So I’m not sure if this is the best online etiquette, but I feel compelled to share an e-mail I got from a long-time edblogger this morning with some really disturbing news. Basically, without warning, his district blocked internal access to all of his student blog and podcasting sites.

This afternoon, my district…officially blocked all of my 150 student blogs - both my online magazine and my 100 student blogs for my classroom. The urls you put in your book will work anywhere in the world except in my school, and maybe China.

Now that in itself is pretty ridiculous when you take it at face value. But it’s even worse when you understand, as this teacher does, that they’re not just blocking blogs. They’re blocking a community of learners and an innovative educator who are making great use of these tools. He says:

The blogs have energized my classroom this year. We’ve had over 11,000 hits to our student blogs and online magazine since October of last year. That’s 11,000 times that someone else is reading my students’ writing. We literally created a community of readers and writers.

And why did they do this?

As far as I can tell, the school’s technology officials had no valid reason for shutting me down. I have meticulously created the templates where we blog. I closely monitor all pages. None of the students are identified. Parents are aware of what we’re doing, and support it.

Surprised? I’m not. It’s becoming clear that we’re going to see this more and more, and while I’ll bet the district is going to raise the safety defense, it really has much more to do with losing control than anything else.

But what we have here, it seems, is also an opportunity for parents to stand up and come to the defense of good pedagogy. (What a concept…) And that might be a first. Isn’t it about time we read a newspaper or magazine article where parents and teachers and students are advocating for the learning that comes with less control rather than the ignorance that comes with ratcheting it up?

Updates as they come in…

Another reason why I haven’t had enough time to read of late is because over the last few days I’ve mailed out 93 packages with 104 books, much to the chagrin of the people standing in line behind me at the post office. This order fulfillment process is quite the joy, though I’m sure it’ll slow down real fast. (Won’t it?)

The really cool thing is that many of the books are going international, as in Brazil, Sweden, Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Malasyia, UK, and Spain. It’s a reminder of the audience reach that blogs can have, and of how connected we can all become.

Seems I’m forever saddled with Bloglines backup these days, and it’s so frustrating not to have the time to read and think and write as much as I’d like to. And then when I do have the time, I read such interesting stuff that it’s hard not to take extra time to read and reread and dwell on the ideas. I’m starting to think that in my perfect blog world, I would have only about 20 kick butt feeds in my aggregator that I could just slowly chew through and breathe with, and then turn into some decent blogging. When I feel like my blogging sucks, like I have the past couple of weeks, it’s not about the writing. It’s about not having the time to read. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about this practice, by the way, one that not a lot of people really understand until they do it. Learning to me does not come very much from transcribling my life as it does capturing provocative ideas and deconstructing their meaning and relevance in my own practice. That’s where this becomes a lifelong learning addiction, in the connections between the reading and the writing.

The good news is that not everyone blogs like Barbara Ganley, ’cause if they did, I’d manage only five or six feeds max. Her latest post covers the ways in which she’s getting out her students’ way even more through blogs and podcasts and digital storytelling. She talks about teacher as DJ:

I believe wholeheartedly in having a huge stockpile of exercises and assignments in my pocket, and then ditching them all for something that evolves, that emerges from the learning community and the learning moment.

She talks about learning as a process, not an event:

So I am comfortable viewing the course as a living organism that will often take us places unanticipated at the beginning of the semester or even at the beginning of the class hour. This is an essential characteristic, I believe, of a successful blogging teacher.

And she writes about reinvention:

I have resisted setting up many guidelines for the stories–I want them to feel their way to their stories from this moment here in time. And right now, many of them are surely thinking that I have lost my mind–they look for the due dates; the detailed, clear instructions for success; and they really wonder why we aren’t just sticking to notebooks and keeping their creative writing, for the most part, private, between covers where for many of them it has lived since they were children, or slipped to the professor only when absolutely necessary…And we will blog–sharing the bumps, the pleasures, the questions, the discoveries. Already they feel self-conscious about posting, but that they are writing about that self-consciousness in their opening posts shows a willingness to speak honestly. Even i this opening week, the comments they leave one another illustrate already what the connectedness of social software can do for our students–they do not feel isolated in their learning, and if they feel a connection with others, well then, they will engage with the learning opportunities the group offers.

