My good friend and neighbor Warren Buckleitner is the lead source for today’s story “Safer Cyber-Playrooms” in USA Today. The news is that both Disney and Nick are now offering social networking sites for the sub-14 set.

Parents can explore along with their kids — or create their own account— and may be doing their kids a favor. “These prepare (kids) for services like MySpace, wikis (online collaborative sites) and blogs,” Buckleitner says, “the same tools that are becoming part of the workforce and culture in general.”

Small pieces (and kids) not so loosely joined…and heavily branded.

A mind-expanding article in this week’s New York Magazine titled “Say Everything” attempts to come to grips with a new generation gap, one built largely on the growing disconnect on just what privacy really means anyway. (via Totally Wired, btw.)

Because what we’re discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

This is one of THE big disconnects that I think we are just starting to wrap our brains around. It’s absolutely what most teachers I talk to find so incredibly difficult about using these tools, the “putting myself out there for other people to see” part. According to the article here are the three big shifts:

1. They think of themselves as having an audience

2. They have archived their adolescence

3. Their skin is thicker than yours

Whoa. Here are a few other snips to whet your appetite:

When I was in high school, you’d have to be a megalomaniac or the most popular kid around to think of yourself as having a fan base. But people 25 and under are just being realistic when they think of themselves that way, says media researcher Danah Boyd, who calls the phenomenon “invisible audiences.” Since their early adolescence, they’ve learned to modulate their voice to address a set of listeners that may shrink or expand at any time: talking to one friend via instant message (who could cut-and-paste the transcript), addressing an e-mail distribution list (archived and accessible years later), arguing with someone on a posting board (anonymous, semi-anonymous, then linked to by a snarky blog). It’s a form of communication that requires a person to be constantly aware that anything you say can and will be used against you, but somehow not to mind.

And:

Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, “Why would anyone do that?” This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (“you know who you are!”), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?

I think that question is especially relevant for educators, don’t you?

I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up, but it was kinda fun last week…

Connie wins the prize for best scouting caption, btw…

(Photo courtesy the Graham I. photostream.)

Technorati Tags: caption, fun

“In times of change learners inherit the earth, while
the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world
that no longer exists.“–Eric Hoffer

Technorati Tags: Hoffer, quotes, learning

My good friend and new blogger Rob Mancabelli writes about the challenges of schooling in a world of extended, global connections and information in terms not just of the literacies this more complex environment demands but the emotional toll as well. His thoughts come on the heels of a conversation with a principal who was concerned that

students were seeking out and locating more and more emotionally packed information on their own time, often by themselves, causing them to come to our schools each day laden with a plethora of undiscussed feelings, questions and ideas.

It’s an interesting point, and not one that I’ve thought about much in terms of my own practice. In the six years that I’ve been slogging away at this now, I’ve come to a place where the underlying emotional messages of much of what I read get sifted out through a filter, though that’s not always the case, obviously. But to really get empathic and sit in the shoes of a teen-ager (or younger) with all of this, I wonder what types of coping mechanisms he or she might have.

Which brings me, once again, to the larger point: who is teaching them how to cope as self-learners both on an intellectual and emotional level? And can we as educators teach them if we ourselves aren’t coping? I’m in no way belittling the question that principal poses, but if she herself is working to solve these issues in her own practice, would she not better understand the pedagogies for teaching her students how to deal with the stresses? A lot of rhetorical questions, I know (which will once again make Tom Hoffman glad he’s not reading my blog any longer.)

I find it kind of interesting, also, that the one part of that quote above that really jumps out at me is the “often by themselves” part. At first blush, that seems pretty innocuous, but since much of what I read and access is brought to me through my network, as is the case here, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing this by myself as much. Rob has already lent some of his perspective and analysis to this, which in some ways, helps me cope with my own reaction to it. That’s the power of this in my life, and one reason why the whole concept of networked learning resonates so deeply for me. And why we need to teach our kids how to build networks of trusted sources they can turn to themselves for intellectual and emotional support in the process.

But how can we do that if we ourselves don’t?

Technorati Tags: literacy, learning, education, teaching, schooling

(Via Smart Mobs) So here is a research study (and I mean research, full of all sorts of funny looking formulas and symbols and stuff) about Wikipedia that comes to the conclusion that the more edits there are to a particular article the more accurate it is. Not surprising, to me at least, but since smart people are publishing quantitative results, it might add to the discussion.

