(via Hugh MacLeod)
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So this is what happens when you go away for a few days without a great connection and you have over 600 posts to read in your aggregator when you get back and despite your best efforts to file stuff away or blog about it as you’re cranking through the heap you find way, way too much good knowledge to manage and when you shut everything down you realize that you’d have to be Wes Freyer to write about it all before your wife files for divorce.

Oy.

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David Warlick:

No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.

Whoa!
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From Alex Halavais:

At some point, the spy v. spy effort to contain cheating seems to occupy far more time than it is worth, and you fear you are neglecting the students who really are there to learn. In many ways, the propensity for students to cheat on the exams is a symptom of an educational system that has failed. If we cannot teach our students the value of learning, rather than the value of the GPA, we really are not very good at our job.

Read the comments thread too…

From the “Churning Through my Overloaded Aggregator Department” comes this discussion over at D’Arcy Norman’s blog about the ways in which tagging and aggregating via “EduGlu” can start bringing all sorts of content together. Now I’m a little slow on the machinations of all of this, but the basic idea here (I think) is that we can give our students a unique tag for any interesting content they find that’s relevant to a course, get them to start collecting that content in their blogs, on Flickr, in del.icio.us and anywhere else where tagging is allowed, and then pump the RSS feeds for that tag from all of those sites into a SuprGlu type page to create quite the extensive “River of News.” (And even if that’s not what they’re talking about, it’s a pretty cool idea just by itself.)

Which reminds me, I gotta remember to tag these posts. Another reason to get off of Manila which doesn’t have a form field for it. So here:

Tags: RSS, Tags, SuperGlu

When I read the Ewan had accidentally deleted his blog I literally felt sick to my stomach. I can’t imagine what I would do if that happened to me. (Actually, today I tweaked the template a bit and accidentally hit the “Restore Default Template” button. Oy. Luckily there was a confirm message, but that was enough to get my heart beating a bit faster.) I know that my blog host makes backups of everything, but still. I’m sure until I got it recontructed I’d be in agony.

But isn’t that the way we would want our students to feel if they suddenly lost the work that they had created? I wonder how many of them would. How many of them feel enough connection and ownership to the work they do to literally mourn the loss of that work? What does that say about what happens when you build a portfolio of conversations and ideas in this way, so that when you lose it you’ll spend hours, maybe days, trying to recreate it? What does that say about the work we’re giving them to do?

This is a bit different, isn’t it?

I love this comment that Ewan leaves at the end of the thread:

Thankfully I’ve managed to go back through the archive and save large number of the conversations I’ve valued in shaping my own opinions. Time to write a book, I think, and get them all on static (safe) paper

He’s kidding, of course, but he’s also making an important point. All of this, from the technology to the transparency to the unknowable audience is more of a risk. And that’s of course what makes it difficult for many to take on. The good news is, the reward for this risk is well worth it, at least for me. And I’m guessing Ewan would still agree.

Just in case you might be interested to see what a bunch of U.K. students working on wikis look like, I just posted a slew of pictures at Flickr. There’s also one of a funny looking car.
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So I got an e-mail from someone who had gotten an e-mail from someone who is a district tech coordinator sitting on the hiring committee for a new superintendent asking for suggestions as to what questions to ask about technology. I’m curious to see what others might come up with, especially since I’m going to be a part of the search committee for my own replacement. (That still sounds weird.) So, what key question regarding technology would you ask a candidate for superintendent (or tech coordinator) in your district? (I’ll share what I sent back in the next couple of days.)

While my trip to England was great on all accounts, spending a few days with limited connectivity sure makes coming home a bit more, shall we say, difficult. I’ve got over 500 unread posts in my Bloglines account, and about another 40 e-mails that need answering. That, and of course, I still do have a real job for a few more months. Talk about feeling buried.

And I have to say how weird it felt not being able to make a phone call when I had the need to. Between the snow storm that had me scrambling to even get over there, a cancelled seat on the way home, and various other minor emergencies, it’s obvious how connected I’ve become. Good and bad, I guess.

So anyway, even though I missed the big storm, I’ll still be digging out the next few days. Hopefully there will be some blog time in there somewhere.

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Home from three great days in Bolton, England working with high school aged kids to build what could be a really neat wiki and learning a lot about how far blogs and the like have spread, or not spread. And, learning a lot about being an American abroad..

The best part? The kids, without question. We spent full days with about 50 students with 10 teachers, and to a person they were enthusiastic, engaged, and extremely interesting. I loved the accents, and I they taught me a lot about just how varied the accents are, some being very different just three or four miles apart. They were all interested in what things were like in the states, especially what school was like. (They didn’t much like the fact that kids here don’t have to wear uniforms…) And they all took to the wiki like fish take to …er…chips.

