Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

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Standardized Personalization

April 29, 2019 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

Just for the record, if you’re an advocate for “personalizing” learning, then you need to do more than just offer some options for how students might work their way through the curriculum.

That’s just a starting point.

If you really are serious about honoring a student’s interests and dispositions and individuality, then you’re going to have to also honor a “personalized” version of “success” and “achievement.” You’re going to need to honor what fulfills the individual, not what fulfills the institution.

I mean, remind me again the point of “personalizing” a path to “standardized” outcomes?

Of course, this requires that we seriously give up control over where a “personalized” path may lead. But in the service of developing kids as deep, curious, persistent learners, that’s a small sacrifice. Especially when being a deep, curious, persistent learner is now the coin of the realm.

Right now, we can only imagine what the experience of school might be if we put learning fully in the hands of learners.

My guess is it would be more joyful, more hopeful, more relevant than what most kids experience today.

Filed Under: EduZen, General

Embracing “Rapidly Changing Times”

July 7, 2016 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I Tweet a fair amount about climate change, and how it’s something that we’re going to need to help our kids cope with on all sorts of different levels. From where I sit, this is now the work of schools, engaging students in the important questions we face and helping them develop the skills and dispositions to answer them and problem solve their way through it. I think of my own kids in this regard all the time. Are they ready? Will they flourish? Will the enjoy their lives?

Through our new Changeleader Facebook group, I found Superflux:

We work closely with clients and collaborators on projects that acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times, designing with and for uncertainty, instead of resisting it.

“A world in flux” feels totally right. Cultures around the globe are colliding with “historically unprecedented force.” We now have “local and global crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.” Political upheaval, racial tensions, economic uncertainty…I can’t think about it too long before I start feeling queasy.

179299295_1024a70998_bBut I do think about it. And we need to think about it with kids in our schools as well. We need to “acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times…instead of resisting it” in our classrooms, for the sake of our kids.

For instance, Superflux is thinking about “mitigation of shock” that will no doubt occur as the globe heats up.

The disconnect between scientific, data driven predictions of global warming, and the lack of immediately visible signs contributes to a space of cognitive dissonance, its implications unsettling and ominous. But it is also a space which offers the opportunity to confront our fears, to experiment with ways in which the shocks of the impact of climate change can be mitigated. It is in this space that we at Superflux have situated our research and design project: Mitigation of Shock.   We want to conduct experimental design responses to first world disasters that are likely to happen in the near future, by prototyping alternatives today. Tools, methods, materials and commons that individuals can learn, use and share in order to gain agency and capacity to mitigate the shock of climate change.

Tell me, why wouldn’t that be a worthwhile goal and challenge for our students? To “gain agency and capacity to mitigate the shock” of what is almost undeniably coming their way?

I know that these are difficult subjects to discuss with kids. But we resist at their and our peril. And we’ll all be better served if  the next generation is comfortable (as it can be), engaged, and capable with embracing uncertainty head on.

Asking questions that we don’t know the answers to would seem a logical place to start.

(Image credit)

Filed Under: Classroom, General, learning

Google, Gmail, Maps…All Down. Uh-Oh.

June 30, 2006 By Will Richardson

So does anyone else get a little freaked when the whole Google kingdom seems to be offline as it is at 6:30 am EST?

Or is it just me?

technorati tags:Google

Filed Under: General

Reinvention–Chapter 3: Moving Day/Spring Break

April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

This isn’t quite as earth shattering as Chapter 2, but the personal reinvention continues with the end, finally, of my Manila blog and the beginning of my new space served up by James Farmer at Edublogs. I have mostly good things to say about my three-plus years with Manila, but I’ve just had Word Press envy for too long, and James was kind enough to shoulder all of the migration load for me. So, with any luck, in the next couple of days, all 4,955 pieces of content that have been created here since 2003 will be ported over. The RSS feed will stay the same, and I’m hoping there won’t be too much of a disruption. Fingers crossed.

And actually, this move offers up the perfect opportunity for me to take a little break from blogging. Unless something major happens, I’m going to turn off the computer for a couple of weeks and recharge my batteries. We’re off to Sweden for 10 days on Friday, and I’ve got two articles that I need to get working on as well as some other projects. As I’ve mentioned before, I have not felt like a very good blogger of late. It feels a bit stale for some reason, and while the conversations are still important, they’re feeling a bit redundant as well. I think I’m feeling a bit of Clarence’s angst when he writes about “seeing other people.” I too am finding the need to move beyond the “echo chamber” a bit, to keep learning about new things instead of revisiting the common themes. We need to extend this conversation, I think, ’cause I’m just becoming more convinced that schools and education aren’t going to change before society changes. To be honest, I’m looking forward to not checking the feeds for a while.

