Nice article in Educause by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler titled “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0″ which is another great conversation starter for those who still may not have a basic understanding of these shifts. It’s written more toward the higher ed audience, obviously, but there is still a lot of resonance for the K-12 set.
There are many familiar themes here, but a couple came a little clearer for me. First, the idea that while this is still about being able to find information in many ways, the Read/Write Web makes it more importantly about finding people.
The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people.
I was on an Elluminate session for our PLP project yesterday with Brian Smith and he made the point that he’s no longer as apt to do a Google search as he is to do a del.icio.us search when he’s looking for information, and I find myself doing that more and more as well. I know that’s still about information, but now it’s becoming more about information in the context of the network. It’s people with an interest in a particular topic making a decision about the usefulness of a resource, and, in doing so, making themselves available for connections.
I also liked the way the authors described the the importance of participation in this world:
Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.
They talk about the apprenticeships that can now be found online, citing the open source software community as an example. But most critically, they highlight how participation is now a part of gaining mastery instead of an outgrowth of it.
But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.
That’s certainly been borne out in my own experience.
There’s more here, obviously, and I think it’s well worth the read. Bottom line is that we have to prepare our students to be much more active participants in their own learning, and that we have to help them experience the value of being embedded into communities of practice that can sustain their lifelong learning needs.
On the somewhat surreal occasion of the 1,000th person to follow me on Twitter (really, how is that possible?), and since Twitter seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues at EduCon this weekend, it’s probably an appropriate moment to reflect on how I’ve evolved in my thinking on this strange yet somehow important little tool.
In my session on Saturday, when I opened up the discussion on personal learning networks, the first response was simply, “Twitter”. We attempted to define it, someone mentioned “Twitter guilt” I believe, and various folks weighed in on why the did or did not “get” Twitter. At some point later that day (lunch maybe), I made the comment that it seemed a lot of profound, previously bloggable ideas were being “Twitterialized”, which, of course, I think someone Twittered. (That’s why I’m blogging about it…so there.) Case in point, when Kristin Hokanson was asking the very probing questions of the morning panel on Sunday, she started one with “In 140 characters or less…” and we all laughed.
But that idea has been sticky in my brain. I wonder if this 140 character world in which many of us spend much of our time is in some way dumbing down the conversation. And my thinking still feels pretty thin on this because for some reason Twitter just remains hard to fully get my head around, hard to peg. But here are some somewhat random thoughts, not all original btw:
*I’m thinking that in my case at least, only a much smaller percentage of those people are actually tuning into my Tweets. Even so, I know that I’m pretty much an outlier here, an outlier in all of this at this point at least, seven years into this grand network building experiment that has turned my life on its head.
*It feels like some use Twitter because 140 characters alleviates the pressure of developing and articulating ideas in a full-fledged blog post. At some point this weekend, we were talking about this from a reader standpoint and I was struck by how almost equal numbers actually liked just reading the short blurb while others missed the context. Which makes me wonder what if any affect Twitter is having on my reading.
*Twitter gets most frustrating to me when I see long lists of Tweets from people who are responding to the individuals who Tweeted them giving me absolutely no context for what the response means or is about. These usually end up being something like “@soandso That was amazing! Thanks for sharing it! This will definitely transform my classroom!” or “@soandso My mother used to say the same thing! ;0)” some of which compel me to start clicking through links to gain some understanding that usually ends up being personal or irrelevant. (Mea Culpa, I know, but I try to limit it.) There is a signal to noise ratio here that is more acute than blogs I think, and I’ve started doing some unfollowing because of it. (Not that I follow that many folks already, I know.)
*And since I only feel like I can follow a few people or risk “Twitter guilt” (and hours of my life) by not reading every Tweet, most of the people I follow are people I actually know and have met in person. (In fact this weekend I was able to add quite a few to my blogger/Twitter life list.) Btw, how do people “follow” 657 others?
*Twitter is most powerful to me when people ask questions and get quick answers and suggestions. And you see that happening all the time. It really can be “PD on Demand” in many ways.
*Twitter is also powerful in terms of networking, no question. The ability to send links or interesting ideas to people who might not currently have you on their radar makes for a pretty connective tool.
*I struggle with the marketing aspect of Twitter. And I am guilty of this as well, the “New Blog Post: The Twitterialization of Blogging, Networks, Etc” http://tinyurl…” type of Tweet that serves to bring readers in faster than a speeding RSS aggregator. I feel kind of slimy for some reason when I do that. (Not slimy enough, of course, to not do that at some points, but slimy enough to not do it every time.)
Obviously, Twitter wasn’t created to be the learning/professional development tool that it seems to have become. And I think in many ways it struggles under the weight of that. And yes, there is some network capital to be harnessed here. And yes, 1,000 “followers” (I really, really hate the way that sounds) makes it compelling. But while there may not be a direct cause and effect, since I started using Twitter last March I’ve been blogging less and reading blogs less and wondering more about where all of this takes us in the end.
