Learning to Change

Professional Learning Communities at Work Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement Professional Learning Communities at Work Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement by Richard DuFour & Robert Eaker

An important step in the school improvement process is to examine local data in order to determine future goals. The Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) have developed a format for conducting data retreats. Contact your local CESA for more information. The following 8 steps are exerpted from the CESA 7 Data Retreat Participant's Guide.

Gathering data. You do it all the time. With it, you've gained an expert understanding of how your school operates. But have you also capitalized on it to improve your students' learning? Data Retreats, two-day leadership institutes, help you focus on the important data you've gathered and create the strategies you want to help improve your school. A Data Retreat guides you through the discovery and analysis of four types of school data: Student achievement Demographic Program Perception

Mike Arrington, the TechCrunch uber-blogger, spoke for many when he wrote recently: "Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they'll stop using it."

Online, what's personal is increasingly becoming what's professional, and vice versa. Locking down the bits streaming in from Facebook and other social networks may seem like a good idea at the time, but it's likely shutting down one of your employees' most powerful networking tools. We're in a knowledge economy, people. And people and relationships and who knows what and who knows whom are an integral element of the knowledge economy value chain. And you want to shut that down? Really? Seriously?

Successful initial implementation and ongoing maintenance of process improvements requires overcoming the resistance to change. Green Belts are change agents who need to recognize, understand and interpret resistance to change and develop skills to manage it effectively. Managing change resistance is often covered in training, yet a primary learning issue facing most organizations is the lack of engagement and motivation in lecture-based training. By using simulations, exercises or games, practitioners can enliven their learning environments and improve knowledge retention, skills and applications. This will keep the audience members interacting with each other and with the content.

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting - and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies.

According to the latest data, the U.S. "adoption rate" for mobile phones stands at 85 percent. That's higher than the percentage of Americans who have DVD players (84 percent), home PCs (80 percent), digital cameras (69 percent) or MP3 players (40 percent), according to the Nielsen Co. "The concept that within my lifetime we'd have the kind of penetration we have today is unimaginable," says Martin Cooper, 79, the former Motorola researcher who invented the portable cell phone in 1973.

Is it educational technology? Only insomuch as most of us couldn't do what we do without a lot of caffeination. However, it is education, since business education has become largely inseparable from technology. That being said, his thoughts are quite timely as more and more businesses look to employ some degree of "compassionate capitalism," whether that means spending extra on facilities and building green, giving back to their communities or employees, or otherwise spending money in thoughtful ways that don't simply line the pockets of investors and executives. So here's a little departure from ed tech and some thoughts from Dean Cycon on the impending closing of Starbucks' retail outlets.

Chris Pirillo is right. It's time to move on. TECHTV is gone and will not be back; those who made the network great have moved on to other venues. Thankfully, the internet makes that possible. It is their example that helped me understand we can all support what we want on the Internet

Juggling requires maintaining your center. The idea is to stop managing life so much, and begin managing yourself. Long ago I learned that it's better to prepare the speaker than the speech, particularly when I'm well acquainted with the subject matter. If I meticulously outline a lecture, rehearsing the points as I get ready to begin, I'm likely to lose my center. But if I chat with the audience first, put myself at ease, or take a few minutes for some deep breathing, the talk always goes more smoothly.

Today's product holders have it easy. Computers were 10 times heavier in the 1980s, leading to rampant drug abuse from the Eastern Bloc holders and numerous injuries. Just look at the suspiciously wide jaws on this lot.

Critical Mass: How Digital Technology Will Define the Way You Live Digital communities are where you live-that's "you" as in Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2006, which recognizes and celebrates "the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter." This Digital Communities Special Report discusses how the 120 million Americans who are active online users and creators of content and services are changing the world by redefining it around their preferences and predilections, and by the technologies they use and the way they use them. Also see http://www.accela.com/products/whitepapers.asp

Every Monday, All Things Considered will air its new series called All Tech Considered to explore the sometimes daunting - always changing - world of technology. Are you baffled by your cell phone? Wondering what your kids mean when they say they're tweeting on Twitter? Whatever it may be, All Tech Considered is here to explore it with you."

Have you bought any textbooks recently? K-12 book prices are outlandish; college textbooks border on criminal and publishers are moving slower than molasses in January when it comes to moving towards any sort of electronic publishing model. I know, let's cut down countless trees, print on them with toxic inks, and gouge the heck out of students when we could drastically cut costs and environmental impact by publishing books electronically! Good call.

explains how many of nature's information, including gene sequencing, etc are now OWNED by private croporations, ets

Will the transhuman technologies that our accelerating future promises enable us to increase our empathy to others? Or will their use decrease our ability to understand 'the other' that exists outside our own selves, families, communities and cultures? As the world grows smaller and more connected, humans will grow ever more divergent because of their possession - or not - of a multitude of transhuman technologies, and so the role of empathy grows larger and more important than ever. In theory, sensory/media input stimulates mirror neurons, which enable empathy.Practically, empathy is created through storytelling, which is not only the most successful remote means of creating social empathy, but has actually been the engine of social/cultural liberalization and change. I will demonstrate both the positive and negative affects on empathy through the increasing reliance we have on transhuman media technologies and how I believe storytelling is the key to empathy creation.