So I’ve been getting tweaked by filters again and the amount of stuff that many schools block and try to keep away from kids and, to a depressingly large extent, teachers as well. I know this is just a repeat of the same basic issues that have been floating around here for a while, but for some reason I’ve been slamming into that wall both technically and intellectually in the past weeks more than usual. Frustrating when it seems to be getting worse instead of better.

At one recent event, I had a couple of hours between my sessions and since the wireless was spotty, one of the school administrators offered up his office and his computer for me to use. “Slow as hell,” he said as he logged me in. He wasn’t kidding. But the worst part was that I really needed to get onto my Gmail account to snag a file and it was, of course, blocked. Google docs, blocked. YouTube, blocked. Webpages came up with photos and videos “x’d” out. Apparently, everyone in the school suffered under the same filter. And the same was true of a school superintendent I spoke with who lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

I swear I wanted to grab them both and shake them and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! Why do you stand for that?”

Oy.

I say this all the time, but I truly believe that filters make our kids less safe. They step off the bus into unfiltered worlds with no context for making good decisions about the stuff coming at them. It’s a huge problem. But on some levels, the bigger problem is what we are doing to our teachers. It insults the profession to not at the very least provide desktop overrides for teachers when they bump up against a filtered site. Have a policy in place to deal with incidents where teachers make poor choices if that’s what the concern is.

Seriously, am I missing something? Why is that so hard to implement?

The only way we’re going to get students, or teachers, to master the Web is to let them use it.

I’ve become a real Cory Doctorow fan ever since reading Little Brother (and yes, I did double check that.) It’s a great novel for geeks and non geeks alike, and I wish I could remember who I loaned my copy to.

Anyway, Cory has a post at Boing Boing today that talks about his recent reading of John Holt’s classic How Children Learn which I remember reading parts of quite a while ago. (It’s obviously something I need to revisit, along with many others.) He pulls out some really great quotes that just make me yearn for that type of learning environment for my own children. I loved this one snip:

Most resonant for me was his description of kids’ learning unfolding from the natural passionate obsessions that overtake them.

Me too. I remember when I was in sixth grade and Mrs. Tharp let me go outside of the regular essay assignment to write another chapter in my exceedingly exciting novel about a camping trip gone bad. (I wish fan fiction was around back then.) Same with Ms. Riley when I was a sophomore in high school who let me write the bulk of my journalism stories around sports related topics, and Dr. DeCavalcante when I was a senior who instead of doing the standard report about John Updike let me instead try my own hand at a short story a la A&P (one of my all-time favorites) written in Updike’s voice. It wasn’t the story that he assessed, it was my attention to style and diction, and I loved trying to replicate the cadences and dialogue. And even though I knew the story wasn’t great, I got an A. (I’m an English geek, I know.)

So I’m wondering what memories along these lines others have. And I’m wondering how much we feel we’re able to let kids do along these line in our classrooms.

Btw, Doctorow’s post is worth it for the comments as well…

So I’ve been doing this for seven years and luckily can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve messed up pretty badly, but that last post was a whopper.

Not only did I confuse Mark Federman (who I mostly agree with) with Mark Bauerline (who I mostly disagree with), I actually fell on the side of the latter in that post. Go figure.

Suffice to say, I screwed up big time. And I am experiencing a personal teachable moment. Not that I would change anything in terms of what I said about the essay. But this realization is providing some interesting reflection.

(Thanks to an e-mail from Jay Hurvitz for catching the switch and being very gracious in his e-mail pointing it out.)

(UPDATE: Please read the correction above reagrding this post to understand the cross outs.)

I’ve been a Mark Federman fan ever since his great essay “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time“ from a few years ago, which, if you haven’t read it, would land on my required reading list for anyone interested in this conversation. Federman is with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and he’s one of those people that just pops up from time to time to get me thinking.

