From Chris Lehman’s ribbon-cutting remarks on Thursday…

There is another idea central to the creation of the Science Leadership Academy – and that is that schools can no longer exist in a vacuum in our society. We need students to be able to see beyond the walls of their school, beyond the boundaries of their neighborhoods to the see themselves and their learning as part of a much larger world. We live in an age of interconnectedness, where the global village has allowed us access to information at a rate faster than in any time in human history. We must give students the tools to critically analyze that information, to make judgments for themselves, to draw their own conclusions and then to join that debate as informed and impassioned citizens of this country and our world. Today, more than ever before, it is our task to prepare students to be involved in the world around them, to be content producers as well as content consumers, and to be active participants in their immediate community of Philadelphia and the world beyond our city limits. Our students must understand that learning is not limited by the walls of the school or the hours of the school day, but rather that it is a lifelong, 24/7/365 endeavor.

Amen. Amen.

(And by the way…check out how they actually cut the ribbon. Too cool!)

technorati tags:learning20, education, school20

I feel really fortunate that Edutopia asked me to give my perspective on the Read/Write Web for its October issue, and the essay titled The New Face of Learning is now online. Since the magazine doesn’t have a function for comments, please feel free to continue the conversation here if you like.

technorati tags:read/write_web, Edutopia, education, learning, weblogg-ed

This is your last reminder…presentation proposals for the First Annual K12 Online Conference are due by the end of day Saturday, so if you haven’t gotten yours in yet, you better get cranking. As of this moment, we have 34 proposals…

Click here to submit.

technorati tags:k12online, k12online06, learning, education

So I spent the last couple of days in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn working with a pretty diverse group of educators and engaging in some pretty hefty conversations about what we should do about these changes that are occuring. Today, I got some pretty serious pushback regarding the usual suspects…Wikipedia, cell phones. Interesting.

On the long drive home, I started wondering to what extent some of this stuff is really being integrated in districts. So, just for kicks, is there anyone out there who has all of the below integrated somewhere into the curriculum? 4 out of 5? 3?

1. Wikipedia–as in teaching kids about the collaborative construction of knowledge.
2. Cell phones–as in teaching how to use them effectively as tools for “just in time learning.”
3. MySpace–as in teaching the safe and effective use of the Internet to build networks and publish content.
4. Martinlutherking.org–as in teaching the skills necessary for navigating a world where editing occurs post publication.
5. Google–as in teaching the skills to find the information we want.

What other “basics” would you add?

technorati tags:literacy, education, learning, weblogg-ed

True story…

I pull into a parking space yesterday morning at the county park where I plan on running my first 5K in about a year, and of course, since it’s race day, it’s like 85 degrees and 95% humidity. So I roll down the windows in my car and pull out my computer so I can get a few moments of writing in since I’m about 45 minutes early (gotta get the t-shirt, ya know) and notice that there’s a woman in the car next to me who appears to be reading a handout of some type. She’s talking to one of her young teenage kids in the back seat, something about keeping it down ’cause she has to do this reading for a paper that’s due tomorrow. Every minute or so she offers up a little tidbit of the reading to her kid…it’s about the recent issues with the Pope and offending Muslims and world reaction. The kid is non plussed, but at one point finally says, “Whadda ya reading anyway, mom? The New York Times?”

“Nope,” says the woman. “It’s from Wikipedia.”

Color me surprised. Who ever thought of printing out a Wikipedia article for the road?

technorati tags:Wikipedia, weblogg-ed

I’m in the throes of research for a next book, and I’ve been going back to my highlighted, starred, underlined, exclamation pointed parts of The World is Flat in my idea collection process. I’m impressed at how well the implications for education seem to be holding together. Anyway, I came across this one starred part that I hadn’t remembered, a section titled “From Command and Contral to Collaborate and Connect.” I’m going to sub-in some of my own phrasing in italics, but I think there’s an interesting point made here:

