Especially when you compare it to Ms. Dewey. Sheesh…

technorati tags:search, google

So here are Time’s recommendations:

1. Teach kids more about the world.
2. Think outside the box.

3. Become smarter about new sources of information.

4. Develop good people skills. (Communicate, collaborate)

We can do that.

technorati tags:school20, learning20, education

True story I heard second-hand today:

In a planning meeting for state educational technology leaders recently, one attendee actually said “Why in the world would anyone over the age of 30 want to text message on a phone?”

Because:

If teaching is an exchange of ideas, the ways that people convey their thoughts in this day and age — text messages, podcasts, the Internet, instant messaging — must find a place in the modern classroom.

If we don’t do it, who is going to teach our students to leverage the technologies they already use for 24/7/365 learning? (I know…another rhetorical question.)

(Thanks to Christian Long for the link.)

technorati tags:education, learning

So how would it be to comment not just on total posts but on individual paragraphs within posts themselves? From a writing teacher’s standpoint, I think it would be pretty awesome. You could annotate specific sections of blog posted essays or stories and then leave more general comments at the end. Other people (students) could come in and leave their own pointed feedback. It would come pretty close to the type of handwritten comments that teachers have been leaving on student work (for better or worse) for ages.

Well the folks over at Future of the Book are working on it. Check out this text by Mitchell Stephens where, after selecting a section from the left hand margin, you are basically able to click into a specific part of the post and offer feedback. (Here’s a particularly interesting back and forth on one section.) Pretty cool, I’d say. Even cooler is that they’re planning to release this as a WordPress plugin at some point. Talk about being able to debate certain points within the whole.

I seem to remember someone else trying this sometime back. Now just wait until we can voice annotate parts of posts…

technorati tags:book, future, blogging, education, writing

Yesterday, I found myself on a Skype call with a colleague of mine and we were editing a Google document on the fly preparing for another three way Skype call that we’re having today. I was sitting there watching the document screen refresh every time my collaborator stopped typing, watching his actions in the Skype video screen (as he watched me on the video as well.) Later, I was on an Elluminate session with a group of teachers from across Pennsylvania, watching as they interacted on the whiteboard, listening as they took turns at the microphone asking questions, reading as they text chatted about their experiences. I was, with varying degrees of success, talking them through a Web tour of Weblogs in classrooms from around the world.

At some point during the day, I had a Jetsons moment. I remember loving the Jetsons when I was kid, not so much because of the space ship transportation mode, but because of the way they communicated. Video phones. Mobile telephony. (I loved Astro, too.) Although my memory is admittedly fuzzy, it seems like there was a lot of interconnectedness in that world. Even for a cartoon.

So here I am, pretty much ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate, watching the people who I’m talking to. I might as well get rid of that phone thing I have at home that has wire. And stamps? What are those? And I realized recently that since the one at home died about two months ago, I don’t own a printer and probably won’t be getting one any time soon. I don’t even know what to do with paper these days.

Call me Elroy…

technorati tags:education, learning, Jetsons, Skype

(Warning: Shameless self-promotion ahead…) So if you’re in the Philadelphia area during January 29-February 3, you might be interested in a series of Ed Tech Live Workshops that are being organized by Steve Hargadon (who never sleeps.) They feature a 2-day Moodle Workshop, a 2-day Drupal Workshop, and a 2-Day Web 2.0 for Educators Workshop that I will be leading. (See the wonderful little notice at right…) Steve already has a number of other Moodle workshops scheduled around the country, and we’ll be announcing some more dates shortly for the education workshops in other cities as well. Stay tuned…

What’s really cool about the Philly workshops is that they will be held at the new Science Leadership Academy where Chris Lehmann is principal. I’m actually getting the privilege of making a visit down there next week to see firsthand how things are going…cannot wait.

Anyway, if you’re in the Philly area, or you know people there, it would be great to see you in February.

technorati tags:learning20, school20, education, web20, steve_hargadon

So today was a finish line of sorts…once I get home (if I get home) tonight, I’m staring seven weeks of R&R in the face starting tomorrow, and I have to say, I’m ready. It’s been such a treat for me to travel around the country (and the world) and meet so many interesting and dedicated people, but the last couple of months have been crazy, and next year is already shaping up to be just as nuts. I want to do some more reflection on my travels this fall, but for now I’m ready to take a break from it all.

But today outside of Chicago, something really funny and weird happened. I was giving a workshop and wanted to demo the ease with which you could post photos to Flickr from a camera phone. So I took this picture:

Just minutes after that photo went up, Michael Stephens posted this photo in the comments noting that he had taken it during a training session he gave this weekend:

Now is that just freaky or what? Same exact room. Same exact angle. Perfect example for my workshop on how the connections on the Web work these days.

Anyway…here’s hoping the plane takes off on time…

technorati tags:Web20, education, learning

I’ve been playing around with Google Reader and just noticed an interesting thread between the first two posts that I shared to my public page. First, David Weinberger:

I came away realizing why media literacy programs often bother me. Frequently, the idea even is that we have to teach our children how to recognize the Internet sites that are as reliable and safe as what they’ll find in a library. That’s a useful skill, but the overall picture is wrong. If you want to know what’s going on in a field, the static and credentialed sources generally aren’t where you want to go. The credentialed sources are great for certain types of information—the solid and stolid facts, the commoditized information, the boring truth—but the real intellectual action is usually occurring in the blogs, newsletters, and forums. Confining students to the credentialed sites is likely to kill their interest and enthusiasm. [Emphasis mine.]

