Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Network Learning Practice

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Obviously, I’ve been taking a bit of a blogging break of late. And while I’m not feeling like I’m totally back at it yet, I have found myself doing some reading, getting back into Twitter, and connecting some dots in my brain. Without question, these last six weeks have been mind-numbing…way too many presentations in way too many cities to have much left in the tank at the end of the day to read or write. And I don’t cross the finish line for another few weeks, a point at which I’m sure I’ll simply hibernate for a few days to catch up with everything.

What’s been interesting with this day after day presenting is how my thinking about this message has been tweaked and how certain parts of it have floated to the top. If nothing else, Twitter has made plain the power of the network, and that network has become the focal point of almost all my presentations. (Thanks, btw, to all of you who have answered spur of the moment requests in Twitter or with Skype or others to help me demonstrate the potential of the network. Much appreciated.) It’s not about teaching or classrooms or even kids…it’s simply about learning, about how we can learn, about how we do learn when we are connected. And, most importantly, it’s about how we need to understand what’s happening in our personal learning networks in order to make sense of what the potentials are, at some point, for our classrooms. Nothing really new here, I know. But just a deepening in my own understanding that is pushing me further.

Of course, the network has been helping this. Stephen’s recent posts “How the Net Works” and “The Personal Learning Effect” have been greatly instructive and have caused me to re-evaluate important parts of my practice. The more I consider it, the more I find myself moving away from a frame of social networking towards one of networked learning (which is obviously social by nature). More toward the literacies of networked learning. I find myself reflecting really deeply of late about how we build these connections, how we manage them, how we leverage them.

And that’s fueling my main frustration right now which is how hard it is to get the educators I speak with to be selfish about these ideas and not run toward classroom implementation of tools. I understand why it happens. Part of it is the “drive by” nature of much of my work, something that I’ve begun to shift away from. (More about that at some point.) And, even more, it’s because of the very little emphasis that districts in general put on supporting the personal learning of teachers. It’s all about student results and assessments, and it’s very difficult to look at these opportunities outside of that frame. Invariably, when the questions start, it’s all about how to keep kids safe or how to satisfy the IT people that we should do this or…you get the idea. I wish the questions after my sessions were more about how to cultivate trusted nodes, or strategies for creating connections outside of physical space.

At some point, I want one of the goals and outcomes for the students at my kids’ school system to be that they will graduate with the ability to build their own learning networks in effective, ethical and safe ways. But that will only happen when enough of the administrators and teachers understand that for themselves. Only then will they be able to help my kids add dots to their world maps in ways that teach them the power of networks in the ways we already know it.

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From Scotland to Stockton, Learning Scratch

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So I wasn’t there to see it, but Tess and Tucker learned Scratch this afternoon from Andrew, an 11-year old from “across the pond” from Perth, Scotland, during their weekly Tuesday “supplementing school” class. I had to be on an airplane to somewhere, but the early reports are that Andrew did a stupendous job, using Yugma and Skype to show my kids how to start to program their own characters and get all sorts of sprites doing all sorts of things. Neil, Andrew’s dad, (pictured here during the session) really gets to my own feelings about this (please read his post):

The implications of being able to find what you want to know from someone who is willing to share… even if they are not present… turns our traditional model of education on its head… and even more so when you realise that the person with the knowledge you require might be the person you thought you ought to be teaching!

I just find it hard to express how cool I think this is. And what a different world this is from when I was 8 or 9, and how envious I am of my kids, and how much I want schools and teachers to understand this very, very different playing field we’re on right now. I just absolutely love what my kids are learning, not just about Scratch, but about a world where they can connect with other kids, other teachers to learn, a world where walls are irrelevant, one filled with opprotunity and creativity and… I know, I know…I’m in a giddy place again. But I want other parents to feel this, to feel how absolutely incredible and different and wonderful this is.

Thanks Andrew. Thanks Neil. It’s an amazing time.

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"School as Node"

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I’ve had George Siemens’ “Pots, Kettles, and other small appliances of like appearance” post open in my tabs for what, three weeks now, and it’s been percolating in my brain as I keep mousing across it from time to time, rereading, rethinking. (As a side note, that’s an interesting little shift in my practice that the advent of tabbed browsing and sessions management in Firefox has brought, isn’t it?) George writes:

We are at a point of real change in education (k-12, university, even corporate training). We (the edublog community) still carry the baton of change, but if we are unable to conceive a broader vision of systemic change, we’ll find ourselves passing the baton to others.

