“So let me get this straight…you’re just letting people know what you’re doing when you do this?”

“Right.”

“And you call it ‘Tweeting’?”

“Well, uh, yeah. It’s kinda like a bird letting you know where he’s at, I guess.”

“And you do this how often.”

“Depends. Maybe 4, 5…10 times a day. It doesn’t take that much time, really.”

“Like how much time?”

“Dunno…maybe 10-15 minutes, total.”

“And all you’re doing is letting your friends know what you’re doing, right? At any given moment.”

“Right. But they’re not all friends in the standard sense. I mean I’ve never met some of these people.”

“And they let you know what they’re doing.”

“Right.”

“Even people you don’t know.”

“Right”

“Why?”

“Dunno.”

“Like that guy teachanlearn is ‘Reading RSS’ and he wants you to know that?”

“Um, I guess. But he also wants me to click the link there too.”

“Well, where does that go?”

“Dunno…let’s find out…it’s a blog post about a new WordPress theme.”

“And he felt the need to ‘tweet’ that?”

“Apparently.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know. It’s kinda hard to explain. I mean I didn’t really get it at first…still not sure if I do.”

“You know all these people…how many?”

“Twenty-eight right now. They’re all in my network.”

“The network.”

“Right. My teachers…my classroom…remember? We talked about this.”

“Right. And these other people, these ‘followers’. How many?”

“Um, 209 right now.”

“209! And they want to know what you are doing?”

“I guess so, though I can’t imagine why.”

“But you only follow 28.”

“Right.”

“Does that upset them?”

“Who?”

“All those people who are ‘following’ you that you’re not ‘following’.”

“I dunno. I hope not. I can’t follow more than this many right now.”

“But I still don’t get it. Why do you want to follow them at all?”

“It’s just another layer of the connection, I think. I mean on some level, I like knowing that Chris missed his plane or that John’s doing a wiki workshop or whatever. It’s not important stuff on any major level, but it adds something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just…just…presence. Just this weird presence thing. And depth. I can’t really explain it.”

“Presence.”

“Well, more than that. I mean a lot of people post links and resources and ask questions and stuff. I learn from it too.”

“And people answer? So it’s like IM, right?”

“Um…no. I don’t do this for conversation, though it turns into that sometimes.”

“I don’t think I get it.”

“I don’t either.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Technorati Tags: twitter connections networks

Online Newspaper Audience Rising Twice As Fast As General Internet Population: Report

• Quote: Newspapers’ online audiences are rising at twice the rate of the
  general internet audience, according to research by Nielsen//NetRatings
  for the Newspaper Association of America.

  Note: And so what’s different about reading news online that we have to help our kids with?
   - post by willrich

searchCrystal

• Quote:
  It
  is a search visualization tool that enables you to compare, remix and share results from the best web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, Flickr images or RSS feeds.

  Note: Try searching for “iPhone” in mashup mode…
   - post by willrich

David Weinberger: “Open up The Britannica at random and you’re far more likely to find reliable knowledge than if you were to open up the Web at random. That’s why we don’t open up the Web at random. Instead, we rely upon a wide range of trust mechanisms, appropriate to their domain, to guide us.”
(Via George Siemens)

Technorati Tags: literacy, authority, trust

I have to say, I love Skitch. It’s a MAC only tool that makes it oh so easy to snip pictures from the screen, annotate them, play with them and then, and here’s the cool part, easily upload them to your “MySkitch” webpage where you get all sorts of code you can then use to publish it out. I used to love to make collages when I was a little kid. So to experiment, I did the above in about 15 minutes using Flickr Creative Commons photos (listed below) uploaded the result in one click, and then just snagged the code and pasted it in.

That, seems to me, to be covering the “last mile” in terms of some of these non-bloggy tools, the getting it online really easy part. If you want to see that done with screencasts, take a look at Jing. You capture your video, click a button, and it’s online for you to link to or do whatever. That publishing hump continues to get smaller.

