As a journalism major, I really find the challenges that reporters and MSM are facing these days to be incredibly interesting. For me, the writing part was always the easy part; it was the reporting that I found and still find difficult, and these days the rules are being rewritten. Witness the brouhaha that’s been building over at Wired as one of it’s reporters has been trying to do a story on some Web 2.0 types who don’t want to play by the traditional rules. Jeff Jarvis deconstructs the whole affair in his blog, and if you want to get a sense of how radical this is, imaging the following as part of the new model:

As Winer says: “So if you want to work together, let’s find a new way to do it. I’m fed up with the old system. The way we start the reboot is to do all our work out in the open, real-time. Not via email, but in full view of everyone.” Examine the possible benefits of this: The reporter asks a question and I answer it. But I get it wrong and a reader pipes in to give a correction. Isn’t that a better way? I read my answers as I write them and improve them myself. What’s wrong with that? Why should the reporter get the opportunity to rewrite and edit and I don’t? Why should the reporter get to look smarter than the subjects? The best reporters, after all, go to find people who are smarter and know more than they do to get the best story. Ah, but I can hear some of you saying, wouldn’t this blow an exclusive? Well the exclusive has a fleeting value of about 30 seconds anymore anyway. And what’s exclusive about what Dave Winer has to say about Mike Arrington? If anyone owns that exclusive, it’s Dave, no? And Dave’s stance is that if he has anything to say on a subject, he’ll say it on his blog. Welcome to the transparent era, my fellow journalists. You want transparency? This is transparency.

What’s fascinating to me is just being able to watch this play out. Seems like every day the challenges mount. I know in my own case that I would much rather use the wisdom of the crowd to help me make decisions than the traditional advertisements I’ve been peppered with all my life. I mean really, how long will advertising as we know it have any effect on what we buy when we can connect to people who we actually trust to guide us?

Technorati Tags: media, journalism, education

One Picture, 1,000 Tags – New York Times

• Quote: Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called.

  Note: I really can’t wait until David Weinberger’s new book comes out…

   - post by willrich

Is this really what we want to spend $60 million promoting in terms of education “reform” in this country?

The project will not endorse candidates — indeed, it is illegal to do
so as a charitable group — but will instead focus on three main areas:
a call for stronger, more consistent curriculum standards nationwide;
lengthening the school day and year; and improving teacher quality
through merit pay and other measures.

As Judy Breck says,

It’s not exaggerating in the least to say that the above
3-plank education platform would sound perfectly appropriate for the
elections of 1988, or 1948, or 1908. Yet times have changed as the 21st century has arrived.

How about three different main areas instead:

1. Making sure every single school child in America has a personal computing device and ubiquitous access to the Web
2. Supporting teachers’ efforts to leverage technologies in their own personal learning
3. A national curriculum that emphasizes creativity, communication, and the building of connections in safe, effective and ethical ways.

(I’m sure you can come up with better ones.)

Better yet, why don’t we target the money toward giving our national legislators (and “education visionaries”) a clue as to what the heck is happening with the world as it relates to learning.

Frustrating.

(Via Stephen Downes)

Technorati Tags: education, learning

LeaderTalk: Using A Web 2.0 Credo to Help Frame Administrative Actions

• Quote: Our Campus Web 2.0 Credo

      * Believing that all Web 2.0 educational endeavors are populist not elitist in nature,  equal and full access to technology for learning will be a guaranteed right of all students on this campus.
      * Every student is entitled to an education that includes on-going opportunities for involvement with and participation in web-based learning communities.
      * Computer Literacy will be considered of equal value to all other forms of literacy.
      * Student self-expression, initiative, intuition, and exploration within the Web 2.0 environment are to be promoted with as few outside rules and as little authoritarian supervision as practical for an educational environment.
  (From Texas principal Greg Farr)

  Note: I find that a pretty progressive take on how we might start leading with these technologies. The entire post is interesting in the way that Greg struggles with the best way to get all of his staff invested in the uses of Web 2.0 technologies. The only phrase that niggles at me is “computer literacy” as, obviously, it’s not so much about the computer as it is about the information the computer connects us to.
  
