By way of introduction, let me first tell you that in 2007/2008 I experienced a something of a crisis.
You see, I'm a bit of an idealist.
No, let me correct that. "A bit" doesn't really express it. The fact is, if there's a gene for idealism I've probably got it.
Idealism flows in my veins. And what nature failed to provide, nurture quickly supplied. I am the son of a Federal bureaucrat who devoted himself to public service. I'm the recipient of a pretty decent liberal arts education from an institution where the unofficial slogan was "Atheism, Communism, Free Love" (in fact, I bought a t-shirt with that slogan for my 3 year old niece in the campus bookstore). I did a stint in the Peace Corps in East Central Africa. And I started my computer career in the not-for-profit sector--devoting myself to better enabling, through technology, those who were attempting to do good works in the world.
And it should come as no surprise that I brought that idealism to my work as a software engineer. I mastered methodologies, led seminar-style lunch-n-learns devoted to bridging theory and practice, and just never, never, never stopped learning.
And then Agile hit the streets. My first encounter was an article by Kent Beck in IEEE's Software magazine about eXtreme Programming. Make no mistake, it was a revolution. And not just a methodological revolution; it was a social revolution. It was egalitarian at its core. Its was values-based and principled. Instead of telling programmers what they would do and when they would have it done, they were picking work (written on 3x5 cards) off the board that they felt was the right thing to do next and letting the "estimate" emerge along with the software. In this respect, it was a complete and utter rejection of our fathers' negotiate-a-contract-and-hold-their-feet-to-fire style. And I was hooked.
I actively sought opportunities to use it, and eagerly tried various experiments in the practices. You should ask me about "Promiscuous Pairing" sometime. (My wife said she was fine with it, as long as I wore finger cots 
while at the keyboard. She even bought a box for us to keep in the bull pen.)
It was challenging, engaging, creative, and at times irreverent. I was in heaven.
So, that's where I was toward the end of 2006, when I found myself drawn toward a new idealism: applying technology to K12 education.
<to be continued: a description of the crisis and the genesis of this presentation>