Weblogg-ed » 2009

Arrived at NECC in time for the morning keynote debate about whether or not bricks and mortar schools impede learning. It wasn’t a great question to begin with, because I don’t think anyone really thinks it’s an either or, either online or face to face, but a combination that’s going to emerge from this. I wish the focus had been more on the topic of learning and what we focus our learning efforts with kids on; that’s the real shift we need to explore. Gary Stager was a last minute addition to the panel, and I agreed with much of what he said, especially the idea that we should do what can be done at home at home and that schools should be places where we focus on projects and problems and arts and service. I find myself being more and more drawn to that vision. The debate had its moments, two great student members of the panel, and I’ll link this to the archive when it’s posted.

But here was the real kicker. Brad Jupp who is a high level adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was also on the panel, arguing that we should keep physical space schools. He pretty much articulated a vision that didn’t hold much in terms of any significant change. But if you want a snapshot of what the problem is in terms of moving any of the conversation forward, here you go: An administrator in the audience directed a question at Jupp that basically asked “How am I supposed to use things like blogs and wikis in my classrooms when I have the threat of lawsuits from parents and others hanging over me all the time?” In a phrase, his answer was “Lawsuits? What lawsuits?” He did go into somewhat of a response about a teacher using Facebook and being careful, but it was painfully obvious that he was basically oblivious to the on the ground concerns and fears that these new technologies have created. Not a clue.

I’m not feeling any better about the ability to move any of this to a different space with that apparent lack of understanding from the folks at the top.

A couple of Friday nights ago I may have made a big mistake: I went to bed at 11. It’s not that I stayed up too late. Instead it’s that I might have gone to bed too early. If I’d had my wits about me, perhaps I could have prevented what I’m sure will turn out to be a disastrous oversight on my part, one that may have huge implications to my online reputation (whatever is left of it.)

It seems that sometime early that Saturday morning while I was blissfully asleep, another Will Richardson claimed the new Facebook domain for my name. Will “Cuddle Bug” Richardson, that is, he of (or recently of) Laguna Beach High. Friend of what appears to be 195 other adolescent beach bums with goodness knows how much potential for embarassingness in the years to come.

“Cuddle Bug.”

Oy.

Maybe I should have set my alarm, or had someone call me, or even paid my wife’s high school intern to do the virtual camp out on Facebook and secure the address. Ugh…how could I have been so stupid? I mean, this other Will looks nice enough, arm around what appears to be his mom in the only picture he’s shared publically. (Interesting taste in shirts, however.) But there’s something unsettling about all of this.

“Cuddle Bug.”

Oy. Shoulda stayed awake.

Steve Hargadon hosted a panel discussion the other night on the topic of “The Future of Books and Reading” and I was honored to take part with Maggie Tsai of Diigo, Travis Alber and Aaron Miller of BookGlutton, and author Bob Burg. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Diigo, and during our discussion I started thinking what the ultimate in social reading might be. This is still thin thinking, but this is what I want for Father’s Day, kids.

I want to be able to buy a cloud book, that is a license that allows me to access my copy of the book from any device that gets me online. (This assumes, of course, that the book hasn’t been released with a CC license, in which case I just need the access.) As I read my copy, I want to be able to annotate it a la Diigo, but I also want to invite others who have a license to that particular title to join me in the reading and annotating. (This is what BookGlutton is doing with public domain and CC licensed books, though the annotations are not on the text itself like in Diigo; more on the margins.) I want to be able to see and interact with all of those notes from any device as well. In addition, I want to be able to see all of the annotations by people who are also reading, and since that might be overwhelming, I want to be able to sort what annotations I view by date, geography of the reader and by tags. This last one is the key. I know I’ve said this many times before, but if I ever got the ability to tag at the comment level, my ability to organize my reading, writing and learning life would increase exponentially. I seriously get giddy thinking about being able to create digital notebooks filled with pages created by pulling together individual notes from disparate sources around one tag that I’ve left somewhere, complete with linkbacks and reference information. If we taught kids to do that, imagine the notebooks they could construct over their school years. Imagine getting rid of all that paper.

Imagine.

Kevin Kelly wrote this three years ago in the New York Times, and it appears we’re getting there:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

While much of this will be done by the technology (the Semantic Web awaits) we’ll add the context, tweak the relevance. I know there is the potential for all sorts of havoc here, all sorts of breaking of tradition, all sorts of reading attention issues and much more. But maybe I’m an optimist to think that we could do this well, that it could be a value add, that while it will certainly be different, it could actually be better. I really love being at the beginning of all of this. Will be great fun to watch it all unfold.

