I had an absolutely great time during my online session on RSS with the Webheads this morning. There were over 20 people from Europe, Asia, South and North America, and the Middle East that participated. The Elluminate Live software over at Learning Times is incredibly easy to use and really powerful for presentations like this. I was able to run some slides, take them on Web surfs, and narrate the whole thing as I went. I know they recorded it, and I’ll see if I can post a link if/when it’s up.

What was really interesting was the talking to an audience without seeing an audience part. It was almost like doing a somewhat interactive podcast. (Which, of course, is still on my list.)

Have I mentioned how much fun doing stuff like this with technology is? Have I???

UPDATE: The link to the presentation is up on the Learning Times site. You’ll need to do some configuring, but it’s all free.

This week starts a pretty busy couple of months of blogvangelism that should be both fun and interesting. It starts tomorrow with an online session with Webheads from around the world over at Learning Times. I’ll be webcasting about RSS and how it can be used in the classroom, and I’m really looking forward to interacting with a global audience. Then on Friday, it’s off to Bermuda to do a workshop on the Read/Write Web at the Whitney School in Hamilton. (I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to post some pretty pictures at Flickr.)

When I get back I’m doing a workshop on Weblogs in Higher Ed at William Patterson College in nearby Wayne, NJ. Then in March, I’m off to Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio Commons for Digital Education conference, Washington D.C. to keynote the Internet @ Schools East Conference and do a session at CIL as well, and then to Detroit for the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning Conference…all in the span of seven days. Whew. This is getting serious!

In the meantime, I’m hoping to start work in earnest on a project that I’ve been putting together for the last couple of months. Hopefully, it will be a process that will involve a lot of educators in the making. Good thing all of this is still so much fun…
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Last night we had dinner with some friends whose 12-year-old son is true digital native. He brought with him his dad’s G-4 notebook, his i-Pod, and his wireless mouse, plopped himself down at our dining room table, and cranked up Garage Band. He played us a couple of his compositions, and promised to show us all how to create a new one after dinner.

Now, I knew Josh was ahead of the curve on most things technological, but I really thought that I could one up him with the whole Podcasting concept. Guess again. He’d already tried a couple using Garage Band, and I he promised to compose some intro music for me for my next Podcast (whenever that might be.) I did feel pretty proud of myself when I schooled him on how to get an RSS feed for his Podcasts, something he hadn’t been able to figure out. Oh yeah. Uh-huh. (He probably hadn’t been able to find the 30 seconds needed to go to Feedburner and do it.)

After we ate, Josh unfolded his laptop and got to work. And I just watched in amazement. Now I know that he’s not the only kid out there doing this, but I have to tell you, it was pretty obvious that he just gets this in ways that I will never get it, no matter how much work and practice I want to put into it. He laid a bass track, then drums, then guitar. Then he had us all do some voice riffs, did a little mixing and cutting, and before I knew it we were all snapping our fingers to this very cool, homemade music track that sounded pretty darn good.

The whole experience was just fun to watch. We were creating. We were learning. We were thinking hard about how to make it good. Very cool.

Now, when is someone going to create a Garage Band for PC? I mean c’mon, my daughter is seven. She’s ready to go!

So I got up early and did some site sprucing, namely updating the Practices page that I have been totally neglecting. That’s because I hadn’t added my Furl feed for the classroom or school sites that I have been finding lately. Now that I have, there are 94 links on the page, and it will be automatically updated as I Furl along.

—–

It’s been a long week. Way too much thinking. I’m tired. So instead of holding forth on some convoluted idea in my brain, here instead is a list of some edu-blogs I’ve Furled of late.

Chico Christian Middle School
AuburnWiki
Apple Students Blog
Simmons College Student Blogs
The Future of Mathematics which today has some ideas about Flickr in the classroom.
Networked Rhetorics from Syracuse U.
English 120 from Iona College.
Spartan Weblog from Durham, NC.
Ohio State Website Redesign Blog
Kew Forest (NY) Spanish
Wilson High School

Go Blogs (and wikis), Go!

More about learning about your passion to gain a passion for learning…

Found this really great post (via Robert Patterson) at a new blog called Creating Passionate Users that just struck every chord in my brain regarding what’s wrong with classroom instruction:

The best learning occurs in a stimulating, active, challenging, interesting, engaging environment. It’s how the brain works. The best learning occurs when you move at least some part of your body. The best learning occurs when you’re actively involved in co-constructing knowledge in your own head, not passively reading or listening. (Taking notes doesn’t really count as being actively involved.)
People complain that their kids can’t pay attention in school, then their kid comes home and spends two hours studying the elaborate world of Halo 2. Reading, absorbing, problem solving, using sophisticated mental maps, and on it goes.
When learning is “presented” in a push model, your brain says, “This is SO not important.” You’re in for the battle of your life when you try to compete against the brain’s natural instinct to scan for unusual, novel, possibly life-threatening or life-enhancing things.
Forcing people to sit in a chair and listen (or read) dry, formal words (with perhaps only a few token images thrown in) is the slowest, least effective, and most painful path to learning.
Yet it’s the approach you see replicated in everything from K-12, to universities, to adult/corporate training.

