Remember my jots to del.icio.us dilemma? Well thanks to Tom Hoffman, my jots bookmarks are migrating to my del.icio.us account as I write this. (Up to 189…probably a few hundred more to go.) I IM’d him this morning asking where to go for help, and after unsuccessfully trying to guide me through the process (I was hacking with Python, oh yeah, uh huh…) he generously just ended up doing it for me. It’s nice to know that though he tires of my “blogvangelism” from time to time (at least I think that was directed at me) he’s willing to help out a fellow blogger in need. (And get me thinking.) I know I’ve said this before, but to a person, the people who I have connected with and met face to face through blogging over the past few years have all been just really good people. (224 and counting…) And I really feel like I’m part of a smart, creative, respectful community which is not always the case in the blogosphere. (243…244…245) So, while there is still something to be said for Jots, the community over at del.icio.us is too strong to ignore. And so part 1A of my information transformation is complete.

Sincere thanks, Tom.

So I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how best to organize my info life and make it more manageable. Let me first say that the hardest part about all of this is trying to ignore the “I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING THAT’S GOING ON” voice in my head, the one that says every deleted Bloglines subscription is surely going to have all sorts of interesting nuggets tomorrow that I’ll never see. (I’m an info hoarder, what can I say.)

Step 1 was to chop out 50 feeds at Bloglines just now. (Ouch!) Step 2 is to come up with some really focused search feeds that will let me chop out about 25 more. Now’s when the fun starts… I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Serendipitous surfing brings me to this comment by Gardner Campbell on Dave Cormier’s blog:

I’m thinking that college is now the opportunity not only to begin one’s personal library, but also to build one’s personal suite of trusted and inspiring experts. That of course is what already happens to some extent, but now it need not be confined to the campus. The campus is where the beloved local professor simply starts the ball rolling.

I like that “suite of trusted and inspiring experts” line especially. But I would add, why wait until college? A K-12 teacher can just as easily get the ball rolling for students if we teach them early on how to start building their own resource lists.

Which brings me to my own resource list at Bloglines that has been causing me some angst of late. I just can’t read all of these sources any more. I’ve tried, I really have, to keep up, but I can’t any longer. So I’ve been thinking about a major overhaul, one that organizes my feeds differently but also relies more on really focused search feeds. I’m thinking that I need to spend some time over at Stephen Downes’s site and the search sites like Technorati, Feedster and others. And I’m needing to figure out a more effective way of incorporating the information I save in del.icio.us (which I’ve started using again despite the fact that it has a very limited notes space). Now that I’ve been doing this for four years, I feel like I really need to settle in and find a best practice for my needs.

Got an hour to spare to get your brain wrapped around how schools are starting to use these technologies in the classroom? Check out this presentation/screencast about blogs and podcasts and screencasts from some Bryn Mawr College professors. One highlight: the blogging process boiled down to “Read. Think. Blog. Repeat.” Perfect.

So can we fall back an hour every day so I have more time to play with this stuff?
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Just a few think-abouts on a sunny, chilly Fall morning (with an extra hour to work with):

Blogging is different altogether, providing a wonderful balance between putting work out there and developing the practice. Yes, they get to float their young, sometimes inspired work out in the world and see what comes back. They get to read it on the Web, Google themselves, try the writer’s life on for size. They look back at old posts with incredulity–I wrote that? Argh!– but see the growth, the need for apprenticeships while reaching out with the work to see how the world responds. Through blogging, they also develop discipline, writing regularly both at as high a level as they can and freely, because no one expects you to do anything spectacular on a blog anyway. There is the freedom that comes with a medium that is not altogether accepted as a means of artistic expression. At least not yet. How immensely satisfying for the teacher and the student. We can both relax into the writing for its own sake, relishing the discoveries and the risks as they appear through our fingers and into language on our screens, and hold ourselves to a routine of writing and to a standard–the fact that our words go out into the world instead of staying in our notebooks forces us to consider them more carefully, perhaps, than we would in a journal or for a teacher alone (at least the kind of blogging I’m talking about). –Barbara Ganley

