Al Gore was on Fresh Air yesterday, and I caught about half the conversation in between picking up kids and shuttling them to friends and riding lessons. (One of the effects of reinventing yourself out of a job…all sorts of new jobs crop up.) He was talking about global warming, and I thought he did so in a very wise and articulate way. I’ve liked Al for a long time, especially for his views on the environment, and yesterday he just seemed to have a very focused, pull no punches message: we either fix this now or we’re toast. Literally. And he just took to task those special interests who have been attempting to obfuscate this message (and who continue to do so now…did you hear about the “CO2, They call it pollution, we call it life” pitch? Painfully absurd.) Anyone who still thinks there is a debate about this is fooling himself. And the main reason, aside from the pitchmen, is, as Gore said in the interview, that “change is inconvenient.” We don’t want to admit that our actions have put civilization on the brink, because once we do, the only alternative is to change.

Those changes will need to be big and small. Some will deal with individual choice, like our decision to buy a reel mower this year, to compost, to seriously reduce the amount we consume, to save for a hybrid, etc. Some will require political action to force corporations and other entities to employ more eco friendly (civilization friendly?) practices. But any way you slice it, our lives have to change in some significant ways if we are to make an impact. (Personally, I’m not extremely hopeful on this score.) This is “An Inconvenient Truth” which is the title of

Gore’s book and movie on the subject. (Both of which are certain to be assailed.)My point is that there are similarities to education here as well (though obviously, not quite as dire.) In short, change in our schools and classrooms and practice is inconvenient. We are comfortable with what we’ve been doing for the past 100 years. We recognize it as our own since we were all participants in it when we ourselves went to school. It’s ingrained in our culture, and it’s a system that despite its flaws, most people don’t seriously want to change. It’s too much trouble.

But just like the polar ice caps are melting (and yes, they really are melting), our relevance as an education system is melting away as well. In both cases, we are the frog in the slowly warming pot, unable or unwilling to sense the danger until the water begins to boil and we pass quietly away. Overly dramatic? Maybe. But I don’t think that there can be too much disagreement that for now, it’s easier to keep what we’ve got than make dramatic changes, even though those changes are happening all around us. It’s just too inconvenient.

Note: I just want to mention that my wife Wendy is on her way to San Francisco today after being asked to do a spot on Air America’s Eco Talk which will air around the country on Saturday. She’ll be talking about her environmental tip book which I would highly recommend (but only if you want to change.) It goes without saying that I am extremely proud of her, and am inspired by her passion. You go, girl!

Jeff Jarvis posted one of those push-my-feeble-brain-to-the-limit posts last week which I think has resonance in a lot of ways. It starts with this:

In the future of media, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and content is controlled where it’s created.

He writes about how when we work and practice in a transparent, read and write environment, all of us become nodes in much larger networks. (There is a lot of

George Siemens in this.) I love this description:

Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.

It’s interesting how much this speaks to education, and how far we need to go. We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.

The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment (Jill Walker), is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.

So, I get the chance to address 49 Superintendents in Upstate NY on Thursday. I’ve got some ideas of what I plan to show them about the power and potential of the Read/Write Web, about what teachers and students are already doing, and about the obstacles that we need to begin having serious conversations about. But I’m wondering, if you had 90 minutes with this group, what one thing would you bring up/point to/challenge them with? What would be your most important message?

Chime in before Wednesday because I would love to point them to this post during my talk.

Anne pointed to this pretty amazing exchange that occurred on one of her student blogs recently, and it’s an interesting and effective example of how involved parents can contribute to their childrens’ learning in these more transparent spaces. I wonder how many teachers actively invite parents to at minimum read and perhaps respond to the work that their children are doing in their blogs. I know when I was in the classroom, I made a point of letting parents know what the URLs of the blogs were, but I left the decision to have parents comment on the sites up to the students themselves. Since it was high school, most opted not to let that happen. But a few did, and while the responses were not many, almost all of them were helpful, instructive, and relevant. And I do think for the students who allowed their parents to contribute it was a positive experience, especially for the parents who like the opportunity to be more involved.

Anyway, it’s nice to see such great discussion happening on student blogs. It’s rich, personal and, in this case at least, adds a great deal to the topic.

