Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Thinking About “Learneracy”

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From the “I’m An Ex-English Teacher and I Can Make Up New Words Department:”

We have a huge focus in schools on literacy, and deservedly so. Almost no one argues that kids don’t need to be able to read and write and do basic math. We measure ourselves by literacy rates. We create rubrics and tests and other assessments and label kids as “good readers” or “bad writers” or “competent at math.” We put literacy at the center of our work.

We don’t do that so much for other subjects or skills. Sure, we dole out grades in science and history and French. But those aren’t skills focused as much as that literacy stuff. I mean, my kids didn’t get a grade on their skills as a scientist or as an historian. It was more about the content, the knowledge.

All that said, it’s debatable today that being able to read and write and do math in the most widely held sense gets us even close to being literate today. Reading is no longer linear or solely text based. Writing is no longer local or text based. Math is no longer computation based.

I’ve argued in the past that through a modern lens that encompasses all of the new genres of reading and writing and mathematics, most kids are illiterate when they graduate from school. Most adults who teach them are illiterate as well. Most people in general would be considered literate in the most modern sense of the word.

We seem not to like to talk about this, however.

Literacy, unlike most other things in school, is in flux. It’s evolving. Quickly. And that makes it hard to teach. If we think of literacy as something to “learn” and get a grade for, it signals that we think it’s static. That it’s a box to check and move on, when in reality, it’s a new box every day.

I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off focusing our efforts on helping kids become “learnerate.” As the word suggests, do they have the skills and dispositions to learn their way to whatever outcomes they desire? Are they curious? Are they persistent? Do they embrace nuance and not knowing? Are they reflective? Can they create and vet their own curriculum, find their own teachers, and assess their own progress? (Add your question below…)

None of those things happen because of explicit teaching. None of those things are easy to measure. They are dispositions that already exist in every child and skills that are nurtured and developed tacitly in the process of doing meaningful, important, beautiful work with others. You become learnerate by continually learning, not by being taught and measured by a test or a competency, but as manifested in the desire to learn more. (We’re not learning if we don’t want to learn more, btw.)

“Learneracy” is currently not our focus in schools. But it should be. Especially today when each of us has so much more agency over and access to the things we want to learn, whenever, wherever, and with whomever we want to learn it.

The Future (and Present) of Expertise

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Yesterday, I ran across this quote from Degreed, an online credentialing site:

“The future doesn’t care how you become an expert.”

Now, is that a marketing pitch or a reality? Obviously, for some professions, the future is still going to care a lot about how people gain their expertise. As I’ve said many times, I don’t want my surgeon trained on YouTube. (And don’t laugh; that stuff is already starting to happen.) There will always be certain kinds of expertise that we will want to accredit through rigorous training and practice.

But there’s going to be a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t going to require a traditional certificate or diploma given by a traditional school. For lots of “professions” now, people will (and are) able to begin to cobble together their own credentials. And portfolios. And websites that display their expertise. And networks that connect them to other professionals or learners or whatever.

In other words, the potentials to roll your own career are exploding, assuming you have certain skills, literacies, and importantly, dispositions to do that.

In schools, we talk about the skills…a lot. To be honest, I don’t know how well we actually develop the skills since “learning” them is so hard to quantify. We love our data, and we hew to the quantifiable in the end. Testing for real world, in the moment critical thinking is hard and messy and time consuming.

And we cover the “literacies,” although again, I think you could argue that we don’t do a great job of it. Recent Stanford research suggests that at least.  I think it’s arguable that by modern standards, most students and teachers are illiterate, and that our practice around teaching literacy is in dire need of rethinking.

That all said, how do we do on the dispositions part? I know that a good chunk of how kids approach the world is hard wired or baked in by the environments they grow up in. But if the opportunity (expectation?) is that expertise is now something that you develop on your own, then how are we tackling in schools the development of mindsets to do that? How do we create conditions where kids will learn perseverance in non-oppressive ways? How do we help them remain optimistic in the face of some serious global changes and tensions? How do we nurture patience and healthy confidence with a significant chunk of extroversion?

