donations and award grants. And, in anticipation of that status, it has begun to implement fundraising and vendor partnerships which will make such work possible. KySTE is poised to move to the next level. But what level might that be? And what, exactly, should KySTE become? There are three possible answers to that question.

1. An extension of the original KATC. One of the major strengths of KySTE is its continued connection to regional groups with a clearly-defined and familiar membership base, drawn primarily from district technology leadership. Through these regions, KySTE has been able to successfully balance a state-level presence with a connection to real practitioners in the field. Of course, a lot of KySTE’s new constituency does not participate in these regional organizations, because, in fact, many are in the classroom when the regional groups meet. In addition, as standard systems (email, student records) have been adopted, and many previous district-supplied capabilities (such as online content management) move to the cloud, many of the huge issues facing the early KATC members have largely disappeared.
2. A true education professional organization. The Kentucky Council of Teachers of English (KCTE) is an example of an organization which serves to support and advocate for a defined part of education: English/Language Arts. It is member-driven, and serves that membership through trainings and conferences. It partners with the Kentucky Department of Education to institute standards and reform relative to that defined part. Although education technology is certainly a “defined part of education,” “education technology professionals” might very well include everyone, making it difficult to define an exact constituency.
3. A service organization. The implication of true 501(c)(3) non-profit status is that of a charitable organization like The United Way. Such organizations have governing boards, but exist primarily to service a general population (rather than a specific defined constituency or membership), through services addressing an identified general population need.

Of course, these three visions of KySTE are not mutually exclusive, but a primary focus on one would substantially impact how it might implement its vision. With one grant already “in the wild,” KySTE’s grants and member services arm, branded as KySTE Outreach, is already in the business of attempting to implement KySTE’s vision.

        Let’s assume, for the sake of illustration, that KySTE wanted to implement a new grant program. Who should it serve? At what should it be aimed? Here’s what this might look like using each of the three models above…

1. KySTE’s first grant program (still in effect) offered funds to support training through the regional tech organizations, for use as each saw fit. The audience was clearly district tech leadership as reflected by the regional group membership, with no attention to membership in KySTE itself. That more closely matches the first vision above.
2. A grant for which only members could apply, regardless of regional affiliation (or professional status), and aimed at the defined mission statement of the organization, would reflect this second vision.
3. A grant available to any educator or educational leader in Kentucky, regardless of KySTE membership, would fit the third vision.

...and that’s before we even get around to discussing the specific goals of the grant!.
        KySTE is poised for great things. What sorts of great things will be determined by the membership and leadership of this organization. It won’t be enough to depend on history. It will depend primarily on hard work – on being willing to show up, to collaborate, to provide direction for change. Like any great organization, the vision of KySTE, the next level it will achieve, will be determined by who shows up and rolls up their sleeves.
In "To Tell the Truth," the goal of the panel membership was to successfully pick the professional from several impostors. In contrast, the KySTE membership has the luxury of defining the profession itself. So when they ask, “Will the real KySTE please stand up,” will it be you?
       [The conversation about KySTE’s history, vision, and future, continues at KySTE 2012. Look for the KySTE President’s Talk, “Will the Real KySTE Please Stand up?” Friday, March 9, 9:15 a.m. For a timeline of KySTE History, see our History page.]

Mobile Computing and the Polyester Leisure Suit

       In a recent posting on EDTECH, the international discussion list part of the Humanities Network (H-Net) at Michigan State for which I was a moderator, several participants voiced the opinion that mobile devices such as the iPad and smart phone are substantially changing the way we do things. That is, anytime, anywhere access to information and processing power are a game changer, a paradigm shift our students have already made. As educators in the 21^st Century, we would be foolish not to attend to these devices and their implications for learning.

       Maybe all of these folks who’ve drunk the iPhone/iPad Kool-Aid are on to something – maybe a piece of hardware really can have a substantial impact on human history and behavior. I was reminded of an old BBC program which aired in this country on PBS channels 40 years ago called “Connections” – a quirky British historian names James Burke, decked out in the ubiquitous 1970’s polyester leisure suit, traced how significant technological advances proved to be pivotal in historical events, such as the stirrup’s role in the rise of horse-borne combat and the Byzantine Empire. Of course, I had no idea whether these “connections” were being portrayed accurately. I was very much enamored with the idea of technology-driven change, caring somewhat less about the facts.

