cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk
We’re looking to hire a new Director of Operational Technology1.
The job description is below in block quotes. It’s fairly boring. I think that’s a legal requirement. Stuff I think you should know is above that.
These are interesting times. You are joining a large, well established 1:1. We have a good foundation, solid infrastructure, and plenty of experience. This is not a passing fancy. We’re serious about taking our integration capabilities to the next level. Your focus is on how to support, manage, and improve all our various projects to help make current and future integration goals happen. There are lots of people and projects to manage in addition to working with me on a regular basis.
You like Macs? We’ve got those for all of our elementary teachers and 5 per classroom (in addition to a number of carts in each school). We even have 1520 iPads. You like PCs? We have quite a few of those as well. 6-12 has a Dell laptop for every student and teacher.
You want to advocate for new devices/platforms/concepts etc.? No problem. The HS device RFP is this coming year and MS and ES RFPs are the year after that. SIS and data warehouse projects are wrapping up but conversations around the LMS and its role in our future are still full swing.
This is an interesting time to be part of the discussion that will set our course for the next 5 years.
Our Technology Department works hard. You will never ever run out of things that need to be done.2 There is an increasing focus on making sure technology decisions are data driven and customer focused. You’ll be jumping into the pool. There is no shallow end. Be prepared for difficult work with a large degree of pressure and intensity.3
Come do amazing things that make life better for teachers and students, that enable new possibilities, and expand our impact immeasurably.
Title: Director of Operational Technology
Job ID: IRC34654
Brief Description
Directs and manages the District’s Information Technology programs. Oversees all computer-related purchases and initiatives of the District. Provides leadership in development of electronic infrastructures to support the activities of the school division. Supervision is exercised over various levels of professional and non-professional staff. Areas of oversight include infrastructures, computer maintenance and repair and administrative technology systems development.
Detailed Description
- Meets with the Executive Director and Assistant Director of Organizational Development4, Quality and Innovation to ascertain the instructional and operational needs and requirements of the district.
- Coordinates the continuing development of the District technology plan
- Formulates, sets, and implements standards for current and future information and operational technology systems and activities
- Reviews and recommends improvements to the District LAN/WAN
- Provides direction for the design of new facilities and the retrofit of existing facilities regarding the requirements for integrating new technologies
- Plans, directs and coordinates department activities and functions
- Prepares and recommends design proposals for data networking and hardware configuration
- Contributes to preparation and management of the department budget
- Plans, schedules and reviews work of professional and non-professional staff
- Attends work daily and is engaged and on task
- Provides support for the appropriate integration of technologies for the teaching and learning process
- Provides and manages a structure to provide support for school-level and division-wide educational technology applications
- Provides direction and guidance to other departments for computing activities to support learning and management
- Keeps abreast of emerging new technologies for consideration by district leadership as tools for appropriate integration into the processes of instruction, learning, and management
Job Requirements
Experience in a technology related management position. Needs extensive knowledge of interactive technology systems, networks, and instructional computing directions; skill in scheduling and coordinating personnel and facilities in order to execute programs efficiently; ability to establish and maintain effective working relationship with employees, department heads and the public; or any equivalent combination of experience and training which provide the required knowledge, skills and abilities.
Additional Details
Salary will be based on experience and training.
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by bionicteaching
Back in November of 2010,1 I posted about building an ITRT “mother blog”2 to share things I thought might be useful for Henrico ITRTs.
It seems like it’s working on my end. There are currently 1912 posts from at least 261 different sources3 and that includes a period of time when Delicious feed stopped working for some reason. That’s an average of about 3.5 posts a day. The most important part is that this is part of my work flow. I am not working harder but I’m doing more with the energy I was already expending.
Documenting for an audience has changed some nuances of my process as well. I add a few more tags in Delicious. I have more of tendency to add interesting quotes and explanations to links in the hopes of providing context/interest for others. All in all, it simply makes me more aware of an external audience. That probably helps me in the long run as well as I’ve been known to forget my own ideas.
There are virtually no comments on the site but I have seen evidence through conversations that at least a few people read it at times. I think I’m good with that for now. It’s a step in the right direction.