Anyway, just a bit of play on a rainy Sunday morning…

(BTW, I’ve got four Skitch invites for any MAC users who may want one…leave a comment with your correct e-mail…I send ‘em if I got ‘em.)

Lights
The Veins of Bangcock
Jealousy
Dark Dangerous Moods
a loto stand
Sunset
Locking nothing
Orange jellyfish for orange day
Today is orange day
halcyon

Technorati Tags: skitch, flickr, art, collage, publishing

Social Media And University: How New Technologies Are Used In Academia - Robin Good’s Latest News  Annotated

• Quote: The results are conclusive. Social media has arrived in college admissions. The ivory tower is innovating even faster than the elite Inc. 500. And the game has changed forever.

  Note: Interesting look at how colleges are beginning to use social media in admissions, 20% of whom now graze social networking sites to find out information about potential candidates.
   - post by willrich

With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking - New York Times  Annotated

• Quote: With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies
  recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography,
  drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound
  and videos. In the process, they are reshaping the world of
  mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely
  to be both richer and messier than any other.

  Note: Doesn’t that last part sum just about all of this up? Richer and messier…that’s the Read/Write Web.
   - post by willrich

Bud Hunt was nice enough to throw up a test of the CommentPress theme that allows paragraph by paragraph commenting, and I posted some session descriptions I was thinking about for the Learning 2.0 Conference I’ll be at in Shanghai in September. Feel free to take the theme for a spin and offer up some feedback if you feel so inclined.

Technorati Tags: learning20, commentpress, blogging, WordPress

One of the first things I downloaded on my iPhone was the Ted Talks video that featured Sir Ken Robinson, the one titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” For some reason, it’s one of those pieces of content that I feel like I have to consume every few months or so. It just says so much about what’s wrong with the current view of education, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re encouraging our kids as much as possible to play and dance and draw and sing. (In fact, we may be dropping a family trip to the beach in a couple of weeks so Tess can go to drama camp…like she needs it.) I love when he says:

“The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people, think they’re not because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.”

He makes such a compelling case for rethinking our approach, yet it’s a case that we here in America certainly aren’t listening to. A study released yesterday of about 350 districts across the country showed that 44% of them were reducing time on art, music, health and physical education. Instead, we’re getting more and more focused on reading and math where the standardized test scores really matter, a 31% decrease overall in subjects that aren’t tested.

Now I know Daniel Pink isn’t an educator, and I hear those who are wondering why we here in edbloggerworld seem to revere “A Whole New Mind” as much as we do. But when he says that creativity and right-brained thinking will be more and more crucial to success, that an MFA will mean more than a MBA, it resonates because we’re in a highly creative space. In this network, creativity abounds. At almost every turn, people are pushing the tools, playing, making connections, trying things out, succeeding and failing in most transparent ways. And the cool thing is, we all learn from what others do, at least I do, whether it works or not. To me, Twitter and CommentPress and Skitch, which I’m playing with tonight, cropping photos in new ways and experimenting, are chances to explore and to dig…to construct. Yeah…we construct with Twitter. What a concept. Or watching my kids play with Scratch. Why is this any different from putting pencil to paper and drawing, writing stories, making ideas become real? Creating?

But it’s obvious our classrooms and our structures don’t support this, nor can they when saddled with standards like the ones we’ve imposed. If Pink is right, if my kids really will need to be more creative and flexible thinkers to succeed in their futures, we’ll have to be the ones to get them there.

(Photo “Children’s Day-VI” by Carf.)

Technorati Tags: creativity, readwriteweb, KenRobinson, education, schools, art

Powered by ScribeFire.

Just a brief on a development from the folks at Future of the Book. They’ve created a new WordPress theme that allows for comments to be left on each paragraph, not simply at the end of the post. Huge potential there from a teaching writing standpoint and from a focusing the conversation standpoint. If you want to see it in action, check out McKenzie Wark’s book “GAM3R 7H30RY” and you’ll get a great idea of how it works.