The answer isn’t hard. It’s about culture and about a mission and vision that focuses as much if not more on the “immeasurables” as on the easy to measure stuff. What’s hard is actually changing culture and mission and vision to accommodate that need.

The next time you look at the students in your schools, ask yourself this: Will they be able to become experts on their own when they leave you? Will they be able to learn to the depth necessary, connect widely enough, and have the confidence to make their expertise known to a global audience?

They’re not all going to do that, I get it.

But they all should be able to.

Image credit: Steven Wei

#IranElections: Why We All Need to be Editors Now

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If you’ve been following the news out of Iran the last few days, odds are you’re following it very differently from even a few years ago. Ten years ago, most of what I would have learned would have come from the TV news or the New York Times the day after. Five years ago, it was the New York Times or other traditonal media websites that I probably would have turned to. Today, however, for me at least, it’s Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia and then the New York Times website. It’s a bit of a different process, I’d say.

While we’ll wait to see how social tools affect the outcome in Iran, we can’t wait to begin to teach ourselves and our kids how to make sense of media that we ourselves have to edit. The complexities here are huge, in both an information and technological context. We’re reading and viewing content created by people whose identities and agendas are unkown to us.  While much of it is raw, we can’t know how much of it is made to look raw, how much of it has been edited, how much of it is true. I can read the Tweet above and believe it, or I can wait for confirmation. I can do what all good journalists have done throughout time which is verify and reverify before believing and reporting.

The difference is, obviously, is that I have to do this for myself. I now have access to the raw information, the stuff that I used to pay for someone else to find and sift and synthesize and share. I can choose to continue to take that route, certainly, to only check the reputable media outlets for updates and “news”. But if I do that these days I deny myself a greater understanding of not just how to consume all of this but how to participate in it. I’m not in Iran (thankfully) but I can still share the best of what I find about Iran for others in my network. I don’t take that task lightly, because I want to be a trusted contributor. I want others to share with me so that we can sift and filter and synthesize and contribute the best of our resources and thinking. As Donald Leu writes, these days “we read online as authors, and we write online as readers.” And, I would add, we need to read and write as editors as well.

I know that we should have been teaching these skills and processes all along with every piece of information we read or shared. But the reality is that we as an educational system haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Right now, however, we and our kids simply can’t get away with not having these skills any longer. I know the school year is over for many, but for those that are still in session, welcome to a teachable moment about the world, democracy, technology, media, and most of all, participation.

Those Who Publish Set the Agenda

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In my Delicious network bookmarks I found this pretty interesting study (pdf) titled “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” which concludes:

…Despite new opportunities to engage in such distribution of content, relatively few people are taking advantage of these recent developments. Moreover, neither creation nor sharing is randomly distributed among a diverse group of young adults. Consistent with existing literature, creative activity is related to a person’s socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling. The novel act of sharing online, however, is considerably different with men much more likely to engage in it. However, once we control for Internet user skill, men and women are equally likely to post their materials on the Web.

The study states that as far as kids are concerned, those with at least one parent with a graduate degree are much more likely to publish, and that “while it may be that digital media are leveling  the playing field in terms of exposure to content, engaging in creative pursuits remains unequally distributed by social background.”

Obviously, this is not especially good news, but it’s not at all surprising. The significance of it is clear, however, from one other line in the study:

If we find unequal uptake of these activities then such discrepancies imply the emergence of a two-tiered system where some people contribute to online content while others remain mere consumers of material. Those who share their content publicly have the ability to set the agenda of public discussions and debates. (Emphasis mine.)

I think that’s another bullet point to add to the compelling case for teaching these technologies in classrooms, and especially in those classrooms in lower socio-economic areas.  It reminds me of the quote from the Horizon Report a few weeks ago that said:

Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines.

I’ll admit I still marvel at how long it’s taken the system to even show signs of understanding what’s happening and taking steps to deal with it. For any of this to happen, we need teachers in the room who can expand their global connections as well. But the more we can begin to distribute this type of research to the educational leaders in our schools, the more opening we have to starting the conversations.