His latest pop (Correction: This is actually by Mark Bauerline. Oh, the irony.) is in The Chronicle Review and it’s titled “Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming.” It’s an interesting recap of some of the online reading studies that have been done by Jakob Nielsen over the years, but it  quickly turns to a discussion of why technology has met with mixed (at best) success in the K-12 classroom over the years. In a word, it has to do with reading:

Digitized classrooms don’t come through for an off-campus reason, a factor largely overlooked by educators. When they add laptops to classes and equip kids with on-campus digital tools, they add something else, too: the reading habits kids have developed after thousands of hours with those same tools in leisure time.

In many of my presentations I ask those assembled what percentage of their reading is done online and whether or not they know of anyone who addresses online reading literacies in the classroom. You can probably guess the results: not much, and zero. (Well, almost zero.) Once again, this is one of those areas where the kids are doing it already and the educators in the room don’t have much to go on in terms of what the differences are or any substantial practical experience. Federman Bauerline makes the point that when new technologies enter the classroom, teachers see change. Students, on the other hand, see the status quo:

Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.

For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives.

Federman Bauerline argues that screen reading cannot provide those skills, and he argues it persuasively.

We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking.

This resonates. In fact, I’ve made myself take time over the last few months to read longer texts, and after plowing through three really, really engaging and challenging novels in the past month or so, I’m feeling like my brain is back in gear somehow. It’s getting closer to balance.

What continues to concern me, though, is the paucity of conversation about any of this in our schools. This is hugely complex, and it requires a strategy and good pedagogy. I feel almost blessed that my kids enjoy reading books, longer novels, Meg Cabot and Mike Lupica type stuff that are even above their age levels a bit. And I love talking to them about what they read. But as I watch Tucker search for and read helps and hints about Spore, I can see the difference. It’s not bad, but it is different. And it’s a difference we need to name.

(Photo Revision by -nathan.)

So I have a feeling that I may be settling into a couple-a-somewhat-meaningful-posts-a-week routine here at the old blogyard, not nearly as much as I have posted in the past. It’s not that I’m not writing, I’m just writing in other spaces, trying to comment more to the things I’m reading, writing articles and proposals, and starting and participating discussions in PLP communities. (In fact, Sheryl and I are hoping to start a new blog just about that effort in the near future.) Or it might just be that I’m just really wrapped up in the politics of the moment which I choose not to write about here. Or it might be that I still can’t seem to shake this stuckness I still feel with the conversation about social tools and learning in schools. Or…who knows what else it might be. It’s kind of hard to let this space drift a bit since I’ve been focused here for so long. But drift it might.

At any rate, a couple of connections recently about the importance of and ability to create immersive learning situations for our students and ourselves that I thought I would just note here. MIT Press has a new collection of essays under the heading “Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge” that looks to have some important thinking, and as I was reading the introduction by John Seely Brown (.pdf), this part jumped out at me:

Technology, of course, is key, and I want to dwell on only two aspects of how technology can now transform our learningscape: immersion and intelligent tutoring systems. Immersion is a concept that has received all too little attention in the learning literature. Consider, for example, how every one of us has learned the immensely complex system that is our own native language. We learn language through immersion and desire. Immersion comes from being surrounded by others talking and interacting with us and is furthered [sic] facilitated by our deep desire to interact, be understood and express our needs. We learn language fearlessly and constantly. Nearly everyone with whom we interact is a teacher for us—albeit an informal teacher, encouraging us to say new things, correcting us, extending our vocabulary, and so on. This simple form of immersion is fundamentally social in nature. In today’s high tech, graphically rich world we now have almost limitless opportunities to leverage immersion. We can now build simulation models of cites, historic events, atomic structures, biological and mechanical systems to name just a few. Our challenge becomes how to share the vast simulations and data bases that already exist and share them in a way that others can extend, remix and compose them in order to expand their reach and scope. I still dream of a virtual human system where I can explore any aspect of how our bodies function from organs to cells to membranes. There are promising signs, but as of yet we have no real framework for constructing and sharing modules of such a system. But if we can entertain the semantic web, perhaps we could entertain a vast and recursively interconnected web of simulations. No one group can build it all, but many could contribute, including students themselves.

