So I’m finding it really, really difficult to read much of the edblogloshpere these days. I’ve gotten out of synch…too much traveling. Too much to do at work. Too much of everything.

But here’s the kind of weird thing which is scary at the same time. I’m kind of liking the silence. And I’m not sure if that’s just because I was simply getting overwhelmed or because I was just tiring of the discussion a bit. If it is the latter, that would be an interesting development, I think, one that I’d really want to deconstruct. Am I bored with it? Is it moving beyond me? Is it fruitless? Am I not learning? Is it just too much to take on?

I dunno…

I’ve been thinking seriously about where I want to take this space when my new life starts in a couple of weeks. I’m just feeling like lately it’s become too repetetive, too echo-y. It doesn’t feel fresh. I’ve been lucky to develop a pretty wide readership, but I’m wondering if that’s affecting my work here, pulling it in a direction it doesn’t want to go. It feels like I need to retool somehow. I’m looking for that next step, I think. Blog enlightenment. And I don’t think it’s in writing more or trying harder. I think, as with all enlightenment, it’s about letting go.

But of what?

UPDATE:

Kathy Sierra’s post from yesterday turns out to be extremely, incredibly, wildly relevant and helpful. It’s titled “The Myth of Keeping Up,” and my takeaway is to get focused and figure out how to best use the time I do have to read and write. And this is the one part that really resonated:

Finally, are WE part of the problem? Are we overwhelming our users with documentation? Or are we part of the solution to their info anxiety? We’re the ones that should be helping our users really focus on the things they need at any stage. While we all recognize that we are stressed for time and on info overload, we tend to think our users have all the time in the world to figure it all out (RTFM).

I know she’s writing about a bit of a different context, but I think it’s a great point. I’m very fortunate to have built a pretty wide readership here. The last thing I want to do is add to the deluge. Less reading may lead to less knowing and less writing, but it may also lead to deeper knowing and deeper writing. And that’s really where I want to get, I think.

(via Leigh Blackall) So here’s an interesting idea from Teemu Arena:

I go on and suggest a new school book paradigm. Turn everything around.
Write a school book that has purposefully inserted factual errors. Make it as uncertain as possible, so that the student needs to seek conversations to make any sense out of it.

Make the point of the course to discuss the book and what things are actually true and what are not. Base that on conversations reaching to other information sources and people for answers outside the course as well. Help them to be curious to seek different points of view. Make critical peer review and discussion the central process. Make them realize that to cope with untruths they need humble conversations rather than forcing their own beliefs.

So I know this is a “doh” moment, but it strikes me that one of the points of blogging is to engage in those “humble conversations” in which we try to socially negotiate truth. We’re not purposely writing untruths, but we’re writing “yet-to-be-discovered truths” which necessitate a different type of reading, one that requires the critical thinking and information literacy skills that a book of errors would demand.
Interesting way of framing it, I think…

Tonight and tomorrow Alan November and I will be together with our Seton Hall executive Ed.D. students for the last time to reflect on their semester of blogging, wiki-ing, Skype-ing etc. and to get them thinking about how to move forward with these technologies. I’ve been doing some reflecting on their work myself, feeling bad about not having enough time to provide a Ganley-esque experience for them in our mother blog and promising myself to rectify that next year (when I will supposedly have more time…) But I have to say that in general I’ve been really impressed by the work they’ve done on their own. I think I mentioned at some point that about a third of the cohort really took to the tools, another third managed to make a serious attempt at integrating them into their schools and practice while the final third struggled. I think I could have nurtured that last group a bit more, but I’m really not that surprised at the breakdown. I will say, however, without exception, these are potential superintendents that at least have a context for the conversation, which in many ways puts them ahead of the game.

The title of this post comes from one of the reflections from the class. Why blog?