New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators

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So here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.

And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they   need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.

  • Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
  • They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
  • They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
  • Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
  • We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.

So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:

New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

What do you think?

Mourning Old Media, Mourning Old Media Teachers

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I remember when I first starting teaching journalism way back in the day actually using one of those stinky, buzz-inducing ditto machines to publish my students’ work “widely” up and down the hallways. I remember copy-editing by hand with green Flair pen, the same color my dreaded college journalism professors used, teaching my kids the fine art of marking up each other’s stories and adding suggestions for improvement. And I remember buying about 15 copies of various newspapers every Friday just so we could all spend some time getting our fingers black with ink as we searched for interesting and/or well written stories.

When I think of those days, I feel really old, for sure, but I also feel amazed at how much has changed in terms of media. And now, when it seems that “old” media is finally tipping full force into a “new” digital media model, I have to say I’m somewhat wistful.

Ok. I’m over it.

Yesterday’s New York Times piece by David Carr “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” got me really thinking again, however, about how much more important journalism has become in these days when newsrooms are being cut and reporters laid off. The Christian Science Monitor is closing its print edition. The Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and others are making deeper cuts. All of which is going to increase our reliance on not only online media but participatory online media, the form of media that is largely unedited, essay-driven and agenda-ridden. All of which, by the way, should be driving our conversations about how to fundamentally rewrite our curriculum and our delivery system to prepare students to be, um, participants both as readers and as writers.

I loved this graph from the article:

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.

We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…

(Photo: News by Kazze.)

WeGottaStopThis.org

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Just an observation here, but three times in the last week I have been speaking to different educators who in passing have made the point that we do a good job of teaching kids that .org sites are more trustworthy than .com sites but that in general, we really don’t have a solid grasp of online literacy.

Ya think?

A "Publish Then Filter World"

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Clay Shirky has a new book that’s just been released titled “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” with an accompanying blog that both advance to the idea that our ability to connect on the Web potentially changes much of what we know to be true about business, politics, and everything else. Should be here in a day or so.

David Weinberger was live blogging a presentation by Shirky at Harvard last week, and there were a couple “shift-capturing” phrases that caught my eye. First, Shirky was talking about the difficulties one of his NYU students was having running a health and beauty discussion board at an online magazine site for teenage girls because they couldn’t “get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating.” That’s an effect of the Net, the idea that group forming is “ridiculously” easy, that we can’t stop it, and that “all we can do is watch and act.”

But here’s the quote that struck me:

Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world.

Not an earth shattering revelation, I know, but an interesting way of saying it, I think, and one that again captures the shift pretty powerfully. We who are engaged in personal learning networks understand this filtering role, in fact, we depend on it for our learning. We have become editors, and we have become dependent on the editorial faculties of those we have chosen to learn with. In fact, if you’re not an effective filter, odds are good that you won’t be a part of the network.

Now I know that we should have been teaching our kids to be effective filters all along, but I have serious doubts as to how many of our students are being taught to edit in the context of self-organized learning networks. And I think it’s another way to pose the question: Are we preparing our students for a “publish then filter world?”

The second little tidbit in the post that I found interesting was a discussion of the potential use for social tools in a potential Obama presidency. While Shirky noted that Obama excels at fund-raising online, no one yet has “proposed a policy wiki” or “lateral conversation among supporters.”

There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social
production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But
I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive
dissonance among the voters.

That last part really resonates in terms of the conversation about education. But let me ask this: How much easier would it be to make the case about social technologies to parents and administrators and teachers if the President of the United States were in some way invested in them? (I know, I know…would probably still depend on whether or not they voted for him or her.) But it just speaks to the idea of how important modeling the uses of these technologies is.

