I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve had the great fortune this year to team teach the technology part of a doctoral course at Seton Hall with Alan November, and tonight we were back in class talking about blogs and wikis and the like. There are about 25 students in the cohort and about half have dipped into blogs in one way or another. I’ve linked to some here previously, but I found out tonight that there was quite a bit of blogging going on under the radar as well. There was actually blogapplause…cool!

What was most interesting were the ways in which they were using blogs and the process some of them had to undertake in order to get them started. Some had to literally jump through hoops to get Weblogs “approved” first by principals, then superintendents then boards. Others just went ahead and starting using them without asking permission. Some used them to carry on conversations about policy and planning. Others used them to have conversations about technology and blogging. Many formed partnerships and collaborations through their sites. In all it was pretty interesting mix and really fun to hear about.

But the bottom line was that for most, the implementation of these technologies is still a huge mountain to climb. One of the “students” who is an administrator at her school talked about how difficult it was for her teachers to see the potential, to think creatively about the technology. She said that so few of them were current with the tools and that few were able to easily get to the ways they could be applied. And I got the sense that this was true for most of the people in the room. And I know it’s true for most schools. We don’t do a great job of helping teachers stay abreast of what’s happening in technology. We need to show them more clearly how these technologies can change their practice and their classrooms. RSS feeds, screencasts, podcasts…these are all technologies that we can use to get teachers interested in what’s out there and model their use at the same time.

One thing that I find intruiging in the phrase “Read/Write Web” is that neither “read” nor “write” really means what it used to when we talk of literacy or being literate. I mean, reading is no longer just being able to make sense of the letters. Literate readers need to be able to evaluate the source and meaning of what they are reading to glean its true relevance and importance, and they need to be able to “read” the varied mediums that writing now embraces. “Writing” is no longer just putting words to a page. We can write in many different forms depending on the situation or the need, with audio or video or other digital images. These are big changes in short periods of time, and many will be thinking and hopefully writing about these changes more and more as they become more mainstream.

Which leads me to this essay by John Udell. He talks about screencasting in the context of writing, about how writing is changing, and how we need to think about the implications for our classrooms.

We’re just scratching the surface of this medium. Its educational power is immediately obvious, and over time its persuasive power will come into focus too. The New York Times recently asked: “Is cinema studies the new MBA?” I’ll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we’ll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles–consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement–will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.

In the middle of his piece, he compares essayists and programmers and the ways in which they deal with their texts. It’s an interesting analysis that I think has a lot of merit. Writers and programmers must both struggle with making the code work effectively. And I love the fact that many more programmers are writing the code I can understand because I’ve learned much from their words even though I’ll never really understand their other language.

Different students are going to embrace different ways of expressing their ideas. As Udell says, traditional writing is still the foundation, but it can’t “just” be words on a page any longer. It’s daunting to think about how education will respond, but it’s also fun to think about the new, creative texts that are on the horizon.
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Jeff Jarvis who has skyrocketed to fame and, well fame, on the shoulders of the blogging revolution (seen him on MSNBC lately?) has moved his citizen media movement into the video realm and he wants MSM (main stream media) to get the message. I urge you to watch his three minute vlog just for a sense of how easy it’s become. Here are some outtakes to get the flavah:

The citizen media movement now comes to broadcast. This will be big…blogs are…It’s all about control. My first law of media, and life, is give people control and they will use it. The remote control, not the Guttenberg press, was the most important invention in the history of media for it lets viewers control their consumption of media. How much more powerful it is to create media…I would see this new medium as a way to build a new relationship, a conversation with the audience. [Emphasis mine, obviously.]

Jeff came out here to Flemington a couple of times last year as we held some blog meetups, trying to start a citizen journalism movement here. It didn’t take root, unfortunately, more because we didn’t have the time to put into it than anything else. But I’m inspired again. I think it would be very cool to start a Flemington area I-channel with vlogs and blogs and podcasts and goodness knows what else that’s coming down the line. Jeff’s right, we can all have our own personal tv space now.

