Tom Austin, a researcher for Gartner, is interviewed in Fast Company this month and makes some interesting points about the value that businesses can find in implementing and using social tools in their workplaces. I like the idea that we should be hiring more “cultural anthropologists” in our IT departments, people who understand the social shifts that are occurring. It’s a pretty interesting interview throughout, with some points made about how we assess collaboration and what we should look for in our employees.

But here’s the quote that I thought was most interesting:

Look at teenagers today. They’re teamagers. They work on projects as a group and think nothing of doing it that way. I expect to see that kind of thing percolate through the enterprise as an unstoppable force over the next two decades.

Nice twist on the word, but I’m wondering if you agree that teens have group collaboration down as a part of the way they do their business. What are you seeing?

I’m not following all that many people on Twitter, I know, but even with the ones I do follow there are upwards of 300 “Tweets” a day, far too many for me to get to in most cases. I like following the updates when I’m online, but I confess I rarely go back and see what I’ve missed when I’m not watching the updates flow by in Twhirl. Still, when people add links to their Tweets, I usually find interesting stuff. So, I was hoping to find a way to strip out only those posts that have links in them and at least just catch up on those, preferably in my Google Reader.

And, thanks to the many answers I got to my Tweet about this, here is the way you do it, just in case you might be interested as well.

So what do you do if you are a student in Nashua, NH and along with your community, you’re staring a teacher walkout in the face?

Well, you put together a whole slew of Read/Write Web tools and get ready to cover the event, everything from a Facebook group to a video channel to a blog. Here is the deal according to the Facebook page:

A team of students from both Nashua High Schools, skilled in video production, computer editing, webcasting, and Internet social networking have established an off-campus production center to keep the community informed, moment-to-moment, in the event of a Nashua Teacher’s Union job action. The student center will webcast daily, upload video interviews and other footage constantly. The team will employ video chat, instant messaging, and social networking activity through sites such as Facebook to keep in touch with their audience.

And the kids seem to get what the possibilities are:

“What people don’t see is how this situation is impacting the students.” said Korey O’Brien, producer. “We have first amendment rights, and as citizens in a democracy have an obligation to get involved.” O’Brien believes that students can be objective: “Given the extreme opinions on both sides that I’ve read about in the newspaper, it should be easy for us to offer a more reasonable viewpoint. If we broadcast the student’s perspective, perhaps our voices will affect how the issue is resolved.”

They’ve got over 230 members in the Facebook group since Thursday, a half a dozen videos up already, and according to Nicole Tomaselli who sent me the link, they’ve got quite a following already.

The Nashua teachers have been modeling the uses of these tools for quite some time. I’ve had a link to their YouTube channel on my presentation wiki for over a year now. (Check out this video from their “Education Worth Paying For” series.) I have no idea if these kids have been “taught” to use these tools for the intended purpose or if they’ve recognized it on their own, but I think this is an amazingly cool example of kids doing real work for real audiences, the same audiences which will, in the end, assess the effectiveness of their work.

So where is this in your currciulum?

Great article in the New York Times that asserts the Clay Shirky idea I noted here earlier of a publish then filter world.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

I like the phrase “social filter” that the article puts forth as a way to capture what I think is a big shift in emphasis on many of the basic reading literacies that we should have been teaching but by and large haven’t been doing a very good job with. We have to be editors, not only in the sense of identifying those pieces of information that should be “passed on” but in assessing those that have been passed on to us. It is a bit more complex, and potentially problematic, when the filter who is suggesting something for you to read may not be very well trained in the skill of filtering either.

While, as the article points out, much of this trend is a technological version of “word of mouth,” I think the difference is the scope of the potential personal audience, the ease with which we can copy and forward what we find, and the speed with which it all happens. Think Twitter for all of that.

And this is a younger vs. older thing. While two-thirds of those under 30 use social networking tools to disseminate and consume information, only 20% of those over 30 do. I’m guessing those percentages are about right for education as well.

Finally, I find this really encouraging, especially in an age where talking heads hold so much sway:

Young people also identify online discussions with friends and videos as important sources of election information. The habits suggest that younger readers find themselves going straight to the source, bypassing the context and analysis that seasoned journalists provide.

