This weekend I saw the future. Not that it’s the long term future by any stretch since things seem to be moving at warp speed anyway. But there were a couple of technologies on display at the “New Media Literacies in Learning Landscapes Conference” in Charlottetown, PEI that had me feeling like that giddy little geek that sometimes pops up when everything around me is feeling new again.

The first isn’t really all that “new”, but it was the first time I’d taken part in a live video stream of one of my presentations thanks to Jeff Lebow of Worldbridges.com (and edtechtalk.com) who was there to record the proceedings. I should say that on Friday when I gave a short tech pep talk to a group of about 50 7th graders who are embarking on a most excellent online archiving project about PEI, it was very cool to tell them that folks from as far away as Australia and Abu Dhabi  were watching us live. And then yesterday for the conference with about 40 island teachers, we had at one point about 25 viewers “in da house” to watch and take part by text chatting questions and having that more and more ubiquitous back channel chat going on throughout. (The best was when Jeff told me Clarence Fisher had been watching while doing his dishes as I raved about his work during my keynote. Kinda scary, but cool.)

Jeff used about a hundred miles of cables, numerous headsets, cameras etc., but he streamed the whole thing through Ustream.tv which, if you have a camera, a mic and a fast connection, you can start “broadcasting” live from wherever you are in like maybe 3 minutes. (And so of course the new model is to Tweet “Hey I’ve got a show starting in 15 minutes! Here’s the link! Come participate!” Mercy.) The mind reels with the possibilities, and I’m actually to do a first “broadcast” interview Q&A from the audience on Tuesday if I can set it up. (I’ll be sure to Tweet it from willrich45.)

Now I know that streaming per se isn’t all that bleeding edge any longer, and really neither is the whole Second Life in education discussion, though there is much there that still needs to be worked out. But what Dave Cormier (who with Bonnie Stewart were running both the archive project and the conference) showed us in terms of a new Second Life “hack” (for lack of a better word), was pretty mindbending. OpenSim uses the Second Life interface (which Linden Labs released to developers last year) but allows you (wait for it) to serve up your own world on not just the server of your choice, but (wait for it) even just your local computer. Want a world just for your classroom that isn’t “out there” on the Second Life server? Done. (Read more about it in Dave’s post here.)

And get this. Dave said that while this is all still in alpha and very thin, within six months we’ll probably be able to take our own local worlds and selectively connect them to other local worlds, building communities just among those that we want our kids to interact with. From our desktops. That’s what he’s working toward in the project he’s doing with the PEI kids. They are going to build their own archives in their own local worlds and then invite other school worlds in to show them around and teach them about the history of the island. Private tours, so to speak.

I’ve struggled with Second Life for a lot of reasons, and frankly, I haven’t stepped a virtual foot in there for about six months. But what I saw and heard the last couple of days just started my brain really exploding with the possibilities. OpenSim sounds like it’s building toward an easier, safer, more convenient environment than where Linden is going. And you can do it without the downside that comes with the open grid or even the teen grid to some extent.

We’re not quite there yet with either of these technologies, but this weekend, you could just feel it coming. That is what’s so much fun. Almost as much fun as spending time with Sharon Peters, Rob Patterson, Stephen Downes and Harold Jarche and some other great educators trying to make a difference. Good stuff.

Technorati Tags: technology, secondlife, learning, education, streaming

I’ve had George Siemens’ “Pots, Kettles, and other small appliances of like appearance” post open in my tabs for what, three weeks now, and it’s been percolating in my brain as I keep mousing across it from time to time, rereading, rethinking. (As a side note, that’s an interesting little shift in my practice that the advent of tabbed browsing and sessions management in Firefox has brought, isn’t it?) George writes:

We are at a point of real change in education (k-12, university, even corporate training). We (the edublog community) still carry the baton of change, but if we are unable to conceive a broader vision of systemic change, we’ll find ourselves passing the baton to others.

So, that “conceive a broader vision of systemic change” line brought me back (once again) to the shift I think we’ve been trying to make in this conversation. The one that moves from being about tools and “flatness” to one that begins to really think about and, more importantly, articulate school models and systems in different ways. And even in that discussion, there seems to be two natural camps evolving, those who say reform is next to impossible without totally blowing out the model, and those who feel that we already have some inroads to reform within the current structures, that there are already progressive school models that might begin to point the way. I struggle to find my own way here, for a variety of reasons. I admit that I have little contextual knowledge of this whole debate to bring to the table. My understanding of progressive school reform movements is thin at best, and I’m in catch-up mode. Yet I have two children in a system (not just local) that is badly in need of reform in light of what’s coming. Blowing up the model will not work for them (unless we decide to remove them from the system) and, frankly, I don’t think there will be a critical mass of folks willing to do this to the system for decades to come. Yet I am equally negative on the prospects that schools can meaningfully change in some sort of timely way without starting over. As a good friend of mine who is planning to leave education after 15 years said recently, “I have no hope that the educational system as we know it will appreciably change in my lifetime.” He’s in his 30s, btw.

