A new book due out next month from Don Tapscott (whose Growing Up Digital was great) looks at the potential of collaboration on a mass scale and looks like it might offer up some more ammunition to the conversation around rethinking what we do in our classrooms. Not sure if there is an education specific piece to the book as only the introduction and first chapter are online, but here’s a quote that whetted my appetite:

These changes, among others, are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history—a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive. A world where only the connected will survive. A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated—cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.

And, can you say “irrelevant?”

And, just ’cause I like to play with words, here’s another snippet with some “editing” (the original is in the brackets):

For smart schools [companies], the rising tide of mass collaboration offers vast opportunity…Schools [Companies] can reach beyond their walls to sow the seeds of innovation and harvest a bountiful crop. Indeed, educators [firms] that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators are positioned to form vibrant classroom [business] ecosystems that enhance learning [create value] more effectively than hierarchically organized schools [businesses].

More to read during my break for the holidays…

(Via Steve Cohen)

technorati tags:shifts,education, collaboration

Martin Luther King Jr.
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While I don’t agree with all of Tom Hoffman’s points regarding the use of the MLK.org site (and, no, I’m not linking) as a poster child for Web literacy (I don’t think this has as much to do with the authors being evil as it does them being manipulative and that it makes for a pretty compelling example of the potential for manipulation especially for those that need to be shocked into it), and while the irony of Google bombing other more “palatable” resources is obvious, I’m feeling a bit frisky this morning and would love to someday use this exercise as an example of the complexities of what we’re up against these days. I suspect Tom thinks this isn’t really anything different from the skepticism that we should have been taught to practice all along, but the problem is there seems to be tons of kids (and adults) who didn’t get the message like Tom did. (See Tom’s post for the code if you want to play.)

technorati tags:education, literacy

Just cracked Sir Ken Robinson’s 2001 book subtitled “Learning to be Creative” and I have a feeling it’s going to live up to the presentation he gave at TED earlier this year.

Many of the face to face conversations I’ve been having during my travels of late and the push that’s been occurring on the blog (which I think is a great thing, btw) have been challenging many of the assumptions that I’ve formed over the last five years. I think that’s why I’ve felt pulled to his message, because he asks us to look at things from a different perspective. Here’s a taste from the first few pages that make me want to read more:

One of the most fundamental problems is the very process that’s meant to develop our natural abilities–education…Education doesn’t just follow the natural grain of young people’s abilities; it sorts them through two different filters. The first is economic: education categorises people on implicit assumptions about the labour market. The second filter is intellectual: education sorts people according to a particular view of intelligence. The problem we face now is that the economic assumptions are no longer true and the intellectual filter screens out some of the most important intellectual abilities that children possess. There are drastic consequences for the development of creative abilities. This was always a problem, but now it’s getting critical.

There’s a bunch of good stuff to support the college isn’t necessarily necessary point of view, and there looks to be a great deal more regarding the deconstruction of the current educational system. I’ll reflect more on it as I go. Would love to hear from others who have read it.

technorati tags:ken_robinson, education, shifts, creativity, learning

A recent article in School CIO magazine discusses the use of social networking in schools, highlights one school that is trying to find the middle ground with the blog and wiki abilities of Blackboard, and quotes another school as not going down the Read/Write Web road because none of the teachers have asked to. (Oy.)

“Together, these two tools could give the student the ability to experiment with blogs and wikis in a safe, secure environment where they would receive feedback from their teacher and classmates that was monitored and attributable,” says Paul Regnier, community relations coordinator for Fairfax County Public Schools.