(Photo “Sweet Home Under White Clouds” by tipiro.)

Just a couple of quotes that I’ve run across of late to add to the reading and writing conversation. I love this one by Donal Leu:

Another difference from earlier models of print comprehension is the inclusion of communication within online reading comprehension. Online reading and writing are so closely connected that it is not possible to separate them; we read online as authors and we write online as readers [Emphasis mine.]

And this from Deborah Brandt at the University of Wisconsin Madison in a great article from the Chronicle titled “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers“:

Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline. But that view, she says, is “being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They’re going to be reading, but they’re going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read.” [Emphasis mine]

(See also Kathleen Blake Yancey’s wonderful essay “Writing in the 21st Century” if you haven’t already.)

I know as a long-time high school expository writing teacher (who really misses that classroom), my curriculum would be decidedly different today than five years ago. There would have been a lot more situated practice in reading as a writer and developing the skills necessary to track and participate in the distributed conversation that hopefully occurs. I find it fascinating to consider the ways in which social technologies afford all sorts of potentially global, immediate connections around what we write. And I still think that a basic shift here is that we can no longer look at publishing as the final step in the process but see it instead as somewhere in the middle. Maybe even see it as the start of something.

Interested to hear from teachers who have begun to rethink or rewrite curriculum in light of the potentials of the technologies.

If you’ve been following the news out of Iran the last few days, odds are you’re following it very differently from even a few years ago. Ten years ago, most of what I would have learned would have come from the TV news or the New York Times the day after. Five years ago, it was the New York Times or other traditonal media websites that I probably would have turned to. Today, however, for me at least, it’s Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia and then the New York Times website. It’s a bit of a different process, I’d say.

While we’ll wait to see how social tools affect the outcome in Iran, we can’t wait to begin to teach ourselves and our kids how to make sense of media that we ourselves have to edit. The complexities here are huge, in both an information and technological context. We’re reading and viewing content created by people whose identities and agendas are unkown to us. While much of it is raw, we can’t know how much of it is made to look raw, how much of it has been edited, how much of it is true. I can read the Tweet above and believe it, or I can wait for confirmation. I can do what all good journalists have done throughout time which is verify and reverify before believing and reporting.

The difference is, obviously, is that I have to do this for myself. I now have access to the raw information, the stuff that I used to pay for someone else to find and sift and synthesize and share. I can choose to continue to take that route, certainly, to only check the reputable media outlets for updates and “news”. But if I do that these days I deny myself a greater understanding of not just how to consume all of this but how to participate in it. I’m not in Iran (thankfully) but I can still share the best of what I find about Iran for others in my network. I don’t take that task lightly, because I want to be a trusted contributor. I want others to share with me so that we can sift and filter and synthesize and contribute the best of our resources and thinking. As Donald Leu writes, these days “we read online as authors, and we write online as readers.” And, I would add, we need to read and write as editors as well.

I know that we should have been teaching these skills and processes all along with every piece of information we read or shared. But the reality is that we as an educational system haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Right now, however, we and our kids simply can’t get away with not having these skills any longer. I know the school year is over for many, but for those that are still in session, welcome to a teachable moment about the world, democracy, technology, media, and most of all, participation.

The American Press Institute is making a number of recommendations to newspapers to create successful new models, and their number one suggestion is:

BECOME PART OF THE SOCIAL WEB. Newspaper executives should take it as a personal and professional challenge to participate in social media: Share photos and video online. Follow industry experts on Twitter. Create a Facebook or LinkedIn profile. This is extremely valuable market research. Learn all you can.

Now, I know I’m a dreamer, but there’s an interview with an editor that follows that quote that’s making me think what it would be like if some type of American Education Institute made the same recommendation to principals and superintendents. I’ve changed the words a bit to make me feel really giddy, but imagine an exchange between a reporter and a school leader that included this:

Reporter: What have you learned from actually participating in the social Web that you wouldn’t have been able to pick up from colleagues describing the experience?