Look, I’m a writer. I list to my right. I think in metaphor. So when George says we need a broader vision of systemic change, my mind runs to find words that might begin to piece that vision together in my own brain that might make sense. And as I’ve been mulling over all of this, of how to best begin to perhaps reframe the way I think and talk about schools that might allow me to think and talk about a “broader vision” of schools, my brain keeps coming back to something that I heard Tom Carroll of NCTAF say last month at that Institute of the Future seminar I was at. And I’m not sure he even remembers that he said it because it was just a few words in a much longer response about the future of teaching, but in the middle of that response he said “…school as node…”

I wrote that down.

I think for most people, school is still seen as the (THE?) place where kids go to learn. I know that’s the way it was for me. Yeah, there was a lot of informal learning that took place on the playground, on Main Street, in the back of cars, etc. But the “real” learning, the important stuff happened at school. It was the center of learning in my life, though I never called it that, per se. But I know that’s how my mom saw it. You went to school to learn because that’s where the knowledge was. And if the teachers at the school were good, they helped you understand why that knowledge was important. And that “vision” worked pretty well for a lot of years. It was pretty easy and consistent.

Problem now is, it’s not working any longer. School isn’t the only place where the knowledge is. Knowledge is everywhere. You don’t have to go to school to get it. And now, because knowledge isn’t stuck to a time and a place any longer, knowledge is contextual. It’s not one size fits all. The whole idea that 30 kids in a classroom need to learn the same stuff at the same pace at the same time just makes no sense any longer. In this environment, we can’t keep thinking of schools as the center of knowledge and learning. Instead, we have to start thinking of schools as a part of a much richer tapestry of an individual’s learning and education.

As a node.

Thinking seriously about schools as nodes in larger more expansive networks of personal learning changes the concept of what schools are for. It doesn’t diminish their role, but it does reframe it, and I think it places the emphasis where it more appropriately belongs these days: helping students create, edit, and participate in their own networks of learning. (What a concept.) What if we started seeing schools as the places where our students learn how to learn, where, when they are younger, the school may be at the center, but when they leave us, they have built a vast, effective network of learning of their own in which school and schooling is simply one node? Where we’ve helped them learn how to nurture and sustain those networks to serve them over the long term? Where we’ve shown them how to leverage those connections in safe, ethical and effective ways? Our roles as educators and systems would no doubt shift away from content delivery toward modeling and supporting each learner’s unique journey. And it would challenge us to rethink the ways in which we assess what our students have learned. But that would be crucial and important work, work that some semblance of traditional school structures might actually do pretty well.

But, as Hugh’s great, great drawing suggests, we’d have a lot of getting over ourselves to do for that to happen.

So anyway, just some thin early Thursday morning thinking thrown out for comment, pushback, hole-poking, name-calling, whatever from a node in the network… There is much, much more to consider here, but it is a reframing and some language that at this moment makes some sense to me at least.

(Just as an aside, after thinking about this for a while, I started imagining how school would look as just “a node” in my learning practice right now. As in following “school” on Twitter, or reading the “school” feed in my aggregator, or adding “school” as a friend on Facebook. All of those seem pretty bizarre at first blush, which either means this whole line of thinking is equally bizarre or it speaks to how inelegantly school currently fits into the personal learning network that I’m already a part of.)

Technorati Tags: networks, learning, education, schools, teaching, George_Siemens, connectivism, Hugh_McLeod, school_reform

Only 29 tabs open today. Here’s a few of the things I’m hanging on to:

Twitter Tales: This might be old news since I’m having trouble even finding my aggregator these days much less read anything in it, but somehow I stumbled across Nancy White’s “Twitter Collaboration Stories” Wiki. Really cool. Twitter as “Virtual Water Cooler”. Twitter for “Serendipitous Improvement”. And, my favorite, Twitter for “Global Presence and Participation in Professional Development.” Who woulda thunk just a few short months ago that this kinda whacky, 140-character, micro-bloggy, not-sure-why-the-heck-I-like-it-but-I-do tool could have so many good uses? And, of course, the even warmer fuzzy is that you can add your own story to Nancy’s wiki. Life is good (as long as the Cubs win, of course.)

Electoral Education: So I’m not a Hillary Clinton supporter at the moment, though she’s still in my mix. And I have to say that after listening to her responses to the education question at the Yahoo Democratic Debate Mashup, I’m a little more impressed. She actually says things like “Is education working in the 21st Century?” and “We have to ask ourselves some tough questions about how we better prepare our children who live in a very media rich environment and who are much more tuned into the world than I ever was at their age” and “just because I went to school and folded my hands on my desk with the teacher at the front of the room does that mean we need to keep on doing that year after year after year?” (or something close to that.) And in response to a Jonathan Kozol question, she says “we should not look at our children as if they are walking tests…we’ve gone way overboard…” On balance, considering it’s politics, I was surprised. (Now if only she didn’t laugh at the Bill Maher question the way she did.)

