Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

"Norms of Participation"

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A few days ago, Gary Stager tweeted me this link in the LA Times about the demise of journalism and freelance writing primarily due to everything being, well, “free” on the Internet. The subhead read, in part, “the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce.” Gary’s Tweet read “This is disastrous for our culture and democracy…Web 2.0 won’t solve this problem.” And to the first point, at least, I think he’s right. The loss of quality reporting and thoughtful writing has to be a concern, especially for a society that by all indications is becoming more and more disengaged intellectually. (Read this David Brooks column and the accompanying comments and any of the magazine covers at your supermarket checkout stand for evidence.) But regarding the last part of Gary’s tweet, I’m stuck with two reactions. First, who says Web 2.0 won’t solve this? And second,  what’s the alternative?

I mean sure, we can wring our hands and lament the slipping away of what many of us older types (ugh) feel are the best parts of our culture, the parts (good journalism included) that preserved and promoted democracy and citizenship and art by setting high standards and celebrating the complexity of the world. But all the hand wringing in the world is not going to slow down the train of participatory culture, this place where 4.5 years of mostly insipid YouTube video is being uploaded in the next 24 hours. Whether we see the Web as beast or feast, it’s long past the moment that anyone can argue it away on the grounds that decency and civility and intellectual engagement are being lost. And to me, at least, that leaves us with how do we make the most of it? How do we (and it’s not  “can we?” because I believe we can) take this huge disruptive force that is the Web and turn it into something that celebrates culture, promotes and supports the best of our democratic ideals, and improves the world in ways that maybe we can’t yet imagine?

Frankly, what’s our choice?

Clay Shirky writes compellingly about this in his most recent Edge piece, which, btw, is one of over 160 such pieces encompassing 130,000 words from some of the smartest folks out there that you can curl up with in front of a nice fire on a cold winter afternoon (and night.) I love this snip:

Unfortunately for us, though, the intellectual fate of our historical generation is unlikely to matter much in the long haul. It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

We are in many ways “freaking out” right now about how these things are changing. And, specifically to Gary’s point, Shirky offers this:

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

I won’t speak for Gary, but I would guess by his Tweets and comments over the years that that comes close to how he and others feel. But it’s the next line that I think sums up the choice we have in front of us pretty clearly:

So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.

While the “us” there is certainly each and every one of us, there’s no doubt that’s a bar that is especially being set for educators and for parents. I’m convinced this doesn’t have to be disastrous. But I’m also convinced that we’re not working hard enough as a society to make sure that we find and promote the real intellectual value of these tools in literate ways. Because they exist, and because, like it or not, we’re the ones who in Shirky’s words have to set the norms for their use. I love the way he ends his essay:

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

I know, I know. I’ve sipped the Shirky Kool-Aid pretty hard. But we do have a choice here, let’s not forget that. I don’t think any of us in this network sees the Internet as a place with just “a modicum of educational material” in a sea of flotsam and jetsam. I hope we see it more as that “communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change” because if we don’t, if we don’t figure out ways to start setting those norms for our kids and others, then we surely will be on the precipice of disaster.

No pressure.

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?

"Willing to be Disturbed"

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Earlier this week, I wrote a post bemoaning the ways in which the system treats teachers when it comes to technology and I hinted at a different reality for one school I’ve been working with. Well, that school happens to be my old school, the place where I worked as a teacher and an administrator for 21 years before setting out for my current very different existence. And now, due to a somewhat sudden, imminent move to a new house, the place where in all likelihood my own kids will go to high school.

While I love what Chris Lehmann is doing at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the problem with the SLA story has always been that it’s hard to replicate. Chris is a visionary who was given the chance to build a school pretty much from the ground up, and I think just about everyone would agree that he has done an absolutely amazing job of it. If I could take SLA and clone it, I would. But that’s not possible. So, the tougher question has always been how do schools that have been around for 50 or 100 years begin to undertake the real shifts and real changes that are required if they are to move systemically to a point where inquiry-based, student-centered, socially and globally networked learning becomes just the way they do their business? In all honesty, I haven’t seen many schools that have fundamentally set out to redefine what they do in the classroom in light of the affordances and opportunities that social technologies create for learning. (If you know of any who have a plan to fundamentally redefine what they do, please let me know.) There is a great deal of “tinkering on the edges” when it comes to technology, districts that hope that if they incrementally add enough technology into the mix that somehow that equals change. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve seen that have a whiteboard in every room yet have absolutely nothing different happening from a curriculum perspective. Old wine, new bottles.

