A couple of vignettes from the road last week that I wanted to capture briefly. Both have had me thinking over this very enjoyable holiday weekend.

I often show FanFiction.net in my presentations as an example of passionate participation. I happen to know a couple of kids (here’s one) who do fanfic on a fairly regular basis, and every now and then I check in and dig around for some good stuff to read. It’s usually not too hard to find. Anyway, Tucker has been checking out the Percy Jackson stories fairly regularly since after the fifth time through the series, I think the books are finally starting to lose their luster. Some of the Fanfic stories he likes more than others, but the cool thing is that he’s been thinking of trying his hand at writing something himself. But at almost 11, he’s still a little nervous about putting something up there for everyone to see, regardless of his own anonymity in the process.

Last week when I told this story, a tech director raised her hand and said “You know, I think it’s interesting that your son is nervous about sharing his writing. Does he ever get nervous about his writing for school?” I thought for a second and said “Um, no…you know you’re right. He hardly thinks twice about that stuff.” She said “I’m guessing he’d be more motivated to work on his Percy Jackson story to make it good than he is his homework.” And ever since I’ve been wondering why we can’t instill a healthy nervousness every now and then into our writing process, now that we have these ready made audiences (or at least easily found audiences). All it would take is a willingness on our parts to let kids write about the things they truly love from time to time and connect that to an audience larger than the classroom. Shouldn’t be too hard these days…

The other story is less hopeful. At a collection of school leaders and IT people, one of the participants told the group that his school had bought a number of iPads for teachers and that they had scheduled a chunk of training on how to use them. Unfortunately for him, I had just read an exchange on Twitter where Gary Stager had made the point that I quickly made to the group: “You know, something like 1.3 million people have bought an iPad and I doubt any of them have gotten any “training” on how to use it.” The people in the room half chuckled, but one woman said “Our teachers won’t do anything with technology unless we give them training.”

Sigh.

We’ve done the same thing to our teachers that we’re doing to our kids, namely conditioned them to wait for direction on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to show they’ve learned it.

3,462

That’s the estimate, (give or take a few hundred)  of how many Expository Composition essays I read during my tenure as an English teacher not so too long ago. I was a process writing teacher, bought into Nancie Atwell’s workshop approach and Donald Murray’s revision voice from the very start. I actually loved teaching the revision process, the reflective part of reading what you wrote, testing it out in voice, scribbling in the margins and really trying to hear what the reader heard. The “final” copies always kinda bummed me out, because they were only final  for the grade.

I’ve written here before that writing feels way different now; publishing isn’t the end part of the process any longer, it’s somewhere in the messy middle, except on those few occasions when something I write actually ends up in print (or, god forbid, on a pdf.) somewhere. Bud and I have fairly regular albeit sporadic conversations about “connective writing,” the idea that we don’t just write to communicate as much as we write for connection, for response, whether that’s here in the blog or on Twitter or wherever else. That the audience is far greater than the teacher or the other students in the class. That connections happen when we write about the things we care about, when our passion shines through. In that light, somehow those 3,462 essays and the classroom they were written in seem like a lifetime ago.

But nowadays I find myself writing “live” more and more, in the chat box in Skype or during the Elluminate sessions we do in PLP or on a live stream at UStream. There’s no “process” in the writing other than quick response and reaction, making plain what’s in our brains at the moment. We write with little reflection, little thought, in many cases. And usually, we’re trying to multitask our way through many responses from different people responding to different questions as the stream goes by. We have to write in the flow, (flowwriting?) and it’s not an easy task.

As I write this, I hear the little typewriter sound of chats being posted to a Cover-it-Live session open in another tab, kids at Carolyn Foote’s school in Austin, Tx who are backchannelling a panel presentation on technology and censorship and the book 1984. It’s hard to follow the conversation by just reading their chats without hearing the panel, but it struck me…did those kids get any prep on how to live write? (I just Tweeted Carolyn with that question. and I also chatted it to the panel. Let’s see what happens.) Are their certain skills or nuances around “flowwriting” for live audiences that we need to teach and nurture? Certain “rules” or norms for use? (Carolyn Tweeted a whole bunch stuff back, and now we’re chatting about it in the CiL room and she’s bringing the teacher in. Different way of communicating, huh?)