I think this Q and A with Danah Boyd and Henry Jenkins about the many very subtle and significant aspects of MySpace should be a must read for any of us that are concerned with the general response that schools are taking and the recenty DOPA legislation. If nothing else, it should give us some great talking points for holding a discussion about the site and the dynamics surrounding it. Here are some of the highlights:

“Youth are trying to map out a public youth territory for themselves, removed from adult culture. They are doing so online because their mobility and control over physical space is heavily curtailed and monitored.”

I know this is a difficult argument for some to accept, that we did this out in the real world and our kids are forced to do it in the virtual world because the real one has become so scary. As a parent of two small kids, I struggle with this as well. When my children get old enough to, say, take their bikes and ride off on their own, how comfortable will I be with letting them go alone? Certainly, when I grew up around here, it was the norm to go and find a game or whatever outside. Now..? There is much more in this interview about this.

“In many cases, schools are being forced to respond to real world problems which only came to their attention because this information was so publicly accessible on the web. Schools are uncertain what level of responsibility they should have over what their students do online – some are worried about what they are doing on library computers and others seek to extend their supervision into what teens are doing on their own time and off school grounds. Much of the controversy has come not as a result of anything new that MySpace and the other social software sites contribute to teen culture but simply from the fact that adults can no longer hide their eyes to aspects of youth culture in America that have been there all along.”

This is an interesting point, I think. As parents, are we just now being confronted with behavior that we didn’t really want to deal with before?

“As a society, we are at a moment of transition when the most important social relationships may no longer be restricted to those we conduct face to face with people in our own immediate surroundings but may also include a large number of relationships which are conducted over vast geographic distances.”

You pretty much have to believe this in order to understand MySpace. And this is a tough one for most. It’s so different from what we’ve experienced. But, as with so many other things that change from generation to generation, who is to say that it is necessarily worse from what we are accustomed to?

There is much, much more…

Well, that was too much fun flying around Second Life with Dave, Ewan, Tom, Doug, and others today in Second Life. I’m not sure what I think actually, other than it’s an absoultely amazing, um, place that could have some interesting applications for the classroom. In fact, I guess, it could be a classroom. But, oy, the thought of spending another chunk of my life learning enough about it to actually make some sense of it is giving me a migrane. (And besides that the first couple of people I tried to interact with ran away from me. Was it my breath?) Luckily, the technology doesn’t seem to be stable enough yet to make classroom use an option right now. I don’t think. Ewan and others were having a slow time of it, and some folks crashed.

The other fun was doing my first Skypecast with Dave at the helm. That too had some mixed reviews, but it was fun being able to talk to people while interacting with them in SL.

Btw, in case I ever get back there, my SL name is Blogsar Lumpen. Don’t ask.

Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier of Worldbridges have been kind enough to set up a tour of Second Life for us newbies who are feeling really clueless about the whole virtual environment thing. (That means me.) So, if you’re free tomorrow at 11 EST, head on over to Webcast Academy in the chat room and meetup for a introductory Skypecast. In an e-mail, Dave says:

BEFORE YOU START
Please go to secondlife.com before we start and sign up. You will be asked
for you credit card, or your paypal id. This is to be expected, as there
is a realy economy inside and they don’t want people signing up at random.
You will not be required to pay anything.

But you might. After you see how cool it is. That’s what happened to me.
But for the purposes of looking around, you don’t need to pay.

Try signing in once before we start to make sure you have the appropriate
graphic drivers…

Maybe we’ll “see” you there.

There certainly were a week’s worth of highlights packed into my quick two-day visit to Edinburgh for e-Live 2006, among them meeting Ewan McIntosh, David Muir and John Johnson (three more checks on my edblogger life list), the very enjoyable meetup at the Jolly Judge just off the Royal Mile and later a fun dinner in Leith near Ewan’s home, listening to Alan November’s keynote and the opportunity to meet and chat with dozens of educators at every level of the Scottish system.

But the best highlight, not suprisingly, were the kids. This conference was especially enjoyable because there were kids everywhere, in the audience, in the vendor booths, welcoming participants into the sessions, and even a couple of troops of wandering podcasters that were reporting on the event. It was really just a joy to watch them, producing everything from complex GarageBand performances (they even had one student band doing live performances into the computer) to creating claymation movies to demo-ing a whole host of interesting other applications that were set up throughout the venue. (Note to self: don’t just pack the camera next time…actually bring it to the event. Doh!) Talk about engagement! These kids were totally, wholly involved with the technology, having all sorts of fun, figuring it out, pushing it. It was pretty amazing.