Sage Students: Darren coined the term “scribe” to describe the student whose responsibility it was to summarize and extend the days events from class on the blog. But now KB Foglia has come up with a different, and I think even more interesting moniker for students working her AP Bio blog: “sherpa.” “Each day a student in class will be assigned to be the class sherpa — our guide who will show us the clear path up the mountain of knowledge.” Nice.

Quote O’ the Day: “They expect to be part of the discussion, part of the living thing that text itself is becoming.  This is how we get kids excited about language, about writing, about thinking: by giving them the power to be part of the conversation. When we lock our machines down, filter their internet service and not allow them to be contributors we take away the involvement, the intensity, the power. Remember doing grammar worksheets in school? I don’t. But I do remember art class, the time I got to take part in making a radio play and another teacher that let us act in class. They involved me, they challenged me, they forced me to think, to play with language, to defend my opinions. Language fairly pulses and thrives across cyberspace. Let kids in to the conversation.” Clarence Fisher

25 to go…

Technorati Tags: learning, education, technology

One of the things I asked Jeff early on in planning for Learning 2.0 in Shanghai last week was whether or not I could do something a bit different in my sessions. I just did not want to “prepare” a 45-minute presentation to “deliver” to the people in the room for a variety of reasons. I’m sure the genesis of this feeling was because of the “unconference” format we used at Edbloggercon last summer in Atlanta, but I find myself more and more questioning the “get up in the front of the room and impart knowledge” model that is so thick with irony in the context of this conversation that it just doesn’t feel quite right anymore. So, anyway, what I decided to do for my five sessions was to simply offer up a topic, prep 10-15 minutes of discussion starting context, and then sit down and try to facilitate a conversation. Happily, Jeff was all for it.

For the most part, that’s how it worked out. Sheryl and I decided to combine one of our sessions, and we basically ran a discussion on overcoming obstacles around some key questions. And two of the sessions ended up being slated as “unconference” sessions where I prepped even less and just tried to let the conversation fly. But the other two had me talking for about 15 minutes on the topic and then just opening it up. And from my standpoint, at least, some fascinating discussion ensued. And what was great was that Jamie McKenzie sat in on one, Gary Stager on another, and Wes on a third. And they all contributed to the conversation. I just played the good group therapist and tried to reflect and deflect, prod and probe, without giving too much of my own bias away. (I will say that someone who I least expected came up later and heaped on some genuine love on what transpired conversation-wise in one of the sessions. It was a nice moment.)

On a number of different levels, I guess this could be seen as selfish. For one thing, I didn’t have to do as much work, and for another, I got to hear and learn about other people’s ideas and experiences instead of simply conveying my own. That’s not to say that there wasn’t some work and deftness that went into leading a worthwhile discussion. But it is a much different beast from nailing together that PowerPoint or that wiki page and then going through it step by step, filling up the allotted time. And my bottom line takeaways were that a) for me at least, it was a much more fulfilling experience, and b) for the participants, I think, it served a more effective purpose. (If anyone was in the rooms with me for those sessions, I’d love to hear your feedback.)

So here I sit, as do many of us right now, I’m sure, thinking about NECC 2008 and the looming deadline for proposals about a week away. And I am seriously struggling. Because I want to do something really different. Something disruptive…not in a bad way, but to push the envelope a bit. I want to bring the unconference to the conference, not just have it on it’s own separate day, and I’m wondering how to best do that.

Without totally cutting my throat here, it’s becoming obvious that traditional conference formats just aren’t as needed as they used to be. That’s not to say that there still won’t be 14,000 people (not including you) in San Antonio trudging from room to room, getting a look at the latest tools or ideas and learning just enough to make them dangerous, and wallowing in the multi-gajillion dollar vendor floor picking up huge Best Buy bags that will end up in the nearest landfill a day or two after. (My, how many laptops we could buy for kids and teachers with the money getting thrown around down there.) And it’s not to say that getting together face to face is no longer important. (K-12 Online is an amazing undertaking, but the totally virtual conference leaves something to be desired as well.)

In this world, every moment can be a conference session, one that’s much better than watching some slide show. I mean seriously…throw a dart at any conference session list and see if you hit one that can’t be done better through the network. (Ok…there are some, I know. But what percentage? 10? 20 percent that would be worth traveling the distance to see?) Somebody somewhere of late talked about this new, on demand, speed learning a la Twitter that’s cropping up, and it is pretty powerful. Tweet that you want to learn something and voila…instant classroom. The other day, John Pederson and I decided to learn Yugma (worked for him…I still can’t get it to see my Skype list.) And then Jeff tweets that he’s trying WiZiQ and all of a sudden I’m in a room with about 10 other people from like 10 other continents and we’re all chipping away at it, trying to figure out what works and how. And after you read Jeff’s post on the topic, tell me he woulda’ walked out of a conference session able to write that.