So, that “conceive a broader vision of systemic change” line brought me back (once again) to the shift I think we’ve been trying to make in this conversation. The one that moves from being about tools and “flatness” to one that begins to really think about and, more importantly, articulate school models and systems in different ways. And even in that discussion, there seems to be two natural camps evolving, those who say reform is next to impossible without totally blowing out the model, and those who feel that we already have some inroads to reform within the current structures, that there are already progressive school models that might begin to point the way. I struggle to find my own way here, for a variety of reasons. I admit that I have little contextual knowledge of this whole debate to bring to the table. My understanding of progressive school reform movements is thin at best, and I’m in catch-up mode. Yet I have two children in a system (not just local) that is badly in need of reform in light of what’s coming. Blowing up the model will not work for them (unless we decide to remove them from the system) and, frankly, I don’t think there will be a critical mass of folks willing to do this to the system for decades to come. Yet I am equally negative on the prospects that schools can meaningfully change in some sort of timely way without starting over. As a good friend of mine who is planning to leave education after 15 years said recently, “I have no hope that the educational system as we know it will appreciably change in my lifetime.” He’s in his 30s, btw.

Look, I’m a writer. I list to my right. I think in metaphor. So when George says we need a broader vision of systemic change, my mind runs to find words that might begin to piece that vision together in my own brain that might make sense. And as I’ve been mulling over all of this, of how to best begin to perhaps reframe the way I think and talk about schools that might allow me to think and talk about a “broader vision” of schools, my brain keeps coming back to something that I heard Tom Carroll of NCTAF say last month at that Institute of the Future seminar I was at. And I’m not sure he even remembers that he said it because it was just a few words in a much longer response about the future of teaching, but in the middle of that response he said “…school as node…”

I wrote that down.

I think for most people, school is still seen as the (THE?) place where kids go to learn. I know that’s the way it was for me. Yeah, there was a lot of informal learning that took place on the playground, on Main Street, in the back of cars, etc. But the “real” learning, the important stuff happened at school. It was the center of learning in my life, though I never called it that, per se. But I know that’s how my mom saw it. You went to school to learn because that’s where the knowledge was. And if the teachers at the school were good, they helped you understand why that knowledge was important. And that “vision” worked pretty well for a lot of years. It was pretty easy and consistent.

Problem now is, it’s not working any longer. School isn’t the only place where the knowledge is. Knowledge is everywhere. You don’t have to go to school to get it. And now, because knowledge isn’t stuck to a time and a place any longer, knowledge is contextual. It’s not one size fits all. The whole idea that 30 kids in a classroom need to learn the same stuff at the same pace at the same time just makes no sense any longer. In this environment, we can’t keep thinking of schools as the center of knowledge and learning. Instead, we have to start thinking of schools as a part of a much richer tapestry of an individual’s learning and education.

As a node.

Thinking seriously about schools as nodes in larger more expansive networks of personal learning changes the concept of what schools are for. It doesn’t diminish their role, but it does reframe it, and I think it places the emphasis where it more appropriately belongs these days: helping students create, edit, and participate in their own networks of learning. (What a concept.) What if we started seeing schools as the places where our students learn how to learn, where, when they are younger, the school may be at the center, but when they leave us, they have built a vast, effective network of learning of their own in which school and schooling is simply one node? Where we’ve helped them learn how to nurture and sustain those networks to serve them over the long term? Where we’ve shown them how to leverage those connections in safe, ethical and effective ways? Our roles as educators and systems would no doubt shift away from content delivery toward modeling and supporting each learner’s unique journey. And it would challenge us to rethink the ways in which we assess what our students have learned. But that would be crucial and important work, work that some semblance of traditional school structures might actually do pretty well.

But, as Hugh’s great, great drawing suggests, we’d have a lot of getting over ourselves to do for that to happen.

So anyway, just some thin early Thursday morning thinking thrown out for comment, pushback, hole-poking, name-calling, whatever from a node in the network… There is much, much more to consider here, but it is a reframing and some language that at this moment makes some sense to me at least.

(Just as an aside, after thinking about this for a while, I started imagining how school would look as just “a node” in my learning practice right now. As in following “school” on Twitter, or reading the “school” feed in my aggregator, or adding “school” as a friend on Facebook. All of those seem pretty bizarre at first blush, which either means this whole line of thinking is equally bizarre or it speaks to how inelegantly school currently fits into the personal learning network that I’m already a part of.)

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Learning at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai

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So what am I learning at Learning 2.0? This is a bit of a very tired brain dump, but, I’m learning that…
 
…the teachers everywhere struggle with many of the same challenges and pressures that teachers in the States struggle with, by and large. The one big thing they don’t struggle with is NCLB.

…that teaching at an international school can be an amazing and rewarding experience. I’ve been struck by how many of the people I’ve met here have parents who taught abroad, and how many of them can’t imagine teaching in the US again (though many of them did.) That’s not to say that they are all expats, but it is interesting to hear them talk about how “hard” it is to come back to the States, for any number of reasons.

