I’m in the throes of research for a next book, and I’ve been going back to my highlighted, starred, underlined, exclamation pointed parts of The World is Flat in my idea collection process. I’m impressed at how well the implications for education seem to be holding together. Anyway, I came across this one starred part that I hadn’t remembered, a section titled “From Command and Contral to Collaborate and Connect.” I’m going to sub-in some of my own phrasing in italics, but I think there’s an interesting point made here:

This is what happens when you move from a vertical (command and control) educational system to a much more horizontal (connect and collaborate) flat educational system. Your student can do his and your job…Students, if they are inclined, can collaborate more directly with more of their peers than ever before no matter who they are or where they are in the world…But teachers will also have to work much harder to be better informed than their students. There are a lot more conversations between students and teachers today that start like this: “I know that already! I Googled it myself. Now what do I do about it? (212)”

The intellectual relationships and roles we have with our students are changing. I’m just sayin’…

technorati tags:teaching, learning, education, weblogg-ed, WorldIsFlat

So here we have an example of a high school civics class blog by a student that is using the tool pretty well, I’d say. Especially just a few days into it. Once again, comments on Civics dude! are open, which has led to a pretty interesting exchange between student and unknown commentor. To guide you through it, here’s the original post, the comment, and the student’s response. I love this part from the student:

I think it’s so funny that someone I don’t even know who it is (Gayatri?) is posting comments on my schoolblog. I see how it can be very upsetting reading a highschool kid’s view on what America is doing. It is truly not my meaning to sound ever-knowing, or wise. Let’s face it, I’m seventeen and I don’t know 1% of what’s going on in the world. But I think that not understanding that I am a student trying to learn and expand my world, is pretty narrow-minded, as Gayatri said I was.

This is getting closer, I think, to what can happen…writing in response to reading for real audiences.

And by the way, Sanna’s teacher, I think, provides a great model for teachers to follow in terms of pointing to good blogging work by their students. This is how you start modeling the connections, by reading and linking. I snipped one such “mother blog” post below…click it to go read the comments.

technorati tags:education, blogging, learning20, weblogg-ed

So Jeff (who is becoming a daily link-to here) has announced a new site for a new class on Web 2.0 tools that he’s teaching. TeenTek is all about his students blogging about what they find newsworthy and interesting, and it’s all about teaching the tools of the trade in the context of what the kids discover as meaningful. (I know, I know…once I latch on to some phrasing it takes me a while to let go.) And, it’s all about helping kids to understand that one of the most powerful things they can do when they have an audience is teach. (I’m learning a lot about cell phones already.) I really hope Jeff’s students feel the license to explore their own passions but at the same time come to understand the power of being able to take what they learn and communicate it in a way that readers (in the broadest sense) will understand and learn from.

But the other piece of this is, of course, that this is a course specifically created to do the type of learning we’re all talking about. (What a concept…hey, really…what a concept! I wonder if Jeff would share his proposal so others might, um, propose a similar course at their schools.) What about the 99.999% of courses out there that are about content? Even Jeff himself in a comment to my previous post says:

I wish I could spend that much time developing the stories, interacting with the world here in China in which these students live. But theissue is content. I have to get through x amount by 1st quarter, by 2nd quarter, etc. Our school systems are not built around learning, instead they are built around content and assessing the learning that takesplace within that content or context.

And he continues by asking the $23,456.34 question:

How do you make that change? How do you ’sell’ this to principals and parents when they walk in and ask, so what have you covered? Instead of asking, what did my student create, contribute and learn?

Yeah. So how do we do that?

technorati tags:jeffUtecht, blogging, classroom, education, learning, weblogg-ed

I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about where we’re at with all of this from a student perspective and wondering (again) why it is that there aren’t more examples of kids using blogs (in particular) to make their thinking and learning transparent. I mean there is no doubt that more and more teachers are using the tools with their students, and that there is some residual learning that happens by that mere fact. But I’m hearkening back (once again) to something Tom March said in that interview at NECC about “where are the real best practices with kids using these tools?”

