So it’s Friday, and in the thousands of posts I’ve written here, I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. But I am moved.

It’s been out for about three days, but I must have listened to Sheryl Crow’s “Wildflower” at least 20 times already. (Have I mentioned how totally awesome Rhapsody is lately?) All I can say is…”mercy.”

Now I’ve been a fan for a long time, but this is without question her best, I think. Be warned, it’s not uptempo. Instead, it’s really intricate harmonies and soft balladry that has soulful Beatles written all over it (the title track especially.) And her voice… Oh. My. Goodness.

Now, does Sheryl have a blog?

Real easy. Yes or no. In terms of education as we know it, the Web (of the Read/Write flavor) changes everything.

Defend your answers.

So the good news blogs in the classroom articles just keep on coming.

The NEA has New Kids on the Blog which offers about as hip and upbeat assessment of the potential of blogs in schools as I’ve seen.

When Maeve, a Maine fifth-grader with a mammoth conscience, hears some troubling information about the Mars cocoa farms in West Africa, she doesn’t whisper it across the lunch table—she announces it on her blog. Within minutes, her classmates furiously respond, hunting for the M’s on their keyboard. “I am never going to buy M&M’s again!” types one young activist. “Thank you for this information,” writes another.

students working at computerJunk-food discourse, summer vacation advice, and Red Sox statistics all fly across the wires in Lisa Plourde’s writing workshop at the Connors-Emerson School in Bar Harbor, using fresh technology called Web logs or “blogs.” A blog is a Web site that allows its author to type, type, type, and then receive comments from readers in a sort of digital conversation.

Rosie O’Donnell has one, as does NBC weatherman Al Roker. But so do Ally, Emma, Amethyst, Nick, Rebecca, Hadley, and the rest of Maeve’s classmates in Bar Harbor, as well as thousands of teachers across the country.

Oh yeah. Uh-huh.

And then via Anne comes The Online Edge from District Administration magazine. It’s not quite as peppy, but it does give blogs a big nod in the potential department.

The use of Weblogs to share personal thoughts and opinions over the Internet is capturing the interest of students across the world. But because content can be irreverent and even offensive, administrators are justifiably wary about using blogs in school. With the right guidance, Weblogs can be one of the greatest online communications vehicles in K-12 education.

Someone pinch me…
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One of the things I really like about David Weinberger is his interesting, unique vision of what is happening to knowledge because of what is happening on the Web. That and the fact that he pushes my own thinking so much. He’s a perfect example of that whole “the teachers we find are better than the ones we are given” potential of the Read/Write Web. He (and a few select others which I mention here often) challenges me in ways that are relevant to me, to my passions, leading me to new insights and connecting me to new teachers.

Another example of this is his latest essay “The New Is.” It’s a further evolution of what he articulated at his NECC keynote in Philadelphia earlier this month, and it’s a mind bender, at least for me. So this will be one of those scary “work through it in a blog post” type of posts. And maybe, the beginnings of a conversation.

Start with this:

We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn’t what it is.

As opposed, I would guess, to an age where to understand something is to think we see what it is, right? An age in education when we teach by the “here it is and here is what it means” method based on a system of structured knowledge with absolute answers. An age in which, because we’ve had limited access to other voices and other sources, there is an urge for everyone to conform to traditional understandings.

But on the Web, Weinberg asserts, structure is a problem because very few ideas fit so neatly into the traditional schemes. Most ideas, most understandings are nuanced in ways that make them more personal rather than one size fits all. In fact, meaning and knowledge is evolving through millions of conversations and interactions that were not possible before, with different people “tagging” similar ideas in dissimilar ways, creating a messiness that he says is a sign of “successful order.”

We don’t need perfect knowledge in an age of knowledge abundance. We just need pretty good knowledge, and that’s something we don’t need perfect gatekeepers for. To the gatekeepers what looks like chaos and the degradation of learning to Netizens looks like an exponential increase in intelligence.

And who are the gatekeepers, you think? I can’t tell you how much angst this “exponential increase in intelligence” is causing in certain circles, and we’ve all heard it, I know. “It can’t be trusted.” “What authority does the source have?” “How do you know that?” All legitimate questions in certain circumstances. But questions whose acceptable answers are not changing, as of yet, with the new realities of information and knowledge.

And then there’s this, one of my favorite Weinberger riffs:

The difference in views occurs in part because the Net explodes the old view of intelligence as the containing of lots of knowledge. This container model is reflected in how we talk about documents: We say they have contents even though print is as 2-dimensional as a shadow. On the Net, documents ( pages ) get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to.