That fundamental redefinition is hard. It takes an awareness on the part of leaders that the world is indeed changing and that current assessment regimes and requirements are becoming less and less relevant to the learning goals of the organization. It takes a vision to imagine what the change might look like, not to paint it with hard lines but to at least have the basic brushstrokes down. It takes a culture that celebrates learning not just among students but among teachers and front office personnel and administrators alike, what Phillip Schlechty calls a “learning organization.” It takes leadership that while admitting its own discomfort and uncertainty with these shifts is prescient and humble enough to know that the only way to deal with those uncertainties is to meet them full on and to support the messiness that will no doubt occur as the organization works through them. It takes time, years of time, maybe decades to effect these types of changes. It takes money and infrastructure. And I think, most importantly, it takes a plan that’s developed collaboratively with every constituency at the table, one that is constantly worked and reworked and adjusted in the process, but one that makes that long-term investment time well spent instead of time spinning wheels. And it takes more, even, than that.

I’m seeing a lot of that happening at Hunterdon Central, my old school. And you can take this perspective for what it’s worth since I feel like I played some small part in this process five years ago when we formulated a long-ish term plan for technology that started with piloting a teacher/classroom model for technology when I was there to today, when they are piloting a student 1-1 model (netbooks) for technology this fall. My good friend and former co-conspirator Rob Mancabelli is guiding the work, and he’s had amazing success in bringing teachers, supervisors, upper administration, community, students and others into a really “big” conversation about what teaching and learning looks like today, how global and collaborative and transparent it is, and what the implications are for the curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms. This is not tinkering on the edges; this, instead, is a deeply collaborative and reflective process for a small cohort of 30 or so teachers whose kids this fall will all have technology and a ubiquitous connection in hand, a process that encourages them to be creative, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to pursue their own personal learning as well. All of it as a first building block for the systemic, culture change that is hopefully to come in the next few years.

Tuesday, I had the chance to spend a few hours with a part of this group, and I came away just totally energized by the experience. The main reason? Lisa Brady, the superintendent. The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. And on Tuesday, now as the school year begins to loom large, Rob asked Lisa to address the group and make sure they understood their efforts would be supported. Lisa started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed.” I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the first graph gives you the gist:

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally–our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

I hadn’t expected to try to capture any of what Lisa said next, but as she talked to the teachers, I started writing some of it down. And I started imaging what it would be like if every superintendent walked into a meeting of teachers who are engaged in reaching beyond their comfort zones and learning something new and said things like:

My question to you is how willing are you to be disturbed?…We have to be willing to examine our practice, to be disturbed about what we think we know about teaching and learning…We don’t really know what we’re doing; we’re teachers, we’re supposed to know, but we don’t know everything…I’m as unsure about all of this as you are unsure, but I believe we are doing the right thing. It is of critical importance to this organization, of critical importance to our kids…Your classrooms are learning labs; we want you be exploring, looking, analyzing…You are fully supported in this work; don’t be afraid of what you are doing…at this school, we don’t change easily, but we change well.

It was really powerful stuff, the superintendent of schools encouraging teachers to take risks, to think differently, to be okay with not knowing, and to know that it’s a process, that it’s not going to happen overnight.  And this is the same type of message Lisa plans to deliver to the full faculty on the first day of school. (The Wheatley piece is being sent to all staff this week.) Already, Central has decided to end the practice of monthly full faculty meetings this year and instead engage in professional conversations around the question “What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century?” Since May, all of the supervisors have voluntarily been meeting on a regular basis to study and discuss the shifts around an inquiry/problem based curriculum delivered in networked learning environments. And the teachers in the cohort are archiving and communicating on a Ning site specifically for the work.

Now I know there are some caveats here and not all of this is replicable either. For the last two years, 99% of teachers at Central (3,200 students 9-12, btw) have had their own Tablet PC (for personal and professional use) with wireless connection to an LCD and wireless Internet in every classroom, part of the teacher model that Rob and I started before I left. I would defy anyone to show me a school that has a better customer service oriented technology support plan for teachers and classrooms to make sure everything works. The school has made a fairly substantial financial commitment to the work (with the support of the community…budgets pass). And, 99% of kids in the district have Internet access at home.

But despite all of that, what interests me more is the stuff that they’re doing that just about any school could do right now: have the conversations, begin to build a culture around change, encourage learning on the part of every segment in the school, and create a long term vision and plan that attempts at least to account for whatever deficiencies or roadblocks currently exist. I see so many schools (SO many) where huge sums of money are spent on technology without any thought of professional learning or thinking about what changes. It’s all haphazard, unplanned, unsupported. I talk to so many teachers who just roll their eyes at the newest initiative because a) they haven’t had a voice in the process and b) because they know the next initiative is right around the corner. There’s no thread that binds all of it together, that congeals into a fundamentally different vision of teaching and learning. As Chris often says (channeling Roger Schank) “Technology is not additive; it’s transformative.” But that transformation doesn’t come on its own. It comes only when the ground for transformation has been well plowed. Whether we have the budgets or the technology in hand right now, there is little externally, at least, that’s preventing these conversations to start, assuming we have real leaders who are willing to be disturbed at the helm.