One, I wanted to blog before it was assigned. It is novel way to communicate about things that capture my interest. Writing for science journals is an arduous process that may not end with a publication. Blogging leads to publication. Two, friends checked it out and considered it, though none commented to my blog. My guess is the public nature of the comments. However, they read it. Three, the design allows for posting articles that remain readily accessible. I use it for its server space. Four, personal evidence abounds that my writing style is different. I am writing to a wider audience and potentially unknown audience. I have improved my clarity. Evidence is found from my comparative writings. Colleagues have described my emails as cryptic. Emails are quick. They range from blunt to cryptic depending on my intent. Emails store and transmit information and ideas. Letters to my family and friends are subjective. Personal letters take time. There is emotion attached to the thoughts. My journals chronicle time and thoughts. I find value in writing beyond the demands of work and business. Blogging combines pieces of the previous three types of writing. Blogging is a unique form of writing. Finally, there are the interactions from other regular bloggers of Cohort IX who offer comments and questions that lead me to question or reconsider my posts. Technology involves time, money, energy and space. In education, technology is measured by the extent to it provides meaningful learning experiences. Blogging has meaning. Blogging is an investment worth the costs.

I hope to do some more synthesizing of the work in the near future…

Live blogging at the Milken Conference…

Moderator Tina Sharkey at AOL cites the usual statistics…37% of people engage in blogs on a regular basis, bloggers spend 4 hours a week blogging, 42 million page views a month, etc. This is the generation making its own content. What is the impact on traditional journalism?

Panelists are Rafat Ali of paidContent.org, Dave Sifry of Technorati, Dean Rotbart of Newsroom Confidential. Jonathan Weber of New West
Dean asks when the idea for Weblogs was first seen in the media, and answers that in 1690, Public Occurences where the 4th page was blank so that the reader could add his or her own news and idea before passing it on. This idea of citizen journalism has grown out of each new technology. Always been citizen journalists. The other interesting thing is that the rise of the blogosphere is causing the decline in circulation of the old media. Not true. The first mention of the Internet as we know it comes from 1989 in PC Week. First blog mention is from Dan Gilmor in May of 1999 that said that Slashdot might be a prototype of Web communication. In the Times in 1976, a report stated that declining readership is a problem for newspapers. Then it was television, then cable. He is a skeptic that these two worlds are in competition and that one is winning out over the other. Moderator asks about the role of the traditional reporter. He says that role won’t change. Just because there are 75,000 blogs being created each day doesn’t mean anyone is going to believe them or that Wall Street is going to invest in them. Some very narrow focused blogs do have some respect.

Jonathan says the decline of newspapers and the decline of journalism are two different things in fact this is a golden age of journalism. The rise of new ways of publishing and dissemintating is a good thing.

(Picture of George Siemens blogging at the event as well.) Rafat says is that tradional journalism needs to unlearn much of what it’s done for centuries and that they have to learn to do good journalism at a tenth of the cost. None of our reporters have been edited in the last five years. We thrive on speed, which is the key. Journalism is no longer once a story is done it’s done, it’s evolving.

Jonathan says at his time at the LA Times, a story would go through five editors before it hit the page. Now, we don’t need all of that in the process in reporting. Much more efficient than it used to be. But many large media orgs haven’t grappled with that.

Sifry says that he realized we are starting to use the Internet in a fundamentally different way than even in the 90s. The fundamental metaphor about the net is starting to change. Two big trends are a proliferation of tools and broadband/mobile access. The way that we use the Internet has begun to change. THe traditional way to think of the Net is the world’s biggest library. The shift is that the Net is very much more an always on, real-time media. The way we use the net today is a communications form as well as a reference form. So, if you could build an engine that understood time and be extraordinarily timely it would be significant. Cites the London bombings and the tsunami. This was fundamentally an increase in the scope of reportage that had not come to fruition in the past. By incorporating the ability to have people who are not working under big J journalsm but by a group can inform us in an expanded way that this can serve as a supplement to traditional media and in some ways scoop the story.

Tina gives example of how Technorati works. Less about information and more about conversation.

So Dave says, how do I know who to trust? How do I know this person isn’t a nutcase?

Jonathan talks about how in one sense the blogging thing is due to the low cost and easy access of the tools, and the online advertising market is very strong and will continue to be strong. Online media has a good future. New West is an ad model. Branded media properties will have a place.

