This makes me downright giddy:

2015
The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

Now I know I have no life, but this is what it’s all about. This is where my sometimes nutty brain feels things are headed as well. Think of what this means for teachers and schools. And, before we miss it, let’s really think about this moment and what we are a part of.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t.

I do…every day. I know I am really out there with this, but I still get butterflies when I read and think and participate with this new Web. It’s the power of ideas and conversations and contribution. And it’s very cool.
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Alan says that he’s moved from Furl to del.icio.us and I guess that means I’m going to have to snag his new RSS feed (though it’s kicking out an error right now.) But the ironic thing is I’ve been moving away from Furl as well, but to Jots instead, not del.icio.us. Still not sure exactly why, and in all honestly, Jots does not seem to be gaining a lot of tracking if the slow increase in URLs linked is any indication. But there is something about the look of the page that just appeals to me, and something about del.icio.us’s that I bump up against. I’ve been thinking of adding the RSS to my Jots account as a link blog feed, and, actually, I just went ahead and did it. (Thanks to Alan’s Feed2JS.)

I think at some point, you just kind of latch on to what “feels” right, sometimes at the expense of a larger community. Alan is definitely tapping into the bigger database, but then again, I’ve never gone too far down the social road of these tools anyway, save the subscribe to someone else’s feed or search feed path. And maybe that’s enough. But I do know there is a whole day’s worth of thinking and writing I need to do regarding the folksonomy stuff that’s been bubbling up lately. Organization has never been my strength…

This is all good stuff that I wish I had time to blog about…

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So the bad news is that after more delays and groundings, I finally got home at about 1:30 a.m. yesterday morning. Oy. The good (?) news was that I got to sit next to 16-year old girl blogger from Seattle on the first leg of my flight and we had a really interesting talk about the state of adolescent journaling online. In a word, it seems she and her friends are “addicted” to their Myspace sites. Seems they spend more time than they should reading and commenting to each other, even though they’ve just seen each other at school. And she told me stories of her friends putting all sorts of private information and pictures online, even though she said she didn’t do that. And it seems they’re not doing a heck of a lot of blogging (v.), that most of what they do is just basically IM each other on their sites. I asked her if they used blogs at her school and she kind of chuckled. “Not really. I mean we read blogs sometimes; we use them for research.” I pressed her on how that worked, but she was vague on the details. At one point I was tempted to pull out my iPod and capture the conversation digitally, but I resisted. Would have been interesting. She was smart, the kind of kid whose blog probably would have been a pretty good read.

So when I told her about the article I’d just read that said that kids are doing a lot of real writing online, she said, “Oh, I used to do that at my Live Journal site.” Hmmm… Seems she wrote volumes in real sentences there. She told me, however, that even though she kept all of her posts private to just her friends, her mom found out about it when she read all the friends’ posts. That was pretty much the end of that. Now this girl consciously tries to not spend too much time at Myspace, even though, she admitted, it’s hard not to. She seemed surprised when I told her I was a blogger. She was also decidedly unimpressed when I told her what I blogged about. “Oh, that’s cool,” she said before moving on to a story about a girl whose mother found her “blog” and grounded her for a month.

So, what does this mean? I dunno. My brain is still numb from the trip. And much of this isn’t news, I know. But it was an interesting hour, one that just confirmed a lot of what I (we) already knew. But here’s the most telling moment, at least to me. As we were descending into Memphis, she goes “You know, I think you’re the only grown up blogger I’ve ever met.”

What a surprise…

(via Anne) Finally, a parent who gets it. (Hmmm…I’m writing a lot about parents lately…) From “Kids and the Internet - it’s a good thing” comes some very common sense advice from Laura Matthews:

We read a lot of alarmist commentary about the dangers of the Internet for youngsters. How it puts kids at risk, erodes social skills, lays traps for the unwary and innocent, and contributes to the long slow spiral into illiteracy.

I’m the first to admit that there are risks involved with letting kids online. In raising two children, I’ve had to face and circumvent the pitfalls - strangers attempting contact, enticing popups, too-good-to-be-true downloads, casino-like games. I’ve had to aggressively impose safeguards for my own peace of mind.

Yet, from what I’ve seen, the educational benefits of online access are worth it. Yes, parents have to be vigilant. But the opportunities for communication and self-expression the Internet provides are bringing benefits to everyone - especially children.

