This will probably be our last post of 2007, and while we’ve been doing some looking back, our brains have been taking us more into what next year might be like. Our thinking has been framed by Clay Burrell, Doc Searles, and a conversation with a friend, and it has us dreaming about new learning models grounded in passion, small connected groups, and the Live Web—where learning, not grades or tests, is at the heart of everything.
Tomorrow, Amazon is set to release “Kindle,” the digital book reader that holds over 200 books and does a whole lot more. We may be on the verge of moving one of the last bastions of the analog world online, raising questions about how connected, digital reading will change books, readers, and authorship.
We’re reposting Chris’s announcement of EduCon 2.0, an education and School 2.0 conference focused on innovation and the future of schools, built around inquiry, co-creation, and networked learning, and issuing a call for proposals for interactive conversations due November 1.
We reflected on experimenting with unconference-style sessions at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai, why traditional conference formats feel increasingly out of step, and how we might bring more participatory, networked learning into events like NECC.
We spent a day in a workshop on the future of teaching, exploring how “learning agents” might work in schools that look very different from today’s. The discussion focused on new roles centered on facilitation, connection, and collaboration rather than traditional classroom teaching, and on the pressures that might drive long-term change in education.
We’re big mind map people, and MindMeister has our minds a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that makes it easy to import FreeMind and MindJet MindManager maps, collaborate with others, track history, publish and embed maps, and even get Twitter update alerts—all while smoothing out that “publishing hump” much like Skitch and Jing.
A conversation with ourselves about why we use Twitter, what “tweeting” is, and how following and followers create a strange sense of presence and connection we can’t quite explain.
Bud Hunt was nice enough to throw up a test of the CommentPress theme that allows paragraph by paragraph commenting, and we posted some session descriptions we were thinking about for the Learning 2.0 Conference we’ll be at in Shanghai in September.
We’ve been pushing teachers to examine how new technologies challenge their own personal learning, yet most questions still focus on safety, tools, and delivery rather than on educators’ own learning practice. Why is it so hard for us, as educators, to put our own learning first?
There are more educators using blogs, wikis, and Read/Write Web tools than ever, but the real shift isn’t just about publishing student work—it’s about networks, connection, and ongoing learning beyond individual projects and classrooms.