Chris Harris has put this together already, but there are some great remixes of standards popping up, most notably from John Pederson and Jeff Utecht. John substitutes “teacher” for “student” in remixing the ALA’s Information Power manifesto, and my favorite part is :

The teacher who is an independent learner is information literate and;

4) pursues information related to personal interests

5) appreciates literature and other creative expressions of information

6) strives for excellence in information seeking and knowledge generation

Jeff throws out the word “technology” and substitutes “information” with similar powerful results:

3. Information productivity tools
• Students use information tools to enhance learning, increase productivity, and promote creativity.
• Students use productivity tools to collaborate in constructing information-enhanced models, prepare publications, and produce other creative works.

Subtle, yet interesting shifts…
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I know it’s Monday of a short week, which means, of course, that all hell is breaking loose, but I decided to do some edblog surfing while eating the really “fresh” salad (with a couple of baked potato halves smothered in cafeteria cheese) that I scored for my daily, relaxing 10-minute lunch, when I clicked back to David Warlick’s post about conversations and how they’re growing out of these new technologies (which are slowly becoming transparent) and started reading through the comments and stopped cold on the one left by Jeff Utecht (who I just got a Gizmo request from and will be calling in China as soon as I can figure out the time difference) because of the almost audible connection that a few synapses made in my brain when he wrote this about the teachers he’s teaching about technology:

[A] problem I’m facing and I think the point you are making is that teachers, for the most part, just want the tool. They don’t want the conversation. My class is about the conversation and not about the tool and I keep getting teachers coming to me and saying “So why can’t we just learn how to use it?” They don’t see the need for conversation; to them it’s just another thing they can use in their classroom and not something that can, if used in such a way, revolutionize the teaching learning process. Until we realize the conversation is more important then the tool, we will be stuck in a 1.0 world.

And I swear my brain just went “zzzzzzzzzzttt” when I read that (as in sparks, not sleep, even though the potatoes were a bit heavy) because what I think most people don’t get when they pick up these tools is that to use them well they have to want to be learners, not just teachers. This isn’t like a textbook or a worksheet or a (fill in your one-dimensional outdated teaching tool here). This is a conversation, (or at least the potential for one) not a monologue or some contrived negotiation of knowledge that ultimately gets tested against what’s been written in a textbook somewhere. Teachers who use them well have to be willing to learn new truths about the material they’re teaching, and be able to contextualize those truths and make them relevant to their students. (I can hear the groans now.)

Welcome to teaching 2.0, which while a lot more fun, is also a lot more work than teaching 1.0. The question is, are we up to it?

As long as my quick launch toolbar doesn’t quite have enough icons to fill up the entire width of my screen, I’ll keep Tim Lauer in my aggregator. Not only has he done some really cool things with these technologies at his school, he is without question one of the best at finding new tools and apps to play with.

Gizmo is like Skype except you can record your conversations. Nice. Since the thought of me droning on by myself in a podcast is why I’ve basically stopped podcasting, this might make it easier to get back into it. My Gizmo came is willrich45 (just like Skype) if anyone might want to try it out.

He also mentions a Firefox extenstion that makes it easy to geotag your photos at Flickr and embed Google maps with them. That also will make it easy to locate the many pretty scenes that show up there every day.

I think it’s been a while since I’ve asked for a few more hours in the day. I think I’d like three. Eh, maybe four. I’m staring at about a zillion leaves in my front yard…
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Just wanted to inform everyone that Tucker now has a blog roll going at Bloglines. (See proud father smile greatly…)

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I love Firefox, don’t get me wrong. But what usually happens is I have about 15 tabs left at the end of the day, pages I want to blog about or add to del.icio.us or something. Since it’s Friday, I gotta shut down this machine, so here are some links to what’s still open on my screen:

The banning blogs debate just gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it) and regardless of how you feel, it’s a pretty good example of the kinds of conversations (distributed as they might be) that the Read/Write Web facilitates.

