Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Live Tuesday Feb. 5 - Carol Black on "Occupy Your Brain" (and Special Screening of "Schooling the World")

Join me Tuesday, February 5th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com conversation with returning guest Carol Black on her essay: "Occupy Your Brain: On Power, Knowledge, and the Re-Occupation of Common Sense."

I previously interviewed Carol about her hugely thought-provoking film, Schooling the World, which Carol has generously agreed to make available again for free viewing between now and the 12th of February. The film is at https://vimeo.com/32012579 (password is STW2013), and looks at the often-devastating impacts of Western-style schooling in the developing world, particularly in Northern India.

In "Occupy Your Brain," Carol states, "[a]s our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?"
In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. We allow remote “experts” to dictate what we must learn, when we must learn it, and how we must learn it. We grant them the right to test us, to measure the contents of our brains and the value of our skills, and then to brand us in childhood with a set of numeric rankings that have enormous power over our future opportunities to participate in the economic and political life of our society. We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
I hope you'll join us for what should be a challenging discussion.

Date: Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-02-05.1729.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/carolblack2.mp3 and at http://www.futureofeducation.com.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/21430.

Carol Black is an Emmy-Award-winning writer/director/producer of both entertainment and documentary television and film, co-creator with her husband Neal Marlens of the television series The Wonder Years, noted for its portrayal of the American public school experience. She studied education and literature at Swarthmore College and UCLA, and after the birth of her children, withdrew from a successful career in the entertainment industry to become involved in the alternative education movement. Schooling the World was the culmination of many years of research into cross-cultural perspectives on education.

“The reality is that the modern school is no silver bullet, but an extremely problematic institution which has proven highly resistant to fundamental reform. No system that discards millions of normal, healthy kids as failures – many of them extremely smart, by the way – will ever provide a lasting or universal solution to anything.”


Top photo by Carol Black

Live Thursday - The Effects of Health and Poverty on Education

Join me Thursday, January 31st, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com conversation with Stephen Bezruchka, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Health Services, the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.

A recent set of widely-reported studies are highlighting statistics that don't surprise Stephen, but are shocking to those previously unfamiliar with their findings. The National Research Council and Institute of Medicine's U.S. Health in International Perspective found that U.S. citizens suffer from poorer health than nearly all other industrialized countries, and of the 17 high-income countries looked at, the United States is at or near the bottom in at least nine indicators--including infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, and adolescent pregnancies, as well as more systemic issues such as injuries, homicides, and rates of disability. In Differences In Life Expectancy Due To Race And Educational Differences Are Widening, And Many May Not Catch Up, researchers found that when "race and education are combined, the disparity is even more striking. In 2008 white US men and women with 16 years or more of schooling had life expectancies far greater than black Americans with fewer than 12 years of education—14.2 years more for white men than black men, and 10.3 years more for white women than black women."

Stephen and I will discuss the connections between education and the poverty and health outcomes from these and other reports, and why they are unfamiliar to most, given the similar documentation over many years. Hopefully we'll also get a chance to explore the role of institutions in masking or redirecting attention away from these issues (see my recent post on rethinking education reform in light of institutionalization), the effects of inequality as a deeper story, early-life impact on health, the catch-22 of compliance-driven schooling when dealing with scientific and social problems, and ultimately what we can do with this information.

Special thanks to Craig Seasholes for connecting me with Stephen.

Date: Thursday, January 31st, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-31.1720.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/bezruchka.mp3.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/21414.

Stephen A. Bezruchka is Senior Lecturer, Global Health, Department of Health Services, the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. Stephen also works with the Department of Global Health MPH program. He has spent over 10 years in Nepal working in various health programs, and teaching in remote regions. He tries to draw attention to the socioeconomic determinants of the health of populations.  His research interests include: effective methods of disseminating determinants of population health to the general population so they work to change societal structures to improve America's health; theories of global health asking the question why do countries order by health outcomes such as life expectancy in the Health Olympics?; medical harm and the lack of interest in the USA for responding to this marked health risk; medical tourism and its affect on host populations

Monday, January 28, 2013

Live Tuesday - Looking at Education Through the Work of W. Edwards Deming

Join me Tuesday, January 29th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com conversation with Gary Obermeyer about the work and philosophy of W. Edwards Deming (see the Wikipedia article on Deming for a good overview).

