Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

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

Teach Students How to Cheat

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8596536128_9892524ee0_zWe’re tested every day in real life. Every one of us. Many are personal tests, tests of character, life tests. Others are professional, problems to solve and solutions to create, or tests of skills that we need to apply at any given moment. Few of any of these are planned or scripted. Few are “announced” a week ahead of time.

And importantly, rarely are we asked to pass these tests by ourselves. In almost every case, we reach out to friends or colleagues to ask questions and mine their tacit knowledge. We search our physical and virtual networks, and we use that knowledge to help us learn or fix or create or invent. Hardly ever are we forced to totally go it alone.

Yet, the kids in our schools are almost always asked to go it alone when it’s time for a test. Accessing their networks for information, or connecting with their peers or teachers in the room or on the phone, is strictly prohibited. “That would be cheating!” we say in schools.

If true, then we’re all cheaters in our real lives, aren’t we?

Now that we are working so hard to give kids access to all these tools and networks, why wouldn’t we encourage them to cheat? Teach them to cheat, even. Why wouldn’t we be more interested in whether or not they can use their access to pass the test, rather than just passing the test on their own?

Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

(Image Credit)

Pulling Networks Together

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I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through John Seely Brown’s (and others) new book Pull, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It sets up a pretty convincing picture of what it means to be living in a world where we make our way through the many connections that are now possible in the social and learning networks we have access to online. What has been striking to me is the way that Brown and his co-authors have been hammering home the continued importance of face to face connections and the value of serendipity in making those connections. They write at length about the value in attending conferences on topics that we have passion for, and making ourselves as available as possible to the conversations outside of the meeting rooms. I know that we’ve talked about that a great deal as well, how many of us go to conferences these days for the spontaneous conversations that can erupt when you get into a place that’s full of people who love what you love, and that the “presentations” pale in comparison (though they do have their purpose.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share one idea that the authors put forth in terms of how to think about the personal learning networks that we can create in both our face to face and virtual worlds. Basically, it’s a set of five questions that are intended to get readers thinking deeply about their passions and about the connections they form around them. I’m going to throw just a sentence or two of personal reaction to each one in italics, but I’m wondering how others might approach these as a way of starting to think more globally about networks.

1. Can you identify the fifty smartest or most accomplished people who share your passions or interests, regardless of where they reside? I think I can probably come pretty close, though I haven’t created a list. I’ve been lucky enough to have been swimming in these waters for long enough (nine years!) to have a pretty good idea of who is there, at least in the virtual space. And since my passion has to do with the virtual, there probably aren’t too many who linger just in physical space. (Hopefully that made some sense.)

2. How many of these people are currently in your professional / personal networks? Again, this is just a guess, but I’d hope that the majority of them are. I can rattle off at least half a dozen, however, who aren’t, primarily because of my hesitancy to reach out to them (for a variety of reasons). This part can be a struggle at times.

3. How many of these people have you been able to engage actively in an initiative related to your shared passions or interests? Obviously, the percentage gets smaller and smaller here. This reminds me of the the “collective action” piece that Clay Shirky talks about, or at the very least, creating something together. When I think about how many people I have actually “actively engaged” I wonder why it’s not more.

4. To how many of these people would you feel comfortable reaching out and mobilizing in a new initiative related to your shared passions and interests? I’d say most, but not all. That’s a constant point of reflection for me…What stops me?

5. For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other’s activities? Obviously, to some extent, that depends on the other person’s “findability.” I’m pretty confident that if someone was looking for me via online social tools, they’d find me. Not sure if that’s always that case.

Some interesting questions to ponder when thinking about our intentional construction of these networks and communities.

I Don't Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)

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I’ve been thinking a lot again about phones and about the disruption they are already creating for most schools (high schools at least) and about the huge brain shift we’re going to have to through collectively to capture the potential for learning in our kids’ pockets. A few particular items have kind of come together of late that have been pushing the conversation in my head pretty hard.

First, this kinda cute little YouTube video titled “Phone Book.” Not sure who or what it was that led me to it, but it’s worth a quick couple of minutes to watch it.