There’s much to write about EduCon Day 1, but here are just some quick thoughts before heading over for the final sessions:
*Science Leadership Academy is a special place. There are tons of schools out there that have more technology, better facilities, etc., but I think we’d all be hard pressed to find a school that has a more positive, deeply connected culture than this school. You talk to the teachers here and they tell you they feel like the luckiest teachers in the city of Philadelphia. They are passionate and committed to the principles that they have developed together. When the students talk, they talk with empowered voices. They don’t just attend this school; they live this school when they are here and when they are not. This culture of caring and respect is sticky in their lives, and they too seem to sense the uniqueness of what’s happening here, at the school and at the conference. And then there is Chris, who is just one of those unique individuals who is smart enough, charismatic enough, caring enough and invested enough to pull it off. I don’t know about the rest, but he’s coming closer to hero status in my eyes, someone who embodies totally what educational leadership is all about and has no agenda, none, other than to do well by his students, his teachers and his community. And, by us.
*I sat in on Tom’s session that made the case that School 2.0 is not far afield from the principles set forth by the Coalition of Essential Schools. We didn’t even mention the word “technology” for the first 45 minutes, and I was struck by how problematic, in my mind at least, the whole “2.0″ piece is because of the obvious ties to technology. (Does that make sense?) As the second sentence in the description about this conference says, “This is not a technology conference.” But it is, because in large measure, technology is what is driving the conversation that schools must change. Tom talked about how in the 70s and 80s, we were discussing these same ideas, and now, after an interlude where school reform has been beaten down by NCLB and standardized assessments, there seems to be some heat building under that reform fire again. It is, I think, because of what is now possible in large measure to these tools. As Chris says often, “Technology is not additive; technology is transformative.” So the question becomes, how do we square great principles with great technology to make great schools as SLA? And the bigger question, the more frustrating question that many of us kept coming back to throughout the day, is does it scale? I asked Chris last night if Philadelphia is now looking at SLA as a continuing experiment or a model. Without hesitating he said “Oh, god, I hope it’s not a model.” Grrrr… I understand why not, but I think there are a lot of folks here who are looking for those concrete takeaways that help them get from where they are closer to here. And, that are at their core hoping the answer is that it’s just not possible to do without building from ground up.
*Finally, the one real head twister that I got yesterday was during Chris’s own session when he was talking about how his thinking is moving away from the “having kids publish globally to the world” product piece of all of this a “let’s focus on the process of community building and publishing within the walls” approach. (Not his quotes btw, just my attempts at paraphrase. You can always go to the videotape.) Using Moodle, SLA has established a vibrant, important ongoing discussion that extends not only what happens in the classroom but also deepens the sense of connectedness that these students and teachers feel. The culture of sharing and participation that is created within the local community is more important almost that making those connections outside. (I asked one of the students in my session about how connected he felt outside of the school, and his answer was all about his connections inside the school…interesting.) On some level, this is an “a ha” moment for me that I’m going to be writing more about at some point.
What a cool world it is when you can bring a couple hundred passionate educators together in a special place like this for two days of really rich conversation without ever printing up a flyer, buying an ad, creating a marketing piece or making a poster. In all of our conversations about Twitter and blogs and Second Life and whatever else, the pure power of network connections that can make face to face connections like this happen is never far from our minds, at least, certainly, not mine…
Just in case anyone might be interested in watching my EduCon session. Would love to have those of you who attended drop some of your comments in here if you like.
So the cool news here is that the CommentPress project that’s been spearheaded by the folks at The Institute for the Future of the Book is about to evolve into something that I think will be greatly useful for educators using WordPress blogs in their own practice or with their students. For the uninitiated, CommentPress is currently a WordPress template that allows readers to leave feedback not just on posts as a whole but instead on each individual paragraph in the post. That in iteself has creates all sorts of potential, but it does mean making an entire blog capable of doing that, which you many not always want. So here’s the news: in the near future, the CommentPress functionality will be released as a plugin, meaning bloggers will be able to select individual posts to have paragraph level commenting without making the whole blog subject to that.
Just off the top, that creates some cool possibilities for student feedback on each other’s posts and for deconstructive feedback on teacher provided models in terms of writing instruction in general. And it also enhances the idea of “connective writing” in that I really think we need to help our students use in their practice. Personally, I can’t wait to install it here so you guys can really pick apart my ideas.
Finally, if you want to participate in a pretty interesting experiment using CommentPress, check out the new book “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Gamrs and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin of Grand Text Auto fame. Here’s the teaser:
Expressive Processing is the name of my forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press. Now is the time, in traditional academic publishing, when the press sends the manuscript out for peer review — anonymous commentary by a few scholars that guides the final revisions (and decisions). As Jeff Young reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, we’ve decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: asking the Grand Text Auto community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.