And the other thing is that I feel like this space is becoming way too much about me. (Ironic, huh?) I mean I know that I’ve been getting around more what with speaking and the book, but the offshoot of that is that I have less time to read deeply and blog thoughtfully. Doing a conference wrap is an easy substitute. I really want to stop writing about what I’m doing and focus more on what I find classroom teachers and students are doing. Stop trying to paint in broad strokes and focus more on the details. It may take until quitting day (May 15) for that to happen, but it’s a goal.

And finally, it was nice to get a faint signal from Steven Downes this week. I looked at the pictures from his isolated cabin up north and felt pangs of jealousy. That tells me something. And, as is typical, he wrote something that just resonated in perfect pitch:

I’m trying to find that place, you know, where I can have a meaningful life, where I can be completely engaged and committed and passionate, where I can matter and be important. These pictures will always be special to me, because they will always remind me that I can and sometimes do dare to hope and dream of being something more, and that there are, absolutely, some things worth dreaming about.

Amen to that.

So, Murphy willing, the blog reinvention will be in place shortly. My own reinvention, however, continues at a much more unpredictable pace. Back in a couple of weeks.
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Filed Under: General, On My Mind

Ed Week on Wikis

April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

Education Week is running a story titled “Educators Experiment With Student-Written ‘Wikis’: Malleable, Open-ended Web Sites Seen as Aids to Collaborative Learning” that highlights some of the work being done by the likes of Tim Lauer, Paul Allison and others. Here’s a snip that I thought was pretty interesting:

“You can�t do the cookie-cutter essay anymore, because it won�t make sense,” Mr. Allison said.

Many students have taken to using his collaborative-writing wiki, which can be used for expository writing as well more-creative compositions. For instance, on the �discussion� page of the school�s wiki on “Macbeth,” students wrote 20 adaptations of the play’s opening scene, in which three witches in a forest conspire on a coming battle.

In Shakespeare’s version, the first witch says, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” The second witch replies: “When the hurlyburly’s done/When the battle’s lost and won.”

One student rewrote that exchange this way: “Yo, where we gonna meet at?/In the [sic] Japan, Tokyo, or Mega world?” The second character replies: “When the grasshopper is finished/And the battle is lost or won.”

So many interesting ideas…
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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Higher Ed BloggerCon

April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

The Higher Ed BloggerCon seemed like a pretty cool idea when it was first announced and it’s absolutely fulfilling my expectations, through Day 3 at least. It’s a month long event that features two screencasted presentations a day, and it kicked off this week with the teaching strand. I’ve learned something from everything that’s been posted thus far and I’m really looking forward to what Ewan and James have on tap for Friday. Some pointers so far:

  • Mark Ott’s presentation on screencasting was good, and the discussion afterwards even better. Take away ideas: Using teacher created screencasts to review material for exams and asking students to take teacher generated podcasts and mix in their own recorded reactions to the content.
  • Tyler Magee’s work using blogs to connect marketing classes in China and her own students provides a clear framework on how to set up collaboration online. Take away ideas: Creating community like this to study collaboratively takes a fair amount of planning and nurturing, but it pays off in the end (at least in this case.)
  • Nicole Ellison and Yuehua Wu of Michigan State University shared the results of “from one of the first empirical studies exploring whether online writing offers a true pedagogical advantage over traditional writing projects submitted on paper.” The result? Pretty mixed, and not statistically telling for the most part. Students spent more time on the paper assignment compared to the blog assignment. But generally, students said the blog was a postive experience, and more thought it was a more effective use.
  • In “Blogs for Learning,” Ellison and Ethan Watrall talk about an upcoming website with online resources for teachers and students who want to engage in academic learning. (The site will go live this fall.) In some primarily anecdotal research that they’ve done, they identified these problems with student blog use:
    1. It felt like busy work or a chore because of a lack of interest in the class, time pressures, irrelevance, or a perception that what they wrote was not being read. 2. It was too overwhelming to read all of the posts. 3. They had trouble interacting with other students’ blogs because they felt uncomfortable or because there was nothing of interest to comment on.There is another session on copyright and podcasting that I haven’t gotten to yet. And tomorrow, it’s wikis and nomadic desktops.
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  • Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Cool 7th Grade Science Blogs

