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…