…that for the first time, if I had it to do over again, I would seriously consider taking my kids abroad for a year or two to give them a more global perspective. That’s not to say that they still don’t have the chance to immerse themselves in another culture before they get out to their real lives (and I think now I’m going to give them a lot of encouragement to do that), but as I flipped the pages of the yearbook in the office at the Concordia International School where the conference is being held, I saw a bunch of kids from all over the place who were getting a pretty amazing experience. For some reason, I’m really loving the sense of adventure that seemed to jump off of those pages.

…that Susan Sedro, Clay Burrell, Kim Cofino and others are just as compelling and interesting as their blogs suggest, and that they are doing some really fantastic things in their classrooms with these technologies. It’s been great to get a chance to talk with them and hear their contributions in my sessions.

…that things are cheap, really, really cheap here. And on some level that conflicts me. I am really looking forward to this afternoon and the next two days when the conference has ended and Jeff (pictured here) takes us around to where the “real” China is. (Where we are right now is kind of an upscale expat village where mostly corporations house their workers.) But I’m also somewhat put off by the zeal for buying knock off Rolex watches and designer clothes. China is a huge contributor to the environmental problems of the world, (the air here is just not right) not to mention all sorts of human rights violations and poor working conditions that I have not doubt surround the production of all that junk. And while I’m no saint, consumerism in general will be the death of us all. I keep wondering, how are we going to help our kids navigate the looming environmental crisis if we ourselves can’t do it. So, downtown Shanghai will either blow my mind or make me more depressed. Maybe both.

–that Gary Stager is a really good guy, which I already knew, btw. We may not agree on everything, but more than most, Gary wants kids to learn in engaging and meaningful ways.

We wrap up at noon today…that’s midnight EST, as my body is still well aware. Photos, I have a feeling, are going to be scarce as Flickr is blocked here and while the Firefox plugin seems to be working, the upload isn’t working. I’m going to have to get my brain around how to do it.

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Greetings From China

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So it may seem strange to start my first blog post ever from China with a picture of my daughter, but the reason I’m feeling so giddy at the moment (aside from about seven hours of sleep after a 27-hour travel day) is because I am just loving my Skype, Skitch, connected from wherever I am in the world life. It’s about 9 am here in Shanghai and I just got off an hour Skype video call with my kids (where it’s about 9 pm) where I, like I normally try to do, helped them with their homework (Tess and I had an interesting conversation about “bartering”) and asked about Tucker‘s soccer practice and talked baseball. (My Cubbies are hangin’ in.) I know it’s not the same as being there, but I have to tell you it’s pretty darn cool to be half a world away and still be able to see them and interact with them. And I loved snapping pictures of them on my end with Skitch and then giving them the link so they could see what I just posted and watch their faces break into huge smiles, all within, literally, 45 seconds start to finish. In five years, I know, that’ll seem like nothing, but right now, it’s a big deal.

Sheryl and Wes and I arrived about 9 last night and Wes was by far the most productive on the trip, writing about 37 blog posts, doing a couple of podcasts, and getting yelled at by the Chinese authorities at the airport for taking pictures in the  customs line. (I’m sure they are on Flickr by now, which, btw, is blocked here.) Jeff picked us up and brought us to the hotel where I crashed hard after flipping through the dials and seeing almost nothing but English and American sporting events and something that looked strangely like “Chinese Idol.” Could that be? With my very limited first impression, I guess I’m almost disappointed at how Westernized it all feels. But Jeff is promising to show us the real Shanghai on Monday and Tuesday after the conference which I am looking forward to greatly. And, my own personal angst was about the air quality here…on the drive last night, you could only see about a mile or two ahead the haze was so thick. And Jeff said that was a great improvement over the last three years…they’re gearing up for the Olympics next year, you know.

So now I’ve got an afternoon to get my brain in gear for what promises to be a pretty interesting unconference-y conference with folks from around Asia. It will be really interesting to see what their take is on all of this. I feel pretty much out of my element, and in those cases I usually end up learning more than anyone, especially with the focus that Jeff and the organizers have put on the conversations. I’m leading five sessions, two of them are going to be totally unconference, one to discuss the Cult of the Amateur as it relates to Learning 2.0 and the other titled “Teachers as Learners; Learners as Teachers.” The other sessions I’m going to “present” for about 10-15 minutes and then hopefully use the rest of the time to talk about “The Big Shifts in Learning,” problem technologies in schools, and our own personal learning practice as educators. There will be a lot of Twittering going on, so if you want to follow that conversation just tap into the Learn2cn feed. And don’t forget the almost mandatory Ning site for the conference that has, I think, the coolest Ning banner to date. Hope to see you in the mix.

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It's Not Just the "Read/Write" Web

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So there is no question, right, that there are a lot more teachers using blogs and wikis and Read/Write Web tools today than ever before. And even though most people still report huge obstacles standing in the way regarding implementation of these technologies in their classrooms, it just feels like the winds are starting, ever so slightly, to shift in a different direction. (And no, I don’t think this is a “tail wind” from the EduBloggerCon love fest we just had in Atlanta.) More people are opening up to the conversation.

