I remember it well

Back from when I was a little boy growing up on the prairie - sort of...

"A link to a 1993 video clip from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the new-fangled Internet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n4fDgmrF3o

All about assholes

It’s always, always, always better to be a nice person than an ass. 
You will make mistakes at home and on the job. So keep this in mind: People will forgive your mistakes if you are generally a nice person; they never forget them if you behave like an ass. from Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part. Illustration by Brady Johnson

Asshole is one of those words like bullshit that, while rude, is sufficiently descriptive and exact to be useful.  My copy of Robert I. Sutton's smart little book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't came in the mail yesterday. When I sat down with it I meant to only read the dust jacket but wound up nearly finishing it.

Based on an earlier article in the Harvard Business Review, Stanford professor Sutton defines an asshole as a person who meets these criteria:

Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful than at those people who are more powerful? 

While Sutton suggests we can all be temporary assholes, he singles out the chronic and "flaming" assholes as not just unpleasant to work with, but actually damaging to a company's bottom line. He even provides a TCA (Total Cost of Asshole) formula to determine what an asshole might be costing an organization.

 While Sutton's observations and examples come from the business world, those of us in education can also learn from this  book. At least I know I have worked with assholes and have probably acted like one more often than I would like to admit. I would even argue that the "no asshole rule" - that assholes will simply not be tolerated as part of the organizational culture - is even more important in schools than in businesses. The damage that assholes can do to kids is greater and more long-lasting than that they can do to adults. Period.

One piece of advice about disagreements Sutton shares comes from the University of Michigan's Karl Weick: "Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong."  Something as a blogger - writer, reader and responder - I need to remember a little better.

Do you have an asshole story that has a happy ending? 

Odds and Ends - March 4

The Sunday papers are read, the e-mail checked, and the driveway is still clear. Life is good in snowy Minnesota and it's time to add a few odds and ends to the blog...

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I am ALREADY getting excited about NECC in Atlanta this June. Look at this from Peg Milam, SIGMS chair:

SIGMS Forum: The Changing Landscape of 21st Century School Information Centers 
Tuesday, 6/26/2007, 10:30am–12:30pm
The SIGMS forum will feature a discussion about the changing landscape of the 21st century school information center led by a panel of technology experts. These experts will include bloggers, wikiers, tech gurus, technology information specialists, school library media specialists and administrators. Nonmembers welcome!
*Brian Kenney, editor-in-chief of School Library Journal, will introduce the panel
Esteemed panelists: David Warlick, Will Richardson, Larry Johnson, Alice Yucht , Joyce Valenza, and Lisa Perez (AKA  SL's Elaine Tulip).
Other panelist: Doug Johnson   

Will this be cool or what? Worth the price of admission alone! 

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The 2007 Horizon report is now available. (I reported on the 2006 edition last November.) The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE put this report together to analyze and predict the impact of emerging technologies on education. More when I get a chance to read it the report thoroughly. From the abstract:

The 2007 Horizon Report looks at six selected areas--"User-Created Content," "Social Networking," "Mobile Phones," "Virtual Worlds," "New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication," and "Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming"--the project draws on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable individuals in business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project's Advisory Board probes current trends and challenges in higher education, explores possible topics for the "Report," and ultimately directs the selection of the final technologies. 

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Just to torture myself, I decided to try out the Google Reader to view my RSS feeds. I have been a happy Bloglines subscriber, but I figured, what the heck. A few observations, keeping in mind that any may be the result of my own ignorance of the program and how it works:

• Google Reader makes it VERY easy to import all your feeds from Bloglines. It literally took five minutes before I was up and running with all my feeds. It even kept the public/private settings. Amazing.
• Google Reader feels slower than Bloglines.
• Google Readers lists all past posts of a blog, even if they have been read. This might be the feature that keeps me using Google Reader. I almost never go back to read comments to a post on another blog - even the ones I find really interesting - simply because I forget about them. Now I am reminded. Maybe Bloglines has this feature too and my settings are just wrong.
  
• I have to click on the "mark all  as read" in Google Reader in order to make any entries show they have been read instead of them automatically being counted as read after having opened them.
  
• Google Reader works so much like Bloglines, that the learning curve is very short.
  

While I am starting to get the feeling that by supporting Google that I am in league with the next technological Evil Empire (ala Microsoft), I will use it for a week or so and then go back to Bloglines for a while. It's tough when evaluating these products to separate functionality and familiarity.

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Speaking of reading follow-up comments, I went back and looked at some responses to the post "Discussing education with non-teachers" by Dennis Fermoyle over at his In the Trenches of Public Education blog. Wow - Dennis has his critics, and long winded ones at that. But what really amazes me is the generosity of spirit, patience, and respect Dennis shows in his responses to them. You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

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 I was delighted to see AASL put the draft of their new Student Learning Standard in a wiki and invite members to take a whack at editing them. Kudos to Gail Dickinson and AASL for this demonstration that AASL members, not just its leaders, have ideas worth offering.

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Jacob Nielsen's Life-Long Computer Skills post at Alertbox is worth a read. He makes the argument I am always trying to make to our curriculum people:

The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn't turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn't the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today's third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years -- and even more before they retire in 2065.

Here is his interesting and eclectic list of "life-long" computer skills:

• Search strategies, like forming good queries and judging relevance of results
• Weighing the credibility of online information
• Techniques for dealing with information overload
• Writing hyperlinked online text
• Computer presentation skills (nip bad PowerPoint habits in the bud!)
• Workplace ergonomics
• Debugging -- not the heavy-duty stuff, but the logical process of tracking down errors
• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

 Hmmmm.

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I fussed in last Thursday's posting that ALA's Office of Intellectural Freedom has not responded to my requests for resources for setting web filtering/blocking policies in schools. In response, AASL president-elect, Sara Kelly Johns steered me toward  ALA's list of resources on its Intellectual Freedom page. While I still can't locate a document that speaks directly to developing a school selection/reconsideration policy for online resources, ALA has done more in this area than any other professional organization to my knowledge. Thanks, Sara, for the direction. And thanks to ALA for working to uphold the precepts of intellectual freedom.

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A Sunday quote for contemplation:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  -Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

 Will Richardson on his Weblogg-ed entry Stuck writes: "This whole School 2.0 thing is the crux of it. There’s this niggling feeling in my brain somewhere that at the end of the day, I’m totally missing the point. That for the most part, we’re all missing the point." What's our "endless immensity of the sea," Will?