Teach42

In case you haven’t been keeping up with ISTE‘s dive into the crowdsourcing arena, the final voting is now open for the ultimate keynote presentation at this year’s conference. Your choices are:
* Chris Lehmann
* Alan November
* Jeff Piontek
* Peter H. Reynolds
* Gary Stager

I know most of the people on the list, and they’re all worthy choices. You should definitely stop by and cast a vote for your favorite.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this has boiled down to. The process began with people proposing and voting on topics.

Then the topics were narrowed down to five, and people were able to suggest and vote for speakers on each of those topics.

Now the topics seem to have gone away completely, and we’re left with five names and we’re just supposed to pick one, on the topic of “Excellence in Education.” I guess the topic of “Good Things to Talk About” would have been too broad.

While I applaud ISTE in their efforts to engage the community and bring them into the process, I think it was handled poorly. Clearly, things have not been thought out quite enough.

It seems as thought phase 1 should have been skipped entirely. In round 2, there were 5 topics listed, and people nominated speakers for each topic. However, based on the sheer numbers in the voting, clearly not everybody realized that you could vote for people for each of the different topics. The speakers that were nominated in the first topic got the vast majority of the votes. Some very qualified people I think were victims of that confusion.

And the net result? When all is said and done, we have a popularity contest that’s being run on Polldaddy of all things. Really? No registration required to vote, just using a free polling widget that has already been well documented to be ‘hackable‘? I’m shocked that the largest EdTech conference in the country would step it up and not use a free, insecure polling widget to determine who will be their keynote presenter.

Moral of the story? Love the idea, hate the implementation. Hope they learn from this process.