So I took a much needed day away from the computer yesterday to go skiing with the family…it was seriously a perfect 10. (Right now, the slopes are getting another 9 inches of powder. Sheesh.)

Anyway, this morning I was greeted with a whole bunch of great thinking about the Read/Write Web in the classroom. And the good news is that this is becoming the rule rather than the exception. The bad news is that it’s a lot to capture, and it’s getting harder and harder to do justice to it all. (Especially if I want to go skiing with the kids from time to time…)

Here are some snippets and some pointers.

Aaron Campbell–

The possibility that personal webpublishing might encourage a move toward autonomy is real. Just as Fromm argued that the social structure determines which aspects of the social character are dominant, perhaps likewise the semantic social network as learning environment might play a role helping learners become more autonomous in the way described above. If institutions of learning founded their pedagogy and practice on learning methods that allowed the learner to develop this kind of autonomy en route to cooperative knowledge creation and the development of useful skills, we could indeed achieve at least a partial degree of sanity and peace in this world.

Tom Hoffman–

But, more significantly, I haven’t heard a peep from anyone about creating a blogging system specifically for schools. That isn’t too surprising either, because it also seems inherently unprofitable, especially with school budgets being stretched ever more tightly. We’ll see if blogging starts popping up as a feature in other school-based applications at NECC, but it is looking unlikely to me. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for much demand for school-specific blogging tools, even among school-based bloggers. Perhaps I should point out why I think they would be important.

Jeff Moore–

And we all know the dirty secret. When you control for everything, socio-economics is all that kids need. Traditional teaching and measurement, and traditional “rigorous” curricula, are only relevant to certain socio-economic groups. They are only understood to be part of the formula for success by students who come to school ready to learn. They will never deliver on the promise to be a ticket out of disadvantaged communities, because they will never be relevant to a student who experiences more strife on the way to school than the high-socio-economic kid experiences in his/her entire life.

Educating the Net Generation (Educause e-book)

The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.

This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum. Contributions by educators and students are included.

David Warlick–

What our students understand (and that we, as teachers, seem blind to) is that the very nature of information has changed. It’s changed in what it looks like, what we look at to view it, where we find it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. We live in a brand new, and dynamically rich information environment, and if we are going to reach our students in a way that is relevant to their world and their future (and ours), then we must teach them from this new information environment.

I’m awed and overwhelmed. Very cool.
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Now I know I link to just about every one of Barbara’s posts, but she’s just so darned smart and articulate when it comes to the whole blogs in the classroom thing that it still amazes me that she only has 45 subscribers on Bloglines. And today’s post is no different, though I feel myself heading down a bit of a different path than I normally would when writing about her reflections. Regardless of what follows here, read her post…it’s great thinking about blogs.

What has my interest today, however, is the following quote from Elmine Wijnia which Barbara cites:

To me that is the biggest challenge the educational system faces in the next few years. Schools are not dealing with the way teenagers learn. They are taught by people that grew up and finished their education before the internet era. Lots of teachers still lack the skills to teach current teenagers in the way they are familiar with and can understand. Loads of information is coming to them via the internet and everything they do is through the screen: the learning, the reading, downloading and listening to music, writing, designing and most importantly: communicating with the world. And if everything teenagers do is through the screen, why then is there so little taught through the screen??? It’s time for a change, it’s time to blog! (or to use wiki’s or whatever you prefer as long as it’s screen wise)

Yesterday’s quiz about the state of education stemmed in part from the reminder those facts gave me about how divorced from reality my school is when it comes to graduation rates and college. I don’t teach in the real world, and I think I need to remember that more than I do. This is especially true when I think about the level of technology use and the natives/immigrants discussion that I write and speak about so often. In my zip code, kids do have the access, the computers, the iPods. (You should see their cars…) But my zip code is not the norm, and by and large, kids who go to college are not the norm either according to the numbers.

Which begs the question, is it really the norm that “everything teenagers do is through the screen?” A bit ago, David Warlick left a comment here that this idea was a myth, and more and more I’m thinking he’s right. It’s not a myth at my school, but nationally, it’s a lot more complex than the digital natives description offers. And so the answers about blogging and technology are more complex as well.