Um, yeah but…are they also being taught to navigate these environments outside of school so they have the tools to stay safe in the no so secure real world? Aside from the inherent problems with using Blackboard, the bigger problem is using it to avoid the difficult responsibilities we have to our students these days. Anyone know if Fairfax is not only banning MySpace but teaching it as well???

technorati tags:education, learning, shifts, schools

I’m using Skype on my MacBook and all of a sudden none of the people in my contact list show up as being online. I’m thinking this may have something to do with some connection configurations that some folks did for a presentation I gave last week, but now I’m not sure how to change everything back. Anyone know what the defaults should look like when I go into my System Preferences and look at the Network information? Or is it a system/sharing issue? I’ve tried to contact Skype to no avial. Any ideas? Anyone? Bueller?

technorati tags:skype

I’m still sifting through the amazing presentations from the last few weeks at the K12 Online Conference as I know many of you have. If you have viewed any (even one) of the presentations from the Conference, please take a few minutes and complete the post-conference online evaluation form.

technorati tags:k12online, k12online06

My brain feels as tired as it has in a long time, and it’s a combination of the challenging (at least for me) discussions that I’ve been having both on and off blog this week. I’m still humbled by the fact that over 40 people responded to my vent last week. In some ways it’s inspiring and overwhelming at the same time. To me, it captured very clearly the complexities of this moment we seem to be at. The ground is shifting, but it feels like we’re stuck.

Last night, I spent a most enjoyable 90 minutes or so with Nancy White and Dave Cormier here at the NYSAIS conference at Mohonk. Over the course of the last year or so, Dave has become someone who always challenges me to think about this work from outside my comfort zone. And Nancy, whose work I’ve just come to recently, is another that sees things from a perspective that challenges my own frame. It’s no surprise that the conversation last night at dinner was extremely thought-provoking and left me in some ways dazed.

We talked about the limits of “blogvangelism,” a term I’m growing less and less fond of. (Hey, I’m evolving.) And we also discussed the problems with the “natives/immigrants” discussion and how it tends to simplify what is a much more nuanced and complex relationship that kids and adults have to technology. And we talked about the myriad of issues that schools face in moving toward real change.

Nancy’s thinking of late has been focused on what she calls “Second Wave Adoption” and what the best way to support that is. The early adopters have all jumped in, but now we’re looking back at the vast middle group and wondering how best to bring them along. She’s written much about this on her blog, and I’m hoping either she or Dave decides to articulate our discussion more clearly than I’m able to right now. But the upshot for me was that this is the most important question that has no one, simple answer. And I think it’s much of what has led to my frustration of late. We live in a world and a society where we just want easy answers to very complex questions. And there are those easy answers here, too. We just know in our hearts they aren’t the best answers.

So, what do we do now?

Perhaps, as we talked about last night, we need to focus less on spray and pray and more on small group, extended practice. And that done in the context of systems, not individuals. I’ve said this before, I know, but at the end of the day, this is a discussion about culture both outside and inside the system more than a discussion about technology. And while there are an amazing group of technology professionals here this week, there needs to be curriculum directors and principals and kids and support staff and media specialists all working and talking about systemic change, not individual change. Not sure…

And I wonder, if at the end of the day, Stephen Downes isn’t right when he writes:

But again: it is not so relevant whether instructors use these tools nor whether or not they are used in the classroom; what matters is that students are using them, in or out of the classroom.

Right now, all of this is too much for my brain to keep up with. And so I feel a little break coming on. I need to get home, play with my kids, turn off the connection, and reconnect with my offline life for a bit. I’m sure the conversation will still be here when I get back.

technorati tags:education, learning, Dave_Cormier, Nancy_White, Stephen_Downes

It’s still going to take some time for the use of these tools to become more legit and have even more effect, but here’s an interesting shift from last night’s elections:

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system. And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube.

Certainly there is room for abuse, but it’s pretty amazing to me the potential as citizen journalism continues to expand.

technorati tags:shift_happens, blogging, politics

Dear Tess and Tucker,

For most of your young lives, you’ve heard your mom and I occasionally talk about your futures by saying that someday you’ll travel off to college and get this thing called a degree that will show everyone that you are an expert in something and that will lead you to getting a good job that will make you happy and make you able to raise a family of your own someday. At least, that’s what your mom and I have in our heads when we talk about it. But, and I haven’t told your mom this yet, I’ve changed my mind. I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree.

