From the “Do We Really Want Our Daughters to Learn This on Their Own?” Department comes this excerpt from the cover article of the Sunday Times Magazine this week titled “Blog Post Confidential“:

Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

One girl’s careening story about enlightenment when it comes to telling to much on her blog (and others doing the same.) A story for our times.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read this story, and as I read almost anything having to do with kids or young adults trying to navigate these spaces if they wouldn’t have a better time of it had they had teachers and adults who were modeling and guiding them on how to do it well…

Yesterday, Sheryl and I finished up the culminating session of our year-long work with a Western New York Powerful Learning Practice cohort, and while the teachers were once again pretty impressive in articulating and showcasing the shifts that have occurred in their professional practice and their classrooms, the highlight of the day was a presentation by Laura Stockman, the fifth grade blogger at 25 Days to Make A Difference. Laura is the daughter of Angela Stockman who was a member of our cohort, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, her service project blog in honor of her grandfather has gained national attention. She talked about how she started her quest to get donations for charities by finding sponsors for her daily good works, how surprised she is that over 30,000 people have visited her blog since last December, and how she’s been able to donate over $1,600, 50 pairs of pajamas, and over 400 books to charities in her area. It’s a great story and example, one that I’ve shared with Tess on a number of occasions.

But for some reason, the moment that jumped out at me was when she was talking about how she decided which charities to support. “I asked my readers,” she said. And I just felt like, “How cool is that?” Here is a fifth grader who is first and foremost making a difference in peoples’ lives (which is cool enough) but also who is connected to a community of others who are passionate to make a difference as well. (She dropped some names of some pretty well know philanthropists that had been in touch with her.) She gets it on a practical level that not only models what’s possible but that will no doubt serve as a support for whatever learning experiences she will have in her life.

And one other note. Today in a presentation to some New York City middle school principals, I talked about Laura in the context of how we begin to help our kids create their own digital footprints in positive ways, to be, in a word, “Googleable.” Even fifth graders. Here’s what comes up when you Google “‘Laura Stockman’ Buffalo.”

Pretty good start, I’d say.

UPDATE: Please read what Laura’s mom Angela has to say about the experience.

I’m extremely interested in watching the impact of social media on the current presidential election cycle, and I’m wondering if we really are at the point where, as the author of this post suggests:

Facebook and MySpace are as important as New Hampshire and Iowa.

I don’t think there is any doubt that the Obama campaign has gotten that message sooner than the rest. Their very savvy use of social tools on their Website has been an incredible boon to their fund raising and, in turn, their ability to capture delegates. Some of the deconstructions of the impact have already begun, as in this great piece in Rolling Stone. This quote sums up what’s happening:

“They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.” In the process, the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.

But the impact of blogger/observers is turning out to be pretty huge as well. According to the Technorati article, almost 30,000 blogs are parsing every word the candidates utter, every policy, every interaction (which is a good thing, right?) If 51% of Internet users are not turning to blogs to “gather information and communicate about politics,” and every indication is that the number will continue to grow, it’s pretty obvious that realities of being an engaged, informed voter are becoming more and more complex, and that our students are going to be stepping into that reality without a great deal of navigational skills unless we begin to bring these shifts into our curriculum.

So how are we doing that?

So here is the money quote from “Turn Teen Texting Toward Better Writing” from the Christian Science Monitor last week:

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.

The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.

Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.

SCENE I

(Tucker and I at the computer getting ready to get some info on how to throw the boomerang I just brought him back from Australia.)

Me: So where do you want to start?

Tucker: (Already typing “www.yout…”)

Me: Wait a sec. (Trying to sound wise.) Before we go there, why don’t we see if we can get some background? (I’m thinking physics, aerodynamics, etc.)

Tucker: (Keeps typing “…ube.com)

Me: Tuck. Seriously. (Grabbing mouse.) Where could we go to find some other info about boomerangs?