In that context, I can’t help to think of watching Tucker learn Spore, which he loves, btw. Last night, I watched him as his creature mixed it up with another tribe, ultimately getting himself killed in the process. I tried to really focus on the decisions that he was making, to fight, to run, all the while feeling, literally, the intensity coming off of his skin. When the battle was finally over, he went back and starting re-creating his creature, assessing the traits that he needed more of, the things he could get rid of. And then, he was off to try it again.

Like I’ve said, I’m not a gamer, but I’ve been struck by how much Spore hooks you in. The graphics, the objective, the decisions; you are immersed in this world and in the process. And you are pretty much in there on your own to figure it out. You literally learn your way through the game, and while that may not be an insight for those who have been there, done that, it is a revelation for me. What I would like, however, is a Yoda. Someone to work through this stuff with, to counsel me, ask the right questions, nudge in the right direction, but let me learn it on my own. Tucker, however, is perfectly fine without that. In fact, I think he prefers the challenge of doing it on his own. Me, I can feel my frustration. My son, who is easily frustrated in many other areas of his learning life, goes with the flow.

That concept of immersion also has me thinking about my PLP work with Sheryl. One of the reasons we went down this path of long term, six to eight month professional development is because we didn’t see (and still don’t see) much movement or deep learning coming out of the one-day (or one-hour) workshops we were doing. Sheryl’s brilliance in her work in Alabama was not only that to really help people and specifically educators understand the potentials of online social learning environments, they had to be immersed in those spaces, not just dropped off for the day, but that they also needed to feel a sense of community in the process. We all know, this isn’t about tools, it’s about the connections and the relationships.  And while this is common sense, this idea that the best way to learn French is to go live in France for a few months, it’s not easy to make work in these contexts. Even though Tucker may not mind being dropped into Spore and figuring it out on his own, most of us need that situated community support to start learning the new language or tools or pedagogies. We need the immersion into the conversation. We need Yodas.

That’s why that Seely Brown quote jumps out, especially the “Immersion comes from being surrounded by others talking and interacting with us and is further facilitated by our deep desire to interact, be understood and express our needs” part. Not saying we can’t do that without technology, but I wonder how we can do that more effectively with it.

(Photo by Arcady Genkin).

I had the pleasure of meeting John Palfrey (albeit briefly) and listening to a couple of his presentations when I attended iLaw (which I miss terribly, btw) at Harvard’s Berkman Center a couple of years ago. So when I saw that he had a new book out and that it was about digital kids, I figured it might be worth picking up.

Now I just got it, and as is usually my wont, I was doing some quick skimming around when I landed on the passage below towards the end of the book. Suffice to say that if the it covers these topics in an interesting and challenging way, I’ll be writing more about it.

I think of this book as an invitation to conversation. It’s an invitation sent out especially to parents and teachers of Digital Natives and would-be Digital Natives. I think they–we–are essential to the happy resolution of the many conflicts we describe in this book. Parents and teachers have lots to worry about, I know much of it unrelated to the privacy or Web-surfing habits of their kids. But this is important, and more so with each passing day.

As of today, and surely subject to change, I’m absolutely convinced of three things about the population born digital.

First, the ways in which some–by no means all–young people are interacting with information, with one another, and with institutions is changing rapidly. the consequences of these changes are enormous for the future of our societies. It’s not a foregone conclusion that it will turn out well. There’s a lot we’ve got to get right if we want to give our children, and our societies, bright futures.

Second, I’m certain that there is a global culture in the making, which joins people from many corners of the globe together with one another based upon common ways of interacting over information networks. The emergence of this common culture is part and parcel of the trend toward globalization. The consequences of this second notion, of an emerging global culture, ought to be overwhelmingly positive. It is a dramatic amplification of the diplomatic and cross-cultural benefits gained by the invention of the telegraph, millions of international student exchanged, and the rise of the globally networked economy. As we celebrate the emergence of this global culture, we need to recognize that a sharp divide has formed between those with both the access and skills to participate in this digital culture and those without either.