Go Read/Write Web. Go!
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I’ve been doing some research into Flickr in the classroom lately and I came across (once again) this example that I just wanted to note. It’s an “History of Western Art and Civilization: Renaissance to the Modern Era” class at FIT in New York City. Barbara had mentioned it last fall, but I didn’t get a chance to look at it closely until today. A lot of annotations and discussion about what the work achieves from an aesthetic sense. It gives you a pretty good idea of what the potentials are…

I know that when I did my Teacher’s Toolbox class last week, Flickr was a big hit. In fact I’ve been talking with some science teachers who are trying to figure out how to use it with photos of dissections. Mmmmm.

So this is how it works…

I’ve started playing with del.icio.us a bit more of late, especially as a place to quickly save things I want to read or write more about in the future. Yesterday, I saved a link to Ken Smith, who by the way has been blogging great guns of late. Today, when I went back to del.icio.us, I noticed someone else had linked to the same post. Turns out it was Paul Allison, who I have written about here before and who has a pretty nice list of tagged sites of his own which, of course, I had to start clicking around in. Which led me to pfhyper who has an extensive list of tags, including my meme of the day: socialsoftware. Which led me to TagCentral, (which I immediately Furled) a site where you can put in a tag and get the latest saved links and photos with that tag from a whole slew of sites. Which, when I put in education, led me to this story from NPR on Big Picture Schools that included this great description that flowed right out of my previous post:

Students are encouraged to discover their passions, interning two days a week with mentors in the community who relate those passions to the real world. The student might work at a hospital, a bakery, or an architectural firm. School projects are designed by the mentor, the adviser and the student together — and are presented orally, along with a portfolio, every nine weeks.

I love this stuff…

I love this quote from Jay Cross:

“Curriculum is for kids; exploration is for adults.”

I brings me back once again to the idea that Ted Sizer expressed about the disconnect between the way the school system teaches kids and the ways in which adults teach themselves. I can’t imagine not learning by exploration, which is what I do every day of my life. I’ve developed my own curriculum of sorts that changes based on where my explorations take me. Today, if you check what I’ve been Furling, it’s about social software. Tomorrow, if may be about podcasting. The key is my self-interest in these topics motivates me to learn, and within the context of those explorations I learn other things too, how to write clearly, how to negotiate meaning, how to think critically.

Maybe it’s because over the last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing the boredom of my daughter and the boredom of my students. What they are experiencing is not meaningful learning…they’re just getting through. Terry said it so well yesterday:

The best weblogs are their own reward. A few students get that right away, then they ask themselves, “What do I need a teacher for?”

And that’s sad, isn’t it, because kids see teachers as the people who deliver content, not as the people who teach them how to learn. That’s what kids need teachers for. To show them what learning looks like, how messy and reflective and individualized it really is. To show them what a wonderful gift failure is. We all do this differently. For me, much of it happens here when I take the time to put words to my ideas, or when I’m trying to build something or coach my kids. It rarely happens with 25 other people consuming the same content at the same pace in the same place… It is exploration.

Blog as exploration. I like that metaphor too…

Terry Elliott was there at the beginning of this whole blogs in education movement and his posts were always finely crafted, intelligent and thought provoking. Although I think he stayed the course in terms of using the technology in his classroom, his own blogging habit has been more off than on of late. But today, he commented on an “old” post on this site from almost two years ago that I didn’t want to go unread:

My take on blogs has always been that they blow the doors off institutional frameworks, especially moribund ones. Weblogs are a means to an end; and the end is learning not schooling. The strategic student is always looking for the extrinsic reward–the grade–so he or she will use it to get that grade, dust his hands together, and say, “Well, that’s that.” As long as schools consider weblogs as a just another delivery tool for the same old wine then it won’t matter how shiny, cool and new the bottle is. The best weblogs are their own reward. A few students get that right away, then they ask themselves, “What do I need a teacher for?” I am struggling with the same problem although I think what Dennis is talking about is the institutional difference between high school and higher ed. As David Wiley said recently, paraphrasing here, just because you are a good water polo coach doesn’t mean you do the same thing with horses. Chew on that, grasshopper. ;]

Great stuff, and a nice surprise to hear from one of the early adopters once again…
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So here’s Steven’s take on the whole Wikipedia as a source issue:

I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about using Wikipedia as an online resource. Many say that we shouldn’t trust it. My usual replay is that we shouldn’t trust anything both online and off. That includes those ready-reference materials that sit right at the reference desk that we turn to to answer a basic query (are there any basic queries anymore?) We should treat Wikipedia like we treat anything online. With skepticism.