    April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

    So this 7th grade “Exploring Our Dynamic Earth” blog (with the very appropriate tag line of “Using blogs to learn”) is an interesting example of how RSS can be woven into the work. The front matter is all done by placing feeds from a host of class blogs and a few science news feeds (including a latest earthquake feed) for pretty easy viewing. Click on one of the headline links and it will take you to a specific blog where teachers are posting some pretty thought-provoking assignments and students are engaging in some pretty impressive conversation through the comments.

    For example, we’ve got 58 responses to the question “What’s the most dangerous place on Earth?” and if you read through them, you’ll see some real give and take going on. And the writing is pretty audience-centric, as in this snip:

    Imagine this: it�s a perfectly normal day, nothing particularly unusual has happened. Everything is going fine until� BAM! OH DEAR LORD, A VOLCANO IS ERUPTING!! EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! This is what could happen if you lived in Chile…

    Or this gentle push back:

    johanna, I know 143,000 people died in that Yokohama earthquake. But that�s not because the earthquake was more dangerous. It�s because the CIRCUMSTANCES were different. Maybe there just happened to be a lot of people in Yokohama walking around, underneath buildings! Maybe they didn�t have very much advance notice. THAT DOESN�T MEAN THE EARTHQUAKE WAS MORE DANGEROUS. A 9.5 EARTHQUAKE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN A 8.3 EARTHQUAKE. Also, earthquakes in Japan do occur pretty often� but they�re usually of small magnitude, and so not a lot happens. I�ve done research, and it turns out that BIG earthquakes only occur in Japan every 70 years. The other earthquakes aren�t very dangerous at all. So I would have to disagree with you.

    Oh, by the way, the blog is courtesy of teachers and students at the Shanghai American School, Jeff Utecht’s hangout…
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    Filed Under: General, Weblog Links

    MySpace Not Cool Anymore…

    April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

    Just when we started figuring out exactly what the heck MySpace really is, now it’s destined for the trash heap. At least that’s according to some of Jeff Utecht’s students:

    �It became something you HAD to do, people were going crazy, and you had to write something or people would say �Yeah, you haven�t written anything all week.� it just got to be a hassle.�

    From the conversations, I get the feeling the students ran into blogger burnout. They got to a point were they were forced to write do to peer pressure rather then having something to say. The blog postings become so diluted that they were boring to read. Having to write something just for the sake of writing something so you are cool, is not cool.

    That’s a pretty sit up and take notice point, I think, and it goes to the discussion we’ve been having of late as to the motivations of blogging in general. Jeff, as always, makes some interesting observations about how important purpose is to the writing, and how quickly things can change.

    MySpace and Xanga aren’t going away any time soon, but I would be surprised if they keep adding over 250,000 users a day, as MySpace did a couple of weeks ago. What I’m wondering, as is Jeff, is what’s going to take their place.
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    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Welcome Washington Post Readers…

    April 3, 2006 By Will Richardson

    How much fun is it to say that?

    If you’re here because of today’s series of stories in the Washington Post on educators blogging, let me take this opportunity to welcome you to the “edublogosphere” and to a really great conversation about how blogs and wikis and podcasts and other Web publishing tools are changing what we do in our classrooms and impacting student (and teacher) learning. (If you’re not here because of the Post articles, go read them!) Personally, I think it’s great that this conversation has finally gotten some coverage from the maninstream media. I’m really hoping it encourages more educators to dip their toes in the water, so to speak, and start considering the power and potential of the “Read/Write Web,” the one where it’s just as easy to create content and share it with wide audiences as it is to consume what’s already there.

    Although the article states that “blogs can be personal journals for everyone to see,” please know that even more, they can be spaces to share ideas, to push each other’s thinking, to reflect on the practice and profession, and to make strong and powerful connections with people and ideas. I’m a blog snob in that I believe there is an intellectual component to this that can make it a pretty amazing learning tool, not just a place to capture the day’s events (though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.)