Well halleluljia! It’s funny, but it strikes me how I constantly seem to be arguing for the Web in schools. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think the Web is the most transformational technology out there? That it’s the most incredible resource of information? Why is it we’re constantly finding fault with it instead of developing ways to mitigate the bad stuff and take advantage of all the good it has to offer?

And I know I seem to discredit myspace.com and xanga blogs a lot, but the bottom line is the kids are writing.

To keep a blog going, you have to have the discipline to write daily. This puts today’s young bloggers on the fast track to future Pulitzers. To keep your friends coming back, you have to be interesting, funny, intelligent, relevant. These kids are all that and more. Once I got past the immature spelling and punctuation (along with usual teen slang and vulgarity), I was treated to some of the best poetry I’ve ever read. All of their blogs together are a veritable anthropological study of high school life. One senior I know has, in four years, transformed from what seemed like functional illiteracy - incomplete sentences, poor spelling - into a blossoming philosopher headed for a major university.

As Anne says, you don’t have to take every word of this one parent’s experiences to be gospel. But there are many important, educational benefits of the Web, and as educators, we need to get over our fears and deal with them head on. Articles like this only remind us how much our kids are missing when we don’t.

So I made it to my hotel in Pensacola at 1 am CST last night after the pilot of the plane I was supposed to catch in Atlanta announced, and I quote, “Sorry ladies and gentlemen but the plane is broke.” That was my second broken plane of the day…not a good trend. And I almost didn’t even make it to Atlanta as I had to go back to security in Philly to get the full pat down treatment when the boarding gate guy said my pass hadn’t been punched correctly. Not a good day for traveling all around.

But today has been better. I spoke to and with a very enthusiastic group of library media specialists about the new technologies of the Read/Write Web and while I think they left overwhelmed, I also think they left really excited about going home and trying to dive deeper into what I’d showed them. Now this was a 2.5 hour talk, no hands on, and by the end we were pretty much all mush (especially me, working on about four hours of sleep.) And now…free wifi at the Pensacola airport! Despite the thunder clouds brewing over the tarmac, maybe my luck is changing…

Anyway, here the most interesting (I think) observation of the morning: Just about every person who came up to me at the break and at the end introduced themselves by saying “I have a 15 (or 13 or 18) year old at home and he’s (she’s) always on the Web…” It was really striking. The ideas were resonating with them on a parent level almost more than an educator level, which I guess shouldn’t surprise me at all. But it does remind me that these ideas need broad understanding, that parents really are just as much of an audience as educators. And more and more I’m thinking if we don’t teach them as well, we’re missing the boat.

And, as always, I’m left with much to think about, many great questions and concerns to mull over as I try to make it home to Philly, which I see is “experiencing delays…” Go figure.
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So just a quick “waytago” to Henry Abbot, local Flemington, NJ blogger and church buddy who just got a Forbes Best of the Web Award for his pro basketball blog “True Hoop.” Nice to see that my little small town is becoming such a blogging hotbed. But hey Forbes…no education division?
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So I’ve been pretty lucky up until now with the blogvangelism road tour in terms of making flights and not missing any presentations and such. But my attempts to get to Pensacola today are not going well. First Northwest cancels my flight from Philly and gets me on a Delta flight that gets into Fla around midnight EST, four hours later. Oy. Now I see that a bunch of Delta flights are getting delayed or cancelled. Double oy.

I’ve got a post brewing about this double life I’m leading…this summer has been extremely busy, and one of the saving graces has not having to deal with stuff like this. I don’t know how Warlick and November and Co. do this pretty much full time. That’s one thing not to envy.
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Steve Cohen sent me a link to this story at North Jersey.com that captures the incredibly messy stage we’re in regarding schools and blogs and students and Web publishing. Pretty much seems like schools are in reaction mode instead of proaction mode, and to me it’s only going to get worse until schools start understanding the shifts that are occurring. This is a very different landscape, one where, to some extent, I think resistance is futile. The old paradigms of trying to manage or control the information flow pretty much goes out the window when everyone has a platform.
What can schools in general do? Well, here are some pretty straightforward ideas, I think.

