I was mulling over a response to the response to the latest Wikipedia ugliness, but now I don’t have to, thanks to Alan.

I am tired of the WikiPedia flogging going on- yes the issue is worth discourse, but it seems to be the only conversation now, and what is being lost in the wash, is the un-heralded, social software fueled human explosion that pushed WikiPedia out there, that created an explosion of information. So is only important thing to be “right”, “factual”, “trusted” as opposed to having a voice in the conversation?

The whole current discussion seems flawed in being polarized; it seems unwise to gloss glowingly on WikiPedia without acknowledging the flaws and inherent issues of mass written content, but it also seems unwise to dismiss the whole process because a smaller number of &$^%ing idiots are pissing in the well.

Can I get an “Amen?”

So now that I can leave tabs open when I shut down Firefox knowing they’ll come up again when I bring it back up, I’ve got about 20 tabs that I don’t want to close. So, I gotta clean house again. Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading and wanting to write about but just don’t think I’ll get the time to post about. (And I mean I’m doing all of my shopping online and everything…oy.)

I love questions, especially ones that make me think real hard about the answer. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun these days, ’cause there are so many difficult questions being posed about education and technology and the mixture of the two.

Via Harold Jarche comes a link to someone else who is posing big questions, Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Like this one from his essay titled “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time“:

“What is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority?”

Ok, just my opinion, but I think this should be must reading for this community. The way in which Federman structures this essay is downright masterful, and the ideas it conveys are profound. As usual, here are a few snips with some hopefully cogent reactions.

Federman traces literacy from the oral tradition through the introduction of the alphabet through Gutenberg’s press through the introduction of Morse Code and he does it in a pretty captivating narrative. Let’s just say I learned a lot (including why the Cluetrain Manifesto has 95 theses…guess I missed that part of history class.) Especially interesting to me was the way in which he discusses the way in which we assign authority to authorship:

When we invoke knowledge that we obtain through the proxy of an author’s book, we assume some of that author’s patina of authority.

I wonder if that holds true for what we do with blogs…

And in terms of the pace of all these changes, (something I’ve been lamenting a lot of late) he says:

Roughly speaking, it takes about three hundred years for the foundational knowledge ground of a culture to change, that is for the society to change its conception of what is valued as knowledge, who decides what is valued as knowledge, who controls access to the knowledge itself, and who controls access to those controls. The time span is relatively easy to understand: for the transition to be complete, there cannot be anyone left alive who remembers someone that remembers someone who was socialized and acculturated in the prior system of knowledge.

The most disruptions occur about halfway through that period, and guess what? Right now, Federman says we’re about 160 years into the current 300 year period, ever since electricity and the telegraph “undid” the effect of the written word. And now, with Google and the current tools, we’re undoing even more.

Consider the reversal that has occurred here. In the traditional literate structure of the academy, indexers who controlled the portals to knowledge were very few, very knowledgeable, and possessed a high level of public trust. In the traditional literate system, assertion of both meaning and value of a collection of knowledge by that trusted individual, whose power and authority were vested through an institutional proxy, was paramount for establishing the redibility of that collection. But it seems that we are in the process of changing from the traditional, closed system of knowledge to a more open system of knowledge. A single person or authority asserting meaning and value is automatically suspect, like in the example of Sears.ca; it is the collective wisdom of all the Maries and Steves and Alices that creates trust.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.

Today, establishing the credibility of knowledge sources is a challenge of such complexity, that the literate frame has no mechanism with which to approach the problem. Stated simply, for any avenue of inquiry, both the information and the information sources themselves have both become subjects of research in a way that makes problematic, and fundamentally challenges, the existing academic structure. Research can no longer be a deterministic, linear process, akin to that delineated by the so-called scientific method. Rather, establishing the credibility and reliability of both information and sources comprise an emergent information seeking problem that is subject to multiple, interdependent processes and contexts, all of which, save one, are only incidentally connected to literacy.

Federman makes all of this sync nicely with connectivism, talking about how we need the ability to think nomadically and to recognize patterns in what we are reading and consuming. We need to be able to think “widely and diversely about a topic,” a phrase which doesn’t much resonate with what we ask of our students today. And he says that our “former literate quest for truth [today's classrooms] gives way to a quest for making sense of the world as it is experienced.”