The best part was when I got the honor of being interviewed by the podcasting teams. They were bright, happy kids who seemed a bit impressed by the Americans and had a slew of good questions prepared. They asked about the Internet, about whether they should be allowed to have cell phones, about where technology was headed. But the best moment was when they asked me what my favorite technology was. Of course, I told them it was my tablet. They looked at me a bit quizically for a moment, but when I spun my screen around and laid it down on the keyboard, they almost jumped out of their seats. “Whoa!” “Look! You can write on it!” “That’s incredible!” (By the way, at that moment I fell in love with the Scottish accent…) And even better, at just that moment, Ewan, who was giving a presentation in the room right next to us, Skyped me! When they heard the “phone” ringing, the kids were looking around, and when I tapped on the screen and started talking, they were really impressed. Just to show them what you could do with Skype, when Ewan hung up I called Sheryl in Virginia Beach unannounced and she picked right up and starting chatting about life in the States. (It blew them away when they heard how warm it was, until they realized she was talking Farenheit.) Anyway, it was 15 minutes of spontaneous tech magic and was easily the best moment for me.

Until, of course, at the end of the interview, when I asked them what their favorite technology was. “The Tablet!”

Oh, and by the way, if there is any doubt about what a bunch of geeks we all are, the highlight of the dinner conversation at the blogger get together was wondering what the Flickr tag was going to be for Ewan’s upcoming wedding. Scary. Really Scary. My sincere thanks to Ewan and the rest for organizing a great evening.

Greetings from my first blog meetup in Scotland and here’s to many more to come. Here is John Johnson of Sandaig Primary School making me think. To see a whole bunch more pictures, try Ewan McIntosh’s Flickr stream. You can also check out the eLive 2006 Conference feed. I’ll write more tomorrow, but suffice to say, this has been a great visit with lots of great discussions with some great folks.

Just in case any one might be interested in some late Sunday night ramblings, I had the good fortune of being on Ed Tech Talk #46 this weekend. Here is the link if you’re interested.

Welcome to eLIVE 2006 in Edinburgh, Scotland where Alan November did the opening keynote yesterday and I do mine in just a few minutes. I managed to roll right off the plane yesterday morning looking like a rumpled mess, but I’m always interested in seeing Alan live. So here’s the day after “live: blog. (Ewan posted yesterday.):

Used to be that school was the place where kids had the access to technology, but now they are getting a wider access to ICT at home. Their favorite application is MSN. And the school says that’s against the rules. Someone needs to explain why we take away the tools that kids use. It’s fear. I think schools like to stay the way they are. What we are trying to do is fit technology in to the culture of schools as they have traditionally existed. It’s ok to use a computer to do what we already do, but to start to use tech with stuff we don’t do, that’s a tougher sell. Many kids have Websites. School policy says no. We use the Internet, kids do the Internet. We should talk to our students ask them what they do with technology when they are not is school and then ask ourselves why are we blocking all the things they do on their own. Ask kids what happens when schools block blogging. They will go home and create one. We need to give them role models of the appropriate use. Otherwise we are sending them out on their own to use some of the most powerful tools ever invented. We say this is for protection, but they are using it at home. (Comment: The whole city blocks MSN but there are some sites that the council tries to make available.)

IBM on an average day generates 10 million IMs each day of adults working. They do it because they have people around the world that need to solve problems. Outside of schools, computers are the number one form of communicating around the world. Do I punish or reward my son for using IM to finish homework with his friends. Collaboration is one of the most important skills we should be teaching our students. I think teaching is one of the lonliest, most isolated jobs in the modern economy. Tells the story of teaching on a Boston island prison school, and he taught algebra and oceanography. All of them wanted to know more about oceanography. If you are desperate for learning, you will learn.

What is the problem? The problem is not technology or teaching children technology. The problem is that India is ramping up in technology and education, online learning. China outstrips the US by the year 2050. It means a lot more people have a lot more money to spend to use up the world’s natural resources. We could lose over 17 percent of US jobs to offshoring. One of the unitended consequences of the Internet was that it was overbuilt in 2000s which made it free to send information around the world. Now our kids will have to compete with anyone on the planet for their jobs. This is the most scary, unusual moment if you are a father and you have kids and you wonder if they will be economically viable.