More molecules moving…

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It's the Empowerment, Stupid

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Every week, my kids bring home their “Friday Folders” from school, usually packed with paper…torn out worksheet pages, handouts from school, permission slips, tests taken, more worksheets, lunch menus, letters from the principal, more worksheets, more tests, an occasional fund raiser, and yet more worksheets. Wendy and I sign our names to much of it, usually in a Monday morning blur, our kids shoving it in front of our faces saying “Just sign it Dad, it’s nothing” or something similar when we ask just what it is we’re signing. And the next week, that signed paper comes back with another flurry of worksheets and tests and quizzes and god knows what else.

We’ve been collecting it, all of this Friday Folder paper, growing what’s become an enormous pile of it in the corner of our bedroom, a pile that I guess in the eyes of their school in some way represents the learning that my kids have done this year. I’m guessing we’re supposed to be proud of all of this accomplishment, this big pile of paper that my kids never, ever revisit as it sits there, growing week by week. Sometimes I look at it and see 1,000 paper airplanes. And sometimes I look at it and wonder if what it really represents is not so much what my kids know as what they have become, a couple of highly dependent learners, enabled by their teachers and their school to produce a constant stream of, of…of what? Knowledge? Learning? Busy work?

I was reminded of this by David’s post today where he writes about the need for students to become more self-directed, to take charge of more of their own learning in a world where, for the kids who are connected, at least, there is so much more to learn. I know this isn’t anything new; we should have been teaching kids that all along. But the fact is that what we’ve taught them is that the teacher sets the agenda, defines the method, assesses the outcome and controls the whole process. And as David suggests, it’s no wonder many teachers and adults in general seem to be waiting for someone, anyone, to teach them instead of taking the initiative to teach themselves; we are most all products of the system.

But I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to what my own children are going to need to be able to do when they get to where they have to support my wife and I in our old age, and I’m convinced that none of what they are learning now is going to in anyway ensure a pleasant retirement for us. They are not being empowered to learn, not being helped to become:

  • Self-learners who are able to navigate the 10 or 15 or however many job changes people are predicting for them by the time they are 30
  • Self-selectors who must find and evaluate and finally choose their own teachers and collaborators as they build their own networks of learners
  • Self-editors who can look at a piece of information and assess it on a variety of levels, not simply believe it because someone else does
  • Self-organizers who can manage the slew of information coming at them by developing their own structures and strategies for making sense of it all
  • Self-reflectors who are not solely dependent on external evaluation to drive their decision making and their evolution as learners and people
  • Self-publishers who understand the power and importance of sharing and connecting information and knowledge and can do it effectively and ethically
  • Self-protectors who understand where the online dangers lie, can recognize them, and can act appropriately to stay away from harm

Of course, all of this requires a certain willingness to relinquish control, not just of the things we know but of the things we don’t know. In fact, that second part is even more important, I think.

The teachers in my kids’ school are good people, and I know I’m a tough parent. But the more I look at it, the more I’m convinced that my kids just are not being served by the constant passing of paper back and forth, by a curriculum that’s driven by stupid assessments that require answers that may no longer be accurate or relevant by the time my kids need to actually call them up later in life. It’s the exact opposite of what they need. And I’m not sure I can sign off on it much longer…

(Photo “fly the flickr skies” by gadjoboy.)

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The Emotional Side of Self-Learning

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My good friend and new blogger Rob Mancabelli writes about the challenges of schooling in a world of extended, global connections and information in terms not just of the literacies this more complex environment demands but the emotional toll as well. His thoughts come on the heels of a conversation with a principal who was concerned that

students were seeking out and locating more and more emotionally packed information on their own time, often by themselves, causing them to come to our schools each day laden with a plethora of undiscussed feelings, questions and ideas.

It’s an interesting point, and not one that I’ve thought about much in terms of my own practice. In the six years that I’ve been slogging away at this now, I’ve come to a place where the underlying emotional messages of much of what I read get sifted out through a filter, though that’s not always the case, obviously. But to really get empathic and sit in the shoes of a teen-ager (or younger) with all of this, I wonder what types of coping mechanisms he or she might have.