Rafat talks about three models, the big media trying to incorporate, sites like New West, and other individual bloggers. There is no business model yet for the individuals. In the middle level, it’s about passion and somewhat philanthropy.

Dave says there is an enormous 90% return from blogs that isn’t about ad revenue. Writing books, consulting, etc. Jonathan says that there will be much more of a mix for ways for networks to find revenue. (I’m starting to fade a bit here…) Talks about blogvertorial which is a sponsored post, essentially. The success of AdSense and the networks depends a lot on the content. Works for highly specialized key words and niche topics. Most bloggers will just get pocket change from that. Tells some stories about AdSense. Google takes most of the money, so it’s not really the answer. Moderator asks him how he balances paid writers and citizen writers. Talks about unfiltered part of site, and when things come through that are relevant, he promotes them to the main part of the site. Things filter up. You do get what you pay for. The contribution that citizen journalists will ultimately make will be limited. Photography/video is another story. We get far better visuals than text. Journalism as we traditionally think about it will still be done by people who are paid to do it. (Paused to take a really bad picture and send it to Flickr…anyone still reading?)

Dave tells the Kryponite lock story and how they missed the whole buzz about their locks being broken. He’s starting to hear those conversations again where the companies are waking up to the fact to their consumers are talking about their products in blogs.

Dan pushes back. You need a dozen Kryptonite lock stories a day to make him believe that mainstream media is being threatened by the blogosphere. He’s not sure it’s citizen journalism because we don’t have people putting in the time to write stories. Dave says no one is saying it’s traditional journalism. Dan wonders if it’s journalism at all. Dave says if you search school board (Whoa! Someone said something education related!) on Technorati you’ll get thousands of hits from people who are writing about their communities. Dan says the blogosphere needs some good pr.

Rafat talks about fake news. And, unfortunately, I have to catch my plane…

Surprise #1 is that about 60 people cram into our small room for the Blogs, Wikis… panel yesterday, and rumor had it that there were about 20 people waiting outside the door for any early exits. (Even bigger rumor is that former US Education Secretary Rod Paige was turned away…oh, the humanity!)

Surprise #2 is that not only does 96% of the room know about blogs, 90% of them READ blogs. And the vast majority of them say they use Wikipedia. Wow. A big, friendly crowd!

Non surprise #1 is that as we go down the line and each answer a question from our moderator, the passion of the participants is palpable. We love this stuff.

Surprise #3 is that what seems to really drive the whole point home about how we connect using these technologies is when Liz divulges that she and George and David and I are participating in a running IRC back channel chat during the panel. Audible gasps. (I gasped this morning when I realized that David was live blogging the panel as he was back channel chatting and participating…whoa!) Unbeknownst to the audience, David scolds Liz for telling.

Surprise #4 is that I actually get asked a question about how my own school is moving with these technologies. Somewhat equally surprising is that the majority of questions thrown at us are really well crafted and relevant.

Non surprise #2 is that the MySpace monster gets raised, and we spend a fair amount of time trying to move the discussion away from the fear to the potential.

Surprise #5 is that we get to the end and only a few people have gotten up and left.

All in all, I think it was a great discussion. And I was really struck by how totally engaged the audience seemed to be, which I found somewhat ironic considering the vibe I’ve been getting at this conference for the past two days. Not really sure what the takeaway will be for the participants, but for me at least, the best part was once again getting to meet some of my teachers and just getting a chance to spend some time turning over these ideas and experiences in real time.

Not sure just how much learning I’ll be bringing back from this conference, at least not in the vein of technology’s role in educational change. (If I was here trying to figure out how to make a million dollars while changing education I might be having a better time of it.) But here are some random snippets from today:

• If you are a woman in business, I mean high level business circles, you need to wear pointy shoes. Very pointy shoes. Shoes where the points get into the room about five seconds before the rest of the body. I’m trying to picture the average female high school teacher in these shoes…and find myself totally unable to do so.
• A quote from a panelist discussing his students in the “Changing Post-Secondary Education to Meet the Needs of a Global Economy session: “Increasingly, they want it on demand. They want just what they want. They want to control it. They want choice.” Wonder how that translates to K-12. (Btw, Liz and David Weinberger blogged this session comprehensively.)
• I got a chance to speak briefly with Dr. Susan Zelman who is the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the Ohio Department of Education and I asked her about a comment she’d made on yesterday’s panel about losing students from the system to charter and voucher schools. She told me that they’ve lost upwards of 75,000 students to these alternatives. I said something along the lines that “That must pose quite a challenge.” Without missing a beat, she looked at me and said “Not enough of one.” I wonder, as I’m sure she does, how many it will take before the system recognizes its growing irrelevance.
• From the useless statistics dept: 67% of Americans can name the Three Stooges. Only 17% can name three Supreme Court justices. 87% of college educated Americans can’t locate Iraq on a map. 65% can’t find France. China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. In China, kids with college degrees make nine times more than those without. In the US, they make less than twice as much. Oy.

More after the panel I’m sure…

Some observations from the Milken Conference out here in Hollywood:

• Yesterday, out of probably 2,000 attendees, I had the very strange honor of being the only person there wearing jeans. (What was a thinking?) I was like a flounder in a sea of Versace clad business sharks. Talk about sticking out. Despite my dapper sports coat, I’m sure the conference security thought I was a gate crasher. (Note: Liz Lawley, who I’m on the panel with today, had some similar fashion concerns, but she was much more appropriately attired than I.) I’ll have nicer pants on today…promise.
• If you don’t think the elite business world is “ubiquitously connected,” think again. I talked to two suits at lunch who expressed near suicidal panic at the thought of their Blackberrys being deactivated by that legal battle a couple of weeks ago. I cannot put into words what a strange vibe this conference has, and how totally, different it is from the education types I usually hang around with.
• So I’m in the conference book store, looking at a book on writing by one of my favorite authors Mary Pipher (she even has a section, albeit thin, on blogging), when another browser says “s’cuse me” and I look up to see former senator and presidentail candidate Gary Hart about 18 inches away from my face. Later, Andre Aggassi strolled by. (He’s taller in person.) Ah, fame…
• I got a chance to spend a bit of time with George Seimens who is also on the panel (and also blogging the conference.) We talked about the “power” factor and how much of a different feel this has. Looking forward to getting more of a chance to talk to him today.
• I went to an education panel titled “Ensuring America’s Success in Education” which was, on the whole, dissapointing. It was obvious that most of the panelists had guzzled the “World is Flat” Kool Aid, but the ironic thing was that in the entire 80 minutes, the word technology was never mentioned. I mean, isn’t that the whole reason the world is flat? Most of the talk was about the need for early childhood education and the struggle to find science and math teachers. (There are a total of 16 people being trained to be physics teachers in Iowa and Ohio together according to the panelists.) There was an intersting thread about how the people we really need to educate to get to school reform is the parents. (Liz does a much better job of detailing this session.)
• And if you think we’ve got issues in education, you should have gone to the panel titled “Not If, But When: The Economic Impact of the Coming Flu Pandemic.” Let’s just say that according to the panelists, if the flu hits any time soon, we’re pretty much up the creek. I mean seriously up the creek. Long term power outages. Bodies piling up. No way to communicate. I heard one conference goer say “Well, good thing I was a Boy Scout, own a gun, and have a cabin up in Wisconsin.” Oy.
• Finally, the luncheon session featured Michael Milken moderating a panel of Nobel Laureates in Economics. The topics were equally depressing…global warming, problems with health care, etc. What struck me was how wedded one of the panelists, Gary Becker, was to technological determinism. Want to solve global warming? Don’t conserve, just create the technology to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere? Problems with obesity? Heck, just create a pill that will make obesity less dangerous. There was some push back, but not a lot.

On the whole, aside from meeting George and Liz and being able to sit on the panel today, the out-of-touchedness I’m feeling with this group is wholly unsettling (flu pandemic nonwithdstanding.) I’m going to be really interested to see if a) anyone shows up at our panel today, b) if they do show up if they’ll stay once we start talking, and c) whether there will be any relevant discussion from the audience.