There are four themes that seem to form a core set of practices and beliefs among bloggers: the networked nature of communication, the opportunity for engaging in ongoing conversation, easily produced microcontent, and transparency…These four themes are not unique to blogging. They apply more broadly to systems that support social interaction, including user-editable sites (wikis), tag-driven sites like del.icio.us and Flickr. The community that makes use of weblogs tends to be among the first to take up other social technologies as well. Though it will almost cer-tainly change over time—and the word “blog” may disappear from the vocabulary—these larger themes seem to have taken hold socially and are likely to continue to be influential. –Alex Halavais

So how much commenting are you doing? If you feel you are not getting enough comments, are you giving? –Alan Levine

As I have said repeatedly, my kids live in a tiny town in the middle of Northern Canada, for them to make contact with kids from Texas and with kids from Melbourne is a radically different idea. I have been involved with internatinal education projects in the past. The kids spend a huge amount of time talking about their favoutie bands and movie stars, but often little beyond that. That is not education. Many of these projects I have wondered about the validity and worthiness of after we have put in the time and energy to create them. Blogging is different. It will give us extended contact on an entirely different level. It will actually allow for an exchange of views and concerns, not just lists of mp3 files. (only if we get into podcasting!) An exchange of viewpoints, burgeoning political beliefs, the ability ot write diplomatically for an international audience is not something that many junior high kids get experience with, or exposure to. Last week one of my students posted a well written piece on his blog against the war in Iraq. It was diplomatic, respectful of other viewpoints, and articulate. Within 24 hours, he recieved two long, well thought out comments from others who are in favour of troops being in Iraq. He posted again explaining his beliefs and recieved well written, extended comments in return. An international discussion, an interest in current affairs, an experience explaining his beleifs, and a chance to post a viewpoint knowing others will read it and think about it. This is a vital education for this century. –Clarence Fisher

I got an e-mail pointing to this post at if:Book that asks “Can there be great textbooks without great authors?” The basic premise is that the movement to create collaborative texts a la Wikibooks will never produce the quality required to truly replace traditionally authored texts.

The open source volunteer format works for encyclopedia entries, which don’t require deep knowledge of a particular subject. But the sustained examination and comprehensive vision required to understand and contextualize a particular subject area is out of reach for most wiki contributors. The communal voice of the open source textbook is also problematic, as it lacks the power of an inspired authoritative narrator.

The post goes on to discuss a portion of the Wikibook Art History that was obviously plagiarized from a very widely circulated art history text.

If the first page of the wikibook-of-the month blatantly rips-off one of the most popular art history books in print and nobody notices, how will Wikibooks be able to police the other 11,000 plus textbooks it intends to sponsor? Finally, what will the consequences be if poorly written, plagairized, open-source textbooks become the runaway hit that Wikibooks predicts?

Oy. It’s getting harder and harder, isn’t it? Which is why we have to work harder and harder to get our brains around these issues and figure out how to counsel and teach or students. And I’m struggling here.

On the one hand, I agree that the voice of one author will usually be more coherent and powerful than the combined voice of hundreds or thousands. On the other hand, the knowledge that hundreds or thousands can contribute to the text will usually be more all encompasing than the knowledge of one. On the one hand, it’s going to really stink if collaborative texts are just amalgamated rip offs of existing texts without attribution. On the other hand, if we’re good at teaching responsible research and attribution, that’s an easy problem to fix. On the one hand, however, it will be tempting to appropriate large chunks of copyrighted material, paraphrased and attributed as it might be. On the other hand, if we take the time to understand and teach Fair Use, and if we do the work necessary to interview and research our own sources (and teach our students that process), we can, I think, create something of value. And while it might not compare in terms of eloquence and cogency, what it represents in terms of an exercise in the collaborative attempt to negotiate truth and meaning may be worth even more.

Look, even the most eloquent texts can be a) wrong, b) irrelevant or c) outdated. None, I would guess, are perfect. Would Wikibooks be less perfect? Probably. But could we live with that, and as a part of our practice, could we teach our students the skills necessary to move those texts closer to perfection? Somehow that makes more sense to me these days.

But there’s no doubt, this is all more work for all of us.

So I love Jots, I really do. No really. I love how easy it is, how it looks, the rss feeds, etc. But after reading David Weinberger’s update on what’s in store for del.icio.us, well, I think it’s time I got with the masses and revived my very quiet account there.

Delicious is adding social networking. You’ll be able to designate people as members of your “network” so you can keep up with what they’re tagging and you’ll be able to create groups within which bookmarks can be kept private. Eventually, Delicious may disambiguate tags in part by weighing your groups’/network’s use of them more heavily. In any case, the addition of social networking will create yet more unintended consequences…something to look forward to.

But now here’s the problem, and yes, I’m looking for help. I’d love to be able to import my jots bookmarks into del.icio.us, but there doesn’t seem to be any google-able info on how to do that, and jots support is, to be kind, nonexistant. (Silly me.) So, I’ll ship one of my wife’s homemade pumpkin pies to the first person who can tell me how the heck to move my bookmarks. (Hey Alan, they got pumpkins in Phoenix???) And “you can’t” just isn’t an acceptable answer.

This post by George Siemens really resonated down to my toes. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve started to feel guilty about the way I read these days. My wife gives me grief because I don’t spend as much time with books as I used to. And in some ways I miss that. But what I’m finding is that these new reading skills that I’m developing are necessary for the world in which I’m living.

What happens when we change how we interact with information? We “ramp up” our processing habits. Instead of reading, we skim. Instead of exploring and responding to each item, we try and link it to existing understanding. We move (in regards to most information we encounter) from specific to general thinking…from deep to shallow thinking. Shallow thinking, in this sense, isn’t as negative as its connotations. Shallow thinking (perhaps I need a better phrase) involves exploring many different sources of information without focusing too heavily on one source. Aggregating at this level helps us to stay informed across broad disciplines. So much of education intends to provide “deep learning”. Often, however, “shallow learning is desired” (i.e. we want to know of a concept, but we don’t have time or interest to explore it deeply). All we need at this stage is simply the understanding (awareness?) that it exists. Often, learning is simply about opening a door…

As an example, today while skimming my Bloglines feeds, I formed a general awareness of lawsuits against Apple, developments with Google Base, blood tests for determining anxiety, etc. I’ve grown in my skills at rapid reading and aggregating information. I’ve also learned to quickly recognize information that is important for deeper exploration. The bulk of this work still happens in my head, but I’m encountering more software tools that assist the process. I don’t think it’s too ambitious to say that we are still very much at the beginning of a new era of learning – one defined by confusion in the abundance of information…and the accelerated need for determining which information is valuable, and how the pieces fit together.

Amen to all of that. And here’s to not feeling guilty about doing less deep reading than I’ve done in the past. When I’m moved to do so, I do so. But the fact that my reading habits have changed, that I’ve become better at quickly finding the main idea, that I’m more in tune with contextual cues to meaning, that I read with an eye to finding and saving resources that might be worth a more close inspection later on is a good thing, a different thing, not a bad thing. And it’s a skill that we’re going to have to teach our kids as well, once, of course, we master it…

So I already think Skype is pretty amazing in terms of facilitating the ever more infrequent Ed Tech Coast to Coast podcasts (though there may be a new one shortly!) But I happened to be watching an online presentation by my friend Alan November yesterday and he suggested a use that just made me slap my forehead in a “Doh!” moment: Skype to allow parents to listen to their child’s presentations at school!

And while we’re at it:

Next year, it’s the Cubs’ turn…

Right?

So after spending a great couple of days exploring Monterey and the Salinas Valley area, yesterday started with a keynote (blogged in amazing detail by the estimable Jenny Levine) and ended with a white knuckle landing into a windy, rainy Philadelphia just before midnight. (Good to be home.)

But here is the moment that has my stomach roiling (aside from the nasty “snack” the airline gave out): at the end of my presentation, a woman in the audience related the problem with blogs at her school. “The kids are posting questions and answers to tests in between periods so kids later in the day know what’s coming. What do we do about that?” My first response was “sounds pretty inventive to me.” And I know that some people took that as being flip. But I was being serious. What a great use of the technology, not from an ethical sense, certainly, but from a collaboration and information sense. This is the new reality of a Read/Write world where knowledge is accessible, number one, and knowledge is shared instead of being kept closeted, number two. These kids are finding ways to share the information they need to be successful at what they are doing. Isn’t that something we should cheer? (Am I in trouble yet?)