I’m hoping to follow this story pretty closely this year, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. Would love to hear your take on what Central is doing and on other attempts at moving old schools systemically into new places of learning.

(Photo “Do Not Disturb” by Sue)

"Tinkering Toward Utopia"

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During Boot Camp last week, Sheryl turned me on to Phillip Schlechty’s newish book “Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations” and I had a chance to get through a chunk of it on the cramped, smelly plane(s) to Melbourne. In it, he makes a pretty compelling case that “reform” is really not going to cut it in the face of the disruptions social Web technologies are creating and that we really do have to think more about “transform” when it comes to talking about schools. There are echoes of Sir Ken Robinson here, and I’ve still got Scott McLeod’s NECC presentation riff on Christensen’s “Disrupting Class” on my brain as well, especially the “the disruption isn’t online learning; it’s personalized learning” quote. And while there are others who I could cite here who are trumpeting the idea that this isn’t business as usual, I think Schlechty does as good a job as I’ve seen of breaking down why schools in their current form as “bureaucratic” structures will end up on the “ash heap of history” if we don’t get our brains around what’s happening. In a sentence:

Schools must be transformed from platforms for instruction to platforms for learning, from bureaucracies bent on control to learning organizations aimed at encouraging disciplined inquiry and creativity.

To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter. Here’s a key snip in that case:

As long as any innovations that are introduced can be absorbed by the existing operating systems without violating the limits of the social systems in which they are embedded, change in schools is more a matter of good management than one of leadership. Such changes can, in fact, be introduced through programs and projects and managed quite well by technically competent people who are familiar with the new routines required by the innovations and skilled in communicating to others what they know.

In these cases, while it is sometimes difficult to break old habits, usually after a brief period of resistance, old certanties are abandoned and new certainties are embraced. For example, teachers now routinely use PowerPoint slide shows where once they used overhead projectors and slate boards. The reason this transition was relatively easy to accomplish is that it did not change the role of the teacher. Indeed, PowerPoint makes it easier for teachers to do what they have always done, just as a DVD player is easier to use than a 16 millimeter projector. Moreover, the technical skills required to use a PowerPoint slide show are easily learned and communicated, making the process of diffusion relatively simple.

But when innovations threaten the nature and sources of knowledge to be used or the way power and authority are currently used and distributed–in other words, when they require changes in social systems as well as operating systems–innovation becomes more difficult. This is so because such changes are disruptive in inflexible social systems.

So, from the social media standpoint, the message here is clear. This isn’t about doing what you’ve always done as a teacher or as a school. It challenges those social constructs in the classroom and in the system, and therefore, these shifts are going to be much harder to embrace. Channeling Christensen, he says that existing organizations seldom successfully adopt truly disruptive innovations, and that it’s easier to build something new than to change the old. And if you listened to Scott’s presentation, you get the idea that the time is ripe for those innovative systems to form and flourish in education. (My question is whether commercial interests will be at the heart of those efforts.)

What I really like about this argument so far, however, is that while the thinking is rooted in the affordances of the technologies, Schlechty also makes the case in the context of citizenship in a democracy as well as a moral imperative that we create citizens who “have discovered how to learn independent of teachers and schools.”

Many Americans fear that an inadequate system of education will compromise America’s ability to compete in a global economy [hearing Friedman here]. In fact, they have more to fear from the possibility that young people who graduate will lack the skills and understandings needed to function well as citizens in a democracy. Americans have more to fear from the prospect that the IT revolution will so overwhelm citizens with competing facts and opinions that they will give up their freedom in order to gain some degree of certainty than they have to fear from economic competition around the world. Leaders should be far more concerned that Americans will cease to know enough to preserve freedom and value liberty, equity, and excellence than they are with how well American students compare on international tests. As numerous scholars have shown, authoritarian leaders and charlatans thrive in a world where ordinary citizens are overwhelmed with facts and competing opinions and lack the ideas and tools to discipline thier thinking without appealing to some authority figure for direction and support. [Emphasis mine.]

That resonates with me on so many different levels, on trying to navigate the arguments about global warming, for instance, or in attempting to explain the nuances of the world to my kids who more and more are coming to me with questions inspired by their interactions with online media. The key to this all, to me at least, and a piece that I don’t think Schlechty gets, is that much of that now is dependent on our “network literacy” in terms of building our own personal systems of filters and sources that are balanced and open.

The idea that schools become “learning organizations” is compelling in the way that Schlechty describes the shift.

Schools will be places where intellectual work is designed that cause students to want to be instructed and will become platforms that support students in making wise choices among a wide range of sources of instruction available rather than platforms that control and limit the instruction available to them.