(BTW, George has set up a SuprGlu page to aggregate some of the conference blogging.)

If you want to know what the real threat to kids is at MySpace, read today’s piece in the New York Times and remember that predators aren’t always interested in sex:

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe’s advertising ideas—turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers’—so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become “friends” with movies, cellphone companies, and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up by these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial “friends” can even send them messages—ads really, but of a whole new kind.

Oy. Scary.

Even worse is that there is a good chance it will work. One college student quoted in the article is trusting MySpace to get a feel for potential dates.

While she does not use the site to meet people, it has become a part of the dating ritual. “When you meet someone, the question is not ‘What’s your number?’ she said. It’s ‘What’s your MySpace?’” By checking out a guy’s profile, she said, “you can actually get a feeling for who they are.”

Especially if they have Old Spice in their profiles, right?

Once again, I’m struck by how much educating needs to be done here. Too bad the educators in the districts that we’ve been talking about lately won’t be getting the Times article any time soon…

Did some spring cleaning in my Bloglines account today…cut about 50 feeds with an eye to cutting about 25 more at some point. My extended vacation made it very clear that I’m just not being realistic to keep 150 or so active feeds (not including my Seton Hall course blogs) in my aggregator. So, by the time I finish, I’m hoping to get to 75-100 instead of 200+. The struggle is, of course what (or who) to cut. It’s hard to drop the people who I know, even if what they’re writing about isn’t always the most relevant to what I want to follow. I find myself looking at every feed with the “what have you done for me lately?” question lingering. I actually dropped a few people today that I had been reading for a very long time, and I feel bad on some level. But it’s that time thing again. The fact that Stephen Downes is hinting to his return from a break has me hopeful as his daily posts always held stuff of interest and I have missed them greatly. (No guarantees, that Stephen will be blogging as in the past when he returns, however.) And by and large, that’s what I’m really looking for more than anything at this point. Filters of good information. Trusted sources that consistently produce links and thinking that I can learn from. I’ve become a very demanding reader…

And on a personal note, I just wanted to acknowledge the “passing” of Earth Day today. I’m amazed at how little attention it seems to garner, especially in a time when we need to give it (or at least its raison d etre) a great deal of notice, I think. And if you don’t believe me, you should read my wife Wendy’s new book which she just released last week: Just the tips, man for protecting the environment. It’s not a calendar, but it’s got 365 simple acts that each of us could practice to make a difference. Her research for the book was inspiring (and somewhat depressing, if you know what I mean…we’re such pigs.) I’m extremely proud of her efforts to make a differnence, and her passion has led me to change many of my ways. (If you don’t believe me, come over some weekend and watch me cut my lawn with my new push mower. My biceps will be bulging, baby, and I can put that stinky, smelly, polluting two-cycle engine lawn mower to bed. But now, how the heck do I recycle it?)

Anyway, remember, any day is Earth Day. If you know more, you’ll do more, so check out the book. (Shameless family self-promotion, I know…)

From the Introduction to “The Wealth of Networks“:

We are in the midst of a technological, economic, and organizational transformation that allows us to renegotiate the terms of freedom, justice, and productivity in the information society. How we shall live in this new environment will in some significant measure depend on policy choices that we make over the next decade or so. To be able to understand these choices, to be able to make them well, we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice–a choice about how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and economic conditions. As economic policy, allowing yesterday’s winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow’s economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable.

I am loving this book.

By the way, David Weinberger blogged the book release event in NYC.

By the way #2, there is a wiki to go along with the book.

By the way #3, so far I’ve been reading with a mind to how to bring these ideas more fully into an educational context. Anyone up for a book club wiki? (I may not have the time, but I’d love to facilitate…)

So I feel myself moving back to the whole “How is reading literacy changed by the social creation of highly distributed digital texts on the Web?” question these days which, of course, usually creates a whole ‘nother set of questions. I’m really trying to tap into what I’m doing when I’m reading online these days, what the conversation is in my head, and how different that conversation is from the way it used to be. These days, I read with a writer’s mind, not a reader’s mind. I read for engagement, constantly testing what I’m reading against my own lens and looking for opportunities to become a part of what’s been written. I read to edit, to find strength and weakness in the argument or point, and to improve or even disprove it if I feel capable. I read to get the gist of what’s being said, to quickly find the thesis, the salient points, the conclusions.