Mercy.

Go and read about the school the author’s daughter went to for the first six years of her education and you’ll see where I was at a couple of days ago. Kids need to be allowed to pursue their passions. Actually, we all do. I have a passion for blogs. Well, guess what? Blogs aren’t just technology. They’re social studies (citizenship, collaboration, politics, geography, democracy, history), art (graphic design, video, photo, music), English (writing, reading, editing, researching), technology (programming, software, peripherals), mathematics (algebra (i.e resizing), geometry, statistics), world languages, business, etc. I learn about all of those subjects in the context of my passion. Which is why I’ve said all along, this isn’t about blogging, it’s about learning.

And regarding adult learning opportunities:

One of the biggest mistakes adult learning programs and learners can make, in my opinion, is to use traditional school as the model. It doesn’t work for kids, and it doesn’t work for adults. Because it doesn’t work for the brain. I know there are enormous challenges and pressures for delivering public school learning (that so many teachers don’t have the option or power to change), but most adult education programs that follow the same poor model don’t have those excuses. In many cases, adult classroom training looks like school just because that’s how it always looks. There are a lot of interesting and wonderful exceptions in the adult learning world, of course, and a lot of novel things being done with everything from arrangement of chairs in the room to the role of the instructor as facilitator rather than “teacher”, and I’ll say more on that later.

But for the most part, we’re still using the same approach that, given the pace of information change today, is even LESS useful than it was in the past. We need a big change.

Can I get an “Amen”?

(BTW…on the tiny steps path to this more effective model, my daughter’s book is now online at Flickr. It’s a start…)

Losing our accents, that is. From Amy Bowllan’s Kew Forest Libra/Tech Blog:

Why am I so…”oh myish?” Well , I know just 5 years ago I could never have received soooo MUCH information without jumping through hoops. The educational blogs also let me know that there are communities of people ALL OVER THE WORLD sharing information and appreciating where we are in the 21st century. Please take your time while you sift through these web sites. You will find yourself saying “Oh My! There’s so much out there! Get me a Furl, bookmark or the good ol pen and paper. Now….I’m off to try and climb through this mountain of educational tools.

—–

Digital, that is. From Jenny Levine:

Here’s the punchline, though. As I was reading the essay, the kids came home and Kailee excitedly told me how today her class had watched a video of President Bush’s inauguration.We talked about it for a while, and then I asked how they had watched the video, wondering if the teacher had grabbed a webcast. But no, Kailee said a relative of her teacher had recorded it on video and lent it to her, which really surprised Kailee. She didn’t know you could record onto videotape, because she has grown up with digital video recorders (DVRs) in the house. She then proceeded to tell me her theory that the relative must have set up a video camera in front of the TV and pointed it at the screen in order to capture the video, even though the whole setup sounded rather silly. She laughed and laughed and laughed at that thought.

Oy.
—–

My brain hurts. Sometimes there are just too many interesting, intensely profound ideas floating around out there. What did I do BB? (Before blogs…)

This is going to be one of those work-it-through, brain dump type posts that probably won’t make much sense and rightfully shouldn’t even see the light of day without more polish, but, what the heck. We had a snow day yesterday. I’m feeling brave.

My zeal for the potential of Weblogs, wikis, RSS etc. is born almost entirely from my reflective self that is constantly amazed at the way these tools have transformed my learning first and my teaching second. This is pure passion for new ideas, for stimulated thought, for dreaming. It is in many ways intoxicating and exhausting. But I really feel like for the first time in my life, I’m getting the most out of my brain.

While I’ve tapped my intrinsic motivation to learn, (which I believe all of us have for subjects that interest us) there is equally intense extrinsic motivation to be a part of a community of learners that is sharing this struggle of ideas with me. They are equally engaged in their passions, and we’re able to connect to each other by our blogs and our feeds. This community shares little if any resemblance to the traditional classroom community whose members are motivated neither by the intrinsic joy of pursuing their passions nor the extrinsic pull of being a part of a larger effort to learn.

My learning occurs in the context of a shared construction of meaning. In isolation, meaning-making ends once the meaning is made. In this online community, meaning is never totally made or finished. It evolves and grows, nurtured by the community. Ironically, I used to preach to my Expository Composition students that a piece of writing was never really finished, that they could pick it up again and make new meaning. But we all knew the lie inherent in that promise. It was handed in. It was assessed. It was finished. Not so in this space, however.