Who owns the learning in your school? Who manages it? In the Victorian model, the teacher owns it. Now we have all this new stuff, and kids can learn it faster than most adults. 2006-07 Scotland will be delivering digital content on an amazing network. Teachers will not have to deliver content in classes anymore. We can rewrite the job description of a teacher, and at the top should be diagnostic skills, teachers who can understand data about how children learn across a wide variety of subjects, and how to personalize instruction. Kids are social and territorial. We don’t give them their own space, and we should. Shows High Tech High in San Diego where students own the learning. If you have educated kids for 8 years in one way, you have to unlearn them, which takes months. But we’ve underestimated what teen agers can do. But what is the balance between what the state wants and the self-direction of the student. Here, you get the same math teacher for four years, and he’s taking everyone to calculus. We have to change time, space and relationships. If we don’t change those three things, it doesn’t matter about technology if we don’t do that. If a teacher has a student for four years, you know the student, and you know the end product. Content is in the network, and so students can take the tests any time you are ready. There are tests that are now created in real time, and the software brings back the results in real time. So you can go through content faster. The real issue isn’t technology. Are we willing to allow students to move at different rates in the same school.

It’s not about adding computers, it’s about fundamentally changing the culture of learning. This is a fun time once we get past the fear. So I would start producing videos of what’s happening in the classroom and send them home. And podcasts. I think the changes I’m talking about so far are two decades worth of change. 65% of kids leave for college and then come back. So the first question is how long do you want your adult children to live with you.

Kids don’t understand the algorithm of Google. The Internet is the real change, not the hardware. And the first step is to teach students to decode the Internet. The real staff development is to teach teachers to design mew assignments that we’ve never designed before. Shows tree octopus, MKL.org, etc. We teach young children who wrote a book, and yet we don’t teach kids how to read who wrote a website. Most parents will agree that we can’t get rid of the Internet, so the question is are you actually graduating students that don’t know the grammar of the Internet. We still teach like print is the dominant medium. Shows altavista. Use ask.com and answers.com rather than Google in terms of school work. Syntax in using search is crucial. We need to teach teachers to find content all around the world, because now the assignment is how do you reconcile the difference between the way the Japanese think about Hiroshima as opposed to the way we think about it. The role of the teacher is the network is to build relationships around the world that create authentic learning. Kids would rather present their work to the world than to just their classmates. Shows fan fiction. Asks why don’t the kids use their own names? On this site, you get reviewed. Asks, how many of you have 103 reviews of your work on the Internet?

Tim O’Reilly’s recent commencement address at the UC Berkeley School of Information has been widely cited, and I’m not sure that all of it really resonates, but there are a couple of phrases and ideas that are especially relevant and worth noting. And since he wasn’t just talking to a group of educators, these points are worth remembering when bringing this discussion to a wider audience.

First is the idea that this is a turning point not just in technology:

In my remarks today, I hope to elaborate on this idea of turning points. Not only are you at a turning point in your lives, we are at a turning point in the technology industry, and perhaps even in the history of the world. Most of you probably know that I’ve been evangelizing an idea that I call Web 2.0, the idea that the internet is on the verge of replacing the personal computer as the dominant computing platform. And as you know, platform shifts are times of enormous disruption and enormous opportunity.

I think that bears remembering, that despite the very messy, difficult period that we’re entering here, there is also a real opportunity to make some much needed changes in the classroom. We need to keep focusing on how best to do that, but the good news here is that we’re advocating for rethinking education at the same time as others are talking about rethinking journalism and business and politics because of the same changes. I think it might be easier to frame our discussions in that context.

O’Reilly also discusses the importance now of the network:

The internet as platform is the sum of all connected computers and devices. True internet applications can be thought of as “software above the level of a single device,” applications that run not on any individual computer but on the network that connects them. Ultimately, the network ties together all those devices into a single vast computer.The applications that succeed on that new computer platform are those that understand deeply what it means to be network applications. It’s as simple as this: the secret of success in the networked era is to create or leverage network effects.

And then later…

But even more important than their enthusiasm, the users of successful internet applications supply their intelligence. A true Web 2.0 application is one that gets better the more people use it. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a link on the web. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a search. It gets smarter every time someone clicks on an ad. And it immediately acts on that information to improve the experience for everyone else. It’s for this reason that I argue that the real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence.

