At BLC05 Listening to Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab talk about how we need to take the conepts of learning from kindergarten and apply them throughout education. About how there is a growing recognition that success in the future is going to depend on acting and thinking creatively, yet schools give little opportunity for students to develop as creative thinkers. He’s giving great examples of kids really invested in projects that they’re designing and creating. As I’m sitting here, I’m thinking about how much I want my own kids to be among those that he’s talking about. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time reading the works on his site Lifelong Kindergarten and trying to figure out how to provide these types of experiences for them. (Looks like I’m going to have to dive into MindStorms…) And, trying to figure out how teachers and students can use Read/Write Web technologies in inventive ways.

Guiding Principles: 1. Learning through design. 2. Following your interests. 3. Enouraging emergent community (natural collaboration, mentors). 4. Cultivating and environment of respect and trust. Now he’s showing a program called Scratch, which is pretty amazing. And he’s saying that the knowledge we build from the information we have access to is important, but what is more important is moving toward where success and satisfaction will depend on the ability to think and act creatively.

There have been a couple of keynoters here that have talked about how enabling students to pursue their passions in creative ways not only allows them to become more effective learners but also builds their self-esteem and become imporant parts of their communities. I think that’s where these technologies fit. Obviously, these are primarily asynchronous tools. And I believe they are more than just publishing tools. I’ve been in blogvangelism mode all week, and the good news is that no one, not one person in either of my Intro to the Read/Write Web sessions raised his or her hand when I asked if anyone did NOT know what a Weblog was. Watershed moment. But it’s getting time to get beyond that. Kids are embracing these tools in creative ways…the job now is to not let the system suck the life blood out of them.

My brain hurts. This has been a great, great conference, both in terms of the really provocative learning that’s taken place an in the community of learners that’s been built. This is, in my mind, the best technology and learning conference I’ve been to, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.

Tags: BLC05, Alan November

So via Clancy Ratliffe, I came across a link to H2O which is a site where you can make “playlists” on particular topics. So, for instance, if I’m teaching about the Read/Write Web (what a conincidence!) I can build a list of key resources that people might find helpful and share it via RSS. Looks pretty cool, but obviously it’s going to take some time to figure out exactly what it can do.

But here’s the best part…I’m figuring it out with Steve Dembo, Jim Wenzloff and Jack McLeod (left to right in the picture). Now how cool is that…four bloggers rolling up their sleeves to collaboratively figure out a potentially cool new tool and who agree to meet at the ship’s bar tonight during the Boston Harbor Cruise to share our findings. Should be an interesting post.

The blogosphere is great, but it’s also a lot of fun to get to spend some time with people who I read on a daily basis. And to learn with them as well…
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So here’s the question of the day…what’s this world look like when Moodle adds it’s blog component (due out soon) so that students can exist in the very safe, collaborative space of the CMS while creating and producing their work and then use the blog module to open up the door to the public just a crack to publish? I am loving Moodle, and I obviously love blogging. Seems like a pretty inviting scenario if you ask me.

I spent six hours with teachers from around the world yesterday talking about blogs and wikis and RSS and it was an exhausting, educational day for me as well as, I hope, for them. One thing I find when I give workshops like this is that I always learn something from the conversation, and I really appreciated the way this group probed and pushed back and thought hard about the changes we’re seeing. I’m still amazed at how amazed I am by these technologies. I still find them so fascinating, so powerful…and so unruly.

Case in point: I wanted to show Paul Allison’s “High School Online Collaborative Writing” wiki and when I went there, this is what I saw. Teachable moment! And it really was. It was such a perfect reminder of the messiness of the Read/Write Web, that despite the potential power that I think we all see in it, there is still much to think about in terms of bringing it to our students. As Tom said, wikis need a lot of care and tending, and in their current forms, they are a challenge in terms of student use. So we talked more about wikis as ways to connect teachers and resources and how we can bring students to wikis in careful ways.

The best part continues to be that these tools require educators to think differently about what their classrooms could be. To be able to instigate some of that thinking is just way too cool.