I just love that concept, and I love the way it relates back to George Siemens and Barbara Ganley who see that not only are their texts not simply containers any longer, neither are their students. And isn’t that how we’ve thought about students, really, for a long time, ultimately as containers of the information we impart? But with the Web, they become much more than that, because, like pages and online texts, then can connect their own messy knowledge to the messy understandings of others and, in the process, exponentially increase their intelligence. I am so struck by how limiting I see the traditional classroom any more, the restrictive nature of it. (Much like what I think of paper anymore, btw.) So look at the last quote again and think students, not documents.

On the Net, [students] get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to.

That’s a bit of a shift, huh?

And so what does all of this mean for instruction? I think he starts to paint that picture as well.

If you want to know about an idea, you could go to an encyclopedia and read what an expert says about it. Or you could find a blog that talks about it and start following the web of links. You’ll not just see multiple points of view, you’ll hear those points of view in conversation. That’s new in the world. The old dream of finding a single knowledge for the entire world, having knowledge be like reality, in other words, is dying rapidly. The connectedness of the Net has made it too clear that the world is not going to come to agreement and be able to write its single encyclopedia, covering everything we need to know without dissent. To understand now means to hear the multiplicity of meaning talked about across the world. The more of the world we get into the conversation, the more the world will mean.

And that then becomes the task, to get teachers and students to enter into the conversation, to get them connected (in more ways than one) to the idea that understanding and meaning and knowledge is no longer quite as easily defined, that we find them in negotiation and interaction, in the “continuousness of conversation” as he puts it.

How tough could that be?

Reality check # 278 comes via Bruce Landon who cites this Forrester Consumer Forum report on consumer use of blogs, rss and social networking.

Blogging: Ten percent of consumers read blogs once a week or more, compared with 5 percent in 2004.

Real Simple Syndication (RSS): Six percent of consumers use RSS feeds once a week or more, compared with 2 percent in 2004.

Social networking: Six percent of consumers use social networking sites once a week or more, compared with 4 percent in 2004.

And not to disparage educators, but we all know we’re not exactly leaders when it comes to technology adoption. So I’m thinking it’s more like 6, 3 and 2 percent respectively.

Lots of Kool Aid yet to mix.
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Few bloggers are making me think more these days than George Siemens and Barbara Ganley, and today they both hit on the same themes and make so much sense that for this moment, at least, I plan on packing up my office, leaving my public high school job and begging some small university somewhere to let me come in and teach a writing class or two filled with blogs and wikis and podcasts, asking only for a laptop, a high speed connection and a family meal plan at faculty dining facility as compensation. (This will pass I’m sure.)

First, George blogs an imaginary conversation that’s not so imaginary between him and someone seeking to understand what these new Web technologies are instead of what they make possible. And what they make possible is his (I think) well articulated theory of Connectivism which explains how learning happens in a digital era. It states, briefly, that old theories of learning are becoming obsolete because they can’t account for the speed at which learners are being asked to consume and process information these days. That whereas we used to have the time to “construct” our learning and experience it, now we need to be able to connect to the information and people who will make us smarter. He says that we are actually “aggregators,” a term that definitely hits home for me. And here is the key line, I think:

We are continually connecting…but we are not always constructing.

See my previous post in terms of not being able to construct. But understand that nowadays, the connection is just as important as the construction. I didn’t stop reading and thinking. And this:

…connectivism should change much of how we educate learners – both in public and corporate education. Courses, programs, and knowledge fields are re-shaped to permit learners to form connections based on interest and need.

Why? Because we can, if, of course, we have access to those resources. (BTW, look at what Massachusetts is thinking along those lines.) I know I’m getting repetitive here, but it’s just becoming so clear to me how absolutely imperative it is to have access to all of this information and all of these people and to think seriously about what a dramatic shift having it requires in our pedagogy.

Like Barbara, whose post today is one of those posilutely must read snippets of professional blogging practice that very few of us have been able to get to, myself included. (Hence the professorship wish…) Want some Siemens-esque profundity?

