Remember “The Jerk“? The scene where Steve Martin finds his name in the new phone book and yells “I’m somebody!”?

Well, here’s my “Jerk” moment. I just got this e-mail from Amazon:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased “The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog” by Rebecca Blood also purchased books by Will Richardson. For this reason, you might like to know that Will Richardson’s “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy by following the link below.

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
Will Richardson
List Price : $61.95
Price : $61.95

To learn more about Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, please visit the following page at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/
1412927668/ref=pe_snp_668

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

Talk about surreal. Now if only they had gotten the price right…

It occurred to me as I was listening to David yesterday that not only is this the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that we don’t have a real clear picture of what your kids’ futures look like (from a professional standpoint), this may also be the first time in history that our kids bring serious knowledge to the classroom that their teachers don’t have. And I mean that on a couple of levels.

First, from a technology standpoint, there is no question that most (not all) kids are more comfortable and facile with computers and the Read/Write tools than most (not all) teachers are. What that sets up is an opportunity for teachers to let their students teach, not only the teacher but each other as well.

Second, one of the most significant changes in the classroom today is the fact that teachers (or schools) no longer know most (not all) of the relevant sources of information for the topics that they teach. Think about it…when I was in high school, I doubt that I used too many sources for my research and my work that my teachers didn’t have knowledge of or at least had a clear understanding of. Today, that’s no longer the case. I hear teachers all the time relate the fact that they are “scrambling” to keep up with both the types of sources and the sources themselves that their students are using. Again, I think this is an opportunity for teachers to learn from their students in some meaningful ways.

What this means is that we need to start looking at our students more as resources instead of recepticles. We need to be able to let go of some of those traditional roles and, as David so rightly said yesterday, focus more on teaching and showing students how to manage their own learning. We need to push our kids to go beyond our curriculum and help us expand our classrooms because, let’s face it, they can now.

—–

Chris Lehmann graciously invited me down to Philadelphia this morning to take part in a Curriculum Summit for his new Science Leadership Academy School opening up in September. Right now David Warlick is giving a short keynote, and it’s not wonder why David has become one of the busiest Read/Write Web educators out there. (That’s David and Chris in the picture, btw.) His message is truly powerful, that for the first time in history we know “almost nothing” about what our students will be doing in their futures. And that the main answer to that is to teach them not the same old content, but teach them to teach themselves. It’s good stuff.

Chris has brought together about 40 people from around the region to sit down for the day to talk about what the SLA will look like. To give you a sense, the mission and vision statement starts with:

“We do not realise how significant the Read-Write internet could be.” –Lawrence Lessig (12/05)

So if you’ve read this site for awhile you know that Lawrence Lessig is one of the people I really admire, not only for his brain but for what he’s doing with it. His latest screencast on Google Book Search is definitely worth the look, and anyone who is trying to understand the significance of this Read/Write Web thing we’re mucking around in needs to read this piece in the Financial Times. It’s pegged on the animated music video phenomenon and how (guess what?) there are now attempts to rein it in. But it’s also about the amazing potential of what we have here and the threats to it. A few excerpts:

AMVs are just part of a growing and important “Read-Write” internet-a world in which content is bought, but not simply to be consumed. Blogs, photo journals and sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace signal an extraordinary hunger in our culture for something beyond consumption. According to a recent Pew study, almost 60 per cent of US teenagers have created and shared content on the internet. That number will only grow next year. As it does, these creators will increasingly demand freedom to create, or more precisely, re-create, using as inputs the culture that they buy. In a sense, this re-creativity of the Read-Write internet is nothing new. Since the beginning of human society, individuals have remixed the culture around them, sharing with their friends the product of these remixes.

We’ve all got to understand this and take every opportunity to let people know what this means. Lessig writes that we’re on the precipice of an era where an amazing explosion of culture could take place as long as it’s not co-opted by those in power politically or financially:

It is hard for those of us from the couch potato generation to understand why the creativity of the Read-Write internet is important. But if you focus on something that we are likely to understand – market value – then the Read-Write internet, indeed, has a great deal to recommend it. The computers, bandwidth, software and storage media needed to enable an efficient Read-Only internet are but a fraction of the technology needed to support the Read-Write internet. The potential for growth with the Read-Write internet is extraordinary, if only the law were to allow it.

And if you don’t think this is important to our kids, listen up:

But to those building the Read-Write internet, economics is not what matters. Nor is it what matters to their parents. After a talk in which I presented some AMV work, a father said to me: “I don’t think you really realise just how important this is. My kid couldn’t get into college till we sent them his AMVs. Now he’s a freshman at a university he never dreamed he could attend.” The father was right. We do not realise how significant the Read-Write internet could be. Nor can I even begin to imagine how policymakers could be made to see the harm that perfecting the Read-Only internet will have for this more vibrant and valuable alternative.