Next up for consideration is how to keep my sadly neglected portfolio site updated in the context of a workflow. I had to update a resume this year and I had to refer to my calendar to try to remember what I did this year. I never want to do that again.
I think this will be fairly interesting and something we’re going to be exploring with interested ITRTs in the coming year. I can certainly speak to the good things that come from documenting your work online and engaging with all the smart people on the Internet.
Despite all evidence to the contrary I haven’t given up coming up with decent WCYDWT examples for English. In the meantime, here are a few English pieces that don’t make that bar but interest me nonetheless. They aren’t much more than parlor tricks but they might interest someone.
“My Hands Smell Like Colon”
Colon vs cologne – Sometimes spelling something wrong changes the meaning quite a bit.
Sort of
‘Sort of’ is such a harmless thing to say… sort of. It’s just a filler. Sort of… it doesn’t really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like… after “I love you”… or “You’re going to live”… or “It’s a boy!”
The details in the language in these examples matter. You can have fun with how that works and use small things to break the intent of statements. It’d be a fun running assignment that would get students engaging with language in the wild in different ways.
Shakespeare – Old School
Original Pronunciation – This site is devoted to the production or performance of works from earlier periods of English spoken in original pronunciation (OP) – that is, in an accent that would have been in use at the time.
I remember my English teacher talking about sight rhymes. It’s interesting to see that it probably wasn’t the case. Once again, one of those things where the details matter and change the understanding of the work.
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by bionicteaching
These two articles have no direct links to education but have some connections in my head.
Foie Gras
It helps if you understand gavage and how people make foie gras right now.
“They’ll eat anything if they think that they’re wild. But that’s the key: they have to think, from the moment they’re born, that they’re just passing through, that they’re not part of this movie,”
“If you wanted to raise a baby Rambo, would you want him living rough out in the country or coddled in an intensive-care unit?”
and finally
Although Haney is intrigued by the idea of raising animals in conditions that replicate the wild, he’s not sure he can make the economics work. Natural nesting means that the birds lay only one set of eggs per year, and for a diversified farm where each animal has to earn its keep, that’s nowhere near enough eggs. Also, he prefers to be scientific in his experimentation, altering only one variable at a time. “Farms change in years,” he says. “Not months.” For now, Stone Barns’ geese will be hatched in incubators.
Seems like there’s a lot about our current educational system that resembles informational gavage. Students are clearly domesticated and the instinctive way they would fatten their heads in the wild seems to get turned off.
Heroin Rehab
According to USC psychologist Wendy Wood, environmental change explains the difference and the lessons of the returning Vietnam solider are applicable to anyone who’s trying to change a bad habit. According to Wood, addiction treatment in the 1970s and 1980s focused largely on having people make changes to internal systems of goals and intentions. What the Vietnam vets got when they returned home after treatment however was a massive change to their everyday environment – and it was this complete transformation of daily life and routine that made it so much easier for the returning heroin addicts to remain abstinent.
Just thoughts on how staying in the same school, let alone the same classroom, for 30 years might impact attempts at changing practice. Not paralleling anything directly to heroin, just thinking how much school culture and daily patterns make it hard to make any serious pedagogical change.
NBCLearn
Washington Post
NBC told this blog today that it would investigate its handling of a piece on the “Today” show that ham-handedly abridged the conversation between George Zimmerman and a dispatcher in the moments before the death of Trayvon Martin. A statement from NBC:
“We have launched an internal investigation into the editorial process surrounding this particular story.”
Great news right there. As exposed by Fox News and media watchdog site NewsBusters, the “Today” segment took this approach to a key part of the dispatcher call:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
Here’s how the actual conversation went down:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.The difference between what “Today” put on its air and the actual tape? Complete: In the “Today” version, Zimmerman volunteered that this person “looks black,” a sequence of events that would more readily paint Zimmerman as a racial profiler. In reality’s version, Zimmerman simply answered a question about the race of the person whom he was reporting to the police. Nothing prejudicial at all in responding to such an inquiry.
These two things came my way at about the same time. I don’t want to overstate things based on this one example but it does exemplify one argument I keep having with people. The “vetted” world comes with its own inaccuracies and biases yet we don’t seem to approach this content in that way. Textbooks, NBC’s media library, statements from members of our government, the content of library databases we provide students etc. are all things that ought to be looked at with the same critical eye we encourage for other less “trustworthy” sources of information.1
I wonder to what extent we’d have a more interesting and involved classroom if we introduced the idea of the textbook as an unreliable narrator. It’d be interesting to see what students would consider worth proving vs what they’d just accept. There’s a lot you could play with there. It’d certainly be a fun book to write.
1 Suspect everyone and follow the money might be a good rule of thumb.
So I actually taught a 55 minute class Monday. I’d give myself a C- but I think the underlying concept and the examples are decent and worth sharing.
Here’s the idea. Essentially it’s easier and easier to tell convincing lies in a digital environment.
I’m stealing from Dan Meyer here. I asked the kids to tell me one thing they knew was true and then one thing they knew was false. The next request was for a statement that was sort of true or sort of false.
Augmenting Reality
So I start with the question “Are these pictures lies?” and then try to drill down to the various pieces and apply the idea of context, intent, and manipulation.
Essentially, maybe it doesn’t matter so much if Dana Carvey is airbrushed up. He’s a comedian. I don’t think anyone cares too much what he looks like. He’s not selling anything to do with looks.
Does it matter more that they’re changing Beyonce’s skin color dramatically? Why would they do that? Does it matter? Interestingly, the students seemed to feel that this was done with lighting and wasn’t a big deal.
With Demi Moore, I tried to add complication. Would this be a lie if this picture was used to sell a beauty product? That seemed to trigger something for the students and they stated that manipulation of the audience was what made these “augmentations” of reality acceptable or unacceptable.
Now I brought in Mike Daisey and his comments about Foxconn. What was interesting to me was that most of his lies were simply adding himself into the story. Matthew Baldwin illustrated that really well in this post. I tried to illustrate that by starting with the entry statement above (which is true) and then adding the lie portion in red (below). “It’s a lie but the important part is true. Does it matter?” The students seemed to feel that if he’d add himself to manipulate you that stripped him of any credibility.
It’s important to emphasize that he’s an entertainer. That’s his excuse. It’s entertainment but the important parts are true.
So now we have “real” news and they’re certainly altering things to make a more compelling story. I didn’t seem to convince them that this mattered. The observation that the Newsweek title ought to have been on the Time magazine. The feeling was that the Time magazine looked like a movie poster. I should have drilled down more on why the image was darkened. What is the purpose?
NYT's graph of the housing crash
Only the bottom $100,000 measure is showing initially. I then ask them to guess how much the house would cost at the peak. The red money markers appear sequentially and then we talk about how you might manipulate the axises to make graphs more dramatic and why you might want to do so. I’ll stress again that this is accurate. The question is then “Is this a lie?”
Now we get into quote mining or decontextualizing phrases. This was a quote used to promote the movie Se7en.1 The more complete quote is below and it turns out Owen was not very impressed by the movie.
So we got most2 of that done semi-decently in about 25 minutes.
I wrapped up with the idea that we were going to impugn the reputation of a historical or fictional hero. The goal was to come up with two images- one that uses a partial quote from the character/person and then one that uses actual data in some way to discredit them. My examples were from Star Wars.
I originally had Hitler stats in the chart. I replaced them with the Khmer Rouge. It is strange that one mass murderer feels more acceptable than another but it seems that’s the case.
Place I got media or information
Dana Carvey
Beyonce
Demi Moore
Daisey quote
Daisey image
Foxconn death
OJ Simpson covers
Comparison for the NYT graph
Se7en quote excerpt
Yoda image
Deathstar population
Civil War
Khmer Rouge
Cultural Revolution and Mao
Democide
Skywalker image
2 I skipped a few slides that I used but I’ll put all of the links to stuff below.
This collection of dashboards1 was brought on by a tweet2 from Dan Meyer but precipitated by the fact that I am struggling to figure out what matters in terms of a future LMS and how the data we present (or don’t present) to students and teachers impacts education as a whole.3
While we4 often say we5 want a balance between multiple choice assessment and other types of assessment, if the only data that teachers see and talk about is related to multiple choice we probably shouldn’t bother talking about other types of assessment. There’s also the idea that assessment data may just be the tip of the iceberg. I’m not sure what exactly would make a difference but there are lots of other things that ought to be looked at.
In the end I see the data displayed to students and teachers as being pretty important but it means nothing if it’s not set within the right context and used in the right way by both parties.
All that aside, let’s see what’s going on right now.
Delaware Insight Dashboards
Fairly traditional, I’m not sure these dashboards are even meant for student view but many of the systems I’ve seen lately just give students access to their own data with the same views they give teachers and call it a student dashboard. One of the things that concerns me here is the green/red binary system. There is no room for even a yellow in this world view? Even if your focus is purely on test scores, this kind of thought disregards the importance of scores that fall immediately below and above the cut score. Those scores can easily go either way so seeing green may lead to unfortunate degrees of over confidence.
EquipSchools
Despite having one of the worst icons I have ever seen, EquipSchools has some interesting pieces to this dashboard.
Note the motivation/stress/energy/engagement/homework chart on the right. I’ve seen some people6 encouraging students to input those kind of data that through Twitter like status updates that use emoticons to indicate the emotional state but this is the first I’ve seen of something more sophisticated. It would be interesting to have those kind of data as a student and as a teacher but it seems like they have an awful lot of categories. I can’t think of a way to gather those data without it being either burdensome (and thus not done) or ineffective. Their method, multiple strand Likert scale ratings, seems to be presented in a way that ties it too loosely with time and too tightly with projects for it to be as useful as it could be.
I like the idea this seems to support. Students ought to set goals and the software ought to facilitate that as well as the tracking of progress towards those goals. While that’s a relatively obvious idea, it’s not often done. Most student data dashboards are purely passive visualizations of test data.7 If you’re lucky you might get a mouse over for more information or a dynamic chart.
Ten Marks
This is one of those dashboards that seems to creep up too often in education. It tries to make the data fun by letting you fill up these wacky body shapes with blood.8 It’s pretty much useless for student reflection and really only shows progression along a predetermined path.
You can also see some attempts at “gamification” going on in the sidebar. Apparently you can earn presents. This type of thing would prepare your children well to succeed in College Apprentice where they can accomplish feats and win awards by generating points by attending “events hosted and supported by College Apprentice.”
Read 180
Read 180 pulls out all the stops on the “gamification” bandwagon. I almost expect to get some virtual chickens for my virtual farm if I read enough. Personally, I don’t like this mentality. I fear it’s going to catch on and I imagine it motivates certain kids. I don’t think it does anything to help them learn or reflect on what they’re doing that might impact their learning. I don’t think it’s aiming too high to expect that.
1 A pretty imprecise word that appears to mean quite a few different things to different people.
2 I will never like that word.
3 Someplace I have an interesting way that someone was visualizing learning along five thematic branches (content, critical thinking, etc.) and displaying it as a star/pentagram in order to help reflect the idea of balance. For some reason I thought it was an NSF grant but I’m not finding it currently.
4 I have a frog in my pocket.
5 Yep, frog is still there.
6 I think it was eSparks but their website tells you nothing. I’m also pretty sure Dell’s new personalized learning environment does this as well but I can’t recall if they aggregate the results for student reflection.
7 CosmicMath seems to be a good example of that.
8 It’s bright red, apparently liquid, and in a body. What else could it be?
Hello Ms. Rivas,
I would be interested in a post that details why allowing random people who solicit you via email to guest post on your blog is a terrible idea.
Seriously,
Tom
On Feb 24, 2012, at 5:38 AM, Katheryn Rivas wrote:
Hi Tom,
I hope this email finds you well. I only recently started reading your blog, I am a freelance writer, regularly write for USELESSCRAP.com. I was wondering if you would be interested in publishing a guest post on your blog.
