Konrad Glogowski’s Blogging Session at NECC
Awesome session by Konrad this morning. We had about 50 people in the room from around the world, and it was streamed into Second Life as well. (Here is the chat.) It was just so much fun to be in a packed room of people who were into not just the tool but the pedagogy as well. Enjoy!
Just before coming to NECC, I found a pointer to this recent post by Dave Winer reflecting on what conferences can and maybe should be. I actually attended the very first BloggerCon at Harvard in 2003. The “Blogging in Education” panel featured Pat Delaney, one of my earliest mentors, and there were a bunch of other smart people all around. But the real kick to the conference was the Day 2 unconference. The idea was to capture the best part of conferences, the conversations, and displace the presentations.
So, when I was designing my own conference in 2003, I decided to do something different — I moved the conference out of the hallway and into the meeting room. Or you can think of it the other way around. I tried to imagine what a conference would be like if you held it in the hallway.
It was, in a word, awesome. People engaged, interacting, debating, riffing on ideas and playing them out, all facilitated by “discussion leaders” that weren’t there to “present” but to guide. It was the hallway brought into the room.
I think that’s what we tried to do, with some pretty good success, last year in Atlanta with the first NECC related EduBloggerCon day. We had about 65 folks, and from what I remember, it was a lot of sitting around tables and on floors having some pretty wide ranging conversations about the state of education. It was like we all just wanted to get our brains stretched by the ideas, and have a chance as a group to get some deep, synchronous, back and forth with a whole bunch of folks who were passionate about figuring out what exactly was happening. It felt different. I wrote:
I’m not sure how far down the road we’re getting on answering any of the big questions. But we’ve started some conversations that I’m sure are going to continue. Steve, who has done such a great job of making this happen, said at the outset that he’ll be interested in seeing what transpires from this six months out. I’m feeling, at this moment at least, that we may have actually pushed further forward by that point.
In essence, as I read over the posts I wrote from NECC last year, we were part of a giant coming out party for these ideas that we’ve been kicking around here, some of us for years. It was like, finally, at last, people are listening. They’re getting it. We’re shifting.
Which is why yesterday’s EduBloggerCon II was, at least for me, a disappointment. I mean absolutely no disrepect to Steve who worked his tail off to organize it all and who I just simply admire as a good human. But right from the start, it was obvious that we hadn’t pushed further. In fact, if anything, it felt like we took a step backwards. Yep, there were more people, and that is a good thing. But the sessions I dropped in on and walked past didn’t have the same feel. They were being led, not facilitated. They were about tools. There were cameras and boom mics that totally interrupted the flow of the conversation, with clipboard laden vendors swooping down on those that talked with release forms needing signatures.
In short, it felt more like Monday than Saturday, in the room, not in the hallway.
It might be me. Others seemed to have gotten a lot out of the day. But it feels frustrating, on some level, that the week is shaping up once again to be more about tools and vendors than about the real work of getting our brains around how learning and networks and the very essence of how teaching and schools are being pushed by the shifts that are occurring. (And before anyone takes me to task, I’m fully aware that I’m doing a session on tools tomorrow, which, on some level I regret proposing.)
So I’m asking, what’s changing, really? How have we moved further down the road since Atlanta? I really want to know.
One question I get asked a lot during and after my presentations is “how much time to do you let your own kids have on the computer?” and the answer, in a couple of words, is “not much.” Both Tess and Tucker have their own accounts on our iMac which is conveniently placed in our living room, and they have access to a limited number of programs for 45 minutes a day. (The television is almost never on in our house, btw.) They can request more time if they like, and I often give it when Tess is in the midst of something on Google Sketch-up (me hoping she’ll follow in the footsteps of her mother the engineer) or when Tucker is deep into the latest batting statistics for his beloved Phillies. (I know, I know. Cubs are his second favorite team.) If it’s Webkinz or Line Rider, when time is up it’s up. But by and large, especially in the summer, Wendy and I want them off the computer and outside shooting hoops, jumping on the trampoline, or climbing up the mountain making forts and looking for snakes. Or reading books on rainy days. Or just being bored.
Wendy said that to me early on in our parenting lives when the kids were like 3 and 5. “Sometimes it’s good to let them be bored.” I’d never thought of it that way, but I’ve come to believe it wholeheartedly. They need to learn how to entertain themselves, to fill up their days.
Last weekend, they got really bored. After two months of weekend basketball stuff (which we are re-evaluating), Wen and I just wanted a couple of days to veg. The kids couldn’t believe it. They kept begging us to do stuff. We kept saying no. Computer? No. TV? No. It went on like that for a good two hours. But finally, it got quiet. We heard them rummaging around in the kitchen and in their rooms, running in and out of the house, and then a measured commotion down by the basketball goal. “I think they’re doing suicides,” Wendy whispered when she looked out the window.
Yes, they were. And not only that, they had devised a daily practice schedule (click on the pic above), which they proceeded to work through for the next two hours, coaching each other, supporting and praising each other, until the very end when Tucker threw the ball at Tess, she hit him in the head with a stick, and they both came stomping up to the house locked in mortal sibling combat. Oy.
Anyway, on par, boredom is good. They’re 8 and 10. They’ll have plenty of time for the computer…
In case anyone is interested, I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Darrel Branson and Tony Richards of the Ed Tech Crew in Australia last week, and they’ve posted the podcast on their site. Enjoy!
Preparing for Participatory Politics
My head is swimming with all sorts of impressions from the opening day of the PDF conference. Really smart people talking about really amazing shifts, trying to figure out if they are really transformative or just a better, larger, more immediate way to communicate with people and move them to action. I think the jury is still out (though I’m leaning toward the former) but it gets pretty heady when you think about what we have to prepare our students for in terms of the potentials for participating in the political process (both good and ill) and the extent to which we encourage that participation.
Zephyr Teachout (who has by any measure one of the coolest names ever) opened the day with a compelling question:
How many people have within them the knowledge of how to form a local group and to use that group to change the structure of their society?
And it wasn’t asked in the context of these connective technologies, but the implication was obvious. If we’re not preparing them to do it in their own physical spaces, how can they be expected to do it effectively in virtual space?
There was lots of talk as well about being able to use these tools, especially mobile tools, to capture and document important events and share them with the world. The example of Mayhill Flower, who happened to catch the Obama comment on average Americans being bitter and clinging to their guns came up on a couple of occasions, as did the Hillary Clinton comment about Bobby Kennedy which was captured on a Mogulus stream. Left a lot of people wondering if all of this is a good thing or just a recipe for chaos.
During the session I Tweeted to Andy Carvin who was also in attendance, asking whether all of this meant we should be preparing our kids to be, in effect, journalists. He Tweeted back, yeah, we should prep them to “conduct random acts of journalism when moments arise that demand coverage, debate.” I think I agree.
And then there was a panel titled “Building and Using the World Live Web” which featured Robert Scoble and the creators of Qik, Mogulus and Cover it Live. It was a fascinating discussion and model of just how live things are getting, including live streaming from your phone right to the Web where people can interact, ask questions, leave comments which are then sent back to the phone where you can integrate the suggestions into the broadcast. Stories of politicians who are using the feature to interact with their constituents, me wondering what the potentials are for local board of ed meetings, town councils, graduations, etc. (And, all the not so wonderful content as well.)
Zephyr cited a statistic that said that historically only about 5% of people have actively participated in the political process on a local or national level. I’m heading home tonight wondering if that percentage is going to change because of these tools, and if so, if that will be a good thing or not.
More tomorrow…
Media for Knowledge vs. Media for Action
So, yes, this is yet another post on the thinking of Clay Shirky, who what with all of the videos and interviews available out there on the Web has been pushing my own thinking on almost a daily basis. (I’m also happy to report that I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with him on July 10 at 11 am for those that might be interested in how this all translates down to K-12 education. Stay tuned as I’m going to be asking for some audience participation…)
In a presentation to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), a site that is getting a Ted Talks feel to it, btw, Shirky talks about these shifts in terms of how our use of media is changing. Whereas we used to use media to know things, we can now use media to do things. In this world, to speak is to publish, and to publish is to gather. At one point he says that “every URL is a latent community now,” and that community can not only consume the information there but can build platforms to act together. He discusses a number of examples that he used in his book, but he adds a great story about how the businesses in Palermo, Italy are using these new abilities to fight back against the mafia in some creative ways.
This idea of using media to act has been borne out in some interesting ways in our community in the last few days as well. Doug Belshaw found himself in the midst of some controversy recently when he posted his negative feelings about TALMOS, a Virtual Learning Environment that he had found difficult to use. Seems TALMOS contacted his school and asked that they get Doug to take the “offending” material down, which he did. Doug noted on the post:
***I had criticized TALMOS in this section, but they contacted my school to ask me remove my ‘potentially commercially damaging’ comments. It’s a shame to be effectively silenced through legal threats when all I did was compare their offering unfavourably against another…***
Love it. Of course, when people found out about this, they started writing and Tweeting about it, and it now appears that the company has backed down, saying according to Doug’s comments, that they wanted to “start a dialogue.”
And the other example was the networks reaction to ISTE‘s announcement of its seemingly restrictive policy about videotaping and streaming at next week’s NECC conference. After a number of bloggers wrote about it and attempted to frame a coordinated plan of action, ISTE re-evaluated it’s stance and has now made it much more accommodating to sharing.
But while that is all well and good, there is a part of another Shirky video interview that resonates here. He talks about groups’ abilities to use these tools for action, but he differentiates between using them reactively and using the proactively.
We’re not seeing a lot of real world collective action where people are coming together to build things and not just complain about things.
Now certainly, there are some examples in our network of that kind of work. But to me, that’s the real challenge for us as educators, teaching kids to use the tools for connecting and learning and acting, but also teaching them to do it not just as response but as creation, as inspired construction. That’s the real creative, potentially transformative piece to this. That’s what I want my own kids to be able to do.
That’s what it’s going to cost you to excerpt in your blog any content published by the Associated Press under it’s new pricing structure. According to a pseudo FAQ on copyright that the AP has published:
Don’t use your browser to cut, copy, and paste content. It is wrong and, in most cases, illegal.
That right there might cost me under the new guidelines.
The potential scenarios for what are and are not billable excerpts are a nightmare, and articulated fairly well at BetaNews. Jeff Jarvis sees this as the beginning of the end for the AP, and bloggers everywhere are yelling and screaming and debating the impact. And how this plays out is important for our own understanding of how to teach this stuff to our kids. I know that Gary’s comment on my previous post about this is an important point in the debate despite his cynicism, and I hope he draws it out more here. But this is another benchmark in the disruption, another test that I find fascinating on many levels, and one that is worth our attention and conversation.
Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:
It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.
I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.
What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.
The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.
Just in case anyone is interested, and because I haven’t posted three times to my blog in one day in a while and I’m feeling a little wacky, here is a short list of what’s on my summer reading list (as if I have any more time in summer than any other part of the year these days.) For some strange reason, I’m on a real book reading jones right now.
Suffice to say, there are other books in my pile that I’m hoping to get to (including a few given to me by network associates) and with the election coming up, there are all sorts of other political titles I’d love to get to. Odds are I won’t make it through most of these, but best intentions…
Btw, I’ll just say it again, if you don’t have Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody on your list, I humbly think you should.
Suggestions for additions?
Following Lehmann‘s lead, here’s my del.icio.us folksonomy on Wordle. I had too much fun playing with fonts and colors.
Election Special: Technology and Communications
A bit long (1:20), somewhat esoteric, but pretty interesting for a listen (not a watch…wish this was in podcast form.) Former FCC chairs Reed Hundt and Michael Powell take the Obama and McCain case respectively to discuss broadband, Net Neutrality, and communications technology. Highly partisan, but some compelling back and forth about where all of this is headed and, more importantly, where it could be headed under either administration.
Oh, and yeah, education is mentioned here and there. Sigh. (Update: Powell has an interesting answer about parenting and filtering at 1:12.)
There is another post brewing here along the “walk the talk” lines that wants to answer how much do either of these guys really use technology in their own practice, and along those lines, do they understand the potentials and pitfalls for education. If their campaigns are any indication, at least, I don’t think there’s any doubt who has the greater potential to engage in that narrow conversation.
So what are the salient questions for us to wrap our brains around in terms of this election?
(Full disclosure: I’m a Obama supporter and have contributed to his campaign.
Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions about what the Web is doing to our reading skills and to our intellects. As with many of these types of pieces, it’s really hard not to read this through the lens of what this means for our teaching and our curriculum, and I think there is little doubt it means a lot. Carr actually makes several similar points to Mark Bauerline in “The Dumbest Generation” (which I’m almost finished with, btw) with the difference that I honestly think he wants us to think deeply about what all of this means. (Bauerline just wants to call names and toss around blame, for the most part.)
Let me say that Carr’s description of how his own reading habits have changed resonate deeply:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Describes me to a tee, though I have to say there are still longer works (Shirky’s book most recently) that I find hard to put down. But the denser stuff, Wealth of Networks, for one example, I find tough any more. And there are some prominent edbloggers who I simply don’t read because of the length of their posts. In many ways, my own angst about this is why I am so thrilled that my own kids are reading books, that they are at least getting a sense of that extended, deep reading that longer works provide, even though I know that once they start really reading more online, that may change.
While there is little research to clearly paint a picture of what is going on in our heads, something is most definitely afoot. Carr cites a study that says
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
(Read the comment thread to my earlier post to get a sense of that debate.)
There’s more that’s equally compelling in terms of making the case that in all likelihood, the Web is changing the way we read. But the obvious question here is, what are the implications for us as educators whose students are reading more and more in online environments? I’m not suggesting that this type of reading is necessarily better or worse than our pre-Web worlds. I don’t think Carr is either; in fact he takes pains to point to moments in history when new technologies were created and roundly denounced only to see great gains in ways few could have predicted. Perhaps this is a step in our evolution as thinkers and learners. Who knows? But what I do know is that very few schools are thinking deeply about what this all means in terms of reading development and practice.
Maybe this article will jump start some conversations.
(Photo “Day 79-Focus” by Margolove.)
The other day, after reading a tweet from Dean Shareski about being upset that Shareski.com (I think it was) was already registered to someone else, I buzzed over the GoDaddy and snagged “tessrichardson.name” and “tuckerrichardson.name” for the next 10 years.
I’m expecting big things, kids.
On some weird level, I feel like this domain reserving thing is now a part of being a father, of providing as much opportunity as I can for my kids’ futures. And I know that sounds really, really silly to some, but I think I actually mean it. (I don’t think, however, as some are doing, I would pick a name for my child based on the domain being free…oy.) I wistfully imagine the day that Tess goes for a job interview and maybe gets some minor bump by the fact that she can pull up her own domain and start clicking through the wonderful work she’s created, the ways in which she’s been changing the world, and her vision of what’s to come.
A dad can dream, right? (Is Father’s Day this Sunday, btw?)
But I’ve been wondering how long it’s going to take until the digital footprint is an expectation rather than just an exception. Right now, for many folks, no footprint is a good footprint. But I wonder how long it’s going to take for employers or potential mates or whatever else to wonder “what, no footprint?” when they start looking around for one. As in “haven’t you been participating and doing good work that you want to share?” I tweeted out that same question today during a workshop and got some great responses that were literally all over the timeline. (Read from the bottom up.)
What a headshift this is for many of us, however. When I say to teachers “You want your kids to have a footprint” or “You want to have your own footprint” and suggest they embrace these ideas rather than avoid them, I can feel the discomfort. It goes against our best judgment, which, in this case, isn’t really best at all.
But I’ll just say it one more time for the heck of it. My kids are going to be Googled over and over, and when they are, I want tessrichardson.name and tuckerrichardson.name to come up at the top of the list. With any luck, whoever is looking will be impressed.
Lessig on Media and Government Reform
It’s no secret that Lawrence Lessig has been one of my heroes in this conversation for a long, long time, and I just wanted to share his most recent presentation from this weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. Would have loved to have been there.
I’ve always been a student of Lessig as a presenter; when I first started I ripped off his minimalist PowerPoint approach without apology and got away with it because very few of the people I presented to had ever seen him present. I’ve gone down a different path these days in terms of the technology, but I just don’t think there is anyone better in terms of making a clear point by building a contextual narrative that really gives perspective to that point and builds on it and challenges an audience to think about it in serious, meaningful, and new ways. Listen to the way he weaves the story, with just enough humor and cynicism, and how he brings it all together in the end, in this case, by getting back to the “core problem.” Very few intellectual moments in my life come close to the first time that I saw Lessig five years ago at Harvard, when I literally had goosebumps, and I am really looking forward to seeing him again in NYC in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, in case you haven’t heard his newest message, take 30 mins to watch. My bet is he’ll make you think.
A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…
Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:
And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)
I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:
Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”
That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.
Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.
So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.
And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.
(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)