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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A great essay by Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal this weekend “How the E-Book Will Change the Way we Read and Write” has me thinking hard once again about reading and writing skills and literacies as we move toward an even more digitally integrated world of texts and links. It immediately made me think of one of my other favorite essays on the topic, Kevin Kelly’s “Scan this Book” from the Times a couple of years ago, not necessarily because I agree with everything that both authors discuss but because each makes me take a look at my own reading and writing process through an adjusted lens.

But what was different in my reading of the Johnson essay as opposed to the Kelly essay was my ability to interact with it through Diigo. Over the last few months, I’ve become more and more enamored with Diigo as a tool for notetaking and bookmarking, sure, but as a platform for some interesting conversations. And, while I’m not sure Johnson even knows of its existence, it’s already bringing to fruition many of the social reading potentials we’ve been thinking of as futuristic. The idea that I can not just annotate a paragraph or a sentence or one idea on a webpage but that I can engage with others in sharing our thinking about that particular sentence or idea is at once powerful and daunting. I mean, imagine the meta conversations we might be able to have over different passages in the classics once they all get scanned and put online by Google (or someone else.) As Johnson writes:

As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

I’d say that is a pretty profound shift, wouldn’t you? One that is not so well understood and, in many cases, not even desired by many “traditional” book readers out there.

So when you compare the un-annotated Kelly essay to the marked up Johnson piece (this link lets you see all the notes), there is a vastly different feel, for me at least. And it would be even more different if you would add your own annotations to the piece. In my presentations, one of the most powerful examples of how this particular tool is a potential game changer is when I show this article, “Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis” in the un-annotated form and then turn the highlights and conversations on. There is nothing but critical thinking and analysis happening there as supported by, um, technology. The irony is palpable.

Is social reading and social writing in our kids’s futures? I don’t think there is much doubt about that. More and more I’m finding Diigo annotations and notes cropping up on the articles and essays that I read, and by and large I’ve found the commentors to be serious, thoughtful and articulate. In other words, while they do add volume, they also add value. Those of us who are mucking around in these new reading and writing spaces have no formal training in it, obviously, just a passion to connect and a willingness to experiment and engage in conversations around the the topics that interest us. But there are skills here that if developed with some intention (read: taught and modeled) can improve literacy in interacting with texts and people in these digital spaces. As always, however, we have to begin to see this shifts as natural progressions in the evolution of reading and writing and not simply tools that bring a temporary WOW! factor to the process.

So a number of different threads are congealing in my tired brain regarding writing and blogging and why we do all of this stuff. The post that finally led me to try to get this down was Bud’s Brain Dump on NCTE where he quotes council president Kathleen Blake Yancey as saying this:

If you are writing for the screen, you are writing for the network.

Oh. Yeah. How nice that is to hear, isn’t it? Not “global audience,” but “network”. And as Bud unpacks his conference experience, you get the sense that this whole blogging thing may finally, finally, finally be tipping over the edge in terms not just of a tool to publish but of a tool to connect.

And that is a crucial distinction, I think. Yes, we write to communicate. But now that we are writing in hypertext, in social spaces, in “networked publics,” there’s a whole ‘nother side of it. For as much as I am writing this right now to articulate my thoughts clearly and cogently to anyone who chooses to read it, what I am also attempting to do is connect these ideas to others’ ideas, both in support and in opposition, around this topic. Without rehashing all of those posts about Donald Murray and Jay David Bolter, I’m trying to engage you in some way other than just a nod of the head or a sigh of exasperation. I’m trying to connect you to other ideas, other minds. I want a conversation, and that changes the way I write. And it changes the way we think about teaching writing. This is not simply about publishing, about taking what we did on paper and throwing it up on a blog and patting ourselves on the back.

This after-the-publishing part is difficult because we are forced to attempt to do it in filtered, restricted, contrived spaces for learning, spaces that are not conducive to this type of writing or learning. Barbara Ganley (who was featured last week in the Times as a “slow blogger”) is consdering this as well.