Alex Halavais has an interesting post about ways we might think about certifying the value of Wikipedia, and I think he gets it right when he argues that just assigning academics with PhDs or “acknowledged experts” to do the work is probably not the right way to do it:

First, that some absolute fools manage to get the doctorate. Some of these fools graduate from the best schools out there, and some of the less able programs graduate more fools than scholars. So, the Ph.D. is certainly not a measure of insight. Indeed, how many business cards have you received with the “, Ph.D.” after the name and thought that this was a replacement for any obvious signs of intelligence.

Moreover, there are plenty of brilliant people who will never get a Ph.D. The degree has a lot to do with a conforming to a particular set of social and economic conditions, and it is not the best learning fit for very many people. It was good for me, I think (still working that one out), but it’s not for everybody. And I have flunked some truly brilliant people out of our own program because I knew that while they were smart and able, they were not going to be able to complete a degree.

I do think that the average Ph.D., and perhaps the average faculty member, is an expert in their field and able to teach about it. But just as with the Wikipedia, that expertise is only most of the time on most of their specialized topics. The difference is that there is social acceptance of this form of authority. And the question is how to lend that authority to Wikipedia.

It’s good stuff, and it takes Andy Carvin’s recent post on student examination of Wikipedia a step further. I find this whole discussion hugely interesting and valuable in thinking about so many things: writing, information literacy, research, open content…

Last night at a pre conference dinner, Alan asked all of those in attendance to introduce themselves and talk about what their fantasy for technology was. The answers were mostly about the desire to connect everyone to this resource that’s becoming such an important part of our lives. And after achieving that access, I said my fantasy might actually be coming true right before my eyes in Wikipedia. I am still so incredibly inspired by the idea that thousands of people from around the world can collaboratively contribute to the creation of such a vast and impressive resource all the while asking nothing in return and remaining anonymous. It feels like such a gift, and feels like such a shift in what is now possible.

In a comment here a couple of days ago, Stephen Downes linked to his “Principles for Evaluating Websites” post, and I just wanted to make sure I commented on how absolutely must reading it is for anyone struggling with how to navigate this new Web. I’ve said this before, the bottom line is that even for those who have always been tuned into the need to evaluate information, it’s a much harder task these days. And Stephen really nails it in so many ways in this post. Briefly, here’s what he says, but you need to go read the whole thing.

1. There are no authorities. Authorities sometimes lie and are themselves fooled, so ultimately, you must be the one to determine if something you read is true.

2. What you already know matters.

3. You need to learn who to trust and you do this through repeated contact.

4. Learn to distinguish facts from appearance of fact. Personally, I think this may be the hardest to teach.

5. Be on the lookout for generalizations, especially universal ones.

6. Statistics can be misleading.

7. Go to the source, whenever you can. If, for instance, a study is online, go look at it before accepting someone else’s interpretation. I should do more of this, I know.

8. Motives matter. Remember: EVERYONE has an agenda.

Bottom line, as Stephen says, “determining what to believe – or to not believe – is a matter of trust. You need to determine for yourself who to trust about what.” And that’s what makes this so difficult…it’s work.

Best part? He includes some examples of trustworthy and untrustworthy sources.
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Well, duh. Is it any surprise that a nationwide survey by the National Governors Association find dissatisfaction from students about their high school experience? Bored. Dumbed down. Not challenged.

We are becoming irrelevant because we continue to advocate a system that doesn’t allow our kids to pursue their individual interests and challenge themselves in meaningful ways.

How sad is it that “a large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult…” What does that say about what we’ve been doing for the last 100 years?

So I’m packing up the wife and kids and heading off to Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston beginning with a all day blogwikifurlflickr workshop with 20 victims on Monday and then four presentations Tuesday through Thursday. Last year was a real treat for me, and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s gathering for a good while. (One reason is to spend a little time with Steve Dembo who will be in attendance.) I hope to be blogging some of the sessions here and at the conference blog, and I think blc05 is the official tag for those of you that want to follow along via RSS.