Now take that concept and mix it with these four ideas:

  • Apple’s next iTouch is coming out with 64GB of memory, and the iPhone won’t be too far behind that.
  • In the next five years, every phone will be an iPhone. (And let’s not forget that there are already over 100,000 apps for that little sucker, many of them with relevance to the classroom.)
  • We’ll soon be seeing what Steve Rubel is calling a “dumb shell” that takes the book idea in that video and creates a netbook sized (at least) keyboard and screen that your phone simply plugs into.
  • According to NPR, the Pew Hispanic Center says that there is a definite trend toward phones being chosen over computers as computing devices, especially for those on the wrong end of the current digital divide. (The article makes more sense of that than I just did.)

All of which leads me to ask a whole bunch of questions:

  • If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
  • How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
  • At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
  • How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

And finally, the big kahuna, are we in the process of transforming (not just revising) our curriculum to work in a world that looks (metaphorically, at least) like this:

I wonder how many educators look at that picture and think “OMG, puhleeeese let me teach in that classroom!” (I suspect not many.) I wonder how many of them already do teach in classrooms that look like that if we consider the technology in kids pockets (or lockers) as the access point. (I suspect, more than you think.) The problem is, and I can guarantee you this, 95% of the curriculum currently being delivered in those classrooms would waste 95% of the potential in the room that we could glean from that access.

All too often we get hung up on the technology question, not the curriculum question. Here in New Jersey, every district has to submit a three year “Technology Plan” and as you can guess, most of them are about how many Smart Boards to install or how wireless access will be expanded. Very, very little of it is about how curriculum changes when we have anytime, anywhere learning with anyone in the world. Why aren’t we planning for that?

So I’m asking. When do we stop trying to fight the inevitable and start thinking about how to embrace it? Or, as Doug Johnson so eloquently suggests, when are we gonna saddle this horse and ride it?

Writing to Connect

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So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it – the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

Assessing Network Building

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So lately I’ve been talking and thinking more and more about this idea of a “performance standard” that reads something like “Students create, grow and navigate online personal learning networks in safe, effective and ethical ways” and what that would mean in a NETS type framework. For instance, students:

  • locate, identify and evaluate potential mentors or teachers online
  • communicate with co-learners clearly and effectively in a variety of modes
  • share work online using a variety of media in appropriate and creative ways
  • track, read, evaluate, organize, utilize and share relevant information effectively

And so on. It starts some interesting conversations among those who haven’t yet considered or been much exposed to the idea of online learning networks, and often, those conversations lead to “how do we assess that?” The only obvious answer is that it probably isn’t happening on a test.

I constantly struggle with my own work in this. The last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the nodes in my network, trying to think critically about diversity, reexamining the tools I use to access it, looking at the ways I interact and what I contribute. For all sorts of time-related reasons, I’m not happy with the scope of my work right now either; it feels too text heavy, too comfortable. And, for many of the same reasons and even though I have made some changes of late, my network seems static. I need to come up with some strategies for freshening things up around here.

I know assessing networks takes understanding networks, and that’s why I’m still very much into the “think about this in your own practice first” mode. But at some point, it would be interesting, and hopefully necessary, to think about ways in which we’d assess our students in this undertaking.

"I Never Knew I Could Have a Network"

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That quote from a teacher at one of the schools Sheryl and I are working with pretty much sums up the scale of the shift that a lot of educators (and others) are facing these days. And since I heard it last week in one of our sessions, it’s stuck with me as a testament to how isolated and how local teaching as a profession still is. At various times, some of us have called these network connections we’ve created something akin to a virtual staff lounge or pd on demand, and I think most of us ensconced here know the real power is the ability to find others who are equally as passionate about learning and doing in schools and with kids as we are no matter what we teach, no matter what our role. My ongoing awakening to the possibilities of networked learning continues to be one of the most transformative experiences of my life (nothing tops parenting, however) and I simply can’t imagine functioning in the world without it.

But I would still venture to guess that 75% (maybe more) of educators in this country still don’t know that they can have a network. While most of our kids are hacking away at building their own connections outside of their physical space, most of their teachers still don’t have a firm grasp of what any of it means or what he potentials are. And even for many that do know it, there are still legitimate fears and obstacles to creating professional connections online, time and technology at the forefront. If we really come to the point where we want our teachers to learn and teach with technology, we need to do as my old school did and provide them with technology that works, and what Carolyn‘s school has done in terms of beginning to give them the time to learn it and use it well. And, beyond all that, we need an environment that supports real teaching, not simply curriculum delivery. Unfortunately, very little of that is happening in any systemic ways.

