I didn’t even see the guy looking at me, probably because my head was gazing down into my iPhone. We were in Concord, NH, last Thursday, having just watched Food, Inc. at a local indy theater, and I was pulling up the nearest geocaches (our new favorite sport) for my kids to peruse, hoping to set off on a hunt before heading back to our connectionless retreat on a hilltop in the woods.

“You’re a technoslave!” the guy yelled across the square, and I looked up to see him hurrying along with an angsty expression on his face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my kids wheel around, too, Tucker stopping dead in his tracks. “It’ll ruin your life! Throw it away! Just throw it away!”

And he was gone, zipping around a hedgerow and then disappearing into a bookstore as my wife turned to me smiling and my kids gaped open-mouthed, struggled to figure out how to react. I, of course, just shrugged it off, saying something brilliant like “Yeah, whatever” while brushing him and the idea away with a half sweep of my hand, the one not holding the iPhone, of course.

But as we picked through a tick-infested field adjacent to a Dunkin Donuts parking lot to find our third ammo can cache of the day, the “technoslave” charge turned in my head. Am I a slave to all of this? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? This all on the heels of spending a week with bandwidth (I just typed “badwidth” which would have been appropriate) that maybe reached half a bar on my Verizon stick when the wind was blowing in the right direction and I held my computer at exactly 32 degrees. (Think aluminum foil and tv antenna if you’re old enough.) I think I Tweeted like three times, maybe, and even those were wistful dispatches from nature that felt almost strange in the making. (As in “Why am I Tweeting how nice it is to watch this thunderstorm roll in without all the usual distractions?” Hmmm…) I tried to answer a few e-mails, but I think I just managed to make people angry. And I did get to scan the front page of the New York Times site after the 30-minute or so download most mornings. But that was about it.

Except, of course, for my iPhone, which served us well as we crawled through the claustrophobia-inducing caves and caverns at Lost River Gorge, snapping decent pictures of our trek (though not of the point where I got stuck), or while being strafed by mosquitoes while watching the new Harry Potter movie at the local drive-in letting me sneak an update on the Cubs game. And, when we started finding those caches. In fact, that may have been the highlight of the trip in some ways, the “doing something fun out in nature with the family” aspect of going around trying to find these little hidden treasures while avoiding the eyes of curious “Muggle” onlookers, reading the logs of people who had found them before us and feeling this weird sense of connection to a community of people online AND in real space that we had little sense of before.  Facilitated solely by technology.

Go figure.

So, yeah, in many ways, I’m a slave to all of this. And I’m ok with that. I like being reminded how good it is to get away from the network from time to time; the world doesn’t end when the connection runs out. (Gasp!) But the connection is just a part of me now that at times may lead to distraction and a sense of overwhelmedness but on balance, adds a richness to my life that that angsty guy doesn’t get and probably never will.

So Sheryl and I have spent the last week here in Melbourne kicking off a four-month PLP project with 120 or so teachers from Victoria who are part of a pilot where all of their students will have netbooks in hand in the next few months. There seems to be a growing commitment here to put technology in the hands of kids (instead of spending huge sums on stuff that students can’t use outside of the classroom) and to thinking about how practice and pedagogy changes when that happens. There are a number of other initiatives that are attempting to reframe the way Victorian teachers think about teaching, namely something called E5 (pdf) that I’ll be giving some more attention to on the plane ride home but that at first blush has some interesting language that focuses more on learning than teaching. And that’s really what our work here has been about, trying to create opportunities for teachers to be learners first in both face to face and online communities, and in doing so, helping them see ways to implement technology in ways that go beyond just publishing.

All of us have been doing a lot of thinking and questioning around the idea of what it would be like if every 5th grade student and above had ubiquitous access in hand, and there’s no question that’s a huge shift. (When I made the slide at right for a part of our kickoff presentation, I was surprised at the reaction it got on Flickr.) If this is really where we hope to get, and I think it should be, the required shifts in educator practice and school culture are significant, as are the implications for professional development. It’s not just about if every student had a computer; it’s about if every teacher had a computer as well. (As opposed to if every teacher had a whiteboard.) Imagine if our students were being taught in systems where technology was just a natural part of the way we created and constructed and connected and learned, that it was how we do our business. Sure, things would be different. There would be distractions. (We’re having an online conversation about “attention literacy” already.) And there would be teachable moments. But don’t we have enough faith that we would learn our way out of those challenges (and others I haven’t mentioned) to come out the other side with a more relevant, effective experience for our kids? One that is more in tune with the way the world seems to be headed?