Let me put it to you this way (and I’ll explain this more as you get older.) I promise to support you for as long as I can in your quest to learn after high school, whatever that might look like. I’ll do everything I can to help you find what your passions are and pursue them in whatever ways you decide will allow you to learn as much as you can about them. I’ll help you put together your own plan to achieve expertise in that passion, and that plan may include many different activities and environments that look nothing like (and in all likelihood will cost much less than) a traditional college experience. Some of your plan may include classrooms, some may include training or certification programs. But some may also include learning through online video games, virtual communities, and informal networks that you will build around your interests, all moving you further along toward expertise. (Remind me at some point to tell you what a guy named George Siemens says about this.)

And throughout this process, I will support you in the creation of your learning portfolio, the artifact which when the time comes, you will share to prospective employers or collaborators to begin your life’s work. (In all likelihood, in fact, you will probably find these people as a part of this process.) Instead of the piece of paper on the wall that says you are an expert, you will have an array of products and experiences, reflections and conversations that show your expertise, show what you know, make it transparent. It will be comprised of a body of work and a network of learners that you will continually turn to over time, that will evolve as you evolve, and will capture your most important learning.

I know, I know. Even now you are thinking, “but Dad, wouldn’t just going to college be easier?” It might, yes. And depending on what you end up wanting to do, college might still be the best answer. But it might not. And I want to remind you that in my own experience, all of the “learning” I did in all of the college classrooms I’ve spent time in does not come close to the learning that I’ve done on my own for the simple reason that now I am learning with people who are just as (if not more) passionate to “know” as I am. And that is what I want for you, to connect to people and environments where your passions connect, and the expectation is that you learn together, not learn on your own. Where you are free to create your own curriculum, find your own teachers, and create your own assessments as they are relevant. Where you make decisions (and your teachers guide you in those decisions) as to what is relevant to know and what isn’t instead of someone deciding that for you. Where at the end of the day, you’ll look back and find that the vast majority of your effort has been time well spent, not time wasted.

In many ways, I envy you. I think about all of the time I spent “learning” about things that had absolutely no relevance to my life’s work simply because I was required to do so. Knowledge that became old almost as soon as it was uttered from my professor’s mouth. I think about how much more I could have gotten from those hundreds and hundreds of hours (and dollars) that now feel frittered away because I had no real choice. I want to make sure you know you have a choice.

So, when the time comes, we’ll start talking about what roads you might want to pursue and how you might want to pursue them. Your mom and I have high expectations, and we’ll do everything we can to support the decisions you make. But ultimately, my hope is that you will learn this on your own, that you will seize the opportunities that this new world of learning and knowledge offers you, and that you will find it as exciting and provocative a place as I have.

Love always, Dad

technorati tags:college, education, George_Siemens, shifts, learning

Alex Reid has a pretty provocative post at his Digital Digs blog that looks more deeply at some of the reasons this all is such a struggle. Here’s one section that jumped out to me:

In other words, they [his students] continue to view their profession as one that will be founded on a discrete, unchanging body of information that they will acquire before graduating. We might all deride the notion of the teacher/professor reciting the same lectures and lessons plans year after year, but somehow this does not alter this belief that a degree will certify us once and for all as authorities. Sure, all these teacher-students recognize that they will gain experience as teachers, learn helpful tips along the way, and become better practitioners. But this development of practice is separated from the acquisition of authoritative knowledge.

And this faith exists in both K-12 and college faculty.
The threat of the network is the dissolution of this authority. The ongoing development of media and networks requires us to keep moving. It doesn’t mean that what we’ve learned has no value; it means that it cannot establish us as authorities. We cannot imagine the classroom as resting upon a core body of knowledge. We are engaged in a technocultural shift that shakes the very foundations of epistemology: what began as a philosophical critique in theory now becomes a material condition.