But here’s the thing that’s been sticking with me of late. For all of the talk about Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 and Addyourwordhere 2.0, there still isn’t much talk about what fuels the 2.0…the network.

A couple of purposely vague examples. I listened to a presentation of late that attempted to define School 2.0 and did so pretty much solely on the grounds that we can have our students create and publish meaningful work to the world. Now I have absolutely no problem with infusing these tools into classrooms to allow kids to publish what they know to large audiences. That’s a great first step. But that’s not School 2.0 (is it?) And in another conversation I had recently with someone who is doing some really interesting implementations of social technologies into her district, the main success was that her teachers and students were now able to communicate more effectively with each other and parents. That’s not it either (is it?)

I know I visited this theme a couple of weeks ago at NECC, but in the time since, it feels like it’s been jumping out at me more and more. (Except when I was on the beach where even the fish weren’t jumping.) I’ve been trying of late to convince folks that until they understand the uses of these tools in their own learning practice they’ll be really hard pressed to deliver the different pedagogies that go along with them in compelling and effective ways. Yes, we can have kids create movies and podcasts and wikis and all sorts of artifacts that have meaningful purposes and messages. And yes that’s all good, but at the end of the day, all that’s about is being able to use the tool to do the same stuff we’ve done in the past only put it into a new form and offer it to a wider audience. The pedagogies haven’t changed.

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

It’s not just the Read/Write Web, is it? It’s more than that. (Someone already came to this conclusion a while back, I know, but I can’t dig it out right now.) It’s the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web as well. It is, in the words of Jay Cross in his book Informal Learning (which I’ll have more to write about later,) the “Learning is Optimizing the Quality of One’s Networks” Web. I love this other quote by Jay as well:

“What can you do” has been replaced by “What can you and your network connections do?” Knowledge is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts. (18)

He’s right. This is our “outboard brain”. This is the power that the publishing facilitates. And this is what we need to get the conversation to, now that the tools have “arrived”.

Photo “The People I Follow on Twitter” by CC Chapman.

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Teaching and Learning for Grandparents

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Vinny Vrotny is a technology integrator at an independent school in Chicago, and he was asked to put together a succinct presentation for grandparents about the work his teachers and students are doing. He came up with the following five ways that teaching and learning have changed at his school due to Read/Write Web tools:

  1. Allowing teachers and students to communicate and exchange information with others around the world. (Examples used are an 8th Grade Cultural Exchange that we have begun and a faculty meeting on global collaboration presented by Jennifer Lindsay in Bangladesh)
  2. Allowing teachers and students to see the world in new ways. (Example used was the American Holocaust Museum’s GoogleEarth Darfur project, which is being used by our eighth grade Service Learning Project, our ninth grade Regional Geography and History course and our twelfth grade Holocaust elective)
  3. Allowing teachers and students to reconstruct history. (Showed our fifth grade’s Mayan village recreation using Google Sketchup)
  4. Allowing teachers and students to share new stories. (Played an excerpt of our third grade’s podcasting project to research and tell the stories behind the named spaces around campus)
  5. Allowing students to change the world. (Told about our eleventh grade’s service learning project as inspired by reading Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea)

I just like the way that’s all framed. It’s not “we can blog” or “we can use Sketchup.” It’s what we can do with those tools. The presentation itself is included if you need some ideas for that group of grandparents (or others) that might be headed your way.

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7,500 Words on the Irony of Social Computing Degrees Later…

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So the whole conversation that has developed over the last two days has been another one of those amazing, intellectually stimulating back and forths that I feel extremely privileged to be involved in. Let me just say at the outset that the number of quality, thoughtful comments that have been coming to this blog of late has just blown me away, and I thank all of you for being willing to participate. I can only hope that those contributing or reading are getting as much if not more than I. There is another entire post forming slowly that connects this to the whole Classroom 2.0 idea and some other stuff that’s evolving out of it…but that’s for another day.

Without beating a dead horse, this latest conversation has got me thinking, on a number of levels. First, on how interesting it is to see the nuanced interpretation of what I originally was writing about. Second, on how my own thinking keeps going back and forth as I read through the comments, pushed by people who I respect and admire greatly who have vastly different viewpoints. But ultimately, on how certain snippets, certain phrases push me to bigger insights or questions. I find that whole process incredibly interesting.

So here’s what got me to this post. Liz Lawley, who was one of the people who really helped me understand the pedagogies of these social tools very early on in my reading of blogs, left a couple of pretty challenging comments, which pushed me to think. In the second, she wrote:

Will, debates like this are absolutely a good example of a back-and-forth collaborative learning process. But expecting that people will systematically (a) seek out and (b) find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view is–I think–naive.