In that context, Dan Visel’s post titled “Learning to Read” gave me much to think about. In it, he writes about how “we don’t really know how to read Wikipedia, yet,” how we struggle with knowing whether to read it as an authoritative text given the fact that what we are reading today may well be gone tomorrow. We’re reading these new texts through old lenses, judging them by “what we are used to, and everyone loses.” As Dan says

…we need to learn to read Wikipedia, to read it as a new form that certainly inherits some traits from what we’re used to reading, but one that differs in fundamental ways. That’s a process that’s going to take time.

As educators, however, I wonder how much time we should allow for understanding this shift? Our students who are engaged in these online environments are certainly reading differently (and, many would say, less effectively) than their teachers who for the most part are less engaged in these social texts. If they are reading them in the same way that they are reading a book, isn’t that a problem? Should they be reading to engage the ideas that are being presented? If they continue to read as simple passive consumers of information, to what extent does that compromise their literacy?

And then the bigger(?) question (as one of the commentors on the post asks,) once we’ve figured out how to “read” Wikipedia and blogs and the like, how do learn (and teach) how to write it as well?

Jill Walker’s keynote at the Technology, Colleges and Community Online World Conference today promises to be extremely relevant to our attempts to understand how to best use these technologies in the classroom. The title speaks for itself: “Network Literacy: Learning with Blogging and Web 2.0.” Her post today summarizes the talk, but I’ll be looking forward to the Elluminate capture at the TCC2006 site. (Just FYI, both Tim and I keynoted at the event on Tuesday…I’m not sure if the presentations are publically available, however.)

Jill makes some great points about what works with students and why teachers need to get a handle on these tools.

Ok…so I’m getting chills. Here’s the opening paragraph to Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Wealth of Networks, the one that Lawrence Lessig says is, and I quote, “by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.”

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet revolution.” In some academic circles, it is positively naıve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

I had the great fortune of meeting and listening to Professor Benkler at the two I-Law conferences I attended and in each instance, I was left greatly impressed. I’m really looking forward to this read (especially now that I have it in OneNote on my tablet so I can ink it all up digitally…)

Miguel, Wes, Andy and others, I’m sure, are engaged in an interesting and important discussion about how we should be responding to what appears to be more and more widespread efforts on the part of school districts to block certain content from coming through their Internet lines. (Before going any further, I think it’s crucial that we begin identifying exactly how widespread this is…to that end, I just slapped together a wiki where people can add specific instances of what’s being blocked and where. If anyone wants to jump on the idea, feel free.) While certainly not the only example, Andy and Miguel cite the fact that some districts are banning not just MySpace the site but “my space” the word. (Guess they won’t be reading this.) Miguel even suggests that we all start putting the words “myspace.com” on every page that we create to bring attention to the issue.

I hope that by doing so, the outcry against banning words–not just URLs–will be so great as to cause education leaders to reconsider their decision to censor words, not URLs.

And I think Andy asks legitimate questions regarding the effects of all of this:

The filtering software used to supposedly protect children is preventing educators from taking an active role in understanding and discussing the complexities of Internet use in the classroom. Schools may claim “in loco parentis” when describing filters used to protect children. But what are they trying to protect teachers from? Being better users of technology? Being responsible, informed educators?

Even Stephen (whose blogging I especially miss after being out of the country for 11 days) chimes in with a pretty strong response to Miguel’s post:

There is more at stake here than just this particular issue. If we can be silenced here, we can be silenced anywhere - and will be.