   - post by willrich

Innovate – Schools, Children, and Digital Technology: Building Better Relationships for a Better Tomorrow

• Quote: A significant implication of this has been that teens have, in many respects, rewritten the rules of socialization. Whereas teenagers in the past would focus primarily on their physical appearance and behavior, many of them are now more preoccupied with creating digital profiles and learning how to present themselves online in order to be validated by peers.
  
  Note: An article that looks at the complexities that social tools create for schools and the ways in which districts are dealing with them (mostly ineffectively.) Free registration required.

   - post by willrich

Let’s see now…it’s been almost a year since I decided to take the plunge and do this speaking/consulting thing full time. And in that time I’ve done 71 events of various types a number which, in itself, boggles my mind. But what’s really mind boggling is the number of students I’ve seen at those sessions throughout the year.

I started thinking about this because of the students who have been commenting on this blog of late. George Mayo’s students have been chiming in on their experiences with self-publishing at Lulu, and Diane Albanese’s kids have been commenting on their work with wikis in her classroom. (Btw, I love what IanE says: “The kids that work on this page take this like it’s their life. You see them taking the pictures and writing comments and pages during classes just because they care about it so much.”) Personally, I love hearing their voices.

But here’s the thing. In the past year, I’ve maybe seen a total of 25 students who were attending the events I’ve been at to be a part of the conversation, not just to showcase the work they are doing in the classroom. I think those showcases are great, mind you, but I wonder why we aren’t inviting kids to these conferences or workshops as a way to keep the presenters (myself included) honest, number one, but also to help teachers understand the realities of their worlds. Alan November has been saying this for years, btw…

One of the moments in my presentations that always amazes me is when I point out that upwards of 55% of kids are using social networking sites, and then I ask how many teachers in the room have one. It’s rare to get over 5%. That’s just one sign of the disconnect, one that I think having students in the room could really help to assuage.

(Photo “final exam” by dcJohn)

Technorati Tags: students, teaching, learning

So, certainly things have developed over the last few years in terms of blogging tools for educators. And it seems that more and more of the platforms are gearing themselves specifically to address the calls from teachers for varying levels of transparency, safety, etc. I remember way back in 2002 we chose to install Manila because it was one of the few to allow differing levels of public-ness (if that’s a word) even though at the time the process was pretty clunky. But today, that’s not the case any longer. And in the last couple of days I’ve seen some blurbs on some even more ed-centric options that are beginning to provide some real choices.

For instance, Edublogs has just announced a plugin that makes blogs private to all but registered and logged in Edublogs users. (Full disclosure: Edublogs hosts this blog in exchange for the ad at right.) And Bill Fitzgerald just announced that he’s released DrupalEd for free download. Add those to recent releases by 21Classes and even the new Blogger, David Warlick’s ClassBlogmeister, and even Vox, and all of a sudden, there’s much more to think about. (And btw, Manila is still around…)

So I’m wondering what teachers in the trenches are using right now. And I took literally 30 seconds to put up a new page at Support Blogging where we collectively might start to make a menu of the options. (I’m sure I’ve missed some.)

The good news is that we have some options out there to explore if we want to do that.

Technorati Tags: blogging, learning

So we’re driving to the airport, Tess and I, to start our most excellent weekend adventure to South Dakota. Tomorrow, it’s horse shows, Sunday, Rushmore and Custer, Monday back home after a presentation.

We’re cruising down the interstate and all of a sudden she pokes me from the back seat.

“I can’t help it,” she says. “I have to poke someone every thirty minutes.” She laughs, and I put a fake frown on my face.

But then, I start thinking.

“Hey Tess,” I say. “Remember how we talked about maybe you and Tucker writing books and then being able to send them out for Christmas presents?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, you know, that could be a pretty fun story to make into a book.”

Her faces scrunches up in the rear view mirror. “What? About a girl who has to poke people?”

“Yeah,” I say, with more than a tinge of enthusiasm. “Like, maybe it’s a disease or something, like the flu.”

She looks out the window. “Like the 24 hour-flu,” she says and smiles. “Like Pokinitis.”

I laugh. “Pokinitis,” I say. “Perfect. Maybe she wakes up with Pokinitis…”

“Yeah, and can’t help but poke her mom and her dad and her little brother…”

“And maybe her teacher,” I say. I can see this. It’s got potential. I look in the rear view to see if she feels it too.