Does anyone know of a Wikipedia article that has been deconstructed for accuracy?

Dan Gillmor gives a look at the future of the Web, as if we’re not already dealing with enough change. Here’s what we have today:

The big change in the read-write sphere came about because of applications such as weblogs, the personal journals that put newer material at the top, and wikis, sites on which anyone can edit any page. Not only could people make their own sites, but they could update them easily and rapidly.

Blogs have been especially important in the world of the read-write web.

They are far more than the “what I ate for breakfast” diaries of cliche; they have become a key part of a growing, complex global conversation.

We are moving quickly beyond text and pictures in this version of the web, to audio and video.

The cost of the gear we need to make high-quality content is plummeting while the power and ease of use continue to grow.

Ok…that’s all good. We’re all up to speed on that, right? RIGHT? But now there is this…

The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we’re learning how to program the web itself.

An operating system offers programmers something called an “applications programming interface,” or API. The APIs are essentially shortcuts for programmers who want to use underlying capabilities of the operating system, such as displaying text or printing, and they help products interoperate with each other.

The electric outlet in the wall is, to stretch the metaphor, an API. A manufacturer making a product that uses electricity can equip it with a plug that fits into the socket.

A variety of web APIs, offered by companies such as Google, Yahoo! Amazon and others, is letting programmers create new kinds of applications by wiring together various functions into what are called “web services”.

E-commerce has always been a web service, but when we can mix and match from various sites, by pulling specific information from their rich databases, we are moving into an entirely new sphere.

Brain. Numb. But working…
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I can’t remember where I got this pointer, but RSS Mix is a tool that will let you “rip” as many different RSS feeds as you like and mix them into one, which, of course, can make for easier learning. It’s in the spirit of Blogdigger Groups and Stephen’s eduRSS, and I’m sure some others. But it’s pretty vanilla, and I like it so far.

Since we’re embarking on our most excellent Tablet PC adventure at our school, I created the following five different search feeds and mixed them into one.

So, for some reason, this line at Ross Mayfield’s blog caught my eye:

Sitting in the French Senate for Les Blogs…Half of their schoolchildren blog, French is the second most popular language in the blogopshere, they like to express themselves and debate their views.

Which with a little bit of tangoing with Technorati tags brought me to this:

Pretty amazing that in France apparently due to skyrock radio promoting blogs that now around 3 million french kids blog. Yep blogging is BIG in France.

Which, with a little bit of dancing with del.icio.us brought me to this:

The French blogeur revolution is being spearheaded by precocious youngsters. According to government figures, half of all schoolchildren are bloggers, an estimated 3 million. Almost 2 million of them use Skyblog, a service operated by youth radio station Skyrock that is growing by around 600 new journals and 200,000 entries every day.

Many teens use cell phones to post diary entries and pop-culture news flashes to their skyblogs on the move. But that portability is ruffling feathers in the classroom, where provocative adolescents use their journals to lampoon teachers and classmates with embarrassing camera-phone snaps and abusive remarks like “il pue le vin” — “he stinks of wine.”

A spate of blog-related suspensions culminated last month in the expulsion of 10 pupils from high schools in Auvergne and Picardy, four of whom also faced legal action; ministers swiftly introduced new school rules making it unlawful to insult anyone by blog.

“We discovered blogs in the U.S. in 2001 and wanted to adapt this formidable means of expression for our rising generation,” said Skyrock CEO Pierre Bellanger. “The classroom was formerly a closed place but, with mobile phones, it becomes a recordable, open place. The adults do not like it and are lost there.”

“The internet is the most important medium for school kids in France,” said Six Apart’s Le Meur. “The young people are not used yet to traditional media. They were already sharing everything on instant messaging, so blogs are just natural for them – the problem is, nobody told them they could not criticize their teachers.” [Emphasis mine.]

Mon Dieu! 200,000 entrées du jour!?! Tres bien! Non?

Bud Hunt has been thinking more about the value of student journaling sites like Xanga.

But I think that there’s something more important that these journals can be useful for in schools. But not all schools — only those schools that are interested in students as human beings instead of products to be completed or vessels to be filled.
Can you imagine the power of a school counselor getting an update or status check on a hundred students via a single mouse click? For those counselors willing to pay attention, and those students willing to share, online journals can be a valuable tool for assessing the well-being of students.

