School librarian Thomas Washington’s essay in the Christian Science Monitor strikes a chord:

I suspect that the tipping point in information overload has tipped.
Students’ aversion to reading does not necessarily signal a weakness,
much less a dislike of reading. For them, and now maybe for me, moving
on to something else is an adaptive tactic for negotiating the jungle
that is our information-besotted culture of verbiage.

And this:

The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about
a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out. By necessity, we spend more time quickly scanning manuals, king-size
novels, the blogosphere, and poems in The New Yorker than we do
scrutinizing their contents for deeper meaning.

Yesterday I did a couple of RSS sessions in Elluminate for the PLP cohorts and I found myself talking more about what I don’t read than what I do read. I’m guessing that I scan through about 80% of what comes into my Google Reader, actually read a few full paragraphs and note or tag or move another 15%, and do a “deep” read (and perhaps write, as in this case) of the remainder.

I’m feeling guilty about much of this, though Washington is nice enough to let me off the hook. But I still wonder how much of this is just angst about the shifts, the transition to different reading space that might be as wonderful and valuable as the old one, just different. (I will admit, however, that the fact that my kids are currently engrossed and engaged in 400-page fantasy novels makes my heart soar and even leaves me a tad jealous.)

What I like about this essay (aside from that it’s relatively short) is that it nails the friction of our collective educator unease about the direction this is taking.

Reading is all about testing these days. As the NEA reports, it is
also about some prospective employer who ranks reading comprehension as
“very important.” Students know this. It’s part of the reason they’re
in SAT preparation overdrive in their freshman year. Living in the era of information overload forces
a few key questions on all readers. What do we need to know? Why do we
need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have
absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information
available, should we bother knowing it?

So, assuming you’ve read this, what do you think?

Technorati Tags: reading, books, learning, knowledge

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Tomorrow, Amazon is set to release “Kindle,” the digital book reader that holds over 200 books and does a whole lot more (i.e. full text searches, annotations, wireless downloads, online surfing, etc.) It’s a huge suggestion, isn’t it, that we might be on the verge of moving one of the last bastions of the analog world online, and I know that this is a real sore point with many who love to curl up with physical books and turn pages. As an article titled “The Future of Reading,” in this week’s Newsweek about Jeff Bezos’ and his new device says:

Computers may have taken over every other stage of the process—the
tools of research, composition and production—but that final mile of
the process, where the reader mind-melds with the author in an
exquisite asynchronous tango, would always be sacrosanct, said the
holdouts.

I’m not so sure. When you think of all there is to read now, and how the form of that reading has been changed by the Web, I think it’s clear we’re in a transition period that is moving us to something not necessarily better or worse but different for sure. (One of my favorite sayings about many of these shifts.) Again, while fully admitting that my personal practice right now in no way reflects the practice of 97.45% of the rest of the population in terms of the creation and consumption of digital content, and while I still love books with pages and read many of them each year, given the choice, I would rather go digital. (Don’t forget, I still love my Tablet PC even if I don’t use it as much these days.)

The bigger question, as the article alludes to, is whether or not this shift will begin to reverse the trend of people reading fewer and fewer books. And I love the possibility, as suggested in the article, that one potential of connected books are connected readers, that this device or one similar may open up all sorts of ways in which we can share the reading with others. Ben Vershbow, author of one of my favorite blogs, says “The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product.” (It already is, isn’t it?) If you want even more mind bending examples (like the ability of liberals to annotate an Ann Coulter book for all of us to read) then read the whole article.

But is the Kindle the device that’s going to make the slope even more slippery? I’d love to try one out, no doubt.

And in the end, I think that’s what I like more than anything about all of these conversations. That in these shifts, in these changes come all sorts of not seen before potential to create connections, to build networks. Like the Kindle, much of this is absolutely different. That’s what makes it fun, don’t you think?

(Note: The Newsweek article is decidedly rosy about this event. For a less upbeat assessment, try this column in Information Week.)

Technorati Tags: reading, kindle, amazon

So about 80% of the people on the plane to New Hampshire were reading Harry Potter last night. Well, ok, maybe 8 people, but it seemed like a lot. The guy next to me warned me when he sat down. “If you know the ending, I don’t want to hear it.” Between the hour long delay getting out in Philly and the hour long plane ride, he cruised through about 200 pages. Impressive.