Deming, who is widely credited with helping to dramatically alter the economy of Japan in the 1950's, argued articulately and with data against the "tyranny of the prevailing style of management" in business, government, and education. His system theory debunked numerical goals, performance-based pay, and the shallow and short-term thinking of "managing by results."

Deming was particularly incensed with the destruction of schools, the ranking of students and teachers, and the inappropriate attribution of problems to those working in the system instead of to the system itself and to the lack of real leadership. "The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!"

That's a message we don't hear enough today. Deming was no fly-by-night rabble-rouser, but a highly respected thinker with an incredible arsenal of successful results. So Gary and I will talk about in particular about the difficulties that more thoughtful ideas (truths?) have competing for attention in our "results"-driven education culture today, and what conclusions those who have studied Deming and his ideas might have about education change. We'll also look at Gary's work on virtual communities, and discuss how putting the decision-making about learning as close as possible to the learners can lead to self-organizing schools.

Date: Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-29.1105.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/deming.mp3.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/21257.

Gary Obermeyer established Learning Options, in 1986, with a vision of networking innovative educators as a means to transform schools - from a system of factory-style schools to a system of self-organizing schools.

For more than 25 years he has focused his professional energies on networking school-centered change initiatives that engage practitioners in designing, implementing, and learning from their innovative efforts.

The story of how and why he has devoted my career to school transformation is rooted in his own experience as a student in a one-room school (no kidding), as a classroom teacher, and as an elected leader in the National Education Association. 

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Reframing the Education Revolution

This is an informal, web-based version of the "Big Ideas" talk I gave at the 2013 New Media Consortium "Future of Education" conference. The idea of looking at schooling as an institution has been influenced by many, but most profoundly by Ivan Illich. Seeing the broader two education reform movements both as being "institutional" I have explored many times in this blog, but most recently here.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Thursday Live with Gina from Mightybell - More Improvements!

Join me and Gina Bianchini, founder of Mightybell, for a live and interactive Webinar Thursday afternoon/evening (US Time). Gina will both share the new improvements to Mightybell and also ask for your feedback and suggestions as educators and learners.

I consult with Mightybell on their education outreach, and Gina has a personal commitment to having the broader education community benefit from her social software projects (many of you will recognize Gina as the co-founder of Ning). If you haven't "met" Gina before, you'll really enjoy her energy and her devotion to "social learning."

Mightybell is free, and because of its unique capabilities, I think it's increasingly going to find a really valuable place in classroom and learning practice. In a Mightybell "space," you can collect and curate a variety of types of content--think of it like a living textbook, where you can draw in articles, websites, video, and ideas, and are then able to have threaded discussions about each one, as well as a general conversation inside the space. A space can be public or private, allowing as much or as little outside interaction as you want.

Since we last met, Mightybell has added some new features that are significant and that Gina will demonstrate.
  • Search;
  • Categories (takes featuring to the next level by letting you drag and drop posts within categories and then organize categories - this is terrific!);
  • Photos and files in comments;
  • "Space as a Post" - let's you add a Mightybell space itself as an item in another space, thereby also allowing you to create directories of your education spaces;
  • Posting to multiple spaces at one time from the Bookmarklet
  • Reposting - the ability to repost a post from one space to another as well as post to multiple spaces at one time
There is also a Mightybell hosts group (link) where you can ask questions at and we're now encouraging participation in one just for educators at Mightybell in Education.  I'm in both so feel free to reach out to me as well.

Hope you'll join us! If you can't make it, don't worry, there will be a recording (the link will be posted at http://www.stevehargadon.com afterwards).

Date: Thursday, January 24th, 2013
Time: 3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2008350&password=M.C4415D8049A57DF74A3B77771411A0. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-24.1514.M.86035557D2F8C8CA05E067C29AD0A7.vcr&sid=2008350. A stand-alone .mp4 video-only recording is at http://audio.edtech.com/cr20/mightybelleducation012013.mp4.

Gina Bianchini

Thursday, January 17, 2013

ISTE 2013 "Unplugged" + Hack Education 2013

ISTE Unplugged is a series of independent events that take place in, around, and with the support of the annual ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference.

Boy, have we got some fun this year! (Hint: look at the "unplugged keynotes" section below.)

All of these events are free and do not require signing up (except maybe the Saturday night party--keep a watch on my blog or at at http://www.ISTEunplugged.com), so come join us. The Global Education Summit and the Bloggers' Cafe do require that you are actually attending ISTE--and a HUGE thanks to ISTE for making all of this possible!

