(Cross posted to ETI.) Ok, so I know I have been on a wiki bender of late, but there’s just so much that interests me about the technology, and I think I’m finally getting my brain around the potential. While wide open wikis may not make it in the classroom, creating sites with logins and passwords makes more and more sense to me. Especially when I see what Lawrence Lessig is doing.

Lessig is one of my few heroes out there right now. I am just in awe of the important changes he is championing regarding copyright and intellectual property. And there is no doubt that he “gets” what’s happening with the Read/Write Web. The concept of putting your work out there to not only share with readers but to invite those readers to help edit and improve the work is pretty amazing. But that’s what he’s doing with his wiki. It’s very cool.

And the other news with Lessig is that he walks his talk. His creation of the Creative Commons was intended to give content creators more power to decide how their content is used. And last week, he wrote on his blog that he will no longer write for the Minnesota Law Review because of their restrictive copyright policy.

But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the “Publication Agreement.” In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the “exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution” of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.

Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Under that license, Lessig gives others the right “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and “to make derivative works” as long as they give attribution and don’t use it for commercial purposes. The implications of that are pretty profound, and it’s in part the evolution of blogs and wikis and the like that are driving these changes. If you think about this idea just a little, you can’t help but wonder what the shake out will be, in law and in education.
—–

So I’m back in D.C., this time as a conference participant instead of presenter at the CoSN. The theme of the get together certainly resonates: “Using Technology for Transformation.” I seem to be using the “T” word more and more to describe what’s been happening to the Web and, in turn, what can happen in the classroom. Nothing on the schedule that specifically points to blogs or wikis or the like, but it will be interesting to see what’s discussed in the “Hot Trends in Technology” and “Emerging Technologies: What’s Working? What’s Next?” sessions. Don’t know if I’ll be able to blog some of the sessions, but I’ll definitely share whatever might be relevant later in the day.
—–

(via Tim) I’ve been lamenting lately how difficult it has become for me to read books these days because a) I think my brain is getting used to the shorter snippets of blog reading and b) because they don’t have any links. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to click on a word to see what it means or get more information from a primary source.

Well, there looks like there might somewhat of a solution to problem b) from Atlantic Monthly which has woven the hypertext idea into the cover article about talk radio. If you’re quick, you can see the entire .pdf of what it looks like. I like the concept, but I think I’m more into the digital book idea, with hypertext built in. I love reading on my tablet. But I haven’t had a chance to do the digital book thing to any great degree yet. Probably should hurry up and get there before my brain starts shutting down on anything longer than 5 or 6 paragraphs…

Three days away and I feel like there is a mountain of good stuff to get to in my aggregator. I just want to capture some of it here with an eye on making sense of it later.

1. David Weinberger on his birds of a feather at etech:

Ask why tagging is happening now. After all, we’ve been able to tag Word documents forever, but we don’t. Why now? I think in part it’s because we are tagging not just for ourselves. We’re doing it socially, aware that we’re making the Web better for others. Together we’re building a new infrastructure of meaning, created by and for one another. We will figure out amazing things to do with this new social semantic construct.

More and more, the social aspects of these tools are what is really starting to floor me. I’ll have much more along these lines in the near future as I’ve been mulling over a collaborative project for this community for quite some time. But when I talk about Wikipedia and think about the potential, I am seriously in awe of what this could become. Later, David quotes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as saying “Social collaboration is the future of the Net.” A-men.

2. The new A9. (Note to self: Carve out at least an hour to play with this.)

3. Lawrence Lessig is my hero. (Have I mentioned that?) He’s podcasting. That’s not why he’s my hero. He’s my hero because he walks his talk. (Note to self…take note.)

4. A list of wikified books. (Note: There is a theme here…)

5. The del.icio.us screencast. (Note: Screencasting is cool. Much cooler than podcasting. But will it scale?)

6. Kids today:

Coming home from school, my daughter launches into IM to check in with her friends, and not just from her school, either. She chats with her grade school teachers, a friend in Chile and a few people from neighboring schools. Keeping her chat sessions open, she checks her blog on LiveJournal.com, which is only open to a select list. She usually adds a post about the day, reads other blogs (LiveJournal and DeadJournal) and then, to my surprise, she opens up email. In email she reads the responses that have been forwarded to her from people who have read her blog and don’t want others to read their responses.

7. The “Listen/Record Web?”

The amound of exceptional thinking and writing out there is inspiring…
—–

So my three day, two night, five presentation blogvangelism worldwind was just way too much fun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was getting to meet some of the people who are continually teaching me by their willingness to share their ideas online. David Warlick for intstance. And Susan Herzog. And Steven Cohen. And Michael Stephens. And meeting all sorts of other educators who are out there plugging away at bringing all of these technologies to their schools or to their practice. It was just a great couple of days.

Some brief impressions/vignettes:

*At the Internet@Schools East conference a librarian from an inner city D.C. school came up and told me that while she found the technologies interesting, she didn’t know how to even start thinking about using them at her school. “Most of my kids can’t read,” she said. It was a sobering reminder of what many teachers are faced with.

*At my CIL presentation on wikis, I showed them how easy it was to edit content by going to a Star Trek wiki entry on “Sick Bay” (which is amazing in itself) and changing it to “Slick Bay.” One of the attendees took me to task at the end of the presentation for showing how easy it was to vandalize a site, and it was a great point. I hadn’t meant it as that, obviously, but I also hadn’t fixed what I had done, and she felt, rightly so, that it sent a bad message. As she was talking, I was furiously back tracking through my presentation to go back and repair the damage. But, as luck would have it, it turned into a teachable moment when everyone saw the page had already been fixed when I pulled it back up.