This is exactly, I think, what George Seimens talks about when he says that knowledge resides in the network, and that to be truly educated these days, we need to know how to leverage that knowledge when we need it. And that we all get smarter as we link to one another and become a part of the conversations that are going on.

O’Reilly also talks about achieving “global consciousness” on the Web, but I think we are still a long way from that. There is still too much echo-chambering happening, and I think one of the biggest hurdles that we have to overcome in all of this is how to insure that our students (and ourselves) value both sides of the conversation.

Anyway, something to think about to start off the week…

Ewan posted a link to a recent Mark Prensky talk that, despite being cutoff halfway through was well worth the listen on my early morning jog just now. (The toils of reinvention…) Even though I’ve come to find the whole natives/immigrants metaphor a bit overcooked, he does a great job of articulating how it is that kids are becoming more and more “engraged” by the irrelevance of what we teach and how we teach it. For all our talk about learning, it’s a pretty simple equation when you think about it. We learn when we practice those things that engage us. Engagement, of course, can be motivated by many different things both intrinsic and extrinsic, but ultimately I think relevance, challenge and pleasure are the keys. Under those circumstances, we’ll practice as much as we need to learn the content or the skills.

But as I was listening to him talk about students’ saying “engage us or enrage us,” I started thinking about the level of engagement of our teachers especially in terms of these technologies. If we are being asked to engage kids where they are, how do we engage teachers to take on that task? Sure, it’s easy to say that as educators we have to rethink our classrooms and our pedagogy, that we have to employ new practices to prepare our students for a different learning environment. But how do we  really engage them to do that? David writes about Telling a New Story, and I do think that we need to create some new narratives about teaching and learning to share. But the hugely difficult question is how do we engage teachers to become the types of learners that their students are becoming? How do we engage teachers to rethink their roles in the classroom now that their students have just as much access to information as they do (with some exceptions)? How do we engage teachers to become lifelong learners and to model that learning in more transparent ways?

Fifty percent of all new teachers leave the profession in two years. Something tells me they are probably more enraged than engaged…

Dean poined to the fact that Clayton Wilcox, the blogging superintendent at Pinellas County in Florida, has shut down his blog because of the acrimonious debate that took place among the commentors. It’s unfortunate, I think, not just because this will be seen as another indictment against the transparency and openness of blogs, but because I think he had an opportunity to find higher ground with it. In instances like this, I would have no problem with someone vetting the comments and not approving those that made no meaningful contribution to the conversation or were mean-spirited. I know there is a bit of a “slippery slope” there in terms of the potential for steering the community in one direction or the other. But in this instance where the blogger is high profile and where the intent is to start a dialogue, I’m sure a third party reviewer could have been put in place so that the debate could have remained respectful and prductive. In addition, some clear acceptable use guidelines would make that work even easier.

We need to be more imaginative in the way we deal with these issues, because I think Wilcox’s willingness to engage in a more open way was modeling something very important, not just to the people in his disctrict, but to educators and school leaders in general. As Dean points out, pulling the plug on these technologies when people in the community behave egregiously is not an answer for our superintendents or our students. Wilcox had a teachable moment here, and he failed to teach. Too bad.

I’ve been mentioning the work of Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach quite a bit here lately, and by the looks of things, that may continue. Today, she posted a reflection about her first year of work with a group of Alabama teachers to intergrate social netoworking tools into their practice in ways that would <i>positively impact student achivement</i>. She’s done a great job in the post of articulating the model that they used and the ways in which it was put into practice. I was lucky enough to do an Elluminate session with her teacher a couple of months ago, and I know she also featured Darren and some other edbloggers in the process.

I really like how Sheryl and her group framed the work:

Are you willing to change – to risk change – to meet the obvious need
for better alignment between “school as we know it” and the needs of
21st Century learners? Can you accept that Change (with a big “C”) is a
sometimes messy process and that learning new things together is going
to require some tolerance for ambiguity?

This is a risk for most teachers for all of the reasons that we talk about in this community on a regular basis. It takes a supportive structure to bring teachers to the table, to mitigate that risk. And that seems to be what’s happened here. The projects that the teachers involved in the program celebrated last night are pretty impressive, I think. Tons of blogs, wikis, podcasts of all shapes and sizes. As Sheryl says, these are teachers now with the ability “for setting a school’s feet firmly on the path to full-scale 21st Century Learning.” Nicely done!