…the first attempts at blogging by my first-years have me convinced that sustained blogging over the years, not just in the classroom, but after and outside the classroom experience, as a way to reflect on and discuss the connections between the lessons learned inside the class and the world outside our walls, is perhaps the most promising way to use blogging and other social software in a liberal arts institution

Whoa. The rest of the post is just as insightful. My connection to Barbara, my aggregation of her ideas (and George’s for that matter) is a significant part of my learning practice today. Yes, in the process of creating this blog post, I am constructing another face to this learning, one that in no small part imprints it on my brain and deepens my understanding of it. But this learning is driven by my own interest and need to learn about it. I am self-taught in the world of blogs and wikis and rss, just as any student can become self-taught in the world of auto mechanics, or biology or armaments of the Civil War.

So the question becomes, what is the role of the teacher in all of this? Well, isn’t it to facilitate those connections within the structure of, as George says, the competencies we seek to teach? Listen when Barbara talks about how her students take over their own learning in the course. Or how Clarence Fisher, Konrad Glogowski and Darren Kuropatwa write about what’s happening in their blogging students. (All three Canadians, btw…hmmm.) Without going over the top, there is almost a sense of reverence for what’s happening. These are truly transitional, transformative classrooms that are pushing us in interesting directions, leading us to…

…a different learning space.

Oy. That job change fantasy hasn’t passed quite yet…
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Welcome to piece of content #4000 posted to this blog. In the words of the inimitable Shelton Brown, I guy who I used to clean boilers with at a local Western Electric plant about 25 years ago when I was home from college in the summer, all I can say is “sleepin’ jesus.” I have no idea what that means, but it seems profound and meaningful enough to apply to this marker I’m passing on the blog highway, and it’s adequately abstract to capture my restlessness with blogging of late. I mean, I guess after 3,999 pieces of content (not all created by me, certainly) I have the right to feel some blog crispiness from time to time, right? RIGHT?

Sorry.

Thing is it’s been a while since I’ve felt blog drudgery, though I must say taking three days offline and not feeling bad about it helped, as has reading some really good stuff in my aggregator this morning that I want to write about, and having gotten through our jam-packed, tablet roadshow In-Service on Friday (after which 94% of the faculty surveyed said they wanted one, by the way) and getting the final revisions to my book out the door has all helped. There’s a little air in my calendar, and that’s what all of this always comes down to, isn’t it? Time to read and write and play and connect without feeling like it’s happening at the expense of the rest of my life. Which makes me still ponder how long it will take before most teachers have played and thought enough about what all this means for it to start making a real difference in the classroom. As Stephen Downes writes when considering what that’s going to require:

“…there is a certain sense in which you have to experience this full immersion in order to be able to understand it. The teacher who turns on the computer a couple of hours a week? No chance.”

No question.
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Well, we had our four-hour in-service today to show off our Tablet PC pilot and to talk about our vision for technology. It was, I think, as good as it could of been in terms of trying to get 250 or so teachers on the same page about totally changing our classroom model for technology. We had four teachers, young and old, get up on stage in front of the group and showcase their use of the tablets, and by any measure it was an inspiring show. The Spanish teacher who I have written about here before really wowed them some of the ways he integrates inking into his PowerPoints and even video. (You have to see it to believe it…) So far in our follow up survey, 94% of the teachers of over 200 respondents said they wanted a tablet next year. It is a very powerful technology.

Because we ran a bit long, I never did get to do my new tech show and tell, but I did quickly show what I think is one of the most powerful potentials of the tablet. Imagine a digitally submitted student essay or story which you’re able to annotate with ink AND record a voice narration at the same time and send back to the student. Then imagine being able to organize all of those files on your own computer, and being able to publish them to a student’s Weblog where he or she can have them as a resource or where parents and peers can also get a broader understanding of what a reader’s experience is on any piece of writing.

That’s what I’ve tried to show here. It’s a 4:30 Flash movie captured using Camtasia which, in it’s most recent version, is an amazingly powerful tool with tons of potential for educators. What I’m trying to imagine is a paperless classroom where students and teachers can annotate their work in both ink and voice and archive all of it for reflection and publication at some point. It’s such a neat tool, and I’m wondering what other people think after watching it. Let me know…

If you got a chance to listen to the podcast in the previous post, you heard me say something like “most educators don’t yet understand what it means to be connected 24/7, the power and the potential that holds.” Something like that. So when I read “Information Everywhere” over at Clarence Fisher’s blog just now, it really clicked. Listen to how he describes what his students are starting to experience:

They are starting to realize they are swimming in it. As they work from our classroom, from the computer lab, from home, from friends’ houses, they are beginning to realize about the power, and the depth, and the pervasiveness of the information they are surrounded by. I’ve got kids phoning me at home at night (small town, acceptable practice), emailing me, asking me for URL’s, noticing things in videos, and asking about certain podcasts. Its everywhere and it is quickly sinking in for them.

