So, whaddaya say we actually try to do something with these Big Questions, as in turn them into a document that schools can use to frame their own conversations around change? Based on your comments and conversations, I threw together a wiki with a plan of action. Rather than bore you with the details here, why not go and check it out and start contributing your ideas?

Looking forward to learning along with you.

During that time, I’ve outlined more steps, lists, charts, tables, and figures for software developers to automate aLEAP. And, learned how teachers are using aLEAP in classrooms. These things leave a great sense of progress. Look for posts.

I expect to return to posting more frequently than during this past month.

Best wishes as you continue expanding your uses of Tablet and other mobile PCs with Ink in education. Looking forward to your comments. Bob

The Telegraph reports that the average Briton sees 10 extra days of work added to their year as a result of always-on email through devices like the Blackberry.

Yesterday, in a workshop that included an overview of some productivity tips for coping with more information, I made the point that for teachers more than any other profession, the notion of push always-on email was abhorrent:

• Always-on email uses up mental bandwidth that, in teaching, is needed to concentrate on the 30 different learning challenges in front of you;
• Always-on email encourages disorganisation in the sender’s world: no email should ever be sent requesting a meeting any sooner than 24 hours ahead. If you need to see someone that soon, go and knock on their door. If you need a meeting with that person then the subject matter should be of such importance (and not urgency) that you can leave it so others can have time to prepare;
• Always-on email is a distraction from doing the task in hand. If you don’t think focus is important, then just spend some time in the world of Merlin Mann.
• Always-on email outside the normal working day means you are working for free. If you need more time to do parts of your job that are not teaching then either a) ask for less contact time or b) lose some of your job that does not contribute to teaching your youngsters. Don’t ask permission to do this. You’re the professional, after all.

I was astonished, though, at the resistance to this concept. I’d have thought that good email management was a release for everyone, yet a few folk still felt that they had, in the course of the workshop and my keynote, received some useful emails which they wanted to think about. Fair enough, but they weren’t concentrating, weren’t able to concentrate, on the really challenging stuff I was trying to get them to think about. Their choice, and one I often make in a conference situation.

But we must always give ourselves the opportunity of maximum mental bandwidth at least once in the day to deal with the complex goals we’re trying to achieve.

Pic from Kendriya in Andy Polaine‘s Lost In Text Flickr group (permission pending).

1 in 5 Glasgow parents wants to be able to communicate with teachers about their children’s work via Facebook and other social networking sites, reports the Glasgow Herald.

I think this is potentially an underestimate: there are more than one in five parents in East Lothian, I’d guess, who take advantage of the online ‘coverage’ of what their kids have been learning at school through the eduBuzz Word Press blogging platform. I’m sure that more than 1 in 5 sets of parents whose classroom teacher has started a learning log wherever they are, check in to see what their child has been doing, or what their teacher is planning.

I wonder, though, whether Facebook (and its verb form) have become the new ‘Hoover’, the interchangeable Proper/Common noun that has permeated the mainstream so as to mean “communication device”, in the same way as “Hoover” is a “cleaning device for the floor”.

In Glasgow, this misappropriation and lack of geek jargon to describe the right too for the job is particularly likely. The same day we are told that Glasgow is the UK’s least tech-savvy city, with 2% of the population thinking you need special eyes to receive HD TV.

More and more, though, as I look at my own kids and try to make sense what’s going to make them successful, I care less and less about a particular teacher’s content expertise and more about whether that person is a master learner, one from whom Tess or Tucker can get the skills and literacies to make sense of learning in every context, new and old. What I want are master learners, not master teachers, learners who see my kids as their apprentices for learning. Before public schooling, apprenticeship learning was the way kids were educated. They learned a trade or a skill from masters. When we moved to compulsory schooling, kids began to learn not from master doers so much as from master knowers, because we decided there were certain things that every child needed to know in order to be “educated.” And we looked for adults who could impart that knowledge, who could teach it in ways that every child could learn it.

My sense is that we need to rethink the role of those adults once again, and that we’re coming full circle. George Siemens had a great post last week about “Teaching in Social and Technological Networks” and he asked the same question that we had asked at Educon: What is the role of the teacher? It changes:

Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher. Networks thin classroom walls. Experts are no longer “out there” or “over there”. Skype brings anyone, from anywhere, into a classroom. Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.

George goes on to suggest a totally different way of thinking about “teaching” one where “instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.” And he discusses seven different roles that teachers will play, all of which are worth the read. The one that sticks out for me at least is the role of modelling, where he writes:

Modelling has its roots in apprenticeship. Learning is a multi-faceted process, involving cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions. Knowledge is similarly multi-faceted, involving declarative, procedural, and academic dimensions. It is unreasonable to expect a class environment to capture the richness of these dimensions. Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.

But I would argue it goes further than that, that apprenticeship for every student in our classrooms these days is not so much grounded in a trade or a profession as much as it is grounded in the process of becoming a learner. Chris Lehmann likes to say that we don’t teach subjects, we teach kids. And I’ll add to that: we teach kids to learn. We can’t teach kids to learn unless we are learners ourselves, and our understanding of learning has to encompass the rich, passion-based interactions that take place in these social learning spaces online. Sure, I expect my daughter’s science teacher to have some content expertise around science, no doubt. But more, I expect him to be able to show her how to learn more about science on her own, without him, to give her the mindset and the skills to create new science, not just know old science.

How we change that mindset in teachers is another story, however, and I know it has a lot to do with expectations, traditional definitions, outcomes, culture and a whole lot more. But we need to change it to more of what Zac Chase from SLA talks about in this snip I Jinged from the “What is Educon?” video posted by Joseph Conroy. (Apologies for the audio and the stupid pop up ads.)

We still need to be teachers, but kids need to see us learning at every turn, using traditional methods of experimentation as well as social technologies that more and more are going to be their personal classrooms. How do we make more of that happen?

From the Leader of Newcastle City Council John Shipley at the superb libraries conference Edge2010 in Edinburgh Castle came this phrase. He believes that:

“libraries come cheap at the price, reducing costs in almost every other problematic area of public spending: policing and crime prevention, vandalism, drug and alcohol abuse, social exclusion”.

When he and colleagues built the new City Library in Newcastle it was an architectural and social revolution, one of the few spaces in a city centre that you could go to and not have to spend money. As such, it is becoming the pillar of interaction for citizens, and it’s not just to read.

Shipley’s number one preoccupation on his visits is counting the number of laptops that are free for people to use. If he doesn’t spot enough of them, he’ll make sure that more are supplied. Access to information and civic services is such a core entitlement, in his view, that the expense of more hardware is a small price to pay compared to what other parts of his council will have to fork out if the library wasn’t fulfilling its role to the full.

This is profound. It’s profound in an age where libraries are often the first in line to be cut, closed and stalled in their work to make us more fully informed and wise citizens. His point is that it’s the cheapest thing to keep going given what it does to mop up the social problems of a city through engagement. Fact: a £0.5m ($1m) annual cost of an enormous city library is equivalent to half a penny rise in local taxes. It’s a negligible price to pay for what it can offer.