        In the context of the broad brush of human history, one can often easily identify some big technology game-changers. Some of them, like the piano and the telephone, were (at least from my perspective) almost entirely positive in their impact. Others, like personal transportation (and its dependence on the internal combustion engine), were a bit more of a mixed bag. But for the Twentieth Century, that list must surely include the computer, and, probably even more so, the Internet – the two providing a one-two punch impacting everything from creativity to warfare.

        So does mobile computing fit into such a grand category? Needless to say, we don’t have the benefit of historical perspective, since portable devices which support information access and multiple communications capabilities are a distinctly new phenomenon. One could argue that the so-called Arab Spring as a huge historical event owes a substantial debt to mobile computing. But one could also argue that that impact is really just an extension of connected computing – that the game-change was already in place before folks began carrying that power into the streets of Cairo or Tripoli in their jeans pockets.

        But when we look at the classroom, the argument gets even more difficult. Historically, universal education is a little more than a century old, and that change has been completely tied to that distinctly human cultural unit, the classroom. The classroom is a closed space with its own information ecology, its own community and social structure, and its own workflow. There is no question that the Internet has had a huge impact on information access in the classroom, but at this point in history, the classroom as a closed space in which education takes place remains virtually unchanged. In fact, most education technology approaches (the “flipped” classroom, the “intelligent” classroom are two) are quite comfortable there, since they reinforce the closed space nature of instructional practice in the classroom.

        So what would happen if mobile devices were the huge game changer their advocates are promoting? The difference between your parent’s laptop and your iPhone is not about “apps” (another word for software). It’s also not about the human-computer interface, since that will most certainly continue to change (from touch screen to voice recognition to gesture recognition). It’s mostly about mobility. But in a closed classroom, mobility has limited meaning. It might very well be that the classroom as a closed space is destined for the dustbin of history, but a lot of social change will have to happen before that. Almost everything else we’re doing in education (notably high-stakes testing and accountability) is dependent on the classroom and school remaining intact.

        So why the buzz? There are three reasons why personal devices are very interesting to policy people and other onlookers …

1. As a substitute for school-provided 1-1 computing. Many districts are exploring whether student-supplied devices might help them reach the utopia of every student being able to access and create information from their own device. Under this scenario, the decision to use personal devices is driven by simple economics (the district wants 1-1 computing, but can’t afford to purchase every student a device).
2. As a way of leveraging existing student access behaviors and habits. As mentioned above, many of the advocates of personal devices in the classroom are noting that students are already using such devices for learning. They speculate that these behaviors might be leveraged in the classroom.
3. As a way to blur the space-time boundaries of the classroom. Advocates of access/use patterns such as “hybrid instruction” have, as their goal, the ability of students to access and create content online, beyond school class time. Personal devices can help that happen.

        You might have noticed that only the third option reflects the fact that a personal device is mobile, thereby implying the greatest change in school/classroom structure. But what’s interesting is, if students are, in fact, allowed to bring their personal devices into school and use them, the results might very well be the same in any case -- the classroom will be "disrupted," regardless of the teacher's or policy-maker's intent.

        So is this a James Burke moment? Are we going to look back at this decade and say it was the beginning of the end of the traditional classroom? As I state above, my contention is that connectivity (not device) is the “stirrup” of this trend, but the smart money is to prepare teachers for #3, regardless of what else happens. That is, the classroom teacher must be willing to allow their traditional classroom structure to be disrupted, and, in many cases, learn a completely new teaching role which better utilizes the coming changes.