Point is, I think, that there is a better way today than sitting in that room facing forward doing what all of our kids do. (And look, I’m guilty as charged here too in terms of most of what I do when I present.) And that’s why Edubloggercon left us all in a daze. Because it wasn’t that. It was participatory (if you wanted it to be.) It was passion, not passivity. And, I don’t know, but yeah…I want my kids teachers to be learning the way I do rather than spending my tax money to sit in those sessions. If that comes across as hubris, my apologies. But I’ll gladly pay their way to the next Edubloggercon, wherever that might be.

So, I’m askin’…how do we bring the unconference into the conference?

NBC has now joined the other major media outlets in taking a stab at kinda, sorta giving away it’s content but ultimately making you pay if you want to keep it model that the New York Times just failed at. Download your favorite show the night it airs, keep it for a week on the one device you download it to, and then, “poof” it goes away. Read the whole article.

But here is the graph that jumps out:

NBC’s move comes as companies throughout the television business search for new economic models in the face of enormous changes in the business. Networks continue to lose audience share, and viewers — especially many of the highly prized viewers under 30 years old — are increasingly demanding control of their program choices, insisting on being able to watch shows when, where and how they want.

Hey! Get me rewrite!

Valley Central’s move comes as schools throughout the education system search for new models in the face of enormous changes in the learning. Schools continue to lose relevance, and students — especially many of the highly prized students over 13 years old — are increasingly demanding control of their curriculum, insisting on being able to learn when, where and how they want

Never happen…

Technorati Tags: content, learning, shifts

Well, we missed the typhoon, the one that never materialized past the torrential downpours we had on Tuesday, and here I sit, back in my comfy little, boring, stateside house at 5 am, unable to sleep. Time to get on with reality. But before we get back to our regularly scheduled blogging, I just wanted to post my favorite picture from my China trip. Jeff pointed out that what really made this picture was not the unique beauty of the old woman’s face but the fact that she was wearing the traditional Communist uniform. We were just walking in the old part of town and she happened to open her door and come out to sit. She seemed equally happy to have her picture taken.

A few more realizations came on the long flight back from Shanghai. First, and this is going to sound incredible, in a city of almost 20 million people, I saw not one gas station. Not one. I have no idea where those millions of drivers and their millions of cars get their gas. Second, Sheryl and her son Noah pointed out that there were quite a few newly adopted babies coming to the US on our plane. I hadn’t really sorted all the crying that was going on until they pointed that out. And that made me think back to another thing I had noticed on our walks…we saw very few babies in general. No doubt the government’s one child edict had something to do with that. And finally, while there was a great deal of poverty by our standards, there seemed to be very, very little homelessness. And those that did live three generations to a small apartment still had a nobility and cheer that was striking.

And just one more quick thing that I found of interest for now (although I’m sure I’ll be blog processing this trip for weeks to come), Tom Friedman’s column yesterday spelled out a lot of the same themes I wrote about the other day. In some cases almost eerily so. In talking about the Chinese city of Dalian which is almost as big as New York but has no name recognition at all, he writes

I am not blaming them. It is a blessing that their people are
growing out of poverty. And, after all, they’re just following the
high-energy growth model pioneered by America. We’re still the world’s
biggest energy hogs, but we’re now producing carbon copies in places
you’ve never heard of. Yes, “Americans” are popping up all over
now — people who once lived low-energy lifestyles but by dint of oil
wealth or hard work are now moving into U.S.-style apartments, cars and
appliances.

And

Without a transformational technological breakthrough in the energy
space, all of the incremental gains we’re making will be devoured by
the exponential growth of all the new and old “Americans.”

Shanghai surely is symbolic of a new “America,” and I’m afraid, in the long run, we all may be worse for it.

Technorati Tags: shanghai, china

So here’s the view from Jeff’s apartment at about 3 pm Shanghai time. Typhoon Wipha is scheduled to make a direct hit on Shanghai at about 6 am tomorrow. Eight inches of rain. 60-plus miles an hour winds. Over 200,000 people evacuated already. And we’re on the 31st floor. Guess we’re not gonna make it home tomorrow…

Technorati Tags: typhoon, shanghai, china

Not to overstate this, since stark contrasts can be seen in just about any major city you visit, but the surrealness of this place lies in the scale of those contrasts. And it’s a scale that is just hard to put words to.