As a college teacher, I thought I was all about collaborative learning, about students taking responsibility for their learning and their lives–together–but how can you do that within an artificial environment? Within a closed environment?…Teaching and collaborating and learning and working inside an academic institution have absolutely nothing to do with how to do those things out in the world.

And I continue to wonder if the two are even possible to combine. Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the “system.”

Barbara’s post is worth reading not just for her own reflections but for the connections she creates in the writing process. She took me to Scott Leslie, whose post “planning to share versus just sharing” is as one of the commentors called it, “another doozy.” Scott writes about how frustrating this dissonance is, how difficult institutions make it from a tradition and culture standpoint to make this kind of learning happen.

In all of this lies the tension of the world “out there,” outside the walls, this great unknown, or more likely, this great potential wrench in ointment to what we’ve been so darn good at doing for all of these years. I can’t tell you how many “why me?” looks I get from people who listen politely to my presentations but then probably want to go home and throw up. And I think it’s because they’re not writing for the network. They’re not connecting, seeing the value, feeling the network love. Scott nails it:

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it - the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

Oh. Yeah.

(Photo “A fractal night on my street” by kevindooley.)

So here is the money quote from “Turn Teen Texting Toward Better Writing” from the Christian Science Monitor last week:

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.

The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.

Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.

I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.

Paul Allison tweeted out this update from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) exec committee last week in terms of how we need to think more expansively about literacy in the context of these shifts. As a former English teacher and NCTE member, I find these couple of lines to be of particular interest:

Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.

I think that one word, “malleable” is a fascinating choice (and a fine SAT prep word, by the way.) The ideas that these literacies must now be adaptable and bendable to meet whatever comes down the pike is a pretty big shift in thinking. Literacy, in other words, just got a lot harder to measure on a standardized test.

I’ve written before about the idea of a “network literacy” that is almost a requirement these days. I want to write more about that shortly, but a lot of what the NCTE is putting out there moves toward that. The idea of “build[ing] relationships with others” and “shar[ing] information for global communities” as English literacies is a pretty wild shift on some level.

If nothing else, this goes to the heart of connective reading and connective writing that we’ve been talking about here and elsewhere now for years. Reading and writing is still about the ability to understand and to create texts of various types, but it’s increasingly more now about connecting to other ideas, other people, and other conversations.

Technorati Tags: ncte, literacy, education, reading, writing

I’ve been kind of hanging out on the periphery of the ongoing discussion about informal learning and networks and groups that has been bouncing around the last couple of months, but a post from Teemu Leinone and specifically a snip in the comments started something in my brain. Here is the snip:

The problem of the edublogasphere (and actually the whole blogasphere) in the context of learning is that people in the sphere do not - at least often - form any groups (an entity of individuals with an objective).

As I’m trying to think more and more deeply about what networked learning really means in the context of how I might want my own children to apply it their own lives, I think this quote struck me because it made me consider how little I’ve actually engaged in group learning around a particular objective within the network. It is, as Teemu says something that doesn’t really appear very often. This has become, for me at least, a very individualized experience. I’ve referred to it in the past as “nomadic learning” because it happens in a very non-linear, concrete objective-less way. (Technically, I think most are attaching the word nomadic to it because of the mobility of the technology to learn, not the randomness of it.) My learning has a general focus and direction, to be sure, but it’s trajectory is determined by whatever is in my aggregator or on my screen at the moment. There are no written down goals or outcomes that I am attempting to achieve which is one of the reasons this is so different from classroom learning.

Additionally, while I am absolutely “writing to be read” here, meaning that I am conscious and on some level hopeful that others will read and engage in these ideas, I’m not reflecting on these ideas with the direct purpose of advancing the the conversation among a group of others that are connected in our study of this topic. If no one responds or engages, that’s ok. More than anything, blogging, in essence writing is a way for me to cement my thoughts into my brain, a purely selfish act.

