Clarence summarizes the points in Henry Jenkins’ latest white paper and adds more fuel to the conversation in terms of moving away from teaching content simply to regurgitate it and moving toward teaching content in the context of developing skills for learning, and I think they are worth repeating here:

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking— the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse
  communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and
  grasping and following alternative norms.

There’s a healthy mix of Pink, Siemens, Robinson and others in there. (And I would again highly recommend Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture for even more on these ideas.) It’s amazing, isn’t it, how little of this is being done in most schools? Appropriation? (Plagiarism!) Collective Intelligence? (Plagiarism!) Networking? (Plagiarism!) I look at this list through the lens of my own kids’ school experience and seriously wonder…are my kids at risk?

I agree less, however, with the idea that “Jenkins tells us, we need to look beyond our kids having access to tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) and we need to learn how to use them effectively in our classrooms to support their learning.” Yes, I need to seriously roll up my sleeves and, like Clarence, get deeply engaged in the pedagogy. And this is another example of the conversation shifting to a larger scope beyond technology. But I feel like I also need to petition whoever will listen that it’s a moral imperative at this point to get every kid connected. If Libya is on the verge depending on how the $100 laptop initiative plays out, why aren’t we? (Don’t answer that…)

technorati tags:education, learning, curriculum, weblogg-ed

Last week, George Siemens put up .pdf’s of his new book Knowing Knowledge, and I’ve been reading through it on and off for the last couple of days. It’s been pushing my thinking even more about what connectivism and connected learning really is, and I’m amazed at how much it resonates with my own experience.

The idea that knowledge is not only a product but is also a process.

That know where and know who are much more important today than know what or how.

That learning is all about network creation and attending to that network.

That the learner is the teacher is the learner.

For me, that last one is what has made this such a powerful journey, and is one of the biggest shifts in thinking that I’ve had. In my “now” network, I am constantly shifting in the roles I play, most often acting as learner, but occasionaly, perhaps as teacher who then learns from the experience of teaching. And my learning is transparent; I model the way I find, synthesize, process and publish information at almost every turn. And in that sharing, I become teacher. It is an ongoing process, a negotiation not only with the material I consume about the subjects which I am passionate about but with the understanding of that material, the learning, in the context of the way the network offers it or responds to it. It’s about as far from the transmission model of learning as you can get, yet that’s still the way we look at learning in our schools.

At any rate, check out George’s book…I’m sure I’ll be writing more later.

technorati tags:connectivism, George_Siemens, education, learning, knowledge, weblogg-ed

Dave Cormier just Skyped me with a link to this article that details the patents on learning management systems that were just awarded to Blackboard. By the looks of it, Blackboard now owns learning management systems. The day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement, and although the Moodle board doesn’t seem to indicate a great deal of panic, I’d be interested to know what people in this community make of this. Dave says it’s not good…here is his depressing Skypequote:

“DOPA takes all the open sites, and Blackweb all the closed ones…”
Oy.

technorati tags:Moodle, DOPA, learning, Blackboard, education

Jeff Jarvis posted one of those push-my-feeble-brain-to-the-limit posts last week which I think has resonance in a lot of ways. It starts with this:

In the future of media, which is now, everybody is a network. In the past, networks were defined by control of content or distribution. But now, you can’t own all distribution and content is controlled where it’s created.

He writes about how when we work and practice in a transparent, read and write environment, all of us become nodes in much larger networks. (There is a lot of

George Siemens in this.) I love this description:

Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.

It’s interesting how much this speaks to education, and how far we need to go. We are still about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.

The biggest problem is how few of our educators still cannot relate to this description. They are neither networks unto themselves or nodes of a larger system, and they understand little about what it means to be either in a world that is more globally interconnected. And our students are not only left without models of what it means to be networked, they also get relatively little content that is contextualized through the network. So network literacy, the functions of working in a distributed, collaborative environment (Jill Walker), is an important aspect of learning and education that precious few of our students get a chance to practice. And it is only by practicing these skills, whether teachers or students, that they can truly be learned.

So, I get the chance to address 49 Superintendents in Upstate NY on Thursday. I’ve got some ideas of what I plan to show them about the power and potential of the Read/Write Web, about what teachers and students are already doing, and about the obstacles that we need to begin having serious conversations about. But I’m wondering, if you had 90 minutes with this group, what one thing would you bring up/point to/challenge them with? What would be your most important message?

Chime in before Wednesday because I would love to point them to this post during my talk.

Anne pointed to this pretty amazing exchange that occurred on one of her student blogs recently, and it’s an interesting and effective example of how involved parents can contribute to their childrens’ learning in these more transparent spaces. I wonder how many teachers actively invite parents to at minimum read and perhaps respond to the work that their children are doing in their blogs. I know when I was in the classroom, I made a point of letting parents know what the URLs of the blogs were, but I left the decision to have parents comment on the sites up to the students themselves. Since it was high school, most opted not to let that happen. But a few did, and while the responses were not many, almost all of them were helpful, instructive, and relevant. And I do think for the students who allowed their parents to contribute it was a positive experience, especially for the parents who like the opportunity to be more involved.

Anyway, it’s nice to see such great discussion happening on student blogs. It’s rich, personal and, in this case at least, adds a great deal to the topic.

