Week In Review: 2008-MAY-16 Published 2008-05-15 under administration, leadership, week+in+review

This past year, I have been working with a school exploring our digital world from a human development perspective. One of the issues to emerge was the need to revamp the school's acceptable use policy. Thus I was drawn to David Warlick's recent post "School AUP 2.0". Dave points out how AUP grew in popularity in the 90's but many have not been modified to reflect the "information landscape [which] has grown enormously and evolved in some significant and impactful ways."

Instead of just blogging about it, Dave has created a School AUP 2.0 wiki so we can all contribute to what we feel is appropriate use and more importantly discuss ways successfully adopting the AUP. (See the Notes section for an interesting discussion.)

Barbara Barreda enters the conversation drawing our attention to policies affecting cell phone use in class in her article "Cell Phone Conundrum". Barbara references a techLEARNING article ("Cell Division") while wondering "how to help the students develop the maturity they need to responsibly use this tool". As Barbara points out, an "AUP is much more than a set of rules", it should reflect consideration of the issues from many directions: curriculum, human development, legal, safety, and cultural.

The other topic that caught my eye was from a post by Chris Hitch who writes about "The Best Advice I Received". Chris offers three helpful bits of advice:

1. Recognize the "difference between working high value hours vs simply being at the office or working just to slog through some stuff."
2. "Rule of Three" which states that after three iterations of an email conversation (send, reply, reply-to-the-reply), the conversation should move to a more direct means - that is call the person or go visit them face to face.
3. It is important to always be learning.

While Chris' advice is useful as is the advice offered in the comments, I was taken to the post more because it made me think about what important advice has affected my professional and personal life. Of the many great pieces of advice that I have received over the years, two standout: 1) Do something that scares you every (day/week/month), and 2) have a bias toward action. What makes these two standout is that I see the benefit of each but need constant reminders to follow their wisdom. It is too easy to avoid uncomfortable situations (not to speak of scary ones) and it is easy to rationalize the need to approach projects and tasks cautiously erring on the side of too much preparation.

I thank Chris for reminding me that we occasionally need to step back and evaluate how we are doing. His post acted as a kick in the pants - one that we can all use from time to time.

Finally, I wanted to point you toward Detensionslip.org. While I admit to not really reading the posts, I have added their RSS feed to my reader as the titles are good for a laugh.

Tech Tags: aup warlick wiki cell+phone advice leadership week+in+review