That “vision” started me thinking again about what our expectations are for teacher “learning” and the ways in which we might move toward a culture that celebrates and models and makes transparent learning in every corner. One thing that I constantly hear from Sheryl is the idea that we need to see teachers as leaders and as learners, not just teachers. That’s such a huge shift here, one that we talked a lot about and struggled with in Boot Camp. And it all makes me wonder what the next decade or two will bring.

One School's Journey to Online Social Learning

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So if you’re looking for a model of a school that’s heavily invested in social tools but using all open source or home grown apps to begin to teach even their youngest kids the benefits of publishing and networking, read on. During my visit to Melbourne I met Richard Olsen, a former teacher and ICT co-ordinator at the Concord School who now has a role at IdeasLab, a group that is exploring the best ways to implement large scale technology projects across Victoria. We talked at some length about the ways in which over the last three years he implemented everything from blogging, to photo sharing to bookmarking with his students in some big ways. Big like in over 70,000 photos that are housed on the school’s server documenting just about every aspect of learning that goes on there.

Embedded below you will see a brochure that Richard created before he left documenting his efforts. You can see from the introductory statement that Richard’s attempt to leverage the potential of these tools is pretty visionary.  Lumil was the Flickr-type app that Richard himself coded. It uses tags, sets, albums, the whole deal. As you’ll see, you can even sort the pictures by a particular date range, so viewers can get a sense of what’s happening at any given moment. They used Scuttle to house their own social bookmarks, WordPress MU to blog, and Scratch and others for social game making activities. Be sure to spend some time on the skills matrix at the bottom. All in all, it’s an impressive suite of tools and pedagogies that did much to change learning at his school.

What’s most compelling to me here is not necessarily the tool set, however, as much as the vision that brought this to fruition. While most all of this work is done locally on an internal network, the concepts are preparing kids at Concord for the very global network they’ll inhabit once they leave the system. And here is the best part: Concord is a special needs school, a place where kids with all sorts of disabilities attend. The work that these kids do in these contexts is very rewarding on a number of levels.

The larger point here is that this isn’t too far out of the reach of most schools provided they have the courage and the leadership to make it happen. Aside from the photo-sharing tool, the rest is freely available. There’s nothing really too difficult about it aside, perhaps, from creating good teaching around the tools. Makes you wonder what so many other schools are waiting for.

Concord School Web-Based Social and Collaborative Learning

The "Added Value of Networking"

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From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. titled “Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with my Homework.” This is another one of those pieces you’ll want to print out, xerox, and put in your administrators’ mailboxes. (Yes, my cynicism gene is in full gear.) They will like it because a) it’s from Harvard (ooooohhh) b) it’s based on research (more ooooohhhs) and c) it’s from Harvard.

Seriously, there has been a run of these of late, articles by traditionally reputable institutions that advocate (gulp) the use of social networks by teachers. And lord knows we need them. I sat in on a recent presentation by a union representative who told teachers not to e-mail students individually. (Group e-mails were ok, however.) And, as I recounted earlier, I’ve been in a couple of conversations of late with teachers whose state associations are basically telling them not to even create a Facebook profile for fear of litigation. We could spend hours discussing the challenges here; I’d rather focus on the slight breeze beginning to blow at our backs, especially in this article. Here are some of the compelling points to highlight.

First, kids are already using these spaces to learn, though there are huge opportunities for us to teach them how to to do it well:

Greenhow has found a virtual creative writing boom among students spending long hours writing stories and poetry to paste on their blogs for feedback from friends, or creating videos on social issues to bring awareness to a cause. Far from media stories about cyber bullying, meanwhile, she found that most students use the medium to reach out to their peers for emotional support and as a way to develop self-esteem. One student created a video of his intramural soccer team to entice his friends to come to his games. Another created an online radio show to express his opinions, then used Facebook to promote a URL where friends could stream it live, and then used one of Facebook’s add-in applications to create a fan site for the show.

They are learning skills that will serve them well in the future:

The kind of skills students are developing on social networking sites, says Greenhow, are the very same 21st century skills that educators have identified as important for the next generation of knowledge workers — empathy, appreciation for diversity of viewpoints, and an ability to multitask and collaborate with peers on complex projects. In fact, despite cautionary tales of employers trolling social networking sites to find inappropriate Halloween pictures or drug slang laced in discussion forums, many employers are increasingly using these sites as a way to find talent. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers cited this spring in The New York Times found that more than half of employers now use SNSs to network with job candidates. The website CareerBuilder.com even added an application to allow employers to search Facebook for candidates. “Savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking,” says the Times.

No one, however, is teaching them how to use these tools well:

What was more surprising to her, however, is how few teachers were using the Internet at all — and even fewer were aware of, much less using, social networking sites, despite their heavy usage by students. “It is the kids who are leading the way on this,” she says. “They are forming networks with people they meet every day as well as people they have barely met. If we can’t understand what kids are doing and integrate these tools into a classroom, what kind of message are we sending them? I think we’ll see an even bigger disconnect than already exists.”

