Sentiments On Common Sense

I am sure that EVERYONE, no matter what party you tend to lean toward, is looking forward to the end of the election!  Even overseas, we are tired of the endless chatter about the elections on CNN, which fills 90% of the time on the news channel.

Today though…. I completed what I feel has been a very, very easy process of voting overseas.

Step one:  https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/overseas/home.htm was my first stop.  I registered using their directions, sent the paperwork to the US using regular Chinese Postal Service mail.

Step two: About 20 days later, my ballot showed up.  This is important to me in that this is historical for the US, with the first African American on the ballot. I took a photo of it to share here. As an Oregonian, I am very familiar with the vote by mail process, in that we’ve been doing this for many years.  As a homeowner in Oregon, I also am extremely engaged in the places my property tax dollars are going each year and try to stay engaged in the local political scene as well. I was sorry to see that the Hillsboro, Oregon mayor’s race was unopposed, but the guy is doing a great job, so it is probably a moot point.  You will also note in the picture, that I had not cast my vote as of yet, but to no surprise of my regular readers, you can probably guess who I voted for this time.

Step three: go back to https://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/overseas/home.htm, sign in and print out my FedEx address form, and put it in a FedEx envelope.

Here is the good news.  Federal Express is supporting the democratic process by offering FREE or greatly reduced prices for delivering ballots to your elections bureaus back home.  Today in my email, I got this message which shows that my ballot has arrived in Beaverton, Oregon and thus my vote has been cast.  Now it is time to wait and see the result.

Thank you to Federal Express for the support of this important process. As an American living overseas, I deeply understand the importance of this election and hope to see some positive changes for our country as it is viewed by the rest of the planet.

Technorati Tags: overseas voting, fedex

I got up nice and early to visit the MS team leaders meeting. They are talking about student lead conferences and our technology leader Amanda DeCardy talked about the SAS K12online conference LAN parties.  Looks like a fun week ahead!

Doug Johnson shares an experience on a recent trip away from his home in Minnesota.  Apparently while enjoying a stack of flapjacks and bacon one of the millions of conspiracy theorists on the planet found him.  He reports:

We were happily munching on huckleberry pancakes in the dining room
when a pleasant enough looking middle-aged lady at the next table
looked up from her constant prayers spoken in an underbreath to let us
know in the space of about 10 minutes:

• She was an investigative journalist getting evidence of the trains full of
  shackled political prisoners being routed along the Great Northern.
• That the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis was deliberately caused
  by Hilary Clinton in order to get more federal transportation funding.
• That Roswell NM is the site of extensive human genetics experimentation by the military.
• And that all the Yellowstone National Park rangers are on the take
  since the park officials provide prostitutes, meth, and “hard liquor”
  to important guests to the park. As a result of her learning this, she
  was “professionally” poisoned by park officials to keep her quiet from
  which it took her 6 months to recover.

Sigh… what a waste of oxygen!  Living overseas we are not immune to this as well, and the baloney I see coming from the US around the elections and the candidates is just plain scary.  The question that Doug poses is one I have asked myself recently.  How are we going to teach our students to avoid “info-porn”?

Yup… it was the first time I had seen this term in print and goes right to the heart of BAD information being spread through the web.  I did a quick search and I think that wired magazine goes to the heart of it.  According to Wired, for more than 10 years the internet has been a mainstream source of information for the masses.  They cite a Pew Research Center study that shows that Americans cannot answer basic questions about the world and that people who use the web as their news source even know less!

Not a surprise if our news, our email boxes and our minds are being polluted with stuff like my friend Doug heard while on vacation.

The key question: How do we help our students and our community find out the real “truth”?

Technorati Tags: info-porn, internet research, internet sources

Copy link resources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41089232@N00/154285771

It has happened twice to me in the last few weeks.

