Some good news from the New York Times:

African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the “digital divide” that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.

Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it.

But the falling price of laptops, more computers in public schools and libraries and the newest generation of cellphones and hand-held devices that connect to the Internet have all contributed to closing the divide, Internet experts say.

Good news, indeed.

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MySpace has been in the news again, this time because of the role it played in organizing the recent protests across the country (but primarily in California and Arizona) against the immigration bill. The first thing that jumps out to me, at least is that MySpace is now officially a “social networking site,” not just a blog site. Thank goodness we’ve figured that out.

But what happenend this week is Smart Mobs in living color. Look at the lead in the Arizona Republic:

There’s no doubt that the high school student protests that emptied several schools, blocked traffic and packed the state capital lawn were real.

It’s the way they were organized that was virtual.

Although the student demonstrations Monday and Tuesday paled in comparison with Friday’s 20,000-strong march, the city’s biggest, they likely marked the first appearance of a new generation of activists savvy about using electronic gadgets, text messaging and the Internet to organize.

And read this account by a Social Studies teacher in California:

Asked how the students organized so quickly, Ray Siqueiros, a Sunnyside social studies teacher, said, “It’s called technology. It’s called text messaging. It’s called myspace.com.” Students at Cholla and Pueblo coordinated their march within a matter of minutes during lunch by calling and text messaging each other on their cell phones, they said.

Now, I have to tell you, I have a hard time picturing a bunch of grownups doing quick, mass mobilization this way. Seriously. We’re so e-mail. And I’m pretty much done with that whole natives and immigrants meme because there’s nothing stopping any of us from becoming fluent in this language except our own unwillingness to learn it (and, ok, maybe some time issues…where do kids get the time for this anyway?) We can debate whether or not the kids should have done what they did (read the comments to this Danah Boyd post; in fact, read the whole thing) but we might want to recognize it for what it is: a powerful example of the connectedness that technology can create.

And almost as important here, to me at least, are the reactions from some of the school administrators and law makers. From the Republic:

Sunnyside Principal Raúl Nido said he wanted to work with the students, not contain them.
“If you know what the cause is and you’re passionate about it, then tell me why,” Nido said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing then you’re being led. This is a very hot issue.”
Students said they were appreciative.
“I expected them to try and stop us, but instead they’re encouraging us,” said Alex Gonzalez, 17, a junior and Sunnyside student body vice president. “They understand where we’re coming from.”

And from Arizona Central:

“I commend these students because this is a lesson in modern civics education that we can all learn from,” said Rep. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix. “Their voices are being heard, and they’re doing it on their terms. This is very exciting.”

We really can all learn from this, not become it, necessarily, but understand it. We might want to think about how to put their engagement and connections in these communities to positive use in our classrooms instead of simply trying to surpress their importance. Just think of the possibilities…

The folks over at the CCCC Blogging SIG are taking the blog by the horns in terms of beginning to gather some empirical research about the effects of blogs in the classroom. I still think it’s weird that no one has published any results of studies with this tool yet. I may have to carve out a few hours to go digging around some more. They’ve also got some other things on the agenda. One of my favorite snippets is this one:

…we need to move the profession towards a space where we’re more aware of blogging as professional activity. To what degree can we “get credit” for blogging? And, deriving from that, how can we start thinking about blogging as professionals? (One question that was asked in response: if blogging becomes a professional activity, does it lose some portion of its value as teaching/writing tool?)

Wow…we’re finally getting serious about this stuff, huh? Good questions that we’re all grappling with on some level, and I’ll be interested to see how things progress.

So Chris Sessums is learning from his blog by deconstructing his learning, on his blog, which is what this is really all about. I know I sound like a snob when I start talking or writing about how blogging is an intellectual exercise, but that’s what this is for me, and I think his post today is a good example of what I mean. I also like the way he defines the scope of what teachers can do with a blog:

1. Modeling: the teacher �puts his/her mind on display�
2. Coaching: teachers observe students performance of a task, offering feedback
3. Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.
4. Articulating: drawing students out dialogically, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
5. Reflecting: debriefing, replaying and discussion after an activity
6. Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

What’s interesting to me is how the items in that list have less to do with teaching than facilitating and creating a learning environment. And thanks to a bit of Web serendipity, I stumbled across this relevant link in one of my del.icio.us feeds today excerpting Carl Rogers’ “Freedom to Learn”. There’s more than what I’m snipping here, but this will give you the gist of what he has to say:

a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher…

Like I said, there is much more to it that needs reading in order to fully understand his ideas. But the learning here for me at least is an even more heightened sense that blogs can be spaces for self directed learning, and that to use them well as teachers, we may need to stop thinking about how to teach with them as much as focus on how we might bring them into our own practice to model what our students can do with them.

