Does Kanye Know Best? #ISTE11 Reflections

While #ISTE11 in Philadelphia, PA is almost a month past us, I have some unfinished business to take care of here on Raised Digital stemming from my trip to the City of Brotherly Love for the annual conference. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy; perhaps it’s because I’m busy; and it’s certainly so this post didn’t get washed in with the hundreds of other ISTE Reflection posts, I am now recording my thoughts and take-aways from the 2011 ISTE conference experience.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my ISTE trip this year. From EdubloggerCon, to my model lesson presentation, visiting, sharing and learning from all my colleagues and an enjoyable round of golf with a rag-tag crew of edubloggers, there were lots of great moments. The best part of it all was the fact that I was able to have my family with me. My wife attended the conference and came away with a lot of great ideas she can share professionally in her district. She and I got to spend time together, which is not par for the course when I attend conferences.

Perhaps the the greatest experience was having our 4 year old son with us. While it was challenging at times to haul a preschooler around the Philadelphia Convention Center, I was proud of the way he handled himself over the 4 days we were in attendance. To watch him communicate, create and explore among some of the top educational minds and thought leaders that were in attendance was truly a proud moment for me as a father. I know we had fun and learned a lot together, as a family. I have evidence.

For further review, I submit to you, my thoughts/notes from #ISTE11.

On my model lesson

• Packed model lesson session with great colleagues.
• Sessions are still good, because many people learn that way.
• Twitter sells them out, which is somewhat sad.

On meeting, talking  and sharing with people

• Conversations are helpful.
• Observing how other people construct meaning is possibly the most beneficial part of attending ISTE.
• You need to see, hear and feel how others learn to become a better learner yourself.

Eye opener

• There need to be more kids there.
• Young kids. Middle school kids. High school kids.

The @djakes in me

• There is not enough thoughtful attention to designing spaces that support transliteracy.
• The conversations around libraries are crucial, yet they get kicked in the gut around edtech circles.
• Literacy has not changed, but the forums for access, interactions and modes of interacting with written and verbal communication have.
• Careful attention to the design of “schools” must take priority in our administration of said “schools.”
• Space, device and access all need to support learner goals.
• We should not be talking about “devices” if space and access do not adequately support all learners in an equitable fashion.
• We are still not talking about these concepts of space, device and access or making significant changes to how education looks in our own communities.

Now a little Kanye
While Kanye West takes a lot of flak for his antics, and a lot of people might not respect him, I find this line from his song, “Power,” to be quite insightful and very telling concerning the state of public K-12 education today.

The system broken, the schools closed, the prisons open.

This idea that we are preparing kids for prison rather than life may be even more appropriate in the context of ISTE and what people who attend the annual conference keep talking about doing. The idea that we can transform education by effectively integrating technology has been the talk of ISTE since I first attended in 2004. But what has really changed in that time? We’re still talking about it, debating the pros and cons with each other, and never really moving towards developing steps or a plan that can actually help our schools implement and achieve this. Are students being served an adequate public education when we never get to the point of creating action items to move forward? I go back to thinking about spaces. Maybe the reason edtech PD and teacher utilization of technology has not permeated more deeply over all the years of ISTE is because a majority of spaces we send children to for 185 days a year are no longer viable spaces to support learner needs. Maybe?

Some @bengrey and Mac Miller to top it off

We gonna take over the world while these haters gettin’ mad,

proclaims Mac Miller, a Pittsburgh based rapper. This lyric also keeps coming back to me as I think about ISTE11 and a conversation I had with Ben Grey. We had been discussing the whole ed tech debate/firestorm that is centered around the “what is the best 1:1 solution,” i.e., netbooks versus iPads versus Android versus iOS. Eventually the best we could determine was that we might never know the “best solution” but in order to move our organizations and communities forward, we both needed to make the “best decision for our schools, our communities and our kids at this time” and then do it. We concluded that sometimes you just have to stop the rhetoric and move forward with your best plan, knowing full well that along the way you will make mistakes and when you identify mistakes, that you will fix them. That’s learning. That’s POWER. So while all the debate over filters or no filters, Facebook or no Facebook, cell phone or no cell phones, netbooks or iPads, continues to dominate the ed tech landscape, “we gonna take over the world while these haters gettin’ mad,” simply because we are carrying out our best laid plans and not just talking about it.