When I got out of the terminal here in “Manchestah” to where the hotel shuttle was supposed to be, a woman who had arrived for the user group meeting I’m keynoting tomorrow recognized me (oy…t-shirt, two-day beard…oy) with, you guessed, it Harry Potter in hand. He’s everywhere.

Then today, in the midst of a workshop I was doing, I tweet to the network that we’re looking for the favorite Web 2.0 tools of the group. Within minutes, the tweets start coming in. I’m showing it real time in Twitter Camp. The people of the room are mesmerized. I’m trying to articulate what all of this means, the fact that in the midst of my sobbing at the Philly airport yesterday watching some soldiers come back from Iraq, greeted by their screaming children and affectionate wives, not being able to imagine what it must be like for them, that in the midst of that powerful moment I decided to Tweet the fact that I was sobbing.

I need help.

So anyway, in response to the tool question, Lucy Gray (who’s Twittering her way to Monterey, btw) responds with “How about Scribd?” and I’m like “How ’bout wha?” So I go there and try to take like one minute to make sense of what I’m looking at when I see someone has posted a .pdf of the entire Harry Potter book scanned in a page at a time.

All 638 pages.

And I’m doing this on screen as everyone is watching, and there are like audible gasps and reactions from the group and I’m getting pretty stunned, mumble something about copyright and intellectual property when all of a sudden I see this link underneath the .pdf that says “mp3,” and I’m going “this can’t be what I think it is” and so I click on the link and sure enough it starts downloading this huge file to iTunes which after a few minutes opens up and this female computer voice starts reading the last Harry Potter book through my computer speakers to the whole room. And there are a couple of women in the front who have their fingers in their ears saying “Ooooooommmmmm. Ooooooommmmmm.” so they can’t hear this voice which, if you really pay attention you can kinda get in the rhythm of things and follow along the story.

It’s surreal.

And amazing.

Have I mentioned lately, I love this stuff? I really, really do. Every day for me is like a little kid at Christmas, my eyes opened wide by what this interconnected life I’m leading brings my way. Today was, on balance, just too much fun.

I’m not worthy.

(Photo “The Circle is Complete” by Teban.)

Technorati Tags: harrypotter, learning, twitter, manchester

Daniel Pink has it right about design being an important literacy in a world where we are able to publish so easily. To that end, I’ve been noticing that a lot of us, myself included, have been putting more and more photos and graphics in our posts. Many of us are also reading Kathy Sierra’s blog which always offers up some compelling graphics, ones, however, that seem a bit out of reach for my scarcely artistic brain.

So I need things like Thumbscrew (MAC only) which lets me take a picture, like this one of Tess, and in about a nanosecond give it just a bit of a twist to make it all artsy and stuff and, hopefully, enhance the design of this blog. (Watch out…that’s my kid.)

Now I know there is a danger of over-design here. (I know I’m on the verge of getting over-widgeted.) And I also know that many times vanilla is better than a whole bunch of flavors mashed together. Good thing my wife is a designer and has promised to kick me in the right brain if I get out of hand…

Thanks to John Pederson for the link.

Not sure why it took me so long to finally dive into Library Thing but, despite the imminent demise of books as we know them (smile) I got hooked in maybe 27 seconds. In fact, I might say that I found LT to be among (if not the) most intuitive, easy to use, fantastically fast interface of any social site I’ve seen yet.

Basically, Library Thing allows you to easily catalog all of the books in your personal library which, in turn, leads to all sorts of social goodness. I can easily find out who else is reading the books I have, see what’s in their libraries, and start conversations with them about what they are reading and recommending. Of course, I can tag the books in my collection, rate them, write a review, add comments to the listing, and access all of the Library of Congress information about the book in an instant. (They just added their 9 millionth book to their database.) There are widgets to add (scroll down and see mine in the right hand column) and it has a great zeitgeist page that gives an overview of all things…um…Library Things. (For instance, the largest collection is 14, 954 books…whoa!)

Obviously, this is a great way to not only track what you’re reading but find other stuff to read (although one look at the stack of books next to my bed and I wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.) But I also thing it’s a wonderful example of the social potential of Web 2.0 in a very concrete way. I mean del.icio.us is a powerful tool, but I’m not sure how many people really “get it” without some bit of brainwork. This is easy and obvious, and let’s face it, everyone has a library…right?