The real value of a formal educational process is that all too often “we don’t know what we don’t know”–and so without a systematic structured approach to a complex topic we run the very real risk of not seeing the big picture, and falling into the trap of generalizing from our anecdotal experience.

I hear that, but here are the questions that provokes for me…and they are sincere, not simply meant to start more discussion.

  • How much of people’s inability to systematically “seek out and find examples of every important theme and its associated points of view” is because we simply don’t teach them to do that in a systemic way from very young ages?
  • How much of that is because we are so focused on content and not learning, because the system that’s still in place hasn’t shifted at all to keep pace with the fact that we can connect to information and knowledge and teachers on so many new and profound levels?
  • Can we systematically teach students to “see the big picture” in ways that will allow them to construct their own process that might actually come close to replicating that formal educational process?
  • Or do those types of potentials only come at a later age or from experiences that cannot be replicated in a K-12 system?

Those may be naive, I don’t know. But what I’m struggling with is how do we re-envision what we do in our classrooms to prepare our students to leverage the potential of the connections now available to (most of) them, connections that have not been available in the past.

And while I know this is a bit of a different topic from the above, I’m not saying that physical space, high-level coursework isn’t going to remain important and in fact relevant for some pursuits. But I’m not convinced that stringing courses together to earn a degree has to remain as the only way to achieve “expertise,” which in an of itself is open to all sorts of different interpretations.

(Photo “Inspiring the Class” by Brian U.)

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Schools and Communities Blogging Together (?)

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So I’m looking for examples of schools that have begun using Read/Write Web tools to engage in conversations (not simply communicate) with members of the local community. I have a couple of examples where some first steps have been taken, but I’m wondering if some districts are really connecting and networking with audiences outside of school that really inform what’s happening inside. You know, allowing comments on blogs, or collaborating with local mentors, etc. Any pointers?

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What the Future Holds(?)

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Now I know on many levels I’m not normal, but there are moments in the blogging process that just give me butterflies. Many of them occur serendipitously when I’m reading and two or three pieces of content flow up from my network that begin to click together in my brain like magnets, making connections. And at that moment, my mind starts writing, composing a post that it needs to make sense of the ideas, the patterns that seem to be emerging. I’ve come to rely on the blogging to cement together the pieces and make them more of a whole, one that I know is never fully complete, and never will be. And that’s when the butterflies come, in that moment of recognition, when things seem to make more sense. They tell me some molecules have moved, that I think I know something that I didn’t before. It’s what keeps me doing this.

Obviously, that happened just now as I was wallowing in my Google Reader (having left Bloglines far behind), reading post after post that made my brain hum with thought. But what clicked were a couple of items that just led so seamlessly one into another as I pulled them up.

The first was from if:book which is one of my favorite reads these days. Kim White writes about the coming “sea change” in terms of the structure of and reading of digital books. And much of the analysis is hung on the work of Jeff Han, whose amazing TED presentation floated up again someone’s blog a few days ago, and who was the subject of a feature in Fast Company which Tim Lauer pointed to this morning. (The picture above is a snip from another video of Jeff Han at work that’s on the FC site.) Kim’s description of how 3D, touchscreen computing will affect books is compelling:

Here’s an example of how it might work, imagine the institute’s Iraq Study Group Report in 3D. Main authors would have nodes or “homesites” close to the book with threads connecting them to sections they authored. Co-authors/commentors might have thinner threads that extend out to their, more remotely located, sites. The 3D depiction would allow readers to see “threads” that extend out from each author to everything they have created in digital space. In other words, their entire network would be made visible. Readers could know an author’s body of work in a new way and they could begin to see how collaborative works have been understood and shaped by each contributor. It would be ultimate transparency. It would be absolutely fascinating to see a 3D visualization of other works and deeds by the Iraq Study Groups’ authors, and to “see” the interwoven network spun by Washington’s policy authors. Readers could zoom out to get a sense of each author’s connections. Imagine being able to follow various threads into territories you never would have found via other, more conventional routes.

Now that would be an amazing capacity, to follow the connections and gain all sorts of context as to the authors and the ideas and their evolution. And it would demand reading skills that revolve around following connections and vetting sources in ways that would challenge our current pedagogies. Talk about active reading…

In that same vein, I’ve been spending some time clicking around Daylife, which is a newish news puller-together that looks to contextualize what’s happening in the world and connect the events to the people and the history around it. It’s not the 3-D world that Kim describes, but as I read David Weinberger’s post this morning it was clear that it’s a step in the right direction. The individual topic pages (like this one on Condoleezza Rice) are full of content…pictures, articles, people who are connected in some way, quotes, Wikipedia entries, etc. It gives the opportunity to drill further down into the information in ways that newspapers can’t. Now I know this is new, and it has a ways to go in terms of building up resources, etc. But it’s the direction I find interesting.