This is what happens when you move from a vertical (command and control) educational system to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate) flat educational system. Your student can do his and your job…Students, if they are inclined, can collaborate more directly with more of their peers than ever before no matter who they are or where they are in the world…But teachers will also have to work much harder to be better informed than their students. There are a lot more conversations between students and teachers today that start like this: “I know that already! I Googled it myself. Now what do I do about it? (212)”

The intellectual relationships and roles we have with our students are changing. I’m just sayin’…

technorati tags:teaching, learning, education, weblogg-ed, WorldIsFlat

Stephen points to a listing of Wikipedia school and university projects that gives some interesting examples of how we might think about teaching Wikipedia. Most of these are higher ed examples, but I think many are still relevant for K-12. There are a fair amount of suggested uses for Wikipedia in the classroom as well. However you might decide to implement Wikipedia or wikis with your students, don’t forget to make good use of the discussion function, which, personally, I’m coming to think is the most interesting part of the whole wiki process. Take a look, for instance, at the talk page devoted to the most recent space shuttle mission. I know I can be geeky at times, but I find the whole discussion about standardizing the time format in the article to be just fascinating.

technorati tags:wikipedia, education, classroom, collaboration, weblogg-ed

Just in case anyone is interested, here’s the opening graph of my recent post at The Pulse:

So here’s the question: as you lit on this post and made the decision to start reading it, are you reading it differently from the way you read today’s newspaper or the latest best-seller laying by your bedside? Not interms of one word after another, left to right sort of thing. I mean in terms of the way in which your brain takes in the words, processes them,makes decisions about them. Believes them. Is the process different, somehow?
It should be…

technorati tags:thepulse, reading, education, learning, weblogg-ed

So here we have an example of a high school civics class blog by a student that is using the tool pretty well, I’d say. Especially just a few days into it. Once again, comments on Civics dude! are open, which has led to a pretty interesting exchange between student and unknown commentor. To guide you through it, here’s the original post, the comment, and the student’s response. I love this part from the student:

I think it’s so funny that someone I don’t even know who it is (Gayatri?) is posting comments on my schoolblog. I see how it can be very upsetting reading a highschool kid’s view on what America is doing. It is truly not my meaning to sound ever-knowing, or wise. Let’s face it, I’m seventeen and I don’t know 1% of what’s going on in the world. But I think that not understanding that I am a student trying to learn and expand my world, is pretty narrow-minded, as Gayatri said I was.

This is getting closer, I think, to what can happen…writing in response to reading for real audiences.

And by the way, Sanna’s teacher, I think, provides a great model for teachers to follow in terms of pointing to good blogging work by their students. This is how you start modeling the connections, by reading and linking. I snipped one such “mother blog” post below…click it to go read the comments.

technorati tags:education, blogging, learning20, weblogg-ed

Harold Jarche in his post titled Small Schools, Loosely Joined makes an interesting pitch to return to the one room school concept, mostly because the tools make it possible:

• With access to the Internet a one-room school would have to reach out to the rest of the world and not be wrapped in the confines of the industrial school. Schools would have to seek out partnerships and not be isolated islands.
• Communities of learning online could be developed to link learners in several schools and even in different countries.
• No teacher would be able to “master” the subject matter, so teachers would become facilitators of learning, which is what they profess to do anyway .
• Small schools would be integrated into the community and there would be a sense of ownership by the community, not the education system.
• Most children would be able to walk to school, therefore eliminating busses, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging exercise.
• Children and parents could have more than one school to choose from.
• Sales of industrial school buildings could be used as financial capital for the transition.

All interesting ideas, I’d say, not to mention the effect on the overall financial, taxpayer burden for funding schools.

Reminds me of a good friend who is eschewing the local public school kindergarten for something unique in my experience. He and his wife have banded together with a half a dozen or so other families with kindergarten age kids and hired a Montesorri teacher to work with them in their homes on a weekly rotation. So, you host school for a week then get five weeks off. Parent/hosts help the teacher work with the kids, and what you get is a very safe, supportive, close-knit community of parents and learners who are invested in their kids education.