Now I just need to find somewhere to get the theme installed so we can play…

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing, wordpress

So about 80% of the people on the plane to New Hampshire were reading Harry Potter last night. Well, ok, maybe 8 people, but it seemed like a lot. The guy next to me warned me when he sat down. “If you know the ending, I don’t want to hear it.” Between the hour long delay getting out in Philly and the hour long plane ride, he cruised through about 200 pages. Impressive.

When I got out of the terminal here in “Manchestah” to where the hotel shuttle was supposed to be, a woman who had arrived for the user group meeting I’m keynoting tomorrow recognized me (oy…t-shirt, two-day beard…oy) with, you guessed, it Harry Potter in hand. He’s everywhere.

Then today, in the midst of a workshop I was doing, I tweet to the network that we’re looking for the favorite Web 2.0 tools of the group. Within minutes, the tweets start coming in. I’m showing it real time in Twitter Camp. The people of the room are mesmerized. I’m trying to articulate what all of this means, the fact that in the midst of my sobbing at the Philly airport yesterday watching some soldiers come back from Iraq, greeted by their screaming children and affectionate wives, not being able to imagine what it must be like for them, that in the midst of that powerful moment I decided to Tweet the fact that I was sobbing.

I need help.

So anyway, in response to the tool question, Lucy Gray (who’s Twittering her way to Monterey, btw) responds with “How about Scribd?” and I’m like “How ’bout wha?” So I go there and try to take like one minute to make sense of what I’m looking at when I see someone has posted a .pdf of the entire Harry Potter book scanned in a page at a time.

All 638 pages.

And I’m doing this on screen as everyone is watching, and there are like audible gasps and reactions from the group and I’m getting pretty stunned, mumble something about copyright and intellectual property when all of a sudden I see this link underneath the .pdf that says “mp3,” and I’m going “this can’t be what I think it is” and so I click on the link and sure enough it starts downloading this huge file to iTunes which after a few minutes opens up and this female computer voice starts reading the last Harry Potter book through my computer speakers to the whole room. And there are a couple of women in the front who have their fingers in their ears saying “Ooooooommmmmm. Ooooooommmmmm.” so they can’t hear this voice which, if you really pay attention you can kinda get in the rhythm of things and follow along the story.

It’s surreal.

And amazing.

Have I mentioned lately, I love this stuff? I really, really do. Every day for me is like a little kid at Christmas, my eyes opened wide by what this interconnected life I’m leading brings my way. Today was, on balance, just too much fun.

I’m not worthy.

(Photo “The Circle is Complete” by Teban.)

Technorati Tags: harrypotter, learning, twitter, manchester

First off, I got an iPhone on Friday, and I love it. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty impressed. (I know…that doesn’t take much.) It’s just…um…smooth and easy. The screen is amazing, and I am loving the full web browser. And the camera was way better than I expected. Nice.

So yesterday, when we spur-of-the-moment decided to go for an afternoon hike on the Appalachian Trail, I threw the iPhone in the pack. I know purists will decry the mixing of technology and trees, and to be honest, I didn’t tell Wendy that I brought it. But I’m glad I did.

We were nearing the top when another hiker and his dog appeared coming down the trail. Suddenly, his dog stopped short and started growling at the bushes. The hiker said, “Whoa! Check this out.” Of course, my kids started running over there, until they heard him say “It’s a black racer snake.” They screeched to a halt until we slowly walked over and saw this beautiful, long, black snake slithering through the underbrush. “Is it poisonous?” my daughter asked. The hiker didn’t think so, and I surely had no clue. So we kept our distance and watched a bit longer as it gracefully moved further into the stand of wild blueberry bushes.