And it leads me to a better understanding of one of my favorite excerpts from one of my favorite articles about all of this, “Scan This Book” by Kevin Kelly:

Yet the common vision of the library’s future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book’s full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Which is another vision that gives me butterflies.

In his TED presentation, Jeff Han said:

I kind of cringe at the idea that we’re going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with the standard mouse and Windows pointer interface. This is the way we should be interacting with machines from this point on…There’s no reason in this day and age why we should be conforming to a physical device. They should conform to us.

My question is how fast is all of this going to reach our kids…and what does it mean for our curriculum right now. These literacies aren’t necessarily new, but they are much more complex. Our younger kids, my kids, are going to need to have them. I don’t think, right now at least, most schools have much of a clue as to how to address them.

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Connectivism Online Conference

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Just a brief pointer to the “Connectivism Online Conference” running in February that’s been organized by George Siemens and will feature presentations by George, Stephen Downes, Terry Anderson, Bill Kerr, and, believe it or not, yours truly. Luckily, I think I’m scheduled for early in the week, so the bar will no doubt be raised as the conference evolves. If you are interested in “attending” this free event which will be delivered through Elluminate and Moodle, head on over to the conference page and submit your e-mail to get updates as we get closer. In all likelihood, some other folks will added to the list as well.

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That Whacky Web 2.0

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So today was a finish line of sorts…once I get home (if I get home) tonight, I’m staring seven weeks of R&R in the face starting tomorrow, and I have to say, I’m ready. It’s been such a treat for me to travel around the country (and the world) and meet so many interesting and dedicated people, but the last couple of months have been crazy, and next year is already shaping up to be just as nuts. I want to do some more reflection on my travels this fall, but for now I’m ready to take a break from it all.

But today outside of Chicago, something really funny and weird happened. I was giving a workshop and wanted to demo the ease with which you could post photos to Flickr from a camera phone. So I took this picture:

Just minutes after that photo went up, Michael Stephens posted this photo in the comments noting that he had taken it during a training session he gave this weekend:

Now is that just freaky or what? Same exact room. Same exact angle. Perfect example for my workshop on how the connections on the Web work these days.

Anyway…here’s hoping the plane takes off on time…

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Dispatches from the Front Lines

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This is why we open up and connect our kids to the world and teach them how to function there safely:

About a month ago, two of my students reported on research by a geneticist involved with sleep and memory, and posted their reports to the my class blog. In their reports, the students raised some questions about the research.

Yesterday, that researcher responded to the students questions in the blog itself. This is incredibly exciting!

So far, in less than 8 weeks, we have interacted with a graduate student from Ohio who was doing research in the instructional use of blogs. My students participated in a survey, which formed a key part of a paper she has prepared.

Earlier this week, we heard from an author of an article from National Geographic, who was impressed with a student’s critique of his work. And now this.

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.

There are a billion teachers out there…

Go, blogs! Go!

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"Nervous but Thrilled"–Yet Another Flat Wiki Project

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So the project wiki run continues with this entry from Chris Craft in South Carolina whose students are prepping for a flat-ish Skype call with students at the American School in Lima, Peru next month. In this iteration, groups of kids are studying various aspects of the Peruvian culture and economy that will serve as the basis of their discussion. Chris is going to try to capture the event and hopefully he’ll be able to share it out later.

On his blog yesterday, he was talking about a “dry run” that he did with the Peruvian teacher. At first, the technology didn’t cooperate very well, but when they got it going, it was electric. Here’s a snippet:

When the video flipped on the class went wild. They quickly settled down and we chatted with a teacher down there. My kids were nervous but thrilled! They stepped up to the mic (figuratively and literally) and did a great job muddling through basic Spanish. The teacher there spoke perfect English, and she was gracious about it.

Then the cool stuff happened. Her room started to fill up with kids.

Then my kids got to talk to their kids.

That was cool to watch.

Isn’t that what we want our kids to be? Nervous but thrilled? That’s the edgy-ness that these technologies bring, a nervousness that’s built on a couple pinches of newness and risk at pushing through your limits, and a thrill of doing something real and immediate. Aren’t those the times when we really learn about oursevles and really cement our knowledge?

Compare that to taking tests when our students are mostly just nervous. Which would you want for your own kids?

Go, wikis! Go!

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A Read/Write Web Learning Curriculum

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Clarence summarizes the points in Henry Jenkins’ latest white paper and adds more fuel to the conversation in terms of moving away from teaching content simply to regurgitate it and moving toward teaching content in the context of developing skills for learning, and I think they are worth repeating here:

  • Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
  • Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
  • Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
  • Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
  • Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
  • Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
  • Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
  • Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
  • Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
  • Networking— the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
  • Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse
    communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and
    grasping and following alternative norms.