Shanghai is city split by a river. On one side is the old part of town where, in pockets at least, the architecture is a mix of European and what you would traditionally think of as Chinese. During our walks and rides around this absolutely massive city (Jeff tells me the ride to find green rolling hills takes two and a half hours), we’ve been referring to this as the “real China”. On the other side of the river is the Western face of China, a place where literally just more than a decade ago there was little more than rice paddies as far as the eye could see. (We bought photo books yesterday where the photographer found old photos from various parts of the city and then went back and took new pictures in the same spot…the contrast is breathtaking.) Now, tall, neon-lit buildings and concrete have replaced all of that rural history. Two of the five tallest buildings in the world stand right next to one another. A third, “The Pearl” is something right out of the Jetsons, a tall spire that holds a strand of three pinkish orbs, the smallest and highest being a revolving restaurant where you can take in the sights. (If you want to skip the textual attempts at describing it all, just see the picture I posted a couple of days ago.) And make no mistake; it is Western. There’s a Hooters along the river, all of the major chains of hotels are here, and you know where to go if you want coffee, right? (Apparently, the big buzz around town is the first Cold Stone Creamery that just opened.) At night, the buildings themselves become billboards, and ships cruise down the river carrying these huge LCD screens that must be like 50 feet wide and 30 feet tall, flashing one advertisement after another for designer clothing or local restaurants and health clubs. Cars and bicycles and scooters and people are everywhere, and there is just a constant blur of activity and motion.

When you first see it, you have this “Grand Canyon Moment” where it just takes your brain a few minutes (or hours, or days) to fully comprehend what it’s looking at. And even then, as opposed to a quiet scene of natural, awe-inspiring beauty, the scene is just overloaded by noises and smells and colors and that just makes it hard to focus on any one aspect, on really “seeing” any one piece of the whole. I found myself just staring at it, blinking. It’s cliche, I know, but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

And then there is the old part of Shanghai, the “real” China, the part where a restaurant may be a couple of chairs and a table on a street corner where people can sit after buying some type of meat or fish on a stick that’s been barbecued on a makeshift grill built on to the back of a 30-year-old bicycle. A place where people dry their clothes and their linens on lines or fences or poles…anything that works. A place where you can buy these large, loud crickets housed in clay pots or small, bamboo cages and then enter them into some type of insect cage match for sport. A place where in almost every dimly lit storefront or window you can see people selling and bartering during the day, and lazing about, smoking cigarettes, playing cards or board games at night. A place where elderly couples stroll slowly along the sidewalks while half-crazed scooter drivers and cyclists weave in and out among them. A place where, according to Jeff, blocks of people may be “removed” overnight, their homes razed with amazing speed to make room for new big, Western buildings. A place where you can fill yourself up on really good dumplings for a dollar or less.

From the balcony at Jeff’s apartment where I’m staying these last two nights in Shanghai, these two different worlds are easy to take in. Almost straight down lies the old city, while not far in the distance to the East, the towering glass buildings literally nip at the clouds, the two separated only by a winding river and what seems like 1,000 years. It’s wild.

For myself, I can’t decide whether I like this place. Without question, this visit has changed my frame of thinking in a lot of ways, some of which I tried to articulate a couple of days ago and more of which I hope I can capture more of the coming days. The people here, both Western and Eastern, have been kind and gracious and helpful. And I’ve had a slew of new experiences, my first foot massage (an hour long), bartering (though with little energy) at the knockoff markets for 32 Gig flashdrives ($15), eating the abolute best fake lemon Chicken at this very cool vegetarian restaurant Jeff led us to. (Combine that foot massage and the tofu chicken and I might have had to start smoking again, something, btw, that a vast majority of men in this country are addicted to.) And even though there is a typhoon approaching and it’s pretty stormy outside, we’re going to go after some of the more cultural aspects of the city today.

But by and large, the city is almost too much to take, too polluted, too inconsistent, too sensuous, too much in motion. There is just too much that changes in too short a time that it’s hard to get your feet under you, massage or not. And there is something else, a reality that creeps slowly into your brain to scratch this can’t-put-your-finger on it itch that you feel after a few days here. At some point you realize this: there are no birds in this city. No squirrels. No rabbits. Nothing, and I mean nothing wild save the bats that swoop around your head as you walk through the parks at night or the occasional feral cat whose eventual destiny is almost surely sealed from it’s birth. When it dawns on you, that you’ve seen no living animal in the wild for five days, it kinda creeps you out.

Yes, China is growing, and you can’t help but feel it’s force when you scan the horizon from Jeff’s balcony. But the unsettling irony of this view of China at least is that for the most part, what we see here is ourselves. It’s a mirror of our own industriousness, entrepreneurship and hard work, and our own waste and greed and avarice as well. An article in the Shanghai Daily yesterday noted that the gap between rich and poor in China is growing, that a lake in one of the nearby provinces is almost “dead” from the pollution, stories that aren’t all that different from the headlines we read every day at home. While you might argue that the priorities in this country have always been misplaced, the Shanghai face of China seems to be bent on following our worst lead. New is old. The dissonance is acute.

