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?