Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Not "The Dumbest Generation"

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So with the caveat that I am only halfway through Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, I have some early impressions to throw out there. While I think there is some merit to this side of the debate (much like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur) what really bothers me about this book so far is, as the title suggests, this sense that our kids are at fault. Let me put it plainly: our kids are not “dumb” nor is this generation “dumb” simply because they spend a lot of time in front of television screens and computers or because they haven’t worked out for themselves how to get smarter using the Read/Write Web. And to label them so is demeaning and smacks more of marketing than reality.

Here is a sampling of quotes that I think pretty accurately reflect the tenor of the book:

In an average young person’s online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn’t expand, memory doesn’t improve, analytic talents don’t develop, and erudition doesn’t ensue. (109)

For must young users, it is clear, the Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers. (110)

The major finding: “More than half the students failed to sort the information to clarify related material.” It graded the very communications skills Web 2.0, the Read/Write Web, supposedly instills, and “only a few test takers could accurately adapt material for a new audience.” (115)

And just whose fault is this?

If the argument is that these types of gains are not possible through the Web, that’s one thing. But, speaking for myself, I know that is not true. My interactions using social tools have definitely expanded my vocabulary, improved my memory, improved my analytic abilities, made me a more discerning critic and all the rest. And I would be that many reading this would agree to those shifts in their own experience. Networks push our thinking. Networks can push our kids’ thinking.

Bauerline guzzles the “Digital Native” metaphor and leverages it to the extreme, expressing genuine surprise that our kids aren’t able to figure this all out on their own and then, worse, blaming them for the failure when the failure is ours. It’s our own lack of context and practical skills for what is happening right now that is the failure, not just at school but at home. How many millions of parents have no clue what their kids are doing with their online time, have no ability to counsel or model for their own children the ways in which these technologies can facilitate new opportunities for learning? How many tens of thousands of educators?

And that really is the time challenge that we have, not so much the lack of time in the day to get our brains around this but the time it’s going to take for adults to get on some sort of more than equal footing with our kids in their uses of these technologies. We’ve always known more, been able to do more, been “smarter.” In these contexts, however, we’re not smarter any longer at a time when our kids really need us to be.

We’re the dummies, not our kids.

If Clay Shirky is right, and all us baby boomers are carrying around a boatload of “cognitive surplus“, we better start unleashing it sooner rather than later.

(Photo “Bored” by foreversouls.)

Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0

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First Monday is out with a collection of essays that might be of interest in terms of contextualizing where the whole 2.0 thing is at. From the introduction:

The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs.

I’ve added a bunch of these to my “To Read” list (which just keeps getting longer), but I settled into one by David Silver titled “History, Hype and Hope: An Afterword.” Here is a part from the “Hope” section:

This is the writeable generation, a generation of young people who think of media as something they read and something they write – often simultaneously. This is a generation of content creators, a generation of young people who with the help of Web 2.0 tools know how to create content, how to share content, and how to converse about content. This is the generation for whom broadcast media – and its silent, obedient audiences – is rapidly fading and for whom conversations make more sense than lectures. This is a new generation with new writeable behaviors and it’s hard not to be hopeful about that.

I’ve got a post brewing about what our students really know and can do in this Web 2.0 world, and I think I’m slowly coming to understand that this type of rhetoric (of which I have been guilty of kind of dreamily espousing myself) is really still hope, not reality. Kids have the potential to do this in ways that no other generation ever has, but not so many are doing a great job of creating content and coversations and exhibiting “writeable behaviors” to the extent that most would like to think.

At any rate, just offering up the link for those that might be interested…

Supplementing My Kids' Education

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On many levels, I’m lucky. My children go to a good school where by and large the educators care about their well-being and want the best for them. There are computers in every classroom, the student body doesn’t get itself into too much trouble, and there’s talk of starting a compost bin in the courtyard for lunch scraps. It’s a safe place, situated right in the middle of corn fields and barns. The air is clean and crisp on these fall mornings, and I know as I watch Tess and Tucker get on the bus each day that they will be getting much more than the vast majority of kids in this world are getting in terms of an education.

My curse, of course, is that it doesn’t feel like quite enough. There’s not enough connecting going on, I think, and the number of worksheets and handouts that come home in the “Friday Folder” frustrates me no end. While there is some technology, it’s not used very well, from what I’ve seen. It’s more for automating (as Alan November calls it) than for constructing and creating and publishing and starting conversations. As I’ve said numerous times, it feels like my children are being fairly well prepared for a world that is already past, not the much more “hyperconnected, hypertransparent” world that is their future.

