Not so new, but John Pederson has been doing some hard-hitting blogging of late. (I don’t think I could send these e-mails to my staff…though…) But last week I landed on his eduriff of the Cluetrain Manifesto (courtesy of Doug Johnson) and got stopped in my tracks. Here’s my favorites:

1. Learning is conversation.
6. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
7. As a result, parents and students are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked learning changes people fundamentally.
8. People in networked learning have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another and the Internet than from textbooks and worksheets.
14. Schools that don’t realize their learning is now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
21. Smart learners will find schools who speak their own language.
25. The community of discourse is the learning.
37. Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills schools.
67. To traditional schools, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
68. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Now if only we could start these converstaions with the people in charge.
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Lately, there’s been a small but growing group of classroom educators who have been simply inspiring in the things they’re blogging about, and I think there are a couple others to add to the list. In no particular order, Clarence Fisher, Darren Kuropatwa, Bud Hunt, Konrad Glogowski and Dean Shareski have been teaching me a lot by the way they’ve been chronicling their experiences. They’re dealing with such important issues, coming up with great remixes, and bringing their students’ voices into the story. Great stuff.

James Matthew and Tim Frederick are two others. Here’s a snip from the former:

The ‘hyperlink’ style of reading also seems to bring with it cognitive gaps , as students jump from skimming one topic to the next, in a style similar to ‘free association.’ The problem is, only students who are self motivated will come back on their own initiative to fill in those gaps. As a teacher, I find I am constantly pointing students back to topics or areas on the web/text that they should’ve covered in the first place. Hyperlink-style reading is great for keeping interest and for ‘specialised reading’ (read: reading only for what interests you personally), but seems to produce a pastiche style of understanding with a lot of gaps to fill in. Unfortunately, students who are not self motivated seem to turn to the teacher for the answers, instead of backtracking and filling in those cognitive gaps on their own.

And here is one from Tim’s blog:

Now, I’m getting into using wikis for various purposes. I wrote in my last post about using a wiki for the ELA department in my school and our venture in creating a true vision and resource for the department. Now, I’m using a wiki for my lesson planning. Such a simple idea, but it makes writing lesson plans a bit easier since I can do it anywhere there’s Internet. The added benefit is that I can make the wiki public and offer my lesson plans to others with little added effort. I only have a few lessons on there now, but after using it for a while I can see it being a library of lesson plans. Imagine if whole groups of teachers did the same thing the amount of lesson plans we could have online and available for sharing.

That group is sending some quality stuff to my aggregator just about every day. Might be time for a mashup of these new blogging voices…

If you’ve reading others like this, please share.

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I rarely do this, but I’m hoping I can tap this network for some ideas on coming up with a solution to a problem we can’t seem to solve here at my school. We have two wireless laptop carts that teachers sign out for student use. For a variety of reasons, we don’t want to give students access to the full list of printer options on campus, but for some reason, we can’t seem to find a way to allow them to print to a wirelessly networked printer resting on the cart that would be moving between access points and changing channels. There is no access point on the cart.

Thanks for any ideas you might have.