Learning and Leadership

Today I am off to a leadership course where I will be presenting my ideas on what I am planning to do about my learning challenge.

The challenge is to do this within the framework of the huge demands of managing a school, building a new school and preparing for an external audit of the school. The challenge of learning in a new way for me is causing concern but not as much as how scary it is to bring this into a school for others.

I read a blog posting from Will Richardson today about his conversations with some graduate students. The full conversation is at on his website but I have edited a little.

"I got the sense that most didn’t want to accept that challenge or felt it was just too daunting. And at another point, after going through a list of reasons why using these ideas were going to be difficult, I said “yes, but you know there is nothing stopping you from changing the way you learn.” Not sure how well that went over, either

I don’t mean to come across as disparaging to any of these students. You could tell they were by and large smart and sincerely interested in the discussion. But I guess I was hoping for more, though I’m also not entirely surprised I didn’t get it.

As much as I want it to be otherwise, the reality here is that we’re just not getting it done on so many levels."

That is somewhat how I feel. Somewhat daunted and the reality on so many levels so far from where it should be.

School Development

At the moment I am developing an action plan for the further development of the school into a learning school. This blog will be important as a collaborative part of that development.

The action plan for this is developing on my web page. The link to this is at http://scottieoconnells.wikispaces.com/Action+plan

Information

I came across this writing by Ian Jukes which has some fascinating information regarding the future of information and where this is heading. http://ianjukes.com/infosavvy/education/handouts/fgtg.pdf
The future of education is hugely linked to the future of information. Information is as Ian Jukes says in the process of exploding. But what does this mean for learning.

Paper

I recently came across information that on a fraction of the words (5%) that were written last year was published on paper. The rest is all digital.

But our schools are all paper.

Most teachers don't know about blogs or pod casts or wikis. They still use textbooks.

Most schools block access to myspace or youtube or digg.

Why?

With over 100 milion users my space is obviously sgnificant to learners but what those this mean to us as educators?

This is the first listing of mine on a blog. My role is principal of Whangaparaoa College a large secondary school in Auckland, New Zealand.

The school is new only been open two years and has had a number of difficulties getting underway due to hassles with project managers architects and planners and not least the Ministry of Education in New Zealand. But we do have many wonderful buldings which I will post pictures of in a few days time.

The school has been built with learning at the fore front and this is the continued challenge as we move on. The challenge of keeping learning the key while surrounded by the so many other demands. Even more the challenge is about what does learning mean in our Web 2.0 world and as a school leader what does this mean? While the excitement of working in a web enabled way the management of that around risks of internet safety are huge and I would be interested in how that works.

If Web 2.0 is the future what does that mean about our schools and the way learning occurs?