Principal: I describe the social Web as a cocktail party filled with interesting people. You can move from group to group, engaging on different topics, listening quietly when you want to, talking at others. The neat thing is that, like real cocktail parties, you can meet new people, hear great stories, learn valuable things and have a few laughs. You can come and go as you please, and the cocktail party is always going on…but it is more than that. You can follow education experts on Twitter, etc., and learn from their links and their conversation. You can converse with people much smarter than you — well, I can, at least — and they’ll respond, helping me. You don’t need to know them, you don’t need a fancy title, you don’t need an introduction. You simply need to ask a question. How cool is that? And, as a result, you establish yourself as a person. A real person. I hope that the people who connect with me on social networks see me as more than a name on a office door. I engage with them. I show some personality, to the extent that I have one. I listen to what others are saying and let them know that I am learning from THEM.

Reporter: How has what you’ve learned helped you improve your school?

Principal: Three ways that I can think of right now. First, social networking is a way to get feedback. Ask a question about policy, about a course, about an idea, people will respond. For instance, I asked a question about the future direction of our arts program on Twitter, sending people to my blog, and got some great responses. And I think it helped that I have established a presence as an active player who engages with others. So, when I ask for help, people offer it. Second, it’s a tip service. The Twitter grapevine is faster than many of the traditional streams of information. Sorry, it just is. Third, the conversations and the links about issues of education, learning and teaching help me think through ideas that I should be thinking through but normally may overlook. It’s more, too, than following the thought leaders. It’s following the thinking of people in the trenches working through the same things they’re working through. Lots of inspiration out there.

Reporter: What have you stopped doing that you used to spend time on before you began blogging, tweeting, etc.?

Principal: I’ve always considered this question — or the implied objection to social networking behind this question — as bogus. Educators are supposed to be thinking about learning. We’re supposed to be thinking about the future. We’re supposed to experiment and try new things. We’re also supposed to talk to our parents and engage with the community. So, this is part of the job, period. Any educator who says they don’t have time to do these kinds of things is working on the wrong things. The real answer? My day has probably gotten longer, but this is important stuff.

Reporter: Advice for other educators thinking about making social networks a part of their personal learning?

Principal: Assume nothing, because, most likely, all of your assumptions will be wrong. Social media is easy. If you find it’s not easy, I assure you most of your students can help you. That’s what I do. Make no judgments about any service until you’ve tried it yourself. Find people you know and follow them. Find people you don’t know but who live near you or who do what you do and follow them. Jump in. Give it longer than a weekend before you decide if it’s good or bad. Be yourself and be engaging.

Wake me up when it happens.

(Photo “Apple Martini” by Smaku.)

Had a great conversation with my friend and former colleague Rob Mancabelli the other day about the challenges that individual teachers face in understanding and, more importantly, practicing learning in these online spaces. Rob started a blog for a bit a few years ago, one that I thought was exceptional, but he dropped it in short order. He’s mulling over a return, thankfully, because he’s continuing the work we started at my old stomping grounds by rolling out a student 1-1 pilot this fall, one that will hopefully move teachers and students to more self-directed, inquiry-based curricula and classrooms. Personally, I keep begging him to share that process in a blog; I think I may be breaking him down. ;0)

Anyway, we were talking about the pilot group of teachers that had been selected for the work, and at one point the talk turned to the reasons why this is such a hard shift for many. It’s not the technology, we both agreed, as much as it is the shifts in transparency and privacy, and the emphasis on writing and creating that go along with putting yourself out there online. “It’s not about blogs,” he said “so much as it’s about human development.” I totally agree, but since our conversation I’ve been thinking about what the implications of that are, exactly. The Web and the social connections and learning it affords is moving us, I think, to a different type of consciousness, a different way of being in the world. While the way we interact with people in our personal spaces will always be crucial to our personal development and well being, we are in many ways being asked to recreate ourselves in virtual spaces, sometimes multiple spaces. And we’re being asked to do that work in public with others. I happened upon this old Doc Searles quote this morning, and it made even more sense than it did two years ago when I first read it:

“We are all authors of each other. What we call authority is the right we give others to author us, to make us who we are… That right is one we no longer give only to our newspapers, our magazines, our TV and radio stations. We give it to anybody who helps us learn and understand What’s Going On in the world.”

The comfort zone required to live in that “author-ity” space is pretty difficult for many of us, educators and non-educators alike, to find. And while our kids may seem to exist more comfortably in these online, social spaces, I still question whether they completely comprehend the potentials of their work there.

So in case you don’t know it, I’ve got kids. They’ll be 12 and 10 this summer (omg) which makes me perk up when I run across magazine covers like this one from Time last week titled “The Future of Work.”

Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no longer a ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path.