What got me started on this, actually, was the work that Jeff’s kids were posting to YouTube. Now before I go any further, I’m in no way demeaning that effort; I think it’s a great start down the road. But there has to be more here. At some point, I’m hoping Jeff will scaffold up from “the same-old-report in a different format that has a big audience” work to more “critical analysis of the content that we’re producing to test our ideas” work. I mean that, at it’s core, is what is powerful about these technologies. They allow us to take risks with our ideas, to test them in authentic ways with real audiences, and learn from the process. (In many ways, this post is a risk.) Why shouldn’t we be asking students to do the same?
Take the IBM video for example. What if next, that student does a second video (or writes a blog post) that deconstructs the marketing efforts of the company, shows how the brand is manufactured and sold in China, and includes personal responses to the advertising? Something that involves risking his ideas or interpretation with the payoff that the viewer (or reader ) will learn something absolutely unique, something that can’t be found at Wikipedia, and may, if done in a provocative enough way, motivate that viewer to respond. Something that genuinely teaches something new.

Now I know there are those who will suggest that for this scenario to truly play out, we need to open up student work to audiences in ways that we may not be comfortable with. But I look at the links to student work that Clarence posted today, think about how that content is “exposed” to open commentors (though I will guess they are moderated), and wonder how much more his kids are understanding the potential because of it. I mean, there is some nascent blogging (the verb) actually happening in those posts. It’s closer…
The shift with doing something like this is more than just safety, however. The real shift is with the stance of the teacher. This idea forces us to move away from delivering content as we have for 100+ years and instead move toward assisting students to discover content on their own. What are the ideas, concepts and examples that can be woven together to create meaning in the context of our class goals and outcomes? What personal learning can be made transparent that informs a larger discussion of the curriculum? It’s not our (the teacher) answer that is important.

We learn when we take risks. We learn when we fail. That’s one of the most difficult lessons I’m trying to help my own kids learn. It’s fourth grade, and for Tess, now the onslaught of grades really begins. Everything is a 97 or a 84 or (god forbid) a 75. Nowhere on those sheets is even an implied message that says “Congratulations! You got stuff wrong! What an opportunity to LEARN!” And so my daughter continues and will continue to look to the teacher in the room to deliver to her what’s important instead being compelled to discover, through managed risk-taking and safe failure, what learning may await her.
This is difficult work. Just ask Konrad and Barbara (and others,) both of whom continue to inspire me with the depth of their reflections about their practice and how disruptive these shifts are in their own work. But at some point, we have to get to it in ways that push our students farther down the same road we in this community are traveling. At some point, we have to see it more manifest in front of us.

technorati tags:teaching, learning, education, blogging, weblogg-ed, shifthappens

…that Jeff Utecht‘s kids in Shanghai are publishing a series of History of Technology videos to YouTube that most American kids probably won’t be able to see?

What’s not surprising is that because they are being uploaded to YouTube, Jeff’s students are starting to understand the reach of what they can do.

We talked about what these numbers meant and that they were producing something that could potentially be seen by millions of people. I then read them the comments that Clarence and David left on my last posting about the videos and more than anything that was what really caught them off guard.

“You mean people are waiting for us to finish this?”

“Canada? I’m from Canada!”

As I looked around the room there was all of a sudden this sense of ‘he’s not joking’. One student completely deleted his work and started over proclaiming, “This isn’t good enough.” I had another student go home that night do more research and then come back Thursday with a 4 page report on the history of Google. We had to have a talk as YouTube videos must be under 10 minutes, and as he recorded his voice we decided that talking faster wasn’t a good solution to fitting all his information in a 10 minute slide. Another student that was finished came over and helped him edit his work decided to cut the years 2001, 2003 out completely and chopping some paragraphs here and there. He didn’t finish his on Thursday so it will be uploaded to the account on Monday. My teaching partner has his students uploading their videos on Friday so you might want to stop by and check those out as well.

These technologies empower students to do good work. As I wrote on Thursday. They become contributors to society and they understand that and live up to that potential. Empower students with information and what them go!