I want my own children who are just 5 and 7 to share this passion. But I see it already being bled out of them by well-meaning teachers who are bound by a system that nurtures conformity rather than creativity. I have few choices when it comes to where my kids go to school, but I know I have many choices as a parent in the ways I nurture and support their own learning. My daughter blogs. She constructs. She publishes. And I want her, eventually, to find her own community. (This goes for my second-child-syndrome son too, by the way.)

Aaron, who has been on a brain bender lately, says “Clearly then, there is an immediate need for educators to find ways to allow students to follow their intrinsic interests in the context of the classroom.” This REALLY makes my brain hurt. He’s right. But what a huge, huge task. So, my first job is to facilitate that at home, at least, in the bigger classroom that is the Internet. That’s where the real learning opportunities seem to be happening.

So, we’ve established (haven’t we?) that reading what people write is now only half of the fun on the Read/Write Web. Even more importantly, it’s only half of the learning. The other half is reading what people read.

Blogs were a start in the RWOR front due to the deep linking that blogging (v.) usually builds upon. To read blogs well is to many times find yourself clicking through sites following a thread of an idea, watching it de-evolve back to the original post. This entails a different kind of reading literacy, one that requires quick assessment of source reputation, skimming for main ideas, and the ability to synthesize snippets of information from many sources into coherent ideas (one of the skills developed from blogging (v.)) Along the way, many times you find other good sources or posts to either file away for future use and perhaps blog about later.

But now, I can subscribe not only to what people write; I can subscribe to what people read. So, not only do I get what, say Alan Levine is writing about. I also get what he’s been reading and found interesting enough to save into his Furl account. Same with del.icio.us. If I track those feeds, I learn quite a bit. First, the links that Alan saves give me information that I can use to further guage Alan’s reputation as a source. And his reputation is everything. As Tom says, it’s the people in the network that are the keys (which is why he’s not happy when people do too much Furling…he wants that commentary that blogging requires.) That’s not to say that Alan would save bad sources. But he may save things that I find generally irrelevant, which would diminish his use to me as a source (though not necessarily his reputation.)

Second, of course, if his links are relevant, I find more new sources and more good reading. Which in turn leads to more good sources and links. Which at some point requires me to sift through my sources and cut some of them loose, all the while raising the quality of my blogroll and the focus of the information. So, reading what he reads ultimately raises the level of my own learning.

Third, his “irrelevant” links can introduce me to new ideas and applications of the technology. This is, in fact, one of the reasons I especially like Alan’s blog/Furl.del.icious content. This post on Bit Torrents is a good example of incrementally stretching my scope. His Furls on the topic are where I go to start to learn more.

Alan is certainly not the only source I use in this way; I’ve subscribed to the readings of eight others as well. At this point, however, while I always check the writing in the blogroll, I’m not as consistent with these reading rolls. But I find myself more and more making time for these feeds in lieu of others. Must mean they’re getting more and more valuable.
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Lately, there have been a couple times when I went to check my Bloglines account only to have it either take an inordinately long time to come up or, god forbid, not come up at all. Like just now. Given what’s a pretty great record in terms of always being there, I’m not too worried. But it does make me realize how dependent I am on my aggregator these days. Literally makes me queasy.

I need an online feedreader because I shift between two or three computers on a fairly regular basis. Plus, I just like knowing that no matter what may break on my tablet, which is what I’m using now, I’ll still be able to get to my subs. That is unless my subs can’t get to me.

Good news…it’s back up. I feel better. I’ve saved my OPML. If you’re a Bloglines user, you should too.

My how times are changing.

(via Scripting News) The BBC has an article that says blogs and education are starting to find some roots. And, in what seems to be a growing trend, it asserts that Weblogs are effective tools for learning, saying they are a “strong tool for rapid knowledge development,” and that they “open new opportunities for students and staff.” Nice.
—–

In the process of working through out technology plan at our school,
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to frame the directions that the
Read/Write Web is taking learning. The other day, in fact, a colleague
and I did a presentation for our Ed Tech Committee outlining the
pedagogies and “toolpaths” that we see coming down the road.

Stephen Powell posted this model of learning on his site last week and it captures a lot of my own thinking as well:

So much of this is driven by what we can now do with the Internet: we
can learn everywhere, at any time, and we decide what we want to
pursue. There is so much more that is at my daughter’s fingertips than
was available to me. The key is how to help her become driven to learn
and use all of these resources. It didn’t really happen to me until
well into my 30s. And the Internet has had so much to do with it. It
really amazes me.