Obviously, that can be good or bad, depending on who those “seasoned” journalists are and who your friends are. But I’m just thinking that if we can teach kids to go to the source and do their own cogent, reasoned analysis, that’s a good thing. Again, establishing these skills and habits in our students has to be something that we model and include in every part of the K-12 curriculum.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending four hours in Elluminate with Sheryl and a dozen or so of the schools that we’re working with from the Southeastern states for PLP holding a “work session” around the culminating projects they’ll be presenting next month. And though I know the idea of spending four hours doing anything online is overwhelming for a lot of folks, I do mean it when I say “pleasure.” Their projects, by and large, blew me away in terms of their scope and thoughtfulness, and it was apparent that most of them were really beginning to understand the network creation and expansion part of this. And it was great to see the extent to which these ideas seemed to be taking hold in their schools. (We’ll be sharing these out down the road.)

But while it wasn’t a central focus of most of the projects, for some reason what’s really stuck in my head are the conversations we had about those that revolved around using these technologies for articulation. And the more I thought about it, the more natural a starting point it seemed for schools who are trying to adopt (or adapt to) these technologies. I’m often struck by how many times I hear about the lack of communication, the isolation of teachers, the inconsistency of the teaching and pedagogy in schools and districts. And those are all things that teachers lounges and monthly department meetings can’t really assuage.

I know it would require some front end loading, but if districts were using wikis to house curriculum and encouraging teachers to work off of them as they move through the year, noting, tweaking, fine tuning, reflecting, etc., it would be one way that they could begin to make good use of a Web 2.0 tool and make it easier to connect to what other folks are doing. Not to mention the growing of some very important local network connections (which then, of course, could be expanded out.) And the other piece, of course, is that it’s a “safe” way to get started at least in terms of not having to deal with student participation issues.

And when you think about it even for just a few seconds longer, it’s not hard to come up with all sorts of other ways to create a rich curriculum “text” if you will that could include videos of lessons, links to resources and artifacts, and the general throwing around of ideas that could potentially deepen the impact of what’s happening in the classroom.

Or not. There is the time issue, the buy in issue, and other issues. But I’m sure there are some good examples of this already out there, aren’t there?

I had the great pleasure of listening to Jonathan Zittrain the two years that I attended I-Law at Harvard (an event that unfortunately is no longer being held.) Going back and reading this post from four years ago just now reminds me just how far all of this has come and, more dishearteningly, how little has really changed. (i.e. “And right now, while kids by and large have the technology skills to create, they have very few models for appropriate uses for that creation.” Oy.) I will always remember those two sessions as among the most amazing and interesting learning days of my life, hugely validating and compelling on all sorts of levels.

No doubt, it’s one of the reasons I still perk up when Lawrence Lessig or Yochai Benkler or the rest publish books or articles or interviews. And so when I saw that Zittrain was publishing a book, I pre-ordered from Amazon and got it this week. While I’m only a few pages in to it, the point is clear: we are at a critical point in the evolution of the net, one where we are faced with some not so great scenarios of abuse and control that are going to require some level headed thinking and action to navigate. Here is the thesis:

In the arc from the Apple II to the iPhone, we learn something important about where the Internet has been, and something more important about where it is going. The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others. So too with the Internet. Both wer generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet.) Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-alone word processors and proprietary online services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past. The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of the sterile appliances tethered to a network of control (3).

I’m not sure yet how much this parallels the lock down vs. open up choice that schools are facing right now, but I have a feeling the conversations will parallel in many ways. (There is only one page referenced in the index to schools.) More as I dig through. And, just a off the top thought, but if anyone wants to do a book club, let me know.

The New York Times reports that Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out and that is not good news for the kids  most affected. Basically, because of Earthlink’s problems, tens of thousands of people who were promised access will most likely be cut out.

But the excited momentum has sputtered to a standstill, tripped up by unrealistic ambitions and technological glitches. The conclusion that such ventures would not be profitable led to sudden withdrawals by service providers like EarthLink, the Internet company that had effectively cornered the market on the efforts by the larger cities.

And of course, it’s the kids who get affected the most.

Now, community organizations worry about their prospects for helping poor neighborhoods get online. For Cesar DeLaRosa, 15, however, the concern is more specific. He said he was worried about his science project on “Recent and archival news about global warming.”