I’ve been drafting a type of ed-bloggers credo, for lack of a better description, and I think the first tenet on the list has to be about working first and foremost to get people access. It was a point Pat Delaney made a long, long time ago, back when he was one of only a handful of educators who was exploring blogs. It’s one worth remembering.

From Anastasia Goodstein over at Ypulse:

In my fantasy world one or all of the tech companies would outfit every new and older teacher with a brand new laptop full of software, bookmarked with the coolest and best educational sites and resources online and an iPod. Every teacher would attend a three day paid training where they explore these sites, build their own site, create a blog, load their favorite music on their iPod and learn to Podcast. They should create a profile on Myspace or a Live Journal and explore those worlds. They should play The Sims or Everquest. Basically they should be immersed in everything their students are with the addition of new and cutting edge sites and technology they can use in the classroom.

Ok, so let’s see…about $139 billion paid out in teacher salaries last year, divided by 185 days times three tech-immersion days = $2.25 billion cost. That’s about what we add to the national debt every day.

Hmmm…

1. True or False–More than 1/3 of Americans aged 25-29 have a bachelor’s degree.

2. What is the ratio of poor adults (from households making less than $35,000) that have a bachelor’s degree by age 24?
a) 1 in 5
b) 1 in 12
c) 1 in 17
d) 1 in 23

3. What is the ratio for those coming from the richest families ($85,000 a year)?
a) 1 in 2
b) 1 in 5
c) 1 in 8
d) 1 in 12

4. True or False–Nationally, high school graduation rates are increasing.

5. True or False–More than 40 percent of students graduating from America’s high schools are unprepared to deal with either college courses or anything but an entry-level job in the workplace according to a recent National Governor’s Association Report.

Oy. You can guess the answers, can’t you? False (29% do), c, a, False, True.

Two points. First, Ted Sizer from The Red Pencil:

“The best predictor of a child’s educational success always has been and still is the economic and social class of his family rather than the school that he or she happens to attend. The schools as they presently function appear, save at the well publicized margins, rarely to countervail the accidents of family, wealth and residence. “Success,” as conventionally defined, and ultimately graduation thus depend largely on the chance of birth and income, embarrassing a democracy that pretends to offer equal educational opportunities for all.”

Second, when are we going to look at these problems and admit that this model doesn’t work any longer, that it hasn’t for most Americans for the last 50 years, and that no amount of testing and forced regurgitation is going to fix them?

I know I tend to the dramatic at times…sorry. But there is so much change coming down the pipe right now, not just from technology, but from other countries and economies that seem to be figuring it out more quickly than we are. There is no innovation in testing. There is no creativity in standardizing curriculum to fit a model that is no longer relevant.

Double oy. Maybe I’m just grumpy today…

(Sources: NY Times, Detroit News.)

That will happen in 2007 according to predictions by Teemu Arina over at the new Flosse Posse Weblog dedicated to open source technologies in education.

2007–Educators discover one-click publishing

In contrary to large and rigid content management systems, educators and students have noticed easy personal publishing on a wide scale. One weblog related to education is created every second according to statistics provided by Technorati. Google has launched a specially branded service called EduBlogger™ based on their popular Blogger™ service.

Teemu spun this prediction and many others out of an interview with Alan Levine that is definitely worth putting on your iPod.
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I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at Word Press and Moodle for some time now, and I finally had a chance to play with Word Press this morning. Oy. I really, really like what I see so far.

Thanks to the pioneering efforts of James Farmer at IncSub, you too can set up your own free Word Press site. And if you have any blogging experience at all, finding your way around should be pretty straightforward. Word Press is a very robust open source software that has all of the features I’ve been yearning for in Manila in terms of easy to understand user levels, review of posts and comments, flexibility in what’s private and public, and a real nice, easy to understand “dashboard” that puts everything at your fingertips. Very nice.

Now here’s the news…it’s not that I don’t love Manila…I still do. But I’ve actually started some conversations with one of the department supervisors about the idea of creating blogfolios for all of our students at the beginning of their freshman year where they post their work throughout their time in high school. And my brain is just swimming with the possibilities. And Word Press, if it can scale, seems like it has great potential in terms of running upwards of 3,000 sites since it has all of the good stuff that Manila is missing. Hmmm…

Five to nine inches of snow coming tonight…a day off tomorrow for Moodling around, perhaps?