On the plane home, I kept thinking about that teacher’s question, about how absolutely relevant and important it was, and how absolutely abhorrent most educators will find the answer. And I wished I’d asked this question in return: How much of what is on that test could those kids potentially find on the Internet anyway? How many of the answers or ideas are already a part of the “sum of all knowledge” that the Web is becoming? And why, if the answers are already out here, are we asking our students to give them back to us on an exam? I can understand why we used do this, back in the days when the answers were difficult to find. But today? Instead, why aren’t we asking them to first show us they can find the answers on their own, and, second, show us that they understand what those answers mean in terms of their own experience an in the context of what we are trying to teach? Shouldn’t we hear what they are saying, that in a world where the answers to the test are easily accessible that the test becomes irrelevant? (And by the way, I’m not saying that all tests are irrelevant in every instance.)

For a long time now, I’ve been thinking (agonizing?) about what this new landscape means in terms of plagiarism and cheating and ethical use. And I have arrived at the point where it’s just so clear to me that it’s not the kids that need to change. It’s us. We have to redefine what those things mean, because the old definitions just are not reasonable any longer. And please hear me when I say that I’m not advocating that we accept cheating or copying as the way of the world and not work to prevent it. But I am saying that we need to drastically shift our approach to dealing with it. Blocking blogs or Websites or Google is not the answer. Asking kids to take tests to see if they have memorized material that they can now find on the Web is not the answer. Making two or three or four versions of the test is not the answer.

The answer, I think, lies in teaching our students how to correctly and ethically borrow the ideas and work of others and in demanding that they not just use them but make those ideas their own. That they take the ideas we have tried to teach them and connect them to and show us that they can teach it to someone else with their own spin on it, their own remix. It’s so funny that it’s taken me until now to truly start to understand what Lawrence Lessig has been preaching about remix, over a year since I first heard it. It’s how learning happens in our own lives. We take the knowledge we need when we need it, apply it to our own circumstance, and learn from the result. We need to say to kids “here is what is important to know, but to learn from it, you need to take it and make it your own, not just tell it back to me. Find your own meaning, your own relevance. Make connections outside of these four walls, because you can and you should and you will. This is what bloggers do (at least the ones who are blogging.) And this remix is neither plagiarism or thin thinking. It’s the process of learning in a world where, as Lessig says, everything we do with digital content involves producing a copy. This is a profound change from the closed, paper laden classrooms most of us still live in.

And, I’ll continue to incessantly beat the drum for educators becoming effective models for how to use all of this information effectively and ethically. Just as we can’t teach kids to read well unless we read well, or to write well unless we write well, we won’t be able to teach them how to deal with what’s ahead if we don’t start figuring it out and doing it well ourselves.

So I’m all worked up, and I’m feeling seriously hesitant about putting all of this out there, because I know this is a very, very disruptive line of thinking. Oy.

But if I don’t, what am I going to learn?

For some reason that “one teacher” quote from Saturday has been sticking in my brain, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what I learned from those three influential classroom teachers I had growing up. Not much of what I remember has anything to do with content. I mean I remember some of the assignments and exercises, sure. But what I remember most, and the reason they’re still with me today, was their passion for learning, their willingness to go beyond the text or topic, their senses of humor. They were the smartest three teachers I had, not so much in what they knew about their subjects but in what they knew about learning. They were always talking about things they’d read, and about how those ideas had relevance in their lives. They were sincerely interested in what I had to say, to make sure I was “getting it,” no doubt, but also because they seemed to want to understand their own learning more deeply. They would challenge me, but even more, I got the sense they wanted to be challenged back. As opposed to the worst teachers I can remember, the ones who knew everything and knew exactly what they wanted us to know, these teachers consistently modeled learning, not teaching.

Just a quick story that I think has some relevance to this discussion. Yesterday, we watched some surfers off of Pebble Beach try navigate these huge, foggy, foamy, cold waves that were pounding a rocky shoreline. I was trying to catch some of it on video when a guy drove up and jumped out of his car, zipping up his fleece, ooohhhing and ahhhing at the scene. He walked up beside me and said, “Have you seen any macs?” I just looked at him and kind of sheepishly said, “I have no idea what that means.” We both chuckled. “Really big waves,” he said. “Mac daddies.” Oh. He was a surfer, had lived in these parts all of his life. And for the next 20 minutes, he gave me the most arm-flailing, knee-bending, face-contorting lesson in surfing and waves and weather that you could ever imagine. I was mesmerized, asking every stupid question I could think of, getting understandable answers (and usually demonstrations) to each one. But all the while, he was watching the surf, the surfers, the skies, and you could tell that he was adding bits and pieces of it to his own database. We were both learning.