Let your students teach to the world and watch what happens. But if you’re here in America, you’ll probably have to find a way to do it without using the most insanely popular publishing tool out there right now.

technorati tags:youtube, JeffUtecht, video, school20, classroom20, weblogg-ed, education, learning

So here is another example of what elementary kids can do in terms of publishing text and audio to the Web. This is the Top of the Fold online newspaper that Grandview Elementary in Monsey, NY uses to publish student artwork, podcasts and more. The teachers have a lot to do with posting the work, but the idea is pretty simple: give kids the opportunity to share their work with wide audiences and have them teach to others what they themselves have learned. Take a quick listen to this podcast to see what I mean.

Just think for a second about how differently these teachers consider the work they assign. I’m finding more and more, that’s the real power in all of this. We need to stop passing paper back and forth, don’t we?

technorati tags:podcasts, education, weblogged, learning, teaching20

Pat Aroune who is a high school teacher in upstate New York and a new edblogger (after 16 years in the business) sent along a link to some student Weblogs from his summer class on economics and a couple of them, Greg’s Public Views and Economics According to Andi struck me because of some of the work there and their reflections about blogging. Pat’s idea was to have them use their blogs to study economics in the context of whatever their passions were, and the results are pretty telling. Greg commented

I’ve learned in a way that tailors to my interests, what with using the internet to its fullest extent and writing about things that I am interested in. I would write about things like snowboarding, soccer, filmaking, eating, sleeping… whatever I wished, as long as I related it to economics. After doing this for a while, I started to realize that I was learning much faster than I would have normally by reading a boring (sorry, they almost always are) textbook. Not only could I write about things that I like and post them, but others could view those posts, as could I theirs, and consequently learn from their experiences and interests as well.

I think about this all the time in terms of my own children, who are learning to do all sorts of things in the context of what they are passionate about be it Power Rangers or horseback riding. And I’m really trying to nurture their entry into a world where they can learn together with other kids who are equally passionate about those topics (well, maybe not Power Rangers…)

Andi states it a bit differently but clearly makes the point:

To be quiet honest, I’ve become so accustomed to the “old skool” way of learning through the textbook and lectures, taking tests, and writing essays, that it’s just how I learn the easiest. It’s all I’ve known. How is this blogging thing gonna really help me? How am I even gonna know what to do? What does my teacher expect from me and how will I be able to meet those expectations? That was the main question right there. I’ve found that I learn in a way that requires a lot of structure. Someone tells me what to do and how they want it done, and like the mindless little nerd-monkey that I am, I do it. But by using this blog, I’ve been exposed to a new way of thinking and learning which has really been of benefit to myself. I’ve learned to think outside of the box and learn how I want to learn. You need to read her entire post about the experience…some very thoughtful and challenging reflections.

So here is a “new” bloggy teacher kicking the tires by allowing students to use blogs to write about things they are interested in and still draw it back in to the subject at hand. It’s not perfect…as the kids say, more commenting could have helped. But I really admire the initiative to change and experiment and reflect. And to make me think…

technorati tags:education, blogging, learning

So I got a chance to spend half a day with Chris Lehmann and his full staff at the Franklin Institute in Philly yesterday talking about how the Read/Write Web might work at their new school, the Science Leadership Academy which opens in about six weeks. It was the last day of an 8-day intensive planning session, and they were probably more tuned into the “closing ceremonies” to be held at a neighborhood restaurant in the afternoon than on listening to me, but I was extremely impressed by their attention, their questions and their thinking. And their thinking was all over the place…on a Moodle site where they have been capturing all of their work, on newsprint post-its all over the walls of the planning room, in their conversation. I sat there just envious as all get out that Chris had this opportunity to really build “School 2.0,” and I said as much to all of them.

I know I for one will be watching SLA with a great deal of interest, because it is already one of the first schools to be pretty transparent in the planning process and it will be pretty transparent in the product. At one point in our conversation as his teachers were working on their personal technology plans, Chris said something to the effect that his process had been informed by people all over the world, and that by being transparent about it on his blog, it had been a richer, more effective experience. (Chris, if you read this, maybe you could embellish that thought with a comment…but not from the beach!) And I thought it was interesting that one of the interview questions his teachers were asked was “How do you feel about teaching in a fishbowl?” Partially, that comes from SLA sharing the stage with the Microsoft-funded “School of the Future” which is also opening this fall in Philadelphia. But it also stems from the fact that part of the philosophy is to share widely and to be open about the process. Pretty cool.