Not sure what happens next year, however…

technorati tags:education, learning, schools

So Jeff (who is becoming a daily link-to here) has announced a new site for a new class on Web 2.0 tools that he’s teaching. TeenTek is all about his students blogging about what they find newsworthy and interesting, and it’s all about teaching the tools of the trade in the context of what the kids discover as meaningful. (I know, I know…once I latch on to some phrasing it takes me a while to let go.) And, it’s all about helping kids to understand that one of the most powerful things they can do when they have an audience is teach. (I’m learning a lot about cell phones already.) I really hope Jeff’s students feel the license to explore their own passions but at the same time come to understand the power of being able to take what they learn and communicate it in a way that readers (in the broadest sense) will understand and learn from.

But the other piece of this is, of course, that this is a course specifically created to do the type of learning we’re all talking about. (What a concept…hey, really…what a concept! I wonder if Jeff would share his proposal so others might, um, propose a similar course at their schools.) What about the 99.999% of courses out there that are about content? Even Jeff himself in a comment to my previous post says:

I wish I could spend that much time developing the stories, interacting with the world here in China in which these students live. But theissue is content. I have to get through x amount by 1st quarter, by 2nd quarter, etc. Our school systems are not built around learning, instead they are built around content and assessing the learning that takesplace within that content or context.

And he continues by asking the $23,456.34 question:

How do you make that change? How do you ’sell’ this to principals and parents when they walk in and ask, so what have you covered? Instead of asking, what did my student create, contribute and learn?

Yeah. So how do we do that?

technorati tags:jeffUtecht, blogging, classroom, education, learning, weblogg-ed

I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about where we’re at with all of this from a student perspective and wondering (again) why it is that there aren’t more examples of kids using blogs (in particular) to make their thinking and learning transparent. I mean there is no doubt that more and more teachers are using the tools with their students, and that there is some residual learning that happens by that mere fact. But I’m hearkening back (once again) to something Tom March said in that interview at NECC about “where are the real best practices with kids using these tools?”

What got me started on this, actually, was the work that Jeff’s kids were posting to YouTube. Now before I go any further, I’m in no way demeaning that effort; I think it’s a great start down the road. But there has to be more here. At some point, I’m hoping Jeff will scaffold up from “the same-old-report in a different format that has a big audience” work to more “critical analysis of the content that we’re producing to test our ideas” work. I mean that, at it’s core, is what is powerful about these technologies. They allow us to take risks with our ideas, to test them in authentic ways with real audiences, and learn from the process. (In many ways, this post is a risk.) Why shouldn’t we be asking students to do the same?
Take the IBM video for example. What if next, that student does a second video (or writes a blog post) that deconstructs the marketing efforts of the company, shows how the brand is manufactured and sold in China, and includes personal responses to the advertising? Something that involves risking his ideas or interpretation with the payoff that the viewer (or reader ) will learn something absolutely unique, something that can’t be found at Wikipedia, and may, if done in a provocative enough way, motivate that viewer to respond. Something that genuinely teaches something new.

Now I know there are those who will suggest that for this scenario to truly play out, we need to open up student work to audiences in ways that we may not be comfortable with. But I look at the links to student work that Clarence posted today, think about how that content is “exposed” to open commentors (though I will guess they are moderated), and wonder how much more his kids are understanding the potential because of it. I mean, there is some nascent blogging (the verb) actually happening in those posts. It’s closer…
The shift with doing something like this is more than just safety, however. The real shift is with the stance of the teacher. This idea forces us to move away from delivering content as we have for 100+ years and instead move toward assisting students to discover content on their own. What are the ideas, concepts and examples that can be woven together to create meaning in the context of our class goals and outcomes? What personal learning can be made transparent that informs a larger discussion of the curriculum? It’s not our (the teacher) answer that is important.

