DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Die Moldau” by Smetana.

This week I listened several archive sessions from the K-12 Online Conference in 2007.  The sesson that stuck with me was one titled, “Starting from Scratch:  Framing Change for Stakeholders” by Ben Wilkoff.

I suspected, from the title, that Mr. Wilkoff would be working with the idea of cognitive frames which I have encountered in “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and I was pleasantly surprised that this was indeed the case.  Here is an interview, “Inside the Frame“,  with Lakoff where he gives an example of a cognitive frame.

What was particularly useful for me is that Wilkoff steps through the process of reframing the way we talk about technology in education so that when people discuss it, it is not in terms of “fearing” technological change or playing technological “catch-up”.  Instead, his “Academy of Discovery” instead frames the debate in such a way that if you try to contradict the frame, you are contradicting “authentic learning”.

I am currently heading up a committee that will help me redefine the direction of technology use in the school.  I have a dynamic group of people who have volunteered for this committee, and I’m continuously looking for different ways to help assimilate new ways of thinking about how we do things.  This will simply add one more tool to my tool belt.

At this point and time, I am a bit fuzzy about the exact frame that Wilkoff has employed and how he promoted that frame throughout his community.  There seem to be a number of intertwining frames in his presentation.  I will spend more time looking at this.  But, already I have found additional value in the supporting documentation.  Already I see that he provides links to studies to support the frame, examples of authentic learning in his own school, and documents that he used for communication.  Here is a link to the actually “Academy of Discovery” which is not linked on the main page of the conference session.