Saturday, June 22rd - HACK EDUCATION 2013: Audrey Watters of Hack Education co-chairs our all-day flagship event this year, as we yet again rebrand our "unconference" on teaching and learning (originally EduBloggerCon and called SocialEdCon last year). In our seventh year, this event typically draws 200 - 300 participants from around the world. We start by building a session schedule together and then spend the rest of the day in engaged conversations around amazing topics.

Saturday, June 22nd Evening - AFTER PARTY!: After a banner inaugural partner last year, we'll again have an unconference "After Party" from 7 - 9pm.  More details to come!

Sunday, June 23rd Afternoon - GLOBAL EDUCATION SUMMIT: Another return event, the Global Ed Summit is a 3-hour mini-conference organized by Lucy Gray and me for those interested in globally-connecting students and teachers, and a physical followup to the hugely popular online Global Education Conference.

Monday, June 24 - Wednesday, June 26th - UNPLUGGED KEYNOTES: Still in planning stages, this year we are planning a set of pre-dinner short keynotes by some exceptional folks who've strangely never been asked to keynote the actual ISTE conference. Get ready! 

Monday, June 24 - Wednesday, June 26th - THE BLOGGERS' CAFE: Also in it's seventh year now, the Bloggers' Cafe is an informal, couch-chairs-floor gathering area in the conference center for bloggers, social media mavens, and anyone else who wants to find and connect with others. A beehive of constant activity and conversation, the Bloggers' Cafe makes it hard to go do anything else once you discover it.

Those interested in sponsoring ISTE Unplugged or a specific event should contact me direct at steve@hargadon.com.

Spread the word, and hope to see you there!

(2012 in San Diego)

Live Tonight: Journalism as the Essential 21st Century Curriculum

Join me today, Thursday, January 17th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com interview with Holly Epstein Ojalvo and Esther Wojcicki to talk about student journalism as "THE" curriculum for the 21st century.

Holly is the founder of Kicker, a student engagement news site, and when I read about Kicker I emailed and asked if she'd consider coming on the show to talk about youth capability and about journalism as a route to self-directed learning. We added previous guest Esther Wojcicki to the email thread, who graciously agreed to return to talk about this topic, and who added that she believes journalism teaches kids "communications skills, self direction, collaboration, technical skills, [and] critical thinking." Moreover, she said: "It is THE curriculum for the 21st century. It also leads to community involvement and social media, reading news online, [and] staying informed."

The deeper threads here, for me, are so important. So much of the current discussion of education reform is based on a schooling model of conformance, compliance, and dependency--the results of which are not just problematic for learning, but also arguably support a political and business culture that resists appropriate scrutinies. Does student journalism provide an important opportunity to discuss media representation of the news? Can student journalism create opportunities for student independence and shift their perceptions of their own agency and adulthood, and their ability to make a difference in the world?

We'll ask these questions, plus take a look at their impact on what happens in the classroom. From Esther: "[This] runs counter to the Race to the Top which stresses testing and control in the classroom. Getting teachers to relinquish some of their control and getting kids to be the ones in charge of the white boards (not the teacher) is not easy. The culture of the classroom has to change and changing culture is tough." From Holly: "[M]edia literacy and engagement with current events stretches (or, rather, should stretch) beyond the classroom. Some teachers think news isn't appropriate for the classroom, but what does that mean? News is, basically, the world. Why is history appropriate but what's happening now isn't? Why are old nonfiction texts appropriate but current ones aren't?"

I hope you'll join us.

Date: Thursday, January 17th, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-17.1503.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/studentjournalism.mp3.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/20004.

Holly Epstein Ojalvo's dream is to empower young people to change the world by helping them become more informed and engaged. She is the founder and editor in chief of Kicker. Her past lives have included editing for The New York Times Learning Network, teaching high school, advising student newspapers, and freelance reporting.

Esther Wojcicki is very interested in making education more effective. She is Chair of the Board of Learning Matters and Vice Chair of Creative Commons. She founded the Palo Alto High School Journalism program that is now the largest in the US. She loves discussing ways to improve education within the current system.

Kicker
http://www.gokicker.com
From news release at CivicSource.org:

As a society, we want to see our students reading and engaged with the news. However, teenagers and young adults maintain a complicated relationship with current events—one that is alienating in which they feel overwhelmed, “dumb,” bored, and even helpless when reading the news. In response to this increasing social problem, Holly Epstein Ojalvo, former editor at The New York Times, launched Kicker to appeal to those turned off by the traditional method of fast-paced news reporting in which stories feature little background information and lack opportunity for real action. Ojalvo’s new media startup seeks to empower high school and college students by “slowing down” the news and making it accessible, engaging, honest, and actionable.