    So, if you are new to all of this, here are some more links to start you on your journey. First, here is a wide ranging list of ed bloggers to add to those already linked in the article. (Just click on the + sign next to the “Weblogs in Ed” link in the left hand pane.) If you want to click through some links to classroom uses of blogs, try this list. If you want to learn more about how to get started with all of these tools (like you want to know what it means when The Post says you can “tag” the stories,) this might help. (I have no shame.) Or, if you just want to ask some questions, feel free to e-mail me.

    Finally, let me just say that I’ve learned more, found more interesting teachers, and been much more intellectually engaged in my five years of blogging than at any other time in my life. This is an amazing community of educators, and I feel very fortunate to have become a part of it. May it be as transformative for you as it has for me…

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    RSS Experiments

    April 3, 2006 By Will Richardson

    I love Bloglines, but this article in TechCrunch has me looking at the alternatives. One that I really want to like is Rojo, which has all sorts of social Web goodness built into it. I LOVE the fact that I can tag individual posts…kind of like a built in del.icio.us. Of course, every tag has it’s own rss feed, which creates all sorts of possibilities. And the recommendation feature a la digg is also very cool. But for some reason, Rojo doesn’t seem to update as consistently as Bloglines. And I have to remember to mark all of the posts read manually instead of just marking stuff I want to keep as with Bloglines. And finally, I guess I just really like the framed Bloglines page which doesn’t require a refresh every time I click on something. This is one of those “wish I had the best of both worlds” moments.

    The other one I’ve been playing with is Gritwire which is AJAXalicious and therefore fun to play with. It has a wiki function built in as well as podcast support through the Grit Wire Media player (which is a pretty nifty little app.) But even with all of that, it’s just not as simple as Bloglines, somehow. Maybe it’s just old habits.

    So, can anyone give me a reason to switch from Bloglines? Anyone using FeedLounge or Google Reader (which got the highest ratings in the TechCrunch article)?

    Filed Under: General, RSS

    Closing the Divide

    March 31, 2006 By Will Richardson

    Some good news from the New York Times:

    African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the “digital divide” that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.

    Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it.

    But the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries and the newest generation of cellphones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet have all contributed to closing the divide, Internet experts say.

    Good news, indeed.

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    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Smart Mobs Student Edition

    March 31, 2006 By Will Richardson

    MySpace has been in the news again, this time because of the role it played in organizing the recent protests across the country (but primarily in California and Arizona) against the immigration bill. The first thing that jumps out to me, at least is that MySpace is now officially a “social networking site,” not just a blog site. Thank goodness we’ve figured that out.

    But what happenend this week is Smart Mobs in living color. Look at the lead in the Arizona Republic:

    There’s no doubt that the high school student protests that emptied several schools, blocked traffic and packed the state capital lawn were real.

    It’s the way they were organized that was virtual.

    Although the student demonstrations Monday and Tuesday paled in comparison with Friday’s 20,000-strong march, the city’s biggest, they likely marked the first appearance of a new generation of activists savvy about using electronic gadgets, text messaging and the Internet to organize.

    And read this account by a Social Studies teacher in California:

    Asked how the students organized so quickly, Ray Siqueiros, a Sunnyside social studies teacher, said, “It’s called technology. It’s called text messaging. It’s called myspace.com.” Students at Cholla and Pueblo coordinated their march within a matter of minutes during lunch by calling and text messaging each other on their cell phones, they said.

    Now, I have to tell you, I have a hard time picturing a bunch of grownups doing quick, mass mobilization this way. Seriously. We’re so e-mail. And I’m pretty much done with that whole natives and immigrants meme because there’s nothing stopping any of us from becoming fluent in this language except our own unwillingness to learn it (and, ok, maybe some time issues…where do kids get the time for this anyway?) We can debate whether or not the kids should have done what they did (read the comments to this Danah Boyd post; in fact, read the whole thing) but we might want to recognize it for what it is: a powerful example of the connectedness that technology can create.

    And almost as important here, to me at least, are the reactions from some of the school administrators and law makers. From the Republic:

    Sunnyside Principal Raúl Nido said he wanted to work with the students, not contain them.
    “If you know what the cause is and you’re passionate about it, then tell me why,” Nido said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing then you’re being led. This is a very hot issue.”
    Students said they were appreciative.
    “I expected them to try and stop us, but instead they’re encouraging us,” said Alex Gonzalez, 17, a junior and Sunnyside student body vice president. “They understand where we’re coming from.”