        But then, I never actually owned a polyester leisure suit…

Footprints In the CyberSnow

        Watching the changing face of professional electronic discourse is a little like following footprints through a popular snow-covered woods. The trails are sometimes single file, sometimes a wide swath. Individual lines of footprints join and veer off the main trails, seemingly at random, without a clear sense of consensus and direction. You might join the common trail for a sense of belonging, or if its direction coincides with your own. But you will veer off in a new direction if both wane.
       That was me this past week, when I resigned as the lead moderator for the international discussion list EDTECH. EDTECH began 22 years ago as a project of Michigan State University doctoral student Vickie Banks Gaynor. I joined it as a member in 1997, becoming a moderator three years later. For more than a decade, my and the EDTECH members’ footprints had a common direction, and I reveled in it.
        The new, hot discussion platform in the 80’s was an email-based distributed discussion system called LISTSERV. (Nope, I’m not shouting – its name, and the name of the EDTECH discussion list itself, were traditionally typed in all caps.) At that time, LISTSERV was freeware (it's now commercial), and was often integrated with the groupware program BitNet. Discussion postings were delivered to members through email by LISTSERV, and also in threaded form on BitNet in what looked very much like an Internet bulletin board or forum. A few years after its inception, EDTECH was absorbed by Michigan State’s humanities discussion system, H-Net, an affiliation it retains to this day. The original BitNet feed still exists, though most such feeds were purchased by Google and added to Google Groups quite a while ago.
        EDTECH was by no means my first LISTSERV. Nearly ten years before joining EDTECH I’d discovered a discussion hosted by graduate students at Indiana University called “The Dead Teacher’s Society.” Unlike EDTECH, it was an un-moderated list. Between LISTSERV, Bitnet, and UseNet, there were thousands of un-moderated discussion feeds. At that time, the idea that postings could be delivered instantly in multiple directions to thousands of participants instantly was pretty revolutionary…and scary.

Flame War: ...a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic. Often these flames are posted for the sole purpose of offending or upsetting other users. The flame becomes a flame war when other users respond to the thread with their own flame message. (http://www.webopedia.com/)

       Such unmonitored (and largely “off the social mainstream grid”) platforms produced lots of off-center feeds, such as sexual fetishes and political extremes. Even for serious mainstream topics, un-moderated lists followed a cycle of initiation, enthusiastic growth, mature discussion, deterioration through “flame wars”/spamming/off-topic contributions, and eventual decline and extinction as the original and more serious participants grew disillusioned and abandoned the list. The trail would go from thousands of footprints, to a very few, stomping through the drifts, before evaporating altogether. The Dead Teacher’s Society was still relatively active when I joined it (and I was completely enamored with the concept), but it quickly became a megaphone for a few self-promoting individualists and an occasional flame war.
        In contrast, EDTECH was moderated – postings were screened and distributed only by the list’s moderators. This had one disadvantage: every post had to be touched by a list moderator before it was distributed through email or appeared in the BitNet feed (which slowed things down); and one advantage: the quality of the postings was consistently high, very professionally focused, and often quite scholarly. Missing were the “me too” and off-topic fluff of ordinary social interaction, the flame wars, bad language, self-promotion and commercial advertising. That’s why it enjoyed such a long and glorious history, with hundreds of postings daily in its heyday.
        BitNet and LISTSERV were powerful stuff. BitNet subjects were “feeds,” being fed directly by participants, and through the email contributions of the LISTSERV. Since it was threaded, you could search/display by subject thread, or by author, or do open text searches. Its tools would be quite familiar to anyone using Twitter today, with the possible exception of the lack of Twitter’s point-and-click ease of use. LISTSERV/list archives/Google Group feeds remain a very powerful technology. That’s not why I left EDTECH. Like everything else in life, I left it because nearly everybody else had as well. A year or two ago, the trail I was following there had dropped to a very few footprints. EDTECH’s volume has fallen from hundreds of postings a day to hundreds of postings a month (or less).
        Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter are certainly GUI-er, but their main advantage these days isn’t “how,” but “who.” Almost anyone of consequence is Tweeting. The online discussions of 20 years ago are now Twitter feeds and hash-tag threads. But even more importantly, since mainstream society has embraced it, the wretched excesses of BitNet and UseNet are largely missing, or at least hidden, for the average user of Twitter and Facebook. The early discussion platforms like BitNet were dominated by libertarian, geeky college students. It’s really quite remarkable what can happen when those students’ parents suddenly show up and start participating. My Facebook news feed has gone from a minefield of “F-bombs,” to PG, in a little over a year.
        I must say – at the risk of sounding like one of the die-hard EDTECH participants – I’m not really excited about the switch. LISTSERV had no restriction on posting length. It also enjoyed a more traditional “question and answer” back-and-forth pattern of participation, which in Twitter has been replaced by short declamatory sentences with a self-promotion feel. Because of this, I had arrogantly predicted that Twitter would be gone in two years; that was over three years ago. I obviously did not anticipate the masses of people and activity – social and professional alike – that would flock to this new platform. But they did. And if one is to be in the conversation, it behooves one to join it, or at least feed it.
        But whether by un-moderated excesses or simple popularity, all things tend to cycle. Twitter will, itself, become yesterday’s news and disappear, just as BitNet and UseNet have. (Interestingly, the KERA list of the University of Kentucky – KYDTC and others – are keeping LISTSERV alive in Kentucky, at least for now.) So my prediction above is probably not wrong, it’s just off in its timing. No platform is forever. But, for me, it is time for me to move on, and join the currently better-used path. I’ll miss EDTECH, but being as most of the better players in it are gone, I won’t miss it that much. We’ll see if the structural limitations of Twitter can still support the sort of professional discourse which is my habit and passion. After all, online professional discussion isn’t about platforms, it’s about ideas and knowledge construction, the one thing that SHOULD transcend the changeover in platform popularity.