The good news is that there are some signs of change. Last summer at NECC, our superintendent dropped in unannounced on my open source blogging workshop. And, while I wonder about the wisdom of doing so, I’ve been invited to present to the school’s staff in a couple of weeks. (I’m already nervous.) It feels like there is an opportunity to start some conversations about how to really think systemically about change in the context of curriculum and pedagogy. And while I wonder what effect, if any, those conversations may have on my own third and fifth graders experience, it’s a start, at least.

For my kids, it’s up to me and my wife to add to the experience they are currently getting. And, more thanks to Wendy than to me, we’re starting to do that. Much of it is informal, such as narrating through our clicks when the kids are looking over our shoulders as we work and surf, or having constant conversations about their use of the computer when we let them online to play or work. They both have e-mail accounts which they check (because they get mail from us). I think we do a decent job of trying to model effective use (as much as we know it) and from that my kids are getting something they can apply to their own practice as well.

But this year, Wendy and a friend of ours who is home-schooling her kids have started supplementing their public school education in some more “formal” ways. Every Tuesday afternoon for about an hour, my wife’s office turns into a classroom where my kids are making wikis, learning about searching, and creating stories around whatever their interest is. And they’re being shown some ways in which technology can be used to connect, as in the picture above. (Click on it to see a more viewable size.) A couple of weeks ago, Steve Hargadon made a guest appearance using Skype to help them identify what they might want to work on in terms of projects. And there are plans to invite other people in to speak to them and help guide their work. (Let me know if you want to volunteer!) Real people, real work, real audiences.

Now I know that, again, I’m very, very lucky that I can offer this to my kids. There are literally billions of people who can’t. And I have an incredible partner who despite my frequent absences is able to make this happen (with ample help from our friend.) And I don’t know what type of an effect this will have on their “education,” but I do think it will help them see the potentials, and perhaps push their teachers even more. (The other day Tess noted that she had told her teacher to try to Skype the author of a book they are reading instead of send him e-mails…you go girl!) My biggest fear, however, is that it will only serve to make their school experience less relevant and more mundane. It’s a delicate balance.

And, of course, I wonder where this leads. I look at that picture and see a pretty compelling classroom, (as well as another pretty compelling classroom right outside the window) with a whole range of opportunities that most schools simply can’t offer. The more I think about it…

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My Flickr Conundrum

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We took a lot of photos while in Australia. A lot. I must have shot about 400 frames throughout the trip, most of them of my kids having fun. But a few of them were of fairly tourist-y spots: the train station in Melbourne, the Syndey Harbor Bridge and Opera House, nice landscapes at various surfing spots. And I found myself wondering aloud at some points just why it was I was taking these pictures. I mean surely, there are better ones that I could find on Flickr. Why shouldn’t I just use those to capture my memories?

Case in point, this picture here that I took of Bell’s Beach, one of the top surfing spots on the South Australia Coast. Beautiful place. Kinda ok picture. Look on Flickr and what do you find? Over 1,100 photos tagged with “bells_beach” and probably twice that many in the database that aren’t as easy to find. And even on the first page of results are a couple that I find much more appealing than my own. Now even though “all rights are reserved” on these, I can still find almost 100 that have a Creative Commons license, and many are the exact same angle, exact same shot. Most importantly, there are some that are as good if not better than mine.

So the question is, why take pictures of places that you visit that probably aren’t going to be as good as the photos that others have already taken that are already available for you to use in your own albums, slide shows, whatever? I mean, unless you want to organize the wife and kids in front of the spot just to prove you’ve been there, what’s the point?

Just a question…

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BLC Day 1 Brain Dump

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Some random reflections and thoughts from Building Learning Communities Day 1:

–In a lot of ways, I can’t believe this is my fourth BLC conference, and if nothing else, the one thing that really stands out is that there is very extensive intellectual (if not practical) understanding of the Read/Write Web as compared to my first year here when a lot of people looked at me funny as I talked about blogs and RSS and the like. Yesterday at a session that Tim Tyson was running about leadership, just about everyone said they wanted to learn more about Web 2.0 stuff, and in a weird way, it was a moment of some validation. Another signal that the train has left the station. But still, the fact that I am still doing a lot of talking on an introductory level speaks volumes, especially about RSS.

–Although the conference has doubled in size this year, from 300 to over 600, it so far has retained its feeling of intimacy. And I just never go to conferences where there are so many people from outside the US. One really funny moment today was sitting down for lunch with a contingent from Northern Ireland and asking them what they thought of the workshops and presentations. They all said they hadn’t learned a thing, and they were serious. It seems they’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time over there. After a little prodding, they admitted their thinking was getting tweaked, but it was fascinating to listen to them talk about the ways in which they were already rethinking their schools.

–There is one technology director here who brought two kids from his school to attend the conference. What a concept. Can you imagine a conference where really high level ideas about schools and education were being discussed where there were just as many students in the rooms and in the discussions as adults? Whoa.