David Wiley has an interesting conversation with Larry Lipsitz about the changes in publishing:

In days of yore, publishing and distributing information was a capital intensive business. But it simply isn’t anymore. In my opinion, “publishers” need to understand that their value no longer comes from disseminating information. We can all do that ourselves(this list, our blogs, and print-on-demand services like lulu.com being examples). There is still value to add, however, in providing editorial services and facilitating peer review. I believe that “publishers” who think their value to the academic ecosystem comes mainly from the fact that they can get information to people (i.e., their value is in their ability to “publish”) have their eyes closed…

This is an intruging line of thinking, to me, because there is no doubt that the value of paper texts and books is changing. I’m not saying we get rid of books, but it sure feels like they are becoming more and more irrelevant from a content standpoint. (They are, however, certainly still relevant from a delivery standpoint because we’re nowhere near to the point where people are ready to give up paper.) Texts are collectors of information that get frozen in time, when you think about it. And, as I said yesterday, I really think more and more we’re going to find power in those tools that connect content rather than just collect it. Books do a cruddy job of connecting us to other content. Blogs and wikis and these other tools are all about connecting content. I think I’m just starting to fully understand how important that is.

David goes on to say that while publishers can still add value in editing and review, where they no longer have value is in disseminating the information and in the fact that they retain all of the copyrights. Read the whole thing to get a more well-rounded picture.

And there is another post brewing here…what really is the value that schools have to offer when the information they impart is freely available elsewhere?

The good news from my visit to Ohio this week is that it didn’t feel like there was as much resistance to the Wikipedia model, even from the librarians in attendance. (At least I didn’t get yelled at like in DC a few months ago…) I totally understand the difficulty many people have with the blurring of trusted/not to be trusted sources. And I got more of a sense of “this is going to be hard work” rather than “this is something we can’t do.” That’s the bottom line. None of this information literacy stuff is getting any easier, nor will it. I thought one of the most genuine moments of the conference was when one woman said something along the lines of “I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.” It’s not an easy admission, and I think a lot of people would just rather hold on to what they are used to, sticking to what they know. Problem is, of course, their kids aren’t. And I think once people understand the inevitability of it, the conversations turns from stopping it to dealing with it. That’s an important first step.

It’s been a great couple of days at the ILILE Conference in Kent, Ohio except for one thing. Here I am waiting for my plane at the Cleveland airport and it’s the first time I’ve had a connection. It’s a sad commentary on my existence that it felt as painful as it did to be offline. Anymore if I go a day without wading through my Bloglines account I get up over 300 posts behind, easy. And I’d still say at least 50% of them are usually relevant or interesting…worth a few minutes at least. I need to get a life.

Today the teachers and librarians in attendance had a great conversation about what it means to teach in a world where content is easily created, freely shared, and actively engaged. It’s such a big shift from the traditional, textbook focused classroom where our students create documents and assignments that are basically collectors of information. With the Read/Write Web, assignments become not just containers but connectors to all sorts of other important resources. It’s a riff on what David Weinberger writes and talks about so well.

But one teacher from Toledo spoke about how fewer than 40% of her students can access the Internet from home, and how she worried that the learning divide between her students and those with access will expand more quickly in the era of an interactive Web. It still amazes me that the number one national education priority isn’t to connect EVERY student to the Web. It’s sinful.

And here I’m complaining about not having wifi that works in my hotel…

(via David Warlick) Andy Carvin comes up with lesson plan that gets the most out of the unverifiableness of Wikipedia. Bottom line, use it to teach the type of information literacy skills we should be applying to much of what we read these days:

Here’s a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.

This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced – hopefully with multiple sources.

Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia’s information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.

I would only add one step to this and that is to have a Wikipedia Party at the end to reflect on why this process is so important these days and how to apply it to other sources. I’d start by asking my students questions such as:

(via Sebastian Fiedler) So I would qualify this as must reading for anyone who is trying to get a handle on what’s happening with social technologies. This month’s issue of Technology Review has a well written article by Wade Roush about the impact of blogs, wikis, Flickr and the like:

This explosion of new capabilities shouldn’t be mistaken for “feature creep,” the accretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing–continuous in the usual sense of “uninterrupted,” but also in the sense that it’s continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness.