If you want more to think about, read Darren’s post today on “The Fear of Transparency.” And then read Miguel’s response and the others there. I left one too. This thread has shown up on about half a dozen blogs (if not more) and it’s been intruiging to watch as the different tentacles have evolved. It’s work, but it’s worth it.

I’m only going to add one more piece to this. We’ve been talking about how blocking blogs from students may (or may not) protect students. But we haven’t talked much about how blocking blogs from teachers affects us all. Here’s a snip from Miguel at Bud Hunt’s blog that really stuck in my brain:

To deal with the trust issue, I agree completely. I have made these points myself. We just don’t trust our teachers–to run their computers, to teach information literacy, etc. In Districts with integrated learning systems, lock-step scope and sequences that must be followed religiously, it’s clear they are not trusted to even teach. The reasons that happens are legion, but I’m sure you can concede the point that trust is not something teachers enjoy universally in the United States…

It’s simply tragic to me that Miguel can’t access Darren’s blog to comment back because he’s blocked from doing so, that the teachers in his district are denied access to potentially millions of sources of knowledge that, even if their students can’t access it, they can use to supplement what they teach and make it relevant. Worse, it’s tragic that until the district educates its teachers in information literacy, the teachers aren’t even being trusted to make good decisions about the questionable content that may crop up. Even scarier is that that sentiment seems to be widespread.

That’s not how it feels here. And while the many teachers I’ve had a chance to talk to may not have been as tech or Web savvy as they would have liked, I can’t imagine the vast majority of them wouldn’t have known instinctively how to keep their kids safe and teach them something in the process. If that’s incorrect, we’re in a lot bigger trouble than I thought.

So I’ve been thinking more about the whole “connective writing” idea and its potential importance as a unique genre of writing in this “new” Web environment. They way it’s framed in my brain, it’s a type of writing that is inspired by reading and is therefore a response to an idea or a set of ideas or conversations. It is writing that synthesizes those ideas and remixes them in some way to make them our own and is published to potentially wide audiences. Because it is published, it is writing that then becomes a part of a larger negotiation of a truth or knowledge that is evolving in the larger network. And finally, it is writing that is written with the expectiation that it too will be taken and remixed by others into their own truths by this continuous process of reading, thinking, writing (and linking), publishing and reading some more.

As I’ve thought about this, one of the key ingredients has been David Weinberger’s idea that texts no longer have value based on what they contain but on what they connect to. So, now that we can publish easily, now that markets or schools or (your plural noun here) are conversations, now that paper is becoming more and more irrelevant as a communication platform, we need to repurpose our texts (in whatever medium) from being simple containers of ideas into being complex connectors of ideas. To me, that represents a very significant shift.

In the last couple of days, a number of people have pointed to a great article at Kairos titled “Why Teach Digital Writing?” that begins to get to this idea of connective writing:

Computer technologies allow writers with access to a computer network to become publishers and distributors of their writing. And chances are they will get feedback, sometimes immediately. Therefore, audiences and writers are related to each other more interactively in time and space. Writers can easily integrate the work of others into new meanings via new media and rescripting of old media—text, image, sound, and video—with a power and speed impossible before computer technologies. The depth and breadth of this type of collaboration—both implicit (“borrowing” from others) and complicit (communities of writers)—may be one of the most significant impacts of computer technologies on the contexts and practices of writing. This context presses up against larger issues of intellectual property, plagiarism, access, credibility of sources, and dissemination of information

At some point, we’re all going to have to shift our thinking about some of the ideas in that last sentence. (Talk about a disruption.) But on the current topic, here’s the money quote:

When we put it all together, the ability to compose documents with multiple media, to publish this writing quickly, to distribute it to mass audiences, and to allow audiences to interact with this writing (and with writers) challenges many of the traditional principles and practices of composition, which are based (implicitly) on a print view of writing. The changing nature and contexts of composing impacts meaning making at every turn. [Emphasis mine.]