There is much to get our heads around, but if we don’t recognize the urgency of this particular issue right now, there may not be too much left to think about in a few years.

Tagged: lessig, read_write_web, copyright

So if you’ve read this site for awhile you know that Lawrence Lessig is one of the people I really admire, not only for his brain but for what he’s doing with it. His latest screencast on Google Book Search is definitely worth the look, and anyone who is trying to understand the significance of this Read/Write Web thing we’re mucking around in needs to read this piece in the Financial Times.

Technorati Tags: lessig, read_write_web, copyright
—–

I’ve been doing some more reading in the Jay David Bolter book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print and I’m finding my thinking pushed more and more in terms of the complexities of writing and reading in a Web environment. Again, this interests me because even though the idea and use of hypertext is not new, I think the explosion of Read/Write Web technologies is finally brining it mainstream in much more expansive and interesting ways, and I’m trying to get my brain around what that means in terms of how we and our students learn and what implications it has for our teaching and our curricula.

I’ve been skipping around a bit, and the other night I lit on a chapter titled “Critical Theory in a New Writing Space.” In it, Bolter frames the discussion by reviewing the history of texts in terms of the authority that was assigned to them and how that is changing. In essence, as printed texts became more and more widespread, the authority of the authors of these texts became more and more enhanced. But this authority is now being undermined by communication technologies. (Connect and compare to this post.) Bolter says that “our society seems to have accepted and endorsed the transient, casual, and generally unauthoritative nature of Web sites” (165). He argues that this new medium has shown that it can “accommodate a different relationship between author and reader” (168).

No longer an intimidating figure, an electronic author assumes the role of a craftsperson, working with prescribed materials and goals. She works within the limitations of a computer system, and she imposes further limitations upon her readers. Within those limits, however, the reader is free to move. If in print, subjectivity of the author was expressed at the expense of that of the reader, in electronic hypertext two subjectivities, the author’s and the reader’s, encounter one another on more nearly equal terms. The reader may well become the author’s adversary, seeking to make the text over in a direction that the author did not anticipate (168). [Emphasis mine]

I wonder how many of us are teaching our students to write with the adversarial reader in mind. Not that we couldn’t be doing that with linear texts, but it’s even more important in online environments when many adversarial readers can connect to and discuss ideas in distributed conversations across the Web. Bolter suggests that this in this way, hypertext

…seems to realize the metaphor of reader response, as the reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words…if the author has written up all the words and chosen all the images, the reader must still call them up and determine the order of presentation by the choices made and the links followed. The author writes a set of potential texts, from which the reader chooses, and there is no single univocal text apart from the reader.

While this description seems more directed at formal hypertext writing, as opposed to, say, blogging, I still think it has relevance for us. I’m not giving you many choices in this post, obviously. But in most of the writing bloggers do, the reader does get the chance to make a choice about how he or she navigates the text.

Another book I’ve dug into somewhat is The New Media Reader, which was another suggestion by Barbara Ganley. In an essay titled “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts” by Michael Joyce includes this quote from Diane Pelkus Balestri:

Hypertext…changes the relation between reader and writer. The reader becomes a collaborator, constructing and reconstructing the text, choosing his own path through it.

She points to the need for training hypertext audiences in the new habits of thought necessary to perceive coherence in patterns and links, and to generate coherent patterns and links of their own. And that, of course, brings us full circle, to the idea of connective learning, and the ability to recognize patterns of thoughts and ideas over different texts, and then to generate more patterns and links in our own writing.

In this way, learning feels more flow-like to me than ever before, and it’s hypertext that creates that I think. It’s as a reader actually acting as a part of the writing, reconstructing it though my own lens, and offering that up for interpretation. Just like what I’ve done here…

This is heavy slogging…but I actually feel like I’m getting somewhere with it.
—–

—–

—–

This weekend, a very popular student at my school and her mother were tragically killed in a car accident. It’s been a difficult few days for many in our community. The reason I mention it is that the student and many of her friends had sites at MySpace, and while hers has since been closed to public view, many of the other kids have been posting pictures and thoughts on their own sites in her memory. What’s been striking to me is the scope of the outpouring online among these kids who are obviously making use of these sites to support each other and to grieve her passing. No doubt, as you scroll through many of these pages, you’ll see troubling pictures and comments and links. But you’ll also see a deeply connected community of kids, kids who are turning to these spaces to help each other cope and express their genuine feelings of sadness and confusion to one another. And it’s a community that I think most adults simply don’t “get” yet, myself included to a some extent. It’s more than MySpace that we need to understand, however. It’s the power of the connections that kids are making online, connections that we never had the opportunity to explore in those murky, gangly, confused years of our own adolescence. We’re totally missing the point if we think we can wave the spectre of danger in front of them (danger of pedophiles, danger of future embarrassment, danger of _________) and expect them just to stop. Whether we like it or not, these are important and meaningful places to a large number of our kids. It’s not our role to control them because the reality is we can’t do that. It’s our role to educate them. And to do that, we have to be willing to learn from them first.