So I won’t go as far as to say that this is the first big test of a Read/Write Web school. It’s not. But it’s a big step on that road. It’s a new model that we might all watch. It has an amazingly creative and forward thinking school leader at the helm, an eclectic and passionate group of teachers, and a very democratic vision that makes it unique in my experience. I am very, very excited to see what happens.

Technorati tags:School 2.0, education, Science Leadership Academy, school reform

Konrad Glogowski has an amazing post today about his grade 8 students’ blogging experiences, and it’s one that should be trumpeted far and wide in this community. Imagine being a part of this:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues. I witnessed the emergence of a semantic network, one where all links, all interactions were based on meaning.

One thing I really like about Konrad’s blogging is that he points me to so much good stuff about learning theory in the context of telling his stories about his students. Here, he references the community as networks of semantic relations that Stephen Downes writes about, Brufee’s “community of knowledgeable peers,” Bereiter’s “progressive discourse,” Scardamalia and Bereiter’s “intentional learning” ideas, and others. It’s a veritable feast for the brain, and it teaches me. And the best news is that he’s documented his transformative experience and plans to teach me, and us, even more in the days to come.

What really jumps out at me here is the power of the idea that we can now create learning communities of meaning that are much more powerful than communities of proximity. This community that I am a part of is testament to that. We are self-directed, nomadic learners, moving purposefully down paths that interest us, engaging in conversations, building connections and networks around our passions and our zeal to know more about them. We share our experiences to confirm our own understanding in the context of the community, hoping to teach, I think, and hoping to move the discussion forward. Is it strange that I get butterflies when I read things as powerful as what Konrad writes? That I can’t wait to make sense of it through blogging, to figure out what about it resonates? That I can’t wait to point others to it? Konrad is writing about his students here, but I think this could easily describe what we as edbloggers do as well:

…the idea of knowing in this community as“the intentional activity of individuals who, as members of a community, make use of and produce representations in the collaborative attempt to better understand and transform their shared world.”

A lot of us will be proximate next week at NECC, and that is always a good thing, but we’ll continue to learn from each other regardless of where we are. As long as, of course, we remain willing to contribute. In the case of kids, Konrad has found the best of both worlds:

That’s when I realized that this class community was truly engaged, that its members were interested in pursuing knowledge as researchers who are passionately involved and not as students who need to absorb the content.

How cool is that? Read the whole thing…

technorati tags:necc, necc06, connective_learning, blogging, education, learning

So says Joanne Jacobs in her essay “The Knowledge Tree Goes Social” which I listened to in podcast form on my drive up to Newport, RI today. (I’m speaking at EdAccess tomorrow morning.) She cites the blog search engine Sphere as the source though I couldn’t replicate the result. Regardless…

69,000.

Whoa.

Not to sound like an old blog fart, but if true, that’s an amazing number. I remember way back in 2001, I couldn’t find more than a handful of educators blogging on a regular basis. And I looked pretty hard (though I’ll admit that I missed Stephen Downes who had been edublogging longer than I.)

If true, that’s a pretty amazing number.

And food for thought.

This is getting serious…

technorati tags:blogging, education, teaching

(I’m in Wes Freyer mode today, huh?)

I just happened to pick up Expecting the Unexpected by one of my favorite teachers Donald Murray this morning, flipped to a page, and read this:

“It isn’t easy, however, to get students to teach themselves. It took me years to learn how not to teach, how to keep from interfering with their education, to follow instead of lead.

The first problem is the teacher. We are all tempted by authority. Power over other human beings–as rapists, clergy persons, corporation executives, therapists know–is a powerful addictive drug, and few jobs offer as much power as teacher…

I feared the students would rise en masse and toss me out the window; worse they might expose my ignorance to my colleagues. I mistreated my students and earned a reputation as a good teacher. I behaved as teachers were supposed to behave, and that made me a good one.

When I finally taught myself to relax and learn with the class, to deal in questions rather than answers, listening instead of talking, I confused many of my students.