I’m not suggesting we stop teaching process writing and essays and such. But I continue to wonder how deal with the affordances of these new writing spaces for our kids and for ourselves. Is anyone teaching it? Should we be?

The New York Times is running a piece in the Sunday magazine this week titled “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” and I think it’s a must read for anyone wanting a compelling albeit starry-eyed look at the President’s education “reform” proposals. While the long version is worth the read, here’s the short version: More money and more tests will make better teachers and smarter kids. A small bunch of “reformists” armed with a boatload of money are in the process of buying off the media, unions, and parents to move schools toward greater “accountability” and “achievement” in ways that more resemble fixing the leaks in the hull instead of building a better boat. Chew on this for a second:

“It’s all about the talent,” Secretary Duncan told me. Thus, the highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers’ union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent job security. To win the contest, the states had to present new laws, contracts and data systems making teachers individually responsible for what their students achieve, and demonstrating, for example, that budget-forced teacher layoffs will be based on the quality of the teacher, not simply on seniority…To enable teacher evaluations, another 47 points would be allocated based on the quality of a state’s “data systems” for tracking student performance in all grades — which is a euphemism for the kind of full-bore testing regime that makes many parents and children cringe but that the reformers argue is necessary for any serious attempt to track not only student progress but also teacher effectiveness. [Emphasis mine.]

Now, I know that in many ways my evolving picture of learning in the 21st Century keeps moving toward the edges, away from schools as we know them, far away from the rhetoric being floated in this article. I know that there are times when I see a learning future for our kids that doesn’t necessarily involve “school” or college as we think of it, one that they design and take ownership of, one that connects them to other learners and teachers and ultimately, to success on their own terms. And then there are other times I think that’s just a total fantasy, that as much as I’d like to believe, as a growing number of folks suggest, that the world has changed in ways that frees learning from the shackles of outdated systems and creates all sorts of new paths for our kids, they’d be better off just playing the game as we know it, going to the good college, getting the degree, and finding success as it’s always been defined.

And I think that’s the part that has been bothering me most about the turn in the larger education conversation, that retrenchment of the typical path to “success.” We’re not changing our definition of “the top” at all. It’s just more of the same, as if the world is the same as it was 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. Which is why, I think, Race to the Top needs another  “T” word in there, as in “Race to the Traditional Top.” My problem is, I don’t think I want my kids to win that race anymore.

I think that redefinition of “the top” is what we here in the small lunatic fringe are trying to create. It’s not about knowledge as much as it is about learning, about a passion for learning, and about a self-motivation that “traditional” schooling drives out of kids. In a nutshell, it’s a pretty different picture of what schools and teachers should be doing, and a totally different view on what and how to assess it. The learning world that many of us are now living in, at least, just isn’t the same as it ever was.

Two quotes. First, the last sentence of the Times article:

“That President Obama did this is a total game changer,” says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. “If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same.”

And the last sentences from Diane Ravitch in her latest post, “Schools 4 $Sale: Inquire at U.S. DOE” over at Bridging Differences:

We have a public school system that needs improvement. Nothing coming from Race to the Top will help. It may even do untold harm to the system on which our nation has relied for more than 150 years.

Problem is, as directly opposite as both of these views are, neither one is talking about anything really different. That “build a new, better boat” conversation is yet to begin.

So, might just be me, but I hadn’t run across the “tl;dr” thing until I was reading a Mark Pesce’s “What Ever Happened to the Book?” post from a few weeks ago. As usual, it’s a totally great piece about “connective reading,” one that explores the motivations of following links and the pressures that linked environments put on the act of reading. As a former English teacher, I love that conversation, and I see myself all over it:

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?

