So here we go, another year, another moment to consider what has been, what might be, blah, blah, blah. Cynical, I know, and not the best way to enter the new year. But here’s the story:
This morning, we stop at our local coffee shop to grab some breakfast. As I pull into the small parking lot, two spots are taken up by a black Jaguar, so I have to squeeze the Prius into a smaller, puddle filled spot near the curb. Grrrr. We get out. The Jaguar is idling.
“Hey Dad,” Tucker starts, pointing. He’s a trained idling spotter.
“I know,” I say. “Knucklehead.” Grrrr. There is a local police car in the lot as well. Hmmm…
We go inside, refill cups in hand, and standing at the coffee bar is the Jaguar’s owner. Easy to spot: Long, Western leather cowboy coat with a brown Stetson hat. Right out of a Jaguar commercial. (I know, stereotyping. Sue me.) Wendy is better at this than I am, asking people to shut their cars off. Making the point that idling is among the habits that is slowly killing us all. But he looks like he’s leaving, so I sheepishly give him a pass. I’m a wimp.
We sit down to eat, watch as the local morning coffee klatsch breaks up, and flag down the township patrolman as we walks by our table.
“Can I ask you a question?” Wendy says. He nods. She asks “There’s a new anti-idling law in New Jersey, right?” He nods again. “So what do you do when you see a car that’s idling out in the parking lot? Ticket him?”
The patrolman gives a little shrug and shakes his head. Smiles a bit. “Well,” he says. “We don’t really do anything.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well,” he smiles. “I mean, we don’t really enforce that law.”
Oh. I. See. I look at Tucker. He looks at me, then at the policeman, then back at me. Message received. “And what other laws don’t you enforce?” I want to ask, just for future reference. But I don’t. He wishes us a “happynewyear” and leaves.
Grrrr.
I have one resolution that I think is worth making: At every moment, as much as I can, be the change.
This will probably be my last post of 2007, and while I’ve been doing some looking back, my brain has been taking me more into what next year might be like. I know a couple of things already: I’ll be spending more of my time working in long term professional development with groups of teachers which hopefully will mean less traveling, and I’ll be committing as much time as I can to getting someone with some vision and real leadership potential elected to the White House. (The next two weeks are going to be interesting to watch.)
But for the last couple of days, my thinking has been framed by a post by Clay Burrell, a presentation by Doc Searles, and a chat with a friend.
More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and statist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist “students” (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths - and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?…I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach
I hear this from many of the teachers who I get to meet when I’m traveling around. The feel so constrained by the system, by the very narrow expectations that they have to meet, by the fear of reprisal from any number of constituencies. I’ve been really surprised, in fact, by the number of people who have come up to me after hearing me talk about supplementing my own kids education and say something like “when you start your own school for your kids, let me know.” The dissatisfaction with the education their children are getting is palpable.
Add to this Doc Searles’ presentation for LeWeb3 earlier this month titled “Turning the Tables: What happens when users are really in charge.” The part that resonates the way he talks about the “Live Web” being more important that “Web X.n”, the idea that what we’re moving toward is a world where the network is ever present and interact-able. Makes me think on some level the shift that’s happened this year in terms of on demand learning and interaction. The network feels much more present this New Year. And again, it makes me think of how removed this shift is from what’s happening in schools and classrooms.
Finally, I had a Skype chat with a friend this morning, one who has a young son who is very much into this digital world and virtual environments. We were going back and forth about how frustrating the landscape is, and how the principal at her school told her to “put down her sword” in terms of having conversations with her son’s teacher about how to engage him with technology. In fact, her son is now not allowed to “type” anything, meaning he has to leave his laptop at home and write all of his assignments out. Amazing, isn’t it?
All of which started me thinking, about a different model, one that is built on really small groups of students that meet in physical space studying and learning about the topics they are passionate about and who are also connected to other small groups of students with like minded passions from anywhere in the world via the Live Web, where long term collaborations and research and learning can happen over extended periods, all of it real work for real audiences, published and reviewed by engaged readers participants acting as mentors from global audiences. The adults in the room are co-learners with the students but also educators who can model and navigate the skills and competencies, the “network literacies” (sorry, Tom) that the kids in the room need to have to leverage the connections they help facilitate. And there might be some high-level, virtual administration in there somewhere, to make sure the connections and logistices are working. And there might be parents learning alongside their students, and others who are involved at different levels of the process. Regardless, it’s a place where learning is at the heart of everything. Not grades. Not tests. Not college acceptances.
