21C Learning Hong Kong, hosted by my school, HKIS, is happening this weekend. Big names from the blogosphere have been flown in, both in real life and in Second Life, and tech-savvy teachers and techevangelists from the Asia region have come to the city to swap ideas for tools and tricks to increase technology use and learning in classrooms.

I have gone to five of these now dating over the past two years. Two of them in Shanghai, and this is the third in Hong Kong. All of the conferences have been put on professionally and thoroughly. I am especially impressed with what my friend Justin has accomplished here in Hong Kong.

However, not to complain, but just to comment…I feel overloaded. Nothing sounds new. That is not to say that the speakers and ideas aren’t still inspiring at times! But what follows is an attempt to toss out some of these ideas…not a finished set of concepts below, but I would love feedback / pushback on what I think I’m thinking.

One pattern that I note is how easy it is to give lip service to the idea that “it’s all about how technology changes the learning” and yet spend the majority of the time in workshops looking at cool new tools. I know that I am as guilty as the next person about this, as I have given two presentations about wikis and blogs without much time spent talking about the transformative capabilities of these tools.

But it’s so hard. How do we have practical discussions about how to make drastic changes in the day to day experience inside of a school?  Surely the conversations need to be focused on something more than just the next cool Web2.0 tool. However is a classroom teacher in any position to implement anything radical? What I keep on hearing / coming back to myself is a frankly naive wish to simply “blow up” the current paradigm of education and start off afresh. I love the idea of a “Ten Man School” as Rob suggested today, take ten committed teachers and build the experience around student learning, with no concessions given for our preconceived notions of what a curriculum ought to be. I loved working at a new school for three years and feeling as if my energy could make a big difference in the way learning would happen for the students.

But what can I do now? Must I be testing out and tinkering with each new Web 2.0 tool? I’m supposed to be delivering Social Studies knowledge, concepts and skills, not teaching my students the next coolest slick looking online gadget like Prezi.

I know that I’ve grown as a teacher. I’m certainly leaps and bounds better than I was 2-3 years ago.

But I am starting to feel that I’m relearning the same things. I’d love to fine tune a curriculum, to go into a week knowing that this is the spot that the students are going to trip up.

But no. I am always up against the task of building the jetliner mid flight.

I feel like this little guy.

Okay. Pity party over. Sorry.

The sentence that stopped me in my tracks:

…Mohammed’s case [a tenured teacher in NYC charged by her administration as professionally incompetent] will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.

Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year.

There’s a part of me that just wants out out out of teaching when I read about this.