Noah, who is a professor at UC San Diego, is asking readers to do an open review at the paragraph level using CommentPress. It’ll give you a chance not only to get a read on what looks to be ain interesting work but to experiment with this new blogging tool as well.
The Atlantic has a piece by Matt Miller that made for some great plane ride reading last night. The article “A Modest Proposal to Fix the Schools: First, Kill All the School Boards,” gives a quick overview of Horace Mann’s desire to bring a Prussian system of nationalized schooling to America before lamenting the effects that the local control we ended up with have had on our educational aspirations.
Mann’s epiphany that summer put him on the wrong side of America’s tradition of radical localism when it came to schools. And although his efforts in the years that followed made Massachusetts a model for taxpayer-funded schools and state-sponsored teacher training, the obsession with local control—not incidentally, an almost uniquely American obsession—still dominates U.S. education to this day. For much of the 150 or so years between Mann’s era and now, the system served us adequately: during that time, we extended more schooling to more people than any nation had before and rose to superpower status. But let’s look at what local control gives us today, in the “flat” world in which our students will have to compete.
The United States spends more than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem-solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading. Half of all black and Latino students in the U.S. don’t graduate on time (or ever) from high school. As of 2005, about 70 percent of eighth-graders were not proficient in reading. By the end of eighth grade, what passes for a math curriculum in America is two years behind that of other countries.
Dismal fact after dismal fact; by now, they are hardly news. But in the 25 years since the landmark report A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm about our educational mediocrity, America’s response has been scattershot and ineffective, orchestrated mainly by some 15,000 school districts acting alone, with help more recently from the states. It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories; they’d know what kinds of planes and tanks were needed, right?
When you look at what local control of education has wrought, the conclusion is inescapable: we must carry Mann’s insights to their logical end and nationalize our schools, to some degree.
I’ve been constantly amazed at the wide variety of emphasis different schools in different parts have when it comes to curriculum and assessment. Equally inconsistent, obviously is the way districts approach technology implementation and professional development and goodness knows what else. The lack of consistency you see when you travel around is acute, and on many levels, frustrating.
What continues to interest me, however, is that even though Miller states that a majority of people now agree we need a national curriculum with national standards, no where does this conversation (or anything close to it) show up in any of the presidential debates or party agendas. Anyone want to bet that education won’t be mentioned tonight in the Republican debate (which I’m steeling myself to catch since I can’t be in Philadelphia where the REAL conversations about schools are already starting)?
While I’m not a fan of testing, seems to me that if we gotta have it, we’d be a lot better off getting everyone on the same page in terms of where we want to get while letting individual districts have the ability to decided the best way to get there.
After watching the Frontline special “Growing Up Online” last night, I’m left with a couple of thoughts. First, it was not as doom and gloomy as the trailer suggested; in fact, by and large I think it was fairly balanced overall. It pretty accurately described the challenges that educators face at this moment (despite the only 8 minutes allotted to the subject.) It refuted the idea that predators are sneaking our kids into the
night, and it gave a powerful portrait of the challenges that parents
perceive (real or not) as they watch their kids grow through a very
different adolescence than themselves.
And I think that was the major point that was driven home to me, that as much as I look at these social tools and “properties” as learning opportunities, as much as they are a part of my life, I understand them only from the viewpoint of an adult, one that came to the Internet and blogs and live streaming television with a pretty healthy sense of who I am and a well-developed and tested decision making process that made navigating these spaces fairly straightforward. As I much as I think I know about all of this, as I look at my own kids and try to imagine what they are graduating into online, I realize that I know very little. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for parents who really have no context for this discussion, which is another reason why schools have to make this a part of the way we do our business, and why we have to integrate what it means to live in this world throughout the curriculum, K-12, in every subject.
In case you’re interested, there is a live chat this morning at 11 am with the producers, and a host of other materials online.
At the risk of riding into another semantic train wreck, I’m looking for a couple of good examples of student blogging. Blogging as in writing that has “Links with analysis and synthesis that articulates a deeper understanding or relationship to the content being linked [to] and written [about] with potential audience response in mind.” (Was that really almost four years ago?)
I put up a couple of Tweets looking for examples, and while many folks were more than helpful in providing me with posts to look at (thanks to all who offered), none of them fit the bill, somehow. Much of the writing was good if not excellent. And most had a link or two to sources. But it felt too report-ish, not “connective” enough somehow.
Maybe I’m asking too much here, but I’m still surprised at how difficult it is to find K-12 students using their blogs to really try to connect with their readers around the topics that they are reading and writing about. To do more than reflect, but to really articulate new thinking or understanding in the writing.
