From MSNBC comes this really nice article on podcasting in classrooms. Sounds like it’s becoming a hit:

Using little more than an iPod and a school computer, Gagliolo and her students have been making podcasts — online radio shows that can be downloaded to an iPod or other portable MP3 player. Avidly discussing their favorite iPod colors and models while they made recordings of their poems and book reports the other day, the fifth-graders bubbled with ideas for future subjects.

“We could read parts of books, to show why we like them. We could do interviews. If there’s a field trip, we could make a recording of it and post it,” said Mohamed El-Sayed, 10. “Kids anywhere will like to hear about us.”

No doubt there is some energy in that quote. Could it be that podcasting has more appeal on the elementary level??? Some great implementations are described that really bring the potential of the technology to life.

I’m loving seeing more and more of these articles…

(Thanks to Elizabeth Fullerton for the link.)
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Stephen Downes has a link to a post by John Hagel III titled “From Push to Pull,” which leads to a longer article on the topic free registration required) written with John Seely Brown, and to an even longer .pdf opening draft of a book on the topic, all of which has has me tingling. (Remember, I don’t have much of a life…)

In a nutshell, clipping from various points in the introduction, here’s the premise as it relates to this community:

The signs are around us. We are on the cusp of a shift to a new common sense model that will re-shape many facets of our life, including how we identify ourselves, participate with others, connect with others, mobilize resources and learn…Over the past century, we have been perfecting highly efficient approaches to mobilizing resources. These approaches may vary in their details, but they share a common foundation. They are all designed to “push” resources in advance to areas of highest anticipated need. In education, we design standard curricula to expose students to codified information in a pre-determined sequence of experiences…In the past decade, we have seen early signs of a new model for mobilizing resources. Rather than “push”, this new approach focuses on “pull” – creating platforms that help people to mobilize appropriate resources when the need arises…Rather than seeking to constrain the resources available to people, pull models strive to continually expand the choices available while at the same time helping people to find the resources that are most relevant to them. Rather than seeking to dictate the actions that people must take, pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise. Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs.

Obviously, that’s just a piece of a much larger discussion, but what has my brain buzzing is they way that description captures so much of what we’re reading and writing about. The whole idea of shifting frames of reference to teaching and learning. The concepts of participation and connection. The ways in which our educational system is designed to “push” the limited resources it had access to. The idea that now that we have access to a plethora of knowledge and resources, we need to think hard about expanding the choices for our students to find those most relevant and effective. We need to teach them to take ownership of their own learning because they can, and because they will be expected to in their adult lives. (What a concept, huh?) To give them “the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise.” (That line really resonated…) The idea that we are all “networked creators…pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to [our] specific needs.” And think about how blogs and RSS fit into this, how we can pull information to us.

Mercy. This is really good stuff, I think. More to come I’m sure…

For some reason, today I stumbled upon a couple of “carnivals” which do a regular roundup of whatever submissions the author gets as interesting blog posts in whatever subject his or her own blog is about. I’d taken a look at carnivals before, but today was the first time that I found myself spending some time clicking around. The Education Wonks just posted it’s 37th roundup while Scribblingwoman just put up what looks to be the second “Teaching Carnival” of higher ed bloggers.

I found a couple of things pretty interesting. First, there were links to a great number of edbloggers who I had never seen or read before (which in iteself is always a nice surprise.) Some got my attention more than others, which started me thinking about the emerging genres of edblogging out there that seem to be falling into three pretty distinct camps.

First, there seems to be an edpolicy group that spends a lot of its time writing about NCLB and education funding and teacher contracts. In my own little hierarchy, there’s no doubt that the members of this group are blogging. They’re linking, defending opinions, pushing each other’s thinking. Depending on your political leanings, they can either be encouraging or frustrating, but they are almost always passionate in their writing.

Second, there is the group that primarily narrates life in the classroom. Sometimes inspirational, sometimes harrowing, there’s obviously such a wide diversity of experience and teaching conditions that it’s amazing we expect any of our kids to come out knowing anything close to the same material. Without taking anything away from the efforts of these teachers, they seem to be using blogs to reflectively share their worlds more than using them for blogging. Not saying that isn’t a noble undertaking, just making the distinction.