“If we don’t have Internet, that means I’ve got to take the bus to the public library after dark, and around here, that’s not always real safe,” Cesar said, seated in front of his family’s new computer in a gritty section of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. His family is among the 1,000 or so low-income households that now have free or discounted Wi-Fi access through the city’s project, and many of them worry about losing access that they cannot otherwise afford.

And in general, we continue not to lead.

Mr. Meinrath said that advocates wanted to see American cities catch up with places like Athens, Leipzig and Vienna, where free citywide Wi-Fi is already available…Mr. Meinrath pointed to St. Cloud, Fla., which spent $3 million two years ago to build a free wireless network that is used by more than 70 percent of the households in the city.

But there may be some potential solutions on the horizon:

Meraki, a wireless networking company based in Mountain View, Calif., has jumped into the void in San Francisco with a program it calls “Free the Net.” The company sells low-cost equipment that can be placed in a person’s home to broadcast a wireless signal. The company also sells inexpensive repeaters that can be placed on rooftops or outside walls to spread the original customer’s signal farther. The combination of the two types of equipment creates a mesh of free wireless in neighborhoods. The company says it has almost 70,000 users throughout San Francisco.

Still frustrating to me that this isn’t on the radar in this political year.

(PS…This is a test of the blogging function in Diigo. Not sure if I can easily add tags. If you want to see my highlights and notes on the page, log into your Diigo account and click on the story link above.)

Take 53 seconds to watch this snippet from Stephen Heppel via Greg Whitby.

Hard to pack more thinkable ideas into that short a time. But the one I love is the idea that we have to start thinking of learning like health; it goes with us throughout our lives. And the idea that schools don’t want to grow up.

It troubles me that my kids are a part of what he calls this “lost generation,” stuck in this “never-never-land” period, but I just can’t get my brain around the idea that it’s only going to take 10 years to play out. (See previous post.) If our students’ frustration really is becoming a policy issue, I wonder how we can work smarter to harness that energy for change.

Finished Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” yesterday and it’s now on the top of my list in terms of books that explain the state of the world in a cogent, balanced, even-tempered way. It’s not a book about education, per se, but it’s a book by an educator who brings a teacher stance to the conversation. And it articulates clearly and without hyperbole the shifts and challenges that are presenting themselves right now.

Before getting to some of the more salient quotes, let me just say that I’m feeling a great deal more urgency about this conversation at the moment. Between reading the book and watching some of the videos from the FastForward blog on the future of enterprise, it just feels like the tsunami is bearing down on us and we don’t even know there’s much of a wave out there on the ocean. (Take a few minutes to watch this vid interview with John Hagel, for instance. How are we as schools developing “talent”?)

Early in the book, Shirky makes the point that while traditional institutions are facing competition, they are not going away. But they are going to have to change:

None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared–relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent (23).

The value of the services that institutions provide is changing as individuals become more and more able to undertake “ridiculously easy group forming” and do everything from share music to create the sum of human knowledge online. That ability is what changes the rules, Shirky says, and that can be a good thing (Wikipedia) and a bad thing (terrorists). But it is profound, nonetheless.

We are plainly witnessing the restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences–employees and the world. The increases in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be (107). [Emphasis mine.]

Which says a couple of things to me. First, we need to move away from this idea (as driven by current assessments) that information is our core product and that second, we need to set information free in our schools. If we don’t, how will we ever be able to teach our kids how to use well the power they can now wield with their networks?

Shirky also points out that this is not going to be fast nor will it be easy.

As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society’s core institutions, but it’s happening anyway. The comparison with the printing press doesn’t suggest that we are entering a bright new future–for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s (73).

I wonder, however, if time runs at the same speed today as it did back then. 100 years feels like an awfully long time for all of this to shake out.

There is much more to think about here, but I’ll end where Shirky ends, with some thoughts on how we first have to change our own frames before any of this will begin to truly make sense. Apologies for the long snip, but I think it’s worth the read:

For us, no matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in new technology, it will always have a certain provisional quality. Those of us with considerable real-world experience are often at an advantage relative to young people, who are comparative novices in the way the world works. The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. The overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.

