Ok, so humor me for a minute here…

Here’s what I LOVE about reading on the Web, when I get into a link flow that dances me from blog to blog, post to connected post and comments, and after about 20 minutes of just letting myself be carried away by the threads of conversations I land on something that makes a small part of my brain blow up in wonder. (This is also, by the way, something that I think too many of us fight when we read online, this idea that if we just let ourselves get caught up in the link trip, reading snippets here and there, scanning there and here, that we’re not really reading deeply somehow. Like my seventh grade English teacher Mrs. Tharp is on my shoulder shaking her head in disdain. It’s just a different depth, I think.)

So bear with me as I try to capture this: somehow I got to Sarah Stewart’s post on the Connectivism course and hopped from there over to this mind-bending post at Mike Bogle’s blog which led me to graze around his site a bit to find this post which sent me to this conversation about Open Educational Resources on Brian Lamb’s site which led me to this comment by Mike Caulfield which provoked me to search for and find this very cool concept of Rip-Mix Learners. Setting aside the beauty of that idea, let’s reflect for a second on that process, one that I’d bet most teachers would dissuade their students from practicing. At every point, my decision to click was motivated by an interest for context, for moving more deeply into the one idea in the maze of stuff that was pulling me most at the moment. I didn’t read half of these posts in their entirety, nor do I feel the need to go back and do so. If I had, I most certainly would not have ended up where I did. And while I know that I just as easily could have ended up someplace even better, I let my interest drive the narrative, not the expectations.

While I’m not suggesting I understand fully the implications of reading in this way, I do know that these flow moments are, on balance, a good thing. I love being lost in it. And it’s almost as if I’ve done this enough to know that if I just give myself to it, the thing I’m supposed to find and learn will eventually make itself known, like it’s finding me somehow. Ok, that may be a bit over the top; suffice to say it’s Zen in a way that I wish all of my moments were.

So anyway…

…this concept of Rip-Mix Learners has my brain taking off in all different directions.:

Rip Mix Learners is a student-run Open Courseware project, in which students make audio recordings of the lectures, compile class notes, and other materials and share them with their peers online.

I’m thinking “Rip-Mix Classrooms” or “Rip-Mix Workshops” or heck, “Rip-Mix Conferences.” I’ve been railing of late at all the paper note talking conference attendees whose observations and reflections and experiences will never be connected after the conference ends. And I know that we’re already doing this to some extent on the conference level and the classroom level (i.e. Darren’s scribes and others.) Problem is, most schools would probably attempt to shut this down and call it cheating, especially if, as this group is doing, they are collecting and adding tests and quizzes to the mix.

The horror!

So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it – the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

So here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.

And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they   need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.

• Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
• They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
• They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
• Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
• We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.

So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:

New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

What do you think?

My friend Bruce Dixon pointed out to me a few weeks ago that if you do a search for “lesson plans” in Google you get almost 9 million hits, which, when you think about it, is a pretty amazing number. Not saying that they are all great plans, mind you, but when you think about the scope and variety of classroom related content that we can mine these days as opposed to just a few years ago.

Yet this concept of sharing content online still seems problematic for a lot of educators. As I travel around talking to teachers, very few of them argue when I suggest that this is still an isolated profession, and I get the strong sense that there is very little articulation around plans, practice or classroom experiences using online tools much less any local digital databases of documents or what have you. When I ask teachers to talk even in general terms about the experiences their students have had previous to arriving in their classes, most sit quietly and scrunch their shoulders. I know, I know…there is a time factor involved in doing this, or least a perception of one. But it just seems amazing to me that at this point there is no real shift towards publishing more of what we do, more of what our kids do, not only to expand our own knowledge base but to model for our students that potentials of sharing.

All of this was brought to mind, once again, in an by Issac Mao titled “Sharism: A Mind Revolution.” While I think the ideas may wax a bit too poetic at times, the thesis is powerful: in this world, the less we share, the less power we have. It’s an interesting discussion of the challenges to intellectual property and copyright and to the still ingrained perspective that to own and keep private our own best thinking is in some way protective and sustaining of our cultures.

Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of Private and Public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing private and stay “closed.” They may fear the Internet creates a potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox is: The less you share, the less power you have.

Mao discusses a lot of the benefits to blogging and sharing, the rewards we can potentially reap, and the positive consequences for the world. And he touches on the implications for education in terms of at least giving our students a leg up in “communication, collaboration and mutual understanding.” Not to mention the idea of helping our students to create a digital portfolio that can not only serve to help their teachers get to know them and their passions more effectively but that can connect them to other teachers and mentors who share those passions. And that is power, not only in the knowledge that we gain but in the learning relationships we foster.