    And from Arizona Central:

    “I commend these students because this is a lesson in modern civics education that we can all learn from,” said Rep. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix. “Their voices are being heard, and they’re doing it on their terms. This is very exciting.”

    We really can all learn from this, not become it, necessarily, but understand it. We might want to think about how to put their engagement and connections in these communities to positive use in our classrooms instead of simply trying to surpress their importance. Just think of the possibilities…

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Bloggy Research

    March 30, 2006 By Will Richardson

    The folks over at the CCCC Blogging SIG are taking the blog by the horns in terms of beginning to gather some empirical research about the effects of blogs in the classroom. I still think it’s weird that no one has published any results of studies with this tool yet. I may have to carve out a few hours to go digging around some more. They’ve also got some other things on the agenda. One of my favorite snippets is this one:

    …we need to move the profession towards a space where we’re more aware of blogging as professional activity. To what degree can we “get credit” for blogging? And, deriving from that, how can we start thinking about blogging as professionals? (One question that was asked in response: if blogging becomes a professional activity, does it lose some portion of its value as teaching/writing tool?)

    Wow…we’re finally getting serious about this stuff, huh? Good questions that we’re all grappling with on some level, and I’ll be interested to see how things progress.

    Filed Under: Blogging, General

    Blogging as Learning (Con't)

    March 30, 2006 By Will Richardson

    So Chris Sessums is learning from his blog by deconstructing his learning, on his blog, which is what this is really all about. I know I sound like a snob when I start talking or writing about how blogging is an intellectual exercise, but that’s what this is for me, and I think his post today is a good example of what I mean. I also like the way he defines the scope of what teachers can do with a blog:

    1. Modeling: the teacher �puts his/her mind on display�
    2. Coaching: teachers observe students performance of a task, offering feedback
    3. Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.
    4. Articulating: drawing students out dialogically, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
    5. Reflecting: debriefing, replaying and discussion after an activity
    6. Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

    What’s interesting to me is how the items in that list have less to do with teaching than facilitating and creating a learning environment. And thanks to a bit of Web serendipity, I stumbled across this relevant link in one of my del.icio.us feeds today excerpting Carl Rogers’ “Freedom to Learn”. There’s more than what I’m snipping here, but this will give you the gist of what he has to say:

    a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
    b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
    c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
    d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
    e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
    f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher…

    Like I said, there is much more to it that needs reading in order to fully understand his ideas. But the learning here for me at least is an even more heightened sense that blogs can be spaces for self directed learning, and that to use them well as teachers, we may need to stop thinking about how to teach with them as much as focus on how we might bring them into our own practice to model what our students can do with them.

    Filed Under: Blogging, General

    Creating Passionate Users…of Schools

    March 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

    Let me first say that I love Kathy Sierra’s blog because so much of what she writes has relevance to education and because there is such a spirit and energy to it that it just makes me motivated to, as she says, “kick ass.” The name of her blog, “Creating Passionate Users” is what education should be all about, shouldn’t it? Helping kids become engaged. Helping them find their passions. Helping them be able to create a life around whatever it is they are passionate about. Notice that it’s not about teaching them to do that. You can’t teach someone to be engaged or passionate. Sure, you can model it, and I think every teacher should share her passions with her students because I’m not sure kids see a lot in the way of healthy passion in the world these days. But there is no text or curriculum for becoming engaged.

    Passion bubbles to the surface only when experiences draw them out. Lately, I’ve been looking at my own children and seeing them begin to feel passionate. For my 8 year old daughter, it’s horses. Yesterday I had to almost drag her away from scooping poop at the horse farm down the road to come home and eat dinner. After riding, everything about her smells like pony, and she refuses to change her clothes to put us out of our misery. (That may be less passion that it is obstinance.) For my 6 year old son, it’s basketball. All of a sudden, all he wants to do is spend time at the end of the driveway dribbling and shooting this old beat up basketball that looks like it’s coming unpeeled as the leather separates from its black rubber body. Seriously, he must take a couple hundred shots a day (and he makes most of them, I might add.)

    But when it comes to school, they have very little passion. I’ve written about this before, but they are bored silly. It’s already become just a routine they put up with so they can see their friends. Wendy and I give them extra work at home, try to make words and numbers fun, but that almost serves to make their disenchantment with school worse. They are disengaging. And I can guarantee that as they take more and more tests that have no obvious relevance to their lives, they will become more and more disengaged.