Which brings me, once again, to the larger point: who is teaching them how to cope as self-learners both on an intellectual and emotional level? And can we as educators teach them if we ourselves aren’t coping? I’m in no way belittling the question that principal poses, but if she herself is working to solve these issues in her own practice, would she not better understand the pedagogies for teaching her students how to deal with the stresses? A lot of rhetorical questions, I know (which will once again make Tom Hoffman glad he’s not reading my blog any longer.)

I find it kind of interesting, also, that the one part of that quote above that really jumps out at me is the “often by themselves” part. At first blush, that seems pretty innocuous, but since much of what I read and access is brought to me through my network, as is the case here, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing this by myself as much. Rob has already lent some of his perspective and analysis to this, which in some ways, helps me cope with my own reaction to it. That’s the power of this in my life, and one reason why the whole concept of networked learning resonates so deeply for me. And why we need to teach our kids how to build networks of trusted sources they can turn to themselves for intellectual and emotional support in the process.

But how can we do that if we ourselves don’t?

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Research on Wikipedia/Trusting the Source of the Source

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(Via Smart Mobs) So here is a research study (and I mean research, full of all sorts of funny looking formulas and symbols and stuff) about Wikipedia that comes to the conclusion that the more edits there are to a particular article the more accurate it is. Not surprising, to me at least, but since smart people are publishing quantitative results, it might add to the discussion.

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English-language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

The conversations I had this week about Wikipedia with the schools I was working with in Atlanta were pretty heated at times. But it’s interesting how it quickly turns into a larger discussion about students as editors in general, and that Wikipedia ain’t the only problem we have in terms of what to trust and what not to trust. And that quickly turns into another discussion about how the network (if you have one) filters out much of the good stuff, just as it did in this instance. You may not trust the source, but if you trust the person or people who sent you the source, the source inherently becomes more trustworthy.

Or something like that…

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SAT Questions We'd Love to See

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Information Literacy Section–Question #14

Read this:

In his new book, ‘State of Denial, ‘Woodward spells out in agonizing detail how George W. Bush and the Republican party have lied to the American people on the level of violence in Iraq and, in particular, the intensity of attacks against U.S. troops.

Now, read this:

Although Woodward seems to want you to believe that American troops are facing a more violent insurgency in Iraq (and that Bush is keeping that top secret), it is really Sunnis and Shiites who are facing a more violent environment because they are increasingly going after each other.

Who do you believe?

(Blogger’s Note: So what’s more important here, knowing how to roll up your sleeves and do the work, vet the sources, weigh the opinions? Or coming up with the right answer? And if it’s the former, will the SAT ever be able to “test” for it? On a personal note, I find this to be one of the most frustrating parts of the “abundance of knowledge.” There are times, many times, when I seriously don’t know what to believe. And it’s because I do try to see what both sides are doing. When I read something like this story, I go to both instapundit.com and dailykos.com, even though my political leanings are much more in tune with the latter. I used to think if I read it in the Times, it was true, mostly because I didn’t have another source at my disposal. Now I do. Now it’s more work. How do we prepare our kids to do it?)

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MySpace in US News

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Jonathan Seal points to an article in this week’s US News magazine that is a comprehensive discussion on both sides of the MySpace issue. The bottom line is the same: yes, there are dangers, but if we teach our kids, we can make them safe. Oft quoted Parry Aftab says that “parents are chicken” when it comes to MySpace, and I would only add that most educators are as well. But as the article points out, it’s just not something we can afford to be afraid of. In some way, shape or form, we have to teach MySpace or at least the social networking concept that it represents.

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More Henry Jenkins

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A few more thought-provoking lines from Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.“ It’s been giving me quite a bit to chew on in the 30 or so pages I’ve read. I think he has an amazingly perceptive read on how access to people and ideas change the equation in the classroom. Just for some context, these are all from a chapter titled “Why Heather Can Write” which was expanded from an article published a couple of years ago in the MIT Technology Review. It’s primary focus is on kids turning to fan fiction, in this case, Harry Potter fan fiction. But the larger conclusions are pretty powerful, I think.

First, there is a discussion surrounding Paul Gee’s so-called “affinity spaces” which says that “people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with contents of their textbooks” (177).

Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because the are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with the participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

That resonates so powerfully with the way I reflect on my own practice as a blogger and with this community: constantly motivated to learn because of the connections that I have to the community of learners in this space. And it’s powerful because of the way learning is nurtured. As Jenkins says

In the classroom, scaffolding is provided by the teacher. in a participatory culture, the entire community takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their way.

I love the language that Jenkins uses as well when talking about the potential effects of the fan fiction world on learning.

What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? Will they develop their craft more quickly? Will they discover their voices at an earlier age? And what happens when these young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors…As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author–and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors–necessarily shifts.

Our students have a plethora of opportunities to publish right now, and more are opening up each day. (In fact, Barbara Barreda is writing about just such an opportunity in her blog.) When are we at least going to start thinking about the possibility of publishing work instead of just handing it in? I think that’s one of the most powerful shifts this is bringing about in our classrooms. If we don’t start considering the potential of publication soon, we’re going to find ourselves more and more irrelevant. As Jenkins puts it, we now live in a world “where knowledge is shared and where critical activity is ongoing and lifelong.”

Not surprisingly, someone who has just published her first online novel and gotten dozens of letters of comment finds it disappointing to return to the classroom where her work is going to be read only by the teacher and feedback may be very limited.

Finally, Jenkins writes eloquently about the new power our students have in this culture.

They are active participants in these new media landscapes, finding their own voice through their participation in fan communities, asserting their own rights even in the face of powerful entities, and sometimes sneaking behind their parents’ back to do what feels right to them. At the same time, through their participation, these kids are mapping out new strategies for negotiating around and through globalization, intellectual property struggles, and media conglomeration. They are using the Internet to connect with children worldwide and, through that process, finding common interests and forging political alliances…In talking media pedagogies, then, we should no longer imagine this as a process where adults teach and children learn. Rather, we should see it as increasingly a space where children teach one another and where, if they would open their eyes, adults could learn a great deal. (Emphasis mine.)

I just find that to be such a powerful articulation of what’s happening to learning in this new world. And I just don’t think many if any of our schools are really looking through this new lens very clearly yet. How are we supporting these types of connections in our curricula? How are we helping our students to become globally conversant? To what extent are we really handing over the power of these tools and teaching them how to use them well?

Much to think about…

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Quote of the Day–Henry Jenkins

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From page 170 of Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide“:

None of us really know how to live in this era of media convergence, collective intelligence and participatory culture. These changes are producing anxieties and uncertainties, even panic, as people imagine a world without gatekeepers and live with the reality of expanding corporate media power.

And…

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but cannot express themselves.

I wonder to what extent he means express themselves publically. I think this is what’s really hard for many educators to get their brain around, and to be honest, I waffle on whether teachers need to be content creators or just have to understand the potential for their students. Some of that ambivalence may be because of the look of fatigue that comes over many people’s faces when I suggest it, and the frequency with which I get asked how I find the time to learn and do all of this. (Answer: I have no life.) But I do think publishing literacy is crucial these days. Not just from the technical aspect of blogging and podcasting, but from the philosophical aspect of sharing and collaboration as well.

I just had a flash of reflection on my own experiences with all of this, that the tools were relatively easy, but the expectations of sharing widely and freely are still issues that I struggle with. Not as much as before, but as recent posts indicate, it’s still there.

And just one more extended quote from the book (page 179) to whet some appetites:

More and more, educators are coming to value the learning that occurs in these informal and recreational spaces, especially as they confront the constraints imposed on learning via educational policies that seemingly value only what can be counted on a standardized test. if children are going to acquire the skills needed to be full participants in their culture, they may well learn these skills through involvement in activities such as editing the newspaper of an imaginary school or teaching one another skills needed to do well in massively multiplayer games or any number of other things that teachers and parents currently regard as trivial pursuits.