But while there is no question that these issues are serious, I have serious questions about the best way to deal with them (and not many answers.) And I think my concerns go back to the larger discussion of how best to extend these conversations to those outside of our own online community. For the most part, we’re preaching to the choir…it’s highly dubious whether any more than a handful of the administrators or tech directors who need to be engaged in this discussion even know it’s occuring. In fact, they have no reason to become engaged. MySpace is the perfect vehicle for schools to exercise control over a phenomenon that they don’t yet understand or appreciate in any way. And as I’ve said many times before, this is less about safety than it is about control. Schools don’t own content any longer. Schools can’t control content any longer in a world where all of their kids have access to more stuff than the system could ever have imagined. But instead of seeing that as an asset, instead of seeing opportunity, instead of rethinking teacher and student roles in the classroom because of this, the culture dictates that we do whatever we can to resist the change.

There are at best, what, 50? 100? 500? 1000? educators tuned into this conversation in a sea of hundreds of thousands. How many have posted? And how many of the tens of millions of parents are there out there who are demanding that we educate rather than block? And why is that?

In this respect, I think David Warlick, as usual, has it pretty much right when he’s focusing on extending the conversations. To be honest, I haven’t bought into the whole “new stories” meme very hard, maybe because the old new stories haven’t seemed to work to any great degree in terms of effecting change. And because I think the new stories need to resonate more with people outside of schools. In that respect, think David takes an important step forward by focusing on the different constituents in terms of community members and parents, teachers and faculty, and administrative leaders and board members. It’s that first group, I think, that needs more of our attention. It reminds me of the point that Larry Cuban makes in Oversold and Underused, that technology will never reform schools in any meaningful way (or, in fact, that school reform in general will never work) until we first change the very foundations and expectations of the larger society:

The answers to these questions, as I have argued, are in the minds and hands not only of teachers but of policymakers, public officials, corporate elites, and parents who set the educational agenda…And without a broader vision of the social and civic role that schools perform in a democratic society, our current excessive focus on tehcnology use in schools runs the danger of trivializing our nation’s core ideals (197).

But Cuban also clearly frames this current discussion:

Yet technology will not go away, and educators have to come to terms with it as an educational tool. Understanding technology and the social practices that accompany it as a potent force in society is incumbent on both students and adults (194).

There is no question that the Read/Write Web, which has taken hold after Cuban’s writing, makes that struggle even more acute. That is what we are witnessing now. As Stephen says, the stakes are high, and this promises to be a long, long, long debate that will not easily be won. I think one way to win it, however, is to continue to model the effectiveness of the tools, to champion the creative and innovative ways that teachers are using them, and, more importantly, to take every opportunity to educate and share and collaborate with audiences beyond our own millieu. It may mean spending less time blogging and more time writing for print beyond the usual list of publications where the ideas may find a different audience. And it may mean being subversive. But I think it’s crucial that we think hard about ways of bringing these ideas to the people who exert the most control over what happens in our classrooms, and that’s not always the people inside the school building.

Well, I’m back. Sort of. Sweden was incredible, as was spending less than 15 minutes online in the last 11 days. Now that I’m back, I can’t believe my inbox, my aggregator (Did Wes really write 47 posts while I was gone???), my todo list, but frankly, it can wait. If nothing else, turning off the box for a while reminded me that there is life beyond the blog. (Is it sad that I had to be reminded of that?)

With less than a month until my official resignation date, I don’t expect to be too active here for a bit more. There are things I need to finish, things I need to write, and lots of weeds in the garden. I figure I’ll have plenty of time for this when my workload gets lighter or, I guess, ends. (What a concept.)

Just a couple of notes for now. I’m pretty humbled by the fact that next Tuesday I will have the distinct honor (and pleasure) of sitting on a panel with none other than George Seimens, David Weinberger, Liz Lawley and a few others to talk about “Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education“ at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Talk about being in over my head… I am especially looking forward to meeting George in person as he has been one of my most influential teachers, and to seeing my niece Liza who is quite the rock star in her own right. If anyone wants to feed me some lines for the panel, I’m open.

And I just want to thank James Farmer again for all of his help in the transition of this site. There is still some work to do, I know. (”Where’s the video on blogs in education?” “Where’s the RSS Quick Start Guide?”) And I’m hoping to get the major fixes done this week. But all in all, it’s exceeded my expectations.

Now, if I can only figure out how to tweak the CSS in WordPress…