Reading about the freedom to focus on the innovation and the soft touch, the value we can add to the nuts and bolts or technology base of a business was very interesting! When I think of my own experiences, of tweaking applications in order to come up with something that I particularly want to have at my fingertips for my students, I get to enjoy some of that freedom to innovate, and my students benefit. Even that little bit of plunking around is a very empowering kind of experience!

Flattener # 4 Uploading, really struck me! My son used to rail over the lack of interface among various software products and companies. I remember when he learned how to convert his dad’s Word Perfect documents into MS Word at home on my PC. He just thought it was so entirely selfish for proprietary code to interfere to such an extent. It seemed so short-sighted to him, and now, Friedman makes it clear why that may be short-sighted, or NOT. Lee has educated and enlightened me about Wikipedia, Firefox, blogging, and online collaboration. Friedman enlightened me about Apache and further articulated the “architecture of participation”. That superstructure exponentially expands what we already have by adding the cyber-participation dimension. Who would-a-thunk we would have this discussion as we now are doing? a classroom teacher with a researcher?

Yet, there was more that really hit home for me in this section of “Flat”. This variation of our movement that involves intellectual freedom goes far beyond that. On page 95, Friedman speaks of the old hierarchy, the “top-down vertical integrations” and how uploading blows that open to innovation. The Gold-Mining examples on page 116 could serve as an analogy for or as a model of what might be seen in some districts, schools, classrooms, too! Are there districts, schools, classrooms still hung up in the old hierarchical model in which not only is bottom-up reform lacking, but intellectual freedom effectively is squashed, and multi-dimensional collaborative initiatives are stymied by the crush of the old top-down hierarchy? My hand is raised “Yes”. I wrote, “Cyber Democracy” and vaguely remembered a news report about voting online, which I would LOVE to be able to do, except that I think it is important to go to school with an “I Voted” sticker on my lapel on those days. Maybe that will happen when a cyber-sticker can be printed for us! (LOL)

Regarding your questions about UPS in Flattener # 8: UPS is definitely on to something! The description of that business told me things that I had not known. I’ll have to go chat with our local UPS store owner about it! Maybe I can take a look at that electronic clipboard! Now, there is something, if modified, I could use when I serve in other teacher’s classrooms! (LOL) More importantly, is their motto, “Trust us.” This REALLY hit home for me! My students and their parents trust me to teach reading, to do my level best to help that student find his way up off the 1st or 2nd grade reading level, and trust me to follow best practices. This year, I am actually going into a World Cultures and a Science classroom, in which my offers to help the teacher and the students has to be based on trust. How can I ask those teachers to discuss and consider how we reach and teach our students without trust? Trust that I will do whatever I can to be helpful, whether that be to resource the teachers to FCRR strategies (or hopefully SIM if I can get away with it), to help students who are NOT ESE but whose hands are up, to explore ways to do anti-septic bouncing for students with disruptive behaviors…. Likewise, the parents and students are trusting me to do my level best to effect reform in those classrooms, by educating the teachers about the accommodations and modifications required in those IEPs, by helping their students NOT to fail simply because they are reading on a 1st grade level within a 6th grade text-bound environment. Then, recursively, I must find ways to do that while continuing to build and strengthen the trust among the teachers so we can continue to innovate in their classrooms. INSOURCING it is.

SIM is already moving towards insourcing, which is bound to continue. I remember my delight in discovering the altruistic, synergistic nature of the SIM community. Trust was clearly deeply embedded within the community ethos. I felt right at home. As SIM moves forward, those are the unstoppable characteristics that will carry SIM into fuller service to our students.

Thanks, Jean for your blog entry. It was good food for thought!

SIMcerely,
Mandy