I know, I know. I’m dreaming here. But heck, it’s the New Year. It’s a time for dreaming…
I’ve been kind of hanging out on the periphery of the ongoing discussion about informal learning and networks and groups that has been bouncing around the last couple of months, but a post from Teemu Leinone and specifically a snip in the comments started something in my brain. Here is the snip:
The problem of the edublogasphere (and actually the whole blogasphere) in the context of learning is that people in the sphere do not - at least often - form any groups (an entity of individuals with an objective).
As I’m trying to think more and more deeply about what networked learning really means in the context of how I might want my own children to apply it their own lives, I think this quote struck me because it made me consider how little I’ve actually engaged in group learning around a particular objective within the network. It is, as Teemu says something that doesn’t really appear very often. This has become, for me at least, a very individualized experience. I’ve referred to it in the past as “nomadic learning” because it happens in a very non-linear, concrete objective-less way. (Technically, I think most are attaching the word nomadic to it because of the mobility of the technology to learn, not the randomness of it.) My learning has a general focus and direction, to be sure, but it’s trajectory is determined by whatever is in my aggregator or on my screen at the moment. There are no written down goals or outcomes that I am attempting to achieve which is one of the reasons this is so different from classroom learning.
Additionally, while I am absolutely “writing to be read” here, meaning that I am conscious and on some level hopeful that others will read and engage in these ideas, I’m not reflecting on these ideas with the direct purpose of advancing the the conversation among a group of others that are connected in our study of this topic. If no one responds or engages, that’s ok. More than anything, blogging, in essence writing is a way for me to cement my thoughts into my brain, a purely selfish act.
But what I think struck me about Teemu’s post is that it makes me wonder about the potential of that group focused study that I could be doing yet am not. And why there seems to be so little of that. I think on some level, the independence or randomness of this learning is what makes it powerful, that it can be about anything that we are passionate about at any given moment. But I guess I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be reaching out more to others to create groups around more focused topics of study, or whether that would work for me.
Interesting story from NPR that talks about the continuing delay in the onset of adulthood (sounds like a disease) that has some implications for our discussions in this community. For instance, the average age of women and men marrying is now 26 and 27.5, up from 20 and 22 fifty years ago. We’re having kids a lot later, and in general, complete financial autonomy doesn’t happen very quickly after college. (Read: Parents need to keep saving.) Alan November in our Seton Hall classes refers to this phenomenon as the “Boomerang Generation”…they keep coming back.
And why do they keep coming back? Well, a big part of it is because they are in debt from going to college.
“As it is now, because I have strings attached, as far as school
goes — loans and how I’m paying for school — that’s kind of what’s
keeping me from entering adulthood,” Herron says.
And they are spending more time in school:
And school is the other part of what Arnett calls the “quiet
revolution.” The number of early 20-somethings in college has doubled
over the past five decades. Today, there are more women than men
attending college. Attending graduate school is more common, also,
thereby increasing the length of time people spend preparing for
adulthood.
Now the upshot of the piece is that all of this is pretty much ok. We’re living longer, we can mature more slowly. The model is shifting, and it’s alright.
I’m not sure I agree. I want my kids to find their independence, to connect to their passions, to not be dependent on the traditional structures to identify their expertise or “success.” My wish for them is absolutely entrepreneurial; now that I’ve joined my wife in starting my own business, I want my kids to be free agents as well, to be able to pursue what they love on their own terms. I know that may not be their path, but I want them to know that it absolutely can be.
I don’t know if I’ll write an end of the year reflection or not (probably not) but now that I’m done with my last presentations for ‘07 I do want to make note of how much the focus of what I’m doing has changed in the last year. Today, it was all about networks, not tools. All about connections, not publishing. All about working together to get smarter, not learning alone. All about how RSS connects us to ideas, how blogs connect us to people, how Twitter connects us to, um, the Twitterverse, and on and on and on. I think for me, at least, 2007 will be the year that really deepened my understanding of how the tools link us and why that’s so important. Not that I didn’t know that on some level all along, but this year, with NECC providing much of the impetus, it just became all the more cemented into my practice.
In the midst of my session in Ontario today, I video Skyped Jeff Utecht in from Shanghai spur of the moment (thanks, Jeff) to just do a couple of minutes on RSS. It was cool giving the people in the room a sense of how much smaller the world has gotten. But what was pretty profound is when I gave Jeff the choice of giving up his blog or his RSS reader, he didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take RSS and Twitter over the blog any day.” Imagine that. But it’s not hard to see why. RSS and Twitter are where the networks are most potent these days. (Of course, however, the RSS part depends somewhat on us keeping our blogs…)
Or when I Tweeted out the standard “Why do you like Twitter?”, I got 52 responses in about an hour. Not that that is anything especially earth shattering, but I really marveled at the passion in the answers. You can read them all here.
