(Cross posted on ETI) Lately, I’ve been doing more worrying about the TMI syndrome. Too Much Information. It’s great phrase to use when someone tells you just a bit too much about their hygiene habits, but it’s also something that I think all of us in education and technology are grappling with these days. Anne’s post a couple of days ago regarding the new info lit test being put out by ETS gets to some of the TMI problem, the part that says we need to teach kids how to separate the wheat from the chaff. But my problem is a bit different.

I have this weird gene that makes me love research, and I’ve been figuring out ways to find good information for a long time. The problem is that with the explosion of information in general out there on the Internet these days, there has also come an explosion of good information. You can take the ETI blog as a perfect example. The people who write there are all smart, dedicated educators (well, most of them) who are adding good information to the database that is the Internet. Just a couple of years ago, they couldn’t do that. Add to that another few hundred equally information rich new blogs and wikis and the like and you get the idea. There’s lots of good stuff out there, there’s more coming online every day, and I want to consume it all.

So here’s my issue. I’m peddling about as fast as I can to keep up with all of it. I’ve got my own blog where I hold forth on what I think is the most important stuff. I’ve got a Furl and a del.icio.us account where I store links and pages. I’ve got about a half dozen Webnotes where I dump random thoughts and snippets. I’ve got a Bloglines account where I store ideas for future writing. And the list goes on.

And it’s not working.

It’s not working because a) there’s too much good stuff and, b) while all of the tools are great, they’re not integrated the way I need them to be. I need one space to put my stuff. (I wonder if George Carlin has thought about this?) I can almost visualize it, the look and feel…drag and dropability, searchable, smooth jazz playing in the background. I need it to be on the Web since I use two or three different computers in my day. And I need it fast.

Now I know we need to focus on teaching people how to find the good stuff. But if there isn’t a way to manage all that stuff once they find it, we’re only winning half the battle.

Now I just know there are all sorts of stories out there like this one just waiting to be told…Right???

Since English teacher Stacey O’Donnell embraced blogging as a teaching tool, the days of ducked assignments and terse essays are long gone. She can’t get her students to stop writing.

“If there were only questions and a notebook, they’d say, ‘I did it. It’s done. That’s it,’ ” said O’Donnell, 32. “But this keeps raising the bar.”

English teachers at North Salem High School were the first to experiment with blogs, the wildly popular and increasingly influential Web logs that are the latest Internet contribution to personal and public communication. They made entries part of graded class work and homework.

It worked so well, they talked it up to their colleagues.

From English, the program spread to the science department. Now the middle school is exploring the blogging possibilities.

“The goal is to expand education beyond the classroom,” said English Department Chairman Nick Kowgios. “It’s very powerful, especially for kids who don’t speak much in class. This gives them a voice.”

Keep reading…

Go, blogs, go.

I realize I’m on a bit of a journalism bender here lately, but I can’t help myself, especially when Jay Rosen announces that the debate is officially ended.

Bloggers vs. journalists is over. I don’t think anyone will mourn its passing. There were plenty who hated the debate in the first place, and openly ridiculed its pretensions and terms. But events are what did the thing in at the end. In the final weeks of its run, we were getting bulletins from journalists like this one from John Schwartz of the New York Times, Dec. 28: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”

And so we know they’re journalism– sometimes. They’re even capable, at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big Journalism at its own game. Schwartz said so. The tsunami story is the biggest humanitarian disaster ever in the lifetimes of most career journalists and the blogs were somehow right there with them.

The question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers “are” journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. By “events” I mean things on the surface we can see, like the tsunami story, and things underneath that we have yet to discern.

I reeaalllly wish I could be at Harvard this weekend, but the aggregated feeds and the webcast will just have to do. And besides, now that I have my iPod, I’m sure Doug Kaye and IT Conversations will be making it all downloadable in short order.

In the never ending search for more mixes and matches of blogs, RSS and “real” news come two pretty creative (I think) entries to the tool box in Memeorandum and Newsmap.

Let me just say that Memeorandum, which takes ral headlines and displays them above blogger reactions, is especially interesting to me as it’s the first step down the road of bringing blogs and old media together in the “newfangled news tangle” format. I like having the news next to the views; I only wish there was some way that I could select which news items I’m interested in and the bloggers whose opining I’d like to follow. It’s also another step down the RSS as textbook road that David Warlick had (brought here via Jenny, who wants
David and I to do some brainstorming… another great idea!) I was thinking about how easily teachers could whip up some feeds about current events i.e. the tsunami disaster for example. Glue together a search feed or two from the traditional media, a flickr feed for pictures and some select blogger feeds, throw them onto a public Bloglines account and in no time you have the beginnings of a text that is constantly being updated. (Then have the students pull out the best info into their own Wikipedia type entry, and…)

My head hurts. (But it’s a good pain.)