Finally, there’s the group that focuses on the technology. Obviously, that’s where I’d put this space. It’s a mix of reflective analysis and pretty serious blogging all in an attempt to connect ideas and experiences for others to share and learn from. It’s where I find most of the push for my own learning.

I also think it’s notable that bloggers in the first two groups usually seem to get more in the way of audience participation. And some of the back and forth is really great stuff. But to be honest, I don’t spend very much of my reading time in those spaces. Obviously, I think the technology is what’s transformative here, and I’m most interested in practitioners who are actually using it in their classrooms with their kids. That and there are not enough hours in the day (even with the carnivals.)

Any genres that I’ve missed?

All of which moves me to think more about the ways in which we can ask students to do similar real blog writing in our classrooms.

I know it’s still almost nine months away, but I’m already going to put in a plug for what I think is the best educational conference of the year, Alan November’s Building Learning Communities. A couple of disclaimers: Alan has become a good friend of mine, and I’m scheduled to do a day-long Read/Write Web workshop as a preconference. But having said that, even if I wasn’t involved, I’d already be registered to attend. It’s three days of really getting to know educators from around the world, and making connections with people who can become not only good resources but good friends. Present company excluded, the presenters are top notch, and next year has a nice variety of practitioners and philosophers all immersed in empowering teachers with new ideas and techniques. I’ve learned way more than I’ve taught in the two years I’ve been a presenter, and I sincerely think it’s a unique opportunity for educators who want an intensive, energizing three days.

The conference sold out last year, and despite increasing the capacity this year, it’s going to sell out again. No doubt. Registration for next July has just opened up. I really hope to see you there.

So I’m finally wading through some of the gajillion posts on Bloglines I haven’t been able to read, and via Ewan McIntosh I found this really interesting presentation from Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network. It’s a pretty sobering perspective on the access challenges we face. Some highlights:

From the “Shameless Self-Promotion” Dept. comes this link to a back page column I wrote for this month’s Technology and Learning magazine. I was more than flattered to be asked to write the second in this series after the inimitable David Warlick led it off in October with a piece on podcasting.

This is actually the first of four articles that I’ll have out in the coming months. It’s still amazing to me that I’ve actually become the published author I always dreamed about in high school. Thanks in large measure to finding Weblogs.
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Take a look at the comments on the C-Net article on blogs in schools and you’ll understand why we need, um, blogs in schools:

Blogs are NOT a valid school subject. Blogs are a sloppy
communications technique, rarely containing anything really
worth while, and rank just one notch above text messaging on
cell phones. We’ve got kids who can’t add, can’t read, and can’t
write in real sentences, and wouldn’t know a verb if it bit them.
There’s where the real education effort needs to be placed. Sure,
that’s not ‘fun’, and kids do want to play rather than learn, and
teachers seem to go out of their way to avoid being actual
teachers.

Sorry folks, but US kids need real help, not junk like this teacher
is peddling. As noted, “… Fisher is among a small but growing
number of teachers and professors experimenting with
classroom blogs….” And maybe that defines the real situation.
The kids are experiments in arcane educational techniques by
educators more interested in notoriety than success, and where
failure is basically irrelevant.

Where to begin.

1. Blogs are not a subject. They’re a learning tool that can be used in any subject as a way to synthesize, think and write critically, and reflect. In addition, blogging teaches deep reading, something that the author of the comment obviously didn’t do with the article.

2. Blogging is inherently not a sloppy communications technique, and blogs done well contain worthwhile content because they demand the author/blogger articulate a point of view that is subject to the review and response of a real audience.

3. Blogging is not necessarily fun. If done well, it’s work. Clarence’s students, who are being taken to task, might be having fun in the process of blogging, but they’re also using their brains in creative and expansive ways. Funny that the author of the comment is doing so as well but just doesn’t recognize it.