    I know a fair number of passionate learners, people who seek out opportunities to think seriously about thier lives and world around them. I wish I knew more. I don’t see many passionate learners in classrooms, however, students who are always “learning, growing or improving in some way” (as Kathy puts it) simply for the sake of knowing more instead of for getting a grade. My kids are riding and dribbling not for an assessment but to get the buzz that comes with being able to do it well (as well as for many other non-graded reasons.) That doesn’t guarantee that they will be life long learners, but it’s a start.

    So the question for me becomes can schools create passionate users? Can we begin to teach the stuff we need to teach in the context of our students’ passions? And in doing so, can we instill and nurture in them a love of learning and growing? For the vast majority of our kids, school is a game, and though it may be hard to admit, most of us on this side of the desk are complicit participants. The outcomes are clearly defined, and very few of them have anything to do with fostering passionate learning. And in a world where our students can much more easily connect to people who share their passions outside of school, we risk a great deal when we fail to think seriously about how we might create passionate learning opportunities in our classrooms as well.

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Track and Field Wiki

    March 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

    (Via cogdogblog) Since I got tagged as a huckster the last time I floated an interesting use of one of these tools in the classroom, let me state clearly that I offer these up simply to get people thinking about what can be done. Sometimes I get a bit too excited about the possibilities. So sue me.

    Here’s a wiki that’s being put to good use by a track and field team in Deer Valley, CO. Here’s the rationale:

    Making our website a wiki makes it easier for us to keep it up-to-date. And a wiki is perfect for a track team since we have so many coaches working in the many track & field events. We can all up date when we feel like it.

    Seems so, I don’t know, logical somehow. And I have to say that pbwiki (which is where I’ve been creating most of my wikis lately) is really doing some neat things to help make wiki sites prettier too. (Uh-oh…was that hucksterism?)

    And speaking of wikis, have you been to Wikiville lately? More and more kids from around the world are adding information about their places. It’s one way that you might want to think about introducing your students to wikis. (How was that, Tom?)

    Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

    Amazon and the Read/Write Web

    March 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

    (From the “Somewhat Shameless Self-Promotion Department”) I just wanted to note that my book is now officially available on Amazon, but even more, look what other Read/Write Web type things you can do:

  • Post a review (ok…nothing new there, I know.)
  • Post to a discussion board about the book. (Somewhat new.)
  • Tag the book with keywords that help others find it. (New)
  • Contribute to a wiki about the book. (New)All pretty cool, I think, though I wonder how many people will use them. And did you know that author’s can have their own blogs at Amazon? I haven’t had time to dive into it much, obviously, but I do think it’s all quite an interesting attempt to get people involved in a product.

    And, most important of all, of course, don’t forget that you can add my book to someone’s wedding registry…
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  • Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    amazon.jpg

    March 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

    amazon.jpg

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    Filed Under: General

    Quote O' the Day

    March 27, 2006 By Will Richardson

    Doug Noon:

    Normative claims that masquerade as objective truth are tools of propaganda. Fear and lies serve devious ends. Do not allow people to use terms like achievement gap, failure, or proficiency without challenging their meaning. The problem isn�t simply “failing” schools. Schools are being asked to clean up a broadly distributed social mess caused by centuries of materialism and greed. Education has been colonized. We are being trampled by our rescuers. This is not a new story.

    I’ll be better tomorrow…
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    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    My Space and Our Space

    March 27, 2006 By Will Richardson

    (Note: This post got away from me. Sorry.)
    (via Kathy Sierra) Last week Danah Boyd posted an essay that talks about why MySpace matters and what the potential fall out from the MySpace panic is. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but I did find this snippet to be particularly thought provoking:

    MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It’s facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned – they’re trying to figure out how to live in this super public. The challenge is that outsiders are panicking about a culture that they are not a part of. They want to kill the super public rather than support people in learning how to negotiate it. No one knows how to live in such a super public, but this structure is going to become increasingly a part of our lives. It is no wonder that youth want to figure it out. And it is critical that they do, especially since our physical worlds have become more segregated and walled off, partitioned by age, race, class, religion, values, etc. Yet, it is the older generation that did that segregating and they’re not really ready to face collapsed contexts at every turn or to learn how to engage with people who have very different values on a daily basis. Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids’ terms.

    “Support people in learning how to negotiate it.” What a concept.