Last night, after we had toured much of the city, we got dropped off a few blocks from where Sheryl and Wes are staying near Jeff’s place, and we strolled slowly home, stopping for a glass of wine, watching couples in the park dance to the sounds of old men plucking ornate stringed instruments, passing thousands of people in the process. At one point, Jeff, Sheryl’s son Noah and I turned down one of the back alleys in the old town and quietly walked past dimly lit apartments and navigated lines of drying clothes strung in our way. We peered into the darkness and made out the outlines of a family sitting on folding chairs in the middle of the walk, taking in the warm night. Not wanting to intrude, we turned back, and as we did, I looked into an alcove where, almost imperceptibly in the darkness I saw an old Chinese woman standing in a doorway. In the soft fluorescence of a streelight, I could just barely see her face, wrinkled, gentle eyes, staring back at me. She leaned against the door jamb, her hands clapsed in front of her, what I thought to be a shallow smile on her face. In that instant, in the muted blues and grays of the shadows, in the hushed corners of that cluttered side street, after a day filled with color and sound and chaos, something about Shanghai finally came into focus.

Technorati Tags: china, shanghai, learning, culture

So what am I learning at Learning 2.0? This is a bit of a very tired brain dump, but, I’m learning that…
 
…the teachers everywhere struggle with many of the same challenges and pressures that teachers in the States struggle with, by and large. The one big thing they don’t struggle with is NCLB.

…that teaching at an international school can be an amazing and rewarding experience. I’ve been struck by how many of the people I’ve met here have parents who taught abroad, and how many of them can’t imagine teaching in the US again (though many of them did.) That’s not to say that they are all expats, but it is interesting to hear them talk about how “hard” it is to come back to the States, for any number of reasons.

…that for the first time, if I had it to do over again, I would seriously consider taking my kids abroad for a year or two to give them a more global perspective. That’s not to say that they still don’t have the chance to immerse themselves in another culture before they get out to their real lives (and I think now I’m going to give them a lot of encouragement to do that), but as I flipped the pages of the yearbook in the office at the Concordia International School where the conference is being held, I saw a bunch of kids from all over the place who were getting a pretty amazing experience. For some reason, I’m really loving the sense of adventure that seemed to jump off of those pages.

…that Susan Sedro, Clay Burrell, Kim Cofino and others are just as compelling and interesting as their blogs suggest, and that they are doing some really fantastic things in their classrooms with these technologies. It’s been great to get a chance to talk with them and hear their contributions in my sessions.

…that things are cheap, really, really cheap here. And on some level that conflicts me. I am really looking forward to this afternoon and the next two days when the conference has ended and Jeff (pictured here) takes us around to where the “real” China is. (Where we are right now is kind of an upscale expat village where mostly corporations house their workers.) But I’m also somewhat put off by the zeal for buying knock off Rolex watches and designer clothes. China is a huge contributor to the environmental problems of the world, (the air here is just not right) not to mention all sorts of human rights violations and poor working conditions that I have not doubt surround the production of all that junk. And while I’m no saint, consumerism in general will be the death of us all. I keep wondering, how are we going to help our kids navigate the looming environmental crisis if we ourselves can’t do it. So, downtown Shanghai will either blow my mind or make me more depressed. Maybe both.

–that Gary Stager is a really good guy, which I already knew, btw. We may not agree on everything, but more than most, Gary wants kids to learn in engaging and meaningful ways.

We wrap up at noon today…that’s midnight EST, as my body is still well aware. Photos, I have a feeling, are going to be scarce as Flickr is blocked here and while the Firefox plugin seems to be working, the upload isn’t working. I’m going to have to get my brain around how to do it.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn, china, shanghai, learning, education

So it may seem strange to start my first blog post ever from China with a picture of my daughter, but the reason I’m feeling so giddy at the moment (aside from about seven hours of sleep after a 27-hour travel day) is because I am just loving my Skype, Skitch, connected from wherever I am in the world life. It’s about 9 am here in Shanghai and I just got off an hour Skype video call with my kids (where it’s about 9 pm) where I, like I normally try to do, helped them with their homework (Tess and I had an interesting conversation about “bartering”) and asked about Tucker’s soccer practice and talked baseball. (My Cubbies are hangin’ in.) I know it’s not the same as being there, but I have to tell you it’s pretty darn cool to be half a world away and still be able to see them and interact with them. And I loved snapping pictures of them on my end with Skitch and then giving them the link so they could see what I just posted and watch their faces break into huge smiles, all within, literally, 45 seconds start to finish. In five years, I know, that’ll seem like nothing, but right now, it’s a big deal.

