geek.teacher

I’ve got a couple of speaking/organizing events coming up soon that I figured I’d mention here:

1. This week I’ll be at MassCUE annual conference on both Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday I’ll be presenting two sessions. The first session will be me flying solo doing An App a Minute, in which I try to share 50 iPad apps in 50 minutes. Think one man iPad smackdown. The second session will be a joint session with Greg Kulowiec on Do It Yourself PD, a topic on which I think I’m somewhat knowledgeable. If either of those sounds like your bag and you’ll learn something, I’ll be hanging out in Theater B Thursday afternoon.
2. I’m very excited to work with the Coalition of Essential Schools to run a half-day unconference at their annual Fall Forum. We will, of course, be following Edcamp format. It’s not an Edcamp proper, but it’s looking like the closest thing you’ll get in New England in the next few months. The unconference thing is great and all, and it might be nice to see me, but there’s some serious heavy hitters speaking at this thing, most notably Alfie Kohn and Deborah Meier.

Assuming I don’t crash and burn this week, I’ll probably throw in a conversation idea or two for EduCon while I’m at it.

I’m not just linking to this because Zac called me, and I quote, “about as fine a teacher and person as you’re likely to meet,” but because he demonstrates in a quick blog post the exact reasons why I online sharing process so much. He could have just written his paper and been done with it, but by putting the entire thing online while he was working on it, he was able to get valuable feedback that improved his work and also provided a springboard of thought for others to use. Frequently when talking with teachers it seems they’re so concerned about the final product it seems like they don’t see the value of sharing the process along the way.

A month ago, my friend Nick Provenzano wrote about the soft relaunch of the DC Comics Universe with their “new 52″ initiative. Long story short, DC has for years been far behind their main competitor in sales, Marvel Comics, and so they took the opportunity to do yet another universe-ending event that rebooted some books completely while keeping others much as they had been before. Please keep in mind that DC has done this at least a couple times before, once back in the 80s with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was a hard reboot of the entire line, and again in the 90s with Zero Hour, which they used as an opportunity to try and fix some of the problems that came out of Crisis in the first place.

Anyway, Nick wore an overwhelmingly positive post about the relaunch based on only one book release. DC actually released 52 comics over the course of the month, and I’m here to report back that it’s not all sunshine and puppies. In fact, most of the books are tolerable at best, and many of them are complete trash. I actually did read every single issue released in the last month, so here’s my checklist:

As you can see, most of the books are “meh.” They’re mostly forgettable, although a few have some good ideas but poor execution. A very small group (~15%) are books that I plan on continuing to read. A much larger group (~30%) are terrible, terrible books. They range anywhere from nearly pornographic to terrible characterization to atrocious art. See the comic below for one of the biggest offenders on all fronts:

So what lessons should we learn from this relaunch?

1) Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. DC had some great books and story lines that were cut off prematurely because of this relaunch. I’ll gladly admit that schools have a lot that needs fixing. But schools also do a lot of good. We should take a good look at what works in schools and find ways to extend those successes whenever possible. (Problem, of course: define “good.”)

2) A pursuit of the shiny and new is not enough. It feels like DC updated a lot of these books just to update them. Especially for those of us pushing for more use of educational technology, we should have compelling reasons to move in that direction and good plans for doing so.

3) The Market is fickle. Continuous chases of quick hits to get quick sales is one of the reasons why the comics market is in overall terrible shape.  Sure, DC has great sales for this month, but already retailers are freaking out about how they should order for issue number 2. To me, this seems remarkably similar to school districts in perpetual search for that magic solution to increasing test scores.

4) Engage your community. DC dropped this bombshell on  people only a couple of months before it happened. Creators didn’t get too much more notice before that. Are you making changes because they’re better for you or they’re better for the community?

Deven Black wrote one of the loveliest pieces on Edcamp and why it matters. A small taste:

Let me make this absolutely clear. There is a rapidly growing national movement of teachers and administrators taking it upon themselves to organize and attend free conferences at which teachers and administrators freely share knowledge, resources and ideas with the sole purpose of becoming better teachers and administrators.

I really wish I had written this.