Tucker: (Sighs) Ok. (Starts typing “www.wikiped…”)

Me: I just think we might find some interesting background and stuff.

Tucker: (Clicks in search line and types in “Boome…” and I notice for the first time that Wikipedia now has partial spelling drop downs.)

Me: Hey, look at that!

Tucker: What?

Me: You can just find the word in the list now. Pretty cool.

Tucker: They’ve had that for like a month, Dad.

Me: They have? (I look at him to see if he’s smiling, but he looks serious.) Hmmm…

Tucker: Boomerang. There it is. (He clicks.) So what do you want to know?

Me: Well, how about we see if… (Before I can finish, he clicks on “Throwing Technique.”) Yeah. There ya go. What does it say?

Tucker: “A left-handed boomerang circles towards the right, and a right-handed boomerang circles towards the left. Most sport boomerangs are in the range of about 2.5 to 4 ounces. The range on most of these is between 25 and 40 yards/metres. A right- or left-handed boomerang can be thrown with either hand, but the flight direction will depend upon the boomerang, not the thrower…” Aw, c’mon Dad. This is boring. (Starts typing “www.yout…”)

Me: (Chagrined) Ok, ok. I just thought maybe that would help. (We watch as page changes.)

Tucker: Here! How about this one. (He clicks the top link.)

Me: Now Tuck, you know, you should probably take a second to try to figure out which videos might be the most…

(Video begins to play.)

(Both of us laugh hysterically.)

Tucker: Oh my god! Let’s watch it again. (He clicks the play button and we replay it, stopping as girl’s legs flail into the air. More laughing.)

Me: (Gaining composure.) So, it looks like you just throw it like you would most anything else.

Tucker: (Clicks on next video, which shows three guys throwing boomerangs at the beach.) Yeah, dad. That doesn’t look hard. Let’s go! (Grabs boomerang and heads for door.)

Me: Wait! Tuck! Go over in the field next door. Don’t throw it in our yard where you lost the last one. (Remembering his tears after first toss of the boomerang from last year’s trip to Australia ended up in bamboo patch never to be seen again.)

Tucker: (Half way out the door.) Ok!

SCENE II:

(Finally leaving house five minutes later, looking over to the big field next door where I see him running toward the house.)

Me: Hey Tuck! What’s up?

Tucker: Um…I need the baseball.

Me: The baseball? Why?

Tucker: (Look of angst on his face.) Um…

Me: Are you kidding me?

Tucker: I’m sorry dad! It just went really high and now it’s stuck in a tree. But I can get it. Where’s the ball?

SCENE III:

(Twenty minutes later.)

Me: Tuck. It’s just too high up there. We’re going to have to wait for a stiff breeze.

Tucker: Sorry Dad. (He smiles.) You want to go watch that video again?

Me: Grrrrr….

So considering Mother’s Day was a couple of days ago, it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking a fair amount about my own mom who died suddenly 27 years ago (has it been that long?) leaving me with a slew of unanswered questions about my family history, my young childhood, her views on life, etc.. Seems like just as I was getting old enough to really have a somewhat intellectual relationship with her as well as a mother-son relationship, she was gone. Still makes me sad.

Last night I had this kind of cool waking dream that is no doubt related to her death and to the holiday. It was at some point in the future, after my own death (hopefully way, way into the future) and my kids were struggling with some of the same questions that I had about my own history. What were they like as kids? Why did we move? What were my grandparents like? But in this dream, even though I wasn’t there to answer them, they had another resource.

What I envisioned was them turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies. Certainly not anything that hasn’t been thought of before, but It was, as I said, a pretty cool vision.

I think that dream brought to light another aspect of why I blog. Not just to reflect. Not just to learn. But in some small way to leave a trail for those who come after me. I certainly can’t predict to what extent those people might find any of this relevant or compelling or useful, but I know I would love to have the chance to dig through the work of my own mother, to learn about her more deeply, to understand who she was and what she stood for. If nothing else, my kids will have that opportunity.