…young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models not because they know more useful things than we do but because they know fewer useless things than we do. I’m old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software and encyclopedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true. I’ve become like the grown-ups arguing in my local paper about calculators; just as it took them a long time to realize that calculators were never going away, those of us old enough to remember a time before social tools became widely available are constantly playing catch-up. Meanwhile my students, many of whom are fifteen years younger than I am, don’t have to unlearn those things, because they never had to learn them in the first place.

The advantage of youth, however, is relative, not absolute. Just as everyone eventually came to treat the calculator as a ubiquitous and invisible tool, we are all coming to take our social tools for granted as well. Our social tools are dramatically improving our ability to share, cooperate and act together. As everyone from working biologists to angry air passengers adopts those tools, it is leading to an epochal change.

Read the book.

“So, are you the principal here?”

“Yep.”

“How many kids?”

“About 1,300 K-12.”

“Wow. That’s a mix.”

She smiles.

“So how much technology do you have?”

“Quite a bit actually, but it’s been difficult of late.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Well, we’ve been a 1-1 school for seven years, but we haven’t been able to buy any laptops for the last three.”

“Wow. That must be a pretty major issue, huh?”

“Well, our budgets have been cut, and the support has been difficult.”

“Anything bright on the horizon?”

“Well, we did just get a $100,000 from our local council for technology.”

“Well, that’s great. That ought to get you a couple of hundred laptops.”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’ll buy us about 50.”

“Fifty! Why only 50?”

“The specs.”

“What specs?

“The bidding specs for the city.”

“Bidding specs?”

“The cheapest laptop we can buy is around $2,000.”

“How much?”

“Two-thousand.”

“Two- thousand? Wow.”

Awkward silence.

“You know you can get a laptop for like, $300-$400 these days, right.”

“I know.” She sighs.

“Two-thousand. Wow.”

“Yep.”

Awkward silence. Bell rings.

“Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks.”

She walks down the hall trailing a group of kids.

Oy.

Technorati Tags: schools, technology, education

Like him or not, what Barack Obama did yesterday, in my opinion at least, epitomizes what we need our next president to be, namely a teacher. Agree with him or not, can there be any doubt that anyone listening to that speech yesterday is not thinking harder and more expansively about race in this country and in our lives today? Trust him or not, is there any question that he articulated a real truth about the state of race relations from both a black and a white perspective?

Right now, we are having a “teachable moment” about race in America. If you listen to conservative talk radio as I have been for the past few weeks, the issue is, no pun intended, black or white. If the candidate does not distance himself from his pastor and his church, then he is guilty by association of believing the invective that’s being dragged in front of us by the media or which we are choosing to consume on YouTube. If he does distance himself, then it’s simply politics as usual. It’s a simple equation.

But the reality is that this conversation, like most, is more nuanced. And it’s our collective lack of understanding of that nuance which bogs us down. We have little empathy for the experiences of those unlike us, and too many of us are afraid to ask. We need an education in this country about race. We need a starting point for the conversation, and we need someone to take on a teacherly role to guide it.

Seventy-five years ago, FDR gave the first of his “Fireside Chats” intended to educate (as well as sway) the American public about the issues of the day. By every measure, they were hugely successful in moving people to act in informed and collective ways. And the feedback that Roosevelt received in the form of millions of letters allowed him to tap into the pulse of the people and the nation in ways that few other presidents before or since have been able to. He guided, he taught my father’s generation about the realities of the world, enabling them to have more informed conversations about the state of their lives. Yes, I know, these were not balanced presentations, but at minimum they made the country think about the proposed solutions to the complexities of the time.

And while the world by its very nature is complex, this moment seems decidedly so. Not just because of race, but because of the litany of problems that Obama articulated and the fact that no one no matter what color or heritage is immune from them. (I don’t think climate change cares much about the color of your skin or your family heritage.) We need someone who will encourage and facilitate a broad ranging conversation about these issues. We need someone who can create some lesson plans for the millions of us who want to engage, want to contribute, want to work to solve the problems together. We need someone who I can hold up as a role model for my own children as a steward for the environment, as a peace maker, as a listener, as a deep thinker.

We need a teacher.