        Goodbye, EDTECH. It’s time to try another trail of footprints.

The Case for the Private Cloud

What is a cloud?
       "Geek-speakers" really struggle to keep the vocabulary fresh, the edge bleeding (if you will). This time, the metaphor is a little short of perfect. In science, a cloud is a visible mass of lighter-than-air water droplets. In technology, a cloud is a collection of computer applications delivered over a network as services. So a cloud is a network, and visible water droplets are software applications. It's a stretch. Some of the wretched excesses of that fluffy dark thing hanging over your afternoon golf game might be, metaphorically, more accurate than we'd like. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
       Of course, 40 years ago, virtually all applications were delivered over networks, since the computers were room-sized. You connected using a dumb terminal (little more than a display and a keyboard -- see at left) to a mainframe computer somewhere else, to run a program. But sitting neatly between mainframe computing and cloud computing is the age of the microcomputer (still underway, in point of fact), which had, at its beginning, two relevant characteristics: 1) it was mostly about purchasing and managing objects (hardware, software, peripherals), and 2) networks were useful, but not necessary, to do work. (Remember sharing your Internet connection with your telephone? OK, probably not, but I do! The handset modem at right was how I connected to the university mainframe at my first teaching position.) These days, connecting things together has become the driving force in computing. We can blame the "mother of all networks," the Internet, for bringing us back around full circle. Since the geek-speakers have the memory of a gnat, it's all new, and it needs a new word. It's a cloud.
        But, of course, that isn't to imply that nothing is actually new. Before the Internet, networks were small, for lots of reasons (some were good reasons, and we'll look at that in a bit). So, the new part of the "cloud" concept is that applications can be really made available globally, over the entire Internet, to anyone. From a business perspective, the result has the same impact as Napster had on the music industry, the e-book has on print -- it's no longer about delivering or selling objects, it's about delivering or selling capabilities. From a software perspective, that means we use Office 360 or Google Docs to word process, rather than purchasing a stand-alone copy of some software to run on our very own computer.

Why should I care?

        Well, the Internet did happen for some very good reasons. When the tools of productivity move online, it makes information sharing, collaborating and group learning a lot easier, hence "cloud computing" is often associated with social networking and online learning management. From blogs to Facebook, people aren't just writing online, they're connecting, sharing, and constructing together. That's probably the most obvious advantage.
        Another is very much in evidence in the age of smart phones. Since the computing work is actually done "on the cloud" (that is, somewhere else), the device used to access such a service can actually be quite cheap and simple. It takes a reasonably powerful computer to run Microsoft Office 2010. In contrast, you can word-process "on the cloud" from your smart phone.
        Then there's software cost. As Google and others have shown, there really is no need to sell such services, so a lot of companies provide their services for "free," making a profit through selling ad space, or other marketing tools such as data harvested from the users of the service. The software isn't really free -- it's just being underwritten by thousands of advertisers. To further sweeten the pot, upgrades and bug fixes don't have dissemination issues. There's nothing to download since the software lives one place -- no one even notices the fix is in.

OK, well, so what's a "Private Cloud?"