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Ok, so this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s kind of a neat application of Furl that I really hadn’t thought of. (One of those “Doh!” moments.)

The journalism 2 kids here have their own blogs and Bloglines and Furl accounts. As they write their stories, they’re Furling all of the relevant pages they find. So, on each of their sites, we’re pulling the RSS feed from their Furl archive into the right hand column, so anytime someone Furls something, it automatically shows up on the page. No biggie, I know. But the cool part is that as the kid Furls the site, he blogs it, meaning he annotates it, writing about what the potential use and relevance the information there has to his story. So, he’s got a handy reference right in front of him as he plans the story.

Now, if we could just have them tag the pages in del.icio.us and then push those feeds to the left column while importing relevant feeds for photo tags from Flickr…

(Let me preface this by saying this is a very blog snooty post that I really hadn’t intended to craft when I started, but, as they say, the spirit moved. I’m not sure how much sense it makes, so please feel free to let me know if any or all of it doesn’t hold up.)

Bud Hunt is a new teacher blogger who I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and he’s been doing some good blogging on his site. He’s trying to get his own blog program up and running at his school, and I like the fact that he’s willing to share the struggle with me and with others. I’m learning.

Something in his post from yesterday caught my eye, though, primarily because I have blogging (the verb) on the brain of late and feel a much longer, hopefully more incisive post building momentum somewhere in there. Anyway, Bud said:

Student blogging provides a showcase for their best work, a playground for working with new ideas, and a place to collaborate with other students, teachers and schools. The more I work with and discover about blogs, the more I realize that they are an entirely new way of thinking — something like the Swiss Army Knife of the Internet. A student blogger could be a podcaster, an artist, a political scientist, a technophile, a poet, a chemist or whatever. The blog is the management, not the content.

Now I don’t have a problem with any of that except for the last sentence. And it’s indicative of why I’m feeling some angst about the edublogging practice going on, much, I think, the way Tom is reacting in his Adolescence of Weblogging post (which by the way I’ve read about 20 times in the last three days.)

To me, the true power and potential of Weblogs is the act that it facilitates, the blogging, not the structure it provides. That is not to say the structure isn’t a good thing. But it’s not the best thing, and I guess I’m not seeing very many new people using it in that best way. Barbara and Anne win gold medals, and there are a handful of others out there who are teaching kids the act of blogging that will serve them well into their adult lives. But much of what I’m seeing from the teachers who are starting to explore the tool goes the way of management, not content.

Take, for example, the post to which Bud is responding from Hipteacher, another new teacher that is blazing her own trail and chronicling it in her blog. Notice how she writes about her use of blogs:

I love and adore using blogs with my students. In my experience, writing, revising and peer editing within the blog structure has particularly helped their writing skills. So, I’ve used blogs in that way. I’ve also had success with journaling in blogs.

And:

If every teacher used blogs, our kids could really have a kick-butt record of their progress in writing and in high school. Maybe they would continue to comment on the work of kids who aren’t in their classes anymore.

She’s a great writer, and her reflections and narratives are great reads. But I find in those passages and most of her posts about her use of Weblogs that the blog gives structure to the content the kids add to it. The blog doesn’t produce or facilitate the content as much as host it. It’s created elsewhere and added to the space, not created within the space. Now, please, and I mean this sincerely: I am in no way disparaging what Hipteacher or any of the other teacher bloggers out there are doing with the technology. I think the sharing of teaching experiences in measured form as a way to support an online network of educators does a great service…it’s something I wish I had when I was starting out 20 some odd years ago. And I think that the creation of community that blogs facilitate and the improvement in writing that occurs because of it are equally as impressive and important.

But I wish Hipteacher and others and their students were doing more blogging. Now I know I’m treading into narrow-definitionville here, but I’m trying to get back to what for me is the essential question: What does a blog allow me to do that I couldn’t do previously without it? Because I think the answer to that is where the key to the tool lies. I’ve always been able to keep a reflective/personal journal, though, I will admit, not one with such a wide audience. And in that I guess blogs can elevate the genre for those who are comfortable in sharing that online. (Tom’s point about the anonymity of such blogs resonates with me, though.) And I’ve been able in some form to create community in my classroom and effect peer review and discussion, although, again, the blog expands the ways in which I can make use of that.

