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.
—–

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.
—–

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…