Here are some samples:
- spammygarbage.com
- spammygarbage.net
- spammygarbage.org
- spammygarbage.us
I could write on any topic you wish, or I can simply come up with a post that I believe would supplement your blog. I just need a link to my homepage (http://www.onlineuniversities.com/) on my anchor text in the author by-line. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this; please let me know if this is something you might be interested in.
Sincerely,
Katheryn Rivas
There are good reasons to use digital content. They don’t seem to come up that often in the articles and posts I’ve been reading lately. Below, with some degree of hyperbole, I mock them. I’m not saying these arguments ought to be negated in their entirety but there are certainly better reasons out there. Granted, they aren’t as easy to chant or fit into pithy catch phrases.
- Physical texts are out of date by the time they’re published! Mars is not a planet! The idea that we’re regularly having major revisions in the kind of knowledge published in k12 textbooks is crazy.1 As a matter of fact, I’d rather have a textbook with errors assuming the teacher knows what’s right and what’s wrong and can help students challenge things.
- Digital textbooks will be more engaging!/Kids love technology! We wouldn’t expect crappy a writer to suddenly become awesome because they switched from printing their books to using ePub. Traditional textbook authors seem to come to digital content with all the baggage inherent in their previous medium. I don’t know if they’re the right people to be rethinking things or at least they shouldn’t be doing it in the isolation they currently appear to be in. Adding movies students don’t want to watch to the text kids don’t want to read doesn’t really do anything but take up hard drive space.
Kids don’t love technology. Kids like the fun and interesting things technology enables. That’s a fairly large difference. Adding technology does seem to make unpalatable things slightly more palatable but that’s a far cry from real interest and engagement (warm dog food vs cold dog food).
-
Digital content is cheaper! Maybe but I doubt it. This is one of those things that’s likely to be misleading. There’s no way so many companies would be so excited about digital content if they didn’t see ways to make more money than they’re making now. There are also some missing cost pieces that need to be considered. If the content you want is above and beyond a PDF version of the print book you need to start thinking.
- What people do you have in place for device repairs, device management etc.?2
- What about bandwidth infrastructure?
- Do teachers need PD?3
- Is the ebook-ish thing in its own LMS? How many LMS’s will you end up with? What is your strategy for getting content build by teachers out of these silos if you go with other publishers in the future? etc. etc.
- Have you thought through all the AUP, student content, parental communication issues?
-
Backpacks are too heavy and are crushing our children! If your child is bringing home a 50lb backpack and the child weighs in at 60lbs, the issue is not that books are too heavy but that your school is apparently requiring insane amounts of homework. Don’t treat the symptom.
In other cases, I wonder what a mixture of helicopter parents, an absolutely shameless panic promoting media, and an obesity epidemic is doing to our expectations of student capacity. This article on the terror surrounding heavy backpacks is a good example of why I have to put the word “news” in quotes.
1 I also don’t care if you get the last leg of President X’s term. If it’s recent, wouldn’t I be better off using the actual real news? I also have no faith that any textbook company would do a good job updating their books aside, possibly, from fixing typos or pretending they didn’t say slaves were happy fighting for the Confederates.
2 Maybe you can escape this with a BYOD but you’ll still have to provide and manage for economically disadvantaged students.
3 Probably so if you’ve got a product that isn’t just a PDF book.
Fast
By Tom | February 13, 2012
As a family, we have a tendency to wait until the last minute for most things. My oldest son, wanted Valentine’s Day cards with him hanging off a cliff. Somehow we didn’t get that done and it was suddenly tonight at about 7:00 PM.
So, I had him hang off one of the stairs and shot it from above. No flash and crappy lighting but a decent enough shot for what we needed. Five minutes later and we had a cliff view thanks to Google. Another 10 minutes of Photoshop between the two of us and we were able to push the finished shot straight to Walmart for printing.1
After I got everyone to bed, I was able to pick up 35 copies.2
I don’t want to make any sweeping generalizations, I just thought it was pretty impressive that we can do things like that in so little time, with so little effort.
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