I think that does speak to something that I’d been feeling below the surface but hadn’t really seen clearly. We are asking teachers in large measure to abdicate their authority in the classroom, at least in the content sense. And what then remains to be authoritative about?

The learning.
Yesterday at Seton Hall, Alan showed a Marco Torres video of preservice teachers talking about their expectations, and one alluded to the idea of teaching being a flexible role between teaching and learning. That we should look at ourselves at varying times as teachers and as learners, and that students can play both of those roles as well. I think we have to approach our roles in the classroom with a “We’re all in this together” attitude, and not “I’m the expert; get ready to learn” one. But that has little to do with technology and has everything to do with re-envisioning what this is all about.

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

I’m back at Seton Hall with Cohort X (The Power of 10!) We’ll be working on the Seton Hall blog. Please leave your ideas or questions if you have them.

I’ve been growing more frustrated lately and I’m feeling more pessimistic about the prospects for any serious change in how we as an education system see teaching and learning, and I think I’ve figured out why. I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students. Many will say that they understand to varying degrees the changes that are occurring, that the Web is in many ways rewriting the rules of communication and socialization, that the world our students enter when they leave us will be much different from the ones we ourselves were prepared for. But it feels like there is this unspoken belief among most that we can deal with these changes without changing ourselves. And that’s is a huge problem.

Lots of teachers I talk to want blogs and podcasts and wikis. Without question, there are thousands of teachers, tens of thousands in fact, who are already using the tools with their students. I see new examples every day. But I’m still bothered by the fact that very, very rarely do I see new pedagogies to go along with them that prepare students for the creation of their own learning networks. That allow them to take some ownership (or at least envision the possibility of it) over their learning. That help them learn self-direction and get them to stop waiting for someone else to initiate the learning. And even rarer is to find one of those teachers exploring his or her own learning through the tools.

More than anything else, I think, teaching is modeling. As a writing teacher, I wrote with my students. As a journalism teacher, I wrote for publication with my students. As a literature teacher, I practiced and modeled reading for my students. Modeling is teaching, and never has that been made more apparent to me than when my own children act out and reflect my own bad behavior back to me. (It happens more than I like to admit.) My own kids, it has become clear, learn less when I talk, more when I do. And so it is with me.

We go back and forth in this community about whether teachers who use blogs should blog, or podcast or read RSS feeds. I’ve always hesitated to come down on one side or the other in that debate for a variety of reasons. But it’s become clear to me that the answer has to be yes. If you are an educator, I think you have little choice but to choose option 3 in the Marco Torres mantra: “You can complain, quit or innovate.” I know in many ways it stinks to have to be an educator at a moment in history when things are changing on a glacial scale. But what you signed up for is preparing kids for their futures. You have little choice but to deal.

Why won’t our kids be as well served if we don’t change ourselves? I mean we’re all products of the system, right? We all did ok. Things were changing when we went through school, right? Um, no. Not like this.

Our students will by and large have the ability to learn anything, anywhere, anytime (if they can’t already.) The level of their collaboration and connections with colleagues and peers in online environments will be of a type that is hard for most of us to imagine (myself included.) The information and knowledge that they will be awash in will require skills and literacies that most of us simply do not have. Their futures (and to some extent their “presents”) look very little like our vision of what it means to be educated. (And if you don’t believe that, spend some time reading “The Education Map of the Decade.”)

And so here is the friction: Recently, I had a teacher tell me that she spent about 10 minutes a day online and that frankly, that was quite enough. She said that she’s not going to sacrifice the other things that she already does in her life to spend more time on the Internet. I wanted to say, as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks, you have the “greatest library in human history” at your fingertips. You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that will help prepare them more powerfully for the world they face.

Many of our kids are already doing this without us. Many of them have much more of a clue of what it means to learn using these tools than we do. Imagine if we could teach them to leverage their connections even more powerfully, if we could show them how powerful they are in our own learning. That we are not just engaged teachers but engaged learners. That we’re not afraid of what’s ahead because we know how to learn.