Third, while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the issues that we worry about–privacy, safety, piracy, overload, and so forth–the best and most enduring solutions are community-based efforts. These are big, gnarly, complicated, subtle issues, every one of them. We have to be flexible in how we approach them, to think creatively, to work together. We have to draw on our wisdom of Digital Natives themselves in the process. They are our greatest hope, hands down.

I know that I’ve been accused of getting a little too excited by writing like this, but you can add this to the chorus of smart people who see what’s happening as “tectonic” as Shirky says it. And yes, we all like to hear others confirm what we ourselves believe; Palfrey may be in my echo chamber for sure. But like Shirky, at first blush this has a pretty balanced feel to it (digital natives reference aside.)

By the way, the book has a pretty impressive wiki to go along with it.

Let me just say at the start that I am not a gamer. I’ve never been in World of Warcraft or any of the other popular destinations, and to be totally honest, the whole concept escapes me on some level. (Maybe I just don’t think I would have the time to dedicate to something to get to the point where I would have some fun with it.) So when I heard that Spore was coming out, and that many thought it was going to be a big deal, I thought that maybe I would be a good opportunity for me to get my brain around what gaming might mean and, in some roundabout way, what the learning implications might be.

It arrived yesterday, and I’ve spend a total of about 90 minutes playing so far, and I’m pretty much blown away. I have little or no idea what I’m doing, I’m sure, but my herbivore (you didn’t really think my spore would eat meat, did you?) paramecium has now evolved into a two-legged, funky-eyed, green, fruit-eating creature who’s growing a family and trying to figure out how to survive in a world with equally funky looking creatures who might be friend or foe. And while getting past the cell stage was pretty easy, this creature stage is already proving to be much more challenging. Just a few minutes ago, I was killed by some purple dudes who ganged up on me and seemed to chew my head off. Luckily, rebirth is almost instantaneous.

The 3D graphics are amazing to start with. On my Mac Book Pro, it’s literally like sticking your head into the screen. The controls are pretty easy to use even with the track pad. And the ethereal music that continuously loops in the background sets a great mood for “evolution”. You make babies by calling out for your mate and doing a cute little love dance (complete with little pink hearts floating up into space) that leads to egg laying. And when you’ve done that (and it appears only when you’ve done that) you can evolve your creature based on the new parts that you’ve found as you travel around the world you’ve created.

What I’m finding interesting already is that I’m evolving my happy little creature into a pummelling fighting machine by adding all sorts of claws and horns and other tough stuff. I mean, now that I have a family with little ones and all… I’ve been trying to make a lot of friends by singing and dancing at them when I meet them. Some sing back. Others ignore me. Maybe I need some more rhythm, I don’t know. And I’ve made one buddy with someone out there in the Spore playing universe although I have no idea exactly what that does.

And let me just note the way the game teaches you how to play. At various points, it pauses itself and gives you some coaching. As a paramecium, it’s all about eating algae. But now, it’s getting a bit more complex. I have all sorts of icons on my screen that I don’t have much of a clue about. At some point, I’m going to just have to spend some time reading and figuring out what all of it means. And while it’s interesting to get a sense of the evolutionary process, not quite sure yet what I (or my kids) would be learning from all of this yet. It’s fun, it’s engaging, and I guess on some levels it’s constructivist in terms of building the creature from scratch and making decisions about how to best keep the thing alive. It’s pushing a part of my brain that doesn’t get a lot of exercise, which is a good thing.

Anyway, I’m off to a pretty good start with Spore…I’ll just have to learn to sleep a lot less if I want to keep up with the rest of creatures.

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.

So, I’m tired. In the last 21 days I’ve traveled about 8,000 miles, near as I can figure, and given 11 presentations, four of them on “opening days” in front of a total of about 3,000 teachers in about a half dozen states and provinces. It’s a fun time when people are rested and ready to get back to school and for the most part engaged in thinking about teaching, learning and schooling. And it’s a good time to get a temperature check as to what’s changing, if anything, in classrooms and in schools. In a few words, my impression continues to be: not much.