There’s a healthy mix of Pink, Siemens, Robinson and others in there. (And I would again highly recommend Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture for even more on these ideas.) It’s amazing, isn’t it, how little of this is being done in most schools? Appropriation? (Plagiarism!) Collective Intelligence? (Plagiarism!) Networking? (Plagiarism!) I look at this list through the lens of my own kids’ school experience and seriously wonder…are my kids at risk?

I agree less, however, with the idea that “Jenkins tells us, we need to look beyond our kids having access to tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) and we need to learn how to use them effectively in our classrooms to support their learning.” Yes, I need to seriously roll up my sleeves and, like Clarence, get deeply engaged in the pedagogy. And this is another example of the conversation shifting to a larger scope beyond technology. But I feel like I also need to petition whoever will listen that it’s a moral imperative at this point to get every kid connected. If Libya is on the verge depending on how the $100 laptop initiative plays out, why aren’t we? (Don’t answer that…)

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Knowing Knowledge–George Siemens

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Last week, George Siemens put up .pdf’s of his new book Knowing Knowledge, and I’ve been reading through it on and off for the last couple of days. It’s been pushing my thinking even more about what connectivism and connected learning really is, and I’m amazed at how much it resonates with my own experience.

The idea that knowledge is not only a product but is also a process.

That know where and know who are much more important today than know what or how.

That learning is all about network creation and attending to that network.

That the learner is the teacher is the learner.

For me, that last one is what has made this such a powerful journey, and is one of the biggest shifts in thinking that I’ve had. In my “now” network, I am constantly shifting in the roles I play, most often acting as learner, but occasionaly, perhaps as teacher who then learns from the experience of teaching. And my learning is transparent; I model the way I find, synthesize, process and publish information at almost every turn. And in that sharing, I become teacher. It is an ongoing process, a negotiation not only with the material I consume about the subjects which I am passionate about but with the understanding of that material, the learning, in the context of the way the network offers it or responds to it. It’s about as far from the transmission model of learning as you can get, yet that’s still the way we look at learning in our schools.

At any rate, check out George’s book…I’m sure I’ll be writing more later.

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Blackboard Patents the LMS…The End of Moodle and Elgg?

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Dave Cormier just Skyped me with a link to this article that details the patents on learning management systems that were just awarded to Blackboard. By the looks of it, Blackboard now owns learning management systems. The day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement, and although the Moodle board doesn’t seem to indicate a great deal of panic, I’d be interested to know what people in this community make of this. Dave says it’s not good…here is his depressing Skypequote:

“DOPA takes all the open sites, and Blackweb all the closed ones…”
Oy.

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The Learner as Network

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Jeff Jarvis posted one of those push-my-feeble-brain-to-the-limit posts last week which I think has resonance in a lot of ways. It starts with this:

In the future of media, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and content is controlled where it’s created.

He writes about how when we work and practice in a transparent, read and write environment, all of us become nodes in much larger networks. (There is a lot of

George Siemens in this.) I love this description:

Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.

It’s interesting how much this speaks to education, and how far we need to go. We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.

The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment (Jill Walker), is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.

49 Captive Superintendents–One Message

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So, I get the chance to address 49 Superintendents in Upstate NY on Thursday. I’ve got some ideas of what I plan to show them about the power and potential of the Read/Write Web, about what teachers and students are already doing, and about the obstacles that we need to begin having serious conversations about. But I’m wondering, if you had 90 minutes with this group, what one thing would you bring up/point to/challenge them with? What would be your most important message?

Chime in before Wednesday because I would love to point them to this post during my talk.

When Parents Contribute to Student Blogs…

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Anne pointed to this pretty amazing exchange that occurred on one of her student blogs recently, and it’s an interesting and effective example of how involved parents can contribute to their childrens’ learning in these more transparent spaces. I wonder how many teachers actively invite parents to at minimum read and perhaps respond to the work that their children are doing in their blogs. I know when I was in the classroom, I made a point of letting parents know what the URLs of the blogs were, but I left the decision to have parents comment on the sites up to the students themselves. Since it was high school, most opted not to let that happen. But a few did, and while the responses were not many, almost all of them were helpful, instructive, and relevant. And I do think for the students who allowed their parents to contribute it was a positive experience, especially for the parents who like the opportunity to be more involved.

Anyway, it’s nice to see such great discussion happening on student blogs. It’s rich, personal and, in this case at least, adds a great deal to the topic.

Going Global

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The biggest news in the blogosphere today seems to be that the number one blog in the Technorati 100 is now the 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG from China written by Xu Jing Lei, replacing Boing Boing. Couple that with the information in the latest report by Dave Sifry that less than 1/3 of the blogosphere is now written in English and it’s hard not to be impressed by the global reach of the Web. It’s pretty amazing and inspiring. Now I know that we’re still talking about a comparatively few actual content creators instead of just content consumers. If my math is right, 40,000,000 bloggers/1,000,000,000 Web users is 4%, right? If the trends continue, however, we’re going to have more and more international voices entering the conversation.
Similarly, I had a chance to revsit Global Voices Online this morning, and I was just blown away by the work that’s happening there. GVO is a project from the Berkman Center at Harvard:

A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.