We’re in the “Networking as a Second Language” point in teaching, this messy transition phase that is slowly gaining traction where we are beginning to understand what this means but not quite sure yet what to do about it. It’s becoming more visible by the day, but it’s still hard for most people to wrap their brains around it. It’s different; in many ways it flies in the face of what we’ve come to believe about learning and relationships. The other day, Clarence pointed to Ulises Mejias‘ dissertation at Columbia “Networked Proximity: ICT and the Mediation of Nearness” that defines nearness not as something that is dependent on physical proximity but can now be constructed and defined in social, not physical terms. Nearness is inclusion; farness is exclusion. And I like this line especially:

A more positive  interpretation would argue that networked proximity facilitates new kinds of spatially  unbound community, and that these emerging forms of sociality are equally or more  meaningful than the older ones. Community is thus “liberated,” unhinged from space,  and can be maintained regardless of distance.

I find that to be true, that in many ways, these connections and more meaningful than the older ones. The passionate learning network of which I am a part is an amazing and important part of my life. The fact that most teachers still have no idea that is possible is distressing on one hand, motivating on the other.

(Photo “Garat” by coti.-moon-bathing)

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Social Networks (No) vs. Social Tools (Yes) in Schools

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Earlier I Tweeted that this post by danah boyd might be the most important blog post I’ve read of 2008 thus far and now, after reading it through for the fourth time, I’m thinking it might stay that way for a while. It’s important to me because it clarifies a lot of my thinking about social networks in schools yet leaves me with a number of other important questions that I struggle to answer.

I read both sides of the debate over the potentials of social networking in schools at the Economist, and while I obviously agree more with Ewan‘s view that “It’s more about helping learners become more world-aware, more communicative, learning from each other, understanding first hand what makes the world go around,” I have to admit to feeling a bit of “starry-eyedness” about the description of how this will all play out. I’m not so sure I agree that “exponential adoption of the ‘new web’ is only round the corner,” or that this new generation of “Bebo-boomers” (ugh) will suddenly impart effective pedagogy in classrooms simply because they will be “marrying their inbuilt capacity with social networks to the theory of sound educational practice.” (It would be nice if I saw more evidence of teacher prep courses actually teaching them to do that.)

But all of that is pretty much besides the point.

danah adds a much needed focus: there is a difference between social tools and social networking, and she argues quite compellingly that social networks have no place in the classroom.

“Social network sites do not help most youth see beyond their social walls. Because most youth do not engage in “networking,” they do not meet new people or see the world from a different perspective. Social network sites reinforce everyday networks, providing a gathering space when none previously existed.”

Reading through the rest of the post makes clear that for most kids, what they do online is simply an extension of what they do in physical space. They interact with primarily the same groups, and, as danah has argued in the past, they use SNS as a way to make up for the dearth of opportunities to socialize that our kids have today. She writes:

I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why social network sites (or networking ones) should be used in the classroom. Those tools are primarily about socializing, with media and information sharing there to prop up the socialization process (much status is gained from knowing about the cool new thing). I haven’t even heard of a good reason why social network site features should be used in the classroom. What is the value of knowing who is friends with who or creating a profile when you already know all of your classmates?

And this:

I’m not saying that social network sites have no value. Quite the contrary. But their value is about the kinds of informal social learning that is required for maturation – understanding your community, learning the communicate with others, working through status games, building and maintaining friendships, working through personal values, etc. All too often we underestimate these processes because, traditionally, they have happened so naturally. Yet, what’s odd about today’s youth culture is that we’ve systematically taken away the opportunities for socialization. And yet we wonder why our kids are so immature compared to kids from other cultures. Social network sites are popular because youth are trying to take back the right to be social, even if it has to happen in interstitial ways.

Often in my presentations I ask how many folks are teaching MySpace or Facebook in their schools. Not teaching with MySpace, but teaching the literacies of networking through the lens of a SNS. Rarely do more than a few hands go up. I wonder what would happen if we contextualized our approach not in the fears that our kids will get themselves in trouble by using these sites but, instead, in the spirit of encouraging them to experience the socialization that danah speaks of. Not that we invade their spaces or friend them, but that we acknowledge the importance of Facebook in their lives, stop pretending like it doesn’t exist, and include it in the discussion of what’s important in life.