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English-language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

The conversations I had this week about Wikipedia with the schools I was working with in Atlanta were pretty heated at times. But it’s interesting how it quickly turns into a larger discussion about students as editors in general, and that Wikipedia ain’t the only problem we have in terms of what to trust and what not to trust. And that quickly turns into another discussion about how the network (if you have one) filters out much of the good stuff, just as it did in this instance. You may not trust the source, but if you trust the person or people who sent you the source, the source inherently becomes more trustworthy.

Or something like that…

Technorati Tags: learning, literacy, Wikipedia, trust

Henry Jenkins posts an article he wrote for Chronicle of Higher Education that looks at the ways in which higher ed is being pressured to change to respond to the use of social tools and networked learning. I love this one part where he describes his program at MIT:

To educate such students, we don’t so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network. The program has a large pool of loosely affiliated faculty members who participate in an ad hoc manner depending on the needs and interests of individual students: Sometimes they may contribute nothing to the program for several years and then get drawn into a research or thesis project that requires their particular expertise. Our students’ thesis advisers come not only from other universities around the world but also from industry; they include Bollywood choreographers, game designers, soap-opera writers, and journalists. We encourage our students to network broadly and draw on the best thinking about their topic, wherever they can find it.

That “wherever they can find it” part is what I find really intriguing. How interesting would it be to teach and encourage our students to go and find the best available information out there? I mean, isn’t not doing that really doing a disservice at this point? It’s still such a difficult concept for a lot of teachers to embrace, this idea that there might be better information, better learning outside of the traditional structures. Case in point, some of the students I had a chance to work with yesterday here in Atlanta voiced frustration and not being allowed to use many online sources in their research regardless of who was creating them. They had to use books or electronic databases where the information was more “trustworthy.”The problem, obviously, is not only are we denying students the ability to connect with and use some great resources “wherever they can find it,” we’re also not teaching them the processes that go along with editing those resources for themselves, for making decisions about the content they find.

For most teachers owning or controlling the knowledge or content is a much more comfortable position than “owning the network” or the learning that comes with it. And again, I think that’s primarily because most don’t yet understand the potential of the network. The scope of “wherever they can find it” is still very narrow.

Technorati Tags: school, education, learning, HenryJenkins,

The other day, Tess put on this strange voice and started babbling something about “eating paste” and that it was “acid free.” I asked her what in the heck she was talking about, and it turns out she was acting out a YouTube video that her nine-year old friend had shown her, one which, with an astounding adeptness I didn’t know my daughter possessed, she brought up to show me about 30 seconds after turning on the computer. It was a really stupid clip about eating glue stick in school, one in a series of stupid clips of some girl talking strangely and babbling nonsense. Funny to a nine-year old…silly to me. (Somewhat unsettling, actually…parentable moment.)

But anyway, here is the kicker. After we watched it about halfway through and I forced her to turn it off, she turns to me and says “Hey Dad. Can you show me how to make one of those video things?”

Next thing you know we’re visiting family over the weekend in Connecticut, and we’re surrounded by people with stories. The 92-year old boyfriend of my 81-year old step-mother, and my 81-year old brother-in-law, all of whom should write books. Anyway, out comes the video camera and Tess is hamming it up as reporter, asking them all questions, good questions (with a bit of coaching) and getting them to tell about their lives. She’s making video. She wants it on YouTube. Thank goodness the interviewees have little idea of what YouTube is.

Today when I was checking out Andy Carvin’s snippets from the NPR Summit, I heard Euan Semple mention that “we’re not sitting in the consumer channel anymore” when it comes to interacting with media. And I immediately thought about Tess. How cool is it going to be for her growing up with the ability to create and publish whatever floats her boat (as long as it’s not about paste.) And how nice that would be if she had some support to do that from the teachers at her school. (More on that later…)

Now, I keep thinking about my visit to Google last week to do the Teacher Academy keynote. What struck me was that almost all of the Googlers (Googleites?) had an open computer with them no matter where they were. I snuck a glance over at one woman who was sitting next to me as we watched a demo of Sketch-Up and noticed she had about three IM windows going and was typing away at some document. She wasn’t just consuming. It didn’t take much to realize that she wasn’t fooling around; this was work. And she was smiling…

My kids’ll get it, cause, like it or not, I’m their father. Wonder what it’s going to take for us to make every kid a “prosumer” as Don Tapscott calls it…

Technorati Tags: learning, read_write_web, readwriteweb, schools

Lawrence Lessig is doing a series of presentations on what Congress should do about Internet Policy. This is another one of those issues that we really have to get our brains around, especially with the coming election, and there is no one I trust more to make sense of it. He’s got two up already, but the two I’m really looking forward to are “Copyright: Remix Culture” and “Network Neutrality. The should be up sometime in the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: lessig, copyright

So, since I’ve officially decided to blow out my aggregator and start all over since there is just too much information swirling around out there and this blog is doing a simply horrible job (or is it me that’s doing the horrible job?) of capturing any of it, it’s time to play. Captions anyone?