–For some reason, I decided to get pretty edgy in my “New Literacies” presentation and I basically started by saying the whole concept of having people get up and give a presentation at conferences like this is really becoming ironic amidst all of this talk about conversation and collaboration. And so it was nice in that about 15 minutes of the hour (at least) was taken up with discussion. While Tim’s keynote this morning made plain the power of publishing, I wanted to push past the feeling that the product was the end of the process, and I tried to move the concept of what we can do now into the realm of building sustained, trusted, relevant, safe learning communities and networks in which the products nurture the conversation and the learning. That creating and sharing a movie or a podcast or blog post is important, but it is the connections we make around those artifacts, the discussions and interactions that surround them from the community where the most powerful learning takes place. It’s where the “meta” stuff happens, where the true potential lies.

—Ewan McIntosh is a rock star. Plain and simple. “The Italian mafia makes you an offer you can’t refuse. The Scottish mafia makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Priceless. David Jakes and Dean Shareski came back from Ewan’s second session awestruck, and I was truly sorry I was presenting opposite. (That is one of the personal frustrations of this conference…so much I want to learn and see.) Waiting for Jakes to post the “Chat Cast.”

–For reasons yet unclear, I am falling more in like with Twitter. Oy. Jakes put up a reflection on his blog that really resonated.

With Twitter and Skype, I have access to immediacy. My aggregator and my del.icio.us network (18 people I follow, 80 who follow me) are more asynchronous, and not as immediate. I need both types of networks.

Amen.

–I found this quote this morning via Stephen Downes and used it in my presentation.

 “We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning.”

Now I’m serious…that wins the “Best Sentence in a Blog Post of 2007” award (so far at least.) Amen. Amen

–Warning: We’re all heading downtown tonight…Tweets ahead.

(Photo “chatcast” by jutecht.)

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A Wikipedia Moment

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So before my flight home got canceled, I had a great day just outside of Green Bay speaking to superintendents and principals at the FIEL conference about the Germanic influences on the English language. I mean…um…the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web.

But here was just a classic teachable moment:

I’m showing how the last 500 edits in Wikipedia occurred over the last 2.5 minutes and how that translates to something like 300,000 edits a day when someone raises his hand and says “so take a look at the very last edit on the list…the one about Ronald McDonald.” I look at my own list, and of course, due to the deluge of edits on Wikipedia, there is no Ronald McDonald edit listed, and so we go to the site and see (Caution: vile and unpretty stuff ahead) this. I say something like “yep, this is the issue with Wikipedia isn’t it? So let’s fix it.” And silly me, I start going in and deleting the picture and erasing the bad words, and by the time I’m done doing all of that I hit save and wouldn’t ya know, someone else had come in and reverted the page back to a more appropriate version.

“See?” I say. Vandals come in at 14:27 and start mucking it up, page fixed within 10 minutes.

That’s why Wikipedia is worth a second, third and fourth look from educators.

Amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pokinitis

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So we’re driving to the airport, Tess and I, to start our most excellent weekend adventure to South Dakota. Tomorrow, it’s horse shows, Sunday, Rushmore and Custer, Monday back home after a presentation.

We’re cruising down the interstate and all of a sudden she pokes me from the back seat.

“I can’t help it,” she says. “I have to poke someone every thirty minutes.” She laughs, and I put a fake frown on my face.

But then, I start thinking.

“Hey Tess,” I say. “Remember how we talked about maybe you and Tucker writing books and then being able to send them out for Christmas presents?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, you know, that could be a pretty fun story to make into a book.”

Her faces scrunches up in the rear view mirror. “What? About a girl who has to poke people?”

“Yeah,” I say, with more than a tinge of enthusiasm. “Like, maybe it’s a disease or something, like the flu.”

She looks out the window. “Like the 24 hour-flu,” she says and smiles. “Like Pokinitis.”

I laugh. “Pokinitis,” I say. “Perfect. Maybe she wakes up with Pokinitis…”

“Yeah, and can’t help but poke her mom and her dad and her little brother…”

“And maybe her teacher,” I say. I can see this. It’s got potential. I look in the rear view to see if she feels it too.

“Hey Dad,” she says after a moment. “Could we really make this into a book? Like a real book?”

“Absolutely,” I say, thinking about George Mayo and Lulu and how cool this could be.

“I already wrote a book, you know,” she says.

“I know. You know how many people have read it by now?”

“How many?” she asks.

“Over 1,700,” I say, and I see her face brighten.

“Really?”

“Really. But we could turn Pokinitis into a book that people can put on their bookshelves.”  She looks out the window and the cars passing by.

“Maybe she goes to the school nurse and pokes her too,” she giggles. I laugh.

“So what do you think? You want to try to write it? On the plane maybe?” I’m hoping.

“Maybe…we’ll see.” I deflate a bit.

“You know what else?” I say. “You could write it, draw the pictures for it, and then when it’s all done, we could make a movie of it with you reading it so other kids could even listen to it.” Oy, I think. Overload. The curse of being so invested in all of this. But she’s thinking about it.

“We’ll see,” she says. “We’ll see.”

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"A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs"–NY Times

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The front page of today’s New York Times features a story about the attempts of Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales to create a set of guidelines for “Web Civility” in the light of what happened with Kathy Sierra and others.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

Should we feel lucky, I wonder, that a sense of civility has pretty much been the norm in this community to date? Obviously, since most all of our conversations in some way revolve around students, I think this whole process will be important to follow as it plays out.

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A Couple of Days at the Science Leadership Academy

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This is a few days late, but I just wanted to write a quick post about the two day workshop that Steve Hargadon organized and that I gave at the Science Leadership Academy this past weekend. First, I got to check a couple of more bloggers off of my life list: Christian Long and George Mayo, both of whose names surprised me when I saw them on the attendee list. George is doing such creative stuff with his kids in terms of videocasting and podcasting. And Christian has become a prolific blogger who is pointing to all sorts of great stuff on his site.

The two days were highlighted by some great conversation about how we get to the next level of the conversation, which to me, at least, is how to make some systemic changes regarding teaching and learning. We all seem to have variations on the same theme, that it will eventually happen from the ground up. I just wonder what we can do to move things along somewhat.

A couple of blog-worthy moments from the workshop. At the point where we started talking about doing audio recordings, I took out my iPod, my iRiver, my microphones and other such stuff. Within about a minute we had a pretty impressive array of equipment that the group was carrying. That was the first time I had that happen, and Chris Lehmann, our distinguished host, pointed to that fact as a sign that things were changing.

The second moment was when Christian began talking about how easy it was not just to publish in digital form but also in print form as well. I had one of those “doh!” moments when he started talking, like why aren’t my own kids writing books that we can publish on the Web but also kick out through LuLu as holiday gifts next year. In fact, we should make it a yearly event. As I looked around the brand new SLA library where we were working, noticing a few empty shelves, I said to Chris “you know, you should reserve one of these shelves for books that your students make.” As you can see by the picture, he agreed.

The best part of the whole workshop was that the attendees got the chance to interact with the SLA teachers for a good chunk of time. Unfortunately, there weren’t any kids around as Friday was a teacher workshop day. But I think we all got a sense of what it was like to work with these technologies with kids and what some of the real advantages were. It was great to see Moodle and blogs and wikis in practice, and there is much more to come when Chris and his teachers move over to Drupal in the near future.

One final story. I got the chance to chat with Marcie Hull who is a technology and art teacher. (She uses both sides of her brain.) She shared with me an IM chat that she had been having with a student as she sat in on the workshop. This student was struggling a bit in adjusting to the different teaching and learning emphasis that SLA has, and, as his advisee, Marcie was counseling him even when he was away from school. The best part was that she was sharing some of her own struggles with him, and modeling for him the ways in which she’s learned to change and cope. It was a pretty amazing example of the extended connections that these teachers can have with their kids. They can know them and teach them and even learn with them in some amazing ways…

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Pew on Tagging: Self-Organization Grows

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Pew’s latest report on tagging doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: 28% of Internet users tag, 7% on a typical day. Things on the folksonomy front are definitely taking some root. But even here there is evidence of a divide: taggers with broadband outnumber those without almost 2:1, and the higher your income and the better your education, the more you tag. (Interesting, though, that the race/ethnicity with the highest percentage of taggers is black, followed by Hispanic. Wonder what that means…)

Worth a read as well is the interview about tagging with David Weinberger that comes with the report. A couple of pull quotes to whet your appetite:

Maybe the most interesting thing about tagging is that we now have millions and millions of people who are saying, in public, what they think pages and images are about. That’s crucial information that we can use to pull together new ideas and information across the endless sea we’ve created for ourselves.

And:

We’ll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.

The whole self-organization meme is really interesting me of late. It’s crucial that our kids get their brains around it in effective ways. This quote from Donald Tapscott’s book Wikinomics speaks to it as well:

We are shifting from closed and hierarchical workplaces with rigid employment relationships to increasingly self-organized, distributed, and collaborative human capital networks that draw knowledge and resources from inside and outside the firm (240).