The key thinking for me, however, is about the difference between social tools and social networks. To be honest, I find Facebook and even Ning hard to like in my own personal learning practice. They seem redundant to me in some sense, I guess, replicating in large measure what I already find so powerful in this “small pieces” suite of tools that I already use for social and learning purposes. And, in a lot of ways, and this may be ignorance, hubris, snobiness (or something much more disturbing), I feel like it’s almost cheating, like the hardest and best work is building that network node by node through blogging and reading and creating and developing those relationships with all the messiness that the Web allows for. I know, I know…there is a lot of that going on too in SNSs. But it feels too easy sometimes, like it’s moving into an apartment instead of building a house. You don’t learn too much about the way the thing works or how all the pieces fit. And you don’t learn all those building skills either. Yes, I’ve come around to the idea that much of what we need to know to flourish with these tools is nothing more than solid reading and writing literacy. But there still seems to me to be a network literacy as well, something that stands apart from simply reading and writing, something that deals with our ability to create and find and connect dots.

So yeah, I agree. Social networks as they are currently defined and delivered aren’t for schools. But using social tools to teach our students to build their own networks, networks that go beyond simply socializing with the people they already know has to be.

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Individualized Networked Learning

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I’ve been kind of hanging out on the periphery of the ongoing discussion about informal learning and networks and groups that has been bouncing around the last couple of months, but a post from Teemu Leinone and specifically a snip in the comments started something in my brain. Here is the snip:

The problem of the edublogasphere (and actually the whole blogasphere) in the context of learning is that people in the sphere do not – at least often – form any groups (an entity of individuals with an objective).

As I’m trying to think more and more deeply about what networked learning really means in the context of how I might want my own children to apply it their own lives, I think this quote struck me because it made me consider how little I’ve actually engaged in group learning around a particular objective within the network. It is, as Teemu says something that doesn’t really appear very often. This has become, for me at least, a very individualized experience. I’ve referred to it in the past as “nomadic learning” because it happens in a very non-linear, concrete objective-less way. (Technically, I think most are attaching the word nomadic to it because of the mobility of the technology to learn, not the randomness of it.) My learning has a general focus and direction, to be sure, but it’s trajectory is determined by whatever is in my aggregator or on my screen at the moment. There are no written down goals or outcomes that I am attempting to achieve which is one of the reasons this is so different from classroom learning.

Additionally, while I am absolutely “writing to be read” here, meaning that I am conscious and on some level hopeful that others will read and engage in these ideas, I’m not reflecting on these ideas with the direct purpose of advancing the the conversation among a group of others that are connected in our study of this topic. If no one responds or engages, that’s ok. More than anything, blogging, in essence writing is a way for me to cement my thoughts into my brain, a purely selfish act.

But what I think struck me about Teemu’s post is that it makes me wonder about the potential of that group focused study that I could be doing yet am not. And why there seems to be so little of that. I think on some level, the independence or randomness of this learning is what makes it powerful, that it can be about anything that we are passionate about at any given moment. But I guess I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be reaching out more to others to create groups around more focused topics of study, or whether that would work for me.

Just some pre-dawn thinking while struggling with a big cookie hangover…

(Photp by pbo31)

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Networks, Not Tools

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I don’t know if I’ll write an end of the year reflection or not (probably not) but now that I’m done with my last presentations for ’07 I do want to make note of how much the focus of what I’m doing has changed in the last year. Today, it was all about networks, not tools. All about connections, not publishing. All about working together to get smarter, not learning alone. All about how RSS connects us to ideas, how blogs connect us to people, how Twitter connects us to, um, the Twitterverse, and on and on and on. I think for me, at least, 2007 will be the year that really deepened my understanding of how the tools link us and why that’s so important. Not that I didn’t know that on some level all along, but this year, with NECC providing much of the impetus, it just became all the more cemented into my practice.

In the midst of my session in Ontario today, I video Skyped Jeff Utecht in from Shanghai spur of the moment (thanks, Jeff) to just do a couple of minutes on RSS. It was cool giving the people in the room a sense of how much smaller the world has gotten. But what was pretty profound is when I gave Jeff the choice of giving up his blog or his RSS reader, he didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take RSS and Twitter over the blog any day.” Imagine that. But it’s not hard to see why. RSS and Twitter are where the networks are most potent these days. (Of course, however, the RSS part depends somewhat on us keeping our blogs…)

Or when I Tweeted out the standard “Why do you like Twitter?”, I got 52 responses in about an hour. Not that that is anything especially earth shattering, but I really marveled at the passion in the answers. You can read them all here.

Or when I decide to UStream the first hour on RSS and within a few minutes we had people watching from around the States and Canada. Again, nothing incredible there, but another instance of the network made plain.