4. Clarence, if you read this, understand that you are not peddling junk. You are peddling reality. The fact that you have your kids blogging has nothing to do with the problems they may have in math or other subjects. If anything, you are giving them an opportunity to remediate the problems they have by engaging them in some real conversation and thoughtful learning practice.

5. Yep, we’re all blogging for the fame. We obviously don’t care what happens to our students, and if they fail, so what? There will be a new “new thing” coming down the road tomorrow that we can hitch our reputations to. God forbid we have educators who are dissatisfied with the status quo and act to change it.

And the biggest irony is the comment comes from an “educator” who wants to stick with a system that he admits is “getting stomped in education.” I can assure you, blogs haven’t been around long enough to bring that about.

Look, blogs and blogging are not a panacea for a system that by many accounts has not been able to keep pace. They are not going to solve the inequities inherent in our educational system, nor are they going to change much of anything without teachers that sincerely want their students to learn. But in the hands of thoughtful practitioners, blogs have great potential to teach our students to think and learn and create work subject to higher standards than they do right now.

C-Net gets on the blogs as learning tools bandwagon with a pretty good overview of the direction this is going (though we still can’t get past the “online journal” label…) They quote Clarence Fisher in the lead:

Like other teachers bringing blogging into the classroom, he thinks the online journals will spark students’ enthusiasm for computers, writing and opining.

“They’re learning the technical skills, but they’re also learning that they have a voice online,” he said. “They may be from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but they’re writing online, people are commenting on it, and they’re learning that they have a voice.”

A bit more mo’ for our cause. Go blogs! Go!
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I just spent most of the last couple of hours participating in a Worldbridges streamed Skype call/Webcast with Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow (which is being restreamed right now if you’re interested.) And all the while there was a chat room with people listening and asking questions, sometimes Skyping in and joining the conversation. It was great fun, despite the fact that about 10 minutes into the show the power here at home went out and I lost my connection. (Great timing.) Took me about 30 minutes of e-mailing back and forth through my cell phone to get a Skype-in number so I could spend the last 75 minutes or so joining in.

Anyway, some good talk about the state of the Read/Write Web, and it was another one of those “couldn’t have done this a couple of years ago” learning experiences that have me thinking. And it was definitely a treat to be able to meet (albeit virtually) Stephen and get a chance to interact with him.

By the way, Jeff and Dave have done 20 of these shows at Worldbridges, live every Sunday at 10 EST, open to listener participation. Some more good stuff to consume.

I’ll post a quick link to the podcast version when it gets published.
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Another simply amazing post by Barbara Ganley today that does a great job of articulating a healthy perspective of kids and computers. It’s another one of those posts that she writes that takes time to read and think through, one that I know I’ll come back to again. She’s been such an amazing teacher these past few years, and I’m not talking about the work that she’s doing with her students at Middlebury either…

The other day in Rochester, during my “Blogging the Verb” presentation, someone asked “what do I say to my administrators when they ask why we should have kids blog?” My answer was that blogging is work, that it’s an intellectual exercise that requires deep reading, critical thinking, synthesis of ideas, and well-organized, clear and correct writing that is built upon links and connections. As I’ve said many times here, this isn’t navel gazing. And I’m guessing my description of blogs as learning tools was fairly eye-opening for many who were in the “online journal” mode.

Barbara’s post is just great blogging, number one, and great thinking to boot. She’s pushed by the writing of Lowell Monke, “Charlotte’s Webpage: Why children shouldn’t have the world at their fingertips.” And, as she says, it is a great article, one that anyone involved in educational technology should read and think about. Here’s his thesis:

Children gain unprecedented power to control their external world, but at the cost of internal growth. During the two decades that I taught young people with and about digital technology, I came to realize that the power of computers can lead children into deadened, alienated, and manipulative relationships with the world, that children’s increasingly pervasive use of computers jeopardizes their ability to belong fully to human and biological communities—ultimately jeopardizing the communities themselves.