And with that thought, it’s 26 hours of travel home…

My last full day here in Australia before the long trip home tomorrow. I get my day back, but who knows how long it will be before I get my body clock back. Last summer it took almost two weeks for me to get straight. Tips anyone? (Be nice.)

Haven’t had time to think much of this through, so excuse the relatively thin thinking. (Feel free to poke holes in it, as always.)

I’ve visited a couple of pretty interesting schools during my visit, one that’s in the process of being built, another that’s been around for 30 years, both different in their design. The new school, a high school, will be one built on open spaces for learning, project based learning concepts, individualized learning plans and very different roles for teachers and classrooms. The spaces have been designed with the great thinkers in mind, DaVinci and Einstein spaces, spaces that on blueprint at least offer up a great deal of potential for creativity and independence and passion based learning. Arts are embedded in the curriculum, and there is a really different concept of assessment. With any luck, I’ll be writing more about this place in the near future.

The other school was out in the country, surrounded by fields filled with cows and chickens and pigs. It was a small, PreK-6 school where the classrooms had all sorts of angles and skylights and patterns. Everywhere you look there is evidence of performance learning. Every classroom has a kitchen where kids do a lot of cooking. Outside, playground spaces are performance spaces as well. And the kids tend to the livestock and the farm as well as the school. I loved the feel.

Technology plays a role in both of these schools, though the roles are different to be sure. The high school will be a 1-1 school. The other is expanding the access of computers to its kids. Both are ripe for the ways in which technology can supplement real learning in the classroom, not just information processing. Obviously, there is much more about the culture and the infrastructure and the climate that goes into all of this.

The early thinking that’s evolved from those visits for me is this: we have been living in a world with pretty much one, ubiquitous model for schools for a long time now. This strikes me every time I take off on a plane to somewhere and am able without any trouble to pick out the school buildings we’re flying over. They’re all at right angles, with baseball and football fields nearby. The sizes and number of buildings vary, but it’s rare that I see yellow school buses parked next to anything that looks like something other than a factory.

In my own thinking about what schools might become, I’m realizing that I’ve been thinking that this old model is going to turn into a different model. But what’s really going to happen, I think, is that we’re about to explode into many different models. Obviously, this may not happen with any great momentum until we free up our ideas about assessment and learning culture, neither of which is an easy road. But we do need to find ways to support more unique, passion-based schools, places that like our kids, come in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember when he said it, whether blog or e-mail, but Tom Hoffman reminded me a while ago that we have a lot of different models out there already, many of which are successful in their own right. And as we move away from that one factory model, we need to be open to whatever types of new models might evolve.

(Photo “old classroom” by shuichiro.)

Some random observations of my first few days in Oz:

First, how is it Qantas can serve a free hot meal and free beverages on a 55 minute trip from Melbourne to Sydney when most US airlines I fly on can barely provide a cold, stale sandwich on a cross country flight? It’s also cool, by the way, that the people meeting you off the flight can do so at the gate instead of being relegated to baggage claim. Overall, flying has been much more pleasant here, kiss of death I know for tonight’s flight back to Melbourne.

Surprisingly, what hasn’t been great is the Internet. The connection at my workshops thus far has been spotty or nearly non-existent, and buying it in airports or hotels is insanely expensive. From everything I’ve heard from folks here and others answering questions on Twitter, access is very uneven and, in general, pricey. In fact, many state right out that they are worse off than some third world countries in the connection respect.

As always, the Aussies that I’ve met have been exceedingly generous, helpful, and complimentary. Just like our trip here last year, I’ve felt very welcomed. It’s definitely a place that I would highly recommend making a journey to, despite the fact that our currencies have almost reached parity making things a bit more expensive here than in the past. (Obviously, that’s the case for us Yanks no matter where we go these days.)