“Blogs allow me to create content in ways I could not before, not just post what I could create otherwise in a different form.”

But the one thing the blog allows me to do that I could not do easily in my classroom before is to link, to connect ideas, to make transparent my thinking about those ideas, and to have others link to them and do the same. I’ve been down this road before, I know, many times in fact. But it is the essential piece of Weblogs to me: blogs allow me to create content in ways I could not before, not just post what I could create otherwise in a different form. And in the essence of that creation I use and learn all of those skills that will serve me in my lifelong learning that were (I think) much more difficult for me to learn before: close reading, critical thinking about information, clear and concise writing for a real audience, editing, and reflection, all of it understanding that whatever truth I may put forth will continue to be negotiated by readers and more reading. This, by the very nature of the process, develops reading, writing, information, collaboration and computing literacies, literacies which I think most of us would agree are going to be crucial in navigating what’s ahead.

As I said yesterday, this is heavy lifting. But with the nature of what we do in the classroom changing due to the immense impact the Web is having on our personal and public lives, it’s important lifting. And teachers should be doing it more than most, modeling the learning that comes of it for their students. To me, that’s the biggest task that this adolesence brings to us, pushing beyond the more obvious uses of Weblogs we’ve already identified to a place that challenges both teachers and students to think and learn in new ways. If we do that, then, as Hipteacher says, Weblogs truly “could be dreamy.”
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I’m gathering up links and ideas for my upcoming “Wikis @ Your Library” presentation at the CIL Conference in a few weeks, and I want to make sure that I’m not missing any good stuff to show the thousands who will no doubt be in attendance. Well, maybe dozens. Anyway, if you use wikis in your library, know of wikis in libraries, or have great ideas for wikis in libraries, please let me know. Just post a comment or e-mail me at will at weblogg-ed dot com. Thanks.
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Ok, so I wasn’t planning on spending a good chunk of my morning reading what for me at least is a pretty heady argument for edcuational change, but I happened upon this one sentence that REALLY resonated, and off I went:

Today, however, intense pressures for change now come directly from technology and the economy and not ideology or educational reformist ideas, with an expanding global economy and novel technologies demanding innovative skills, competencies, literacies, and practices.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about too, the idea that these technologies will in and of themselves demand a rethinking of the current educational system, which, if left unchanged, will simply become obviously irrelevant to the ways of learning and working in the connected, “authorship society” we’re entering.

If that turns out to be true, I suggest we fasten our seatbelts immediately…

I highly suggest you carve out an hour or so to read Douglas Kellner’s most interesting ideas.

Today’s selectee is Barbara Ganley:

One of the promising aspects about classroom blogging (and how some students take the blogs and run with them both inside class and out, really making them about much more than classroom discourse as they feel their way through the choreography of their many writing voices playing out on the screen, switching from one to another post by post, something I observed even on a class blog last fall) is how the blog invites students to “take over,” to leave the teacher behind and to put their own voices, their own inquiry, their own concerns front and center. It takes time for a group of students unaccustomed to such a classroom experience to open up and let ‘er rip, but once it happens, they do a better job using the blog well than any of us cyber-immigrants could dream of doing.

And the question then becomes, once they do, are they learning in ways that prepare them for their futures more effectively than the traditional methodologies 99% of educators are still using?

I’ve been grappling lately with just how wholeheartedly to embrace the “all information is now socially constructed” meme that’s building out of the Read/Write Web environment. If true, if we are entering an era where the information we rely on is in constant flux, under constant collaborative revision, then we really need to rethink the literacies we’re teaching our kids. They’re going to have to become much more engaged in their own learning, be able to participate in the discourse, the give and take. They’re going to have to be editors with serious critical thinking skills…problem solvers…negotiators.

In other words, they’re going to have to be bloggers.

J.D. Lasica has a great article on OJR about the ethical considerations that bloggers are being faced with more and more these days. Defintely a part of the blogs growing up meme that seems to be running through my aggregator lately.