This is just one of many teachable moments that this world and this society will continue to throw at us. Rare has been the occasion when we as a country have been led to a deeper understanding of events. In what was without question the most teachable moment of my life six-and-a-half years ago, I was told to go to the mall and keep spending my money. That’s not what a teacher would have done.

To steal from the inimitable Chris Lehmann, yesterday, I saw a teacher.

Amazing.

My aggregator is piling up and I’m in one of those “no-time-to-read-my-feeds” stretches, especially when I get a new book in my hands that really makes me think. Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” is probably about the most level headed deconstruction of what’s happening with the Web that I’ve read yet, and, while it’s not nearly as sexy as Pink or Friedman, so far it’s pretty brilliant and much more grounded. He’s one educator who “gets it” in a very measured way. I’ve been marking it up like crazy and want to revisit a lot of it before I attempt some longer thoughts here, but there was one section that connected for me when I somehow landed on “Why We’re Powerless to Resist Grazing on Endless Web Data” from the Wall Street Journal last week.

In short, the article says that neuroscientists are finding evidence that we are addicted to new information, and in an era where new information is everywhere, that can be a problem:

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom. It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ” For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives…We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.

Hmmm…Twitter like opium, huh?

Believe it or not, I can relate to that “junkie for new information” description. (No, really.) And I really like that term, “infovore”. Definitely works. And it adds another layer to the whole balance issue. If we really are addicted to this, what does that say about how we teach our kids?

Shirky comes at it from the “creator of new information” stance and supplies a nice brain hit as well. In a chapter titled “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production,” he talks at length about what makes Wikipedia work, that it’s more than simply a desire to work together. In fact, he says, Wikipedia “exists not as an edifice, but as an act of love.”

Wikipedia exists because enough people love it and, more important, love one another in its context. This does not mean that the people constructing it always agree, but loving someone doesn’t preclude arguing with them… What love does for Wikipedia is provide the motivation both for improvement and defense (141).

And it’s that last part where the info opiates kick in for me. The reason that vandals fail on Wikipedia is

because Wikipedia as a tool provides them with the weapons to fight those groups. Those weapons are taken up only by people who are willing to fight. Were that willingness to fade, the most contentious articles in Wikipedia, the articles on abortion and Islam and evolution, would be gone within hours, and it’s unlikely that the whole enterprise would survive a week (141)

And finally, there is this concluding paragraph to the chapter:

We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems to squishy and private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. Love has a half=life too, as well as a radius, and we’re used to both of those being small. We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained. Or were constrained–now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and a longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love (142).

I know…quite a Kumbaya moment. But he’s right. Wikipedia was simply not possible before. So much more is possible today and will be possible for my kids, and I want them to feel the love, not just of learning new things, but of doing new things as well.

I’m not sure exactly what it means, if anything, but I just want to reflect for a second or two on my post about 21st Century Skills for Teachers and the 130 comments and trackbacks that ensued. I’m not one to look at my stats very often or track visits to my blog, but I do know that the number of responses to that post pretty much obliterated the old standard in terms of the amount of conversation that transpired. And while much of it was obviously just a connection to what a lot of other folks were feeling or experiencing on that topic, some of it is no doubt due to more people, lots more people in the fray, reading, writing, participating, learning.

I’ve said this before, if nothing else, the network feels more palpable and connected than ever. Without a doubt, Twitter has had much to do with the numbers of comments that have been left here of late. Tom asked in the thread to see a graph of the comments here over time, and while I’m not savvy enough to do that, there’s no question that more started coming around the same time I started “getting” Twitter. And from a network standpoint, the explosion on UStream has been pretty amazing. Just today I caught portions of a high school talent show in Shanghai, a tech session with students in Illinois, and a workshop from a conference in North Carolina. (And I missed much, much more than I saw.)

And there are downsides to this as well. Can anyone really read through 130 comments? Are we getting too distracted, too connected, too participatory for our own good? Are we simply adding to the echo chamber of nodding heads, or are we doing what we need to do to move the conversation out of the blogosphere/twitterverse/ustreamland? All questions, btw, that in some form or another were captured in the comments on that post.

