Beyond School

Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

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Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

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The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened. Read the rest of this entry »

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album [↩]
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.” [↩]
3. I actually use that phrase in class [↩]