Or when I decide to UStream the first hour on RSS and within a few minutes we had people watching from around the States and Canada. Again, nothing incredible there, but another instance of the network made plain.
It’s different now, somehow, than it was a year ago. It’s more immersive. It all feels deeper, closer somehow. Even more important. Maybe it’s just the glow of the prospect of being home for a month. Or the buzz of spending a couple of days with some folks who seemed to, on some level, get the fact that this really is about more than learning the tools. It’s about creating connections, intellectual connections, for sure, but potentially more.
And, maybe in the end, it’s because when I called Wendy today from the London, Ontario airport and she asked me who I wanted to invite to a holiday party her business is throwing next week, none of first 10 or so faces that flickered through my brain where closer than about 500 miles away from beautiful downtown Flemington. (Except for one.)
So the cool thing about this is not that you can pretty easily hack a Wii to make just about any surface you can project onto into an interactive white board (though that is cool, no doubt.) What’s REALLY cool about it is that Johnny Chung Lee, the guy that figured out how to do it, created a video that shows pretty compellingly the amazing applications here and then offered up the program that makes it all work for free on his Website.
I showed this for the first time in a presentation I gave this morning and I made sure to watch the reactions of the people in the audience. They were doing the OMG head shake and stare for the most part. But what I should have made more clear is that the important part of this is not the hack but the delivery, the sharing of the inspiration, the willingness to give it away. You just know (don’t you) that there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of more Wii hackers born because of this, and it’s primarily because of the transparency of the process.
That’s what continues to make me giddy about this moment…
I propose that learning to use blogs, wikis, digital storytelling, podcasts, and video as media of self-expression within a context of “public voice” should be introduced and evaluated in school curricula, after-school programs, and informal learning communities if today’s youth are to become effective citizens in the emerging era of networked publics. In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable.
The whole chapter is pretty interesting (as, it seems, are the other chapters in the collection at least looking at the titles…lots of holiday reading ahead), but I was especially struck by that last sentence especially in light of the blogging that’s been going on of late about digital citizenship and the like. (Dean has as good a round up as any.) While Rheingold is the first to admit that this is a thesis in need of testing, he does make a good case that we have an opportunity right now to engage our students in meaningful participation around the causes they are most interested in. And this is especially apparent as we enter the long stretch to the November presidential elections here in the US (as well as the compelling causes ongoing around the world that students might undertake.)
To be sure, Rheingold also identifies the big hump that we have to get over here, the one of making sure that our students’ public participation actually has a meaningful audience. While there are numerous examples of student initiated protest or action that has scaled well, many don’t. It’s one thing to participate simply for the sake of participating. It’s another all together to be able to have that participation actually create action. Which means, of course, that teachers have to have a deep understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of online activism, that it means more than simply signing a Facebook petition (in the words of Chris Lehmann) or putting up a wiki page todo list.
So here is the salient question, as asked in the chapter: “What if teachers could help students discover what they really care about, then show them how to use digital media to learn more and to persuade others?” The first part is almost (if not more) difficult than the last part these days. But that is a compelling question, I think, because inherent in it is the process of constructing and leveraging networks to learn and interact. As I said the other day, I want my own children to know how to participate effectively in the issues of their day using the way beyond local connections that are now possible. It would be great if they were being taught that in school.
“Education is not merely about transferring information. It is about contextualizing that information in the real life experiences of the learners, and in relation with the experiences of other learners…It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” Mark Federman
One of the things that has been bothering me about my own work of late is the inherent limitations of the current conference workshop or district in-service day structures that I find myself a part of more often than not. I really feel like when people ask me to do a keynote or a general presentation that my job is to inspire, cajole, provide some cognitive dissonance or start conversations. And I am happy to try to do that. But the workshops are a different story. In the best case, they are a full day of one or two particular tools. In the worst case, they are one or two hours on a lot of tools. Either way, the experience usually serves to overwhelm, and at the end of the day (or hour) the participants head back to the craziness of their teaching lives where I’m guessing much of what they have “learned” fails to take root. Now that may be my fault to some extent, but it’s also a direct result of the “drive by” nature of much of what we call professional development. There’s little if anything to support the experience after it’s over. It’s a little better at conferences where people by and large choose to be there, but the larger point is that motivated at the moment or not, there is rarely time for contextualizing the skills and connecting and sharing those experiences after the fact.