While the new government has allocated some significant funds to getting all high school students on a computer in short order, the amazing thing from what I hear is those computers are going to be desktops. Just as in the states, there is not a lot of vision at the top in terms of where to spend technology dollars and what the future might look like.

My “Small World” moment came when my phone suddenly rang and it was Tess calling from back home. Nothing special these days, I know, but a first for me. I just can’t get my brain around how many wireless signals we must be floating in if her phone call found me here in Sydney. Amazing.

And one last: when I was in Brisbane the other day, I was walking down the street when I saw a long line slinking around the corner, dozens of people queued up to get, believe it or not, Krispy Kreme donuts. I kid you not. People were walking out of the store with boxed dozens of the things, and apparently, it is the latest American sensation to hit the continent. Let’s hope it’s not followed by those other sensations that we’re getting more and more famous for: obesity and diabetes.

Finally, one very cool moment: when in my keynote I was discussing the fact that my kids had been taught to use Scratch by Neil Winton’s son Andrew from Scotland during one of our “extended classroom” sessions, it turned out that Neil and Andrew were watching live from Scotland. I only wish I would have known when it happened; what a great model-able moment that would have been.

I’ll try to carve out a few more observations this weekend before my final presentation in Melbourne on Monday. Then back to the states on Tuesday.

In case anyone is interested, my keynote was Ustreamed here, and the other sessions are on this page. Enjoy!

From the “Circling the Wagons Department” it seems the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures. For some reason, letting others know that your are a blogger is highly problematic, and the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blogs. (Hadn’t heard that one before.) As Lisa Nielsen, the manager of professional development for the Department of Instructional Technology writes on her blog, it’s not a direction that serves the DOE.

I find this particularly upsetting because…having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures.

No doubt, employee blogs can be problematic and are not always to be celebrated. And I do recognize the need to monitor what people in your organization are doing. But the reality here is this: educators in New York City who want to connect and share with other educators around the world are going to do that. Some of them will do it well, others, notsomuch. Celebrate the former, educate the latter. Learn from the experience and from the sharing that takes place. In the end, this is once again just lazy policy in action.

Just wanted to point briefly to a new ethnographic study on young kids in online social environments that was released this week by Consumer Reports Web Watch and the Mediatech Foundation, which is the brainchild of my good friend Warren Buckleitner (and for which I serve, badly I might add, as vice president of the board.) The study looked at kids 2-8 and asked parents to create video journals of their children’s use of sites like Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, videos which were then analyzed for a number of different outcomes.

The bottom line:

We discovered that the digital world offers a wealth of opportunity for young children to play and learn. But even in this small sample of 10 families we found–too easily, in several circumstances–repeated examples of attempts to manipulate children for the sake of commerce.

And here are the key findings:

• Even the very young go online.
• The Internet is a highly commercial medium.
• Web sites frequently tantalize children, presenting enticing options and even threats that their online creations will become inaccessible unless a purchase is made.
• Most of the sites observed promote the idea of consumerism.
• Logos and brand names are ubiquitous.
• Subtle branding techniques are frequently used.
• The games observed vary widely in quality, in educational value, and in their developmental match with children’s abilities.

The entire study, “Like Taking Candy from a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments” (pdf) is available for download. And, you can see excerpts from the video journals on YouTube.

Thanks to a short post from Lawrence Lessig (now on his regularly scheduled month long blog hiatus, btw) I’m using Apture for the first time to demo what I think is a powerful new potential for blogging. (Click on Lessig’s name above to get a sense.) In an amazingly easy way, I’m now able to add all sorts of multimedia context to whatever I am writing about, in a way that transcends just “regular old” linking. It’s one of those tools that immediately made me want to be back in a classroom with students, learning with them the ways in which writing and hypertext continue to evolve.