        A "private cloud" is essentially the same idea as a public cloud, except that the folks using the service are part of a closed collection of people. Unlike the private networks of 40 years ago, "closed" doesn't mean disconnected. The convergence of the Internet and the private network means that we can define "closed" or "private" virtually, through a central list of access credentials, without giving up the "anytime, any place" of public, Internet-based computing. Although a private cloud usually lives physically inside a district wide area network, it's still available to that same collection of people, no matter whether they're sitting in their home school, or half a world away.

Why a Private Cloud?

       Private clouds exist for a variety of reasons, but privacy, as you might guess, is a big one. Private clouds are used by private companies or organizations with resource and business interests to protect, or organizations serving a unique population such as children.
        An organization wanting to run a private cloud has to contract with (i.e. pay for) a service, or purchase hardware to run them within their own network. It usually needs paying someone to maintain the services, and support the people who use them. Some of those costs would exist anyway (after all, supporting teachers in the use of any tool, private or public, requires staff time), but running online software yourself does add something to the equation. To reduce costs, many private clouds run open source services or other free software. The private services my district uses include Moodle (online learning management), Mahara (social networking and ePortfolios), SharePoint (professional workflow), Wordpress (blogging and interactive writing), and Umbraco (public website support).
        On the public cloud, we could have replaced Moodle with Edmodo, Mahara with Facebook, SharePoint with Google Docs, and Umbraco with any of a bunch of free or inexpensive web hosting services. Some of the reasons we've resisted would have been familiar with the old mainframe folks -- privacy, central management, support, consistency of service, and network security. But since we're in the business of supporting teachers and student learning, I'll use that perspective to flesh out some of these, and other, advantages.
        It is amazing how many thorny questions teachers ask us about the public cloud which don't even need to get asked when the cloud is private, like...

• “Who is that…really?” In a private cloud, you know who everybody is, since the account was created and assigned to a specific person inside the organization. At any time, if you stop being confident that you know who an account represents, anyone with rights to your network can turn off the account. That greatly simplifies privacy and enforcement. Public cloud tools are based on a personal account model, making the question above (and the enforcement problems it implies) much more difficult.
• “Did you see THAT?” Inappropriate stuff online is always a problem, and a public cloud tool will always struggle with the problem of inappropriate content. In addition, most public cloud tools carry ads, and ads mean that your students are being targeted for commercial purposes. Often the things being sold aren’t appropriate for their age. A private cloud has none of these problems.
• “Can I use this for free for the life of my instructional needs? …this year? …this week?” Ning (social network tool), Jaycut (video editing), Glogster (collaboration tool), even the New York Times started out being free public cloud tools, and are now charging for their services. This is a tried-and-true business model, which works fine in the private sector where all of the players are private citizens. But for teachers serving public school students, waking up one morning and finding your tool has suddenly changed to a pay-for-services model means a change of instructional practice, often even lost activities and resources representing a time investment. On a private cloud, teachers don't have to worry about things suddenly disappearing or costing money.
• “Should I ‘friend’ my students?” Most teachers are strongly advised against “friending” students on Facebook, for good reasons. Some states have even attempted to outlaw it! In contrast, on the private cloud, where all the people are known, the answer is clearly yes — it’s like asking “Should I speak to my students?”
• “I can’t find…” Most teachers are not sophisticated computer users, hence a lot of technical support can be just helping someone retrieve an accidentally-deleted or overwritten file, or locating something that got lost or corrupted. On the public cloud (especially the free one), you’re pretty much on your own — if you accidentally delete something, or misplace it, there usually is no tech support safety net.
• “May I do this?” The public cloud must, by Federal law, restrict who can use it, and how. Because of that, most tools with social networking components require specific parent permissions for students under 13 (Edmodo sets that age at 18). Hence, a teacher of young students has to specifically acquire and manage parent permissions to use such tools, or run the risk of breaking the law (or, even worse, the wishes of a student’s very concerned parents, the reason the laws exist in the first place). In contrast, the private cloud is covered by a school’s Acceptable Use Policy contract.
• “CAN I do this?” There is really no substitute for asking this question of the people who install, implement, and support the cloud tools you use. You will find that, even without the power of the public cloud, the answer is usually “Yes!” In addition, with a private cloud, decisions about changes and upgrades are made with you, the teacher, in mind — no business model, no board of directors, no collection of advertisers, no shareholders, no IT staff with their own schedule and interests. In my district, many of the decisions about our cloud tools are actually made by interested teachers in regularly-scheduled focus group meetings.