As such, the kids are asea:

Even so, with the exceptions like Theresa Sommers, few students were actually using these sites for the purpose they were ostensibly created for — namely, networking with strangers in their intended college or career field. “The networking aspects weren’t even on their radars,” says Greenhow, who argues for a role in educators and guidance counselors in nudging students to take advantage of these opportunities. “Kids are conceiving of reaching out to others outside of school, they are getting there. What teachers can bring from their mindset is the added value of networking.”

The solution? We have to suck it up and get our brains around this for ourselves:

If that is going to be possible, however, first teachers must learn from the students’ mindsets — that is, rolling up their sleeves and creating Facebook profile themselves.

Look, I know it’s starting to sound like a broken blog-ord around here, but this really is the only way to put it: The world is changing because of social web technologies. Our kids are using them. No one is teaching them how to use them to their full learning potential, and ultimately, as teachers and learners, that’s our responsibility. To do that, we need to be able to learn in these contexts for ourselves.

(Photo “Creating Networks” by carf.)

Facebook as Tipping Point?

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More and more I’m starting to think that Facebook may just be the engine that drives school change around technology. The numbers right now are pretty compelling. Six hundred thousand new users PER DAY, and fully three-quarters of the 175 million users are over 25. In fact, the fastest growing segment is women over 55. Whoda thunk that?

I read that as a whole lot of parents and teachers are dipping their toes in the pool and at least beginning to come to terms with social networks. Whether they can see the potentials for learning is another discussion. But I can’t help but think this conversation for reform which includes teaching kids how to learn in networked publics and online communities will be given a boost by their participation.

You?

Those Who Publish Set the Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote O' the Day

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From the just released 2009 Horizon Report:

Information technologies are having a significant impact on how people work, play, gain information, and collaborate. Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections are more likely to advance, while those who do not will find themselves on the sidelines. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and scholars all over the world — online collaborative workspaces, social networking tools, mobiles, voice-over-IP, and more — teaching and scholarship are transcending traditional borders more and more all the time. (Emphasis mine.)

Another pebble for the pile…

Response to Jay Matthews at the Washington Post

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Jay Matthews wrote a piece in the Post this morning titled “The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st Century Skills” to which I replied what follows. Would be interested to hear your thoughts, here or there…

I don’t disagree that the majority of “21st Century Skills” are nothing new, and that we should have been teaching them all along. As computer and online technologies evolve, we have more tools that we can use to teach those skills in perhaps more relevant or compelling ways. But that depends on the teacher’s familiarity and comfort level with those technologies, obviously.

What is different here, though, is something that is not being articulated by the Partnership or many others, and that is the learning that can be done (and is being done already) using online social tools and networks. I’d point you to a recent MacArthur Foundation study which concludes that “New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn” and that this has very important implications for schools and teaching (http://tinyurl.com/55a878, pdf). While most kids’ uses of these technologies are “friendship based”, the more compelling shift is when their use is “interest based” or when they connect with other kids or adults around the topics or ideas they are passionate to learn about. With access to the Internet, and with an understanding of how to create and navigate these online, social learning spaces, opportunities for learning widely and deeply reside in the connections that we make with other people who can teach or mentor us and/or collaboarate with us in the learning process. That, I think, is where we find 21st Century skills that are different and important. Sure, those connections require a well developed reading and writing literacy, and critical thinking and creativity and many of the others are skills inherent to the process. But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Having blogged now for seven years and having learned in these interest or passion-based online networks and communities for almost as long, it’s hard to begin to describe how different it is from the classroom teaching that I did for 18 years in a public high school. My learning is self-directed, and everyone in these virtual classrooms wants to be there because they too are interested in pursuing their interests. They come from all over the world, all different cultures, all different experiences, a diversity that is hard to fashion in most school classrooms. We share our learning openly, admit anyone into the conversation, and constantly seek to make each other smarter.

But while that can sound like a pretty positive and powerful space, it is fraught with complexity. We have to learn to read not only texts but to edit them as well, not just for accuracy but for bias, agenda and motive. In the online learning world, we have to be full fledged editors, not just readers, because the traditional editors are gone from the process. And, we have to be creators as well. In order for us to be found by potential teachers and collaborators, we need to have a presence, a footprint. I’m fully convinced that my own kids need to publish, need to establish their reputations early by creating and sharing and engaging in ideas in provocative and appropriate ways. These are not easy skills to master.(I’d refer you to Dan Gillmor’s new essay “Principles for a New Media Literacy” http://tinyurl.com/4b3pos for more on that.)