We learn when we take risks. We learn when we fail. That’s one of the most difficult lessons I’m trying to help my own kids learn. It’s fourth grade, and for Tess, now the onslaught of grades really begins. Everything is a 97 or a 84 or (god forbid) a 75. Nowhere on those sheets is even an implied message that says “Congratulations! You got stuff wrong! What an opportunity to LEARN!” And so my daughter continues and will continue to look to the teacher in the room to deliver to her what’s important instead being compelled to discover, through managed risk-taking and safe failure, what learning may await her.
This is difficult work. Just ask Konrad and Barbara (and others,) both of whom continue to inspire me with the depth of their reflections about their practice and how disruptive these shifts are in their own work. But at some point, we have to get to it in ways that push our students farther down the same road we in this community are traveling. At some point, we have to see it more manifest in front of us.

technorati tags:teaching, learning, education, blogging, weblogg-ed, shifthappens

Ok…so this one treads pretty close to home, for a number of reasons. (Read between the lines if you must.) But I think it’s worth sharing anyway. Yet another example of what can happen when you put (fairly) easy publishing tools in the hands of the masses (with access). View and discuss.

technorati tags:youtube, education, schools

Wes added the lastest tally of submissions for the incredibly awesome not-to-be-missed first annual ground-breaking highly educational and fabulously interesting K12 Online Conference that’s coming up in (ohmygosh) about a month. If you have an idea (or 7) that you’d like to offer as a presentation, head on over to the online submission form immediately and start, um, submitting. Your presentation can take whatever form you like, and you can get all the details on the blog.

The hard-working energy-filled sleep-when-you-die highly-motivated and at times clueless conference organizers are, well, working hard to provide even more surprises, details of which we’ll release tantalizingly slowly as the conference approaches. (Do the words Bill and Gates mean anything to anyone? Anyone?) In the meantime, we’re holding a competition for the most creative conference going planning by an individual or group, a contest that is currently being led by Jeff Utecht who is actively trying to secure college credit for “attending” in a variety of yet to be determined small group settings (complete with pizza and various libations…sounds just like college to me!) The key will be, of course, to capture the conversations and publish-back the results for other conference goers to interact with. If you have an equally stellar concept of conference “attendance” just post your ideas to your blog and make sure to tag the post k12online06 or k12online so it will get caught in the aggy. The winner will get a FREE registration to the conference!

I know, I know…

technorati tags:k12online06, k12online, education, learning, weblogg-ed, conference

…that Jeff Utecht‘s kids in Shanghai are publishing a series of History of Technology videos to YouTube that most American kids probably won’t be able to see?

What’s not surprising is that because they are being uploaded to YouTube, Jeff’s students are starting to understand the reach of what they can do.

We talked about what these numbers meant and that they were producing something that could potentially be seen by millions of people. I then read them the comments that Clarence and David left on my last posting about the videos and more than anything that was what really caught them off guard.

“You mean people are waiting for us to finish this?”

“Canada? I’m from Canada!”

As I looked around the room there was all of a sudden this sense of ‘he’s not joking’. One student completely deleted his work and started over proclaiming, “This isn’t good enough.” I had another student go home that night do more research and then come back Thursday with a 4 page report on the history of Google. We had to have a talk as YouTube videos must be under 10 minutes, and as he recorded his voice we decided that talking faster wasn’t a good solution to fitting all his information in a 10 minute slide. Another student that was finished came over and helped him edit his work decided to cut the years 2001, 2003 out completely and chopping some paragraphs here and there. He didn’t finish his on Thursday so it will be uploaded to the account on Monday. My teaching partner has his students uploading their videos on Friday so you might want to stop by and check those out as well.

These technologies empower students to do good work. As I wrote on Thursday. They become contributors to society and they understand that and live up to that potential. Empower students with information and what them go!

Let your students teach to the world and watch what happens. But if you’re here in America, you’ll probably have to find a way to do it without using the most insanely popular publishing tool out there right now.

technorati tags:youtube, JeffUtecht, video, school20, classroom20, weblogg-ed, education, learning