Now Newsmap is “an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.” At first it seems like just a bunch of colorful headlines from around the world. But the cool thing is you can click through and get views from a variety of countries, putting them side by side, showing how different stories play in different places. It’s along the lines of 10×10 only it’s more text than pictures and it’s much more informational. You can even go back in time to see what what news when and watch how it evolved out of importance. I’m not sure I would use it regularly, but I just like the creativity, the way someone has decided to push the technology into a new area.

Have I mentioned how much fun this is?
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Kevin Delaney asks the question and answers it with blogs, wikis, RSS and the like.

Pioneering teachers are getting their classes to post writing assignments online so other students can easily read and critique them. They’re letting kids practice foreign languages in electronic forums instead of pen-and-paper journals. They’re passing out PDAs to use in scientific experiments and infrared gadgets that let students answer questions in class with the touch of a button. And in the process, the educators are beginning to interact with students, parents and each other in ways they never have before.

Very cool, especially since many in our community including Tim Wilson, Tim Lauer and yours truly are featured, as well as a nice mix of other teachers using other interesting technologies. Wish I could post the whole thing here, but you know how copyright is. Time to fire up the ProQuest account, if you have access to one.

A few other excerpts of note:

Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., also uses Web-based publishing technology to open up new possibilities in communication. Fifth-graders send classwork, and essays and articles for their monthly newspaper, to a wiki over the school’s network. Teacher Kathy Gould goes to the Web page and writes corrections and comments directly into the text — instead of posting a note in a separate “comments” section, as with a blog. Students can then access the wiki to read and respond to her comments.

How neat is that?

Some school administrators caution that much of the new technologies’ educational value has yet to be proved by any academic research. Some schools have slowed teachers’ efforts to introduce blogging in particular because of concern about what students might write, and be exposed to, online.

Technology presents other problems. Teachers have to learn it themselves and then figure out how it can serve the ultimate goal of teaching the curriculum. And, of course, students sometimes use computers to cheat, harass other kids or just waste time.

But grass-roots tech advocates say that they see improved learning already, even if formal studies to support that don’t yet exist. And others say that as kids get more tech-sophisticated, they have no choice but to experiment with new ways of teaching their curriculum.

Ok, have I broken the law yet?

I’m not sure I could do the following from Dave Pollard justice, at least not without thinking about it for a few days (weeks?) But it seems worth noting nonetheless:

Last, but certainly not least, is this remarkable statement from blogger Rob Paterson on the utility of blogging: “The utility of blogging to me is that it is recreating the lost world of a humanity that is connected to itself and hence to everything.” Rob and I and a group of bloggers have been working on a compendium of our best and most important work, and we’ve been exchanging ideas on a theme or shared vision for the book. I suggested that, if it’s going to sell, the book needs to have utility to the reader, especially the reader who barely knows what a blog (or online journalism) is. Rob identified three ‘values’ of blogging to him personally: Finding one’s voice; Noticing what gives and what drains one’s energy; Redefining the meaning of work as a function of community and fellowship instead of wage slavery. So he’s saying, and I agree with him, that blogging (the participation in the conversation as both a journal reader and writer) re-centres you, frees you from being like, and seeing the world like, everyone else, and allows you to see the world and yourself differently, more profoundly (for better and for worse), and hence to liberate yourself and take charge of your own life. Self-awareness, self-reliance, and the personal liberation that comes from deep knowledge. Could there possibly be a higher utility for anything?

Whoa.
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I think about the evolution of blogs as serious news sources probably way more than I should, but as an educator and journalism junkie, I can’t help but try to figure out what effect bloggers are going to have in terms of media literacy and consumption. I’m in the camp that says traditional journalism has some serious problems ahead, that more and more, forms of participatory journalism are going to cover the news that people consume. I think by and large that people who do any thinking at all about their sources of news have lost faith in the accuracy and trustworthiness of what’s being reported. It’s just becoming way too hard to separate fact from opinion and story from advertising. Trouble is, of course, is that there are too many people who don’t give what they read or hear a second thought.

William Safire opines about the usefulness of bloggers in a journalistic sense today at the New York Times. He suggests that as advertising grows, bloggers will come in from the “meanstream to the mainstream” to eventually deliver “serious analysis and fresh information.” But then he says this:

On national or global events, however, the news consumer needs trained reporters on the scene to transmit facts and trustworthy editors to judge significance. In crises, large media gathering-places are needed to respond to a need for national community.