But what I think struck me about Teemu’s post is that it makes me wonder about the potential of that group focused study that I could be doing yet am not. And why there seems to be so little of that. I think on some level, the independence or randomness of this learning is what makes it powerful, that it can be about anything that we are passionate about at any given moment. But I guess I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be reaching out more to others to create groups around more focused topics of study, or whether that would work for me.

Just some pre-dawn thinking while struggling with a big cookie hangover…

(Photp by pbo31)

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So what does writing literacy look like in the context of these Read/Write Web tools? I mean think of the many different ways that we “write” in our networked lives, ways that differ from the modes that were in primary use just 10 or 15 years ago when I was actually teaching students “how to write” (whatever that means.) Here’s just a quick list of the different ways writing occurs for me today:

• Blogging, which, when I have the time to do it, means expending some intellectual sweat into synthesizing ideas and reflecting on the things that I am reading. It’s writing that is intended to engage; I constantly put myself in the reader’s shoes and try to anticipate reactions and responses because (surprise!) the reader can.
• Commenting, which, when I have the time to do it (and I’ll stop adding that from here on out) is meant to probe or support or question. I wonder, is there a “literacy” to commenting?
• Writing articles or essays for publication, which is the most traditional writing that I do these days. The sense of audience is still present, but there is a huge difference in the way it settles over what I write. I know I may never get feedback on those pieces, that I may never engage in a conversation around the ideas as I do here on my blog. And that changes the voice, the tone, and the style. (Writing books would probably fall in here as well.)
• Tweeting, which has become a bizarre new micro genre, hasn’t it? Tweets are pretty narrow in scope for me. I Tweet  to update my presence (”On a propellor plane to somewhere.”), to ask a question, to respond to others’ Tweets, or to play. But the asynchronousness of it makes it difficult. I’m writing for response, but I’m not as patient about getting that response as I am with my blog. And obviously, it’s mostly reaction, thin thinking, not sweat.
• Chatting or IM, which I am surprised at how much I do, usually in Skype and Gmail. It’s more synchronous, I don’t care as much about misspellings and errors, it’s conversation. But the way I chat certainly varies depending on whom I’m chatting with.
• Writing in video or audio, which I don’t do so much, but have a couple of ideas that I’m working on. Writing in pictures, digital storytelling, can be very compelling and useful but require a different way of thinking about the message, no?

And I’m sure there are others. But I wonder, with all of these different ways now of communicating in writing, does that change what writing literacy is?

All of this comes from a recent post by Barbara Ganley, one of my favorite all-time bloggers and one of the few teachers I think I would actually get into a four-walled classroom with again. In her Creative NonFiction course at Middlebury this fall, she’s leading her students into a whole bunch of different writing environments in ways that I find fascinating. I mean, think of what that course would have been a decade ago. Pretty much essay. Pretty much paper. Maybe some hypertext. Maybe some getting outside the classroom in limited ways. But check out her unit on the uses of multimedia to “write” online. Not only will her students be blogging, they will be creating group “Twitterstories“, linking to pieces of art and posting links to the class Flickr group, writing in one-sentence hypertext shorts, and creating digital stories using the tools outlined in Alan Levine’s 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story resource. And more.

Barbara blogs about the course, saying:

This is the most challenging course I have ever taught because I’m asking my students–right from their first days as undergraduates– in large part to unlearn how they have been taught to read, to write, to connect with the measure of their own work. [Emphasis mine.]

When I get to the part about literacy in my presentations, I always ask how many of the teachers in the room are teaching their students to read and write in different modes, in hypertext, with art and photos, in audio and video, using all of them combined. I’m surprised if I get more than a hand or two going up. And I’m sure that what’s happening in Barbara’s class isn’t happening in very many other college courses either. Traditional writing is absolutely still important, but writing is more complex than just text on a page (usually a paper page) these days.

Makes me wonder, with all of the different ways in which I write, all of the different audiences I write for, all of the different ways I attempt to communicate and engage in conversations and connections around my ideas, it makes me wonder whether we’ll ever see these many modes of writing as important enough to teach our kids.

(Photo “Hand (made)” by 3blindmice.)