Whatever you think about the natives/immigrants discussion, you can’t deny that kids are more willing to put in the time online than most adults. That’s due to many, many diverse and complex reasons, generational divide, digital fluency and work responsibilities among them. And let’s face it…it takes a lot of sacrifice for a seasoned teacher to dive into the digital world and really take it on. I can tell you stories…

But boil it down, it doesn’t matter if you are a native or an immigrant, white or black, rich or poor, time-stressed or footloose and fancy free, if you’re not willing or able to get literate in the ways of the Read/Write Web, you will either become irrelevant or left behind. Being willing but not being able because of economics or geography is simply morally unacceptable. But being able but not willing is absolute foolishness, because at end of the day, if you’re not swimming in it, you’ll be drowning in it.
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Three out of the four of us got together Tuesday night and chatted via Skype for about 45 minutes primarily about access, access to the Web, access to the tools, access to the content. In a nutshell, I’m the depressing one. The longer it takes everyone to get connected, the more the divide is going to grow. There’s just no question in my mind that not providing THE most powerful and important technology out there to every kid is just absolutely unfair at best and really immoral at worst.

Just a couple of show notes…I’m amazed at the quality of what Tim Wilson has been able to produce in the “Pod Cave” and the quality of Skype conference. It may be drivel, but it’s really well produced drivel. And the more I get into this, the more appeal it has in terms of classroom applications. Next week, I mean it, I’m gonna get my teachers Skyping…

At any rate, here’s the link to the show. Enjoy!
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Steve O’Hear sent me a link to this video on blogs that he recently presented on the UK teachers tv channel. (Hey, why don’t we have one of those?) It documents the use of Weblogs by primary students at a number of schools, and it features some really great (and cute) kids with their foward looking teachers. The best part: the students tell the story and hit all the right notes (even the part about blogstipation.)

And actually, the answer to the question of the previous post (how are we going to move these technologies into the classroom?) may just be in the video. Guesses anyone? What can we learn?
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So there’s been a lot of angst flying around the edbloggosphere of late regarding what in the heck it’s going to take to get all of these changes we think we need to make kick started in our schools. Take for instance David Jakes, who responds “Wanna Bet?” to an eSchool News e-mail header that reads “Emerging technologies educators can’t ignore.”

But how many teachers can even design an effective presentation in PowerPoint? How many take advantage of the professional development opportunities available to them? How many internalize technology tools as significant and mission-critical tools required to teach today’s kids. Sadly, the news is not good.
Blogs? Digital Textbooks? Cell phones and iPods? Are you kidding me?

Ouch.

And then there’s Alan Levine, who is wondering if we’re all just “singing to the chorus” rather than really changing our practice:

We know the current generation is almost a different species than our own (a trend that goes back as far as you can go, right?). I’ve heard another presentation where this is highlighted the point again, and at some point, it gets a tad repetitious. At some point we ought to be talking more about what we are doing to address this, strategies for making change, etc. And the irony, of hearing this again at a presentation last week (and even duly noted by the presenter) was that the mode we are communicating this (a single speaker lecturing to a passive audience) is in direct contradiction to the message that learning is social, active learning is the key to engagement, etc. etc. etc. Why are educators in their professional gatherings not changing their own practice?

Oy. (The good news is Alan’s self-medicating and should be back to his more happy self soon.)

In the current issue of EdTech Magazine (free registration required) Pinellas (FL) superintendent Clayton Wilcox voices a familiar refrain.

So, here’s the superintendent’s dilemma: How do you create a compelling picture of our young people’s future with people who are less technologically literate? How do you move people from what they have known to what they have never seen and, in some cases, never contemplated? How do we educate today’s kids for their future rather than for our past?

Good question, it seems. Tough question. How do we do this? Or do we stop trying, accept that it’s going to take a generation for schools to really figure this out, and just try to model what we can where we can? I’ve been really inspired by the work of our teachers in the Tablet PC pilot who for the most part, young and old, are really finding the technology transformative in many different ways. But we’ve been able to give them something we’re not normally able to give teachers: time. Over 20 hours of training, consistent follow up and technical support, and ways to communicate. We’ve coddled some, and prodded others. And, not surprisingly, the younger ones have been riding their tablets the hardest.