Not sure why, but I love thinking about this stuff. It’s fascinating to step back from time to time and go all meta on my own reading and writing. For instance, the process I’ve got down for using Google Reader and Twitter to lead me to lots (too much?) good stuff to read, then to save it to Delicious, or to read it later with Instapaper, or to snip it into Evernote, or to throw it up on Posterous, or even mix it into a blog post here (or there.) Looks a little different from what I did ten or five or even two years ago. The public nature of it all is a big enough shift for most, but my brain just operates totally differently now when reading and writing. Both are a participatory sports these days.

And I know I keep coming around to how my kids aren’t getting any of this in schools, and my frustrations as a parent that most of the good souls in the schools where my kids are don’t create links on a regular basis. Or that they’re not teaching “connective reading” in any real sense. That there not helping my kids with the challenges of this changed reading space, which, continuing from the snip above, Pesce makes pretty clear:

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge.  Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough.  It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments.  We have other places to spend our limited attention.  This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;dr”, for “too long; didn’t read”.  It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.

So, it begs the question, I think, what do we do? Just like I alluded to a changed reality in the Facebook post yesterday, there is a changed reality here, too. The act of reading and writing is different. The habits are different. And it’s still changing and evolving, just like reading and writing always have, but with what feels like, to me at least, more speed. No one is teaching our kids.

Assuming you didn’t go “tl;dr” to this post, what ways are you thinking about or actually implementing change around reading and writing instruction in your classrooms? How are you helping your kids read and write differently? What’s different about the way you read and write today compared to ten years ago, and what are the implications? Reflect away.

From the “We Continue to Bury Our Heads in the Sand Department” comes the question (once again) why are we blocking Facebook instead of teaching it?

I mean really, if you’re on the board of ed, sitting in the superintendent’s chair, serving as principal, or even “just” a parent, how can the following reality not cause you to call a meeting and get Facebook into the currciulum:

• Upwards of 75% of the kids in your high school use Facebook.
• You need a manual to figure out how to appropriately set your privacy settings on Facebook.
• Because of that (to some extent, at least), lots of your kids are doing not so great things in public that might get them into trouble. (See below.)
• Most of the younger kids in your system are going to be on Facebook when they are in your high school.
• No one is teaching them.

Instead of teaching it, we block it. What are we afraid of? It’s not predation, though we continue to use that as the “Be Very Scared of Social Networks” part of the limited online safety curriculum that most schools do have. It’s all about reputation, and there a lots of folks out there right now damaging their reputations on Facebook, many because they don’t know any better.

For you adults in the room, here’s an experiment. Go to Openbook, a new site that searches through all public accounts at Facebook, and enter your favorite bad word of the day. Be prepared…not only for some pretty vile stuff, but from much of it being posted by kids. A (somewhat censored) case in point:

Look, I don’t know how many of these kids are just angry and won’t be helped by any type of teaching. Nor do I know how many of them (or the adults that show up in the results) are just ignorant about what they are doing, or how many of them know and don’t care, or even if posts like these are just a part of youth culture.  (I hope not.) But here is what I do know: the whole private/public thing is a mess right now. danah boyd sums this up really well in what I think is a must read post for educators titled “Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)“:

Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that “everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo, affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

Interestingly, danah points out that new research is imminent that says “youth are actually much more concerned about exposure than adults these days,” an idea I can attest to with my own kids. But the point remains that whether we like it or not, Facebook has become such an integral part of the culture, especially our kids’ cultures, that to not provide them with some context  for both their actions there and the opportunities for learning in similar spaces is to leave them uneducated.

I know Facebook isn’t on the test, but c’mon. It’s time it becomes a part of how we help kids live in this world.

Just want to make sure everyone is aware of Gary Stager’s most excellent “Constructing Modern Knowledge” conference being held this summer (July 12-15) in Manchester, NH. Here’s a snip from the description:

Constructing Modern Knowledge is a unique minds-on institute for educators committed to creativity, collaboration and computing. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in intensive computer-rich project development with peers and a world-class faculty. Inspirational guest speakers and social events round out a fantastic event.