They expected to be taught, and I expected them to learn.” (128)

It’s the traditional system that teaches them to expect to be taught. I see it in my own kids already. They wait for direction, passive in their approach. The problem is that we as teachers are no longer the sole authorities on content or of knowledge in the classroom. But we can be authorities of learning. Learning is seeking, attempting, failing, reflecting, succeeding, practice. What if we really taught kids that in the context of their own passions? And what if we transparently modeled that process for them? Relected on our own failures and successes? Shared our own strategies? What if teachers were learners first?

Murray also writes:

“As I unlearned to teach, they began to unlearn what they had been taught in other composition classes and began to make use of the room I gave them. I learned how to allow them to learn–and they did.” (129)

This is an important shift in how we see our relationships with our students. Murray figured it out 15 years ago, but I think it’s all the more relevant now.

technorati tags:Donald_murray, teaching, learning, change

(So this is my first post using the Flock browser blog posting interface. After an hour of using it, I’m loving the browser…we’ll see how this goes.)

Kathy Sierra writes about the “Mosh Pit as Innovation Model” and I’m wondering about a “Mosh Pit as Classroom Model.” I mean, check out the Old vs. New chart that she includes and read it as an educator.

Old Classrooms vs. New Classrooms

Linear and slow vs. networked and quick–we need to create learners that are nimble and nomadic, able to take responsibility for their own needs.

Proprietary knowledge vs. shared knowledge–We need classrooms where it’s clear that we all own the knowledge and that we all benefit when it is freely shared and remixed.

Ideas as advantage vs. ideas “paid forward”–what a cool way of thinking about it, but isn’t this the way science has worked forever. Here’s what I have discovered, and I give it to you to discover even more. That’s what we’re beginning to do in every area.

Mentors vs. micromentors–every student can network with more narrowly relevant teachers outside the classroom.

Learn by reverse engineering vs. lessons learned benfit all–What could that concept do to standardized assessments? What if the entire class, collaboratively, had to pass the assessment? Just a thought…

Progress by “Shoulders of Giants” vs. progress by “Mosh Pit”–Hey, we already have the teacher as DJ concept. And if in this world of crazy fast information and knowledge, only the “we’re all in this together” approach is going to work.

Wisdom of experts vs. wisdom of crowds–This might be the toughest nut of all for educators, expecially, I would think, higher ed types. But look at Digg and Technorati and all of the other ways that reputation is moving away from the individual to the group. We need classrooms that tap into the power of socially constructed knowledge and ideas.

The rest of the post is amazingly good, as are the comments, but much that validates the thinking of our community.

technorati tags:classrooms, Kathy_Sierra, learning, read/write_web

So here is the not so subtle change that’s happening when teachers learn about the Read/Write Web and the tools that they can bring into their classrooms. As little as six months ago, there was a sense of “yeah, but” resignation in terms of not being able to really implement these tools in effective ways because of blocking/filtering, lack of support, lack of understanding, etc. But yesterday in Kennesaw, despite the many “challenges” that the 25 or so teachers in the room acknowledged were staring them in the face, there was anything but resignation. Instead, they were e-mailing their superintendents asking them to unblock sites that they have no access to, asking how to save locally or to usb drives or to Furl all of the sites that are being blocked so they could share them with their kids anyway, or trying to figure out the best ways to start using the tools despite the roadblocks. It was pretty cool to be a part of.

Two highlights: Anne Davis, who today gets to undo the damage I did yesterday, showed up just after lunch and we got a few minutes to catch up and compare notes. I know the group is going to be totally blown away by what Anne shows them in terms of classroom use, and I wish I could be there to sit in. It was great to see her again. Second, we had about a 15-minute Skype conversation with George Seimens who happened to be “stuck” in a café in Innsbruck, Austria nestled between two giant alps which, horrors of all horrors, was playing havoc with his connection. The call was crystal clear regardless, and really drove home the point of how our classrooms can extend all over the world. And it was just a lot of fun to boot.