“Hey Dad,” she says after a moment. “Could we really make this into a book? Like a real book?”

“Absolutely,” I say, thinking about George Mayo and Lulu and how cool this could be.

“I already wrote a book, you know,” she says.

“I know. You know how many people have read it by now?”

“How many?” she asks.

“Over 1,700,” I say, and I see her face brighten.

“Really?”

“Really. But we could turn Pokinitis into a book that people can put on their bookshelves.”  She looks out the window and the cars passing by.

“Maybe she goes to the school nurse and pokes her too,” she giggles. I laugh.

“So what do you think? You want to try to write it? On the plane maybe?” I’m hoping.

“Maybe…we’ll see.” I deflate a bit.

“You know what else?” I say. “You could write it, draw the pictures for it, and then when it’s all done, we could make a movie of it with you reading it so other kids could even listen to it.” Oy, I think. Overload. The curse of being so invested in all of this. But she’s thinking about it.

“We’ll see,” she says. “We’ll see.”

Technorati Tags: books, publishing, read_write_web

So a teacher named Diane Albanese came up to me before a presentation I was giving at the Delaware Instructional Technology Conference this morning and handed me this business card. Her students were presenting in a showcase last night and were handing out these little puppies…even gave one to the Lt. Governor. Now how cool is that?

And the wiki is pretty darn cool.

This is the stuff I really love, when teachers and students just begin to make this a natural part of what they do in the classroom. They write. They collaborate. They publish.

Way to go Danielle, Kim, Kayla, Dalton, William, Brandon, Aaron and Mrs. Albanese! Wikimasters Rule! And we would love you to come in and comment on this post (as other students have recently done) and tell us all more about what you’re doing.

Go Wikis! Go!

Technorati Tags: wikis, education, schools Delaware

So I mentioned recently that I’ve been spending some time in Second Life, and with some great help from Kevin Jarrett, I’ve now actually got my own “office” space with a view on EduIsland II. If you click on the picture, you’ll see that last night as I was decorating with the help of “Clare Lane” when lo and behold, in walked some guy named “Suriwang Dapto” who looked strangely familiar. Glasses…beard…lookin’ like a 70s holdover…WAIT! It’s David Warlick! Seems he’s setting up an office right next door!

Anyway, I’m still not sure what all of this means for learning and education, and on one level, it makes me scared. Especially since here at 6:30 am in Chicago, as I was in my space straightening things up, who should appear? Suriwang! We both need to get real lives, I think…

If you want to visit, the SL coordinates are 129, 24, 22 and the name is Blogsar Lumpen.

Technorati Tags: secondlife, education

A few months ago when I ran a two-day workshop at Chris Lehmann‘s Science Leadership Academy, we talked about how easy it is for students to be publishing, not just in digital forms but in traditional print as well. Chris even went so far as to hang a sign on one of the shelves in the school library that read “Your Books Here” or something to that effect. Well, George Mayo, who has been doing great work over the past couple of years with his seventh graders in Virginia, and who attended that workshop, has helped his kids put together a book that is now for sale at Lulu. It’s a set of personal narratives titled “Stories from the Past.”

The book is a compilation of narrative essays, written by my seventh grade students, telling the stories of their grandparents, parents and other relatives. These essays show the amazing diversity we have at Silver Spring International Middle School. The stories range from a guerilla war in Ecuador, to WW II and the Great Depression, to two survival stories from the Holocaust, escaping Vietnam during the war, and many more.

It’s a free download, and it costs about $12 to get the paperback version. As George writes “The students are amazed that they are actually published.” In a few weeks, the book will be available on Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. And, I’m sure, it will have a place in his school library.

Now how cool is that?

Technorati Tags: lulu, georgemayo, writing, publishing, learning

So Thomas Friedman’s long New York Times Magazine essay today hits on his newest metaphor for changing the world: “Green is the new red, white and blue.” After spending the last week or so helping my most excellent wife Wendy write an Earth Day “sermon” she’s delivering to our eclectic little UU fellowship today, I hope he’s right. By the way, stay tuned in the next couple of days for a Fisch-esque video on the environment that she created. YouTube, here we come. But I digress…

No doubt, Friedman uses the environmental angle to hammer home the idea that the world is still flat and getting flatter…and warmer. And he frames the three major issues facing us today as “jobs, temperature and terrorism,” all of which he says can be dealt with in the context of green geopolitics:

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Friedman’s self-important tone does get a bit tiresome, but there is still a lot to take away from the piece. It’s a pretty compelling reminder of just how much of all of this, the environment, education…all of it is driven by money and greed. And, this is a moment of serious challenge to our traditional ways of thinking about consumption and our use of the planet’s natural resources, just like it’s a moment of serious challenge to our traditional ways of education.