What I’ve liked about this trip is this sense that I’m getting, here at least, that some people are beginning to think about 1-1 in ways that scale, and that it’s not just about technology for technology’s sake but that there is some real, powerful potential in a world where every student AND every teacher has a computer and access to the sum of human knowledge we’re building online. Those leading this work may not feel all that comfortable with that vision in their own practice yet, but they seem more able to put that aside and and see things from a more long-range perspective. We’ll see how it plays out, but in that regard, at least, it’s been a pretty refreshing visit.

During Boot Camp last week, Sheryl turned me on to Phillip Schlechty’s newish book “Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations” and I had a chance to get through a chunk of it on the cramped, smelly plane(s) to Melbourne. In it, he makes a pretty compelling case that “reform” is really not going to cut it in the face of the disruptions social Web technologies are creating and that we really do have to think more about “transform” when it comes to talking about schools. There are echoes of Sir Ken Robinson here, and I’ve still got Scott McLeod’s NECC presentation riff on Christensen’s “Disrupting Class” on my brain as well, especially the “the disruption isn’t online learning; it’s personalized learning” quote. And while there are others who I could cite here who are trumpeting the idea that this isn’t business as usual, I think Schlechty does as good a job as I’ve seen of breaking down why schools in their current form as “bureaucratic” structures will end up on the “ash heap of history” if we don’t get our brains around what’s happening. In a sentence:

Schools must be transformed from platforms for instruction to platforms for learning, from bureaucracies bent on control to learning organizations aimed at encouraging disciplined inquiry and creativity.

To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter. Here’s a key snip in that case:

As long as any innovations that are introduced can be absorbed by the existing operating systems without violating the limits of the social systems in which they are embedded, change in schools is more a matter of good management than one of leadership. Such changes can, in fact, be introduced through programs and projects and managed quite well by technically competent people who are familiar with the new routines required by the innovations and skilled in communicating to others what they know.

In these cases, while it is sometimes difficult to break old habits, usually after a brief period of resistance, old certanties are abandoned and new certainties are embraced. For example, teachers now routinely use PowerPoint slide shows where once they used overhead projectors and slate boards. The reason this transition was relatively easy to accomplish is that it did not change the role of the teacher. Indeed, PowerPoint makes it easier for teachers to do what they have always done, just as a DVD player is easier to use than a 16 millimeter projector. Moreover, the technical skills required to use a PowerPoint slide show are easily learned and communicated, making the process of diffusion relatively simple.

But when innovations threaten the nature and sources of knowledge to be used or the way power and authority are currently used and distributed–in other words, when they require changes in social systems as well as operating systems–innovation becomes more difficult. This is so because such changes are disruptive in inflexible social systems.

So, from the social media standpoint, the message here is clear. This isn’t about doing what you’ve always done as a teacher or as a school. It challenges those social constructs in the classroom and in the system, and therefore, these shifts are going to be much harder to embrace. Channeling Christensen, he says that existing organizations seldom successfully adopt truly disruptive innovations, and that it’s easier to build something new than to change the old. And if you listened to Scott’s presentation, you get the idea that the time is ripe for those innovative systems to form and flourish in education. (My question is whether commercial interests will be at the heart of those efforts.)

What I really like about this argument so far, however, is that while the thinking is rooted in the affordances of the technologies, Schlechty also makes the case in the context of citizenship in a democracy as well as a moral imperative that we create citizens who “have discovered how to learn independent of teachers and schools.”

Many Americans fear that an inadequate system of education will compromise America’s ability to compete in a global economy [hearing Friedman here]. In fact, they have more to fear from the possibility that young people who graduate will lack the skills and understandings needed to function well as citizens in a democracy. Americans have more to fear from the prospect that the IT revolution will so overwhelm citizens with competing facts and opinions that they will give up their freedom in order to gain some degree of certainty than they have to fear from economic competition around the world. Leaders should be far more concerned that Americans will cease to know enough to preserve freedom and value liberty, equity, and excellence than they are with how well American students compare on international tests. As numerous scholars have shown, authoritarian leaders and charlatans thrive in a world where ordinary citizens are overwhelmed with facts and competing opinions and lack the ideas and tools to discipline thier thinking without appealing to some authority figure for direction and support. [Emphasis mine.]

That resonates with me on so many different levels, on trying to navigate the arguments about global warming, for instance, or in attempting to explain the nuances of the world to my kids who more and more are coming to me with questions inspired by their interactions with online media. The key to this all, to me at least, and a piece that I don’t think Schlechty gets, is that much of that now is dependent on our “network literacy” in terms of building our own personal systems of filters and sources that are balanced and open.