What I find most interesting about the article is the context it gives the argument that goes “our kids are bored and we have to create more engaging learning environments for them.” Monke says that’s the problem; the natural environments aren’t engaging any longer because we’re giving our kids “big events” on the computer. We’re sending them to virtual worlds and giving them experiences that offer up ideals and not reality, which in turn makes reality boring. Interesting thought.

But Barbara doesn’t buy it, at least not all of it.

But it’s ridiculous to shun or to vilify the Web-mediated experience. The Web can (just as books and stories can) point students towards the real, have them dream about the world, prompt them to explore it and revise their sense of it. I wish Monke had gone further in his article to discuss ways in which computers in the classroom–coupled with the experiential learning he promotes– can lead to essential discussions about society and expectations and relationships. Why not take those moments in high school when students turn from f2f conversations with members of their own community in favor of the blog or email discussion with someone halfway across the world as opportunities to talk about the reasons, the repercussions, the differences between these experiences? Why not even have elementary school children examine the computer-generated spider next to the real thing?

And this is the “teachable moment” theory of technology instruction, isn’t it? It’s not saying “this technology is changing things…let’s turn it off.” (Sound familiar?) It’s instead saying “this technology is disruptive and changing things…let’s figure out what that means.”

But make no mistake. As Barbara says, this is “uneasy space we are in right now,” made more so by a sense that the transformations we are seeing are different somehow, more important than being able to just create digitally in words and pictures, but to have something really meaningful to do with that work. That it really has been a warm-up act up until now, and that the curtain is coming up on the main event, for this era at least. And that if that’s the case, this is no time to be pulling the plug but instead to be exploring that unease.

Barbara takes the time to weave a compelling narrative around this point that highlights all of the reading and writing and thinking skills that blogging can bring to us, children included. It’s good stuff, grounded in her own experiences and accessible to anyone who has done even a little thinking about this stuff.
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So I can’t remember the last time where I’ve had a stretch this busy, and obviously, blogging is suffering. Three presentations in the last week. Wall to wall meetings at school. On and on… Yesterday I was in Rochester doing some serious blogvangelizing to New York State teachers and administrators, trying to carve out some time to write and read. Four different presentations. Whew.

So as a result, I’m up to 500 unread messages in my Bloglines account…that has to be a record, and it’s really weird this feeling I’m getting of being really disconnected from what’s going on in this community. Makes me really appreciate the work of Stephen Downes and his OL Daily which gives me a quick view of what’s happening out there. But it’s still starting to feel a bit overwhelming.

Yesterday, however, was great…motivated educators who are sincerely interested in what’s happening “out there,” asking great questions and starting some really interesting questions. It was really interesting to me that there seemed to be a pioneer spirit in our midst, a metaphor that certainly fits but one I hadn’t really tuned into much before. One particular thread of conversation dealt with the coming ethics issues that inevitably are going to come up when the “sum of all human knowledge” ends up online. That’s a bit of a sticky one.

So here’s hoping there’s a few more edbloggers in our midst…

Quick mini-rant here…

Yahoo just launched a Podcast portal. Cool! But why isn’t there an Education category in the main list? WHY? (I guess I should be happy we’re listed, however…)

I can’t recall all of the ones I’ve seen lately, but I’m constantly amazed at how sites launch with all sorts of categories but none dedicated to education.

Oy.

From the previous post you can tell that I did some “blogvangelism” today at a county in-service just north of where I live, and it was five hours of pretty intensive discussion and teaching about blogs the noun and blogging the verb. In fact, it was the first chance I’ve gotten to spend some time with teachers really teaching them how to blog. (The session name was “Writing With Passion Through Blogging”…) And I think that most of them got it, that this wasn’t navel gazing, that it was reading and thinking and writing. (And I think I had a moment of self-enlightenment when I heard myself saying “when I’m not blogging regularly (like now) it’s not because I don’t have time to write as much as it’s that I don’t have time to read.”) We created bunches of blogs at Blogger, deconstructed blog posts by Clarence Fisher and Barbara Ganley, and talked about the ways in which we could use them in our practice and with our students. And we got into the inevitable discussion about what all of this means in terms of research and trust and sources and the like. In fact, one teacher shared that she restricts students to databases when doing research…no Web…no Google. I could totally understand her angst.