There’s more here too, much more, that I will get to at some point. But I’m thinking about how we begin to move our students, young students even, away from container texts to connector texts, about how we start to prepare them for a world of conversations (as David Warlick implores) and negotiations and meaning making instead of meaning taking.

And, almost more importantly, I’m wondering how we move our teachers to doing this as well.

So this is a perfect example of the types of changes we’re going to have to get used to (and perhaps teach?) in terms of reading the Read/Write Web.

Alan publishes a great post on not blogging well with others:

If I were a student in Blog School, the parental note they send home from my blog teachers might bear the comment, “Alan writes a lot, but he does not blog well with others”.

James adds a “manual (“sigh”) trackback” (gotta love that) to his own take on the blogging alone idea:

Absolutely, yes, thrice yes… this is why it’s centred communication, this is why group blogs suck in education, this is why he is totally totally right in that “we should not overlook the value and power of ownership of personal spaces” and this is the whole frickin’ point of the matter: PERSONAL PRESENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the comments left at James site is a long, winding one from Paolo, who by the looks of it doesn’t have a blog of his own:

Blogging with the intention to communicate, to be heard and keeping the audience in mind could therefore never means that one blogs alone. The possibility of comments and trackbacks prove Alan wrong, for every student who wouldn´t use or reflect upon the reactions and review of his peers and teachers really does not blog well with others.

A trackback on the thread leads us to Aaron Nelson (who ironically showed up in a comment left here yesterday about new bloggers.) Aaron says:

I find myself totally agreeing here. To me, one of the best parts of blogging is that it’s my turf. Noone else can tell me what to think, how to think, where to go with my thinking etc.

It is also, as Levine mentions, is where I’ve started to find my own voice, and where I’m free to polish, redefine, and develop it.

I also enjoyed his ideas around investment. When its yours, you invest with great freedom and generosity because it “feels like home.” (Levine par. 5)

To which Graham Wegner replies:

Hey Aaron, this is the amazing thing about blogging. I work hard to put up relevant content on my blog (to me and hopefully others) and occasionally it crosses someone’s rss radar, but I see a post – the same one you saw from Alan – and it resonates with me personally so I type up a bit of a response and that is what strikes a chord immediately with someone else (in this case, you!)enough to not just provoke a response comment but to post to their own blog about it in classic Rip.Mix.Learn fashion.

Amazing, yes.

My take? Well, I’ve pretty much been a no show of late at Ed Tech Insider, because of time constraints, yes, but also because it doesn’t feel like home, somehow. I have real passion for this space for a variety of reasons. I haven’t been able to generate that for ETI. But others obviously have. Not sure what that says.

What I am sure of is that the days of linear reading of ideas in a text are long gone. I’m sure we could whip up an RSS feed to follow this thread throughout blogspace (couldn’t we?) but our brains are going to have to get used to this hypertext, connective reading thing until something better comes along. (I’m sure Stephen is working on it.)

Last night my wife arranged for about 20 of our friends to come to the local computer club to get a two-hour overview of the Read/Write Web and some of the more interesting tools out there. The weather was awful, and only about eight showed up, but the reaction was pretty much unanimous.

Mercy.

The reason we did this was because we knew they didn’t know much about what was going on “out there”. There was a board member from a local district, a few local businessmen, a brother in-law, and a couple of teens in the “audience.” We created and published an agenda/list beforehand using Writely, which I’m starting to like more and more. (Who needs Word?) And the pace was pretty fast and furious. Just a couple of observations:

Last night my wife arranged for about 20 of our friends to come to the local computer club to get a two-hour overview of the Read/Write Web and some of the more interesting tools out there. The weather was awful, and only about eight showed up, but the reaction was pretty much unanimous.

Mercy.

The reason we did this was because we knew they didn’t know much about what was going on “out there”. There was a board member from a local district, a few local businessmen, a brother in-law, and a couple of teens in the “audience.” We created and published an agenda/list beforehand using Writely, which I’m starting to like more and more. (Who needs Word?) And the pace was pretty fast and furious. Just a couple of observations:

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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