This Friday, we get the whole faculty for four hours to hopefully engage them in discussions about process and planning and to show them some of the things the cohort is doing. We’ve been working a plan for the day pretty hard, and I’m hoping it will worth the effort. But I can tell you it won’t be overly effective in bringing too many teachers to the technology table. Not enough time or individual attention. And that’s really what it’s going to take to move people like Tom McHale at my school, or the science teachers at David’s. And that’s the tact that Clayton Williams seems ready to take:

Well, having seen the future, I know where I will start. I am going to tell the story about a boy and his friends who multitask with the best of them, who are not afraid of technology, and I’m going to tell all who will listen that students will gladly volunteer their time when something commands their attention. The great educators I know will find a way to do just that.

Maybe I missed the true nature of my dilemma. Maybe it’s not about creating the compelling vision of a different future for our kids because it’s here for all to see if we just look. Maybe, then, my role is to find the resources so teachers can command their students’ attention in a digital world.

(via Scripting News) Enough of this work stuff, already. I need to do some posting. Like the Allegheny College Dining Services RSS feed, for instance. They get it. I just absolutley, must, have to start getting some parents at this school up to speed on RSS feeds, ’cause once the demand is there…lunch menus, sports schedules, homework, student content. It’ll be a feeding frenzy, if you know what I mean.

I just wanted to give a hearty congratulations to my colleague Tom McHale who has an article in this month’s Technology and Learning magazine titled “Portrait of a Digital Native.” Tom took over most of the journalism courses here at Central after I got my supervisory role a couple of years ago, and he’s continue to move it into the realm of the Read/Write Web with great skill. I know it sounds kinda silly, but I’m really proud of what’s he’s accomplished.

In his post today, Tom posts some goals he’s set out for his teaching this year, and I think they are definitely worth noting:

-to honor the knowledge that students and their parents can bring to the classroom

-to find ways to make the learning more meaningful to them by offering them choices and giving students the tools needed to take control of their learning.

-to provide opportunities for collaboration with different communities of learners, educators, and experts in the field

-to provide opportunities to write for a real audience

-make the planning process transparent – encouraging student and parent involvement

-making reflection (from both student and teachers) a regular part of the learning and teaching process

All of those attempt to maximize the power of the Web and the new tools that have been changing the ways we teach. It’s obvious that he understands the potential, and it’s inspiring to watch.
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So yesterday I spent about 45 minutes observing one of our second year World Language teachers who is in our Tablet PC pilot group. He’s amazingly creative and energetic, and he’s taken to the tablet in a big way. His classroom is now like no other at our school.

I got there before the block started, and as I turned the corner to enter the room, I heard salsa music playing. When I stepped in I saw that on the big screen in front of the class he was projecting a video from his tablet of traditionally dressed Spanish dancers doing some really cool dancing. His students were milling around, many of them trying to emulate the dance moves they were watching, laughing and having a great time. There was energy in the room.

When the bell rang, he switched off the video and up on screen came a blank crossword puzzle in a PowerPoint presentation. He immediately handed the computer to one of his students, but a girl on the other side of the room said “Hey! You said I could go first with that thing today!” So he walked it over to her and she took the stylus and filled in an answer, then passed the tablet to the next student who did the same, and everyone started checking the answers against their own. When it was all filled in, he took the tablet back and did a review, erasing a letter here, an accent there. It was cool to watch.

Next, he started pulling up pictures of his students that they had e-mailed him and that he had put into the PPT. All in Spanish, he had the students identify objects in the photo and then construct sentences about what was happening. As they did, he wrote the sentences across the top of the pictures in bright colors that showed up clearly on the screen. Every student was watching.

After that, he pulled up PowerPoint slides that his students had made, and they came up and presented them as lessons on grammar or on tense or vocabulary. They were using the pen to connect ideas or fill in blanks or annotate pictures. Just a week into the school year, they were changing pen colors, erasing mistakes, drawing pictures. The teacher just kind of melted into the furniture, speaking up only to correct pronunciation or grammar. The kids were literally teaching each other. It was wild.

Unfortunately, at that point, I had to leave. But it was clear what was happening. Students were creating and sharing and loving the process. The teacher was using the technology to connect their learning, and it was their learning, not his. They were in charge.

Now the next step is to start publishing a lot of what’s happening and connecting that content to even wider audiences.

I have to say, meeting Michael Dell was cool, but watching the way that teacher and his students used technology was way cooler.
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