Sheryl and Wes and I arrived about 9 last night and Wes was by far the most productive on the trip, writing about 37 blog posts, doing a couple of podcasts, and getting yelled at by the Chinese authorities at the airport for taking pictures in the  customs line. (I’m sure they are on Flickr by now, which, btw, is blocked here.) Jeff picked us up and brought us to the hotel where I crashed hard after flipping through the dials and seeing almost nothing but English and American sporting events and something that looked strangely like “Chinese Idol.” Could that be? With my very limited first impression, I guess I’m almost disappointed at how Westernized it all feels. But Jeff is promising to show us the real Shanghai on Monday and Tuesday after the conference which I am looking forward to greatly. And, my own personal angst was about the air quality here…on the drive last night, you could only see about a mile or two ahead the haze was so thick. And Jeff said that was a great improvement over the last three years…they’re gearing up for the Olympics next year, you know.

So now I’ve got an afternoon to get my brain in gear for what promises to be a pretty interesting unconference-y conference with folks from around Asia. It will be really interesting to see what their take is on all of this. I feel pretty much out of my element, and in those cases I usually end up learning more than anyone, especially with the focus that Jeff and the organizers have put on the conversations. I’m leading five sessions, two of them are going to be totally unconference, one to discuss the Cult of the Amateur as it relates to Learning 2.0 and the other titled “Teachers as Learners; Learners as Teachers.” The other sessions I’m going to “present” for about 10-15 minutes and then hopefully use the rest of the time to talk about “The Big Shifts in Learning,” problem technologies in schools, and our own personal learning practice as educators. There will be a lot of Twittering going on, so if you want to follow that conversation just tap into the Learn2cn feed. And don’t forget the almost mandatory Ning site for the conference that has, I think, the coolest Ning banner to date. Hope to see you in the mix.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn, shanghai, learning, education, China

So picking up on yesterday’s theme (which amazed me in the scope and depth of commentary, btw) here’s a picture I don’t have to take while I’m in Shanghai for the Learning 2.0 Conference this week. There ought to be quite a conversation going on…Gary Stager, Alan November, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and others…I’m sure our host Jeff Utecht will be chronicling it well. I’m just so looking forward to another 19-hours on planes…

(Photo “Shanghai” by photocello2006)

Technorati Tags: shanghai, learning20, education

We took a lot of photos while in Australia. A lot. I must have shot about 400 frames throughout the trip, most of them of my kids having fun. But a few of them were of fairly tourist-y spots: the train station in Melbourne, the Syndey Harbor Bridge and Opera House, nice landscapes at various surfing spots. And I found myself wondering aloud at some points just why it was I was taking these pictures. I mean surely, there are better ones that I could find on Flickr. Why shouldn’t I just use those to capture my memories?

Case in point, this picture here that I took of Bell’s Beach, one of the top surfing spots on the South Australia Coast. Beautiful place. Kinda ok picture. Look on Flickr and what do you find? Over 1,100 photos tagged with “bells_beach” and probably twice that many in the database that aren’t as easy to find. And even on the first page of results are a couple that I find much more appealing than my own. Now even though “all rights are reserved” on these, I can still find almost 100 that have a Creative Commons license, and many are the exact same angle, exact same shot. Most importantly, there are some that are as good if not better than mine.

So the question is, why take pictures of places that you visit that probably aren’t going to be as good as the photos that others have already taken that are already available for you to use in your own albums, slide shows, whatever? I mean, unless you want to organize the wife and kids in front of the spot just to prove you’ve been there, what’s the point?

Just a question…

Technorati Tags: flickr, australia, phots, creative_commons

So here’s another example of how things are changing…

Yesterday I’m driving down Main St. in the little town where I live when I see a crowd milling about the local funeral parlor. That in itself isn’t totally unusual, but as I pass by, I see an inordinate number of teenagers coming out. Not good. Having been away for the past two weeks, I’m completely out of touch with the local news, so I’m left to wonder if some tragedy may have struck the high school where I used to teach.

When I get home, I click into my Facebook account and do a quick scan of my Hunterdon Central friends, both former students and teachers. I notice one of my former students had joined the group “For Mike–(RIP 9/3/07)” There, I find that one of the more popular athletes from a few years ago had been killed in a car accident. Sure enough, the services listed on the page corresponded with the activity at the funeral home. The group has almost 400 members, and lots of tributes, and pictures and all in all is a pretty moving tribute to this young man, including a thank you from his younger brother. Amazing.

When I see things like this, when I think about how different this world is, not just for the kids and families and friends who are openly grieving for their loss and connecting online in very profound ways, but for me as well, someone who is learning about ideas and events in ways that are new and interesting almost every day, I think about those who say that we could do all of this back in the days of the BBS and that nothing has fundamentally changed. I remember those days too, the days before the Web, and I just can’t fathom how anyone could think that this isn’t different.

