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Yes, today is Earth Day. A couple of days ago at a administration meeting here I asked if anyone knew what Friday was, what significance it has. No one knew. Fifteen of the smartest people I know. Not one knew that Earth Day was upon us.

Now I know that could just be a reflection of the less than effective marketing campaign that Earth Day supporters wage every year. But I think it’s more that the environment is just not on the radar screens of most Americans. And, speaking of this society as a whole, it feels like it’s beneath us to have to worry about natural resources when we’ve become so accustomed to using them up without much concern for what using them up does and means.

Well, we should be concerned.

I feel very, very fortunate that I’ve been able to develop an audience here for my ideas about technology in the classroom. In many ways, I find it hard to believe sometimes. And I try hard to keep the discussion here focused on teachers and schools and education because I realize that’s what people expect to find here. My politics and personal life are not what this space is about.

But I feel really strongly about this issue, and so for this one day I’m going to break my rules. I’d humbly request that you do two things this Earth Day. First, read The Long Emergency: What’s going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle? Now I know this scenario is probably more pessimistic than it needs to be, but the point is well taken. Our current pace of energy use is simply unsustainable, and the “energy bill” that the House just passed does nothing to move us in the direction we need to go.

Second, I’d ask that you do one thing to change your life to help the environment. My wife and I are nowhere near to perfect with all of this, but we are trying. And I really believe the slogan of my wife’s blog: Believing that if people knew more, they’d do more.

This is another thing we have to model for our kids. We need to be stewards of the Earth. Do one thing.

Happy Earth Day!

Maybe… Word has it he’s been invited to the “Kid Tech Day” that me and two of my students are going to be blogvangelizing at down in our fair captial. At the very least, oodles of press types are scheduled to attend. (Hmmm…I wonder if they have blogs?) The idea is to save tech funding in our fair state which is in a pretty poor state budget-wise. Hopefully when they (the gov, state senators, etc.) get a taste of the edtech Kool-Aid today, they’ll scurry back to the statehouse and dig up some funding to keep things going a bit longer.

But the most fun for me will be spending the day with two of my favorite former blog students. I have to say that I have been missing the classroom of late, so this will be a good kid fix. (I know I have two of my own, but they’re not old enough to get my jokes yet.) I’m going to try to do some poderviews on the ride and hopefully share some of their insights. And maybe, just maybe, later today your feed will be filled with a grainy, blurry camera phone image of them showing the governor how to blog…
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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10119925

and

http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/education/article.php/734761
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I feel a podcasting bender coming on, especially after seeing how many education “shows” are listed over at Podcast Alley…64! Holy Spicoli! I mean I knew about the inimitable, car clanging Steve Dembo, the deep-thinking, NJ Turnpike driving Jeff Moore, (not to say that Steve’s not deep thinking…) and the ebullient Bud Hunt (yes, I was an English teacher). But who pray tell are the “The Academic Aesthetic” (who by the way has a podcast dated October 4, 2005 in his list. Wow!) and “Just4Kids” (sadly, I didn’t get that at first) and “Wanhoffs Wunderbare Welt der Wissenschaft” (say wha’?)

Zonks, Podman! There’s something happening here!

And what about this: a PODCAST ONLY NOVEL! What’s next? Podmercials? Podudrama? Podetry, perhaps? Oh, the humanity!

Yes, I will be retiring early this evening…

(Thanks to Steve and Steven for the links.)
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Audiocasting
test

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Believe it or not, I’ve thrown together another underproduced, crackly, levels all over the place podcast for the listening pleasure of anyone out there who has less of a life than I. In this episode, I ask five teachers to give their views on the Web as a teaching tool, and the responses are, shall we say, less than earth shattering but somewhat interesting nonetheless. Suffice to say, these guys aren’t thinking Web first when it comes to publishing. For me, it’s another experiment in form…the interviewcast. Here’s the direct link if you’ve got about 19:21 to spare. (Or if you’re stuck in traffic.)

While what the teachers have to say may merit some comment, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the form. No show notes or links, just ideas…enjoy!

(via Bryan Alexander) The Village Voice offers a pretty interesting piece on blogging in academia, including quotes from my hero.

“I’ve published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I’ve gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic,” he says. “I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time.”

It’s a wonderful thing.

But here is the blogging (the verb) quote, from six-year (!) blogger Josh Kortbein:

I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I’m thinking about how to make them that way.