I also love the last two lines in the table, the idea that teachers are
not just facilitators but co-learners with their kids, and that the
whole point of education is to be a better global citizen. Both remind
me of Alan November who says that we should never be asking questions
we know the answers to, and that we should be teaching kids how to be
stewards of the Earth. Amen to that.
—–

Sometimes it takes me a little while to get my brain wrapped around all these new ideas, and the one I’ve been struggling with a bit lately is the concept of tagging and folksonomies and the like. I love that f-word, the idea that we can create our own taxonomies for the information we find relevant. We’re creating our own personal libraries with our own personal filing systems. I can tag Flickr posts and del.icio.us links not only to give them relevance for me but to associate them with what other like-minded folks are saving and posting. I’ve even started tagging my Web Notes as a way to easily find them when “filter” my pages. (Of course, this means that I’ve also been keeping up a list of tags so I can make better connections of ideas. It’s not as hard as it sounds…)

The rub comes when our own folksonomies don’t exactly meet up with other people’s folksonomies. And even more, when they render traditional taxonomies irrelevant. I’ve been bumping that around in my head the last few days, and then today I found this post by Jenny Levine (via Stephen Cohen) that just made it all come together:

They’ll have other impacts on libraries, too, though, especially services like Flickr and del.icio.us that let users tag items with their own vocabularies. When someone gets used to retrieving items using the words they think of, not the words we think of, do you think they’ll still be willing to type “LastName, FirstName” to find an author? Will they understand a title search that accepts exact phrases only? (Those are rhetorical questions and the correct answers are “no” and “no,” even if you offer keyword searching hidden elsewhere on your catalog.)

So how could we make better use of the integration of folksonomies and user-based vocabularies? I’m not suggesting we throw the bath water out with the baby, because I’m also a big fan of structured searching, and let’s face it – one of the things Google isn’t good at is searching structured data. But why can’t we offer both? They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Why can’t our catalogs let users find items of interest and then store them for later retrieval using their own tags. Take a look at this Flickr page for architecture. Notice the “related” and “see also” links? The same thing happens on the del.icio.us page for architecture. Imagine the display of this type of folksonomy integrated into a library’s catalog, so that users could find titles and subjects for “architecture,” but they could also browse by tags (such as “buildings” or “urban”), which they could then bookmark themselves and specify as “public” or “private” (like Furl’s “private archive” feature). Aggregate the public tags and let users access their private ones.

This is the future of search, not only getting back what the database says is relevant but associating with what other people think is relevant as well. And this is what has been bouncing in my brain, this idea that if we really want to be information literate anymore, we not only need to be able to find and evaluate a relevant source, we need to be able to find and evaluate other people out there who have similar interests and by reputation can inform our own search. We need to subscribe to those people. That’s the gist of it. It’s all collaborative, all of us working as editors and filters for each other. Like a huge organism of networked people behind the ideas we’re tracking.

Ok, maybe that’s a little much. (I’m sure Tom is streching his fingers by now.) But that’s the sense I’m getting. I need to work through it more, but in there somewhere is, I think, an important truth waiting to be found…

And if none of that really matters to you, you still have to read this fascinating description of the ESP Game which is the test your skill at folksonomies game. More, much more on all of this to come, I’m sure.

James Farmer has an interesting post about how students might use blogs to manage their learning. Here’s a snippet:

However, if that learner has their own blog ‘outside’ of the central, managed environment then things can start to look a bit different. Let’s say that in this case they are studying four units and they can simply create categories for each one (so postings relevant to that unit can go there and to their main blog if appropriate), that that category is then aggregated into the ‘central’ area (where unit guides, copyrighted study materials, core materials etc. can also be found) and that this blog also serves as a portfolio cum social tool for the student in question (as each learner has also been furnished with their own aggregator). The student in question owns the content, they are able to develop their blog as they choose and do with their content as they please, they are able to develop an online presence over an extended period of time and become parts of communities through their blog (communities that will form as naturally as communities form in f2f college) and they are able to subvert the technology in many wonderful ways (podcasting, photoblogging, vogging etc. etc.). It’s also their responsibility… and that is a great teacher in itself.

I’ve always thought that the most efficient model for using blogs in schools would be the one that collects student work from all courses and then feeds it out by categories to teacher aggregators. That way students build an online archive and ultimately, perhaps, portfolio of work throughout their schooling. Teachers simply subscribe to the relevant content from each student blog and comment back as necessary.

What James reminds me, however, is the importance of making the site truly one’s own by allowing students to develop the look of their sites and add personal experiences and artifacts as they see fit. Really, the blog should be something not only outside of the cms, it should be outside of school altogether. I mean how many of the 8 million + bloggers out there blog because their schools are asking them to? This is my blog, but this is a place where I think and learn a heckuva lot, and I’m not doing it for school. And so it should be.

We should encourage students to have online learning environments from which we as teachers can pull the relevant bits. That way we’ll be creating lifelong learning spaces, just like real bloggers do.