(From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.”) I’ve got one last permission left to get, but either way, it looks like things are on track for my book to come out in early March. (I still can’t believe it.) If you like, you can preorder it here. Please spread the word if you’re so inclined, and let me just say again how much I appreciate all the support and assistance I’ve gotten from so many of you already. It’s turned out to be an amazingly fun and rewarding experience.
—–

(via Aaron Campbell) I just really, really hate this kind of stuff:

Over the objections of the teachers’ union, the Board of Education here [Houston, TX] on Thursday unanimously approved the nation’s largest merit pay program, which calls for rewarding teachers based on how well their students perform on standardized tests.

Oy. Somehow this is not something that would make me want to move to Houston.

I never really got the chance to write about my Seton Hall weekend, but some interesting bloggy things have been happening with the cohort. One of the assignments that the 33 Ed.D. students have is to identify a problem in their district that could be ameliorated with the use of blogs, wikis, RSS and the like, create a plan to implement some of those tools, and then use their own blogs to reflect on the process. Last weekend was our first chance to talk about their progress, and the reports back were mixed, to put it mildly. Getting into the swing of blogging was difficult for many of them, and we had some great discussions about why some were more successful than others. We talked about the discomfort of writing in public, the difficulty of bringing tools they themselves weren’t yet comfortable with to their colleagues, and the lack of time to learn them. (I’m going to point to this post at the Seton Hall blog in hopes some of them will come here to comment on their own.) It was, I thought at least, an important example of why face to face classroom time is so important.

In the week since we met, however, there a sense of energy around the project in many spots. They’ve been video skyping each other. They’ve been talking about MySpace with their students. They’ve been doing a great job of commenting on each other’s blogs, and it’s obvious they’re feeling more comfortable. Take this post, for instance:

Today we had our first staff development session to introduce blogs to the teaching staff at Kennedy Elementary School. We had nine participants on a voluntary basis. I am not a proponent of mandating this particular initiative. I would rather operate through word of mouth. There is a change to the initial project I posted as part of our class assignment. After our cohort week-end and a conversation with Will, I decided to begin by having teachers build a personal blog instead of building web pages. The first stage was simply the constuction of the blogs. Nine new blogs are now available to the Internet world. This is just the beginning though. Their assignment is now to think about how this new tool can be used to enhace the classroom and childrens’ learning. In the few minutes allowed, we came up with various uses, such as posting vocabulary, lesson plans, as well as interesting web sites that are already being used as resources to the established curriculum. I would say that the overall climate was excellent and I look forward to our next session. The project is beginning to take on a life of its own. By the end of the school year, it is our intention to have web pages, RSS feeds, curricular lesson plans, archived articles all part of each teacher’s blog.

And this from a current assistant superintendent:

Yesterday we had all of our Kindergarten teachers at the Central Office writing assessments. One group was writing an assessment where the students would sort night and day pictures. They were attempting to download clipart to use for this task and were visibly frustrated that they weren’t finding what they really needed. I showed them the Flickr site and how they could search using the tag words for pictures. They found exactly what they needed there and were very excited. (Just imagine a room full of Kindergarten teachers discovering a site like this…the possibilities for seasons, holidays, animals, places, etc.) Forget about the assessments, they were searching for bunnies for spring and lake/ ocean/ river pictures for a unit, etc. Compared to using clipart, it was like going from black and white T.V. to color for them. Our fine arts coordinator was at this meeting. She pulled up the flickr site and shared that she actually subscribes to a site much like it which sends an email to her everyday with pictures. She said that she hates the fact that the files are so big they fill up her mailbox at hotmail. She has no choice but to look at them everyday. I asked her to show me the site and it had an RSS feed. I helped her set up a bloglines account and we brought the site’s feed over to it so now she can receive these pictures everyday, but only needs to look at them when it is convenient. She was very pleased.

Pretty cool. Small steps. But progress. I’m really looking forward to see what they’ll do from here on out.

—–

(via Stephen Downes) Maybe we should start a club, and this might be our manifesto. I especially like:

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.