I love the way that’s stated. Networked learning requires self-organization. I’m still constantly tweaking the way I tag and sort all of this information, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’m as effective as I could be. But it’s the process I learn from, and once again, the way I’m doing it now looks little like what’s happening in most classrooms I see…

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Using Social Technologies to Redefine Schooling–the Podcast

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So one of the reasons I’ve had no time to blog of late (or read for that matter) is that life is getting crazed once again. Seven weeks off goes much too quickly, but I’ve gotten into some very cool projects that I hope to blog about in short order.

Meanwhile, in case any one is interested, here is the link to the presentation that Rob Mancabelli and I did at FETC on Friday. I’d be really interested in any reaction from those of you that might listen and watch (sort of) it.

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On Being "Clickable"

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So I know this is totally self-indulgent and egocentric, but I do have a point to make about the fact that out of over 2.7 billion results that you get when you search for “Will” on Google, this blog now comes up first. First of all, I find that fact just simply amazing in some warped way. I mean, I know it’s in no way a measure of my character or worth as a human being. There are probably at least 2.7 billion people out there without any Google rank who do much more than I to make the world a better place for others. (At least.)

But here’s the thing…the fact that I am “clickable” or find-able to this extent gives me tremendous opportunities to connect to other people, many of whom may have much to teach me. I am truly humbled by the powerful learning that I have done within the network of people that I’ve become a part of, and it would not have happened had I not had a way to engage in these conversations. I’ve said this many times…blogging has transformed my learning. Our students who are not “clickable,” whose content is not being shared and distributed using the tools of the Read/Write Web, who are not engaging in potentially global conversations about the ideas and topics in which they take an interest, who are not learning how to build their own networks of trusted sources and teachers are, I think, missing a huge opportunity. Without question, I come to this because of what has transpired in my own life, and I recognize full well that what’s happened to me in this blog will not happen to everyone who decides to participate. But not taking part, not sharing in this way leaves little opportunity to find the deeply personal learning experiences that have transformed so many of us in this community, regardless of where their names land on a Google search.

Which is why, more and more, I think that educators have to understand and use these tools. As teachers, I don’t think it’s enough to simply repackage old stuff and “publish” it in a new way. Unless we experience the learning that comes with being a part of the network, unless we are willing to take the time to embrace and use these technologies in our own practice, I’m not sure we can adequately teach our students how to leverage these tools for their own learning.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

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Thumbscrew and Design

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Daniel Pink has it right about design being an important literacy in a world where we are able to publish so easily. To that end, I’ve been noticing that a lot of us, myself included, have been putting more and more photos and graphics in our posts. Many of us are also reading Kathy Sierra’s blog which always offers up some compelling graphics, ones, however, that seem a bit out of reach for my scarcely artistic brain.

So I need things like Thumbscrew (MAC only) which lets me take a picture, like this one of Tess, and in about a nanosecond give it just a bit of a twist to make it all artsy and stuff and, hopefully, enhance the design of this blog. (Watch out…that’s my kid.)

Now I know there is a danger of over-design here. (I know I’m on the verge of getting over-widgeted.) And I also know that many times vanilla is better than a whole bunch of flavors mashed together. Good thing my wife is a designer and has promised to kick me in the right brain if I get out of hand…

Thanks to John Pederson for the link.

Library Thing…Finally

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Not sure why it took me so long to finally dive into Library Thing but, despite the imminent demise of books as we know them (smile) I got hooked in maybe 27 seconds. In fact, I might say that I found LT to be among (if not the) most intuitive, easy to use, fantastically fast interface of any social site I’ve seen yet.

Basically, Library Thing allows you to easily catalog all of the books in your personal library which, in turn, leads to all sorts of social goodness. I can easily find out who else is reading the books I have, see what’s in their libraries, and start conversations with them about what they are reading and recommending. Of course, I can tag the books in my collection, rate them, write a review, add comments to the listing, and access all of the Library of Congress information about the book in an instant. (They just added their 9 millionth book to their database.) There are widgets to add (scroll down and see mine in the right hand column) and it has a great zeitgeist page that gives an overview of all things…um…Library Things. (For instance, the largest collection is 14, 954 books…whoa!)

Obviously, this is a great way to not only track what you’re reading but find other stuff to read (although one look at the stack of books next to my bed and I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.) But I also thing it’s a wonderful example of the social potential of Web 2.0 in a very concrete way. I mean del.icio.us is a powerful tool, but I’m not sure how many people really “get it” without some bit of brainwork. This is easy and obvious, and let’s face it, everyone has a library…right?