That’s a provocative scenario, one that for some reason I feel myself resisting to some degree. The question I’m struggling with is why the resistance? Bud makes a good point in terms of being able to peer more clearly, perhaps, into the souls of our students, to assess their well-being. It would seem on the surface to make sense to use that information.

Tom, who glosses Bud’s post on ETI, agrees.

I believe that the more we think about this issue, the more comfortable we’ll become with using the information students are giving us about their lives through these journals. On the surface it is easy to slip into saying to students “what you post on the internet is public,” yet at the same time, feeling like it is polite for the adults who know these kids to avert our eyes from their public postings. This is a contradictory position that doesn’t really help anyone. We’re not going to teach kids and our peers that on the web, public is public is public, if we don’t behave consistently.

I agree with that too, for the most part. In fact I think that may be where we’re failing our students the most when it comes to online publishing, helping them understand all that it means to write in public. If, as my students told me last Friday, over half of the kids at my 3,000 or so student school are creating Myspace.com or Xanga sites, that’s a pretty swift and serious plunge into some basically uncharted territory as few if any have shared their lives with largely anonymous public audience. (Note: I spent some time on Myspace over the weekend and found about 700 references to our school. Wow.)

I know that as educators and counselors, we have a responsibility to watch out for our students, to make sure they are safe. If reading their online journals is a way to do that, so be it, I guess. I wish, however, the parents were taking the lead, though I know that’s asking a lot. So I’m guessing that angst I’m feeling is rooted more in the content of what I’ve been reading at Myspace than anything else. It’s such a mixture of innocent and angry, silly and serious that it makes me wonder how we’d navigate the information we find there. How much of it is adolescent posing? How much of it is peer induced braggadocio? How much of it can we trust?

But in the end, does any of that really matter? Tom’s right. It’s out there. It’s information. And we need to start thinking about ways to give teachers and counselors ways to put it to good use.

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(via Stephen Downes) Mercy. I think we’re getting somewhere. Here is a list of almost 200 blogging in education related articles as listed at Kairosnews. I think I’ve only read about a quarter of what’s there (a fact I’ll probably not divulge to my wife and kids.) As Stephen says, it’s hard to believe the scope of the writing on the subject.

Go, Blogs! Go!
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So I was walking around the Kid Tech room yesterday after we had set up our little blogvangelism table and lo and behold what do I see? Another blogging in the classroom display! This one by a group of elementary school kids in Oxford, NJ who have been reading books and having online conversations about them with kids in other classrooms and the authors. How cool is that? Turns out that their teacher attended a mini blog workshop I gave there last summer, and she just ran with the idea. The best part was that she had about half a dozen bloggers working the crowd including one girl who they had designated as “Blogger of the Year” because of all the messages she had posted. And you could tell she was really proud of the title. She gave me a demo of their project, and then she came over for a demo from my students. (She’s in the Jenna picture below.) It was a great moment to see 18-year-olds and 10-year olds swapping stories about blogs.

On the whole, I wasn’t too surprised that most of the educators, reporters, etc. who came up to our booth didn’t know much about Weblogs. Meredith and Jenna did some serious blogvangelism that was fun to watch. We had a chance to chat quite a bit about their experience in school and the state of the blogging world with kids. The bad news is that a majority of our kids seem to have a Myspaces.com or Xanga site. The good news is that none of them refer to this as blogging. Yay! The other good news is that from what Meredith and Jenna can tell, most people are being pretty safe in the way they use the sites, though I’m sure a good number of them aren’t. The only “real” blogger they could cite was a girl from our Journalism 2 class who does some serious political deconstruction on her Xanga site.

I guess the most striking nugget of info I gleaned was when I asked them how much of their high school experience had really challenged them. Now these are pretty smart kids, going to NYU and U. of Iowa next year. Still, when they both said only about 10% of the curriculum had really forced them to think, I was a bit taken aback. Between them they had taken 6 AP courses and a slew of honors classes, but they both said the content wasn’t very engaging, that they did their homework five minutes before class, and for the most part they felt pretty bored. Oy.

Anyway, is was great to spend a day with kids again. Made me remember why I got into teaching in the first place, but it also made me think more about the long road we have to hoe to make the system more effective and relevant for them.
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