That is such good writing, and such good reading of the kind that makes me promise myself that in my own reinvention I will make time for my own process every day as an important part of my learning.
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I really don’t have a problem with the Virginia state legislature passing a bill that makes it mandatory for schools to teach safe practices on the Internet. I think it’s a shame that schools have to be told to do this, but there’s no doubt that every kid needs to get straight about what he or she should and should not do when navigating the Net. Too many of them aren’t hearing it at home.

But I still think the biggest issue facing our kids when it comes to the Internet is not safety as much as it is basic Web illiteracy among students AND teachers. I’m more worried about the fact that thousands of kids are going to believe much of the junk they read on the Internet without any thought about who is posting it our why. Case in point, which I’ve used before, is the Stormfront (White Aryan Nation) site about Martin Luther King. I know I have voiced my astonishment time and again about how few teachers I meet are able to identify the owners of a particular Website. It happened again recently where only two or three hands went up out of over 100 educators when I showed the site and asked who knew how to find the domain registration.

Why don’t we write law requiring teachers and students to learn about that?
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Here’s how to get in touch with me:

Phone: 908-310-6546
E-mail: weblogged@gmail.com
Skype: willrich45
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(Cross posted to ETI) If you’re looking for a great example of how the Web is changing things, look no further than this post by Alan Levine which describes the wonderful evolution of a real life presentation given by Nancy White into an online multimedia version collaboratively constructed by a cadre of far flung, benevolent learners connected by RSS feeds and a desire to add to the conversation. Read the whole thing, but the summary from Alan is

Doesn’t this set of unplanned, network-enabled collaborations add so much more valuable context to the experience? Let’s follow the geographic trail- starting from a session presented and recorded in Vancouver BC, audio loaded to a blog in Arizona, images uploaded from Seattle, a movie produced from Hong Kong, and a distilled session summary from Portugal!

But the best part is the exchange of ideas in the comments that follow. Dave Lee pushes Alan’s upbeat assessment of the events by asking

I have to wonder how do we convince the average professor who hasn’t moved much beyond powerpoint being a glorified outlining tool that such feats of internet wizardry really are as difficult as they might at first seem? How do we get a corporate line manager who has never built a chart based on an excel speradsheet into a Word document to grasp the concept of small pieces loosely joined?

Great question. And the answers are worth checking out. But here is what I think is the key statement of the whole thread, added by Nancy White herself:

This is the community and the wider network at play. I know I would never had found and learned all the tools to put it all together. But I could bring a piece.

That’s exactly what George Seimens and connective learning is all about. It’s loading what you do know into the network and learning from the others who have other pieces, skills, ideas to contribute. We don’t have to know everything about everything any more, not only because we can’t but because our networks can store it away for us. Like Alan says:

…my sets of skills are always evolving (or decaying) as I learn more by tapping into my remote network, a rather startling shift of embracing my own ignorance (expertise is over-rated) and bathing in what others share.

This is the way learning takes place, by “bathing in what others share” and then by sharing what we know back to the community. Learning as process, not event.
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Danah Boyd posted a most interesting look at the MySpace phenomenon that does a nice job of putting the whole thing in perspective. I have to say that I’ve been suprised to some extent by the “moral panic” as Danah calls it that MySpace has wrought of late. Not to say that there aren’t some dangers there, but the risks something bad happening are still extremely low. It’s all about education…

Anyway, some interesting quotes from her piece:

Adults often worry about the amount of time that youth spend online, arguing that the digital does not replace the physical. Most teens would agree. It is not the technology that encourages youth to spend time online - it’s the lack of mobility and access to youth space where they can hang out uninterrupted.