While they may not have a rulebook, bloggers have evolved a loose-knit set of general tenets. These principles seem to be widely held:

* Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency – of actions, motives and financial considerations – is the golden rule of the blogosphere.
* Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.
* Be honest. Write what you believe.
* Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.
* Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity – lost trust is difficult to regain.

I hope I can get into the blogs evolving idea more later, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve entered a new stage, maybe adolescence as Tom calls it. Early indications are this could be messy, and it’s not clear what the adult blogger looks like…
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Uh. This is one of those posts that congeals out of five or six interesting reads that have so much going on in them that there’s almost no way of synthesizing it all into one coherent, fairly concise piece of writing without rambling. But that is the work of blogging, isn’t it?

And maybe that’s as good a place to start as any, with blogging, the verb. It is the act of blogging that validates blogs, that sets them apart. Sure we call it Weblog software, but I’ve argued in the past that blogging, the verb, is a special use of the software that frankly, the vast majority of users don’t practice. The blogging recipe requires reading first, then thinking, then writing and linking, then publishing, and then reading some more. It is writing that is born in ideas not experiences, because while we can reflect on experiences, ideas are where we do the heavy lifting, the real social construction of truth that these new media require. I blog, you read, you think, you blog, I read, I think, etc…and in doing so we push each other’s vision and idea of truth in whatever matter we’re writing about.

Take yesterday’s post on this topic by Tom.
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Before I take this weekend off to celebrate my wife’s 40th birthday (she’s dealing with it so well…) and do some offline writing, I wanted to dump down a few more thoughts on this whole idea that the Read/Write Web is empowering not only amateur journalists but students and teachers as well.

But first, back to my running book report on The Red Pencil by Theodore Sizer, which I think is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in what ails us. Much of Sizer’s thinking springs from Mortimer Adler’s “The Paideia Proposal” which was filled with pretty revolutionary ideas that were for all intents ignored by the education establishment.

“Or, more charitably, perhaps the establishment was fully, but quietly, aware of the implications of his manifesto. Much would have to change, especially the very way that educators defined teaching and learning. Such would require a revolution, not only in practice but also in the way a democracy views its duties toward its young. Such a move would, thereby, create disorder.”

A couple of words jump out at me in that passage: democracy and disorder. Adler argued that a true democracy would lift all of its citizens and educate them equally; not an easy task to be sure, and one that could be accomplished only by radically rethinking the system. The potential disruption was more than the purists could stomach at the time.

Now, I could be totally, totally wrong, but I just get the sense that the democratizing potential of blogs and the like will extend to education provided we work to get everyone connected to the Web. And in doing so, we as teachers will continue to cede control of the content and the tools to our students causing disruption that I think we’re already beginning to see. The difference is, merely ignoring it will not make it go away.

Think about schools just 20 (or fewer) years ago. Teachers owned the content. We delivered it through books and handouts and choice multimedia very little of which students could find outside of the classroom. And we had mastery over the tools we used to deliver that content because, frankly, they weren’t that hard to master. Books, filmstrips, dittos. (Remember those??? All those nasty chemicals??? God, I’m old.)

Fast forward, as they say, to today where a) there’s not too much in terms of content that can’t be found in some form out there on the Web which, of course, just continues to expand, and b) we no longer have mastery over the tools that our students expect us to use to deliver. (Generally, 40% of students say their teachers are unprepared to use technology in the classroom according to a survey company that we use at our school.) The implications are pretty mind-bending, to me at least.

Certainly, I’m as clueless as the next guy when it comes to predicting the future. But I just keep looking at my own learning and at this space. I own this content. I find it, I choose it, and I choose how to use it. I’m making my own curriculum and, most importantly, sharing it with anyone else who might want to take pieces of it for their own. I’m being taught by many, many educators, most of whom I’ve never met. Together, we are creating meaning by extending or pushing back or outright contesting the ideas that we share. The texts are rich and varied. The tools are new. No books. No paper. No pens. (Almost, at least.) And yet this is more meaningful learning than I’ve ever experienced. And it’s active construction and testing of that learning, to see if it measures up not to some standardized test (taken on paper with pencil) but to the community of which I find myself a part.

This is very different from what’s happening in our classrooms.