Technorati Tags: environment, education, change

Chris points to these pictures that show Nigerian students at the first school to receive their laptops in the One Laptop Per Child program. Very cool to see, and it starts my brain to racing with the possibilities. Let’s hope the pedagogies that these kids are taught help them take full advantage of the awesome connection that they now have.

As Chris notes, it does make you wonder what it’s going to take to make this happen in this country as well. I’d heard somewhere that the company who is making these OLPC machines is thinking about a $200 laptop for distribution in the US. Between that and open source and free software, we could really change the picture when it comes to getting kids access in this country.

The other day I was doing a workshop in a place where many, many of the families in the districts lived on welfare or with assistance. The schools had one working computer in a classroom and one lab in the whole building. Few of the kids had computers or access at home. The sad truth is that those kids, and those districts, are falling further and further behind.

I don’t want to look at these pictures as a call to arms…it’s a celebration. It’s no doubt an important moment. But it should give us all pause. In a society that is more concerned with the father of Anna Nicole’s baby, one that spent almost $14 billion on Easter stuff, (the equivalent of 140 million laptops, btw) what’s it going to take before we understand what No Child Left Behind really means?

Technorati Tags: olpc, nclb, education

Please distribute widely…

Edubloggercon2007–This first-ever, international, one-of-a-kind “meetup” of educational bloggers will take place on Saturday, June 23rd, at the Georgia World Conference Center in Atlanta just before the start of NECC.

All are invited–whether you yourself blog, are just an educational blog reader, or even just want to hang out with an interesting group of people.  The event is free, and you can indicate that you are coming (and see who else will be there) at the Edubloggercon wiki.  This event will be unique in that it is going to be organized by the participants in real time at the wiki.  We have access all that day to the large Open Source Pavilion room at the Conference Center and there will be free wi-fi:  beyond that is up to you.  So come join the discussion and help us plan a fun and stimulating experience.

The good folks at NECC and ISTE have thrown their support behind this. It could be a really great day depending on how the “unconference” format works out…

Technorati Tags: necc07, education, blogging, learning

TechCrunch has a nice post up about the best Web page annotation tools out there, and, of course, I’d only heard and use one of them, Diigo. The others are Fleck, ShfitSpace, Stickis and Trailfire. (Anyone using any of those? Any reviews?) I’m not sure I have my brain fully around the uses of these types of tools (aside from the social bookmarking aspect of Diigo) in terms of marking up the Web. Some vague collaborative applications are floating in there somewhere, but I’d really love to hear ideas about how these could be used from a learning standpoint. As one of the commenters on the post asks,  “Can’t I easily comment about other sites using a Blog?” Probably just have to find some time to play.

On a more general tool note, TechCrunch now lists almost 1,400 apps in it’s company index. 1,400! (So what the heck is Lifeio?) And at the rate this stuff is coming out, it’s easy to see why many people get overwhelmed. I did a workshop in Fort Worth yesterday, and people were pretty much filled up by the 15 or so tools that I showed them. (They loved the the new Google MyMaps feature, btw.) At one point, someone came up and asked “How do you keep up with all of this?” The short answer was that I don’t…I can’t. No one can. But that’s the beauty, and the importance, of the network, I told her. That’s where this whole Connectivism thing makes so much sense. I rely on the trusted sources in the network that I have become a part of for the best tools to filter up. For the best pedagogies to filter up. Just as I’m turning to the network to see if it has any feedback on the tools above.

To me, in a nutshell, that’s the underlying pedagogical shift that when you see it really makes for an “Aha!” moment. We need to think differently, really differently, about the learning structures we build for our students. We need to show them the power of networked learning…because we can.

This is our year…I’m tellin’ ya…

Technorati Tags: dreams, torture, angst, curse, love, Cubbies