David Jakes, who I admire greatly despite his poor taste in Chicago baseball teams, has come to the conclusion that he doesn’t like Tablet PCs. Why? Basically because he thinks they are nothing more than a glorified ink note taking technology. Much like he eschews my Cubbies for the White Sox, he misses the point with tablets. (The point with the Cubs, by the way, is that long suffering is a badge of honor and persistence…in fact, I hope the Cubs never win…no, really.) It’s not just about, as he implies, taking notes using digital ink. It’s about what you can do with those notes once you take them. And it’s also about engaging both teachers and students in ways that regular laptops can’t.

Dave says he would rather save the extra money and “use an overhead and a dime transparency.” Um, ok…and then what? Throw the transparency away? Make paper copies for the kids? Why not take the digital ink notes that you take on a tablet and publish them to a class resource page where the students can review them if they want? Or add to them? Or where you can pull them down and refer to them later? And he also says that he’d stick with paper and pencil instead of tablets to work through problems because “I get enough e-mail.” Well, if all the teacher is doing is asking kids to e-mail in the homework, that’s not a very imaginative teacher. Again, why couldn’t the student post those notes for others to see? Better yet, what about making a screencast of the process complete with ink and sharing that in a similar way. Why couldn’t they become a part of a searchable digital notebook? Last time I checked, paper isn’t searchable.

He says:

What this amounts to is taking a 21st Century tool and applying it to old school teaching, industrial age teaching, where information is transferred passively to even more passive learners….

With the limited uses he cites, he’s absolutely correct. But I’ve seen better. I’ll pull out a couple of results from the white paper we did at my (former) school that was based on the research of a doctoral candidate at Columbia Teachers College and our own internal research that was reviewed by <name drop>Michael Dell</name drop> as a part of Dell’s tablet decision making process. Thirty-three teachers participated in the pilot study, and 100% of them said that the tablet functionality was important to their practice and pedagogy. To quote from the study:

In survey and informal conversation, most teachers said that they would not have thought inking would be so important before they had an opportunity to test it in the classroom and see how powerful a tool it was for student learning. The inking, used in conjunction with the wireless projectors, provided a tool for focusing student attention, helping diverse learning styles, illustrating complex concepts, instantly responding to student questions and capturing a record of each class.

Our researcher found that the pilot teachers cited the following five themes almost universally when using the tablets:

• Instantaneous capability in the classroom
• Connecting to students
• Teacher productivity anytime, anywhere
• Organization
• Teacher Empowerment

I look at what happened at my (former) school as incredibly powerful, and meets David’s test of extending learning both for teachers and students. I can tell you that I will never be without an ink enabled computer again as I use it every day to build both a private and in some cases online notebook of work.

Finally, David suggests that using  Google Notebook and del.icio.us and wikis and the like would serve them just fine. Maybe, if they can access all of that. And perhaps our experiences were unique. I have to say that our planning and execution of the pilot had complete buy in from the school community which is why everyone in the pilot and and the technology committee agreed to roll it out to the entire staff this fall (budget cuts willing.) But I think we’re just beginning to see the possibilities.

At any rate, don’t dismiss tablets just yet. The price point may still be high, but they have much to offer besides “just” taking notes.

Darren lights upon another great idea with the creation of wiki problem solving sites for his kids (and Clarence has picked up the ball as well.) As he puts it, his students are creating the textbook in their blogs, and now they can create supporting resources in the wiki. Read the thinking that he put behind how to structure and assess the work his students are doing. It’s pretty brilliant.

And this is an idea with legs, I think. With math, the concept of a solution manual is pretty straightforward, but how about translation manuals for world language students, or manuals for English class where students develop models of effective writing, or a history manual where students create context for important events or people, or lab manuals for bio or chemistry, or… Again, this goes back to the idea that we have almost unlimited opportunities for our students to learn by teaching…teaching each other or teaching the world. (Darren wants to connect lots of students to these wikis creating a “World Wide Wiki.” Might be tough to implement, but the expansive way of looking at it is right on.)

And just a note about pbwiki which has quickly become one of the best choices out there for wiki ideas. The creators are constantly tweaking the software and have made some real strides toward making it classroom accessible of late. There are still some issues to think through when choosing to use a wiki with your students, but there seems to be a nice balance between privacy and transparency that teachers can reach with some thinking and planning (and reading of Darren’s blog…)

So, what other ways can we twist Darren’s idea?