It’s different now, somehow, than it was a year ago. It’s more immersive. It all feels deeper, closer somehow. Even more important. Maybe it’s just the glow of the prospect of being home for a month. Or the buzz of spending a couple of days with some folks who seemed to, on some level, get the fact that this really is about more than learning the tools. It’s about creating connections, intellectual connections, for sure, but potentially more.

And, maybe in the end, it’s because when I called Wendy today from the London, Ontario airport and she asked me who I wanted to invite to a holiday party her business is throwing next week, none of first 10 or so faces that flickered through my brain where closer than about 500 miles away from beautiful downtown Flemington. (Except for one.)

And so it goes…

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"Participatory Media Education and Civic Education are Inextricable"

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Howard Rheingold has a chapter just out (.pdf) in the latest McArthur Foundation series “Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth” where he writes the following:

I propose that learning to use blogs, wikis, digital storytelling, podcasts, and video as media of self-expression within a context of “public voice” should be introduced and evaluated in school curricula, after-school programs, and informal learning communities if today’s youth are to become effective citizens in the emerging era of networked publics. In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable.

The whole chapter is pretty interesting (as, it seems, are the other chapters in the collection at least looking at the titles…lots of holiday reading ahead), but I was especially struck by that last sentence especially in light of the blogging that’s been going on of late about digital citizenship and the like. (Dean has as good a round up as any.) While Rheingold is the first to admit that this is a thesis in need of testing, he does make a good case that we have an opportunity right now to engage our students in meaningful participation around the causes they are most interested in. And this is especially apparent as we enter the long stretch to the November presidential elections here in the US (as well as the compelling causes ongoing around the world that students might undertake.)

To be sure, Rheingold also identifies the big hump that we have to get over here, the one of making sure that our students’ public participation actually has a meaningful audience. While there are numerous examples of student initiated protest or action that has scaled well, many don’t. It’s one thing to participate simply for the sake of participating. It’s another all together to be able to have that participation actually create action. Which means, of course, that teachers have to have a deep understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of online activism, that it means more than simply signing a Facebook petition (in the words of Chris Lehmann) or putting up a wiki page todo list.

So here is the salient question, as asked in the chapter: “What if teachers could help students discover what they really care about, then show them how to use digital media to learn more and to persuade others?” The first part is almost (if not more) difficult than the last part these days. But that is a compelling question, I think, because inherent in it is the process of constructing and leveraging networks to learn and interact. As I said the other day, I want my own children to know how to participate effectively in the issues of their day using the way beyond local connections that are now possible. It would be great if they were being taught that in school.

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Business as 'Un'usual

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“Education is not merely about transferring information. It is about contextualizing that information in the real life experiences of the learners, and in relation with the experiences of other learners…It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” Mark Federman

One of the things that has been bothering me about my own work of late is the inherent limitations of the current conference workshop or district in-service day structures that I find myself a part of more often than not. I really feel like when people ask me to do a keynote or a general presentation that my job is to inspire, cajole, provide some cognitive dissonance or start conversations. And I am happy to try to do that. But the workshops are a different story. In the best case, they are a full day of one or two particular tools. In the worst case, they are one or two hours on a lot of tools. Either way, the experience usually serves to overwhelm, and at the end of the day (or hour) the participants head back to the craziness of their teaching lives where I’m guessing much of what they have “learned” fails to take root. Now that may be my fault to some extent, but it’s also a direct result of the “drive by” nature of much of what we call professional development. There’s little if anything to support the experience after it’s over. It’s a little better at conferences where people by and large choose to be there, but the larger point is that motivated at the moment or not, there is rarely time for contextualizing the skills and connecting and sharing those experiences after the fact.

Yet, that is the inherent power of these tools, the connections they allow us to create. And in those connections and the networks we can build around them, we begin to seriously challenge many of the traditional constructs of how we do our business. Take conferences, for example. The truth is that the vast majority of what will be offered at NECC this year can be had online, in a community, when you need it or want it. Sure, there will be some sessions that will inspire and push our thinking, but most of the folks who spent time in the Blogger’s Cafe last year will be heading to San Antonio with other priorities than skill building or presentations of papers. We’ll be in San Antonio to push forward the conversations that we’ve been engaged in all year long since Atlanta, to make our networks physical which in turn deepens the virtual. We’ll be there to do what we do in our online community which looks nothing like sitting in rows quietly watching presentations in rooms filled with people.

And the pd part of our business has to change too. These tools support the need for the relationships and the sharing of real-life experiences around the information transfer so that the “learning” isn’t done in relative isolation. We can create community around the experience, community that is not dependent on time and place but is instead available to the learner when needed or wanted. The tools give us opportunities to add value to the face to face, but only, and here’s the rub, if we know how to use the tools. And that’s why workshops feel so stressed, so mind-numbing. Because the way we approach it right now, we have to get it all in one sitting and then hope for the best.

So what about doing it differently? What about doing long-term, job embedded, relationship and network building professional development that blends the best of face to face with the “Fifteen Minutes” model that Carolyn Foote writes about? What about giving teachers new to these technologies just enough to get them started and then take the school year (or more) to immerse them in the tools and networked learning environments where they can learn at their own pace (with some appropriate nudging and guidance from time to time)?

Well, that’s the “different” approach I’ve been taking of late with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, whose knowledge and passion for this work I grow to respect more each day. Working off of the model Sheryl helped develop in Alabama, we’re currently in the midst of six-month long professional development programs with a couple of hundred educators from around the country, leading them through a process that we hope will allow these concepts and skills to really take root in their own learning practice. And it is focused on their own learning, not teaching, not classrooms, not kids. That’s hugely important to us, that these educators be selfish about the learning. No doubt, many of them struggle to approach this process with anything but a teaching lens. But both Sheryl and I feel strongly that what will really create meaningful change in schools and classrooms are teachers who personally understand the potentials of these connections. Already, the most powerful piece of these cohorts to me is that in the process, we’re collectively beginning to build the relationships and share contextualized experiences “that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” The connections are deepening.

Sheryl is fond of saying “This is business as ‘un’usual” and I agree. But it shouldn’t be, should it? While there will always be a role for time and place, physical space, face to face learning, there are other ways and, in some instances, better ways to do workshops and conferences and professional development, ways that definitely do a better job of helping us understand what it means to create and sustain the types of personal learning networks that are now possible. The same types of learning networks, both physical and virtual, we want our own children to master in their own practice.

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The Kids are All Right…

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Alec Couros’ post on digital citizenship makes some valid points, but I’m not convinced that a few examples of really vile content and lazy practice are reasons to think that the concept of citizenship is in some way fundamentally shifting. But I also don’t fall all the way to the Tom Hoffman side of the fence that says citizenship is little more than what many (though not Tom) would call information literacy.

What rings most true, however, was Stephen Downes’ comment about Tom’s post where he says, simply,

The vile content – and it most certainly is vile – is neither new nor original. And it’s not the kids that are creating it.

The fact is that we have been conditioned to see the worst at the expense of the best, primarily by a media that is always on the lookout for the lewdest, awfulest, stupidist behavior of our cultural icons. A media that then inculcates a connection between crass insignificance and news. And, perhaps to that extent at least, Tom is right. If we teach ourselves and our kids to simply stop and use these “five habits of using one’s mind well,” we’ll get a long way down the citizenship road.

  1. How do we know what’s true or not true? How credible is our evidence?
  2. Is there an alternate story? Perspective? How might this look from another viewpoint?
  3. Is there a connection between x and y? A pattern? Have I come across this before?
  4. What if… supposing that…? Could it have been otherwise if x not y had intervened?
  5. And finally, “who cares”? Does it matter? (And, perhaps, to whom?)

Especially the last one.

But I also believe that citizenship suggests more than critical thinking. It requires participation and action. It requires contribution. And the ways in which even our kids can contribute in this environment and the global scale those contributions now have do change the equation. And most importantly, let’s not forget that a lot of kids are creating and contributing and participating in ways that should make us very proud. For instance:

A ten-year old girl in upstate New York who starts a blog Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference that in just a week’s time has caught the interest of a whole bunch of kids from around the world who want to make a difference too.

Or the imminent launch of a network of student bloggers from around the world:

Students 2.0 Launch Teaser from Sean on Vimeo.

Or, though it’s not directly related to kids, the uber alternative to vile (religious music aside):

(Add your own examples below…)

Point is, there is a lot of good stuff out there too. And not that that fact is new or original, but there are a lot of kids who are doing it, and in the process, learning citizenship. And at the end of the day, if we really want to help our kids become good citizens themselves, the best we can do is to use our own minds well and model our own participation wherever and whenever we can.