Your Ideas for EdWeek's "Technology Counts" 2009

As an employee of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and specifically its Instructional Media & Technology (IMT) team my job related duties can be varied to say the least.

One duty that I enjoy is serving on various committees for the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), a national organization for ed tech proponents working at the state level.   I currently sit as the vice-chair of the SETDA Data Committee.  Our committee has two main purposes: to collect data to produce the annual SETDA National Trends Report and to work collaboratively with the US Dept of Education and other groups that collect ed tech data by providing guidance and advice from the field.  

On May 13, I will be part of a group of state leaders that will discuss the data collection and publication of EdWeek's  Technology Counts and how the current indicators and survey may or may not reach the fairest or most accurate results.

Although SETDA approached Ed Week, the people there have been very responsive and willing to talk about how to improve the current efforts. They did mention that the research division, led by Chris Swanson, is very short-staffed, so recommendations should be tangible and reasonable – but SETDA believes that is possible, especially if SETDA offers to review the questions.

In talking with Ed Week and a few SETDA members, we see several particular areas of focus for our call, including:

• Indicators used to determine access (please see link at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/03/27/30sources.h27.html for details on how computed).
  
• Survey questions used to determine use, capacity, and other discussions.
  
• Theme for next Technology Counts (i.e., STEM, funding, virtual learning)
  

What I am asking you is for YOUR ideas, concerns, questions, comments and what not.  What do you like or dislike about Tech Counts?  How can we as an ed tech community make it better?

My meeting is at 1:30 PM ET so be quick and succinct!

I am here for the learning revolution

Scott Mcleod and Wesley Fryer are sponsoring a contest that, by the time you read this, will have met its May 1 deadline.  

The contest is to design a button with the phrase I am here for the learning revolution on it in some way, shape or form that Scott and Wes will distribute at NECC during EduBloggerCon 2008 and Classroom 2.0 LIVE .  I had been thinking about this for a week or so and had not come up with any really good ideas, primarily because my work laptop is devoid of any font or graphic that is out of the ordinary.  I struggled with this over and over and had resigned to not entering anything.

I was searching through the Flickr images to get some ideas - a photo of a shift key or  an enter key were my original ideas with the above phrase superimposed on it.  But I did not find anything that caught my fancy.  So, I did what any normal person would do, I "Googled" revolution.  I went to its Wikipedia entry then went to the list of Revolutions and Rebellions and there I saw the name Julius Caesar and it hit me - the Rubicon River.

I could use the "Crossing the Rubicon" as my analogy to I am here for the learning revolution.  Crossing the Rubicon  means to commit to the point of no return - and stems from Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River with his Roman Army to "invade" ancient Rome in January 49 BC.  Roman Generals were forbidden by law to cross the Rubicon with their army and when Caesar crossed, he made conflict or revolution inevitable.

I thought this was an apt analogy for the contest in that it suggests we, as educators, make that commitment to the learning revolution needed to ensure our students thrive in the 21st century!

So, here it is -- My entry emailed before the end of the day on May 1, 2008.  What do you think?