TMI - Signs of over-communication

One of the questions Darren Draper asks in a series of blog posts about transparency is "Can one be too transparent?" It's a good question. 

But I've been thinking lately about a related but different question: Is there a point when sharing too much information (TMI) can be counter productive to getting one's message across? Are these signs I might be over-communicating?

• I was having a little talk with another district-level director not long ago and she asked if a set of guidelines from my department had been shared with the staff. I showed her that I had sent the information to everyone in one of our bi-monthly "TechTips" newsletters a few months earlier. "Oh," she replied, "Nobody reads those!"
• Follow-up discussions with teachers about TechTips usually reveal that while everyone says they save them for later reading, few people actually read them.
• I titled one of my power-user Gmail Tips "Learn to use filters and never see my name in your inbox again." Nobody laughed when they read it. And everyone seem to pay rapt attention during that part of the workshop.
• When I introduce myself to a staff member for the first time, the standard response is, "Oh, you're the guy who sends all those e-mails."

Do I send stuff to my staff so often that it gets routinely ignored? How do you determine the right balance of too much and too little information? On which side should one err? 

Perhaps there are signs in one's outside-of-school life of TMI as well...

• After a peak of several hundred Twitter followers, you are down just a handful.
• The royalty check for your last book was smaller than your state tax refund.
• Some articles in The Onion seem more mean than humorous.
• You glance at your wife's e-mail inbox and find none of your e-mails to her have been opened.

I know I whack "over-communicators" regularly from my RSS feeds (those suffering from blogorrhea), my Twitter account and from Facebook. I regularly suspend getting messages from hyperactive mailing lists like LM_Net. 

Some guidelines?

1. If you had to pay a couple bucks for each e-mail e-mailed, every Twitter tweeted, or every blog post posted, would you still send it?
2. Are you the sole source of this information or are you just passing it along?
3. Is the information actually important or just "nice to know?"
4. Is the message of interest to a majority of those receiving it?
5. Are you communicating through channels that are "required" or "voluntary?" (We have one school e-mail list that is not optional for district employees to receive; another that is.)
6. Is the message as succinct, clear and non-technical as possible with the reason for the message clearly communicated? 

Send or not to send - what are your criteria?

Image source: http://jimmarous.blogspot.com/2010/06/onboarding-communication-how-much-is.html

It's spring in Minnesota

I couldn't resist...

A deficit of imagination

I've been doing faculty focus groups as a part of a long-range technology planning process. For the past six weeks or so, armed with cookies and a notepad, I've been asking four rather simple questions of voluntary groups of teachers:

1. What is the district doing right with technology and should be continued or expanded?
2. What are your major frustrations with technology and how might they be lessened?
3. What do you hear that other schools or districts are doing with technology that you think might be good for the students in this school?
4. Would you support a 1:1 laptop (or netbook/tablet/etc.) project in your school and what might it look like?

I'm out in buildings enough to not be terribly surprised by any of the responses I got. Teachers like their Smartboards, laptops, and GoogleApps. Teachers are frustrated by dim projectors, slow Internet speeds (that prevent YouTube from streaming), lack of training and lack of time to work on technology initiatives.

So, no hesitance about questions one or two.

But what I did find surprising was the dearth of ideas and any excitement surrounding questions three and four. A couple teachers ventured they might like iPads in their classrooms and there were a couple requests for student response systems and document cameras, but the most common response was no response at all.

And make no mistake - I would put the quality of our district's teachers up against any in the world. These are committed and caring people with whom I am proud to be associated.

As the technology director, I take this as a personal failure*. Why have I not found the means of getting people excited about possibilities? About thinking creatively about technology? About dreaming of a better way to educate students that technology might enable?

Is a deficit of imagination even worse than a lack of skills and information? 

How do I get teachers excited, courageous and imaginative about how educational technology might be used in their classrooms?

* Are rigid state educational requirements, a lack of funding for conference attendance, and feeling demaned by the press and politicians resulting in a "just hunker down and survive" mentality in many classroom teachers?