But I’m wondering if most of them left today with genuine excitement or genuine dread. I really get the sense that teachers fall into one of two camps after my “sermons.” They’re either saying “look at the amazing things that my students and I can do these days…what an opportunity” or they’re saying “Oh. My. Goodness. How in heck am I going to figure this out for myself AND how am I going to teach my kids how to figure this out. This is work.” And it is more work. That whole teachers and students as editors idea alone means a lot more work for everyone trying to figure out what’s true, what’s accurate, what’s trustworthy. I mean there was only one person in the room who knew how to find out who owned the site martinlutherking.org. That’s the kind of work we’re talking about here, going beyond the “here’s the book, the book is true, we can all passively read now” method of teaching.

Dave Warlick and Jon Pederson are continuing threads of this discussion on their sites, and at the end of his post Jon asks

“What percentage of adults have the required skills to a) navigate this environment and b) be critical consumers of information? Can we expect our students to be proficient with these skills when adults aren’t?”

Not solely based on today by any means, my answers are a) 10, b) 5 and c) NO! And this just screams out the fact that our kids have no effective role models for content creation, content management or content editing. And sadly, most educators are not going to want to put in the time to make these literacies a part of their practice. To some extent, I understand why. It is work. And they need time and training that unfortunately they are not going to get nearly enough of. But on the other hand, if they’re not willing to do it on their own, they risk becoming irrelevant and, as David puts it, dropping of the edge.

Greetings from Oxford Central School in Oxford, NJ where we’re learning about blogs!

Some links:

Mabry Online
Mrs. Nelson
Mrs. McCullers
Bob Sprankle
Mrs. Fauss
Secret Life of Bees
Future of Math

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So I got the chance to watch and listen to Douglas Rushkoff on Friday morning before my presentation at New Trier High School, and that in itself was worth the trip. It’s really interesting to me how brilliant people put these times in perspective, and his take on what we’re experiencing was both articulate and thought provoking. (You can get the gist of his presentation by watching this video from Poptech last year.) He sees this as a renaissance, a time when there are shifts in the culture and in the tools and technologies that are transforming societies. And he also sees this as a time when traditional stories are being redefined largely because of the interactivity that technology is allowing, whether it’s the remote control with television or the joystick with computer games or just the keyboard and mouse in general. We have an opportunity now to write our own stories (a “Society of Authorship” as he calls it) and this renaissance is the “rebirth of the sensibility that we can participate in the writing of the story.” That’s pretty profound, to me at least.

And that’s what kids are doing these days, taking apart and rewriting the stories of their lives. They’re blogging and making videos, and that’s all good, but the problem is that “while kids know how to use this stuff, they’re not literate in it yet.” Literacy today is being able to read, disassemble, and write. It’s going from passive consumer to active interpreter to creator.

I’ve written before that I think blogs are in their adolescence, and Rushkoff used the term “terrible twos of self-expression online.” I love the way he put this, and I probably won’t do it justice, but he likened it to early child development where very young kids play alone and then play alongside others before reaching the stage where they are able to play interactively. We’re in that parallel blogging alongside one another phase, he said, still waiting to get to the point where we really start collaborating. And that seems to fit. I don’t think we’re near to finding the potential of the blog or of the concept of blogging.

Rushkoff writes a lot about the influence that media and corporations have on our kids, and how our new role is to teach kids to get outside of the story and ask what is the storyteller saying or doing and how can they do that themselves. And it’s that how can they do this themselves part that really interests me. He says that they should be the creators of the new stories, that “growing up means accepting responsibility for writing their own and our stories.” That we need to “help them accept the challenge of being the next most advanced civilization.” Some pretty heady stuff, and a very tough act to follow. But I think that we actually complemented each other pretty well with the philosophy in the morning and more that hands on, day to day effects coming from me in the afternoon. At least that’s what I hope happened. But it was so very interesting to hear the context he brings to this discussion, and regardless of what happened with the audience, I’ve definitely been pushed in my thinking some more.