        This does not mean that the public cloud doesn’t have anything to offer teachers and their student learning goals. With massive budgets and huge IT staff, many big public cloud players have the ability to innovate and expand. For some teachers, a private cloud will never be quite as snappy, attractive, and extensive as the tools they find and use “out there.” But before they do, we tell them to read the list of questions above, and make sure they understand them all. But even more importantly, we ask then to ask themselves what they want their students to do and learn. In almost all cases, the private cloud has answers that work.
        Metaphorically, a cloud is ill-defined, hard to contain and predict, and often all wet. Bringing your cloud "indoors" requires effort and some expense, but it makes it a lot easier for most teachers and students to use it comfortably.

Are you (dis)connected?

        Making connections is all the buzz -- connecting students to authentic learning, experts, even each other. At this point in history, the technology tools and contexts in which to “connect” are overwhelming in number, and begging for attention. Today, “connect” doesn’t force technology use, but it almost certainly can’t avoid it. And many celebrators of the concept of connection and collaboration are almost indistinguishable from celebrators of the tools they use for such. That is, “Connect!” and “Use this tool!” are, in many advocates’ minds, interchangeable ideas. That has actually produced a couple of interesting disconnects in technology use in education.

The Promise and Practice of Web 2.0: It’s a scary world out there.

        I had just poked into a district office, and the discussion there was about Facebook. It’s a well-worn trail, and in this context the remarks are almost invariably negative, with most of those present saying they never went there, and never would. At the other extreme are the dozens of my professional acquaintances and colleagues who use it to support their professional interests. On their "walls," I am as likely to read about what school they visited or what instructional idea they’ve tried, as I am to hear about their son/daughter’s exploits on the track or court, or the last restaurant they visited. All is thrown in together in a pile.

        Although the world beyond PK-12 education is pretty much firmly entrenched in the idea of online connections in support of professional interests, in the face of Federal child safety legislation and most end user license agreements of known Web 2.0 tools (including Facebook), most teachers are still trying to figure out whether these tools are even legal to use in the classroom, much less safe, or even more important, instructionally valuable. Both the advocates and the detractors of Facebook, like the blind men and the elephant, are grabbing onto different parts of the elephant and declaring its basic character.

        Both are right, and both are wrong. But neither note that we’re trying to evaluate the usefulness of the whole elephant at once by looking at a single aspect of it. Yes, “it” is important, and yes, “it” is unsafe and frivolous...if we’re just talking about Facebook. Of course, what we should be talking about is learning. It’s a disconnect, and neither side has done a particularly good job of addressing why it is one.

The Promise and Practice of Technology in Instruction: Who’s paradigm shift is it anyway?

       Everybody has their pet phrase. “Knowledge construction.” “Collaborative learning.” “Project-based learning.” “Discovery learning.” “Authentic learning.” Almost everybody agrees that the old traditional instructional paradigm of teacher-driven lecture and summative assessment is, if not actually dead, at least seriously outflanked. The charge against it is being led by something as simply-defined as the Kahn Academy (a website dedicated to tutorial videos on school subjects), or as currently trendy and complex as the idea of use of student-owned smart phones and other personal devices in the classroom.

        That, of course, is the implied shift associated with connected technology use. In fact, most teachers view educational technology in terms of “Smart” classroom tools, large digital display, “clickers,” media delivery systems, and laptop carts, all of which are aimed at preserving the teacher’s tenuous grasp on their primacy as a content presenter. To make matters worse, many teachers observe, and recent studies are beginning to show, that direct student control over information delivery (phones, computers, whatever) doesn’t always lead to higher learning outcomes. Students usually lack the personal goals and motivation to attend to that which will improve their learning, if given the choice, so they fall back on their social-driven habits.

       It is clear that the promise and practice of technology-driven shift represents another serious disconnect.