(Photo from the rievse CC photostream at Flickr.)

Technorati Tags: flickr, flicktion

Just in case anyone might be interested in signing up, I’ll be giving a three-hour workshop at NECC this year titled “Empowering Practice: Leveraging the Read/Write Web for Professional Growth” on June 26 at 8:30 am. As I’m sure is obvious by this point, my focus has been shifting of late from classroom practice using these tools, which, by and large, I think has been relatively unimpressive, to personal learning practice. (Don’t get me wrong, there are some great examples out there, but they are few and far between.) I think had I written the workshop description today, it would have had even more to say not just about the how to but about the why and the process of building networks of practice. To me, that’s what really will translate into effective, ethical classroom use.
Anyway, just thought I’d post it up here in case anyone might want to join us…

Technorati Tags: NECC07

Certainly not the greatest picture of my son, but what the hey…a moment is a moment. This morning while Tucker was home (snow day!) researching the Iditarod for school, he found some info on musher Jeff King that wasn’t in the Wikipedia entry. So a couple of well aimed clicks later, the Wikipedia world can now see that King met his wife when their dog sled lines got entangled. (Hey, that’s a Valentines Day story for ya.) I’m so dang proud I can hardly stand it.

Someone help me…please.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, learning

As I said earlier, I don’t have high hopes for this being the year that schools begin to embrace social software in systemic ways and that 2007 may pose more challenges to that thinking. Case in point a couple of items in the aggregator this morning. First, from Michael Stephens, it appears that Illinois is going after DOPA: The State Version. You know the drill…no social networking in libraries, schools, outhouses, etc. And this won’t be the last bill or the last state to try to put it through.

Second, Chris Lehmann points to an article in the New York Times yesterday titled “Teenagers Misbehaving, for All Online to Watch.” As you can imagine, it’s not a great advertisment for the transparency of the Web these days.

Most suburban teenagers, it seems, can rattle off a litany of the latest teens-gone-wild offerings as though they were the local multiplex listings: boys holding cellphones under the lunch table to photograph up girls’ skirts; an innocent kiss at a party posted out of context on an ex-boyfriend’s Web site; someone bursting in on friends who are in the bathroom or sleeping, drinking or smoking; students goading teachers into tantrums; assaulting homeless people.

Lovely.

Chris expresses his concerns about what this all means, and notes, accurately, I think, that the stakes are getting higher, and he says that schools have to play a bigger role in educating kids about how to make “smart, safe and ethical choices.” The more I turn this in my own brain the more I get to the fact that this is cultural. It’s societal. And those of us who have whatever limited enlightenment into the workings of the world about these matters need to do more to educate all of our constituents.

Before any of this is going to get better, more folks who don’t have any concept of learning in social networks need to at least be shown the possibilities. Whether they embrace them into their own practice is something different altogether.

Technorati Tags: learning, DOPA, education

The New Yorker : Google’s Moon Shot
• Quote: Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni directory from 1919.

• Note: Nothing earth shattering here, but this New Yorker article gives some depth to Google’s pursuits. Must reading for educators, I think, who want to get their brains around the changes and stresses that are occuring. Personally, I hope Google is able to make this happen. – post by willrich

In Defense of Crud

• Quote: We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don’t do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create. And from that perspective, the expansion of who gets to create and share what they create with others is important even if none of us produces anything beyond the literary equivalent of a lopsided lump of clay that will be cherished by the intended recipient (whether Mom or the fan community) and nobody else. –Henry Jenkins
  
  Note: Really interesting post that gives a number of defenses of the potential of participatory culture, many of which I find especially relevant from an education stance. – post by willrich

Oh. My. Goodness. I really don’t know what to say about this. Barack Obama (or someone in his campaign) gets this stuff. At MyBarackObama.com you can begin your own social network in Obamaland including but certainly not limited to creating a blog, connecting with friends, making groups, tracking your fundraising, leaving messages for one another… It’s politics 2.0. And on his main site, he’s got the video thing goin’ on, the blog, links to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook. I mean “Get outta here!”

Now I know we are a long ways away from the election, and there is much left to learn about all of these candidates, but is anyone else feeling a little excited by the prospect of this candidacy. A former educator. Someone who seems to have his brain around what’s happening with technology. Someone articulate and, from all accounts, pretty level headed.

What a concept.

Technorati Tags: obama, politics20, social