Rather than spend days listening to a series of speakers, Constructing Modern Knowledge is about action. Attendees will work and interact with educational experts concerned with maximizing the potential of every learner.

While our outstanding faculty is comprised of educational pioneers, bestselling authors and inventors of innovative educational technologies, the real power of Constructing Modern Knowledge  emerges from the collaborative project development of participants.

Animation, robotics engineering, film-making, music composition, Scratch & MicroWorlds programming, simulation building, storytelling are all part of the CMK 2010 mix.

Each day’s program consists of a discussion of powerful ideas, mini tutorials on-demand, immersive learning adventures designed to challenge one’s thinking, substantial time for project work and a reflection period.

The learning environment is filled with stimulating “objects to think with,” including a library, art supplies & materials for tinkering.

21st Century educators need to develop their own technological fluency and understand learning in order to meet the changing needs and expectations of their students. Constructing Modern Knowledge  will help participants enhance their tech skills, expand their vision of how computers may enhance the learning environment and leave with practical ideas to use in the classroom.

Speakers include Alfie Kohn, Sylvia Martinez, Deborah Meier, and Peter Reynolds. While I haven’t had the chance to attend past CMKs, I’ve heard nothing but good things, and I respect Gary’s continuing efforts to place active learning with computers squarely in the center of the conversation around technology and schools.

The New York Daily News today ran an editorial praising the work of state legislators and teacher union groups to come up with a new way of assessing teachers with an eye more than anything else on getting rid of those who are performing below expectations. As always, exactly how to figure out which teachers are “underperforming” is the problem, and the state’s attempt to win some of the Race to the Top money that’s being dangled in front of everyone’s face is driving the conversation. That means, of course, that students’ scores on standardized tests will play a big part in determining whether a teacher is “highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.”

The reasons why this is highly problematic have been articulated over and over; just wait until the first teacher gets fired because his kids conspired to do poorly on the test. But I have another concern, namely the tendency if not habit of people to confuse learning and knowledge. Here’s the first paragraph of the Daily News editorial:

The state Education Department has fashioned a plan that would start New York on the road toward measuring whether each public school teacher is a superstar or a lemon, based on how well students learn.

It should read:

The state Education Department has fashioned a plan that would start New York on the road toward measuring whether each public school teacher is a superstar or a lemon, based on how much their students know.

I don’t know about you, but very few of the questions I’ve seen on the NY State Regents have anything to do with student learning. Instead they attempt to assess whether or not a student knows how to read, knows how to use a formula, know what the parts of a leaf are, etc. It’s pretty hard to look at those questions and find any that get to “how well students learn.”

Semantics? Maybe. But I think it’s a crucial distinction to make at a time when “knowing” is pretty darn easy considering how many places knowledge resides these days, notwithstanding the complexity of figuring out what’s worth knowing in the first place. And yes, we need to know that our kids know some stuff, no question. But what I really want to know is that my kids are learners, that they are motivated to seek knowledge on their own and use it effectively, that they are problem solvers, that they are self-directed, entrepreneurial, and motivated to change the world. If you can find a way to test that, I’d be more than happy to apply the result as a part of teacher evaluation.

Until then, especially if people’s livelihoods depend on it, let’s at least be clear exactly what we’re measuring.

I want to put on my Powerful Learning Practice hat here for a second and talk about the ways in which Sheryl and I are expanding our offerings as we enter our fourth year of PLP. I can’t believe we’re finishing up our third year of this work already, and I can’t say enough about the amazing team of educators who have joined us in this work; we both feel very fortunate to work with all of them.

In our conversations with our colleagues and our participants, we’ve identified some new areas of learning that we’re going to pursue. Aside from our “traditional” cohort model where we are putting together school teams of educators to participate in our 7-8 month long, blended learning experience that about 2,000 teachers have participated in (details here), this year we’re also offering four other totally online cohorts for educators, school leaders administrators, National Board Certified Teacher candidates, and parents.