I’ll let you read the section on “Rewriting School” yourselves…

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Learning to Learn

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On the plane out to San Diego I got the chance to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s great presentation at the TED conference (Technology Entertainment and Design). It’s a pretty powerful call to “radically rethink our view on intelligence” and “rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children” to move toward a much more nurturing educational environment for the arts and for creativity. The money quote is

Creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Why? Becuase, as he points out, the kids who start school today will be retiring in the year 2065, and yet we know as little about what the world will look like then as we do five years from now. We can give them all the content we want, but in this age, in won’t make much difference if we don’t teach them how to learn first. And they do that not by spitting back at us what they “know.” They do it by being creative, by trying and failing, by succeeding and reflecting. It echoes Daniel Pink’s book all over.

George Siemens points to an interesting read in a similar vein in “How Failure Breeds Success” and says “learning is not a process of performance, it is a process of becoming.” And if we are lifelong learners, we are always becoming.

A couple of more notches in the school is irrelevant belt.

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Assessing Blog Posts

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So, using David’s questions about blog assessment, here is how I might assess this post as I write it (with some commentary on the questions along the way.)

1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. (I read some other stuff, too. See below.) And I think an even more interesting question to add is “What was your process of reading?” In the previous post about Net Neutrality, I worked between three or four different readings to assemble the ideas contained in the posts. There was nothing linear about it, which is another aspect of reading/writing literacy in hypertext environments that really interests me.

2. What do you think is important about your blog entry? I think the importance here is the deconstruction of the process and the inherent reflection that goes with it. Sometimes blogging is work, and it’s when I’m crafting a post (as opposed to writing it) that I know I’m involved in some real learning. As a blogger/learner, it’s crucial that I recognize and understand the decisions I make about what to write (based on feel and audience), how to write it, and when to publish it.

3. What are both sides of your issue? Well, some feel whatever you do in your blog is blogging. As is well known, I disagree. I do think this reflective assessment about the blogging can point to the power of reading, thinking, synthesizing, writing and reading some more.

4. What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do? I would add learn to that list. And I would also move this up to second in the list (if we are looking at this as process.) The audience aspect of blogging is central to the task, and if we’re not aware of what our purpose is, we won’t communicate it well. This is the Donald Murray school of anticipating the readers questions, responses, reactions. We have to become the audience (if there still is one, of course.)

5. What else do you need to say? I’m not sure this question works for me, because I’d hope that if I had more to say I would say it. What about What have you learned from the process? or How will you find out more?

Regardless, some good initial thinking on how we might begin to teach the metacognitive aspects of blogging.

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Serendipitous Reading

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(I’m in Wes Freyer mode today, huh?)

I just happened to pick up Expecting the Unexpected by one of my favorite teachers Donald Murray this morning, flipped to a page, and read this:

“It isn’t easy, however, to get students to teach themselves. It took me years to learn how not to teach, how to keep from interfering with their education, to follow instead of lead.

The first problem is the teacher. We are all tempted by authority. Power over other human beings–as rapists, clergy persons, corporation executives, therapists know–is a powerful addictive drug, and few jobs offer as much power as teacher…

I feared the students would rise en masse and toss me out the window; worse they might expose my ignorance to my colleagues. I mistreated my students and earned a reputation as a good teacher. I behaved as teachers were supposed to behave, and that made me a good one.

When I finally taught myself to relax and learn with the class, to deal in questions rather than answers, listening instead of talking, I confused many of my students.

They expected to be taught, and I expected them to learn.” (128)

It’s the traditional system that teaches them to expect to be taught. I see it in my own kids already. They wait for direction, passive in their approach. The problem is that we as teachers are no longer the sole authorities on content or of knowledge in the classroom. But we can be authorities of learning. Learning is seeking, attempting, failing, reflecting, succeeding, practice. What if we really taught kids that in the context of their own passions? And what if we transparently modeled that process for them? Relected on our own failures and successes? Shared our own strategies? What if teachers were learners first?

Murray also writes:

“As I unlearned to teach, they began to unlearn what they had been taught in other composition classes and began to make use of the room I gave them. I learned how to allow them to learn–and they did.” (129)

This is an important shift in how we see our relationships with our students. Murray figured it out 15 years ago, but I think it’s all the more relevant now.