It’s an amazing resource for any student or teacher studying international issues. It’s an amazing model for the type of work we could be doing with our own students. And, as Clarence writes, it’s sorely needed in our classrooms:

These are the voices I’ve been waiting to hear. The voices that most North American kids, locked up in our continental fortress need to hear. We need to listen, to read, to understand; to grow in global understanding and perception. The ability to cooperate internationally, to compete internationally, to know how others live through their days will bring a deeper understanding.

And, I would add, we need to contribute our own voices and those of our students to that mix.

The problem is that these types of technologies and the shifts they are facilitating are not prominently on the radar of any of the conferences I’ve been to of late. In fact, I am still amazed at the virtual lack of presentations that put the use of any technology use in the context of anything greater than the four walls of the traditional classroom. We need to be more expansive in our thinking. We need to be talking more about the opportunities “out there” instead of how to make things incrementally better “in here.” (I’m serious, right now, all sessions on PowerPoint should be banned from conference schedules.) If educators who pay their way to ed tech events don’t at least leave with a sense of the changes and opportunities that the Web affords these days, they’re wasting their money.

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Web of Connections

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(Cross posted to ETI) If you’re looking for a great example of how the Web is changing things, look no further than this post by Alan Levine which describes the wonderful evolution of a real life presentation given by Nancy White into an online multimedia version collaboratively constructed by a cadre of far flung, benevolent learners connected by RSS feeds and a desire to add to the conversation. Read the whole thing, but the summary from Alan is

Doesn’t this set of unplanned, network-enabled collaborations add so much more valuable context to the experience? Let’s follow the geographic trail- starting from a session presented and recorded in Vancouver BC, audio loaded to a blog in Arizona, images uploaded from Seattle, a movie produced from Hong Kong, and a distilled session summary from Portugal!

But the best part is the exchange of ideas in the comments that follow. Dave Lee pushes Alan’s upbeat assessment of the events by asking

I have to wonder how do we convince the average professor who hasn’t moved much beyond powerpoint being a glorified outlining tool that such feats of internet wizardry really are as difficult as they might at first seem? How do we get a corporate line manager who has never built a chart based on an excel speradsheet into a Word document to grasp the concept of small pieces loosely joined?

Great question. And the answers are worth checking out. But here is what I think is the key statement of the whole thread, added by Nancy White herself:

This is the community and the wider network at play. I know I would never had found and learned all the tools to put it all together. But I could bring a piece.

That’s exactly what George Seimens and connective learning is all about. It’s loading what you do know into the network and learning from the others who have other pieces, skills, ideas to contribute. We don’t have to know everything about everything any more, not only because we can’t but because our networks can store it away for us. Like Alan says:

…my sets of skills are always evolving (or decaying) as I learn more by tapping into my remote network, a rather startling shift of embracing my own ignorance (expertise is over-rated) and bathing in what others share.

This is the way learning takes place, by “bathing in what others share” and then by sharing what we know back to the community. Learning as process, not event.
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Connective Learning (Con't)

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If you have a spare 40 minutes or so in the near future, I would urge you to take a look at George Siemens’ latest Articulate presentation on Connectivism. For those already familiar with his work, this doesn’t break a lot of new ground. But I do think that the way he lays out the case for these changing learning environments just keeps getting better and better.

I’ve said this before, but connectivism describes my learning process almost exactly. As opposed to the ready, set, go learning that’s happening down the hallways right now, it’s become more of a constant flow for me, a continual process of seeking and finding relevant information in and out of my online and offline network and synthesizing all of it to share back and extend the conversation.

What struck me even more clearly this morning was the importance of reading AND writing in this process. If, as George says, we learn by building networks, the construction of those networks can only occur when we both consume and create content. If we don’t take that step of making our learning transparent to the other people or nodes out there, we limit the collective intelligence of the group. We sustain learning, we push learning only by sharing it back and becoming a source ourselves to the community of learners out there. Learners become teachers, teachers become learners.

And something else. We really do need to stop treating learning as if it were an event, like it stops at the end of class. And we do this because we are focused on the content, not the process. I can understand how we got here, when it was much more difficult for students to access diverse materials for every learning style that would enhance what they got from the teacher in the classroom. When our students are still being measured by tests that require them to memorize information instead of employ that information effectively. But for those schools with genuine access, like mine, it’s not the content that’s important any more. A lot of content gets lost, fortgotten, or, especially today, quickly becomes irrelevant. We should instead be focused on teaching kids how to learn, so they can continue to employ effective practice throughout their lives.

I have no question as to the relevance of Connectivism in terms of learning in connected environments. What I do struggle with is the rate at which it becomes relevant to others who have not already started learning in this way.
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