1. Schools need to start blogging and inviting the community into conversations about what’s going on. We need to tell parents and students and community members that we will entertain and respond to any comment or idea they contribute provided they do so in a way that respects the civil exchange of ideas and the people involved. We do not need to stand for insults, but we do need to provide a space to discuss ideas because if we don’t, someone else will. And we need to offer the space because we are the educators and this is all about education.

2. We need to in-service teachers, hold courses and community nights for parents, and teach every student the acceptable uses of these new technologies, and we need to model their appropriate use. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but half the problem is that kids are making the rules up as they go along. I love this quote from the story:

As students flock to such sites, teachers worry that without the guidance they would get at a traditional school paper, kids will learn all the bad habits of editorializing and sloppy reporting.

What guidance have students every really gotten in this regard unless they took a journalism class or worked on the school paper? How about this: a course in citizen journalism and Web literacy should be MANDATORY for every student (and teacher, and parent and administrator.)

3. Stop blocking, start teaching. I’ve been exchanging comments about this on Aaron Campbell’s site and he says:

And I agree with you that we should embrace our confrontation with nudity, sex, drugs, violence, and spam in an institutional context as a positive thing, an opportunity to teach and learn and grow. The more we avoid dealing with these issues, the more we give up sharing our experience and wisdom (?) with young people about them. These are part of their world, so they should likewise be issues in the classroom.

That’s not to say that we don’t continue to filter out the worst of it, and that we take every measure to protect our kids from the ne’er do wells of the world. But instead of denying access to a ton of good content that’s coming out of blogs and wikis and other sources, let’s teach kids how to deal with this new world. We do our students a disservice if we don’t teach them that spamming and file sharing is unethical and illegal, that pornography (and half of the magazine covers at the local convenience store) demeans and degrades and objectifies women in ways that should not and cannot be tolerated. That everyone has an agenda, and they need to be able to see beyond the message to the overall subtext. Why aren’t we talking about this in our schools? Better yet, why aren’t we joining with parents to do this? And what happens when we don’t have these conversations and our kids graduate? Who talks to them about it then?

More questions than answers, I know, but we need to start addressing them before not after the ugliness starts.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/07/does_college_ma.html
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As promised to the Building Learning Communities conference goers, here are links to the two PowerPoints that I used while presenting:

New Internet Literacies
RSS: The New Killer App for Eduators

It’s here!

What every educator needs to know about Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, in one handy (and if I do say so myself, smart-looking) volume. Written for young teachers, old teachers, soon to be teachers, administrators and anyone else who wants to learn more about how the Web is changing teaching and learning.

Just click the pic to get your copy today!

and purchase orders from qualified buyers.
Purchase orders can be faxed to 908-788-7097 made out to:
Connective Learning, LLC, 135 Main St., Flemington, NJ, 08822.
Refund requests accepted within five days of receipt of book. Cancellations accepted with 24 hours of order. See our privacy policy. Click here to contact us.

Book Table of Contents:

1. The Read/Write Web

(via Steve Cohen) So look at the graphs, but get your brain around these stats about Wikipedia:

On our last night of “vacation” we stopped to visit some friends in Pleasantville, NY, (where, btw, property values are about as outrageous as you’ll find…a two-bedroom ranch for $750,000? Oy.)

Anyway, another couple came over for dinner, and before long the six of us started talking about taxes and schools and education and the Web. I was almost amazed because someone actually got not only blogs but also had a grip on RSS…he was thinking of starting a blog with his new investment advice business. Good thing I was sitting down! We also started talking about how little parents really know about what their kids do online, how most of them don’t really “get” blogs or IM or community sites like Myspace.com. Of course, I got on my soapbox about how kids have no models for appropriate use of these technologies and how the only place they are going to get it was from school. And we all agreed that it’s the same way for parents…they are looking to the schools for guidance.

So here’s my latest “If I Had the Time I’d Do It” idea: a Moodle course on the Web for our parents. We’ll offer it up four times a year, have it run for four weeks, cover how the Web is changing, Read/Write Web technologies, blogs, IM, acceptable use, some Web literacy stuff, how to talk to their children about this stuff, safety issues, etc., get them participating in the forums, and send them an official certificate at the end. It’ll even have a playlist. I think it could be a great way of a) helping parents get up to speed on some of these issues, b) create some community among the community, and c) provide a needed public service.

Now, if I could just carve out a few days to build it…

Tags: Moodle, Parents, Web,

Catching up a bit…