The idea that schools become “learning organizations” is compelling in the way that Schlechty describes the shift.

Schools will be places where intellectual work is designed that cause students to want to be instructed and will become platforms that support students in making wise choices among a wide range of sources of instruction available rather than platforms that control and limit the instruction available to them.

That “vision” started me thinking again about what our expectations are for teacher “learning” and the ways in which we might move toward a culture that celebrates and models and makes transparent learning in every corner. One thing that I constantly hear from Sheryl is the idea that we need to see teachers as leaders and as learners, not just teachers. That’s such a huge shift here, one that we talked a lot about and struggled with in Boot Camp. And it all makes me wonder what the next decade or two will bring.

In light of the interesting back and forth that occurred on my last post, I’ve been thinking about what the fundamental lessons of schooling ought to be and the role of technology in helping us teach them. “ceolaf,” someone who is new to commenting here, has spent a lot of time pushing back and articulating in some pretty compelling ways the friction between creating lessons to fit the technology or vice versa. I think at the core, we agree that the larger lessons are the larger lessons (or at least that there are larger lessons). And while at the heart of it I don’t think we disagree that technology can be a useful tool for learning those lessons, there is obviously a difference in the way we approach it. It’s been a good conversation, one worth digging into a bit more.

I think “ceolaf” sums it up pretty well here (and if this isn’t the best kernel then I’m sure he’ll tell me):

I fear that Will would lose sight of the real importance of the lasting lessons for the possibilities of today’s technology. (I think that Will might fear that I am not giving enough credit to what a different world our students live in, and therefore must learn to operate in.)

Assuming that we can can come to some general agreement on what those lessons might be, no doubt we need to question and examine the choices that we make around these technologies in our own practice and in our classrooms when it comes to learning those lessons for ourselves or for our kids. We can’t take those choices lightly, and we have to be able to make those choices from a certain foundation of personal learning with technology in those contexts. It’s one of the reasons that I get continually frustrated with NECC sessions and Tweets and blogs that celebrate tools without giving weight to the considerations that goes into choosing a tool in a pedagogical sense. We need more sessions on “why?’ not “how?”, more thinking about teaching with technology and less of what Gary classicallly described as “Burping with VoiceThread.” (That’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Regardless, I believe that used well, these still nascent Web technologies can help us teach those larger lessons, and do so in a way that engages our students and has more relevance than “old” pen and paper, face to face ways. Not all of the time, but some of it. “ceolaf” pointed to this post by Diane Ravitch titled “The Partnership for 19th Century Skills” which eloquently makes the case that in terms of those big lessons, nothing much has changed.

I for one have heard quite enough about the 21st century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in third grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on. Let me suggest that it is time to be done with this unnecessary conflict about 21st century skills. Let us agree that we need all those forenamed skills, plus lots others, in addition to a deep understanding of history, literature, the arts, geography, civics, the sciences, and foreign languages.

She goes on to list 16 such skills which are definitely worth the time to read, and many of which thoughtful use of technology can enhance. And, I would argue, many to which  social media add a new layer of complexity which we must be able to model and teach. While many if not most of these lessons can be learned without technology, I think transferring those lessons into the contexts of online networks and global, cross-cultural, sometimes anonymous interactions is not necessarily fait accompli with our kids. Self-discipline and idealism and certainly communication (among others) in these environments have additional complexity that compels us to explore the affordances of these technologies (again) for ourselves, for our classrooms and for our kids.

There’s much more here, obviously, in terms of even bigger questions about the roles of schools and teachers and classrooms in a networked learning world. But I agree that here is where we have to start. What is it we most want our kids to know about what it means to be a person of this world, and how do we best convey it in ways that make sense for the times we live in? Everything else flows from that.

What do you think?

(Photo: “Playing Water Games and Learning” by Ivan Makarov.)

I’ve got a mental stack of blog posts piling up on a bunch of seemingly random though thinly connected topics on NECC, the environment, note taking with Evernote, my kids’ schooling, the death of RSS and other stuff which I’ll hopefully get to at some point here, but this morning I read a couple of things that seem more interesting, to me at least.

Dean’s reflection post on NECC drew a whole bunch of great comments, but the one that made me really think hard was by Ira Socol who wrote:

So, it is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?

That’s one of those really concise shift statements that makes me bend my own frame a bit. I think too often I fall into looking at these tools and wonder what they can add to our classrooms and our teaching when the real question is how can our classrooms and teaching add capacity to the tools. As he points out, we reframed education with the advent of the book; we need to reframe it once again with the advent of a networked, inter-connected medium that creates incredible new affordances for learning. He writes:

It is the job of education to alter itself to prove itself of value to the world which now exists.