I sat down on a rock overlooking the Delaware Water Gap, buzzards and hawks catching thermals and spiraling up right in front. And I reached into my backpack and pulled out the iPhone. Within a couple of minutes, I was reading about black racer snakes on Wikipedia. Nope, not venomous. They eat crickets, moths and small rodents. And they are fast. Tess and Tucker took turns looking for other pictures, and we pretty much confirmed what we had seen. We were learning on the fly. And then, we zoomed in on where we found it using the satellite feature on Google Maps which the iPhone makes really easy.

I, for one, think that’s pretty cool. We’ve seen stuff on other hikes and said that we were going to go back and “look it up” but, as often happens, we never did. The immediacy of this was what was cool. The fact that we wanted to know now, and we could. I know you don’t need an iPhone for that. No doubt, we coulda brought the trail book that identifies a lot of the things we saw. But this gave me an interesting feeling all around. And what it made me really yearn for was to have my kids chronicle their find at the Encyclopedia of Life, when it comes into full use.

Now that would really be cool.

Technorati Tags: iphone, learning, snakes, hiking, wikipedia

So something shifted a little bit more for me this week at Building Learning Communities. Or maybe it solidified. Whatever it did, it’s feeling pretty powerful at this moment.

I think a lingering hangover from Edubloggercon in NECC had something to do with it, but having another chance to spend quality time talking to people like David Jakes, Dean Shareski, Darren Kuropatwa, Ewan McIntosh, Barbara Barreda, Marco Torres, Chris Lehmann, Joyce Valenza,  Christian Long and many others was just such a kick. And as I left this morning, I felt really sad on some levels, because even though I know the learning will continue, the conversations and connections we were making were just…just…scintillating for me. What was so cool was that 80% of my waking hours were spent in some sort of immersion in this conversation among people who ooze passion for it. I mean, read through some of the chatcasts on Dave’s blog. Good lord that’s some intense back channel chat. And it’s not so much a love for the tools as it is a love for what the tools allow us to do, to experience. It was just one pretty raw learning moment after the next, and it’s a feeling you don’t want to lose.

And that is where some of my thinking really solidified, that passion part. I know this sounds corny, but I was really wishing that every one at that conference could have experienced the same connection that I felt to this community. The one here where we’re just all talking about how we figure out what needs to happen, what we can do, what the world is going to look like, and how we can help shape it. Where, yeah, we ooohhh and ahhh over someone’s iPhone, but a minute later we’re back to talking about where all of this is headed.

And what shifted for me was walking into two of my presentations and basically chucking the script because it just didn’t feel relevant. I mean how ironic is it to talk about school transformation in a setting that looks like a…um…school? And I just got tired of it. I desperately wanted to hear other people’s voices in my sessions, and so starting with the one I wrote about on Wednesday and the morning session yesterday, I just decided to try to facilitate a conversation and see where it took us. And, I don’t know about anyone else in the room, but for me, it was pretty powerful.

Last night on the dinner cruise, I had the honor of being interviewed by some of Marco’s former students who were there to capture snippets of the conference in snippets of video. After they finished, we started talking, and I asked them what they thought of the conference. In a word, they were incredulous that teachers would come to an event like this and sit in long rows of chairs dutifully listening to whoever was in the front presenting. They talked about how people were coming up to them asking them for technical assistance, and how, in general, they were awestruck at how far ahead of everyone else they seemed to be. It was an amazing moment for me, to hear their reflections, because I found them so powerful. They just couldn’t understand it.

It was great.

One more story. Ewan was everywhere at this conference, and no one created more and published more content than he did. He’s amazing. I was looking at his pictures on Flickr and yearning to understand how I could make my own 35mm Nikon do what his 35mm Canon was doing. Believe me, it wasn’t the camera. So I snagged him and made him sit down with me on the bus to Boston Wednesday night and started picking his brain. My camera was different from his, so he had to experiment a bit with it to figure it out…learning in action, right? But he did, and then he took literally two minutes to show me how to begin to play. Not how to take a certain picture in a certain way. Not how to prepare for every shot. But how to play and experiment and take a picture, look at it, make an adjustment, try it again, reflect, reshoot, etc. until I finally got what I wanted. And if you look at my photostream, I think you can begin to see pretty quickly when that bus ride took place.