I agree with Seb who notes that we’re starting to see all of these disparate tools being pulled together into a more holistic framework and that’s a good thing. When all of the parts really come together, it will be interesting to see how close to reality this vision is:

And this, in the end, is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on–even though they’re the only things making the world clear.

Lots to think about…

(via Graham Stanley) So this is a very cool idea to create personalized podcast feeds using del.icio.us:

How to do it:

1. You set up a new tag at Del.icio.us (I tried it with pod-efl).

2. You create a podcast-friendly RSS feed at Feedburner using the Del.icio.us URL of the new tag(http://feeds.feedburner.com/Delicious/blogefl/pod-efl).

3. You put the podcast feed into your podcast client (podcatcher): iPodder, or iTunes, for example.
4. The next time you come across a link to an mp3 audio file (podcast or otherwise) you think you may like, you post the link to Del.icio.us, and then when you run your podcatcher, it’ll be automatically downloaded to your PC or mp3 player.

I’ve just tried it out, linking to the last Comprehensible Input podcast and it worked a treat.

Why this is interesting/useful :

I have just thought (off the top of my head) of these ways of making use of this feature (although I’m sure there are more):

a) You can publish a Del.icio.us feed of what you’re listening to (could be used for recommending podcasts to other teachers / educators), thus filtering interesting podcast content for other educators.
b) You have a class of students (with access to the Web of course, and preferably mp3 players) and you want to give them extra listening practice. Just as using a blog can direct them to relevant and useful resources, so this system can supply them with relevant audio content.
c) You’re interested in downloading mp3 files that aren’t podcasts to listen to later (for example, from ELLO). This would be a tedious job, downloading each file one-by-one. This makes it much easier to do.

Nice! Introducting the “Educational Podcasts for Educators” feed, with, of course, “Free Culture” to start. If you find some specific podcast shows that you think educators will find especially useful, tag them with “webloggedpod” at del.icio.us and they’ll automatically be added.
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(via Dave Winer) MSNBC has an article titled “Blog it Now, Regret it Later?” which in essence does the blogs as journal thing all over again, this time with a pinch of ominousness thrown in.

Experts say such incidents belong to a growing trend in which frank outpourings online are causing personal and public dramas, often taking on a life they wouldn’t have if the Web had not come along and turned individuals into publishers.

Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries — especially those about partying and dating exploits — will have ramifications down the road.

So does this “blogs attract pedophiles” meme has sputtered out, only to be replaced by the “blogs will ruin you” meme? Or the “blogs will create young terrorists” meme?”

That’s what happened at a middle school in Michigan last fall, when principals started receiving complaints from parents about some students’ blog postings on Xanga. School officials couldn’t do much about it. But when the students found out they were being monitored, a few posted threatening comments aimed at an assistant principal — and that led to some student suspensions.

“It was just a spiraling of downward emotions,” says the school’s principal. She spoke on the condition that she and her school not be identified, out of fear that being named would cause another Web frenzy.

“Kids just feed into to that and then more kids see it and so on,” she says. “It’s a negative power — but it’s still a power.”

Ah yes, but there is an upside.

Still, she thinks blogging is worth it — to stay in touch with friends and to air her more creative work, including essays.

“I suppose in that way,” she says, “I think of blogs as ‘open mic nights’ online.”

Thank goodness!

Ok, seriously, these are big issues for schools, and they are only going to get bigger. Not just the fact that kids are blogging. An even bigger issue is that parents don’t know how to deal with it, which is why they are complaining to schools. Like it or not, schools have a boatload of education to be doing, with kids AND parents. (And teachers…) Shutting down access is not the answer. Putting the fear of god into them is not the answer.

Frame it any way you like, kids now have a voice, moreso than most schools. We are losing a lot of the traditional control over content that we had. We need to recognize that education is becoming something much different from what it used to be. It’s not a monlogue any longer. It’s dialogue, conversation, collaboration. Let’s celebrate it instead of fight it because if journalism, politics and business are any indication, resistance is futile.
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