Amen. Arguably, there is a great deal about the current system which has lost its value as compared to what is possible for those who are passionate learners with a connection. (More about that connection piece in a bit.) I mean grouping by geography and age are becoming less and less relevant, and while I’m not suggesting there isn’t a body of core knowledge all students should learn, the emphasis on what we know rather than how we learn it is becoming more and more frustrating to those who are already networked learners. As Ira Tweeted later:

Educators often think that school is the point, when it needs to be the path.

Part of being that path, however, is providing the access to our students that’s necessary for them to participate. Along those lines, I came across an interesting post from Renee Blodgett (via a Tweet from Howard Rheingold) who is writing about “Redefining Digital Inclusion.” The seminal question was “do those that enjoy the benefits of technology have a moral right over those who do not?” As Renee suggests, this isn’t a new thread, but the shift here is that the attitude of parents and teachers around this are just as important as the financial and logistical issues. Inclusion can no longer just be seen as having a device and a connection.

We need to redefine Digital Inclusion. The definition of digital inclusion today is basic access. It doesn’t include basic skills such as understanding some of the technology and social media schools to network and make friends not just locally for globally. It increases their job and life opportunities significantly. It’s time to move that definition beyond simple access. We need a new definition that policy makers, technology creators, parents, and educators can rally around. There will be a revolution when more and more students get their hands on some of these devices and start using them in the classroom.

While this is not a post on where the lever is, I’ve been arguing for a while now that not much of this is going to change until the stakeholders, in this case parents, take it upon themselves to demand something new. Something more relevant. But the only way that parents are going to DEMAND access is if they see that not simply as a way for kids to get a computer but to see connections online as a way to a better future, a way to help thier kids become more educated, better learners than by books and paper alone. Unfortunately, we’re losing the media war on this one right now. Feeling like a broken record, but we need to do a better job of making this case beyond our own still small, nascent network.

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.)

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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.)

So here’s a question I was discussing a couple of weeks ago with a superintendent at a gathering of educational leaders: What percentage of the teachers at your school do a good job of preparing kids to take meet the requirements, pass the tests, and get prepared for college, and what percentage do a good job of teaching them how to learn? Not suggesting that the two are mutually exclusive, but as we talked about it, she shook her head at one point and said “I think 90 percent of my staff is really good at delivering the goods, but only about 10 percent really get student centered, inquiry driven, lifelong learning.”

That answer stuck with me. I would guess that’s probably the case for most schools, and the reasons are obvious. I know many schools and districts have full-time positions for testing coordinators and college counselors and data-driven decision makers. We put a great deal of emphasis on outcomes with our kids, but I keep wondering how much more we could do in emphasizing the process of learning as well, not just for students but for everyone in the school.

So when I read Jay Cross’s latest piece in CLO magazine, I wondered how many schools could point to someone, anyone, who is in charge of learning. By that I mean someone who manages the culture of the school by focusing not on outcomes as much as how learning is writ large in the system. Someone who also understands the ways in which social Web technologies accentuate the need for the learning skills we’ve desired all along: creativity, critical thinking, independent thought, collaboration, etc. I know I keep going back to this, but I wonder how many of us can look at our colleagues and answer the question “How does that person learn?” And think of the leaders in our schools in that light as well.

And it really is about a culture that supports, celebrates and shares learning. Jay points to a survey about CLOs from TogetherLearn that I think acts as a good barometer of that work. Does your school:

• Welcome innovation and contributions from its teachers?
• Encourage (and provide time for) reflection on successes and flops?
• Tolerate mistakes and reward thinking out of the box?
• Share information openly?
• Foster learning for everyone?
• Experiment with new ways of doing things?
• Work across departments and unit boundaries with ease?

All of that suggests a place that emphasizes process, not outcomes. (The rest of the survey is definitely worth a look in the context of schools as well.) And it also suggests intent, not just serendipity. We need to hire for learning, plan for learning, and share the learning of the entire system, students, teachers, and support staff alike. We need to leverage the potential of the local personal learning communities as well as the global networks of which we can become a part. We need people to lead that work, however, people who understand deeply the passion-based, self-directed potentials for learning in a connected world, and the importance of a vision for true learner-centered classrooms and curricula for everyone in the building.

So I’m wondering, do you have a CLO in your school either by name or reputation? Should we be thinking about hiring CLOs in our schools and districts? Modifying other positions to include these ideas?