So what does Kicker do? Each day Kicker features one or two of the most important news stories and provides highlights and information using a variety of media such as graphics, tweets, video clips, maps, and quotes to avoid text-heavy reporting. Perhaps most significant, however, is the unique interactivity of the stories in which actionable steps are listed in varying degrees (small, medium, and large) so that readers can walk away from the story empowered rather than helpless and hopeless. That’s the kicker. Ojalvo explains, “the kicker to any story we tell you is that you can start taking action. Right now. And we’ll point you in the right direction”

Kicker is a great news resource for people of any age. Share with your family and friends as a way to get people interested and up-to-date with current events.


(Black and white image copyright Pender County Public Libraries. http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalnc/8188426709/)

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Announcing the 2013 School Leadership Summit, Worldwide and Online March 28th

The Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL) and I are pleased to announce the inaugural worldwide and online School Leadership Summit, Thursday, March 28th, 2013  (SchoolLeadershipSummit.com). This free conference will be held online and will be a unique chance to participate in a collaborative global conversation on school leadership with presentations by your peers.

To be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please join the Admin 2.0 network and conference website at http://www.schoolleadershipsummit.com. Conference strands (aligned to the internationally-recognized ISTE National Education Technology Standards for Administrators) will include the leadership topics:
  • Vision in a Changing World
  • Teaching and Learning in a Changing World
  • Professional Learning in a Changing World
  • Data-driven Reform in a Changing World
  • Ethical and Responsible Use in a Changing World
Presenting:

The conference seeks to present ideas, examples, and projects related to education leadership in a changing world. Topics are likely to include: expert advice and/or successful practices relating to Common Core; digital textbooks; school reform; tablet devices for teaching, learning, and productivity; social networking; professional development; "flipped" classrooms; digital citizenship and literacies; global collaboration; stakeholder and digital communication; and much more!

The Call for Proposals for the conference is open HERE. Presenters can submit proposals for general sessions focused on one of the five strands above. While the final deadline for submissions is March 15th, 2013, presenters will be notified of acceptance on a rolling basis starting 
February 1st, 2012. There is a motivation for early submission and acceptance, as presenters schedule their own presentation times as a part of the process and the options become more limited as time goes on.
As a conference that is highly participatory, we encourage new presenters as well as more experienced ones to submit to present.

International Advisory Board:

Anyone can apply to be a member of the international advisory board. Advisory board members are recognized on the website and are asked to:
  • Promote both participation and attendance at the conference
  • Help us find partner organizations in their region(s)
  • Help support and potentially train presenters in their geographical region
  • If possible, help moderate sessions during the actual conference
To sign up for the advisory board, please make sure you have joined the Admin 2.0 online network, and then join the advisory board group HERE.

Conference Partner Organizations:

Whether you are a small school or a multi-national non-profit organization, we want to encourage you to become a conference partner. You must be non-commercial and primarily or substantively focused on school leadership to be approved. Once approved, your organization will be listed on the conference site with a link, logo, and a short description; and you will be provided with a "spotlight" speaker session in the conference.

Our goal for the conference is to have it be a milestone event, bringing together organizations and individuals from all over the world. We recognize that much (if not most!) of the outreach for this conference will come from schools and organizations who advertise the conference to their memberships, and we want to recognize and "reward" those who do this!

There are no financial obligations for being a partner organization--all we ask is that you actively promote the conference to your membership and network, and encourage participation as well as presentations and submissions. To apply to be a conference partner organization, please make sure you have joined the Admin 2.0 online network, and then join the partner group HERE.

Conference Sponsors:

There are opportunities for commercial sponsorship of the School Leadership Summit, and both recognition and authentic appreciation for financial support will be given to those who choose to sponsor. Sponsorship levels and benefits can be discussed with Steve Hargadon directly at steve@hargadon.com or 916-283-7901.

More Information:

The School Leadership Summit's founding sponsor is TICAL, a Statewide Educational Technology Services Project funded by the California Department of Education and Arkansas Department of Education under the auspices of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. TICAL's mission is helping K-12 school leaders provide informed and effective leadership in the use of technology to improve education.

We are looking forward to this fun event, and to your participation! For further updates, please join the Admin 2.0 network and follow the conference hashtag #sls13.