And isn’t this how most of us learn? From the experience, the conversation, the doing?

So we’re in beautiful but foggy Monterey for the Internet @ Schools West conference where I’ll be doing some blogvangelism tomorrow morning before heading back East. Somehow I managed to get my jet-lagged rear end through the 10K Big Sur River Run yesterday morning through a beautiful redwood forest. I’m paying for it today, however.

But here’s the quote of the day, overheard in a restaurant: “You know, if you’re lucky, you’ll get one good teacher in your life.”
And there were general assents at the table where the comment was made. And it started me thinking about my own teachers, and how many of them I really remember as having an impact on my desire to learn. There were three, at least in my traditional schooling. I guess I’m lucky. But it also got me thinking about my own teaching, and the thousands of kids I had in my classrooms, and how many of them I left an impact on, not in terms of journalism or media or literature but in terms of loving learning. I wonder…

And it also got me thinking about how many teachers I have now who constantly help me learn. Many more today than in all of my past.

Here is a presentation in Articulate from George Siemens that lays out his theory of connectivism and how it applies to the Read/Write Web. Much of what he says makes sense, I think. We need to start looking at learning much differently in a socially networked world. For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is “network creation” and that we can learn through “collaborative meaning making.” And the idea the we no longer need to learn everything in “advance of need” resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel’s idea of push vs. pull learning, that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

No doubt, these are some disruptive ideas for educators, which is why we need to consider them. The more I listen and read and learn from all of these new teachers, the more much of this seems to come into focus. But it also begs many new questions. What content to we still need to push? What are those core ideas that every child needs to consider? How do we teach ourselves to teach our students the skills they need to find and build their own networks for learning?
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I’d been thinking about trying to put together a basic reading list for people interested in getting their brains around the Read/Write Web and the changes it’s bringing about specifically related to education. So when I saw that Chris Lehmann was putting together a reading list for his future faculty… So here’s a start, and I’m definitely looking for suggestions:

1. Small Pieces Loosely Joined–David Weinberger
Just from a Web philosophy standpoint, this is a great place to start. It really provides a great deal of context in terms of how the Web is evolving and what that means for us humans. Not education specific, but all sorts of connections.

2. Free Culture–Lawrence Lessig
Lessig is my hero at the moment. I’ve seen him speak three times and I just find his ideas and vision to be amazing. He’s the person behind Creative Commons which is as good an idea as I’ve seen in a long time. This book made me see many things in a totally different way. Best part is it’s free online.

3. Connectivism–George Siemens
This essay describes a new theory of learning for a digital age. Personally, the idea that learning is “a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources” makes a lot of sense since it parallels my own experience in this space over the last four years.

4. We the Media–Dan Gillmor
I have a journalism background, so maybe this book appeals to me more than to others. But these changes are already being felt in journalism, politics and business (we’ll get there eventually) and this book does such a great job of describing the effects in media. And guess what? It’s free too.

5. The World is Flat–Thomas Friedman
I actually like this book less and less as time passes because I think Friedman is capitalizing (and overusing) an easily accessible metaphor, and in doing so, I think he makes his argument a bit too lopsided. I’ve read much since that tempers the picture he paints. Nonetheless, the general idea that our world is changing in large part due to the technologies that connect us is an important one. And he does make that idea very accessible in this book.

6. bgblogging–Barbara Ganley
There are many really good ed bloggers out there that I love to read, but if you really want to cut to the chase, Barbara’s blog is the place to start, I think. No one that I have found writes more eloquently and with more synthesis than she, and I really love it when my Bloglines account shows a new post on her site. She’s one of the few bloggers whose content I don’t read in Bloglines because I just find it more engaging to do it at her blog.

7. Educational Blogging–Stephen Downes
8. OL Daily–Stephen Downes
Stephen is a pretty amazing thinker about these technologies, and this article in Educause and his daily wrapup of interesting links should both be required reading by anyone seriously trying to understand the Read/Write Web.

That’s just kind of a brain dump beginning. Now remember, this is a read/write list because you have to write about your reactions after you’ve done some reading. That’s the whole point.

Please feel free to add whatever you think might benefit educators who are thinking about drinking the Kool-Aid.