Technorati Tags: library, books, reading, social

So how would it be to comment not just on total posts but on individual paragraphs within posts themselves? From a writing teacher’s standpoint, I think it would be pretty awesome. You could annotate specific sections of blog posted essays or stories and then leave more general comments at the end. Other people (students) could come in and leave their own pointed feedback. It would come pretty close to the type of handwritten comments that teachers have been leaving on student work (for better or worse) for ages.

Well the folks over at Future of the Book are working on it. Check out this text by Mitchell Stephens where, after selecting a section from the left hand margin, you are basically able to click into a specific part of the post and offer feedback. (Here’s a particularly interesting back and forth on one section.) Pretty cool, I’d say. Even cooler is that they’re planning to release this as a WordPress plugin at some point. Talk about being able to debate certain points within the whole.

I seem to remember someone else trying this sometime back. Now just wait until we can voice annotate parts of posts…

technorati tags:book, future, blogging, education, writing

Since we’re getting practical around here, I just wanted to share a Pageflakes page that I’ve been using in my RSS workshops to show how anyone can create topic specific portals with feeds. This page on Darfur/Sudan (not the most uplifting topic, I know…we have much to be thankful for) is built on tag feeds from YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, the New York Times AND the Sudan Tribune for news, del.icio.us for what people are bookmarking, and Google Blogsearch for, well, blogs. What you get is a dynamic, constantly updated page of content about what’s happening in that part of the world and what’s happening in other parts of the world in response.

From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. Not everything that shows up here will necessarily be suitable for some ages. (I have, however, created a same page for my daughter Tess about horses that I let her read at her discretion…she’s nine.) From a student standpoint, I think it’s a great way to introduce RSS, to give kids some ownership over the type of page they create (assuming you’ve had all the responsible use conversations already) and let them start working out their own processes for consuming and deciding about content in this content rich world. And the good news is that they can keep these pages private, or they can share them with groups (or teachers) so they don’t have to be as transparent as this example.

Additionally, the Pageflakes folks have been creating some interesting edu-specific “flakes”

that teachers can use. See this page, for instance, that has among other things a grade tracker, message board, to do list, and contact list. Again, since the student has the ability to keep these portals private, there are all sorts of ways that we can start introducing RSS and content management types of skills.

Finally, let me just emphasize the idea that in this environment when we can start collecting information from so many different sources around the globe, it’s imperative that we be modeling ways to do that. Imagine the types of global newspapers you could build around relevant topics with something like this. If we continue to just get the US perspective, I think we’re wasting a huge opportunity to expand and challenge our thinking.

technorati tags:pageflakes, darfur, education, learning, reading

Via Blogs for Learning, a new site from Michigan State, comes this pretty interesting article “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom” by David Parry from the University of Albany. It has a higher ed slant, but is very relevant to younger students as well. Some relevant quotes from the article:

• “One of the most significant concerns about using blogs in the classroom is that students often feel as if they are doing the same writing, just placing it on the web. Since context determines meaning, the method and message of writing necessarily changes as students compose for the internet; however, many academics fail to convey this information to students.”
• “If one simply transfers the “book-way” of writing onto the digital space, students have learned little that they could not have gained from more traditional writing assignments. The situation may even be worse than one of unnecessary reconfiguration, for in the digital medium, writing often produces technological frustrations which, if not offset by other gains, leads to negative experiences for the students. Since the context of writing has shifted in the digital, it is important to demonstrate to student how authorship itself has shifted in the age of the digital.”
• “To write “well” in this space students need to learn not only how to cite and link, but indeed to package their writings in a different way. RSS helps accomplish this goal.”
• “The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this…Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found. What RSS does is allow students to make this distinction, to receive content as “bits” easy to scan, and then to select what they want to read.”

I think it’s great to see some more pedagogy centered articles about RSS coming out.

technorati tags:rss, education, learning, blogging

Just in case anyone is interested, here’s the opening graph of my recent post at The Pulse:

So here’s the question: as you lit on this post and made the decision to start reading it, are you reading it differently from the way you read today’s newspaper or the latest best-seller laying by your bedside? Not interms of one word after another, left to right sort of thing. I mean in terms of the way in which your brain takes in the words, processes them,makes decisions about them. Believes them. Is the process different, somehow?
It should be…

technorati tags:thepulse, reading, education, learning, weblogg-ed

First let me say that the comments on the previous post have been pretty amazing and thought provoking. I want to comment on the comments at some point, but first I just wanted to throw out this excerpt from Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. This is, like, Part 3 in my blog book report.