Let me first say that I love Kathy Sierra’s blog because so much of what she writes has relevance to education and because there is such a spirit and energy to it that it just makes me motivated to, as she says, “kick ass.” The name of her blog, “Creating Passionate Users” is what education should be all about, shouldn’t it? Helping kids become engaged. Helping them find their passions. Helping them be able to create a life around whatever it is they are passionate about. Notice that it’s not about teaching them to do that. You can’t teach someone to be engaged or passionate. Sure, you can model it, and I think every teacher should share her passions with her students because I’m not sure kids see a lot in the way of healthy passion in the world these days. But there is no text or curriculum for becoming engaged.

Passion bubbles to the surface only when experiences draw them out. Lately, I’ve been looking at my own children and seeing them begin to feel passionate. For my 8 year old daughter, it’s horses. Yesterday I had to almost drag her away from scooping poop at the horse farm down the road to come home and eat dinner. After riding, everything about her smells like pony, and she refuses to change her clothes to put us out of our misery. (That may be less passion that it is obstinance.) For my 6 year old son, it’s basketball. All of a sudden, all he wants to do is spend time at the end of the driveway dribbling and shooting this old beat up basketball that looks like it’s coming unpeeled as the leather separates from its black rubber body. Seriously, he must take a couple hundred shots a day (and he makes most of them, I might add.)

But when it comes to school, they have very little passion. I’ve written about this before, but they are bored silly. It’s already become just a routine they put up with so they can see their friends. Wendy and I give them extra work at home, try to make words and numbers fun, but that almost serves to make their disenchantment with school worse. They are disengaging. And I can guarantee that as they take more and more tests that have no obvious relevance to their lives, they will become more and more disengaged.

I know a fair number of passionate learners, people who seek out opportunities to think seriously about thier lives and world around them. I wish I knew more. I don’t see many passionate learners in classrooms, however, students who are always “learning, growing or improving in some way” (as Kathy puts it) simply for the sake of knowing more instead of for getting a grade. My kids are riding and dribbling not for an assessment but to get the buzz that comes with being able to do it well (as well as for many other non-graded reasons.) That doesn’t guarantee that they will be life long learners, but it’s a start.

So the question for me becomes can schools create passionate users? Can we begin to teach the stuff we need to teach in the context of our students’ passions? And in doing so, can we instill and nurture in them a love of learning and growing? For the vast majority of our kids, school is a game, and though it may be hard to admit, most of us on this side of the desk are complicit participants. The outcomes are clearly defined, and very few of them have anything to do with fostering passionate learning. And in a world where our students can much more easily connect to people who share their passions outside of school, we risk a great deal when we fail to think seriously about how we might create passionate learning opportunities in our classrooms as well.

(Via cogdogblog) Since I got tagged as a huckster the last time I floated an interesting use of one of these tools in the classroom, let me state clearly that I offer these up simply to get people thinking about what can be done. Sometimes I get a bit too excited about the possibilities. So sue me.

Here’s a wiki that’s being put to good use by a track and field team in Deer Valley, CO. Here’s the rationale:

Making our website a wiki makes it easier for us to keep it up-to-date. And a wiki is perfect for a track team since we have so many coaches working in the many track & field events. We can all up date when we feel like it.

Seems so, I don’t know, logical somehow. And I have to say that pbwiki (which is where I’ve been creating most of my wikis lately) is really doing some neat things to help make wiki sites prettier too. (Uh-oh…was that hucksterism?)

And speaking of wikis, have you been to Wikiville lately? More and more kids from around the world are adding information about their places. It’s one way that you might want to think about introducing your students to wikis. (How was that, Tom?)

(From the “Somewhat Shameless Self-Promotion Department”) I just wanted to note that my book is now officially available on Amazon, but even more, look what other Read/Write Web type things you can do:

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Doug Noon:

Normative claims that masquerade as objective truth are tools of propaganda. Fear and lies serve devious ends. Do not allow people to use terms like achievement gap, failure, or proficiency without challenging their meaning. The problem isn�t simply “failing” schools. Schools are being asked to clean up a broadly distributed social mess caused by centuries of materialism and greed. Education has been colonized. We are being trampled by our rescuers. This is not a new story.