*In Detroit, I was amazed with fully ¾ of the audience raised their hands when I asked how many of them knew what blogs were. And, remarkably, about the same number raised their hands about RSS. Now that was a shocker. But between the three conferences, there were over 15 presentations on technologies stemming from the Read/Write Web. The word is getting out.

*My presentations were blogged by David and and Christina Pikas which for some reason feels kind of weird. In fact, Christina may very well be the person who expressed her disdain at my messing with the Star Trek site.

*I was also amazed at how many people came up to me saying their districts were blocking sites like Blogger. Oy.

*There are now really bad pictures of me all over the Internet. Yuk.

* The technology worked…everywhere! Amazing.

More as it all settles in, I’m sure…

So I leave at 4 today to drive to DC, get there around 8, work on slides until, say 10, get up at 6, do more work on slides, give keynote from 9-10, do more work on slides, give wiki presentation at 11:30, leave DC around 1, drive to Philadelphia by 4, get on plane at 6, land in Detroit at 8, get to hotel at 9, work on slides until, say 11, get up at 6, do more work on slides, give blog presentation at 8:30, give Read/Write Web presentation at 10, give RSS presentation at 11:30, get to airport by 4, fly back to Philly at 6, get home at 8.

Oy.

This might be my last post for a few days…

From an interesting piece in the Washington Post on Creative Commons and how there is a groundswell of copyleft activity:

“There is this weird sense that the Internet is broken because it lets people make easy copies. . . The Internet is a machine for making copies, and artists need to come to grips with that,” Doctorow said.

So here’s my mix: take out “artists”, put in “educators”. I think we’re at the point where we need to start coming to grips with the idea that the “problem” with students ripping other students’ work is not going to get better, especially in the age of online portfolios and classroom blogs, and that it’s the mixing part of the equation we need to start focusing on. I’ve been having this conversation more and more with teachers here at my school. It usually starts with “If my kids put all their work online for everyone else to see, what’s going to stop others from using it?” The answer, obviously, is not much. Unless you really focus on the process, it’s hard to stop kids who want to from downloading content and using it as their own. And as more and more process content goes online, well…

So what about focusing on the remix? What about saying to students “Look, here are some great pieces of content, and here’s why they’re great. Now what can you do with these pieces to make them your own, to inject your own ideas and experiences into them and interpret them in new ways that show you understand the concepts being presented?”

I mean, after all, isn’t that what blogging (v.) does? Isn’t that what I’m doing right now? I rip by reading what others write (or read) because they have allowed me to do so by publishing. I mix that content with my own ideas, partially to articulate what it means to me but also to test those ideas against a public audience. In the process, I learn. A lot.

This is just another part of the transformation, the rethinking that schools are going to have to undertake. The social, collaborative construction of content that the Read/Write Web facilitates is going to challenge us in many, many ways.
—–

—–

For those of you who may still actually visit this site, I snagged one of the beautiful pictures from Wikipedia Commons and decided to change the look here. Who cares if the banner has absolutely no relvance to the topics discussed herein, right? That’s an awesome bird.

Change is good…

—–

Another small step for Manila users…we can now include enclosure tags in our posts. So, I guess that means that if I ever create another Podcast I can just plunk it in my post without using the Feedburner feed I had set up for it. Nice.

As luck would have it, I was talking about just this capability with a teacher in my current Weblogs class here at my school. He wants to pilot Tablet PCs with his kids next year and is envisioning a paperless class where kids access work from his blog, complete it on their tablets, post to their own blog, and he fetches it via the RSS feed. Well, it appears, now he can. This obviously harkens back to a post a couple of weeks ago about using enclosures. Looks like I’m going to have to dig into it a bit more now.

But, not to be a spoiled sport, I wish Manila would also support easy comment previewing, easy off/on comments, easy public/private choice in posting, easy check box deleting of comments or content, more complex editorial permissions… Looks like Drupal is going for the ed market, and I’ve already talked about how much I like Word Press. Manila has so many good things going for it, but it just needs a few more tweaks and an overhaul in the intuitiveness department.

Gigapxl Project–Oy. Amazing what cameras can do nowadays. (Via Alec Courous)

Human Clock–Wouldn’t it be cool to do something like this at school? Maybe a calendar instead of a clock? (Via David Jakes)

Google News Customized–Now you can include your own searches in the Google News interface. Interesting…
—–

A new, widely reported study on kids and media from the Kaiser Family Foundation says they’re spending over 6 hours a day engaged with some type of media and that for more than a quarter of that time they are using more than one medium at a time. Sheesh. TV, unfortunately, is still the king of all media (nearly four hours a day including videos and dvds) with just over an hour a day spent on the computer. Also, 86% of kids live in a home with a computer. Good, but still not good enough. (Only 31% have a computer in their bedrooms.)

Other findings in brief: socio-economic divides continue to exist, the Internet is becoming a “universal presence” in kids’ lives, and home Internet access is up from 47% to 74% in the last five years.

But so here is the “Don’t That Beat All” part of the survey: young people who spend the most time with media also report spending more time with their parents, being physically active, and pursuing other hobbies.

Go figure.

As I’m still immersed in wikimania I came across this amazing deconstruction by John Udell of the Wikipedia entry on “Heavy Metal Umlaut“. If you really want to understand the inner workings of the collaborative construction of content revolution that we are watching happen right before our very eyes, run, don’t walk, to his presentation and be amazed. Great stuff…
—–