My kids need the help of teachers in their classrooms who understand all of this on some personal, practical level. They need teachers who can help them navigate these complex spaces and relationships online that require, at the very least, a different application of traditional skills and literacies. I think as educators we have a duty to do so. You can call it a “fad” if you like, but the reality is that these skills are sorely lacking in our teachers who are suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces. It’s imperative, I think, that we change that. To quote Kansas State professor Michael Wesch, “We [need to] use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create” (http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=192). To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.

Networked Learning: Why Not?

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So there seems to be a little string of really good blog posts that are laying out some definite re-vision of what schools can look like. This one, by Bill Farren, fits nicely with those Mark Pesce posts that I’ve been drifting in and out of here and here. But with Bill’s post the graphics are almost too good for description. How’s this for a visual on networked learning?


And I just love this description:

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?  Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions.

Again, this is higher ed context more than K-12, but I think there is much to think about here… Has me wondering what, realistically, we can expect from schools not just in terms of opening up their eyes to confront what is in front of them but then re-envisioning themselves accordingly. Funny, but as I read more and more of this, I grow increasingly excited and increasingly skeptical all at once.

The Ultimate Disruption for Schools

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So sue me if sometimes I get too smitten with those who write compellingly and with vision about what all of this connective learning stuff means for the long term, but I love to read stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time. Case in point is this post by Mark Pesce titled “Fluid Learning” which I read first last week and have reread a few time since. I know it’s not free of holes, but I have to admit that the picture he paints of higher education in the near future resonates with a lot of my own thinking, and it’s got me ruminating even more deeply on what all of this means for my 9 and 11 year old in terms of what their education is preparing them for.

Start with this:

The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning.

That will at least give you a sense of where he’s going with this, and I’ll give you the briefest of synopsis with the hope you’ll read the whole thing.

He starts with the story of RateMyProfessors.com and the influence it’s having on decision making by students and universities in terms of the courses they take and the people they hire respectively. During a PLP session last night where we were talking about this, Robin Ellis chimed in that her son had relied heavily on the site throughout his college career, and I’m sure others would attest to that as well. (I pinged a few of my former students on Facebook and they all were avid users.) While this wasn’t the original intent of the guys who created the site

…knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

But what I’m really chewing on is the idea that we can do much of what higher ed offers on our own these days. That, I think, has huge implications for my kids and for the way we prepare students for their learning futures. Pesce asks

Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?…Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?

And, to really push that thought:

In this near future world, students are the administrators.

Whether or not my kids decide to go to college, the question for me right now is shouldn’t my school system be preparing them equally as well for a world where traditional college is not the only route to academic success? Shouldn’t my kids get some concept of how to gather their own information, find their own teachers, develop their own collaborative classrooms and write their own curricula? I mean at the very least, shouldn’t we let kids know that is an option these days?

And as the role of students changes, so to does the role of teachers and classrooms. Teachers are mentors and facilitators (not a new idea, I know) and classrooms can be anywhere.

The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom.

Pesce ends with four recommendations. First, “Capture Everything”:

This should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

Second, “Share Everything”:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

Third, “Open Everything” not just using open source, but creating “device interdependence” and in taking down the filters:

Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital…Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

And fourth, “Only Connect”, connecting students to their teachers and their peers:

Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education… Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

I know this last is a huge challenge for teachers and schools, but the reality is that we can connect to our teachers any time we like these days, and there are always teachers available. It’s just another way in which the traditional classroom is looking less and less like the real world.

Read the whole thing and, if you like, come back here and push the conversation in terms of K-12. I’ll write more about this later, but I am approaching the breaking point in terms of what my kids are getting at school. I’ve got to figure out a better way…

New MacArthur Study: Must Read for Educators

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

Get. Off. Paper.

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The other day I was talking to a school administrator about an upcoming hands-on workshop and she asked if I could e-mail her the schedule to handout the morning of the event. For some strange reason I just said “Nope. No paper.”

After a short silence, she said, “Oh…ok.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “We’re going to be spending the whole day online; there is no reason to bring paper.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No paper,” she said, thinking, finally adding “How exciting!”

Now I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still read lots of paper books, but I’m working on that.)

Yet just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room, paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, “paper trained,” and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.

At one planning session I was in a few weeks ago, twenty people were all furiously scribbling down notes on their pads, filling page after page after page. The same notes, 20 times. (I’d love to know where those notes are now.) At the end of the session, I gave everyone a TinyUrl to a wiki page where I had stowed my observations and asked them to come in and add anything I missed. Two people have.

At the end of a presentation a few days ago with a couple of hundred pen and paper note taking attendees (and the odd laptop user sprinkled here and there) I answered a question about “What do we do now?” by saying “Well, first off, it’s a shame that the collective experience of the people in this room is about to walk off in two hundred different directions without any way to share and reflect on the thinking they’ve been doing all day. Next year, no paper.”

