Drape's Takes

While Chris Lehmann was delivering his lunch-time keynote to participants in the ISTE/TIE Leadership Bootcamp, his computer froze and I'm pretty sure I'm the one to blame.

Just before his address, I recommended to him that he break from the standard a little and come down off the stand to be closer to his audience. Chris kindly followed my advice. His computer - probably a Mac running Windows or something like that - didn't like the new arrangement and so it froze on a slide entitled "Humility." No kidding. Being the caliber of presenter that Chris is, he handled the presenter's-worst-nightmare very well, complete with rag-tag tap dance and all. But I'm not really writing this post to apologize nor to extend Chris a well-deserved pat on the back. Instead, I'm writing about trust.

Trust is an amazing thing; built often by reputation, sometimes out of love, earned instantly on sporadic occasions and on others just over a lifetime. Trust is created by proving oneself: An earned confidence on the part of others, marked by belief in ability, certainty of potential, and reliance on capacity. Trust can be very hard to come by.


The reason I recommended to Chris that he break from the traditional organization of the room is that, having just experienced Jeff Pointek's keynote in the same room, I'd solidified further in my mind how difficult it can be to lecture the modern conference attendee. ("Attendee," of course, because "participant" doesn't really describe those consuming a lecture, now does it.) In watching the audience react to Jeff's hits and misses as he'd led us through his tale, I'd learned even better how difficult it can be to earn an audience's trust. And it's not just the laptops. It's that those laptops are now connected to a network and how - more than ever before - the modern presenter battles not only to earn the trust of an audience, but for the attention of that audience, as well.

Have you ever tried to earn a person's trust without knowing that they're even listening? Have you ever tried to do it knowing that they're not?

Therefore, just as we're taught as pre-service teachers, I think immediate audience proximity is increasingly becoming a necessity for presenters asked to lecture the networked generation. What do you do when even your most difficult students begin to stray off task? You move in closer, showing that you care, doing your best to earn the respect and trust you've come to deserve.


To be sure, I certainly don't know everything there is to know about this complex game we call education. As a result, I appreciate very much the opportunity I had to participate in this experience - and for Chris' perfectly-timed words on the essential requirement we all have to be humble in the service we give to others. I'm grateful to have (had? :-) the trust of such a capable teacher in Chris, and the humble manner in which he so passionately leads those in and out of his school.

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Images source: Flickr user Katie Morrow.

Filtering, access, collaboration, care, trust, responsibility, noise, connect, social capital, communities of practice, iPads all around, hyperconnectivity, the six degrees of Bacon, #edchat, reputation, highly intelligent kids, policy, purpose, and politics: I think ISTE 2010 began very well.

Having attended the first-ever ISTE/TIE Leadership Bootcamp, I was impressed with their lineup while torn by the unfortunate scheduling conflict with EduBloggerCon. In truth, the jumps I made during the day from LBC to EBC to LBC to EBC were fascinating because both events were structured very differently, both had quality people contributing to the atmosphere, and each was unique in its strengths.

To delineate, the Leadership Bootcamp taught me a number of things. First, I'm still comfortable with the relatively liberal filtering policies we put in place in our District. We put forth an adequate effort in maintaining CIPA requirements while also giving teachers and students the freedom to access social sites potentially helpful to their curriculum. Second, we've become an incredibly difficult society to teach - at least when teaching means lecture, and as students, well, we're networked. More on that to come. Third, the Leadership Bootcamp was successful in teaching me that an increase in cost doesn't always translate into an increase in learning. While the learning that took place at LBC was certainly top-rate (and traditional in its approach, to be sure), such an environment had no corner on the market of effectiveness.

Fashioned after the "un-conference" model, EduBloggerCon on the other hand, was free to all participants and informal in its approach. Session Conversation topics and facilitators were selected at the beginning of the event, and no participants were paid for their services. Learning was the focus, and provided by the community for the community - all in the form of conversation, untainted by the sight of sages on stages. In jumping back and forth between LBC and EBC, it was clear that conversation is an incredibly powerful method of learning, capable of rapid customization but also often prone to easy derailment. More than once, conversations began with a clear objective in mind, but were quickly shifted toward topics originally unintended.

Through the conversations I was privileged to experience during EduBloggerCon, I also learned many things. Primarily, it was solidified in my mind that there exists an important role in many classrooms for the iPad. In spite of hearing cautionary voices to the contrary, I think that if a teacher's central goals include increasing a student's love for reading, then the iPad is a more sound investment than laptops or netbooks. The more I use the iPad, the more I'm attracted to its interface, and oddly, the more I find myself addicted to consuming its content. In contrast, I've never felt similarly compelled to read PDFs on my laptop and doubt our students ever have, either. Strange, I know (and probably even unhealthy).

David Jakes and his dPad at EduBloggerCon