That just strikes me as so typical of what we expect from Americans as citizens of the world. Study after study shows that we have no real pulse on the rest of the world to begin with. Ask what Gaza is and most people will probably tell you it’s a big band aid. We can’t keep track of what happens in Kansas much less in Kiev. So, Safire says that yes, we can use our brains to sift through American news, but on that oh so foreign international front, we should just sit back and get the regular spoon feed of ideas and information.

Bunk, I say.

Look, we have an opportunity here to really teach ourselves and our kids to be active consumers of news, and in doing so, to be better informed and better prepared for the troubles that certainly lie ahead. And there is a new formula evolving for doing just that. It’s built on the idea that lots of amateur reader/editors can do just as good if not better job than a few professional ones who are beholden to some company or some stock. It says that this isn’t just an American thing, that it works the same way around the world. And it says that the “The Daily Me” really is now the responsibility of all of us; we need to find and construct our own newspapers, aggregated from RSS feeds and the like.

I know that it’s much, much more complicated than that. And I also know that most people aren’t going to want to put in the time. But I’m also hoping that we can use the vast amounts of information and news that we now have at our fingertips to show students how interesting the world really is.

Aaron Campbell, Barbara Dieu and Graham Stanley are putting on a six-week online workshop titled “Using Weblogs in ESL/EFL Classes:
New Developments, Uses, and Challenges”. Anne and I will be leading chats at points, mine on RSS in the classroom. There are over 150 participants from all over the world, and I’m really interested to see how it’s all going to work. The leaders have done an amazing job of organizing it, and I’m happy to have been asked to be a part of it because I’m once again learning about a lot of online collaboration sites like TappedIn, Alado, and Learning Times that I haven’t really used before.

One note about the Yahoo group where the participants are meeting before the class begins. I haven’t used a newsgroup like that in quite a while, and now I remember why. There are over 275 messages coming fast and furious. And even though there is an RSS feed for the group, only the first two lines get aggregated, so it’s pretty much useless. (Is there a way to change Yahoo feeds that maybe I don’t know about?) Actually, now that I think about it, maybe it’s not the group but the feed I’m having trouble dealing with.

At any rate, should be a great experience…

From the Tools that We Want Dept. comes this entry from Dave Gilbert at Marymount College:

Podilicious is an imagined social search engine and clips manager for the Podosphere. The design of Podilicious is based on successful social software such as del.icio.us (its namesake), Flickr, and Furl.

That’s just the beginning. His overview page offers screenshots of how Podlicious would add snippets of our favorite podcasts to our personal “clip bins” which could be shared with other like-minded folk by way of the meta tags we attach. So, for instance, you could subscribe to the “Internet Tools” clip bin and collect the relevant cuts in iTunes to be loaded onto your iPod to be listened to at your leisure.

Oh, the humanity!

Now Dave says he’s no developer, but he’s developed a pretty fascinating idea. Maybe there is someone out there who can bring it to life???
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Barbara Ganley’s recent post about how the tool is becoming indistinguishable from the course makes it clear just how far down the blog road she has travelled.

The deeper into this classroom blogging I get, the more I cannot disentangle the pedagogy from the blogging–to talk about blogs means to talk about student-centered learning, collaborative knowledge spaces, constructivist pedagogy FIRST. Teaching with blogs the way I do–which means not applying them piecemeal but integrating them fully in all their messy, flexible, fluid promise– means you have to let go of control of the classroom, give up the stage and create opportunities for learning magic to occur. The trick is to weave the learning and the tool so seamlessly together that the blog is the class and the class finds the blog indispensible.

That paragraph in itself is pretty amazing and heady, especially for us down here in K-12 land. But that seems to me where the technology is leading us. And I truly think that Barbara and others like her may lead us to a better understanding of what the messy, student centered, student authored curriculum looks like.

Aaron Campbell has a great response to this when he says

…when discussing the possiblity of using them with other educators, we should consider to what extent we are willing to have blogs play such a central role in the classroom learning we facilitate. If we see ourselves, the teachers, as central to the learning process, there is no way that blogs can live up to their potential as constructivist tools. They necessitate learner driven use to work well.

It’s interesting that I seem to be seeing this thread of thinking more and more, and I think it’s got to be because of the learning opportunities that the Read/Write Web offers. I love the idea that so many teachers are starting to think in these terms and that they are starting to rethink their roles in the classroom. We can’t keep telling kids what to say, we have to show them how they can say whatever is meaningful to them and then work hard, as Barbara does, to make connections and sift out whatever answers appear.