I don’t think most were excited.

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?

(Photo “Magnus Christensson’s notes” by Jacob Botter.)

Mourning Old Media, Mourning Old Media Teachers

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

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

Ok. I’m over it.

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

I loved this graph from the article:

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

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

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

(Photo: News by Kazze.)

Our Kids as Criminals

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Longtime readers of this blog know that I really, really respect and admire Lawrence Lessig who early on pushed my thinking in all sorts of directions with his presentations, books, and blog entries. I’m still a big admirer of his work, and I seriously think he will come to be known as one of the great change agents of our times. That’s why his new book about he cultural shifts that are occurring around copyright, intellectual property and art went to the top of the list when it arrived a couple of days ago. (I’ve got a long list to get to, but I’ve also got some long flights ahead of me…)

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a treatise on how we need to start rethinking traditional copyright law in the context of these easy sharing and copying technologies. And what’s especially relevant to our conversation is that he frames it in the way this all shakes out for our kids. In talking about how the government continues to create laws that “wage war” against the copyright infringement that many youngsters engage in every day, he says:

…I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?

And then he asks the central question:

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural.

To Lessig, this is a war that can not be won.

What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and there kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distibution of “copies” simply will not exist?

Lots of questions that he will no doubt answer in the book, and that I hope to get back to here. But no doubt, these are questions we should be asking ourselves no matter how difficult or disruptive they may be. If you are reading this, you are doing so on your own personal printing press. That is  a different world than the one current copyright laws were written under.

Learning to Drive

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Nelson, New Zealand

Yesterday, we drove about four hours from a beautiful little town named Hanmer Springs (many Flickr photos to come) up here to Nelson which sits at the top of the south island. On the way, we stopped to zip line across a gorge, herd some sheep off the road that had gotten through an open fence, and roll some boulders out of the way on a one lane (barely) gravel and dirt (to be generous) mountain pass road that when we finally descended to the bottom turned out to be closed to all vehicles trying to come up the way we had just come down.

Pretty boring day.

What was occupying much of my brain power when we were on the two-lane, paved roads, however, was trying to stay on the right (or should I say left) side of the road. It took a while for my driving mind to get into some balance after the initial dissonance, and I was trying to pay attention to all of the things I had to “unlearn” in the process. For about the first hour, every time I went to signal a turn, the windshield wipers started up. Right hand turns were a real, real struggle, as you can imagine, surpassed in difficulty at the outset only by trying to navigate the roundabouts and always feeling like I was looking the wrong way. (A couple of times after going over one-laned bridges, I reflexively went over to the right hand side of the road only to have my kids scream “DAD! Wrong side!”) And the hardest part for me, at least, was getting in the habit of glancing to the left to see the rear view mirror. A bunch of times, cars that I didn’t even realize were behind me came whizzing by (on our right) almost causing me to drive off the road in the process. After a few hours, though, it all started to make sense in my head. No more wipers. No more screaming from the backseat. No more surprising passes. I actually started enjoying the view. (Actually, that part was easy.)

There is a point in here somewhere about unlearning and re-learning and fighting through the dissonance of change to come out the other side doing some things differently. Maybe a microcosm of what Sheryl and I have been over here prodding teachers to do. There is no question that they are further down the road in all of this than we seem to be, at least from an understanding that there are some technologies out there that are challenging the status quo of classrooms. And, from the standpoint of making it a national initiative to understand that stuff as well. New Zealanders seem to be much more in tune with the value of reflective assessment and the uses of assessment in general to help guide choices that kids make in addition to seeing what they “know.”

Still, it comes down to individuals getting comfortable with doing things differently. Driving on the “other” side of the road really isn’t so hard once you get used to it.

"Ambient Awareness"

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Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.

Required Reading on Reading

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Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions about what the Web is doing to our reading skills and to our intellects. As with many of these types of pieces, it’s really hard not to read this through the lens of what this means for our teaching and our curriculum, and I think there is little doubt it means a lot. Carr actually makes several similar points to Mark Bauerline in “The Dumbest Generation” (which I’m almost finished with, btw) with the difference that I honestly think he wants us to think deeply about what all of this means. (Bauerline just wants to call names and toss around blame, for the most part.)

Let me say that Carr’s description of how his own reading habits have changed resonate deeply:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Describes me to a tee, though I have to say there are still longer works (Shirky’s book most recently) that I find hard to put down. But the denser stuff, Wealth of Networks, for one example, I find tough any more. And there are some prominent edbloggers who I simply don’t read because of the length of their posts. In many ways, my own angst about this is why I am so thrilled that my own kids are reading books, that they are at least getting a sense of that extended, deep reading that longer works provide, even though I know that once they start really reading more online, that may change.

While there is little research to clearly paint a picture of what is going on in our heads, something is most definitely afoot. Carr cites a study that says

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

(Read the comment thread to my earlier post to get a sense of that debate.)

