Authority & Accountability

I’m spending the next three days working with community college folks here in North Carolina. They want to started making use of podcasting throughout the state, so we will be working on some online courses to help faculty learn to produce podcasts. The local college (Guilford Technical Communicaty College) has real estate on iTunes U, so I’m looking forward to learning more about online Us.

In closing, I was going through my Gmail yesterday, a fairly new experience for me, and noticed a little yellow dot by Vicki Davis’ name, in my contacts window. I clicked it, and a chat window popped up. A Chat box appeared, and she typed something to me, and I typed something back, and we chatted. Is that cool or what? Alright, we do it all the time. But there are these opportunities now to just click something, like opening a door you’ve not opened before, and there is an opportunity to share and learn. Conversations everywhere.

Anyway, we got to talking about all of the conversations about barriers to using The Conversation for teaching and learning, and she mentioned that she controlled the filters and blocking software for her classroom. She said something that, to me, says it all.

Give me authority and accountability and I can do my job.

But holding someone accountable without the authority is a recipe for disaster.

Like it? Keep talkin’, Vicki.

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7 thoughts on “Authority & Accountability”

  1. “Give me authority and accountability and I can do my job. ” Hmmm…don’t you suppose that if we gave our students authority and accountability they could do their “jobs” [learning] better too?

  2. Why are some of us so afraid to let the kids lead us to the great new technologies? Are we afraid that the students will see that we don’t know everything? Guess what they already know that we don’t know everything. 😉

  3. I am in NC as well and VERY curious about the community college interest in podcasting. I have one friend who teaches at a Southwestern Community College and her husband teaches at Western Carolina University. I have talked to them about podcasting, but haven’t gotten them on the bandwagon. Is the effort you are working on system wide or just at Guilford CC? Is there a contact person or a Web site where I can learn more?

    – Laura B. Fogle

  4. I like the fact that Google’s chat client (I think it’s still in beta) is so thin, and doesn’t require me to install anything. I realize that there are plenty of other thin chat clients, but gmail’s really does seem mighty smooth. No need to focus on the technology.

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