    I find the culture in this country more and more ironic every day. As Danah says in her essay, we say to kids all the time that they shouldn’t reveal to much of themselves, yet everywhere they look on television we’re engaged in the sport of revelation. We reward our kids with trips to the mall yet say nothing about the fact that we live in a society where 80% of the things we buy are thrown out within six months. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink quotes Polly LaBarre who notes that the U.S. spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. Think about that. (Wendy‘s in the final stages of her environmental tip book…more such items to come I’m sure.) We claim to strive for equality, yet the only voices with any power are white, middle-aged, Ivy League educated, wealthy men who have lost (if they ever had) any perspective of what equality really means. And if you think that’s a problem, try this:

    No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you’ve heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

    Oy. It feels pretty hopeless, sometimes…

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    It's All About Engagement

    March 27, 2006 By Will Richardson

    It’s been interesting reading the threads that have developed around my “To Blog or Not to Blog…” post from a couple of days ago. The comments on the post itself were pretty amazing in their own right, but the extended conversations were equally thought provoking. Chris Sessums, Barbara Ganley, Vicki Davis, Bud Hunt and many others blogged about it, and I’ve been trying to tap into my own reaction as to what they and their respective commentors have been saying. It’s a great example of the messy, distributed nature of the Web these days, and ironically, I think, an example of why many people might find it frustrating.

    What strikes me about all of this is the level of engagement of the participants. All of these teacher-bloggers on some level felt compelled to enter the conversation, to take the time to do some deep thinking, obviously, and articulate those thoughts in a post to share with others. Some came here first, then followed up with posts on their own sites. Some just felt compelled to comment on one or many of these posts. There is the palpable energy of a community of learners who are connecting around questions and answers to better understand their own practice and then share back that understanding with the community to further the conversation. And that investment of time and energy, I think, deepens my trust in the community as a place where I can come to ask about what I don’t understand or what I want to learn more about. It is, for me a powerful occurence, one that does not happen with such consistency in my physical space.

    I know as a parent, I hope my own children will find the same level of passion that I have about whatever it is they might be interested in. It’s only natural, I think, that an educator who feels the power of that engagement would want to share that experience with his or her students. I love the way Barbara articulates this in her comments here:

    Not all of us will be fabulous bloggers, or oral presenters, or readers, or emotionally intuitive. But if each of us will bring our own expertise to give to the others, we will be engaged–our learning will be efficacious.

    And that is the most important part of all of this, this question of how do we get our kids engaged? How can we get them to be motivated to learn? And, since these tools seem to be working for us, how can we use them as vehicles, conduits for students to tap into their own passions? And how do we get other teachers to at least consider them?

    Not every student needs a blog or a podcast or a wiki to be engaged, I understand that. Blogs and podcasts and the audiences they facilitate will not engage every child. But are we not at the point where we can honestly say that the learning potential of these tools is such that every teacher should have them as a part of his or her toolbox?

    Filed Under: Blogging, General

    To Blog or Not to Blog…

    March 25, 2006 By Will Richardson

    I haven’t written too much here about a friend and a colleague who has without question become my main offline teacher in terms of thinking about the Web and how it can influence teaching and learning. He is one of the brightest people I know. We’ve had all kinds of lengthy conversations over the past year ranging in topics from Dewey to school reform to (guess what?) blogging. Of course, I keep urging him to start a blog, and I think he may be ready to give it try. He reads blogs, has a Bloglines account, and I think understands the potential.

    So what’s the problem?

    My friend regularly pushes back about blogging, saying that it’s not as easy both technically and psychologically for most as it is for others, that the tool requires a significant change from how most people work and think. He says that it’s easy for me because I’m a writer by training, a journalist specifically, and that the transparency of content is familiar. For most, however, it’s not so appealing.

    So it was on a couple of levels that I thought of him when I read a post from Leigh Blackall which pointed to this post from Doug Noon which pointed to this post from Miguel Ghulin. On one level, I thought about the time and effort it takes to follow and try to connect the ideas in these extremely interesting and thoughtful posts. All these guys are pretty brilliant and pushing my meager brain in any number of ways. It’s work, for me at least, and requires a pretty high level of engagement that I wonder how many educators have the time or inclination for. (And I do not mean that to sound holier than them in any way.) Second, the theme of this very distributed conversation goes to the heart of what my friend has been saying, that blogging and read/write webbing may be for a select few and not for the masses. Doug’s post ends with

    I made a presentation about blogs to a group of teachers last summer. After I talked for probably too long, a woman raised her hand and asked, �Why would anyone want to do this?� I didn�t know what else to say. You either see it, or you don�t.