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Mosh Pit as Classroom

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(So this is my first post using the Flock browser blog posting interface. After an hour of using it, I’m loving the browser…we’ll see how this goes.)

Kathy Sierra writes about the “Mosh Pit as Innovation Model” and I’m wondering about a “Mosh Pit as Classroom Model.” I mean, check out the Old vs. New chart that she includes and read it as an educator.

Old Classrooms vs. New Classrooms

Linear and slow vs. networked and quick–we need to create learners that are nimble and nomadic, able to take responsibility for their own needs.

Proprietary knowledge vs. shared knowledge–We need classrooms where it’s clear that we all own the knowledge and that we all benefit when it is freely shared and remixed.

Ideas as advantage vs. ideas “paid forward”–what a cool way of thinking about it, but isn’t this the way science has worked forever. Here’s what I have discovered, and I give it to you to discover even more. That’s what we’re beginning to do in every area.

Mentors vs. micromentors—every student can network with more narrowly relevant teachers outside the classroom.

Learn by reverse engineering vs. lessons learned benfit all–What could that concept do to standardized assessments? What if the entire class, collaboratively, had to pass the assessment? Just a thought…

Progress by “Shoulders of Giants” vs. progress by “Mosh Pit”–Hey, we already have the teacher as DJ concept. And if in this world of crazy fast information and knowledge, only the “we’re all in this together” approach is going to work.

Wisdom of experts vs. wisdom of crowds–This might be the toughest nut of all for educators, expecially, I would think, higher ed types. But look at Digg and Technorati and all of the other ways that reputation is moving away from the individual to the group. We need classrooms that tap into the power of socially constructed knowledge and ideas.

The rest of the post is amazingly good, as are the comments, but much that validates the thinking of our community.

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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.

What Will Happen To Books–NY Times

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Ok, so I’m in a bit of a emotional whirlwind today, and maybe that has something to do with my reaction to yesterday’s New York Times magazine cover piece on the future of books in the sense that I’m looking for all kinds of validation for leaving my desk job and deciding to try to bring these ideas to wider audiences, and that I’m hoping that when the New York Times starts getting all visionary that maybe I’m (we’re) really on to something knowing full well that the Times has been wrong before and that all of this is a crap shoot, but that this paragraph literally gave me chills (though it may not have on any other “normal” day):

“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, remized, 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.”

And then this:

“In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will “tag” a photo submitted by another user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture is about: “goat,” “Paris,” “goofy,” “beach party.” Because tags are user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click “votes” on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.” [Emphasis mine.]

Mercy.
Now, might that be a bit of hyperbole? (There’s that word again.) Um…I dunno. Certainly, it’s not something that people with no context of what’s happening on the Web can even begin to understand. Either way, it’s amazing, amazing writing, I think. And in the new Socratic spirit of this space, it begs a number of questions.

Should we be thinking about how to prepare our kids for a linked, tagged world?

What strategies do we need to develop to read and write in linked, tagged world?

How do we best harness the potential of a world where knowledge is easily connected and, therefore, increasingly overwhelming and, as my wife pointed out, perhaps paralyzing?

I want to write more about this, not only because of the implications for the education system but because I find this discussion, this move to a more linked and tagged world to be extremely interesting. If you read the article, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Blog Banning Update

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Tom’s been cranking at the Gray List of sites that he wants to test over at the Blog Banning wiki, and, in fact, he’s ready to give it a shot. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if you can take part, I’d really urge you to participate.

The whole blocking issue really hit home this morning. I was chatting with a superintendent and a principal about some upcoming, summer bloggy training we have scheduled and I asked about the level of blockage at their district. Blogger? Blocked. Edublogs.org? Blocked. PBWiki? Blocked. Wikipedia? Hahahahahaha.

Teacher and student Internet access at home in this district is nearly 100 percent. Does it really make sense to block literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of potentially worthwhile, safe, educational sites with the flip of a switch when those same sites are being accessed from home?

There’s more of a post brewing in all of this. For now, let’s see what Tom comes up with.