Wikiville is the idea of John Bidder who wants to create a place where kids from around the world can come and add descriptions and narratives about the places they live. The kids in Bolton were the start, but we’ve already heard from other teachers in the US, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and Tasmania among others..Surprisingly, most of the students didn’t know what blogs were, though a couple of the teachers said they were beginning to use them with their classes in their schools. And there were only a handful that had heard of wikis, though most had heard of Wikipedia. In fact, it turned out that one young man had worked pretty extensively on the Bolotn entry in Wikipedia (somewhat to the chagrin of the editors). The good news is that the kids created a great deal of content for the first two days, and many of them continued to edit and add information even when they got home. The most difficult point was getting them to write in a non-Wikipedia voice, which may or may not be a circumstance of the tool or of the way that they have been taught to write. (And that may be the case with students all over the place.) But there were a couple of great examples of interesting voice and content.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how it all progresses. John and I agreed that there are some obvious challenges ahead. The students, who cam from about a dozen different high schools around Bolton, will obviously not be seeing one another again. And there are some structural and organizational issues to sort out. But we’re hoping that in a couple of weeks it will be ready to open up to more schools. (If you’re interested, just let me know.)

Just a short post between planes. Yesterday’s blog workshop in Savannah was too much fun for me. I had a group of 18 e-learning types from colleges around the country and they made the day a real conversation about the technologies rather than your typical old training session. We tried to answer the question “Does the Web change everything when it comes to education?” We learned and made blogs and wikis, created Bloglines accounts and started aggregating, and took a look at del.icio.us and Flickr, capped it off with a Skype call to England (which is where I’m at as I write this, having just arrived after a long flight from Atlanta.) Everything just seemed to flow really well from one tool to the next, one question or comment to the next. So there are a few more edbloggers in our midst.

But while the tools are certainly disruptive and potentially powerful, few if any of them really think things in education are going to change anytime soon.

I’ve been linking to Kathy Sierra more and more, but maybe that’s because of my recent life decisions. It’s funny, but the one answer I find myself giving more than any other when people ask me why in the world I would give up my job is “I’m following my passion.” And my passion is learning. Call me weird…I LOVE blogs and wikis and Skype and RSS and Delicious. I love these tools because I am continually learning when I use them. It’s just my reality.

So anyway, here’s today’s Kathy quote:

We can’t expect passionate users, if we ourselves can’t hold (or rediscover) the passion we felt for the work we chose. That doesn’t mean we have to love our actual job — I’ve had plenty of JOBS that could suck the life out of the most inspiring work on the planet. But I’m not talking about the job, which you can change, this is about the actual thing–teaching, writing, programming, delivering a sermon, playing with your kids, training your dog, giving a presentation, managing a team, evangelizing a cause, whatever it is.

Amen. It took me a long time to find something that I was truly passionate about, and that’s why I’m leaving, so my work and passion will be one in the same. (And at that point, it’s not really work, is it?)

Now I know passion doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. But I almost defy you to show me a successful person that didn’t get there by being passionate about something. Yeah, for many it’s the passion to make huge sums of money. But in most cases, the money is the icing. It starts with a love of something, some idea or act that pays you back in ways money never could. When I watch my six year old son shooting baskets in the snow, or watch my eight year old daughter intently brush the knots from her horse’s mane, I tingle, literally, and wonder if they are feeling even just a bit of what I feel, the Zen like flow of the act. Are they feeling the flickers of passion?

I hope so.

From today’s New York Times comes a story about China’s attempt to control the explosion of blogs in the country:

Although Mr. Anti — who is also an employee of the Beijing bureau of The New York Times — had his site closed, any Chinese Web surfer can choose from scores of other online commentators who are equally provocative, and more are coming online all the time.

Microsoft alone carries an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China. Add to that the estimated 10 million blogs on other Internet services, and it becomes clear what a censor’s nightmare China has become. What is more, not a single blog existed in China a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day — some run by people whose previous blogs had been banned and merely change their name or switch Internet providers. New technologies, like podcasts, are making things even harder to control.

“The Internet is open technology, based on packet switching and open systems, and it is totally different from traditional media, like radio or TV or newspapers,” said Guo Liang, an Internet specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “At first, people might have thought it would be as easy to control as traditional media, but now they realize that’s not the case.”

Hmmm. This story feels like it could be about some other entity trying to keep the hammer down on content. Can’t quite put my finger on it…