Technorati Tags: facebook, connectivism, learning

I need to clear out some tabs in my browser…

Back to School 2.0–A Business Week article that highlights some of the work teachers have been doing with Web 2.0 tools, many of whom participated in Sheryl Nussbaum Beach’s most excellent professional development program in Alabama. (You go, girl!) “Freeman says her district is trying to help teach children to solve problems, think creatively, and understand the world on a global scale. To do so, Trussville City Schools and other forward-thinking schools across the country are using technology such as podcasting, blogging, Internet calling via eBay’s (EBAY) Skype, and other tools to foster collaboration, creativity, and the ability to connect with others globally.” What a concept!

YouTube Video Gets Boys Sued by A&P for $1 Million–Just up the road from me in Califon, NJ, two brothers who work at a local supermarket do an after hours rap video about produce that has its lowpoints, post it to YouTube, and get sued when some patrons see it and say they’ll never shop at the store again. “‘The defendants sing various disparaging and disgusting lyrics pertaining to groceries and produce,” the suit said.’” Meanwhile the D’Avellas are providing regular updates on their Web site about the lawsuit. They said, ‘Truthfully, the jobs mean nothing to us; we are merely fighting for what is right.’” Which is what, exactly?

Girl Power–”Ashley Qualls, 17, has built a million-dollar web site. She’s LOL all the way to the bank.” Whateverlife.com, which provides skins and social connections for MySpace sites and is bigger than Oprah! You can even “calculate the exact name of your perfect lover.” Crazy kids. (Twitter nod to Chris Sessums.)

Porn Filters No Barrier for Net Users–A Melbourne student disabled the Australian government’s $84 million porn filter in minutes. “Tom stressed the filters were missing the mark by a long way regardless of how easy they were to break. ‘Filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway,’ he said. ‘Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix.’” Outta the mouths of babes… (Nod to Stephen Downes)

And last, but not least…

Local Schools Battling High Tech Distractions–Seems the beligerent kids in San Diego schools are actually text messaging during class, admitting to cheating with their phones, and listening to iPods during lectures. Why is that? “Social psychologist Jean Twenge believes she knows why personal technology devices are all the rage among teenagers. Her research indicates young people today are [wait for it...] more self-absorbed than ever before, and iPods and cellphones play into that.” Was that absorbed or abs-bored? The administration response? No surprise… “So Vista students now can only use electronic devices at lunch, break, or after school. Students who break the rule more than once could face detention. And the district is even holding teachers more accountable.” But here’s the good news. There is another voice! Jeff Robin of High Tech High says “Kids will always change, it’s up to the teachers to do something more, and it’s a lot of work. I’ve seen so many teachers out there that say, well I’ve been giving these same worksheets out for 30 years and if it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for these kids. It’s not though, times have changed.” Get out of the county…

Messy, messy times.

Technorati Tags: technology, education, learning, classrooms

Aside from taking about a zillion pictures during our trip to Australia, (and yes, I did take that photo) I did do some work too, giving presentations at the Expanding Learning Horizons Conference in Lorne on the south coast and at a smaller, local conference in Mackay on the East Coast. (Did you know like 95% of people in Australia live near a coast?) After the one in Mackay, a woman came up to me and gave me an Aussie “yeah but.”

“I’m really interested in all of this, but I have to tell you, I can’t do any of it in my classroom.”

(In case anyone is wondering, I found the lives of educators in Australia to be pretty similar to those in the US, especially in terms of their own use of social software and their ability to access these technologies in their schools. But I do have to say that some of the work that’s being done in Queensland to prepare teachers to teach with technology is pretty impressive. I’ll save that for a later post.)

“So that’s fine,” I said. “But what do you want to learn more about? What are you passionate about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, what do you do when you’re not teaching?”

She looked at me quizzically as if to say ‘Well, what does that have to do with anything’ and said “Well, I really love mountain biking. I do it with my family all the time.”

“So, that might be a place to start,” I said.

She hesitated. “Oh.”

“I mean, there must be thousands of mountain bikers out there who are sharing stories and information online,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some pretty vibrant mountain biking communities that you might explore.”

Her eyes widened. And then she said, and I quote, “Oh! You mean I can do this for myself?”

We talked for a few more minutes about how this is about learning for yourself first and then potentially modeling that for your students even if you can’t necessarily use the concepts very easily in school. And when she walked away, she seemed almost surprised that it wasn’t just about teaching, that it was about her own personal learning, too.

I know I’ve been here, done that in terms of teachers as learners, but that moment really captured for me a lot of what’s been niggling at me of late. Not only is our kids’ enthusiasm for learning being largely dampened by the system, so is that of our teachers. And I’m not sure which of those problems is worse.

Technorati Tags: teaching, education, Australia,