I have been approached by colleagues with the concern that some of my administrative peers have asked that the members of a committee or an inservice close their laptops and “pay attention” to what was going on in a meeting.  I am sure we have all had the experience.  The one where we are sitting in a meeting listening to someone droning on and on about something inane and totally useless and we as effective laptop users and multi-taskers set about to catch up on an email or two, or even check out the box score from the latest baseball game!  Admit it! We have all done it. 

On the other hand you may also be a member of the club who are highly engaged in a meeting where the speaker has something to say worth listening to and even might get you thinking that there are a multitude of connections to other parts of the work you do on a daily basis.  You then flip open the laptop and do about 10 searches in the time it takes to display 5 bullet points on a presentation slide.  Admit it! A few of us have done it, and added depth, research and current links to the subject.  We engage on a personal level and raise the level of the discussion on a comunity level. 

With the plethora of tools available at the micro-blogging level (ie. twitter) and social network level (ie. ning), we have plenty of opportunities to share, network and add depth to the work we do.  With the use of quality networking tools, we can as a professional expand our learning and conversation and bring a true sense of understanding to the communities in which we work.  I would even guess that if used properly, we could drag the “parking lot conversations” that are currently happenning online into the staff room and even the administrators office where they could be productively dealt with in effective and productive ways.

In a recent study, Technorati estimates that 70000 new blogs are created everyday.  There is clearly a trend to moving our at work time (think “boring meeting here!”) to blog work.  I have recently written about reflection. What did NOT mean is disengagement!  We has a profession have to step up and take the initiative, the credit and the blame for employee engagement and recognize that shutting the laptop lid does not mean that the person in the committee is engaged!  Instead, lets take the blame that IF we are so dull and boring.  In an recent article in the Wall Street Journal Digital Network it is noted that “Businesses are increasingly turning to the Internet to run software. Workers are increasingly using the Internet to do, well, whatever they want.” 

If you ask me, it is at least 50% the responsibility of the “leader” to have the “follower” want to be engaged.  I am started to rant about this as of late in my work. My colleagues are starting to avoid the subject.  My secretary is handing me tissues when she sees me emerge from meetings where a “leader” has failed to engage the participants and in a desperate step to find some attention, has asked for us to close our lids!  Let’s face the facts that they have failed as leaders if they fail to engage us.  Instead lets consider the alternatives.

1.  Encourage your team to build social networks such as ning sites or wikis where they can share and link their work for each others.  If your team is not familiar with these tools, help them learn them so they can be on a somewhat level ground with their facebook/myspace using students and faculty. It would surprise me to see and hear of anyone who would not see power in these tools for collaboration.  IMAGINE a faculty meeting where a ning site was set up to allow for followup questions and online conversation. 

2.  As for feedback (online is the easiest) following meetings.  People are more apt to give you accurate and honest feedback immediately following a meeting instead of days and weeks afterward.  I used to have paper surveys for parents immediately following parent conferences and adapted my conference model from that feedback. This is what lead my school to student-involved conferences.  Surveymonkey is free on a limited basis and will provide you the information you want.  Try it!

3.  Read Presentation Zen.  Learn to deliver “sit and git” presentations with flair and pizzaz. 

4.  Learn to engage your colleagues. We have found great power in the use of Critical Friends Group protocols.  These protocols can, to a point, be applied to the online environment, and indeed, are enhanced by on-the-fly research the internet allows us to do now.

I would like to close this post with a reference to a YouTube video by Charles Leadbetter.  Scott McLeod recently referred to this video and I have found it to be very, very profound and engaging.  “We Think” is a model that school leaders must consider both for our employees and for our students. 
  

Technorati Tags: Engagement, leadership, “We Think”, Digital Leadership, Presentation Zen

If I wasn’t on vacation and relaxed, I might have lost perspective this morning.

4:59 AM- Alarm goes off.  Make coffee, run bath for wife.
5:30 AM- outta shower, wake up baby and 5 year old.
6:15 AM- Load up car and family… chase cat through yard and catch him thanks to a can of Tuna.
6:30 AM- Leave for Airport to find that the flight was canceled. Rebooked on a flight at 5:00 PM!
7:15 AM- Return home….

Sigh….