Welcome to my world. Seems I’ve stepped right into the future. What catches me, however, is that while I could never imagine making the shift back to the life I once knew (or some semblance of it), when I think of my kids, that description of their futures makes me shudder. Ironic, isn’t it?

Inside, Time says

We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values–and women will increasingly be at the controls.

Which would seem to me to suggest that we need to create a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative learning experience for my kids, right? If as the article states fully 40% of the US workforce is predicted to be independent contractors by 2019, shouldn’t we be rethinking what it means to prepare them for that?

What I want for my kids regardless of what school they are in is to be able to pursue their passion, to be problem solvers in the face of adversity, to be provided a different picture of their own working futures in light of this huge shift that’s taking place. Yet I wonder how many classrooms discussed that Time issue (or any other different visions) even in passing. And while I know Time’s vision may not come to fruition, I have little doubt that’s the way things are trending. Doesn’t feel like we’re doing much about it.

So it’s been a while since I’ve turned to my blog, obviously. Just felt like I needed a break, some time to get some balance and reconfigure my thinking a bit. It’s been good, and for what it’s worth, I’ve been growing a list of things I want to write here about. More on that later in the week as I come up on my eight-year blogversary. But for now, just a quick post about a piece that has had me thinking for the last month or so.

Not sure how I stumbled across this 2000 article in CITE titled “If We Didn’t Have the Schools We Have Today, Would We Create the Schools We Have Today?” by Tom Carroll, but I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the last few weeks reading, rereading and thinking about it from a number of different perspectives. In many ways, it’s an amazingly articulate view of the learning and networking potentials of Web 2.0 technologies given at a moment when Web 2.0 technologies were in their nascent stages. In other ways, it’s a validation of what many of us have been thinking and saying about the learning in networked communities aspect of this and the challenges that potential presents to schools. But on another level, it’s a bit depressing to think of how far we haven’t come in this conversation in the almost 10 years since it was written. Most people, I think, would find his vision of the new learning world to be a harsh challenge to their current thinking.

I mean, how close are most educators to this concept?:

In the networked learning communities of the future, expert learners (we call them teachers, educators, scientists, and researchers today) are going to be recognized for their ability to learn and help others learn, as they continue to construct new knowledge and develop their own expertise. Their job will not be to teach – but to help others learn, as they model learning through collaboration to solve problems and achieve goals they have in common. (A significant part of the expert learner’s role will be organizing and managing the collaborative learning community.)

Nothing new here, I know. (Actually, there’s very little “new” anywhere in the thinking about schools and teachers and classroom learning right now.) But it reiterates the importance of being able to do this for ourselves before we try to do it with our kids, to at least have some sense of connectedness beyond our physical spaces.

The vision that classrooms must become more inquiry driven, “learning” (not learner) centered spaces where we co-construct the learning opportunities and new knowledge is also nothing particularly new. But it makes me wonder what percentage of the classes our students take have a curriculum that is significantly altered or made different in the process of taking the course and making “new knowledge.” I would doubt that there would be more than a handful in any individual student’s K-12 career even at this point.

While there is a whole bunch more to think about in this essay, it’s striking when you think about how little of this really transformative thinking is taking place when we think about schools. And how difficult it is to retrofit this thinking into existing spaces. That’s why I particularly love the title of this essay. I think most of us in this conversation would say “no”, that we would create something very different. That given a blank slate, we would keep the best parts of the interpersonal relationships between adults and kids but throw out the schedules, the desks in rows, the grades, the workloads, the levels and more and “think fresh” about the learning process in the context of what’s available to us now. Still, I wonder what percentage of educators in general would really think differently about the role of schools and their roles as teachers and learners.

And I also wonder if we can actually make something new out of something old in this case. Without remaking the system, is it reasonable to expect that we can systemically move toward inquiry based, self-directed, networked learning spaces that focus on the learning that Carroll describes in the essay?

In a networked learning community, we will have “schools” that are nodes in a larger learning environment, and in those schools there will be no teachers and no students– just learners.

That is a huge, huge retrofitting process that would be fraught with failure save a clear vision and inspiring leadership to put it into place among many other things. But the biggest piece, I think, is the re-envisioning of the profession, that we are expert learners first, content experts second (if at all).

The teacher will become an expert learner organizing and leading others in networked learning communities.

To me, supporting that shift is the first step.

(Photo “Bryan Adams High School Hallway” by Dean Terry.)

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