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The "Perfect Storm" for Education

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(Note: Cross-posted at The Pulse) When I think about the potential effects of the Read/Write Web on education I’m continually drawn to watching the way things are playing out outside of our focus, specifically in journalism, music, business and politics. In each of those arenas, the disruption that these changes (i.e. the easy creation and publishing of content) has been and continues to be great. You need look no further than the cell phone captured execution of Saddam Hussein to know that we are entering what will no doubt be an extremely interesting (to put it mildly) period that will push our thinking about privacy, communication, literacy and learning. Newspapers are struggling to navigate a world where we can all be journalists. Musicians are more and more going outside of the traditional steps to stardom, eliminating the middlemen and counting on the viral nature of the Web to find success. John Edwards, like him or not, recently announced his candidacy for president on YouTube. In case after case, the traditional models that have been increasingly used to lock down ideas and content are being challenged by a public that is becoming drunk with the power of publishing.

And so I often wonder how long it will take before our traditional concepts of schooling will be also be significantly challenged by the shifts that a more co-operative rather than competitive Web environment is delivering. One obvious place where the disruption is especially transparent is the explosion of “open content” educational materials that are coming online every day. While the most obvious is the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which is providing the materials for over 1,600 courses free online, there are literally millions of pieces of valuable, solid content online that cobbled together could do a great job of replacing much of what we currently teach in schools.

In a presentation last fall, Todd Richmond, a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC, said that because of technologies that allow students to view powerful content online and then remix or reflect on that material by publishing their own reactions back to the world, “the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.” Richmond asks “How do motivated learners and skilled teachers make use of open educational resources to best achieve their aims?”

That is an important question for all of us in a world where there may be better content and better teachers outside of our classrooms that we can connect to for the benefit of our students’ learning. And it forces us to think disruptively about our traditional view of learning and teaching. As District Administration publisher Dan Kinnaman says in the latest issue:

An alarming reality for K12: Despite the radical transformation of data storage and information access, there has been no associated transformation of K12 education. Alarmingly, there may be no sector of society where technology has had less impact. That’s because K12 education persists in operating on the premise that to have school, you must physically co-locate teachers, students and curriculum materials. Teachers and students are assigned to stand-alone, self-contained school buildings that house paltry collections of mostly outdated curriculum materials. With rare exceptions, digital technologies and interactive communications are still largely peripheral to the primary activities of the typical school day. The premise that co-location is required is invalid, and we need to stop spending inordinate amounts of time, energy and money to maintain it as our fundamental operational structure.

That’s the disruption that I think about when trying to peer into the future. As more and more learning, powerful, passion-based learning becomes available outside the classroom, will the “perfect storm” (as Richmond calls it) for education finally arrive, forcing us, finally, to consider some radical re-envisioning of our classrooms?

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Dispatches From the Front Lines (Con't)

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I came across this post from Pat Aroune in Western NY who has been diving head first into Read/Write Web tools with his students:

About one month ago, I asked five students to participate in an online experiment utilizing Skype and an online interactive whiteboard called Vyew. Vyew is a free, always on collaboration and web conferencing site that allows individuals real-time desktop sharing and capturing. I met with this small group of students, and we began what was essentially on online tutoring session for an upcoming essay. We did nothing that had not been done during the course of a classroom session, except we were all in our individual homes, and it was 8:30 p.m.. I began to sense, over the course of that hour long session, a wave of energy and enthusiasm from the participants. One month later, this concept of online collaboration has taken on a life of is own. Just last night,twenty sophomores from my A.P. European History classes, met online and did a Skype – Vyew session in preparation for an essay exam today. The remarkable thing is, I was not even a part of it. Individual initiative got last night’s conference off the ground. More power to the students!

You might want to check out the reflections of some of his students on another post as well.

Almost as cool is that Pat’s superintendent Neil Rochelle is blogging about his efforts to bring the tools into the school as well. And this post reflects the type of approach that I’ve been thinking and writing about more and more lately. It’s his recap of a monthly Parent and Student Cabinet meeting where they are talking about the Read/Write Web and it’s use in his school. The result:

Students that have been involved in blogging and social bookmarking love the use of these tools that are being made available and integrated into their instruction. Their chief “complaint”….they are overwhelmed! Because we have attracted teachers to the use of these tools in “pockets” across the district, the same teachers are teaching the content as well as the “how tos” for using the technology. Students feel that they need to learn the newest technology in another class BEFORE using it in these selected classes. A point well taken and one that I will be giving much thought to. Consensus however is they love the approach. They are motivated by on-line collaboration such as internet conferencing such as Skype and video conferencing. Before this year, MySpace was a close as they came to social networking. Now they see an educational value.

It reminds me that kids are overwhelmed too, that they don’t know all of this, that we still have a great opportunity to lead and model appropriate and effective uses, and to learn from each other and our students. Pat and Neil are taking their school in a much different direction, and it’s pretty exciting to watch.

Just some feel good for the holiday…any other stories to share?