The biggest news in the blogosphere today seems to be that the number one blog in the Technorati 100 is now the 老徐 徐静蕾 新浪BLOG from China written by Xu Jing Lei, replacing Boing Boing. Couple that with the information in the latest report by Dave Sifry that less than 1/3 of the blogosphere is now written in English and it’s hard not to be impressed by the global reach of the Web. It’s pretty amazing and inspiring. Now I know that we’re still talking about a comparatively few actual content creators instead of just content consumers. If my math is right, 40,000,000 bloggers/1,000,000,000 Web users is 4%, right? If the trends continue, however, we’re going to have more and more international voices entering the conversation.
Similarly, I had a chance to revsit Global Voices Online this morning, and I was just blown away by the work that’s happening there. GVO is a project from the Berkman Center at Harvard:

A growing number of bloggers around the world are emerging as “bridge bloggers:” people who are talking about their country or region to a global audience. Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations, information, and ideas appearing around the world on various forms of participatory media such as blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs.

It’s an amazing resource for any student or teacher studying international issues. It’s an amazing model for the type of work we could be doing with our own students. And, as Clarence writes, it’s sorely needed in our classrooms:

These are the voices I’ve been waiting to hear. The voices that most North American kids, locked up in our continental fortress need to hear. We need to listen, to read, to understand; to grow in global understanding and perception. The ability to cooperate internationally, to compete internationally, to know how others live through their days will bring a deeper understanding.

And, I would add, we need to contribute our own voices and those of our students to that mix.

The problem is that these types of technologies and the shifts they are facilitating are not prominently on the radar of any of the conferences I’ve been to of late. In fact, I am still amazed at the virtual lack of presentations that put the use of any technology use in the context of anything greater than the four walls of the traditional classroom. We need to be more expansive in our thinking. We need to be talking more about the opportunities “out there” instead of how to make things incrementally better “in here.” (I’m serious, right now, all sessions on PowerPoint should be banned from conference schedules.) If educators who pay their way to ed tech events don’t at least leave with a sense of the changes and opportunities that the Web affords these days, they’re wasting their money.

Tags: blogs, education, classroom, global

(Cross posted to ETI) If you’re looking for a great example of how the Web is changing things, look no further than this post by Alan Levine which describes the wonderful evolution of a real life presentation given by Nancy White into an online multimedia version collaboratively constructed by a cadre of far flung, benevolent learners connected by RSS feeds and a desire to add to the conversation. Read the whole thing, but the summary from Alan is

Doesn�t this set of unplanned, network-enabled collaborations add so much more valuable context to the experience? Let�s follow the geographic trail- starting from a session presented and recorded in Vancouver BC, audio loaded to a blog in Arizona, images uploaded from Seattle, a movie produced from Hong Kong, and a distilled session summary from Portugal!

But the best part is the exchange of ideas in the comments that follow. Dave Lee pushes Alan’s upbeat assessment of the events by asking

I have to wonder how do we convince the average professor who hasn�t moved much beyond powerpoint being a glorified outlining tool that such feats of internet wizardry really are as difficult as they might at first seem? How do we get a corporate line manager who has never built a chart based on an excel speradsheet into a Word document to grasp the concept of small pieces loosely joined?

Great question. And the answers are worth checking out. But here is what I think is the key statement of the whole thread, added by Nancy White herself:

This is the community and the wider network at play. I know I would never had found and learned all the tools to put it all together. But I could bring a piece.

That’s exactly what George Seimens and connective learning is all about. It’s loading what you do know into the network and learning from the others who have other pieces, skills, ideas to contribute. We don’t have to know everything about everything any more, not only because we can’t but because our networks can store it away for us. Like Alan says:

…my sets of skills are always evolving (or decaying) as I learn more by tapping into my remote network, a rather startling shift of embracing my own ignorance (expertise is over-rated) and bathing in what others share.

This is the way learning takes place, by “bathing in what others share” and then by sharing what we know back to the community. Learning as process, not event.
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If you have a spare 40 minutes or so in the near future, I would urge you to take a look at George Siemens’ latest Articulate presentation on Connectivism. For those already familiar with his work, this doesn’t break a lot of new ground. But I do think that the way he lays out the case for these changing learning environments just keeps getting better and better.

I’ve said this before, but connectivism describes my learning process almost exactly. As opposed to the ready, set, go learning that’s happening down the hallways right now, it’s become more of a constant flow for me, a continual process of seeking and finding relevant information in and out of my online and offline network and synthesizing all of it to share back and extend the conversation.

What struck me even more clearly this morning was the importance of reading AND writing in this process. If, as George says, we learn by building networks, the construction of those networks can only occur when we both consume and create content. If we don’t take that step of making our learning transparent to the other people or nodes out there, we limit the collective intelligence of the group. We sustain learning, we push learning only by sharing it back and becoming a source ourselves to the community of learners out there. Learners become teachers, teachers become learners.

And something else. We really do need to stop treating learning as if it were an event, like it stops at the end of class. And we do this because we are focused on the content, not the process. I can understand how we got here, when it was much more difficult for students to access diverse materials for every learning style that would enhance what they got from the teacher in the classroom. When our students are still being measured by tests that require them to memorize information instead of employ that information effectively. But for those schools with genuine access, like mine, it’s not the content that’s important any more. A lot of content gets lost, fortgotten, or, especially today, quickly becomes irrelevant. We should instead be focused on teaching kids how to learn, so they can continue to employ effective practice throughout their lives.

I have no question as to the relevance of Connectivism in terms of learning in connected environments. What I do struggle with is the rate at which it becomes relevant to others who have not already started learning in this way.
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