One of the difficulties you run into blogging is trying to find the right location for a discussion. You write a blog post. Someone else writes their own blog post that links back to your blog post. You write a long comment on their blog post. The discussion is now taking place in two places, which can be a great thing in that it can reach a broader audience, but it can have the downside of different people only getting parts of the conversation.

Back on the 30th, Paul Bogush wrote a blog post, Committees Shamittes. It was in response to a post I had written about the Connecticut Schools’ Three-Year Technology Plan. Please, go read his post there. While you are there, spend a little time reading some of his other blog posts as well.

We got into a discussion in the comments of that blog post, and my most recent comment got a bit long winded. I believe it amplifies some of what I wrote in my previous post about Three-Year Technology Plans, and so I’m including it here:

A few comments about the Wallingford Technology Plan. First, I will note that it is for 2006-2009. They should be working on a new plan as we speak. Do you know if Randall Backus is still there? He would probably be heading up the drafting of the 2009-2012 plan.

I also notice that like so many of the other plans I’ve read, it is written by a committee of fifteen people, including one parent and one representative of the ‘business community’. I would love to see the technology committees have more visionaries on them.

I don’t mean to be too critical of the work of that committee. It was for the three years just ending, and things have changed a lot over the past three years, but when I read the vision statement, I have to ask, where is the vision?

“Wallingford Public Schools believes that in order to be a life long learner in today’s changing world every student must develop and use technological skills efficiently, effectively and ethically. We will ensure that our learners will be able to interact successfully in a technological environment to achieve their personal, educational, and professional goals.”

Now if there was a vision more like “to connect kids with others to create, collaborate and communicate”, independent of what happens to the school walls, then, it would seem, there would be a little more vision.

Meanwhile, I don’t know where the Amity Technology Plan is either. I suspect that if I dug around, I could find a copy of the 2006-2009 plan somewhere online. I suspect it wouldn’t be much more inspiring than the Wallingford plan. Yet like Wallingford, Amity is currently in the process of drafting a 2009-2012 plan. Part of my goal is to get people interested in what is going on in their schools and to bring a little vision from the outside in.

So, if you know any visionaries that would like to bring a little to the Amity planning process, let me know. I would love to try and make some connections. Perhaps, like the kids in our schools, we parents, teachers and other stakeholders need to create, collaborate and communicate a little more ourselves.