There is a chapter where he talks about the efforts of some Survivor (the TV show) fans to “spoil” the season’s outcome by collectively gathering intelligence and comparing notes on the evidence all in an attempt to determine the winner well before the season finale. It’s a pretty interesting description of a long, complex process that relies of the work of the group but still bumps up against the “who can you trust” issues that we all face these days.

To give context to the discussion about how trust and authority are changing these days, Jenkins cites Pierre Levy’s notion of collective intelligence as compared to Peter Walsh’s “expert paradigm.” My point here is to talk about how this relates to the whole teacher as learner discussion in that we are now living in a world where collective intelligence is becoming more powerful and relevant to being a learner, but we’re educating our kids in classrooms still under this idea of experts at the front of the room. Here goes.

Walsh argues that our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary; they slip and slide across borders and draw of the combined knowledge of more diverse community.

This is why tests are becoming less relevant, no question. Read the article in the Times today about schools who no longer require the SAT. They save the best quote for last:

“Human intelligence and ambition is more complex, more multifaceted, than any standardized testing system can capture,” Mr. Hiss said.

We cannot know everything. Today, knowledge has no bounds. Truth is in flux, and this requires a network, a community to make sense of it.

Second, Walsh argues that the expert paradigm creates an “exterior” and “interior”; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis.

Why shouldn’t we contribute what we know to others? Why is “knowing” set up to be a competition? When we can connect around ideas that are in flux, everyone can contribute. It’s a much more democratic way of thinking about things.

Third, the expert paradigm, Walsh argues, uses rules about how you access and process information, rules that are established through traditional disciplines. By contrast, the strength and weakness of a collective intelligence is that it is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly. Just as knowledge gets called upon on an ad hoc basis, there are no fixed procedures for what you do with knowledge. Each participant applies their [sic] own rules, works the data through their [sic] own processes, some of which will be more convincing than others, but none of which are wrong at face value. Debates about rules are a part of the process.

We really struggle with this as educators, don’t we, this giving up of the rules about knowledge? This is where the whole idea of Wikipedia just breaks down for a lot of us. Along these lines, I’m finding that the most powerful part of Wikipedia for educators to see is not the history of changes, though that can be pretty powerful, but instead the discussions, the negotiations that occur by the writers in the back channel. The example of the Delta Connections flight that crashed this week is a great example. It’s the messiness of the process made transparent. They, and we, make up the rules, make the decisions as part of the process.

Fourth, Walsh’s experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual that designates them as having mastered a particular domain, often having to do with formal education. While participants in collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate or document how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system and knowledge that comes from real-life experience rather than formal education may be, if anything, more highly valued.

I don’t need a degree to be valued for my ideas in an environment where I can share freely and where people can engage with my ideas. Doesn’t our work become more important than what we “know?” And I know that degrees measure work as well as a knowledge, but still. This is what I know. You can believe me or not…your choice. But you can believe me based on my track record and my participation as a learner in the community, not simply based on the letters after my name or the diplomas on my wall.

Much, much more to think about, as usual…

technorati tags:education, learning, Henry_Jenkins, Pierre_Levy, classroom, teaching

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’m not sure I would go so far as to say that I’m “another uninformed sheepie in the flock of society” or a “Ditto-head wannabee,” but Jim O’Hagan makes a valid point when noting that I took the word of Roy Mark in the previous post instead of going to the primary source, the 96-page report issued by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Ironically, we were having quite a discussion about just this topic yesterday in a workshop which (thankfully) we can continue this morning as I bring up this “teachable moment.” In his comments on the post, Jim deconstructs the survey that the article cited to show, apparently, that the pool of respondents wasn’t quite the most “average” sampling, suggesting, perhaps, that the reality about Internet predators and parental monitoring isn’t quite as rosy as it appears. And he asks, in a world where we have access to primary sources, why didn’t I go there first?