        These disconnects are symptoms of how technology’s role in the classroom tends to get trivialized and distracted by the popularity of a specific platform or tool. A good illustration is the battle over texted communications. Tech advocates and observers are quick to point out that kids text, and they view email as “old people’s communications.” That’s one piece of the elephant. And, for kids, almost all student texts are social. On other side of the elephant, if you go into an actual adult workplace, texting is one of many communications platforms one will have to use to do work, and email often figures prominently in that list.

        But the debate misses the point. Are we supposed to be teaching our students to text, or to communicate? The discussion about paradigm shift shouldn’t be about tool selection, it should be about content and practice. That is our job as educators.

        By the time our students leave us, all of the tools will have changed anyway. But that doesn't remove us from our responsibilities relative to the technologies. We need to actually, meaningfully engage in the behaviors the shift implies. Don't get tied up in the tools, but don't skip them either. They aren't the paradigm, but they do deliver it. It's a delicate balance, but implementing connections in the 21st Century classroom requires that we do so.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

        It's here -- a standard, in amongst all the other writing standards, that specifically addresses what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century...

Writing Standards K-5 - Grade 5 Students: Standard 6.

With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others..

       This standard is one of the new Common Core State Standards adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education, now in training for implementation in the fall. It makes succinct what our students already know: that writing for most purposes involves collaboration and connection. And the way in which students connect, collaborate – even write – is online.
       It’s in the Standards, so will it be in instruction? The process of “deconstructing” the standards in preparation for designing lessons is fully underway, and this standard (as of April 1, 2011) has yet even get that far (see KDE's list). But does it need to be? Is the fact that it’s a separate standard mean that, in fact, it needs separate “air time?” In an ideal world, no, if, in fact, it was already uniformly distributed throughout the other standards, and a teacher's practice. That is as it should be. In the world of higher education and professional work, most writing is connected. Nearly all readers are interactively connected to the writing they consume. Even further, a lot of writings (from textbooks to encyclopedias) are now produced collaboratively online, with many authors, and constantly negotiated content changes and additions. The implication is, in the post-secondary world, writing without interactive connection is rare, and so addressing it separately would be like addressing auto repair without electronic diagnostics.

        That’s the world our students already live in, and is most certainly the one they’ll join when they leave us. Although my “research” is anecdotal and incomplete, I’m thinking it isn’t the world most of our teachers live in. That means, if left to their own devices, chances are that most teachers won’t view this standard as that important. Many may not even know what it means. With that knowledge, the standard probably needs to be specifically addressed, and that is the intent of the Common Core Standards as written. But when, and by whom?

        As a tech integration specialist, I’m pretty used to being invited to the party late. A professional development class is being designed, or a unit is being built, and someone has the idea that, maybe, it should have a technology component. (After all, a lot of folks are talking about technology, so we probably ought to include something!) So I'm called. But when that happens, inevitably, I walk into a room in which the big decisions about content and pedagogy have already been made. The results are a lot of clever graphs and images.

        In the digital age, is it really possible to start a discussion about pedagogy without technology? For this argument, I’m setting aside the revolution implied by a lot of technology tool use – knowledge construction, project-based instruction, student-driven learning, the trifecta generally associated with online and connected learning. Let’s just stick with Standard 6 above. We’ll take something really easy – a personal narrative about some incident in a student's life. Traditionally, a teacher would establish a rubric, pass out instructions, collect the results of the assignment, and grade them. If the lesson needs more "real life" connections, that might change the assigned writing topic. And the impact of my coming into the party late might be that the students are asked to read the instructions online, type them up in Word with some nice added clipart, and upload the results into a learning management system. Good, we’ve got technology in.

       Did we cover the standard? Did the student “publish?” Did they “interact with others?” Did they “collaborate?” Obviously not. To truly reflect the standard, we could redesign the lesson, and have students publish their writings as blog entries, providing for online peer comments and suggestions, and then have that feed a collaborative rewriting process through a wiki. This approach (very different from my “upload Word document” example) actually addresses the intent of the standard. But the changes have a profound impact on the original lesson performance expectation, the rubric, work completion, and grading, so adding this standard would require major changes to the original lesson design. The point, of course, is that it is not possible to begin the lesson planning process without having already selected the technologies, and incorporated their implications into how students write, learn, and are graded.

        It’s a standard, but the standard simply asks the same question the students themselves are asking their teachers: If not you, who? If not now, when?