(Photo “Sharing” by Kymberly Janisch)

So, I’m thinking it’s got to be a good sign when one of the people Obama has picked to head up the FCC review team has been quoted as saying this:

“We’re not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a US industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there’s been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed internet access,” she said.

And in a final introductory statement during her talk (that’s likely to send shivers down the spines of telecom company executives) she said that she believes internet access is a “utility.”

“This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state,” she said at the time.

What a concept.

The other day I was talking to a school administrator about an upcoming hands-on workshop and she asked if I could e-mail her the schedule to handout the morning of the event. For some strange reason I just said “Nope. No paper.”

After a short silence, she said, “Oh…ok.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “We’re going to be spending the whole day online; there is no reason to bring paper.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No paper,” she said, thinking, finally adding “How exciting!”

Now I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still read lots of paper books, but I’m working on that.)

Yet just about everywhere I go where groups of educators are in the room, paper abounds. Notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, index cards…it’s everywhere. We are, as Alan November so often says, “paper trained,” and the worst part is it shows no signs of abating.

At one planning session I was in a few weeks ago, twenty people were all furiously scribbling down notes on their pads, filling page after page after page. The same notes, 20 times. (I’d love to know where those notes are now.) At the end of the session, I gave everyone a TinyUrl to a wiki page where I had stowed my observations and asked them to come in and add anything I missed. Two people have.

At the end of a presentation a few days ago with a couple of hundred pen and paper note taking attendees (and the odd laptop user sprinkled here and there) I answered a question about “What do we do now?” by saying “Well, first off, it’s a shame that the collective experience of the people in this room is about to walk off in two hundred different directions without any way to share and reflect on the thinking they’ve been doing all day. Next year, no paper.”

I don’t think most were excited.

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?

(Photo “Magnus Christensson’s notes” by Jacob Botter.)

So it was pretty humbling to get a chance to meet George Lucas on Friday and to hear him give his take on the future of education for about 45 minutes. And it was a pretty amazing day overall at Big Rock/Skywalker Ranch, sitting with some very passionate educators and fellow GLEF advisors from around the country to share ideas and experiences. It’s all got my brain buzzing.

But without question, what’s rolling in my brain as I write this on this long flight home are a few of the things that Lucas started the day off with. First and foremost, this quote:

“The system falls apart around innovation. This is going to happen because there is a disease out there called digital technology. It is going to change education. All we can do is run out in front of it and guide people along.”

No question, it was an interesting metaphor to use. And the more I keep turning it in my brain, the more I wonder how much of what we do right now is going to inevitably die off because of ways technology will attack the system. And if it will take the 20-plus years that he seemed to suggest before we get, finally, to a “much more sophisticated, global learning environment” than the one we have now. What was also interesting, however, was to understand how he sees that happening, basically one teacher, one school, one district at a  time, convincing them all that “there is a new way of doing things.”

It’s a huge mountain, one that can only be climbed by educating the educators, the central role that he sees for the GLEF and it’s magazine Edutopia. He said;

“We build the swords for the crusaders. The sword is information and knowledge. That’s all we can do to change the world…Our mandate is to figure out how to scale up the the good work that schools are doing.”

There’s much more, obviously, but rather than try to weave it into some sense-making post, let me just share a few of the other major points that he made:

On the speed of change: “Education is the dragging force on innovation. The reason is well intentioned and that is we want everyone to be educated.”

On preservice preparation for new teachers: “Universities a at the core of the problem; there’s nothing more conservative than schools of education.”

On shifting the “why”: “We need to get kids asking ‘why does that happen?’ as opposed to ‘why am I learning this?’”

And finally, a few strung together quotes about the future: “We have a long way to go…the steamroller is coming, and we can hear it now. We were way ahead of it before, but now it’s closing in on us…This change is way bigger than all of us. Technology is going to change it. This will happen. The change will happen.”

(Photo of George Lucas by Bunkfordbraun.)

Thanks so much to those of you who participated in today’s inaugural George Lucas Education Foundation webinar. Here’s hoping that you found the conversation thought-provoking and valuable.

As promised, because of the limited time for questions, please feel free to use the commenting function on my blog to ask anything that we may not have had time for earlier. Remember that if you leave the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box checked, you’ll receive any answers and also other questions in via e-mail. I’ll try to respond to as many of these as I can in the next few days.

Again, thanks for tuning in.

Doesn’t matter who you voted for, history was made last night. I, for one, am happy for my kids.

No matter how the impact of paper newspapers is declining, at moments like these, there’s still nothing like the front page of the paper, not the website, that gives me goosebumps. And in that vein, I’m cruising through the hundreds of covers from around the world at Newseum. Amazing.