So what does this all mean?

…today’s youth and tomorrow’s adults live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity. Everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else, and all available information, through instantaneous, multi-way communication. This is ubiquitous connectivity. They will therefore have the experience of being immediately proximate to everyone else and to all available information. This is pervasive proximity. Their direct experience of the world is fundamentally different from yours or from mine, as we have had to adopt and adapt to these technologies that create the effects of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.

And what is this new world like?

The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

Now, does that sound anything like what are current educational settings are like? This is such a big shift, and this essay makes the case so clearly the significance of what we’re seeing and feeling. I urge you to read the whole thing…

Buried deep in my gmail account I found an e-mail from John Hendron from the Goochland, Va. school district who wanted to alert me to the new podcast that he’s been doing for the district and the fact that the whole district has moved to blogs in a big way. Every teacher in the district will have his/her own blog, and student blogs seem to be close behind (though the audience will be restriced to the within the district.) I’m hoping I can do a Gizmo call with him to flesh out some of the details, but in the meantime, take a listen to his recent “We Blog, We Learn” podcast as he reads a letter he’s written to introduce his students to blogs.
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Let it be noted that at 6:27 a.m. EST on December 10, 2005 I downloaded my first BitTorrent file, an MP3 of Lawrence Lessig and friends talking about Google Print. Sad thing is I’m not sure what it is that I’ve done, and it seems to be going pretty slowly so far. As always, any enlightenment about what I may have wrought would be appreciated…

An interesting thread of late has been the reaction to the Technology and Learning mag column by Jim Holland titled “When Teachers Don’t Get It: Myths, Misconceptions and other Taradiddle.” You can get the gist from the title. Let’s just say it’s not very understanding of teacher laments about being asked to implement technology. And Doug Johnson has a great response as to why Holland is all wrong.

My goals as a teacher are to make sure my students master the curriculum and pass state tests. My job depends on me meeting these goals. Until technology skills are either a part of our standards or are tested, they will remain a means to an end, not the end itself, as much as this may disappoint you. And until technology proves more efficient or effective than traditional methods in helping me meet these goals, it will be a method I may in good conscience choose not to employ.

Obviously, this is more complex than just teachers should or teachers shouldn’t, but I think in general, the whole conversation kind of misses the boat. This issue is systemic. And now that the technologies create as much transparency as they do, it’s even more about vision and leadership (or lack thereof.)

I make a point in my presentations to say to teachers that they probably are not going to get much support from their school leaders if they decide to implement these technologies, that if they feel the tools can potentially help their kids learn more, they may have to be subversive about bringing them into the classroom. It’s not a comfortable pitch to make, but in a lot of cases it’s easier to start the conversation after you have something to show rather than before. There have only been a handful of instances that I know of where these types of technologies have flowed from (not dictated) from above rather than below.

Obviously, I think that needs to change. We need to create ecologies at our schools that support the use of these tools by everyone, not just a few “radical” teachers. And support means that just like teachers should invest in and model effective learning using technology for their kids, school leaders should invest in and model effective learning using technology for their teachers. I’m not saying that every teacher in the profession is motivated to create or even capable of creating positive outcomes with technology. Nor is every administrator. But until we begin create transparent, collaborative, connective workplaces, until we support the practice of teaching with technology from top to bottom, we’re never going to get anywhere.

And, if past history is any indication, it’s going to be hard slogging. For 100 years, there have been huge pressures NOT to change, both on the part of teachers and administrators. The mountains that anyone has to scale to effect change, even incremental, are enormous. Right now, it feels like this community is trying to model effective learning using technology for whatever audience will listen. Sure, we’re just flailing away. We don’t have any answers. And we need more voices in this discussion about what schools should be becoming. We need more disparate voices too, or at least I do. (New Year’s resolution #34: get out of the echo chamber more often.) But we’re putting our ideas and experiences out there which is risky for some. And maybe because we can and we do, we can build the momentum. I hope so, because to me at least, the alternative isn’t very appealing.