Technorati Tags: writing, learning, education, teaching

A few months ago when I ran a two-day workshop at Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy, we talked about how easy it is for students to be publishing, not just in digital forms but in traditional print as well. Chris even went so far as to hang a sign on one of the shelves in the school library that read “Your Books Here” or something to that effect. Well, George Mayo, who has been doing great work over the past couple of years with his seventh graders in Virginia, and who attended that workshop, has helped his kids put together a book that is now for sale at Lulu. It’s a set of personal narratives titled “Stories from the Past.”

The book is a compilation of narrative essays, written by my seventh grade students, telling the stories of their grandparents, parents and other relatives. These essays show the amazing diversity we have at Silver Spring International Middle School. The stories range from a guerilla war in Ecuador, to WW II and the Great Depression, to two survival stories from the Holocaust, escaping Vietnam during the war, and many more.

It’s a free download, and it costs about $12 to get the paperback version. As George writes “The students are amazed that they are actually published.” In a few weeks, the book will be available on Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. And, I’m sure, it will have a place in his school library.

Now how cool is that?

Technorati Tags: lulu, georgemayo, writing, publishing, learning

Karl Fisch points to The Water Buffalo Movie which is just an amazing example of the connections that are possible these days. Watch the movie and read Karl’s take:

I know some folks will fail to see the relevance in this, and will talk about standards and curriculum and mandated testing. But I guess I don’t see how this could be any more relevant - this is life in the 21st century (ironically demonstrated by very non-21st century water buffalo cultivation). This is 12 days from problem to solution, and 24 days from problem to Internet-viral-movie-extended solution that may impact hundreds or thousands. Shouldn’t we be teaching kids about this stuff? Can’t we address the curriculum and standards in ways like this? Shouldn’t we be helping prepare them to be really good at using these tools in both their professional and personal lives to impact the world around them? Shouldn’t we be helping prepare our students to change the world?

Not much more needs to be said…

Technorati Tags: water_buffalo, learning, read_write_web

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

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

A few more thought-provoking lines from Henry Jenkins’ new book “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.“ It’s been giving me quite a bit to chew on in the 30 or so pages I’ve read. I think he has an amazingly perceptive read on how access to people and ideas change the equation in the classroom. Just for some context, these are all from a chapter titled “Why Heather Can Write” which was expanded from an article published a couple of years ago in the MIT Technology Review. It’s primary focus is on kids turning to fan fiction, in this case, Harry Potter fan fiction. But the larger conclusions are pretty powerful, I think.

First, there is a discussion surrounding Paul Gee’s so-called “affinity spaces” which says that “people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with contents of their textbooks” (177).

Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because the are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with the participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine his or her existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

That resonates so powerfully with the way I reflect on my own practice as a blogger and with this community: constantly motivated to learn because of the connections that I have to the community of learners in this space. And it’s powerful because of the way learning is nurtured. As Jenkins says

In the classroom, scaffolding is provided by the teacher. in a participatory culture, the entire community takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their way.

I love the language that Jenkins uses as well when talking about the potential effects of the fan fiction world on learning.

What difference will it make, over time, if a growing percentage of young writers begin publishing and getting feedback on their work while they are still in high school? Will they develop their craft more quickly? Will they discover their voices at an earlier age? And what happens when these young writers compare notes, becoming critics, editors, and mentors…As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author–and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors–necessarily shifts.

Our students have a plethora of opportunities to publish right now, and more are opening up each day. (In fact, Barbara Barreda is writing about just such an opportunity in her blog.) When are we at least going to start thinking about the possibility of publishing work instead of just handing it in? I think that’s one of the most powerful shifts this is bringing about in our classrooms. If we don’t start considering the potential of publication soon, we’re going to find ourselves more and more irrelevant. As Jenkins puts it, we now live in a world “where knowledge is shared and where critical activity is ongoing and lifelong.”

Not surprisingly, someone who has just published her first online novel and gotten dozens of letters of comment finds it disappointing to return to the classroom where her work is going to be read only by the teacher and feedback may be very limited.