Yet, that is the inherent power of these tools, the connections they allow us to create. And in those connections and the networks we can build around them, we begin to seriously challenge many of the traditional constructs of how we do our business. Take conferences, for example. The truth is that the vast majority of what will be offered at NECC this year can be had online, in a community, when you need it or want it. Sure, there will be some sessions that will inspire and push our thinking, but most of the folks who spent time in the Blogger’s Cafe last year will be heading to San Antonio with other priorities than skill building or presentations of papers. We’ll be in San Antonio to push forward the conversations that we’ve been engaged in all year long since Atlanta, to make our networks physical which in turn deepens the virtual. We’ll be there to do what we do in our online community which looks nothing like sitting in rows quietly watching presentations in rooms filled with people.
And the pd part of our business has to change too. These tools support the need for the relationships and the sharing of real-life experiences around the information transfer so that the “learning” isn’t done in relative isolation. We can create community around the experience, community that is not dependent on time and place but is instead available to the learner when needed or wanted. The tools give us opportunities to add value to the face to face, but only, and here’s the rub, if we know how to use the tools. And that’s why workshops feel so stressed, so mind-numbing. Because the way we approach it right now, we have to get it all in one sitting and then hope for the best.
So what about doing it differently? What about doing long-term, job embedded, relationship and network building professional development that blends the best of face to face with the “Fifteen Minutes” model that Carolyn Foote writes about? What about giving teachers new to these technologies just enough to get them started and then take the school year (or more) to immerse them in the tools and networked learning environments where they can learn at their own pace (with some appropriate nudging and guidance from time to time)?
Well, that’s the “different” approach I’ve been taking of late with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, whose knowledge and passion for this work I grow to respect more each day. Working off of the model Sheryl helped develop in Alabama, we’re currently in the midst of six-month long professional development programs with a couple of hundred educators from around the country, leading them through a process that we hope will allow these concepts and skills to really take root in their own learning practice. And it is focused on their own learning, not teaching, not classrooms, not kids. That’s hugely important to us, that these educators be selfish about the learning. No doubt, many of them struggle to approach this process with anything but a teaching lens. But both Sheryl and I feel strongly that what will really create meaningful change in schools and classrooms are teachers who personally understand the potentials of these connections. Already, the most powerful piece of these cohorts to me is that in the process, we’re collectively beginning to build the relationships and share contextualized experiences “that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” The connections are deepening.
Sheryl is fond of saying “This is business as ‘un’usual” and I agree. But it shouldn’t be, should it? While there will always be a role for time and place, physical space, face to face learning, there are other ways and, in some instances, better ways to do workshops and conferences and professional development, ways that definitely do a better job of helping us understand what it means to create and sustain the types of personal learning networks that are now possible. The same types of learning networks, both physical and virtual, we want our own children to master in their own practice.
Alec Couros’ post on digital citizenship makes some valid points, but I’m not convinced that a few examples of really vile content and lazy practice are reasons to think that the concept of citizenship is in some way fundamentally shifting. But I also don’t fall all the way to the Tom Hoffman side of the fence that says citizenship is little more than what many (though not Tom) would call information literacy.
What rings most true, however, was Stephen Downes’ comment about Tom’s post where he says, simply,
The vile content - and it most certainly is vile - is neither new nor original. And it’s not the kids that are creating it.
The fact is that we have been conditioned to see the worst at the expense of the best, primarily by a media that is always on the lookout for the lewdest, awfulest, stupidist behavior of our cultural icons. A media that then inculcates a connection between crass insignificance and news. And, perhaps to that extent at least, Tom is right. If we teach ourselves and our kids to simply stop and use these “five habits of using one’s mind well,” we’ll get a long way down the citizenship road.
How do we know what’s true or not true? How credible is our evidence?
Is there an alternate story? Perspective? How might this look from another viewpoint?
Is there a connection between x and y? A pattern? Have I come across this before?
What if… supposing that…? Could it have been otherwise if x not y had intervened?
And finally, “who cares”? Does it matter? (And, perhaps, to whom?)
Especially the last one.
But I also believe that citizenship suggests more than critical thinking. It requires participation and action. It requires contribution. And the ways in which even our kids can contribute in this environment and the global scale those contributions now have do change the equation. And most importantly, let’s not forget that a lot of kids are creating and contributing and participating in ways that should make us very proud. For instance:
A ten-year old girl in upstate New York who starts a blog Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference that in just a week’s time has caught the interest of a whole bunch of kids from around the world who want to make a difference too.
Or the imminent launch of a network of student bloggers from around the world:
Or, though it’s not directly related to kids, the uber alternative to vile (religious music aside):
(Add your own examples below…)
Point is, there is a lot of good stuff out there too. And not that that fact is new or original, but there are a lot of kids who are doing it, and in the process, learning citizenship. And at the end of the day, if we really want to help our kids become good citizens themselves, the best we can do is to use our own minds well and model our own participation wherever and whenever we can.
Well, didn’t take long for UStream to go mainstream. Mitt Romney’s big speech on Mormonism today got streamed live…not sure how many viewers, but I’m sure it was more than most of the efforts in this community (except of course the worldwide broadcast from that Chicago eating establishment a few months ago.) We’ll get there though…
What I really want to know is if Romney made any use of the chatbox feature. Did he make it interactive at all? I probably won’t actually watch the recorded stream, so if anyone knows if he took audience questions, let me know. It is kind of interesting, isn’t it, to think that we are witnessing the birth of interactive Web TV. Even though it’s pretty much still the wild west (I always cringe when I get to the UStream home page during a presentation) it is another tool, another step, another way to publish.
So I’m looking at pretty bleak odds right now in terms of getting home from beautiful Monterey (where I got the experience of presenting on the TED stage even though it wan’t the TED conference) because there is this big blob of icy snow blue over New Jersey on the weather maps today. But this article about a Boston College professor who is using wikis to have students create the text for his course lifted my spirits a bit. Lots of shifts:
“My wiki is my textbook now,” he said. “This platform is infinitely better and gets better information from a variety of sources. It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated. [The use of] textbooks will begin to fade … and these more collaborative-based, environment will probably rise to the surface.”
But here is the chuckle. In the comments on the story, we quickly get the typical skeptic:
What exactly are the students (or their parents) paying for, and what exactly do the students know at the end of the course that they didn’t know before? Or does everybody just get a nice fuzzy feeling because they create their own exams and determine their own grades? And how many credits do they get for this waste of time and money?
And, in an example of what fun all of this is, a student from the class gives a great response starting with “I’ll take poor assumptions for $800, Alex”. Nice.
Maybe my assumptions about the weather are wrong too…
Google Reader now makes recommendations and, more importantly, relays some data on how many posts occur on those unsubscribed to blogs per week (down to the tenths, btw.) And it’s that last part that gives me pause. I wonder if there is a way to analyze the blogs that I am currently subscribed to in terms of posts per week. Since I’m now in Prius mode and all about data driven decision making (for certain things) I started wondering if there is a pattern to my subscriptions. A very quick, unscientific, first impression look through my feeds shows that the vast majority of them return about 5 posts a week and that very, very few have more than 7-8.
And so here is the thing. On my “Google Reader Recommended List” were a couple of widely read edubloggers that I’m not subscribed to, and when I looked at the average number of posts per week data, I winced: 16.4 and 14.8 respectively. Those numbers absolutely preclude me from subscribing. It’s too much. I’m figuring that the best of those blogs will be filtered by other bloggers who I am subscribed to, and in practice, that’s precisely what happens. (There were links to both of those blogs that came through my reader this morning.)
Which begs the further question that Stephen Downes raised a while ago and that continues to niggle at my thinking: Should we approach all of this more toward reading blogs (and the people that write them) or reading ideas, no matter where they come from? It’s not totally an either or, I know. And there are nuances and complexities to both. But I’m starting to toy with the idea of taking most of the names out of my aggregator and moving toward tracking concepts and tags. What kind of effect do you think that would have? (I have some ideas that I’ll chuck into the comments.)
This all coming on the heels of closing out the first month in three years where I posted fewer than 10 times to my blog. Hmmm…
So here we go, another year, another moment to consider what has been, what might be, blah, blah, blah. Cynical, I know, and not the best way to enter the new year. But here’s the story:
Add to this Doc Searles’ 
I’ve been kind of hanging out on the periphery of the ongoing discussion about informal learning and networks and groups that has been bouncing around the last couple of months, but 
“Education is not merely about transferring information. It is about contextualizing that information in the real life experiences of the learners, and in relation with the experiences of other learners…It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education.” 
Google Reader now makes recommendations and, more importantly, relays some data on how many posts occur on those unsubscribed to blogs per week (down to the tenths, btw.) And it’s that last part that gives me pause. I wonder if there is a way to analyze the blogs that I am currently subscribed to in terms of posts per week. Since I’m now in