Thank you for your interest!

Steve Hargadon
Founder and Co-Chair
http://www.SteveHargadon.com
http://www.Web20Labs.com

Jason Borgen
Co-Chair
Program Director
TICAL, Santa Cruz County Office of Education

Rowland Baker
Co-Chair
Executive Director
TICAL, Santa Cruz County Office of Education

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Today - David Risher from WorldReader.org on "Books for All"

Join me today, Tuesday, January 8th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com interview with David Risher, co-founder and CEO of WorlldReader, a US and European non-profit whose mission is to make digital books available to children in the developing world, so millions of people can improve their lives. Worldreader uses e-readers, existing mobile phone infrastructure and declining technology costs to put a huge range of digital books in their hands. As of November 2012, Worldreader has wirelessly distributed more than 245,000 African and international e-books to children in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, and the children spend up to 50% more time reading than before, with some reading up to 90 books in a single year.

I'll be asking David about the impact of their work and the differences he sees between a techology-simple program like WorldReader versus more complex digital device programs like OLPC. I'm also interested in his thoughts about opportunities technology provides for peer learning, the impact of western-style schools in the developing world, and the multiple practical aspects and challenges of WorldReader. I hope you'll join us or listen to the recording.
Former Amazon.com executive David Risher has loved books for as long as he can remember. They were his only way to explore the world as a child, they were what he studied in college, and they were what attracted him to Amazon in the first place. So when he volunteered at an orphanage in Ecuador and saw a padlocked building with books piled up above the windows, he had to ask what was going on. “That’s our library,” replied the orphanage’s leader. “But I think I’ve lost the key.”  The girls had lost interest in the library’s books, and new books would take months to arrive– if they ever arrived at all.
It was a defining moment for David. E-readers like the Kindle were just coming to market– in fact, he had been using the earliest version as he traveled to help with his own young daughters’ reading.... [A]n idea took seed: Widespread mobile phone technology availability, the falling costs of e-readers and the power of letting children choose books to read could transform lives throughout the world. With that, Worldreader was born. (from WorldReader.org)
Date: Tuesday, January 8th, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-08.1706.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/worldreader.mp3 as well as at the http://www.futureofeducation.com show archive.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/19115.



As Worldreader’s Co-Founder and CEO, David Risher is a lifelong reader who knows that books have the power to change lives, just as they have changed his. He has been at the forefront of technology for more than two decades, first as a general manager at Microsoft and later as Amazon.com’s Senior Vice President for Retail and Marketing, responsible for growing the company from $16 million to $4 billion in sales. David later taught at the University of Washington’s Business School where he was elected Professor of the Year, served as president of the Board of the Benjamin Franklin International School, and is a member of ESADE Business School’s International Advisory Board and the International Advisory Board of Catalonia.

David has a comparative literature degree from Princeton University and a MBA from the Harvard Business School. In 2011, he was named a Microsoft Alumni Foundation Integral Fellow and a Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneur.

On reading:
“Growing up, books were my way to explore the world. We can make it possible for children everywhere to do the same.”

His Favorite Books:
As a kid: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
As an adult: The Odyssey

Follow David on Twitter at davidrisherWR


Worldreader: Books for All from Worldreader on Vimeo.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Thursday Interview - Jim Knight on Elevating the Teaching Profession

Join me Thursday, January 3rd, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com interview with Jim Knight, on his book High Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching. Jim is a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning and the president of the Instructional Coaching Group. He has spent more than a decade studying instructional coaching and has written several books on the topic. High Impact Instruction focuses on planning, instruction, and community building to help elevate the teaching profession and support fundamental changes in education.
One reason why many teachers are not striving to be there best is that poorly designed professional learning can actual inhibit growth by de-professionalizing teachers, treating them like workers on an assembly line rather than professionals doing emotionally complicated knowledge work... If we are to get the schools our children deserve, we need to start by treating teachers as professionals.
I'm particularly interested in how Jim then moves from his discussion of instructional practices to building "safe, productive, joyous learning community" in classrooms, especially balancing freedom with structure for students and co-constructing the learning--and how the learning experiences for teachers and students are parallel.

Date: Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://www.futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recording:  A full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-01-03.1704.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and an audio mp3 recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/jimknight.mp3.  Other interview recordings are available available at http://www.futureofeducation.com.
Mightybell:  A Mightybell space with interview resources and conversation is at https://mightybell.com/spaces/18176.