With an emphasis on “conversation.” For those who might be thinking of coming to my session on Saturday in Philadelphia, just know that I’m not planning on taking up too much of the time (10-15 mins or so) doing anything but contextualizing the rest of the discussion (the last 75 minutes or so), and that this will be an unconference session along the lines of what we did in Shanghai. The description reads
We’ll have a conversation about how best to leverage our own
understanding and practice of personal learning networks in ways that
can influence others’ professional practice and, ultimately, create
change in schools and classrooms.
It would be great if we could come out of the session with a “Strategy Wiki” that might serve as guide for those searching for a way to broaden the conversations at their own schools and districts. Or not.
And if you can’t be there in person, you can tune in and join the conversation (maybe even Skype in) at the EduCon UStream Channel 1 at 12:30 EST.
Since I can, I’m embedding the trailer for the Frontline presentation of “Growing Up Online” which airs tomorrow at 9 EST on PBS channels everywhere. This looks like another of those “Be vewwy afwaid” moments in the annals of kids and the Internet. Joy.
Again, I think danah boyd says it right:
“You have a generation faced with a society with fundamentally different properties thanks to the Internet,” says Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “We can turn our backs and say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘We don’t want a world like this.’ It’s not going away. So instead of saying that this is terrible, instead of saying, ‘Stop MySpace; stop Facebook; stop the Internet,’ it’s a question for us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.”
New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests. The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement. While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public. [Emphasis mine.]
And this quote by a deputy schools chancellor:
“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward…If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”
Whose behavior? The kids? The parents? Does he mean learning? Say WHAT?
Let me just speak for myself. My behavior change would be to do everything possible to find for my children an alternative to a system that is basically treating teachers like unknowing lab rats and treating my kids as if their individual talents, loves, and passions should have little or nothing to do with the how or what they learn.
And this:
The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers.
Well, gee. Let’s see. Sounds like a perfect job to me. I know dozens of “good” teachers who are just waiting to be “found” and “trained” and “measured”. Where do I tell them to sign up?
Saw this at Chris Lehmann’s site. As he says “This is one science teacher’s attempt to influence the way we talk about the issue of climate change. Pass it on.” And also, take action.
Interesting post by Mark Glaser that does a really thorough job of summing up the challenges the major media outlets are facing as they “get the religion of audience participation.” The central question is:
How do you harness the audience’s knowledge and participation without
the forums devolving into a messy online brawl that requires
time-intensive moderation?
The good news here, as Glaser points out, is that we are finally past the point where people are arguing whether the audience voice should be heard. Most of the major newspapers’ online sites have growing points of participation for readers. The contention now is how to moderate all of those comments and which ones to highlight in “eye catching editorial spaces” presumably to drive more conversation. There seem to be a number of options shaping up, from reader recommendations a la Digg to paid employee moderators to filters that search for certain words. Some, like Business Week, are also motivating people to leave quality comments by offering them special incentives, such as an end of the year dinner with editors on the staff. And, of course, there is also the question of allowing anonymous comments at all. Fascinating read.
All of which once again makes me think of my days as a journalism student in college and how totally different life for a journalist is these days. And, it harkens back to what Dan Gillmor said many moons ago now, that “my readers know more than I do.” (I love showing this example of a USA Today article where the featured interviewee shows up in the comments section to set the story straight.) And it also makes me think about how we have to prepare our kids for this more participatory culture that we’re moving into.
So I’m going to break my self-imposed rule about blatant self-promotion in my blog posts just this once.
I just found out that my book has eclipsed 25,000 copies sold, and that sales this year so far are actually on the rise.
This. Amazes. Me.
A heartfelt thank you (been doin’ a lot of that lately) to all of you who have read it, who have shared your stories with me about it, who have showed me dog-eared, highlighted copies of it at conferences, and who have recommended it on your blogs, on Amazon, or to your colleagues. It’s hugely motivating to know that it’s made a positive impact. (I’ll skip the Sally Field moment.)
Nice article in Educause by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler titled “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0″ which is another great conversation starter for those who still may not have a basic understanding of these shifts. It’s written more toward the higher ed audience, obviously, but there is still a lot of resonance for the K-12 set.
On the somewhat surreal occasion of the 1,000th person to follow me on 
There’s much to write about 
*Finally, the one real head twister that I got yesterday was during Chris’s own session when he was talking about how his thinking is moving away from the “having kids publish globally to the world” product piece of all of this a “let’s focus on the process of community building and publishing within the walls” approach. (Not his quotes btw, just my attempts at paraphrase. You can always go to the videotape.) Using Moodle, SLA has established a vibrant, important ongoing discussion that extends not only what happens in the classroom but also deepens the sense of connectedness that these students and teachers feel. The culture of sharing and participation that is created within the local community is more important almost that making those connections outside. (I asked one of the students 