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"Passion Based Learning"

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Another article that’s got me all fired up today is this CNET review of a John Seeley Brown speech at MIT last Friday. As Clarence points out, Brown affirms much of what we as a community has been saying about the types of changes the Web is bringing about and what it means for our practice and pedagogy. Clarence pulls some of the best quotes, but here is one that really resonates for me:

In particular, he praised situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.

To me, this is the one biggest advantages of the Read/Write Web, the ability to connect to others who are passionate about whatever it is that you want to learn. How rare is it to have that happen in physical space, where everyone in the room is ready and excited to learn?

As Brown points out, for educators to really take advantage of the potential of the Internet, we need to rethink our practice. And, I think, the best way to do that is to get involved in “passion based learning” ourselves, much like what has occurred in my practice since I started blogging and connection those many moons ago. That may mean giving up something else. It may mean making a choice between something we currently do, say reading the newspaper, for something new, like reading the aggregator. But we have to find ways to do it, because our current practice will just not pass muster much longer.

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The Conversation Shifts…Maybe.

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Today was one of those days that it felt like there was a subtle shift in the discussion about the effects the Read/Write Web is having on education. I spent about three hours with around 30 or so technology leaders from the Lower Hudson (NY) region, and my talk and the ensuing discussion felt less about tools and more about learning, our students learning and our own. (The session was live-blogged, btw.) And it felt more like a conversation about systems rather than blogs or wikis or podcasts. How will systems be impacted, and how will systems need to change to support what seems to be coming? Sure, there were questions about safety. But this was more of a “how do we make this happen?” session rather than “here’s about 50 reasons why we can’t” one.

Now this was a pretty heady group to begin with. There were people in the audience whose schools were getting rid of AP courses, and others whose students and teachers were holding classes in Second Life. These are by and large connected schools with connected kids, and many of them have traveled much farther down the road than most. And there was a palpable “can do” feel in the room, despite the concerns that were brought up. It was pretty inspiring, if I do say.

I wonder if maybe, and it’s a big MAYBE, we’re nearing another level in the conversation. It’s one where we talk about how the realities of the ways in which our kids are already starting to learn outside of school need to be leveraged inside of school. One where we really start to take a look at teachers as learners modeling learning first. And it’s one where people start to recognize that this isn’t about technology as much as it’s about assembling a new vision for their own practice and for their students’ education.

One thing I do know, and I feel a longer post coming on about this. We have to carry this conversation to other audiences. We’re doing a great job of talking to each other, but at some point, we have to find ways to bring it to people who have little to do with educational technology, namely parents, businesspeople, etc. I’ve said this before, but I need to blog less and try to write more for print pubs that have nothing to do with tech. Hmmm…maybe there’s an angle here for Good Housekeeping…

(Photo of Mohonk Mountain House where the session was held by WalkingGeek)

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New UK Student Bloggers

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Bolton Kids 1If nothing else, this trip has reminded me how much fun it is to work with kids and how I really love to be in an environment where I can be serious and be really silly at the same time. All of the kids that I met this week in Liverpool and Bolton just sparkled about the idea that they could begin to be a part of a more global network of learners (even though the phrasing might have been a bit different.) And yesterday back in Liverpool, we got about twenty more of them up and running with blogs. If you get five minutes or so and could do a quick read of a couple of them and leave comments, I’m sure that would go a long way to helping them sustain their work. (Now before you ask, we reminded them over and over not to use their full names or identify themselves, but obviously, some didn’t listen.) And in an attempt to start capturing more of this in video, here’s a little snippet of one of the kids in the group.

The bad news, if there is any, is that as they were leaving, one of the girls turned back and said “Now I only hope our teachers let us use these…” Now there’s an idea.

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Learning Like Kids

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So the second best thing about being in Bolton yesterday after the amazing group of Year 6 students that were in attendance was that I got to sit in on an introductory Garage Band workshop that and Joe Moretti, and ADE from the UK was giving. All I can say is: Oh. My. Goodness. Now I need about 30 hours in a day. Amazing, amazing stuff that I’m really looking forward to playing with on my long, 8-hour plane ride back home on Sunday. Joe did a great job of getting the kids and their teachers to start playing, too. And this picture epitomizes the experience…kids engaged, collaborating, pushing ahead of their teachers many of whom were left scratching their heads. I found myself trying to channel into their fearlessness and I found it hard to keep up. As Joe was going through the many ways to create and manipulate the sounds and music, I was trying to jot down some notes along the way. But not the students. They just went after it.