Finally, Jenkins writes eloquently about the new power our students have in this culture.

They are active participants in these new media landscapes, finding their own voice through their participation in fan communities, asserting their own rights even in the face of powerful entities, and sometimes sneaking behind their parents’ back to do what feels right to them. At the same time, through their participation, these kids are mapping out new strategies for negotiating around and through globalization, intellectual property struggles, and media conglomeration. They are using the Internet to connect with children worldwide and, through that process, finding common interests and forging political alliances…In talking media pedagogies, then, we should no longer imagine this as a process where adults teach and children learn. Rather, we should see it as increasingly a space where children teach one another and where, if they would open their eyes, adults could learn a great deal. (Emphasis mine.)

I just find that to be such a powerful articulation of what’s happening to learning in this new world. And I just don’t think many if any of our schools are really looking through this new lens very clearly yet. How are we supporting these types of connections in our curricula? How are we helping our students to become globally conversant? To what extent are we really handing over the power of these tools and teaching them how to use them well?

Much to think about…

technorati tags:Henry_Jenkins, literacy, fan-fiction, Paul_Gee, education, classroom, learning

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

So this “High School’s New Face” Conference has been really interesting and another example of how the people out here in Western New York are working hard to move schools and education in a different direction. There are about 150 educators here with each school bringing at team of teachers and a building principal or superintendent They have been split into four cohorts: Engaging the 21st Century Learner, Connecting the 21st Century Learner, Designing a School for the 21st Century Learner, and Leading the Way, the last for the administrators. The idea is that the different teachers from different districts take different strands and then will get back together after the conference to teach each other what they learned and hopefully have meaningful discussions about how to move forward.

I’ve been working with the Connecting group to learn about the tools, and I have to say that despite some connectivity issues, they have been absolutely great. We did two sessions yesterday (the last until 9 pm.) two more today, and will have one more in the morning…a total of almost 16 hours together! We’ve listened to students from local districts and from the Met School in Providence talk about what good teaching and learning is. (One of the students from the Met school read an incredible poem he had written basically about how the school had saved him from drugs and crime in his neighborhood…it was absolutely amazing.) We’ve teleconnected with an educator in Kansas, and tomorrow we’ll be hearing from the creators of Tech Valley High. It’s just been very well planned and delivered, and I’m just getting a really positive vibe about all of it.

The 50 or so members of my cohort are already producing some interesting content too. Kim Moritz who is a principal at a local high school, is asking some great questions about her curriculum. Beth McIntyre is already reading and thinking and writing about what she’s reading and thinking. And there are others who are just starting. We have our own Mother Blog and a cohort wiki as well. We’re getting there. As always, it will be interesting to see how much of it sticks, but if the conversations and ideas are any indication, much of it should.

technorati tags:blogging, education, Met_School, change, school_reform

Welcome to Ellicottville, NY where I have about 30 teachers and administrators in the room for the first session of what will be three days of immersion into blogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds, social bookmarking sites etc. AND pedagogy! (What a concept.)

So before we set up Blogger blogs, I give them my impassioned warning about how you have to be willing to talk (or blog) to the empty room, but that if you keep writing good stuff, people will find you. I draw the “Long Tail” on my tablet, give them strategies to find other bloggers, tell them how to comment on other posts and link back to their own. “Keep the faith!”

Then we make blogs. Five minutes. I tell them to read first, then write. To break intellectual sweat. To reflect, think, post. To…ah, whatever. Just post. But, of course be patient. Keep at it. The comments will come. Don’t…

When wouldn’t you know it. Like that moment in the big Bingo parlor when you call out “N-34″ and someone’s hand shoots up declaring victory, someone in the room says “Hey! I got a comment!” Six minutes after posting.

Six.

I run and put her blog up on the big screen. Even I am impressed. Six minutes. How did that happen, I ask? (Maybe I’ll tell them after dinner.)

I think we’re gettin’ it…

technorati tags:blogging, education