That feels right from where I sit, too. Blogs as platform. That’s what blogging is…

So taking a cue from Bud the Teacher, I checked out Jon Udell’s post on how he creates his screencasts with Windows Media Encoder. I’d been trying to use Camtasia to do some inhouse training stuff, but it was really difficult to get the right file format and configurations to work with our servers and Windows Media Player. But Encoder did the trick. Really easy, and when I play the file off of our server, it looks crystal clear at full screen. The audio needs a bit of work, but I feel like I’m over a little hump with this.

So anyway, here is a Wikipedia for Educators screencast. It’s about five minutes long, and it could be much better with a bit more planning, but you get the idea. I’ve added it to my feed as an enclosure as well, now that Manila lets me do that. Let me know if something doesn’t work.

On My Mind
So taking a cue from Bud the Teacher, I checked out Jon Udell’s post on how he creates his screencasts with Windows Media Encoder. I’d been trying to use Camtasia to do some inhouse training stuff, but it was really difficult to get the right file format and configurations to work with our servers and Windows Media Player. But Encoder did the trick. Really easy, and when I play the file off of our server, it looks crystal clear at full screen. The audio needs a bit of work, but I feel like I’m over a little hump with this.

So anyway, here is a <a href=”http://static.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/gems/techcentral/Wikipedia.wmv”>Wikipedia for Educators </a>screencast. It’s about five minutes long, and it could be much better with a bit more planning, but you get the idea. I’ve added it to my feed as an enclosure as well, now that Manila lets me do that. Let me know if something doesn’t work.

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A grade of C for any student who knows how to use the tools of blogging, who can name their purposes and values, and who can point out the elements of an active blogging community.

A grade of B for any student who accomplishes the goals for a grade of C and who posts regularly in a way that will likely, in time, lead to the goals for a grade of A.

A grade of A for any student who uses the tools of blogging to become a recognized member of an active blogging community, a resource to newcomers in that community, and contributor of ideas and information that advance the work of that community.
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Say what you will about the quality of the 1,055,114,644 pieces of writing that Technorati is tracking on the 8,950,672 Weblogs they are watching, that’s a boatload of content. How much of it is really worthwhile? Depends on your standards and interests I guess, and I know a lot of them are simply links. But I think anyone who reads blogs regularly knows that there is a lot of really great original thinking and valuable information being published these days by people who just a couple of years ago never would have been able to enter the discussion. I find it to be an amazing statistic and an inspiring turn of events.

I have no clue what the statistics actually are, but the trends are clear. The ratio of readers to writers on the web is getting smaller. More people are getting it, realizing that the barriers to entry have dropped, and that it doesn’t matter as much if you know how to put words together in coherent sentences, you can “write” and share your ideas in many new ways. And that most likely, those ideas will find an audience. It’s powerful stuff.

At my school, our quarter ends this week, and I know what that means. New classes, new books, new content for teachers to disseminate, old content for students to throw away. I’m going to make some assumptions, but if our 3,000 or so students each create just 2 pieces of content each day, that’s 1,080,000 pieces over the course of the year. I’m going to be generous and say that via the hallways, the Website, and various other outlets, a typical student or teacher at my school may run across 250 of those artifacts in a year in any “published” form. That’s somewhere around .0002 of what our students produced. (If that’s wrong, remember, I’m an English teacher by trade…you get my point.) Even if we assume only five percent of the total content our students produce is really quality stuff, worthy of being added to the knowledge base, that’s 54,000 nuggets of information, 53,750 of which I’ll never have the chance of seeing.

One more step. Bear with me. As of 2003, about 61 million kids were out there creating content in public schools. If my assumptions hold up and each student creates about 18 pieces of publishable content per year, one every two weeks, that’s 1,098,000,000 artifacts that our kids could be contributing to our knowledge base each year.

We’ve been treating students as consumers for over 100 years. We supply them with all sorts of content that we think they should know. By and large, our students are asked to take it all in, pass the test, and leave with very little to show for their efforts save a grade that once they graduate high school and enter the workforce or go to college has little or no meaning or relevance. And I understand that up until now, we haven’t had the means or the technologies to archive our students learning in meaningful ways for them to reflect upon and for others to learn from.

But now we do.

This is the big shift that the system is going to have to come to terms with. We have to stop seeing our kids as consumers and start supporting them as creators that can all contribute meaningfully to our collective body of knowledge. And we have to give every kid access to the tools to do so. I know there are many things that we have to make sure they know, and many literacies that we have to help them master. But any more, not to find 18 or 10 or even 5 quality things that each of our students creates in the course of a school year and not share them with the world does us all a disservice.

1,098,000,000 student posts a year. That should be our goal…