We did some blogging yesterday, too, and another highlight from yesterday’s workshop was an impromptu Skype call with Chris Turek from November Learning to ask a question about the software that Bolton was using to support its network. When I asked if anyone had any questions for Chris, a whole bunch of hands shot up. Where are you from? How big is Texas? How many people are there? Do you own one of those big hats? Too funny. The kids, and the adults, were amazed that I was talking to my computer and having a conversation with someone halfway around the world. Just another connection…

So despite having to do a final workshop today with a group of high school students back in Liverpool, last night I just could not sleep. I’d be surprised if my brain shut off for even a couple of hours. I laid in bed directing the MacBook Movie I should have been making on this trip, catching snippets of the kids, the technologies, the travel. In my fog, it was a great movie. I kept thinking of David’s keynote and Alan Levine’s presentation (coming up next week), how fun and interesting I found them, and how much I’d love to make my own. But here’s my dirty little secret…getting up in front of hundreds of people and delivering a message is something that no longer bothers me, but I still feel horribly shy about going up and talking to people one on one and, even more, capturing it digitally. I really envy those who can do that easily. Another challenge to work through.

Anyway, here’s hoping I get some sleep tonight…

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Isn't it Ironic…

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…that Jeff Utecht‘s kids in Shanghai are publishing a series of History of Technology videos to YouTube that most American kids probably won’t be able to see?

What’s not surprising is that because they are being uploaded to YouTube, Jeff’s students are starting to understand the reach of what they can do.

We talked about what these numbers meant and that they were producing something that could potentially be seen by millions of people. I then read them the comments that Clarence and David left on my last posting about the videos and more than anything that was what really caught them off guard.

“You mean people are waiting for us to finish this?”

“Canada? I’m from Canada!”

As I looked around the room there was all of a sudden this sense of ‘he’s not joking’. One student completely deleted his work and started over proclaiming, “This isn’t good enough.” I had another student go home that night do more research and then come back Thursday with a 4 page report on the history of Google. We had to have a talk as YouTube videos must be under 10 minutes, and as he recorded his voice we decided that talking faster wasn’t a good solution to fitting all his information in a 10 minute slide. Another student that was finished came over and helped him edit his work decided to cut the years 2001, 2003 out completely and chopping some paragraphs here and there. He didn’t finish his on Thursday so it will be uploaded to the account on Monday. My teaching partner has his students uploading their videos on Friday so you might want to stop by and check those out as well.

These technologies empower students to do good work. As I wrote on Thursday. They become contributors to society and they understand that and live up to that potential. Empower students with information and what them go!

Let your students teach to the world and watch what happens. But if you’re here in America, you’ll probably have to find a way to do it without using the most insanely popular publishing tool out there right now.

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Testing…Testing

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So my Odeo test during my presentation in Coshocton, Ohio didn’t work as expected yesterday and I’m not sure why. I think I’m going to start doing those “look how easy this is” type examples in some other space from here on out. Time to start a beta Blogger blog…

It was interesting yesterday speaking to about 200 teachers about all these shifts and changes, having an hour just to show them my practice and talk about RSS and del.icio.us and the other tools that have become such a part of my life. And as always, I could see a lot of faces in that thinking hard scrunch. (I could also see a few that would have much rather been getting ready for opening day which is today…) I think one of the most interesting things that I’m finding in this new role is the consistent sense of restrained enthusiasm on the part of teachers. On the one hand, I think many who see these tools being used immediately get imaginative, creative ideas for their classrooms or their own practice. But there is always, always, always this underlying sense that what comes first is the “what about the test?” question. And it’s totally appropriate in an environment where what’s always in front is AYP and making the various standards that are being imposed. That, and the reality that as much as we are immersed in it, the technology still doesn’t work as easily as paper and pen in most parts of this country.

One other interesting note from yesterday…When I got to the school and ran through my presentation, I found much of what I wanted to show was being filtered. The administrative password got me through to everything but Wikipedia, which was coming up with an “adult and/or pornographic content” label. One of the technology specialists in the district jumped through all sorts of hoops to find out that the filtering service had flipped a wrong switch, and by the time I got to it in my live presentation, it was coming through. But the point was clear, once again. Educators are not in control of these decisions, and, as was expressed to me by another teacher, one of the most frustrating things is not being able to allow sites through the filter “on demand,” instead having to go through all sorts of levels to get things unblocked. I think at Coshocton, at least, they are going to start having some serious conversations about how to make this an education issue and not a technology one. They are talking about having some expansive dialogue which would include the entire school community to find a better way to do this. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

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Quote of the Day–Susan Mann

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Thanks to John Bidder for this link to an article in The Age out of Australia, where he recently presented at a conference discussing Web 2.0 tools and their potentials in education. (There’s a concept.) The quote comes from Susan Mann, CEO of the Curriculum Corporation:

“The old concept of curriculum is dead but you can’t tell anyone,” she says. “There are innovative schools and clusters of schools but others are stuck in a time warp.”

And that’s in Australia…people here are even less happy to hear that the concept of curriculum is dead. What will we do with all those tests?

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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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