WMS Technology Vision

Interestingly, the commenters on the blogs were overwhelmingly supportive. “The only kind of surprise we had was that almost all comments made by readers were very positive and constructive in trying to offer support for distressed bloggers,” Dr. Barak wrote in an e-mail.

Connecting your staff (be it passively or actively) will help them be more informed and help to focus your efforts on what really matters – the customer.

Encourage your staff to build networks that are appropriate to them – if they work in product development they could build contacts through forums and groups with people who could help them. If they work in sales they could use Twitter as a way to build their own brand and reach out to people to fill the top of their sales funnel.

For many brands reach of your messaging and engagement is important. Your staff provide the single best vehicle to do this. Empowering, practically encouraging, your teams to all engage in social media will be good for their development and also good for you.

I am sorry, but if you haven’t posted it, you haven’t earned ethically the admiration of others, because how can they really know what they are admiring or turn that admiration into useful activity on behalf of students and our society’s future? How can they effectively stand on your shoulders if you haven’t provided them a helpful foundation upon which to build?

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,” Dr. Boyd said in her office at Microsoft, where a view of the Boston skyline is echoed in the towers of books on her shelves, desk and floor. “Letting your child out to bike around the neighborhood is seen as terrifying now, even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

“We need to give kids the freedom to explore and experience things online that might actually help them,” she added. “What scares me is that we don’t want to look at the things that make us uncomfortable. So rather than see what teenagers are showing us online about bullying and suicide and the problems they’re dealing with and using that information to help them, we’re making ourselves blind to it.”

She asks, for example, how teenagers can be encouraged to become politically active when so much of that activity takes place online. And she wonders whether gay children grappling with their sexuality might benefit enormously from chatting online with adults who have been through similar situations. “There are lots of places where it’s extraordinarily helpful for kids to talk to adults,” she said.

ot only do administrators need to feel the power of of learning differently, but they also need to appreciate the time it takes to develop proficiency with tools used for connecting, creating and collaborating, and sharing and reflecting. Too often we assume that learning to use the technology is the easy part, but for many teachers, that too simply is not intuitive. It also takes time to move past the myths associated with particular tools. Twitter and Facebook, for example, two tools that I am absolutely committed to for my own PD, are powerful tools for connecting, sharing, and learning from others, but both have a reputation as being frivolous time-wasters. I want an administrator to follow me on Twitter; better still, I want to follow her, and I want her to ask questions and share answers...out loud.

More than anything else, we need our school leaders to embrace learning in these transformational ways so that they can then lead us where we need to go, so that they can envision more concretely how our schools can thrive in the future.  If school leaders do not become 21st-century learners who can strategize and plan for the future, how can the rest of us ever get there? Your silence is speaking volumes! Your distractions by other issues that demand your constant attention is sending a message.  We need your leadership, and we need it now!

 I say to administrators, don’t let fear of not being an expert, of not fully understanding where it’s all heading, of not having all the answers, stop you from moving forward.  Be the chief questioner, let your faculty know that asking questions and looking for the answers is accepted, even valued.

And you think about some teacher in some rural area who has no impact outside of 150 kids and six teachers in their department. They can have that worldwide, national impact with social media. So see it as an advocacy thing. See it as a professional development thing. Those are my two largest frames I have on it.

I put a small camera on a shelf and filmed it and put it online and just sent a note out and, you know, there's twenty people in that room and I just checked it before I got here and 3,000 people have watched it in total. That's passive. I didn't do anything to pursue any of them. I just put it somewhere where it's easily found and my message, the things I'm enthusiastic about, that I want to advocate, those get out there. And people find it. And they learn from me. And they critique me. And it's all very, very positive.

Social media for me creates this very virtuous cycle where I become more productive, get better feedback, my kids win, other peoples' kids win. And this narrative plays out in reverse with other people who blog and me. I am that person to them that they are to me. It's something that I'm still trying to figure out. I posted all of my Algebra 1 curricula I developed. All my Geometry curricula is just there for easy download. This is kind of the lifestyle now.

 Connected people are more successful, and those most successful at mastering the techniques of connectivity have the greatest successes.  Connection is becoming indispensable, and we have already begun to think of it as an innate capability.  

The billion seconds from 1995 – 2026 is witness to a transition from a world in which no one is connected, to a world where being connected and being human is seen as synonymous.

“We should not view social media as either positive or negative, but as essentially neutral,” he said. “It’s what we do with the tools that decides how they affect us and those around us.”

Though there are certainly real dangers, and though some adolescents appear to be particularly vulnerable, scientists are now turning to a more nuanced understanding of this new world. Many have started to approach social media as an integral, if risky, part of adolescence, perhaps not unlike driving.

“Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is, ‘How is this going to interact with my child’s personality?’ ” said Clay Shirky, who teaches about social media at New York University. “Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted.”

My school puts the relationship between teach, student, and subject at the center of its philosophy, so I feel rock solid about stories like this.  In fact, I wonder if it gets any better.

By interacting with students through Facebook, I can help them fill their life with good stuff and play the role of their intellectual friend – the one who challenges them and points to great stuff they can explore on their own.  Isn’t that teaching?

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.

Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood: idealism, experimentation and wonder