Answer? Time. Laziness. The appearance of a trusted source, though I’ll admit I’ve only read Roy Mark on occasion. In other words, the same excuses our kids will give when their research is not up to par.

A couple of observations here. First, this is the power of the blogosphere to instruct and remind. Despite being taken to task for it, I do appreciate Jim taking the time to do the work I didn’t AND, even more importantly, share the result. Second, in terms of this particular study, even Jim doesn’t go so far to deconstruct the original survey done five years ago to see if the demographics of that study were the same as this one, which if so would seem to indicate that the trends cited are valid. Third, I wonder how I can effectively strike this balance in my own practice. As my time has become less available to reading and blogging, I find it more and more difficult to maintain the practice. So, I don’t dig. The decision then is whether or not I write less often because I haven’t had the time to fully vet a story or idea, to write less deeply and just do more linking, or continue to offer stuff up with half-hearted effort in the hopes that others will edit what I write. To be honest, neither choice feels great. But it’s a more complex issue for me than most, I think for a variety of obvious reasons. Fourth, how and when do we best teach our kids this concept of editing? My seven and nine year old should be learning this…they are not.

In general, I have not been very happy of late with the work I’ve been doing here. And, as I’ve pointed out before when I get this feeling, it’s because I haven’t had the time to read. Something has to give when that happens.

technorati tags:editing, education, teaching, literacy

Kim is writing powerfully about her practice, and a few days ago she posted this:

Here’s the amazing thing about blogging for me. When I go home to my family or talk to friends, noone really wants to talk about education, or my ideas, or drop out prevention, or student achievement. Mystandard response to “how was your day?” is “great” and that’s about it. But I still have my students, school and it’s challenges swirling around in my head a substantial percentage of the time. So now I find blogging and it’s an instant connection to others who are interested in the same thing.

Amen. How many people have passions that they can’t share because they are too esoteric or because geography separates them from others who share it? This is about connection in so many ways, on so many levels, but none more profound than the one that brings us to meet via our ideas in this virtual space. It’s so very cool, and so very powerful when you think that just a few years ago it, for all intents, couldn’t be done. That is what makes not having the time to read and write so frustrating…the connection weakens.

technorati tags:blogging, education, connective_learning

Doug Noon posts about an interesting paper from Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel titled “Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy” that does a nice job of framing the difference of mindeset between the traditional view of the classroom and the emerging view.

I think the underlying premise between the two mindsets is interesting: “The world is much the same as before, only now it is more technologised, or technologised in more sophisticated ways” vs. “The world is very different from before and largely as a result of the emergence and uptake of digital electronic inter-newtorked technologies.”

I know I keep coming back to MySpace, but if nothing else, what’s happening there should be a starting point for just how much the world really has changed. The ability to network widely changes everything, and the kids and adults at MySpace are showing it.

technorati tags:connective_reading, connective_writing, social_network

From the “Throw it Up and See if it Sticks Deptartment” I just put together a Digg-type site over at CrispyNews specifically for those of us who are focused on the Read/Write Web and the implications for education. Here’s how I think you could use it if you bought into it.

First, go over to the EdBloggerNews page and register for an account (left hand column.) Then, grab the bookmarklet (at the top of the left hand column) and drag it to your toolbar so when you find something of interest you can easily post it. Then, most importantly, subscribe to the RSS feed for the site so you collect all of the Web goodness we provide (with any luck).

I know this plays off the del.icio.us idea that I threw up yesterday, and it still might be better if we just collectively used the edblogreading tag that “ratcatcher” created. Suggestions welcomed.

And to be honest, this is all stemming from a bigger burr in my brain of late that has to do with the seeming randomness of all of the really great work that people in this community are starting to create. It’s just feeling like it’s all over the place, and that if we could in some way get our collective act together, we could start creating an incredibly valuable resource. I know it’s all about small pieces loosely joined, but wouldn’t it be great to point the newcomers to one spot that was a clearinghouse for all of this work? Not to mention the value it would have to us old timers in terms of bringing people in. I mean all of a sudden, it seems like everyone has a wiki, and most all of them have great intent and good content. But there’s also a lot of duplication of effort, and more importantly, dis-connection, at least that what it feels like to me.

Am I wrong?

And more importantly, what to do about it?

technorati tags:edblogging, tagging, read_write_web