I learned just enough to teach myself. Pretty cool.

This was a great week. Really. I mean it.

Can’t wait for the next one.

Technorati Tags: blc07, learning, education

Some random reflections and thoughts from Building Learning Communities Day 1:

–In a lot of ways, I can’t believe this is my fourth BLC conference, and if nothing else, the one thing that really stands out is that there is very extensive intellectual (if not practical) understanding of the Read/Write Web as compared to my first year here when a lot of people looked at me funny as I talked about blogs and RSS and the like. Yesterday at a session that Tim Tyson was running about leadership, just about everyone said they wanted to learn more about Web 2.0 stuff, and in a weird way, it was a moment of some validation. Another signal that the train has left the station. But still, the fact that I am still doing a lot of talking on an introductory level speaks volumes, especially about RSS.

–Although the conference has doubled in size this year, from 300 to over 600, it so far has retained its feeling of intimacy. And I just never go to conferences where there are so many people from outside the US. One really funny moment today was sitting down for lunch with a contingent from Northern Ireland and asking them what they thought of the workshops and presentations. They all said they hadn’t learned a thing, and they were serious. It seems they’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time over there. After a little prodding, they admitted their thinking was getting tweaked, but it was fascinating to listen to them talk about the ways in which they were already rethinking their schools.

–There is one technology director here who brought two kids from his school to attend the conference. What a concept. Can you imagine a conference where really high level ideas about schools and education were being discussed where there were just as many students in the rooms and in the discussions as adults? Whoa.

–For some reason, I decided to get pretty edgy in my “New Literacies” presentation and I basically started by saying the whole concept of having people get up and give a presentation at conferences like this is really becoming ironic amidst all of this talk about conversation and collaboration. And so it was nice in that about 15 minutes of the hour (at least) was taken up with discussion. While Tim’s keynote this morning made plain the power of publishing, I wanted to push past the feeling that the product was the end of the process, and I tried to move the concept of what we can do now into the realm of building sustained, trusted, relevant, safe learning communities and networks in which the products nurture the conversation and the learning. That creating and sharing a movie or a podcast or blog post is important, but it is the connections we make around those artifacts, the discussions and interactions that surround them from the community where the most powerful learning takes place. It’s where the “meta” stuff happens, where the true potential lies.

–Ewan McIntosh is a rock star. Plain and simple. “The Italian mafia makes you an offer you can’t refuse. The Scottish mafia makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Priceless. David Jakes and Dean Shareski came back from Ewan’s second session awestruck, and I was truly sorry I was presenting opposite. (That is one of the personal frustrations of this conference…so much I want to learn and see.) Waiting for Jakes to post the “Chat Cast.”

–For reasons yet unclear, I am falling more in like with Twitter. Oy. Jakes put up a reflection on his blog that really resonated.

With Twitter and Skype, I have access to immediacy. My aggregator and my del.icio.us network (18 people I follow, 80 who follow me) are more asynchronous, and not as immediate. I need both types of networks.

Amen.

–I found this quote this morning via Stephen Downes and used it in my presentation.

 “We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning.”

Now I’m serious…that wins the “Best Sentence in a Blog Post of 2007″ award (so far at least.) Amen. Amen

–Warning: We’re all heading downtown tonight…Tweets ahead.

(Photo “chatcast” by jutecht.)