Apture allows you to easily add video, audio, text and almost anything else from Web sources or even local files as a pop-up to whatever word or phrase you designate in your post. So, as I write this, I’m thinking about what I can come back and add context to after I publish it. (That’s how Apture works, post publication.) If for instance, I was writing about the latest education news here in Brisbane or in Australia, it’s exceedingly easy for me to provide all sorts of relevant content that pops up right here on the page (as I’m sure you’ve noticed already.) What’s interesting me right now is how this makes me think very differently about the process, and how I wish, actually, that I could do this before I publish. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

While I think this is an amazing new tool, I’m sure it could just be added noise on some level. But regardless, I love these added pieces to play with and to experiment with. It should push all of us to think further about how writing and reading literacies in online, read/write Web environments might differ from traditional paper.

This isn’t news to many, but this morning, the band Nine Inch Nails released its newest collection of music this morning as a free download with a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license. I’m not sure how realistic the all free music model is, but I really hope the “take this and make your own music” model sticks. It’s a great entry point for teaching kids about intellectual property and copyright, creativity, publishing, collaboration, etc. Obviously, it could mean kids making their own music videos, digital stories, etc.

Since I’m pretty ignorant in the music mashup process, however, (as well as many other things,) I’m wondering what makes it possible for anyone to add other vocals or instrumentals to these downloads. Is it the format? And can anyone point to a process that steps one through how to do it?

If I had wireless, I’d be Tweeting “On a Plane” for the next 22 hours or so. Heading to Australia for eight days of blogvangelizing in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Three conferences and a day at a school district. Should be fun, but I’m dreading getting on this 757 I’m staring at.

At least my Google Docs and my Google Reader are both operable at 40,000 feet.

See you “down under”…

Kind of spur of the moment I decided to UStream all of my presentations at MICCA in Baltimore, and in the midst of doing so noticed some cool upgrades, the best of which is the ability to “cohost.” (Notice the little link in the bottom left of the picture.) This may not be all that new since I haven’t played much of late, but it was fun to bring all sorts of willing experimenters from the studio audience in to play. Talked to bicyclemark in Amsterdam, a classroom teacher in Wichita, a technology specialist in the UK, and some students in Montgomery, Alabama, pictured here. The folks who were watching seemed to indicate that the sound and picture quality were pretty good, despite some spotty bandwidth yesterday. The only glitch was that when I tried to record those interviews, the “cohost” contributions didn’t stick. It was just me talking and listening, making little sense.

I have to say that UStream has become quite the eye-opener for people in my presentations. It’s definitely an interesting way of positioning the drastic publishing shifts that we are experiencing, and to give a bit of context to the “call for conversations” around them. And on a personal note, it is great to be able to watch/listen to presentations while multitasking in the background.

Now if only UStream would archive the chats…

So it’s official. Clay Shirky is my new hero, right up there with Lessig in terms of spelling things out in ways that just make so much sense, and that actually cause butterflies in my stomach when my brain fully wraps around an idea and owns it. I loved his book, Here Comes Everybody, and I love the book blog almost as much, especially when he writes stuff like this.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

It’s an amazing essay that positions this shift just right, that we’re waking up from a collective TV watching bender that has created a “cognitive surplus” that’s just waiting to activated, and that we’re seeing the beginnings of that right now in our ability to participate. And that changes everything.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

It made me think of George Siemens’ recent post where he writes about being unable to state clearly exactly what it is that’s happening right now.

While people have always been able to do this, the scope and ease of collaborating and (hopefully) creating a multi-perspective information source is now greater than before. It just feels different to me. Like we’re still going through many of the motions I recall going through in the past with regard to information creation/sharing…but something fundamental is different. Can’t quite put my finger on it…

Shirky might say we’re shaking off the hangover and discovering a larger purpose for what we are creating and sharing. It feels different because it’s starting to feel like an expectation, not simply an option. As Shirky says

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Great, great essay. And lots of butterflies.

UPDATE: Just saw a tweet from Arthus that led to the video of Shirky’s talk. Cool!