I’m in the Tampa airport (free wireless!) catching up on some reading after spending the day with about 100 tech coordinators from Pinellas County schools talking about investing in the stock market…er…I mean blogs, wikis, RSS and all that other fun stuff. And it was a great day overall (with the exception of one sobering moment that I’ll get to in a bit) that was filled with really thoughtful questions and conversation and a surprise visit from Clayton Wilcox the blogging superintendent. (That’s him in the picture…click it to see a larger version.) Here are a couple quick observations:
There is no doubt that more and more people know what blogs and wikis and podcasts are, though I think they still don’t fully see the potential for the classroom. (BTW, only about 10 knew what RSS was.) This is a time issue more than anything else, because once they do see what teachers are doing, the light bulbs start popping. At the end of the day, they were coming up with some truly inspired ideas for implementation.
From a blogging standpoint, non-bloggers don’t get the idea that blogging starts with reading. And it’s becoming more apparent to me that once they do get that, it reframes their whole perception of blogs, puts them in a more powerful light. You don’t need to read to journal. You do to blog. (I know, I know…been there, done that…and the irony of this journaly entry isn’t lost, btw.)
The biggest shift in thinking has to come at the 40,000 foot level, and that is that there is nothing stopping us (well, almost) from asking our students to do meaningful work for wider audiences. These tools obliterate classroom walls, and we need to seriously reframe the way we look at our assignments and projects and products.The sobering moment? Well, this is difficult, because I in no way want this to come across as a slight to the people in the room who were seriously among the most engaged and articulate audiences I’ve presented to. But it was a moment that crystallizes the work that we have to do regarding the Web in general.
As we were discussing the concept of readers as editors, I showed them the white supremicist created Martin Luther King site . Well, actually, I showed a picture of it since it was being blocked at the time, and after pointing out the obvious racist tenor of the site, I asked how many could go and find out who owned that domain, who created and updated it.
There was a deafening silence.
Not. One. Person.
Mercy.
Steve Dembo is noting another way the tools are pushing us to reinvention:
Some professors posting their lectures online as podcasts claim their seeing a rise in absenteeism. Professors are responding by having more pop quizzes or giving extra credit for attending class.
Am I missing something? What’s the problem here? If students can get all of the necessary information and pass the final exam just by listening to the podcasts, then A ) the student should get a cookie and B ) the professor do some serious thinking about how much value there is of hearing the information firsthand.
If the student could just as easily get all the information from a podcast, then isn’t the lecture period being completely wasted?
And then he asks this really big question:
When the lecture, presentation slides and notes can all be shared online, what SHOULD a higher education class look like?
To be honest, I have a secret wish that when my kids get old enough for college (in about 10 years), that they’ll have consumed all of the necessary consumables and just be showing up to classes that focus on actually taking an active role in the learning. What a concept…
But these are old habits. And we’ve got our fair share of ‘em down here in K-12 land as well.
There are thousands (millions?) of new Web tools coming online every day it seems, and thanks to TechCrunch and Tim Lauer, I think I do a fair job of keeping up with the most interesting ones. MyStickies is one of those tools that I think has some cool thinking behind it, and one that I can see immediate application to the classroom.
It’s a Firefox extension that basically allows you to create Sticky Notes on the fly, tag them, and archive them with links back to the original page. So say I’m doing some research on the ways in which schools are trying to control this new Web and I find a salient paragraph in that Wall Street Journal article I referenced yesterday. I just highlight the text, ALT-drag a MyStickies notebox over it, and a sticky pops up with the highlighted text already included. At that point, I can add my own notes/reflections, and then tag the sticky under any number of headings. When I go back to my MyStickies dashboard, all of my notes are displayed along with links back to the original page, sortable by tags or the sites themselves. In the near future, I can add friends to the process…the obligatory pinch of social goodness.
The downsides:
I want it to save the whole page like Furl.net.
I want an RSS feed for the notes/tags
I want it to be bought my Yahoo or Google so it won’t go away.
I want to be able to export a bibliography of sources.
Hmmm…maybe it would be better to ask Furl to add a MyStickies feature instead…
Still, I can see this working for collaborative teams of researchers working under the same login collecting relevant stuff in a pretty easy and organized way.
I’m in the Tampa airport (free wireless!) catching up on some reading after spending the day with about 100 tech coordinators from Pinellas County schools talking about investing in the stock market…er…I mean blogs, wikis, RSS and all that other fun stuff. And it was a great day overall (with the exception of one sobering moment that I’ll get to in a bit) that was filled with really thoughtful questions and conversation and a surprise visit from Clayton Wilcox the blogging superintendent. (That’s him in the picture…click it to see a larger version.) Here are a couple quick observations: