For those who may want to catch the archive, here is my interview yesterday with Indiana University professor Curtis Bonk as we chatted for about an hour about a variety of topics including the effects of technologies in Third World countries, the barriers to change in K-12 schools, and what the future might hold for the Web. We also talked at some length about a book he is looking to publish about how learning can be leveraged by the connections we can now make, and about his other new book titled Empowering Online Learning. He made the point that a lot of folks are making these days, that many of these ideas have been around for a long time, mentioning Seymour Papert and others from 20 and 30 years ago. When we asked him to pull off a few books from his shelf behind him, he grabbed Mindstorms, Apprenticeship in Thinking and some other older but still relevant titles. All in all, it pushed my thinking in some good ways. Enjoy!
Some session notes: Apologies for the choppy audio in the first half; not sure why it mysteriously cleared up all of a sudden. Thanks to everyone in the chat session (about 30 folks) who offered up some great questions, and to Sheryl who moderated. And last, having some trouble converting to MP4 since the .flv file was so big. UStream won’t do the conversion on files over 100MB.
New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes about the pretty dire state of education in this country in his piece “The Biggest Issue” which ran yesterday, and it cites some interesting research about the relationship between education and technology. Namely, not so great things happen when the pace of educational progress slips behind that of technological progress, which is what is occurring right now.
The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.
Now I know that “educational progress” in this instance is being measured by how much of an education most people get, a rate that peaked (in graduation terms) in the late 1960s and continue to decline. But can we really measure educational progress on the basis of graduation rates these days?
Two other points from the essay: First, the bottom line is that family environments, “which have deteriorated over the last 40 years,” have a great deal to do with the potential success of any given student. Second, it appears, at least, that the candidate better positioned to deal with this situation is Obama, given his emphasis on early childhood education.
Here’s another nugget to chew on:
It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.
I’m still doubtful that either campaign will push these conversations to the forefront even though, as Brooks suggests, they represent “the biggest issue facing the country.”
Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2 pm EST I’ll be continuing my thread of interviews with authors with Curtis Bonk, professor of e-learning at Indiana University. Curtis has just finished a comprehensive companion to Thomas Friedman’s work that looks at the world through an education slant. His blog has been recounting some of his travels around the world, and he’s got a lot of great stories to share that might give a more global perspective on how this is all playing out. He’s early in the publication process and has some interesting ideas for putting the book out, which will also be fodder for our discussion.
The interview will happen on my Ustream channel, and I hope you’ll join in the conversation. If you have any questions that you’d like to ask, feel free to post them here.
Just an observation here, but three times in the last week I have been speaking to different educators who in passing have made the point that we do a good job of teaching kids that .org sites are more trustworthy than .com sites but that in general, we really don’t have a solid grasp of online literacy.
So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out once again in this New York Times piece titled “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” It’s the story of a “typical” family where the kids are online some six hours a day reading and writing at FanFiction.net among other places. There’s not too much hand wringing on the part of the parents, however, who say things like “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”
Sigh.
So here’s the crux of the debate:
As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Kudos to the “experts” who note the difference with reading online:
What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text…In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
So here is the interesting question for me: do we need to teach online reading? Some think not:
Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught. “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”
Don’t they? I think they do. I think that we have to help our kids navigate online reading spaces and provide an appropriate balance between print and digital environments. I think we have to help kids process and track and organized the things that they read, teach them to respond in effective ways, teach them to interact and become participants in the process in ways that don’t restrict their passion and creativity but also give them some context for what they are doing.
Read the whole thing. All in all, it’s a pretty interesting back and forth between old readers and young, and the bottom line is that it’s obvious that’s it’s something we need to be thinking of as we think about reading curricula and pedagogy.
Been taking a bit of break in these parts of late, still reading and watching a lot, writing a fair share of offline stuff, and plowing through a lot of trashy beach novels which, I’ve decided, are my antidote to over connectedness. (It’s also a great way to spend 4.5 hours on the tarmac while on your way to missing a keynote in Colorado…) Playing with some tools and my jail broken then unjail broken iPhone and all the new apps. Kind of in grazing mode. It’s troubling (?) though that at moments I still feel what I can only describe as some weird form of network separation anxiety from time to time, like I must be missing something important or not learning everything I need to learn. It passes more quickly the longer I stay away, it seems. Now, for instance, when I look at the really compelling video stuff that Dan Meyer is cranking out my first response isn’t “I need to find the time to learn that” as much as it is “thank god he’s investing the time and sharing out his reflections,” then reading and reflecting on others reflections, letting it all just sit.
Went for a couple of days to Virginia Beach to visit with Sheryl and her family and we spent a lot of time in a boat on the bay fishing and reading and chatting. In talking with her son Noah about how connected we all seem to be (text messages in between casts, etc.) one of us hit on the phrase above, and it bounced around in my brain for a bit. It seemed to fit the place I’m in right now, attempting, with pretty good success, actually, to control my connectedness, and to let the conversations happen elsewhere, jumping in when I feel compelled. Connecting, (ironically) to Nancy White’s idea of slow communities (like slow food) and wondering some more about the process of network participation and how much pull is too much pull, etc.
And that’s it…just checking in…just wanted to capture that. You have a great day now…
I’ve liked Twitter since I first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy me about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.
Whether it’s some people getting a little snippy from time to time and then other people making a way-too-huge-a-deal about it, or whether it’s two very smart people like Gary and Sheryl blowing out a Tweet-a-minute micro debate about the state of education in this country, or whether it’s people trying to live Tweet hour-long presentations that turn into like 347 updates, I’m finding anything that hints of substance just too scattered, too disjointed to read, even with the wonders of Tweetdeck. It’s like trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of a bunch of people with really bad cell phone reception, hearing a part of one response ’til it cuts out into the other. Frustrating.
And I can’t help feeling like it’s just making all of us, myself included, lazy. We’ve lamented this before, this “fact” that the whole community is blogging less since Twitter, engaging less deeply, it seems. Reading less. Maybe it’s just me (again) or maybe it’s my long term attachment to this blogging thing and my not so major attachment to texting, but it feels like the “conversation” is evolving (or would that be devlolving) into pieces instead of wholes, that the connections and the threads are unraveling, almost literally. That while, on some level, the Twitterverse feels even more connected, in reality it’s breaking some of the connectedness.
I (we?) blog for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m sincerely interested in what others are experiencing and I hope to learn from their reactions. When I write here, I can’t help but hope that whoever reads it will stop, reflect if they find it relevant, and offer up some wisdom (or whatever else) that will pique my thinking. I hope it becomes a conversation among a group of interested parties that want to test out or build on the ideas. But on Twitter, while I sometimes post silly “I ran five miles” type of check in post for anyone that might be interested, I also find myself writing for just one or two people yet publishing it for everyone to see. And when I read other Tweets directed as a response to another person, it’s like I feel compelled to click and dig and sort and try to nail down the context of the “conversation” and then to read it back again to make sense of it.
Look, I love the Tweet links and the “touch ‘em alls” and the zen, in-the-moment stuff. But, selfishly, I wonder how much less I might be learning today than B.T. as more of what we care about gets processed in short soundbites.
Not sure why all that tipped for me today, but it just got really painful all of a sudden. Anyone else feeling similar things?
Well, despite some technical issues (Skype video not working behind the NYU firewall (go figure) and just a complete drop of my Internet connection about half way through) here are the 2-part archives of my (or should I say “our”) interview of Clay Shirky along with the at times compelling chat conversation from UStream. (Apologies to those whose questions I didn’t get to; learning…) I’ll compress my thoughts into a later post, but on par, I found the interview itself and the process of doing it pretty interesting. I hope to have some more of these lined up in the coming weeks.
LATER UPDATE: Here are MP4 versions of Part 1 and Part 2. Looks like these links break from time to time; keep trying. And no idea how long UStream will leave them up…
Given the rules in place, this clash between the old ways of talking to the Congress and the potential new ones may have been inevitable. Noyes says Culberson and Ryan are active users of the Internet. “They have been Twittering all over the place,” he says. “They’ve been Twittering back and forth, engaging one another in debates over politics and policy.” The reporter describes Culberson, in particular, as something of a Web maverick and a poster child for the issue.
Chris shook my brain awake this morning with his reflections on change and Shirky and I’m still trying to sort through some of his finer points. Suffice to say, that it’s among the best posts I’ve read this year because it articulates so clearly where much of this is at and, perhaps, where it needs to go.
The where it’s at stuff is easy to get to, but hard to accept. And, as Chris says, our collective fear of failure, both of our schools and of our kids, is at the crux of the problem. Most are content with “predictably mediocre” schools because the risks associated with change are simply not worth it at this moment. It’s this risk/reward equation that I keep getting drawn to as well, and I keep feeling more and more that schools will not change until the external expectations change, and that the expectations that matter most reside in parents. We need to reframe that lens, and we need to do it fast. And “predictably mediocre” as language may not be a bad starting point. (That’s not what I want for my kids’ school.) But until we can celebrate the successes of “riskier”, change oriented schools like SLA, until we can make a compelling case that not only are the risks a) not that risky and b) imperative for preparing our kids, those risks will continue to be unpalatable.
And then there’s Tom, who is helping me understand “The Role of Chris Lehmann in the Universe.” As Tom points out, there are other progressive schools that might fit that bill, but their efforts are not nearly as transparent as Chris’s in the context of the technologies and tools we use in this community. I love the exclamation point he adds when he suggests that there have been “whole books” written about these places! The idea!
Tom asks if this is a problem in any sense, the fact that these schools and their principals aren’t blogging and Twittering and going to NECC. I wonder in the context of Shirky’s larger point that group action is enhanced by the ability to connect online if it isn’t a problem on some level. I wonder if a transparent network of successful “high-risk” schools connected through social tools wouldn’t at this moment be a boon to the larger discussion of school reform. And this is one of the more interesting effects of all of this, that right now, connecting around books is simply not as easy as connecting around blogs.
Which brings things to the “where all this needs to go” part of Chris’s post which is easier to read but harder to get to. How do we, in Shirky’s parlance, act collectively? Chris offers up some great, concrete, starting points, all of which are daunting to think about on any number of different levels because they inexorably lead to that inherent friction between traditional organization and collaborative group effort. There are new models being built in this process as well. What structure would we build? To what extent can it be owned by the many and not the few? Wikipedia is struggling with this right now. Obama is. It would be an interesting, yet difficult road, one that, as Chris points out, would be easier today than it was 10 years ago. And it could be oh so amazing if we pulled it off.
Much to think about, no doubt.
One more thing: Yesterday, when I picked Tess up from shooting (basketball) camp, she was sporting a new t-shirt, on the back of which read: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
I saw this presentation live a couple of weeks ago at the Personal Democracy Forum and would suggest that it’s worth 25 minutes of your time to take a listen. I really like a lot of what Pesce is trying to say, even though the verbiage gets in the way at times. And it really pushes my thinking about cell phones in general. Have a look.
Here is the overview from the PDF presentation page, which has some great talks by Rushkoff, Shirky, Lessig, Zittrain and others:
In this keynote talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Pesce situates the current moment of transformation in the context of 60,000 years of human civilization; argues that our innate tendencies to connect with each other, copy behaviors and share ideas are now on hyperdrive; and projects a near-future where “hyperempowered” individuals and networks transform politics. As he concludes: “Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.” The text of his talk is available on his blog here. He has also posted his slides on Slideshare, here.
In light of the Obama campaigns use of social tools, Pesce pushes the thinking quite a bit…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with Clay Shirky this Thursday at 11 am at my Ustream Channel. I’ll be picking his brain on how what he sees are the educational implications of the changes and shifts set out in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and I’m hoping you’ll participate as well. Most UStreamers know that there is a chat window that comes with every show, but I’ll also be opening up the cohost feature for those of you with camera and mic that want to come on and ask a question as well. (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know ahead of time if you plan to do that, just for organization sake.)
If you’d rather just leave a question in this comment thread, I’d be happy to try to work it in.
Been trying to get my brain around last week’s NECC experience for a few days now, reading some of the other post mortems, thinking about what the lasting impressions are and will be for my own thinking and learning. For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, San Antonio was not a home run for me, not like last year in Atlanta when the energy and ideas seemed to be flowing more intently, more spontaneously. And before anyone starts throwing things at me, let me just say that was my experience; I’m sure that many, many others found this year’s event to be a celebration, perhaps a transformation in their thinking about teaching and learning and education. In that regard, I’m sincerely happy that more voices have been added to the chorus, and that more practitioners have entered the conversation. We need more voices. We need more good pedagogy and thinking.
I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.
The good news is that the level of passion among those that count themselves in this community is, in a word, amazing. It was evident from the conversations I eavesdropped on in the Blogger’s Cafe to the late night debates on the River Walk, to the back channel chats, the sessions on how to put the tools to good work, to the collective efforts to capture as much of NECC as possible for those who couldn’t attend. I don’t think it was possible to sit in on the sessions or walk by the Cafe and not simply admire the level of engagement of both long standing and relatively new participants in this conversation. All of us, whether evangelists or practitioners or even the naysayers, are deeply invested in trying to make sense of these giant shifts that are occurring, and that is all good.
And there was an international flavor to NECC this year that seemed stronger than in years’ past. (BTW, I don’t count the Canadian contingent as international, thought I know I should.) It was great to see folks from Australia and the UK and many, many other far flung spots around the globe. We need more of their perspectives as well, and that seems to be happening.
But for me, at least, at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering, “what’s really changed?” And, where will we be a year from now?
NECC is the echo chamber writ large and in living color; more than any other conference, it’s where we feel “big.” But the reality of it is, as Dean suggests, the powerful learning that most of us experience in these online communities is still little more than a blip on the radar screen. (I wonder what percentage of the 8 million+ educators in this country are aware of these shifts on a basic level.) And this is a tech conference. As I read through some of the back channel conversations, some were asking about presenting to school boards or parents or even town councils. Others were talking about getting out to non-edtech conferences. Some were, again, searching for that elusive tipping point that will get the conversation jump started outside the chamber.
And I think it’s time we get serious about all of that. No doubt, the vendor floor in Washington will be filled with “Web 2.0 in a Box” and “Safe Social Networking” and control, control, control. And I’m going to guess that, like this year, “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts” will be “Hot Topics” as well as a few other new tools. And we’ll be talking once again about new standards and 21st Century Literacies and all of that. But while we as a community have no control over some of that, is that what we aspire to? Is that what we want the emphasis on NECC 09 to be, once again? Or do we want it to be more?
I hope it’s more. More about learning and figuring out what it means to be connected. More about what we can do to begin systemic change. More tangible, non-toolsy, results oriented thinking. More models that work, models that provide realistic options for educators to wrap their brains around.
More like what Chris Lehmann presented in his session, a session that since it had a “specific pedagogical focus” felt like it was “high stakes,” in an of itself a comment that should get us thinking. More like the conversations on leadership that Scott McLeod and Chris and others tried to have at EduBloggerCon on Saturday. More about ideas and connections.
And in general, without speaking for others, I again think I need to do more to try to get these ideas and these questions outside the walls of my learning community. I’m afraid we’re stalling because without some larger force or lever, these ideas have no where (or very limited routes) to go in a comprehensive discussion about what schools need to be and to do in response to the scale of change that is upon us. (That thinking is influenced heavily by Sir Ken Robinson’s latest presentation to the RSA, btw.) For me, at least, I think it’s time to start writing. (I know; I’ve said that before.)
Change on any level is not easy, and I’m not suggesting that there is one way to change or one thing that needs to be changed or that we all need to change in one particular way. It’s all incremental and personal, I know, but it’s also about doing what will create the most change, do the most good. I’ve been thinking about Lessig a lot and his attempt to attack the root cause of the smaller problems. I wonder what the root impediment for school change is? And, reffing Sir Ken again, we are at a moment where we all must change if we’re to sustain this existence. Along those lines, I’ve also, strangely, been thinking about all of the devoted carnivores that I hung around with last week in steak and barbecue land, thinking about how much healthier they would be and how much better off we’d all be if they and everyone else, for that matter, ate lower to the ground. But that is tough change as well.
Anyway, proposals for NECC ’09 are only a couple of months away…
So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out once again in this New York Times piece titled “