[The photo is of 12 Crawford Rd., the house where my mother lived the first two years of her life.]

I’ve spent the last few days with folks from Broughton Hall High School in Liverpool. As part of the very ambitious Building Schools for the Future …

You’re of course correct that having a network of others to talk with and hopefully even collaborate with is a very good thing and one aspect of being a mathematician, scientist or historian.

However, first you need something to talk about – typically experiences in the form of research (in the historian sense = search for truth/quest for meaning, not the 5-paragraph school essay sense) and activities like experiments. Publishing, discussing and debating your findings follows the active doing of history, science, mathematics (and other disciplines).

All evidence points to the fact that schools are consumed by language arts and little else. (I included social studies in my original comments.) Assessment, even in math and science are really tests of vocabulary and text deconding skills.

Many Web 2.0 activities mirror the bias towards the humanities to exclusion of the arts and sciences.

“I would rather not look at the production of a video or a podcast as the end of an assignment, but as the beginning or continuation of a conversation.

We are so focused, as educators, with what is learned. I wish we were more focused on learning.”

That blew me away, because David Warlick’s absolutely right and describes what is so absolutely wrong with NCLB and standardized tests and the general way we educate students. We focus on content, not skills. We focus on product, not process. We focus on teaching, not learning. It’s not that the product isn’t important: Imagine trying to tell your boss, “Oh, I know the presentation wasn’t very good, but I learned SO MUCH putting it together!” However, we tend to rush students through those beginning and oh-so-necessary phases in our efforts to get something to grade so we can move on to the next bit of content we need to cover. We don’t give them enough time to explore and engage, because we have to finish Chapter 13 by January. A teacher I know once commented, “really this technology stuff is just the same thing in different format,” and I wanted to say “Maybe it’s the way you’re using it.” (but didn’t!)

More importantly, we’re so overwhelmed with the minutiae of the job, that we seldom allow ourselves the time to learn ourselves. This independent study has been a real god-send for me. I floundered the first few weeks, trying to figure out what I should be exploring, but as I searched and probed and dug, out of that mess process grew the roots of a solid understanding not only of the technologies, but of how they can be used to best advantage. Well, the beginnings of an understanding anyway. More importantly, I’m excited. Truly and honestly boring everyone around me with my enthusiasm excited. I haven’t felt that way about teaching in a few years; I can’t wait to try out my ideas this fall. And don’t we owe it to ourselves (and our students) to do everything we can to encourage and nurture that passion? To move beyond covering content and into enthusiastic engagement?

What skills do we need to use these “tools” and what functions do we accomplish with each?

A blog, a wiki, a podcast.
Same questions!

Taking a minimalist approach then, I like to think about these tools separately, relating how they are USED by different people for their most basic and appropriate functions. All following ideas are the “mashups” of recent conversation, the mixing and matching that add complexity to the main thought that they are used to CREATE information, FIND information, or TALK ABOUT information.

I agree with you about the distinction between teaching and learning.

I am curious about your statement about web 2.0 tools being focused on language arts to the exclusion of other areas.

Just to pull two disciplines out of a hat, science and history–both of those disciplines are researched based, and the research is furthered not only by the doing, but by the sharing of what is done. Without the ability to publish, communicate about, or share the research in science and history, the research itself would be almost pointless. The ability of the larger “network” to connect ideas is extremely important. The abilities we have now to digitize, verbally communicate with voice threads, skype or other tools can power these networks.

I think Will mentioned the Encyclopedia of Life example, maybe here or elsewhere?

So do these tools just add speed to these disciplines? I think they also add the element of discovery, the ability to put “two and two” together and discover, chart, or map something old, or something new.

(And I’m not meaning to leave other disciplines out here, just picked two as examples).

And I actually think writing about science, math, or history or any field on a blog or elsewhere enables a conversation, and is a learning laboratory for scientists, historians, and mathematicians, just as in other fields.

We discuss to learn.

Just my two cents worth here…

Thanks, Will, for igniting the conversation.

# Realize that all solutions are truly temporary, some radically so.
# Don’t underestimate how much the world is changing your students.
# Evolution may seem slow by nature, but it is actually punctuated with dashes and exclamation points and ellipses.
# Give up predictability.
# Be humble in presuming you know what is going on–you don’t any more than the person who cuts your hair.
# Beware conference philosophers–we are all emperors with no clothes.
# Keep perspective. We are all “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller”.

I have more in a post about Taleb’s book The Black Swan at my site.

Just a thought.

Brian
http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net

You can use these tools as a natural extension of School 1.0 type teaching. Maybe it’s 1.3 or something like that, but certainly it’s not as radical a change.

Are we also teaching them how to learn to use ANY new tools on their own, whatever they will be – how to collaborate with them – how to share knowledge with them – how to define and solve problems with them? And to do all of this with fearless confidence that comes from successful experience?

The tools will always change. Right now in my third grade, it’s the blog and the wiki. In the next couple of years, who knows? My job, as a teacher of these young kids, is to prepare them with a set of skills and strategies that will enable them to effectively master and lead with any tools they encounter. To me, this is a big part of how a 2.0 classroom is different from a 1.0 one.