This is the sad truth of the times, I’m afraid. I know this with my own kids, that I have a niggling worry when they play outside alone that is really unwarranted. It’s too bad that you never see kids just hanging out anymore…now they’re hanging in.

Another:

The scantily clad performances intended to attract fellow 16-year-olds are not meant for the older men. Likewise, the drunken representations meant to look “cool” are not meant for the principal. Yet, both of these exist in high numbers online because youth are exploring identity formation. Having to simultaneously negotiate youth culture and adult surveillance is not desirable to most youth, but their response is typically to ignore the issue…Without impetus, teens rarely choose to go private on MySpace and certainly not for fear of predators or future employers. They want to be visible to other teens, not just the people they they’ve friended. They would just prefer the adults go away. All adults. Parents, teachers, creepy men.

Finally, this one sentence caught my attention:

Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being [3], profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media.

Hmmm…write themselves into being… What a cool way of thinking about it.
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If you have a spare 40 minutes or so in the near future, I would urge you to take a look at George Siemens’ latest Articulate presentation on Connectivism. For those already familiar with his work, this doesn’t break a lot of new ground. But I do think that the way he lays out the case for these changing learning environments just keeps getting better and better.

I’ve said this before, but connectivism describes my learning process almost exactly. As opposed to the ready, set, go learning that’s happening down the hallways right now, it’s become more of a constant flow for me, a continual process of seeking and finding relevant information in and out of my online and offline network and synthesizing all of it to share back and extend the conversation.

What struck me even more clearly this morning was the importance of reading AND writing in this process. If, as George says, we learn by building networks, the construction of those networks can only occur when we both consume and create content. If we don’t take that step of making our learning transparent to the other people or nodes out there, we limit the collective intelligence of the group. We sustain learning, we push learning only by sharing it back and becoming a source ourselves to the community of learners out there. Learners become teachers, teachers become learners.

And something else. We really do need to stop treating learning as if it were an event, like it stops at the end of class. And we do this because we are focused on the content, not the process. I can understand how we got here, when it was much more difficult for students to access diverse materials for every learning style that would enhance what they got from the teacher in the classroom. When our students are still being measured by tests that require them to memorize information instead of employ that information effectively. But for those schools with genuine access, like mine, it’s not the content that’s important any more. A lot of content gets lost, fortgotten, or, especially today, quickly becomes irrelevant. We should instead be focused on teaching kids how to learn, so they can continue to employ effective practice throughout their lives.

I have no question as to the relevance of Connectivism in terms of learning in connected environments. What I do struggle with is the rate at which it becomes relevant to others who have not already started learning in this way.
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So my wife calls at about 1 yesterday afternoon and says “Did you know your books were arriving today?” and I’m like, “Wha? Um…no. Are they there?” and she says “Yeah, the guy just called and he’s around the block and…” and I hung up on her and drove like a crazy person over to her office, and just as I almost get there I see this red SUV that had obviously side-swiped a parked car and gotten stuck start backing up and speed away, so my brain is like “books… duty… books… duty” and I finally succumb and keep driv…er…pull over, run into the public library outside of where it happened, find the guy with the gray Grand Prix, give him the woman’s license plate and my phone number, jump back in my car and get to the office to see my poor wife carrying the last of eleven 38 lb. boxes up the stairs, run inside, run my car key down the center tape of one of the cartons, rip out the stuffing paper and, lo and behold, good god almighty, can you believe it…IT’S A BOOK!

MY book. Pretty cool.

Of course, that’s the end of anything productive that happens for the rest of the day despite a meeting with Tablet PC cohort teachers that I have to come back for and a most unsettling hour coaching a 3rd grade girls basketball team later that night. (Use your imagination…the 3rd grade boys team was in the other half of the gym.) The rest of the time is spent reading, staring, reading some more, looking for errors (found one typo so far) and just trying to believe that I really wrote that thing. And thinking, “hey, this came out pretty darn good!” Cigars all around.