That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences. There are, and in general, it’s feeling like more and more teachers are taking seriously the idea that we need to start some wide-ranging reflection and conversation about just what it is we’re doing with our students. (How far those conversations ever get is another story, however.) I’m sure there will be those that read this blog and others who will disagree, who will trumpet serious efforts and rethinking things either on a personal or system wide level. And that’s all good, but not surprising. They’re reading and participating already. On some level, they get it.

But, I’ll say it again, what these condensed travels remind me is just how small the scope of all of this talk continues to be. The vast majority of those who I’ve been in rooms with the last three weeks have little idea of what is happening in the world and have given nary a thought to what this means for teaching and learning. How do I know that? By the “omg” comments that I hear as they are filing out. By the “Ugh…we’ve got a lot of work to do” responses. By the teacher/mother of a teenager who asked me what Facebook was. By the consistently less than 10% of people in the room who own a MySpace or a Facebook site. Not that the Read/Write Web conversation is the only one that matters in the context of changing schools, mind you. But it is the one that consumes my time, obviously.

Recently, after one of my presentations, the superintendent of the district and I were standing shoulder to shoulder as his teachers were filing out of the room. He’d given an extremely thought provoking introduction, articulating his desire that they enter into a district wide conversation about change, that they all had a stake and a voice in that conversation if they wanted it. But at the end of my talk, the few questions went pretty much right to the “yeah, buts” and the reasons why these ideas would be difficult to make work. “The problem,” the superintendent said to me, “is that they don’t think they have a voice. They’ve been conditioned to wait for us to lead, to tell them what they can or can’t do. Somehow, we need to change that.”

For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

I still feel that way, for the most part. Things may have moved a tic or two on the scale, but until we do that en masse, not much is going to change.

(Photo “Knives Out” by Charlyn W.)

Moments like the Sarah Palin for VP pick are moments to sit back and take measure of what a complex landscape we’re living under when it comes to what to believe, Googleability, and the whole concept of “citizen journalism.” The stupidity from both sides has been amazing (the “she has foreign policy experience because she’s right next door to Russia” remark on the right and the “it really wasn’t her baby” watch on the left), and the breadth and speed with which all of the details of her and her family’s life have been coming out have been astounding to watch. In fact, we’re no doubt witnessing it in spades right now simply because it was such an out of the box pick and the MSM just wasn’t ready for it.

Good thing we’re all here to fill in.

If you listen to C-SPAN in the mornings like I do, you can’t help but agree with Bill Maher when he says the country is getting stupider and stupider. If you watch FOX or MSNBC, listen to Rush or Hannity or Ed Schultz, read the red and blue blogs, you quickly find yourself in a huge virtual, asynchronous shouting match that regardless of your political leanings will make you both tired and frustrated and longing for the one page briefing memo with just the “facts” if there still are such beasts. (By the way, does anyone want to argue that the Wikipedia article on Sarah Palin may be the most extensive, neutral point of view collection of “facts” that exist about her right now?) Yeah, everyone having a printing press is a good thing on balance. But sheesh, it sure complicates things.

And it’s been a real treat watching a good chunk of this develop with my kids, pausing the TIVO like every 30 seconds to ask them what they heard, what they think it means, and then explain why it doesn’t necessarily mean what is sounds like it means. (Don’t worry, we don’t torture them too much with this, and we do it across party lines. We can only take so much of it ourselves.) All in an effort to plant some seeds of skepticism for media in their brains. (The best quote was from Tucker, btw, who while watching Palin’s introductory speech to the nation said “Why does McCain look so nervous?”)

There must be about 3 million ways we can make all of this a “teachable moment” for our kids, from having them blog the convention goings on to creating their own campaign commercials to building their own policy wikis. (I’m sure there are many others much better than those ideas, btw.) That is, of course, assuming we have the editing skills (and we’re not just talking punctuation, here) to sift through all of it and come to some informed conclusions ourselves, that we have the ability or at least the awareness of our ability to participate in meaningful ways.

I love presidential politics, but while it usually points out what is best about this country, it also serves to remind us how really, really dumbed down the whole process has become. And unless we get some folks around here who can sift through this morass of “truth” with a little more skill, it ain’t gonna get any better any time soon.