And then, from Alex Reid:

In any case, I will say this about research and blogging. When I read scholarship I encounter ideas that I find interesting and thought-provoking. However, if I were going to think about what I teach in my courses, much of the valuable information I rely on comes from blogs, and not only from academic blogs. If I want to know what teachers in new media were doing a year ago, I guess I could read a journal. If I want to know what people are doing now, what new developments are emerging, what is working and what isn’t, I would look at blogs. Wouldn’t you? [Emphasis mine.]

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see this conversation develop more fully on the K-12 level as well? What if we stopped blocking blogs and implicitly telling students that they aren’t reliable and instead start making them a part of our daily classroom practice? What if, as Joyce Valenza‘s matrix suggests, we start teaching our students to make good decisions about the content they encounter, to be effective editors? What if we modeled for them how to engage in the ideas instead of just consuming them?

technorati tags:reserach, blogging, education, learning, literacy

Dave Warlick points to a study that shows that more teachers are starting to use technology in their teaching. Ironically, not once in the article are the words “learn” or “learning” mentioned in the context of teachers or students. Why?

What difference, really, does the infusion of technology into the classroom have if the teachers who use it don’t have a context for learning with it? My guess is that most of what’s happening in schools right now is what Alan November calls “automating,” taking the stuff we used to do on paper and digitizing it in some way without any real change in the pedagogy or in the understanding of what the learning potentials are. I mean, take PowerPoint as an example. If you use PowerPoint, technically you’re using technology. But most of the uses of PowerPoint that I’ve seen in schools have nothing to do with learning. Nothing. In fact I still have a hard time believing how much of what is presented at the technology conferences I go to has nothing to do with helping those in the room become more effective, lifelong learners. It’s all about doing.

At least three-fourths of teachers surveyed recognized the importance of computer technology in teacher-related functions such as attendance-taking and record-keeping (86 percent), communication (83 percent), research and planning (79 percent), and classroom instruction (77 percent).

That doesn’t really get to it, does it? We have to stop focusing on what teachers are doing with technology and start focusing on how they are learning with it.

technorati tags:teaching, learning, technology

This is why we open up and connect our kids to the world and teach them how to function there safely:

About a month ago, two of my students reported on research by a geneticist involved with sleep and memory, and posted their reports to the my class blog. In their reports, the students raised some questions about the research.

Yesterday, that researcher responded to the students questions in the blog itself. This is incredibly exciting!

So far, in less than 8 weeks, we have interacted with a graduate student from Ohio who was doing research in the instructional use of blogs. My students participated in a survey, which formed a key part of a paper she has prepared.

Earlier this week, we heard from an author of an article from National Geographic, who was impressed with a student’s critique of his work. And now this.

Frankly, I expected to see the benefits of blogging in terms of students connecting with one another. But I never expected to have them connect with the world at large so quickly.

There are a billion teachers out there…

Go, blogs! Go!

technorati tags:blogging, education, learning, connectivism

Another article that’s got me all fired up today is this CNET review of a John Seeley Brown speech at MIT last Friday. As Clarence points out, Brown affirms much of what we as a community has been saying about the types of changes the Web is bringing about and what it means for our practice and pedagogy. Clarence pulls some of the best quotes, but here is one that really resonates for me:

In particular, he praised situations where students who are passionate about specific topics study in groups and participate in online communities.

To me, this is the one biggest advantages of the Read/Write Web, the ability to connect to others who are passionate about whatever it is that you want to learn. How rare is it to have that happen in physical space, where everyone in the room is ready and excited to learn?

As Brown points out, for educators to really take advantage of the potential of the Internet, we need to rethink our practice. And, I think, the best way to do that is to get involved in “passion based learning” ourselves, much like what has occurred in my practice since I started blogging and connection those many moons ago. That may mean giving up something else. It may mean making a choice between something we currently do, say reading the newspaper, for something new, like reading the aggregator. But we have to find ways to do it, because our current practice will just not pass muster much longer.

technorati tags:learning, teaching, education

Great article in the New York Times magzine today on the burgeoning use of blogs and wikis by government intelligence agencies to capture and connect information and turn it into knowledge. Now read this:

Indeed, throughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind — and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country’s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world’s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?

OMG! There it is! Forget the ways in which the tools enhance learning, communication skills, literacty skills and all that educational stuff. Our students need to learn blogs and wikis FOR THE SAKE OF NATIONAL SECURITY! What principal, what school board, I dare say what community could argue against that?

And by the way, if this quote is any indication of a larger movement out there toward “getting it,” we really could be at a tipping point of some type:

“Once the intelligence community has a robust and mature wiki and blog knowledge-sharing Web space,” Andrus concluded in his essay, “the nature of intelligence will change forever.”

Now that’s enough to perk up my ears…

technorati tags:Blogs, wikis, education