But in a “let’s keep this all in perspective” moment, earlier in the day a teacher walked into my office with an olive green Algebra book that I instantly recognized to be the same edition that I had suffered through back in 1970-something when I was a sophomore here at Happy High School. Even better, however, was when she opened up the front cover, held out the little “sign your name” grid that was there and said, “Is that YOU?” Sure enough, I look down, and the second name in the list that’s now like thirty names long says “Willie Richardson” in this weird, somewhat familiar cursive that is most certainly my signature.

Now I know that Algebra hasn’t changed much over the years, but let’s get serious. Thirty some years later, isn’t there a better way to frame or contextualize the material than “If gas costs 57 cents a gallon and a car gets 17 miles per gallon, how many miles…”

Time to start working on the second edition…

I got to do some blogvangelism today in front of about 800 folks at South Brunswick High School here in New Jersey as well as get to meet long-time ed tech speaker/consultant Jamie McKenzie and everyone’s favorite source on Internet safety Perry Aftab whose face and name I must have seen at least a dozen times on television and newspapers the past week. The three of us sat on a panel with about five other tech types from the district and two students to react to Jamie’s keynote presentation on implementing ed tech in schools. It was, as always, a great opportunity for me to learn from some very well respected people in the field. But the best part was learning from the kids.

At one point, the grown ups on the panel were lamenting the fact that it was getting increasingly difficult to shut down the information flow of e-mail and cell phones and everything else. I really wanted to know what the students thought about all of that, so I asked them if they felt equally overwhelmed. Not surprisingly, their experience was almost the exact opposite. Both of them said that the Internet was a crucial part of the way they communicated and stayed in touch, and that it had become an almost seamless part of their daily lives. It was amazing how different their experiences were.

I had about a hundred people at my afternoon Read/Write Web presentation, and had some great conversation about the potential of these tools. I always think it’s interesting how different people perceive these changes, and today was no exception. Some were overwhelemed. Some were scared. Some couldn’t wait to get started. I really hope those who stick a toe in the water touch base about their exploits.

The headline in the local weekly paper this week reads “High Schools Striving to Control Cell Phones.” It’s accompanied by a picture of one of the disciplinarian at an area school sitting behind a mound of confiscated phones on his desk. The article is sprinkled with quotes about how parents are too soft, how punishments need to be raised, and that rumors about students using the phones to cheat at school were “false information.”

Last week we also had the first MySpace “incident” at our school. Two of our students started harassing each other on their sites and both ended up in the assistant superintendent’s office for some mediation and some editing. Turns out, unbeknownst to me, btw, that the plug’s been pulled on MySpace here. (Edublogs, Blogger, Flickr and the like are still there.) I’m feeling somewhat red-faced, somewhat amazed, and somewhat ambivalent.

So the pitched battle hits home, and I’m sure I’ll be writing more about the ripples. I’m in no way condoning the harassment or the cheating, but I still think trying to take away from kids the technologies they communicate and learn with is the wrong approach. We can clamp down and ultimately fail as the kids and the technology overwhelm us, or try to educate and model and repurpose our curricula to take advantage of what these technologies offer.

Still not a lot of time to read and write…Wendy’s birthday today, and to celebrate we all went to the Princeton-Columbia women’s basketball game last night where we met Super Bowl winning coach Bill Cowher (whose daughter plays for Princeton) and my kids got their first autograph from someone “famous” (even though they were absolutely clueless as to why an autograph is something of interest.) Tom’s jealous, I’m sure.

Anyway, the post of the week had to be Darren’s report of the student who had just passed Pre Calculus suddenly showing up unsolicited on the blog of the next semester class offering to mentor the new group on blogging commenting and a bit of calc as well. I mean really, how cool is that? And then he followed it up with links to some student scribe posts that are nothing short of amazing. Good stuff.

Is it me, or are things starting to click in classrooms a bit more these days? I can’t wait ’til I feel like I have enough time to process it more completely…
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