One of last week’s Dear Abby columns was dedicated to the perils of blogging on the job, specifically the potential headaches for employers when their employees blog, to which Jon Udell sent an articulate response. With a [few tweaks], it fits for educators too:

Here’s something to consider, though. A blog can be used to narrate the key events and accomplishments in your [educational] life, to establish your reputation as an authority on subjects in your areas of [study], and to educate the world about [the things you're learning about].

…If you’re one of those [educators], how might you judge a blogger’s abilities? That’s easy. Instead of extrapolating from a two-page [test], you can evaluate months or years of exposition and online interaction. And you can tap into other evaluations too, thanks to the blog network’s highly-evolved mechanisms for measuring citation and influence.

Not so sure about the last line, but I think you get the idea. Yes, there are potential problems with leaving such a trail, but we need to keep looking for opportunities to show kids how this is going to work for them, not against them.
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Wikipedia, Schmikipedia. Too controversial. Let’s write the dictionary instead. I mean, how hard could it be to define things like, um, blogging, for instance…
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There has been a lot of interesting reading of late coming out of classrooms regarding the reactions students are having to blogs and blogging and reading. Konrad Glogowski and Clarence Fisher are becoming two of the blogs I seek out in my aggregator hoping that they’ve posted about their work. It’s really good stuff, and very enlightening. Makes me want to get back in the classroom…

Konrad’s been writing about what happens when the blog software crashes and there’s a forced withdrawl from blogging. Guess what? The students miss it.

My students got used to inhabiting a space which, as virtual as it was, constituted an important part of their learning experience. When the space became temporarily inaccessible, learning itself seemed to be put on hold.

Whoa. Read that last line again. That struck me on a number of levels, not the least of which was wondering whether or not that was a good thing. (Ok, I admit…the thought passed quickly.) That’s the thing about technology isn’t it? We’re going to have to be willing to depend on it, and we’re going to have to be creative when it doesn’t work, because we all know that at times it won’t. But as we get more and more invested in it, we’re going to have to make sure it works. (And this is where for me at least, the more mature open source solutions are starting to make more sense.) Also interesting is what happened when he got the new blogware up and running:

As soon as they were able to create their new individual blogs, the first question was:

“What about the old posts?”

The new space, I realized, was not really a blog or a community. It was an empty space and almost all of them were overcome by a need to populate their new blogs. They have been working very hard since but many also insisted on transferring their old entries to the new blogs. Their blogging identity, it seems to me, is so inextricably linked to their writing that abandoning their old work seemed somehow wrong. Many were very disappointed that the comments they received cannot be automatically moved with the posts.

I just find this whole reaction to be a powerful example of how important the community building really is. And this is what Konrad and Barbara and others seem to be able to do so well, to nurture their students acceptance and reliance on the idea that there is a network of learners all in this together. It’s not just the teacher.

Clarence too is seeing some interesting things happen, this time with the connective reading his kids are doing. They’re starting to understand how conversations on the Read/Write Web occur, exhibiting the pattern recognition that George Seimens writes about.

My kids have found it interesting now that they have had Bloglines accounts for a few weeks to see the flow of information develop. I’ve had more then one student come to me and say something like, “did you see all of the people who have been talking about X?” They see a pattern, they see a flow, they experience the depth of information around them online, in magazines, on the news, through the music they listen to. They begin to see how some of the puzzle pieces fit together.

Again, I find this pretty fascinating. And, as Clarence says, it’s another argument for making sure the ideas and information stay within our students’ grasp.

This is what we need in education. We want to develop spaces where kids are free to think, to interact, to listen to each other, and to learn in a response cycle where their ideas are shared and then revised as their understandings grow. We need our classrooms to become cyber – bohemias or 21st century cyber – salons.

But to do this, we need to give kids access to tools and information. We must let them become fearlessly part of the flow. Ideas don’t grow, change, and mature in a vacuum, but they do in real spaces where information is wild. We can’t domesticate it for them, we need to allow them these tasks for themselves.

Did I mention both of these guys are up for EduBlog Awards in the Best Newcomer category? Tough choice…

So we managed to get all four of the Ed Tech Coast to Coast gang together on one Skype call just over a week ago and the result is now ready for consumption. The file is a bit large due to a change in the production process (Read: Steve took over for Tim W.), but hopefully that won’t be a deterrent. This week, we even have show notes! (Can you tell what we were talking about?) Wow!