There’s more that’s equally compelling in terms of making the case that in all likelihood, the Web is changing the way we read. But the obvious question here is, what are the implications for us as educators whose students are reading more and more in online environments? I’m not suggesting that this type of reading is necessarily better or worse than our pre-Web worlds. I don’t think Carr is either; in fact he takes pains to point to moments in history when new technologies were created and roundly denounced only to see great gains in ways few could have predicted. Perhaps this is a step in our evolution as thinkers and learners. Who knows? But what I do know is that very few schools are thinking deeply about what this all means in terms of reading development and practice.

Maybe this article will jump start some conversations.

(Photo “Day 79-Focus” by Margolove.)

What, No Footprint?

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The other day, after reading a tweet from Dean Shareski about being upset that Shareski.com (I think it was) was already registered to someone else, I buzzed over the GoDaddy and snagged “tessrichardson.name” and “tuckerrichardson.name” for the next 10 years.

I’m expecting big things, kids.

On some weird level, I feel like this domain reserving thing is now a part of being a father, of providing as much opportunity as I can for my kids’ futures. And I know that sounds really, really silly to some, but I think I actually mean it. (I don’t think, however, as some are doing, I would pick a name for my child based on the domain being free…oy.) I wistfully imagine the day that Tess goes for a job interview and maybe gets some minor bump by the fact that she can pull up her own domain and start clicking through the wonderful work she’s created, the ways in which she’s been changing the world, and her vision of what’s to come.

A dad can dream, right? (Is Father’s Day this Sunday, btw?)

But I’ve been wondering how long it’s going to take until the digital footprint is an expectation rather than just an exception. Right now, for many folks, no footprint is a good footprint. But I wonder how long it’s going to take for employers or potential mates or whatever else to wonder “what, no footprint?” when they start looking around for one. As in “haven’t you been participating and doing good work that you want to share?” I tweeted out that same question today during a workshop and got some great responses that were literally all over the timeline. (Read from the bottom up.)

What a headshift this is for many of us, however. When I say to teachers “You want your kids to have a footprint” or “You want to have your own footprint” and suggest they embrace these ideas rather than avoid them, I can feel the discomfort. It goes against our best judgment, which, in this case, isn’t really best at all.

But I’ll just say it one more time for the heck of it. My kids are going to be Googled over and over, and when they are, I want tessrichardson.name and tuckerrichardson.name to come up at the top of the list. With any luck, whoever is looking will be impressed.

Get Your Nine Inch Nails Remix On

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This isn’t news to many, but this morning, the band Nine Inch Nails released its newest collection of music this morning as a free download with a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license. I’m not sure how realistic the all free music model is, but I really hope the “take this and make your own music” model sticks. It’s a great entry point for teaching kids about intellectual property and copyright, creativity, publishing, collaboration, etc. Obviously, it could mean kids making their own music videos, digital stories, etc.

Since I’m pretty ignorant in the music mashup process, however, (as well as many other things,) I’m wondering what makes it possible for anyone to add other vocals or instrumentals to these downloads. Is it the format? And can anyone point to a process that steps one through how to do it?

Waking Up With a "Cognitive Surplus"

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So it’s official. Clay Shirky is my new hero, right up there with Lessig in terms of spelling things out in ways that just make so much sense, and that actually cause butterflies in my stomach when my brain fully wraps around an idea and owns it. I loved his book, Here Comes Everybody, and I love the book blog almost as much, especially when he writes stuff like this.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

It’s an amazing essay that positions this shift just right, that we’re waking up from a collective TV watching bender that has created a “cognitive surplus” that’s just waiting to activated, and that we’re seeing the beginnings of that right now in our ability to participate. And that changes everything.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

It made me think of George Siemens’ recent post where he writes about being unable to state clearly exactly what it is that’s happening right now.

While people have always been able to do this, the scope and ease of collaborating and (hopefully) creating a multi-perspective information source is now greater than before. It just feels different to me. Like we’re still going through many of the motions I recall going through in the past with regard to information creation/sharing…but something fundamental is different. Can’t quite put my finger on it…

Shirky might say we’re shaking off the hangover and discovering a larger purpose for what we are creating and sharing. It feels different because it’s starting to feel like an expectation, not simply an option. As Shirky says

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Great, great essay. And lots of butterflies.

UPDATE: Just saw a tweet from Arthus that led to the video of Shirky’s talk. Cool!

Teaching Googleableness (Con't)

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From the “And These Teachers Got Hired How? Department” comes this downright scary quote in a Washington Post article on teachers with Facebook/MySpace sites:

In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Um…that kind of says it all, I think.

So who’s to blame? The schools that hired them? Their preservice programs? Their parents? Society? Technology? Or…

Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail

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From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…