    Which of us who has tried to bring these tools to a wider audience hasn’t heard or sensed that?

    So my brain goes to this…in my echo chamber, I read lots of stories about kids who are getting it, even in Doug’s post, where they are reading and writing and commenting and learning. You read Bud or Clarence or Vicki or any number of others and there are stories that border on transformation. (In fact, Vicki’s latest post is titled “My students inspire me as they “get” Web 2.0.”) But I don’t read much about the kids that aren’t engaged. And I’m wondering to what extent that happens as well. And further, I’m wondering to what extent they compare to the adult educators we’re trying to teach about these tools who choose not to engage. The simple view is that this is generational, that kids are more available to the tools because they live in a connected world or because, well, they’re kids and more open to new stuff than adults…but is it?

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Florida Blogger Meetup

    March 24, 2006 By Will Richardson

    You know how a lot of birders have life lists where they check off one species or another when they happen to see it warbling up in a tree or darting past their binoculars? In some weird way it’s akin to what it feels like meeting the bloggers who are in my Bloglines account. Yesterday I got a chance to cross Wes Freyer and Dean Shareski off of my list as we and a few other blogger types got a chance to engage in some face to face discussion about the state of education at a Discovery Educator Network dinner here in Orlando. Wes was in town to receive a Best Blogger Award from eSchool News and to give a Web 2.0 workshop at another conference in town. Also in attendance were Tim Wilson, Steve Dembo and a number of other educators who collectively produced some really interesting conversation, which we tried to record, btw.

    I hope the others blog their impressions, but I was really struck by the intensity of what we talked about, the roadblocks inherent in school reform, strategies for sharing these tools with school leaders, ways to expand this conversation to teachers and schools that aren’t currently a part of it. It was exciting at times, frustrating at others. Optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. While we have a lot of these converstaions asynchronously on our blogs, it was a reminder of how effective face to face is. We covered a great deal of territory in a couple of hours.

    The upshot? There is a lot of work to do, not so much even in teaching the tools as in figuring out what the answers to all of these tough questions really are. I certainly feel humbled by the sheer magnitude of this conversation, and priveleged to be even a small part of it. But I think that we’re not going to get very far until more voices enter it. And whether or not blogs will save the world, they can at least facilitate that conversation providing access is available and there is enough of a comfort level with the medium to use it.

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    Fear and Loathing at FETC

    March 23, 2006 By Will Richardson

    FETC is without question the “If We Don’t Start Teaching Our Kids 21st Century Learning Skills We’re All In A Boatload of Trouble” Conference. Just about everywhere you look you see a reminder that this is indeed the 21st Century and that we’re teaching to 20th Century standards with 20th Century techniques. It’s almost the message from a lot of the featured speakers is like, “ok…you had six years to figure out that the Century actually did change…why haven’t you changed anything about how you teach?” I’ve heard Friedman’s name dropped three times already, and, the underlying current from many of those speaking is F E A R, or as Willard Daggett said more than once (maybe more than thrice) “They are going to eat our lunch.” Or this photo of the slide that was on screen prior to the start of Ken Kay’s presentation. It’s almost creepy.

    Don’t get me wrong, there are bright spots. David Warlick tells somewhat the same story but with a much more hopeful tone. There must be at least 134 sessions on podcasting that, as far as I can see, haven’t resorted to the “Record or Die” meme. And a couple of the bloggy sessions I ducked in on looked quite happy (though I could give you some quotes from the audience that would make you think we were in the 19th Century.)

    But I’m feeling kind of…I don’t know…bummed in some ways. I mean if you really want something to get scared about, listen to this podcast from Mark Lynas on Global Warming that I put on during the plane ride down here. If he’s right, we really are all dead, and none of this stuff will mean a hill of spaghetti.

    David’s been talking about a new story, and I’ve been putting a post together with my thoughts. But I can tell you this: whatever the new story is, it’s not the one I’m hearing here…

    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

    FETC Live Blogging: David Warlick

    March 23, 2006 By Will Richardson

    Live blogging and wiki-ing at David’s wiki. I was going to cross post but it’s too long.
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    Filed Under: General, On My Mind

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