Surely, that’s worth more than 10 minutes a day.

But the litany of reasons why this can’t happen are on the tips of too many tongues. Today, in our parent conferences, I asked my daughter’s teacher if there were opportunities for her class to work on extended projects, projects that in the end would have a purpose beyond the grade and the classroom. Projects that, to quote Marco again, would “have wings.” The response I got was this: with all of the objectives that must be met for the state tests coming up in the spring, there just isn’t time for it. When I asked my son’s teacher whether she had read his blog, her answer was that blogs were blocked at school and so, no, she hadn’t.

And so I am frustrated, and I am wondering what will it take to make our classrooms places of learning rather than places of teaching. And I’m wondering if teaching really is dead. And I’m wondering, like the survey question from a few days ago, what classrooms might look like 10 years from now, if they will be fundamentally different from what they are today.

My guess right now is not much.

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

A local newspaper reporter is looking for some teacher/bloggers in the Morris County area for a story. Leave a comment if you’re out there…

technorati tags:blogging

Well, that didn’t take long.

Now I know this is all totally unscientific and probably doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but here are the results from the survey I posted Monday with some brief thoughts. I’d love to know what you think. (By the way, I screwed up in terms of allowing people to choose an answer AND comment…seems it was one or the other not both. So some of these “results” don’t add up to 100%.)

Question 1: What percentage of educators in your country would you guess are using Read/Write Web tools in their professional orclassroom practice?

56% of respondents said less than 10% of educators were using the tools, and another 19% said it was less than 25% (Many of the 24% of people who left comments noted that it was less than 10% in their countries.)

Observation: We have a long, long way to go. And any real tipping point is still a ways off.

Question 2: What is the chief barrier to implementing Read/Write Web tools in the classroom?

• Lack of time: 17%
• Lack of PD: 20%
• Standardized Tests: 7%
• Safety/Privacy Concerns: 6%
• Technology Support: 10%
• Lack of leadership and vision on a local, state or national scale: 18%

Observation: It strikes me that the two things I seem to hear most about, namely testing and safety concerns, came in at the bottom of the heap.

Question 3: What group do you think most needs to understand the potentials that Read/Write Web tools have for learningin order to bring about their use in the classroom?

• Classroom Teachers: 50%
• Administrators: 32%
• Parents: 6%
• Community Members: 1%

Observation: Not a great question, I don’t think. A pretty obvious answer.

Question 4: Which of the following tools do you currently employ in your professional/classroom practice?

• Weblog: 92%
• Wiki: 71%
• RSS: 77%
• Flickr: 42%
• Social Bookmarking: 53%
• Skype: 36%
• Podcast 57%

Observation: Not really surprising…again.

Question 5: In general, how much of an effect do you think Read/Write Web tools will have on classroom practice 10 years from now?

• Look the same: 2%
• Classroom practice will look a bit different, but no fundamental change: 32%
• Fundamental change: 40%
• Transormation 19%

Observation: Actually, a bit more optimistic than I expected.

I posted all of the comments to a Google Doc page. Here are a couple I found interesting:

“As a College IT Director our students are beyond the tech/web2.0/Read&Write abilities of our faculty. We must adjust…or students will choose a ‘better’ school that provides these services and ‘talks’ to them with the tools they use.”
“I think the biggest problem at my school is that so many faculty members don’t know their way around a computer well enough to try 2.0 tools. They think I’m some sort of guru because I can connect a computer (set up monitor, plug in right sockets, etc.) and can do a bit with web pages. In fact, blogging and wikis are so far beyond them, it’s a little scary.”

“I am a Media Specialist, former Computer Applications teacher who could not use Read/Write tools due to filtering policies. The transfer was so that I could become more of a voice for change in the way we do business in the area of technology use…it is not the technology, it is what the technology allows students to do. This shift is ironically difficult to realize in an educational setting.”

Maybe more later…

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