As always, feedback appreciated.

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So this pushes past my feeble understanding of XML, but Tracy Logan of the Wayne/Finger-Lakes BOCES in NY seems to have some pretty interesting ideas of how to bring state standards into the 21st Century. Here’s a snip of an e-mail I got from him, reprinted with his permission:

There are a lot of very interesting things we can do with the standards once we have methods of directly referencing them — some of the ideas we’ve tossed around are structured folksonomies (where teachers could use something similar to del.icio.us but pre-filled with Standards-based tags) to categorize webpages; use standards-based tagging for their blogs; tie standards from every state to the Dublin Core (and from there, back to other states), and so on.

Anyway, to date, he hasn’t found any other states trying to tie standards and resources together in this fashion. Either have I (which isn’t saying much.) Anyone out there have any ideas?

From the “Blogvangelism in Traditional Media Dept.” comes the latest Educational Leadership issue which focuses on “Learning in the Digital Age” and features an article I wrote titled “The Educator’s Guide to the Read/Write Web.” While the article will not be free online anytime soon, the abstract is below. You’ll have to visit your local library or an online database near you to get the whole thing (unless of course you want to buy it.)

The Internet is no longer only a place to research information. It is now also a forum through which users can publish and disseminate their own writing. Richardson describes some of the main tools that make this new “Read/Write Web” work—blogs, wikis, really simple syndication, and podcasting—and gives examples of how each can be used to enhance students’ research capabilities, connect students to content experts, and provide a wider audience for student work. He argues that the new research and publishing possibilities the Web opens up, which millions of young people engage in, have implications for keeping teaching relevant. Schools must reexamine what kinds of skills students need to participate meaningfully in this online exchange of knowledge and ideas. Teachers need to reconsider their teaching methods, their use of textbooks when more updated material is available online, and their ideas about student collaboration and the audiences for student work.

In general, it looks like a pretty good issue, headed up by Marc Prensky and packed with what seem to be some pretty forward thinking articles.

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The finalists for the Edublog Awards 2005 are out and I’m humbled to have made the cut in the best individual blog category. I have no clue what that means in terms of numbers of people who may have offered this site in nomination, but I’ll be the first to admit it feels good to be acknowledged in this way by my peers. Thanks to those of you who made the effort and to those of you who continue to read and connect with my ideas and experiences. (Insert Sally Field moment here.)

The even better news is the company I’m keeping. I consider Stephen Downes, and Barbara Ganley to be among my top five in terms of “trusted sources” and most relevant teachers. Both are big nodes in my network. To be honest, I’m not familiar with Ulises Ali Mejias, although a first read of his “A Nomad’s Guide to Learning and Social Software” (nominated in the “Most influential post, resource or presentation” category) suggests maybe I should be.

Just as side note, I think it’s really interesting the diversity of blogging styles in this group. Stephen is the ultimate filter; his sole purpose is to find relevant posts or publications and to give a cogent thumbs up or thumbs down to the reader and move on. Barbara, on the other hand, is the ultimate reflector, bringing us in to her practice with finely woven, link filled narratives. Me, I feel like I’m from the “a little bit o’ dis, a little bit o’ dat” more frenetic school of blogging. That’s what’s so cool about blogs is that they are as diverse as the personalities of the authors.

The other piece of news is there are a slew of new edblogger sites and sources to be checking out the next few days. So if you get the urge, head on over and make your selections. Vote early and often, and let’s celebrate the work that people running the awards and the nominees (and so many others) are doing.

UPDATE: Here’s the direct link to the voting.
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News is not good on the Wikipedia front. (Please, someone stop me if I start using battle metaphors to often around here…) Adam Curry has been doing some self-aggrandizing in terms of his Podfathership, and now there has been some character assisination going on that has really accentuated the Wikipedia problem. Because, you see, there are now a couple of seemingly reputable reference sites on the Internet that are snatching Wikipedia text verbatim (without human eyes) to answer questions people pose.

Oh boy.

Dave Winer says:

…the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

That is the critical question. What does authority mean in the age of Internet scholarship? (I just want to ask questions today, not attempt to answer them. I’m tired.)

And so the disruption goes…

UPDATE: See this NY Times Lesson Plan on the Wikipedia woes.