As both Aaron and Barbara ask, however, which comes first, the tools or the pedagogy? The easy answer is that the pedagogy should drive the decisions about tools. But these days, the tools offer ways to really transform the pedagogy in ways we haven’t even begun to think about yet. That’s what Barbara is immersed in. And that’s what we’ll need more of to realize whatever potential there is.
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Ok, so this is my new concept, podblogging in the sense of listening to podcasts and then capturing the best of what’s in there in a blog post. It’s the same filtering process that regular blogging entails, but with audio. If I could find someone to listen to all the great stuff that’s being produced and yank out just the good parts, well…let’s just say I’d be really happy.

This week, I listened to two great podcasts. The latest Gillmor Gang covered all sorts of interesting topics, but there were a few moments when Doc Searles and the rest were talking about the meaning of this media revolution that were not to be missed. Here’s a quote from Doc:

“[We're seeing the] podization of everything. You get whatever you want from whomever you want and there’s nothing stopping you from producing or consuming, from buying or selling, and that everyone gets to play.”

Here’s a four-minute snippet you can listen to if you like.

The other snippet I grabbed was from the Pop Tech presentation of Doug Rushkoff last fall. (Both of these are via the most excellent ITC Conversations site, btw.) He was speaking on a Next Renaissance, and one of his ideas was the “Society of Authorship” that we are now entering. A quote:

“Meaning is made through collaboration, by connecting with other people… The next Renaissance teaches us first that we are writing the human story, we are responsible for the human story. We are doing it, writing it in real time whether we know it or not. And most importantly, that we have the ability now to write it together.”

Here’s 3:30 of audio to give it more context.

I have to say I’m really liking being able to listen to quality content like this while I’m doing my 20-minute commute. These are a couple of what I would call “Big Ideas”. Making me think. Thinking is good…

In the never ending search for RSS search feeds, it appears MSN now allows you to subscribe to the results of your query. If you haven’t gotten your brain wrapped around this concept, you need to. Right now. You can be researching 24/7 if you have RSS feeds which are bringing search results to you (or your students). Enter your search once, create the feed, plop it in your aggregator and sit back and watch what happens.

I just love this stuff. Really. I do.

Actually, if you haven’t played with the fairly new MSN Search tool, you might want to check it out. The search builder tool makes it easy to focus your results by terms, location, domain, language and, even more importantly, by how recent and how popular the source of the result is. You can go and watch the build of your query, but if you don’t want to leave your aggregator, here’s what my search for “library and wiki” looks like:

wiki library loc:US language:en {mtch=100} {popl=84} {frsh=81}

Terms, location, language, 100% match, must be in the 84th percentile of popularity and 81st in freshness. The URL ends up looking like this:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM=QBRE

Now, if I want to subscribe to that search, I just add “&format=rss” to the URL, like so:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=wiki+library+loc%3AUS+language
%3Aen+%7Bmtch%3D100%7D+%7Bpopl%3D84%7D+%7Bfrsh%3D81%7D&FORM
=QBRE&format=rss

Pop that in my Bloglines account and I’m a happy researcher. Whaddaya know? I’ll keep you posted on how relevant that search turns out…

If you believe as I do that the Internet will continue to become the dominant technology tool for schools, then the new Pew Internet study on the future of the Web is must reading, particularly the part on the future of formal education. Here is the scenario they offered and asked whether the experts agreed. (57% did):

Enabled by information technologies, the pace of learning in the next decade will increasingly be set by student choices. In ten years, most students will spend at least part of their “school days” in virtual classes, grouped online with others who share their interests, mastery, and skills.

If they’d asked me, I’d say that eventually schooling will look like this. But there’s no way it will happen in ten years. If there is one thing that I have been struck by since becoming immersed in these new technologies it is how slowly educators have been implementing them in the their classrooms. And, I may be wrong, but I am absolutely convinced that the collaboration and information management opportunities that these tools facilitate will change much of what we do in the classroom. Schools have to find ways to nurture an individual student’s talents and passions, and one way to do that is through online communities of practice. I’ve said this before also, but I really think it’s going to be more important for teachers to be learning facilitators than subject matter experts. The classroom should be exploration not restricted by what’s in a text. These are all tools for exploration.

Some other interesting responses that I agree with just for the heck of it:

The new National Technology Plan was released last week. I love this part:

Yet students of almost any age are far ahead of their teachers in computer literacy, according to the report, which is based on comments from thousands of students, teachers, administrators and education groups. Students say they see this knowledge gap daily…

Students across the country see technology as an essential part of their lives, yet the primary place most of them gain access to it is at home, not at school, the report said.

The plan lists seven steps to changing things around, among them leadership and bringing content online. They also note that students are behind their international counterparts. There’s even what they are calling a blog that goes along with the site where people can comment. Problem is, they have no clue what a blog really is.

There is much to go through, and I’m just capturing the bare essence here, but basically, it feels like more of the same. I mean the goals are all well and good, but without a fundamental change that focuses on experiential, constructivist learning instead of test taking 101, this will never happen:

This is an exciting, creative and transforming era for students, teachers, administrators, policymakers and parents. The next 10 years could see a spectacular rise in achievement – and may usher in a new golden age for American education.

Oy.

Today I observed a Spanish classroom. I watched as the teacher used the following technologies: blackboard, cassette recorders, overhead projector, CD player. She did a great job with all of them, given the circumstances. But I couldn’t help think as I watched her class what it would be like if the kids had their own iPods and Weblogs and computers.

Each night, the teacher could post any audio files she was planning to use which iTunes would download onto the student’s iPods. Students could listen to the files before class which would make them more prepared to discuss them during class. The teacher could also post some questions for students to respond to using their iPods which they would then dump onto their computers and post to their own blogs. The evening’s homework would be for each student to give feedback in writing to three of his/her classmates on their blogs. On occasion, the teacher could even record responses to the posts, creating a kind of asynchronous audio conversation. Those audio files put up by the students could at some point be shared with native speakers for even more feedback.

Using the iPods, students could easily create oral narratives in Spanish as they moved around campus or even around town. They could collect some of the better narratives in a best practices blog where future classes would be able to listen and respond to them. Every now and then, as a treat from the teacher, she could also post some Spanish music that could be collected onto the iPods while the children slept. (Sounds so poetic.)

Aye Ca-rumba. The possibilities! Now I’m not saying my school can’t get there, but it won’t be anytime very soon. And unfortunately, you won’t find much to support that in the new tech plan, which, for all intents and purposes, seems pretty much rooted in sustaining the NCLB model for preparing a country of factory workers; everyone knows the same stuff and has the same skills. Does anyone see the irony in educating kids for jobs which are being shipped offshore? And I mean really, what relevance do iPods and blogs have for standardized tests, anyway? Right? Way too risky.

What’s even more ironic (scary? sad?) is that we have an educational system that still asks students to basically try to learn independently (they work collaboratively but seldom learn) and use that learning to impress a very limited audience of teachers. Meanwhile, what the real world expects are students that are able to truly learn through collaboration and share that learning with large, extended audiences for meaningful purposes.

One not so funny true story. My wife works with a programmer who moved his family over from India to the US about 10 years ago. His son took his SATs last year and scored a 950. The father was amazed. Back in India, it seems, the kid’s cousin had scored a 1500, and she was taking them over. “How can that happen?” he asked his son. “We’re in the same family!” The son’s reply? “The difference is, Dad, she wants to get to America. I’m already here.”

Oy.

So this is the potential of the Read/Write Web in the hands of creative educators:

This project is based around stories. The idea quite simply is to let young people tell each other stories and by doing so share experiences, analyse and create a new sort of learning. Using old and new technologies the project will bring young people from around the world together into a virtual learning space where they can share, talk and learn.

In its pilot phase, young people from the Anglo European School (AES), and contemporaries from a school or educational establishment in ‘The Third World’ will create a website and a magazine focused around issues of global citizenship.
The site will be designed to enable young people to create new pages and links without any knowledge of computer programming or design. The site will also enable participants to add content direct from their mobile phone. Running alongside the site will be a high-quality print magazine offering content in attractive, easily accessible and portable formats.

The project is deeply rooted in the existing work of the school, the children and the management. It is also deeply rooted in the world of the young people. It begins with their world, it uses their language and exploits their technologies. Using networks and tried-and-trusted ink and paper media the project will allow young people to tell their own stories, listen to others and, under the auspices and through the curriculum of the Anglo European School, build a real learning experience. (Emphasis mine.)

This from Paul Caplan from London who is building this project for his Masters in Education for Sustainability. (Where do I sign up?) He plans on using Weblogs, wikis, cell phones and more to make this work, and he’s looking for either ideas or collaborators. Drop a comment if you’re interested.

The best part is, it’s not that hard. If you don’t believe that, check out the blogversation that George Mayo and Jane Levy are having about getting started.

Just wanted you to know that my whole class listened to your podcast. They loved it and they also read some of the magazine. They’re motivated to give it a go. Please let your students know that they have given my class a lot of ideas of what we can do with our class blog. Send them my thanks and complliments!

Have I mentioned lately how much fun this is???
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