I’ll be better tomorrow…
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(Note: This post got away from me. Sorry.)
(via Kathy Sierra) Last week Danah Boyd posted an essay that talks about why MySpace matters and what the potential fall out from the MySpace panic is. I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but I did find this snippet to be particularly thought provoking:

MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It’s facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned – they’re trying to figure out how to live in this super public. The challenge is that outsiders are panicking about a culture that they are not a part of. They want to kill the super public rather than support people in learning how to negotiate it. No one knows how to live in such a super public, but this structure is going to become increasingly a part of our lives. It is no wonder that youth want to figure it out. And it is critical that they do, especially since our physical worlds have become more segregated and walled off, partitioned by age, race, class, religion, values, etc. Yet, it is the older generation that did that segregating and they’re not really ready to face collapsed contexts at every turn or to learn how to engage with people who have very different values on a daily basis. Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids’ terms.

“Support people in learning how to negotiate it.” What a concept.

I find the culture in this country more and more ironic every day. As Danah says in her essay, we say to kids all the time that they shouldn’t reveal to much of themselves, yet everywhere they look on television we’re engaged in the sport of revelation. We reward our kids with trips to the mall yet say nothing about the fact that we live in a society where 80% of the things we buy are thrown out within six months. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink quotes Polly LaBarre who notes that the U.S. spends more on trash bags than 90 other countries spend on everything. Think about that. (Wendy‘s in the final stages of her environmental tip book…more such items to come I’m sure.) We claim to strive for equality, yet the only voices with any power are white, middle-aged, Ivy League educated, wealthy men who have lost (if they ever had) any perspective of what equality really means. And if you think that’s a problem, try this:

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you’ve heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

Oy. It feels pretty hopeless, sometimes…

It’s been interesting reading the threads that have developed around my “To Blog or Not to Blog…” post from a couple of days ago. The comments on the post itself were pretty amazing in their own right, but the extended conversations were equally thought provoking. Chris Sessums, Barbara Ganley, Vicki Davis, Bud Hunt and many others blogged about it, and I’ve been trying to tap into my own reaction as to what they and their respective commentors have been saying. It’s a great example of the messy, distributed nature of the Web these days, and ironically, I think, an example of why many people might find it frustrating.

What strikes me about all of this is the level of engagement of the participants. All of these teacher-bloggers on some level felt compelled to enter the conversation, to take the time to do some deep thinking, obviously, and articulate those thoughts in a post to share with others. Some came here first, then followed up with posts on their own sites. Some just felt compelled to comment on one or many of these posts. There is the palpable energy of a community of learners who are connecting around questions and answers to better understand their own practice and then share back that understanding with the community to further the conversation. And that investment of time and energy, I think, deepens my trust in the community as a place where I can come to ask about what I don’t understand or what I want to learn more about. It is, for me a powerful occurence, one that does not happen with such consistency in my physical space.

I know as a parent, I hope my own children will find the same level of passion that I have about whatever it is they might be interested in. It’s only natural, I think, that an educator who feels the power of that engagement would want to share that experience with his or her students. I love the way Barbara articulates this in her comments here:

Not all of us will be fabulous bloggers, or oral presenters, or readers, or emotionally intuitive. But if each of us will bring our own expertise to give to the others, we will be engaged–our learning will be efficacious.

And that is the most important part of all of this, this question of how do we get our kids engaged? How can we get them to be motivated to learn? And, since these tools seem to be working for us, how can we use them as vehicles, conduits for students to tap into their own passions? And how do we get other teachers to at least consider them?

Not every student needs a blog or a podcast or a wiki to be engaged, I understand that. Blogs and podcasts and the audiences they facilitate will not engage every child. But are we not at the point where we can honestly say that the learning potential of these tools is such that every teacher should have them as a part of his or her toolbox?

I haven’t written too much here about a friend and a colleague who has without question become my main offline teacher in terms of thinking about the Web and how it can influence teaching and learning. He is one of the brightest people I know. We’ve had all kinds of lengthy conversations over the past year ranging in topics from Dewey to school reform to (guess what?) blogging. Of course, I keep urging him to start a blog, and I think he may be ready to give it try. He reads blogs, has a Bloglines account, and I think understands the potential.

So what’s the problem?

My friend regularly pushes back about blogging, saying that it’s not as easy both technically and psychologically for most as it is for others, that the tool requires a significant change from how most people work and think. He says that it’s easy for me because I’m a writer by training, a journalist specifically, and that the transparency of content is familiar. For most, however, it’s not so appealing.