Technorati Tags: blc07, learning, education

Happy Blogiversary - WSJ.com

• Quote: “And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way. Blogs are an advance guard to the rear. For example, only a primitive would believe a word of Wikipedia
  (which, though not strictly a blog, shares the characteristics of the
  genre). The entry under my name says that in 2003 “major news media”
  broadcast reports of my death and that I telephoned Larry King and
  said, “I ain’t dead yet, give me a little more time and no doubt it
  will become true.” –Tom Wolfe

  Note: Some interesting observations from a variety of folk on what effect blogs have had. Guess I’m primitive…
   - post by willrich

That’s a question that I’m really trying to get my brain around of late. In the past few weeks, I have really ramped up my rhetoric to teachers in terms of trying to get them to examine how these technologies challenge their own personal learning. How can the connections we make with these tools affect their own learning practice? How can they begin to understand what the implications for learning are for their students until they at some level understand them for themselves? And so on. And for the most part, heads nod politely in agreement.

But, here’s the thing. By and large, most of the questions that come up during the workshop or the presentation run along the lines of “how do we keep our kids safe with this stuff?” or “if I want to put up my homework for my kids is it better to use a blog or a wiki?” or “so parents could subscribe to these RSS feeds, right?” All good, useful, legitimate questions. But very far removed from the personal learning focus I’ve been trying to articulate. In fact, when I stand by these teachers and hear their questions, when I look at them directly and say “well, that’s a great question, but I really want you to focus on your own practice here, your own learning,” more often than not what I get is a scrunched up face, a biting of the lower lip, a feeling that their brains are saying “AAARRRGGGHHH.”

And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.”  I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.”

So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

Or, maybe it’s just me…

(Photo “Having to read the old books again” by Edublogger aka Ewan McIntosh.)

Technorati Tags: blc07, learning, education, read/writeweb

So, one of the many reasons I love my wife is that she constantly brings new ideas and experiences to our family, and yesterday was no exception.

At five o’clock, “Matt” showed up, dressed in a green bandana covering his billowing hair, a Grateful Dead tie-dye t-shirt, shabby corduroys and flip flops. He looked like he’d stepped out of 1971. He had a big plastic tub filled with a variety of blenders, choppers, mixers and a slew of totally natural, organic sauces and ingredients. And he had an engaging smile that had my kids hooked from the first minute.

Matt was at our house to teach us about the Raw Food Diet. What that means, believe it or not, is that nothing Matt eats is cooked in any way. He’s a vegan…a raw food vegan. And for a couple of hours last night, we were too. We supplied the raw stuff. Matt supplied the learning. We had smoothies made from kale, bananas and lemon juice. We had fresh zucchini “pasta” which was, um, long curly strips of zucchini fashioned by some crank driven slicer that I’d never seen before. And it was covered by an absolutely incredibly delicious cool blendered sauce made up of tomatoes (fresh and sundried) and celery and other greens and yellows. We had banana ice cream, and chocolate fudge made of all sorts of cool stuff that I can’t remember. And it was all amazing.

But, as usual, the best part was watching my kids watch Matt as he talked about fruits and vegetables and enzymes and acids and vitamins and digestion, describing almost all of it (even the chemistry stuff) in ways that the kids could get it. He was animated, smart, funny…and he taught my kids a great deal. (And my kids already know a lot about nutrition…they read the labels of everything they eat and we talk about what all that “stuff” is.) And while I already guessed the answer, I asked him the one question I wanted my kids to hear the answer to. “So Matt, how did you get into all of this?” You guessed it. No school. No degrees. Self-taught, self-read, self-made businessman. (He was making $50 an hour, btw, which we spilt with a group of other friends who came over to join in the fun.) “I just started eating like this, and it just changed my life in so many good ways.” And he found everything he could read about it, most of it online, learned the vocabulary and the dietary and nutritional foundations, experimented and played with the food. And he got a job at a health food store and now, 24, he was starting to spread the word. It was very cool.

I know, I’ve said it before. I feel the most pressure in my parenting life around helping my kids find their passions and help them pursue them. I want them to be surrounded by people like Matt, people who give them all sorts of models in terms of learning and doing and pursuing what they love. Yesterday was a great example for them of what that looks like.

And they got to drink kale. They loved it.

(Photo “side dish of raw vegetables” by JustChay.)

Technorati Tags: raw_food_diet, learning, vegan, food, health