Each of these cohorts will be together from early October to late April and will feature a virtual community space for ongoing interactions, regular webinars featuring thought leaders and practitioners, and support from Sheryl and I and various members of the PLP team.

• For the “Global Administrator Leader” cohort, we’re looking for educational leaders who want to connect with other leaders around the big conversations that social learning networks are starting to share ideas and experiences and go more deeply into defining what changes schools need to consider.
• The “Global Educator” cohort will be a community of classroom practitioners who are willing to share their ideas around curriculum and pedagogy but also focus on what it means to be a teacher at this moment and what our changing roles in our students’ lives looks like.
• The “Global NBCT” cohort will be led by Nancy Flanagan, former Michigan Teacher of the Year and nationally board certified teacher as well as PLPeeps, and, as you might expect, it will be heavily aligned to NBCT requirements.
• And finally, our “Global Parent” cohort is being created expressly for parents who are interested in learning more about socially networked learning spaces for themselves and for their children. The webinars will focus on a variety of topics including “Facebook for Parents,” “Managing Your Online Reputation,” and “New Learning Opportunities,” and the PLP led community will focus on the challenges and opportunities of social learning tools for parents and their kids.

We have a page on our website for more info on how to sign up or if you want a rundown of the places where our traditional Year 1 cohorts are forming. Don’t forget to check out our Virtual Institutes, Year 2 and 3 options, boot camps, graduate credit options, and more. Please let me know if you have any questions, and we look forward to your participation.

I’ve been slowly but surely working my way through John Seely Brown’s (and others) new book Pull, and I’m liking it quite a bit. It sets up a pretty convincing picture of what it means to be living in a world where we make our way through the many connections that are now possible in the social and learning networks we have access to online. What has been striking to me is the way that Brown and his co-authors have been hammering home the continued importance of face to face connections and the value of serendipity in making those connections. They write at length about the value in attending conferences on topics that we have passion for, and making ourselves as available as possible to the conversations outside of the meeting rooms. I know that we’ve talked about that a great deal as well, how many of us go to conferences these days for the spontaneous conversations that can erupt when you get into a place that’s full of people who love what you love, and that the “presentations” pale in comparison (though they do have their purpose.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share one idea that the authors put forth in terms of how to think about the personal learning networks that we can create in both our face to face and virtual worlds. Basically, it’s a set of five questions that are intended to get readers thinking deeply about their passions and about the connections they form around them. I’m going to throw just a sentence or two of personal reaction to each one in italics, but I’m wondering how others might approach these as a way of starting to think more globally about networks.

1. Can you identify the fifty smartest or most accomplished people who share your passions or interests, regardless of where they reside? I think I can probably come pretty close, though I haven’t created a list. I’ve been lucky enough to have been swimming in these waters for long enough (nine years!) to have a pretty good idea of who is there, at least in the virtual space. And since my passion has to do with the virtual, there probably aren’t too many who linger just in physical space. (Hopefully that made some sense.)

2. How many of these people are currently in your professional / personal networks? Again, this is just a guess, but I’d hope that the majority of them are. I can rattle off at least half a dozen, however, who aren’t, primarily because of my hesitancy to reach out to them (for a variety of reasons). This part can be a struggle at times.

3. How many of these people have you been able to engage actively in an initiative related to your shared passions or interests? Obviously, the percentage gets smaller and smaller here. This reminds me of the the “collective action” piece that Clay Shirky talks about, or at the very least, creating something together. When I think about how many people I have actually “actively engaged” I wonder why it’s not more.

4. To how many of these people would you feel comfortable reaching out and mobilizing in a new initiative related to your shared passions and interests? I’d say most, but not all. That’s a constant point of reflection for me…What stops me?

5. For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other’s activities? Obviously, to some extent, that depends on the other person’s “findability.” I’m pretty confident that if someone was looking for me via online social tools, they’d find me. Not sure if that’s always that case.

Some interesting questions to ponder when thinking about our intentional construction of these networks and communities.