So it was on a couple of levels that I thought of him when I read a post from Leigh Blackall which pointed to this post from Doug Noon which pointed to this post from Miguel Ghulin. On one level, I thought about the time and effort it takes to follow and try to connect the ideas in these extremely interesting and thoughtful posts. All these guys are pretty brilliant and pushing my meager brain in any number of ways. It’s work, for me at least, and requires a pretty high level of engagement that I wonder how many educators have the time or inclination for. (And I do not mean that to sound holier than them in any way.) Second, the theme of this very distributed conversation goes to the heart of what my friend has been saying, that blogging and read/write webbing may be for a select few and not for the masses. Doug’s post ends with

I made a presentation about blogs to a group of teachers last summer. After I talked for probably too long, a woman raised her hand and asked, �Why would anyone want to do this?� I didn�t know what else to say. You either see it, or you don�t.

Which of us who has tried to bring these tools to a wider audience hasn’t heard or sensed that?

So my brain goes to this…in my echo chamber, I read lots of stories about kids who are getting it, even in Doug’s post, where they are reading and writing and commenting and learning. You read Bud or Clarence or Vicki or any number of others and there are stories that border on transformation. (In fact, Vicki’s latest post is titled “My students inspire me as they “get” Web 2.0.”) But I don’t read much about the kids that aren’t engaged. And I’m wondering to what extent that happens as well. And further, I’m wondering to what extent they compare to the adult educators we’re trying to teach about these tools who choose not to engage. The simple view is that this is generational, that kids are more available to the tools because they live in a connected world or because, well, they’re kids and more open to new stuff than adults…but is it?

You know how a lot of birders have life lists where they check off one species or another when they happen to see it warbling up in a tree or darting past their binoculars? In some weird way it’s akin to what it feels like meeting the bloggers who are in my Bloglines account. Yesterday I got a chance to cross Wes Freyer and Dean Shareski off of my list as we and a few other blogger types got a chance to engage in some face to face discussion about the state of education at a Discovery Educator Network dinner here in Orlando. Wes was in town to receive a Best Blogger Award from eSchool News and to give a Web 2.0 workshop at another conference in town. Also in attendance were Tim Wilson, Steve Dembo and a number of other educators who collectively produced some really interesting conversation, which we tried to record, btw.

I hope the others blog their impressions, but I was really struck by the intensity of what we talked about, the roadblocks inherent in school reform, strategies for sharing these tools with school leaders, ways to expand this conversation to teachers and schools that aren’t currently a part of it. It was exciting at times, frustrating at others. Optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. While we have a lot of these converstaions asynchronously on our blogs, it was a reminder of how effective face to face is. We covered a great deal of territory in a couple of hours.

The upshot? There is a lot of work to do, not so much even in teaching the tools as in figuring out what the answers to all of these tough questions really are. I certainly feel humbled by the sheer magnitude of this conversation, and priveleged to be even a small part of it. But I think that we’re not going to get very far until more voices enter it. And whether or not blogs will save the world, they can at least facilitate that conversation providing access is available and there is enough of a comfort level with the medium to use it.

FETC is without question the “If We Don’t Start Teaching Our Kids 21st Century Learning Skills We’re All In A Boatload of Trouble” Conference. Just about everywhere you look you see a reminder that this is indeed the 21st Century and that we’re teaching to 20th Century standards with 20th Century techniques. It’s almost the message from a lot of the featured speakers is like, “ok…you had six years to figure out that the Century actually did change…why haven’t you changed anything about how you teach?” I’ve heard Friedman’s name dropped three times already, and, the underlying current from many of those speaking is F E A R, or as Willard Daggett said more than once (maybe more than thrice) “They are going to eat our lunch.” Or this photo of the slide that was on screen prior to the start of Ken Kay’s presentation. It’s almost creepy.

Don’t get me wrong, there are bright spots. David Warlick tells somewhat the same story but with a much more hopeful tone. There must be at least 134 sessions on podcasting that, as far as I can see, haven’t resorted to the “Record or Die” meme. And a couple of the bloggy sessions I ducked in on looked quite happy (though I could give you some quotes from the audience that would make you think we were in the 19th Century.)

But I’m feeling kind of…I don’t know…bummed in some ways. I mean if you really want something to get scared about, listen to this podcast from Mark Lynas on Global Warming that I put on during the plane ride down here. If he’s right, we really are all dead, and none of this stuff will mean a hill of spaghetti.

David’s been talking about a new story, and I’ve been putting a post together with my thoughts. But I can tell you this: whatever the new story is, it’s not the one I’m hearing here…

Live blogging and wiki-ing at David’s wiki. I was going to cross post but it’s too long.
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