But here is the good news, the best news of all of this. In those 130 comments and trackbacks, there were many, many, many new names and voices. All sorts of people who took it upon themselves to jump into the mix and share their ideas who I don’t remember hearing from before. That can only be a good sign.

Thanks for all of your contributions here over the years, all 8,800 of them. (That’s one stat that’s easy to find.) I have and continue to learn much as I hope you have as well.

(Word cloud for the post provided by Britt Watwood.)

Yesterday, I had the real pleasure of spending some time in a 9th English classroom again, this time with a group of students from an under achieving, 3,000 pupil high school in midtown Manhattan. Ostensibly, I was there as a tag team with Alan November talking to city technology liasons and support teachers about the changes and challenges we’re facing, so while Alan spoke, I visited kids and vice versa. (I UStreamed the last 20 minutes or so of a Q & A that we did at the end of the day. Not great in terms of audio an video, but some good Alan rants.)

Anyway, the kids were the highlight. We talked about the technologies they used, how they used it, and what they might use it for, and the conversation was fairly predictable. Many of them had a decent Internet connection at home, but many had none. Despite that, they guessed almost 90% of the school had MySpace pages, that they went there every day, that they used it to communicate and get information about homework, and that, of course, it was blocked in school. (MySpace is blocked in NYC schools to everyone, even administrators. Ironically, up until a phone call was made on my behalf yesterday, this blog was also being blocked as a “social networking” site. Oy.) Surprisingly, (or maybe not so surprisingly) they seemed amazed at the idea that their sites would be looked at by employers or by colleges, and they seemed never to have thought about the idea that they would be Googled by their future mates. (And that they would be doing some Googling as well.) Now that was a moment.

Almost all of them had cell phones as well, phones which are banned in school. (The policy is that if you are caught with a cell phone in school, it’s taken away and it can only be returned to a parent who comes to pick it up on a Friday.) I hooked most of them when I took out my phone and had them ask me a question that they thought I wouldn’t know, which after a few more colorful attempts ended up being “What’s the population of Spain?” They watched as I sent a text message “Spain population” to 46645 (GOOGL) and get the answer back about 10 seconds later. Amazement ensued.

I told them I was a cell phone is schools advocate, and we talked about what they might say in making a case for a policy change. (The teacher was very ok with this, btw.) Since many of these kids commuted from over 30 minutes away by subway each day, almost to a person they said they needed their phones in case of an emergency. But when I nudged them past the safety issue, they talked about using the phone to make movies, to do interviews, even to write, (which surprised me until I learned Sidekicks were all the rage.) And, now, they said, for research. We talked about the “appropriate behavior” piece of this, that, just like with MySpace, there is an appropriateness issue here, that they would have some real responsibility on their shoulders should the phones ever be allowed. By and large, I was impressed by the way they made the case.

But here was the moment that floored me. Obviously, these kids don’t leave their cell phones at home. They are too important as a communications tool for safety’s sake and for social connections. Yet they can’t get these phones through the airport like scanners at the front of the building. So what do they do? Seems a little cottage industry as sprung up at the delis and bodegas around the school so that kids can check their phones in for the day at $3 a pop. They get a ticket, just like a coat check, on their way into school, and they pick it up on the way out.

Amazing.

So, the cell phone ban not only denies students the opportunity to use the device in all sorts of ways that are relevant to learning, it also costs them real money. Start doing some math, and it’s not hard to get to the answer that this high school’s kids are out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to check their phones. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To me, this is the vision thing again. In a school where there are about 300 computers for 3,000 students, doesn’t it make more sense to get creative about not only how we might use phones in the classroom but teach phones and phone use in the curriculum? I mean, are the economies worth working toward a solution of the “disruption” problem? And I’m sorry, but I just believe that if we show kids from an early age the appropriate and effective use of the technology, if we make it a valuable and necessary part of the way they do their school business, the widespread disruptions will abate.

End of rant. (Doing a lot of that lately.)

I do want to end this on a positive note. I started a UStream show with them, and thanks to Twitter, within a few minutes had about 20 folks from around the world (Canada, Romania, across America). They were blown away. I asked them what they thought they could do with UStream for themselves, and immediately they were talking about cooking shows, news broadcasts, and much more. They. Were. Engaged.

(Photo “Cell Phone Camera” by  L-ines.)