On the plane out to San Diego I got the chance to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s great presentation at the TED conference (Technology Entertainment and Design). It’s a pretty powerful call to “radically rethink our view on intelligence” and “rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children” to move toward a much more nurturing educational environment for the arts and for creativity. The money quote is

Creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Why? Becuase, as he points out, the kids who start school today will be retiring in the year 2065, and yet we know as little about what the world will look like then as we do five years from now. We can give them all the content we want, but in this age, in won’t make much difference if we don’t teach them how to learn first. And they do that not by spitting back at us what they “know.” They do it by being creative, by trying and failing, by succeeding and reflecting. It echoes Daniel Pink’s book all over.

George Siemens points to an interesting read in a similar vein in “How Failure Breeds Success” and says “learning is not a process of performance, it is a process of becoming.” And if we are lifelong learners, we are always becoming.

A couple of more notches in the school is irrelevant belt.

technorati tags:TED, literacy, education, learning

So, using David’s questions about blog assessment, here is how I might assess this post as I write it (with some commentary on the questions along the way.)

1. What did you read in order to write this blog entry? Yee Haw! Blogging starts with reading, and I read David’s post, which leads me to blogging. (I read some other stuff, too. See below.) And I think an even more interesting question to add is “What was your process of reading?” In the previous post about Net Neutrality, I worked between three or four different readings to assemble the ideas contained in the posts. There was nothing linear about it, which is another aspect of reading/writing literacy in hypertext environments that really interests me.

2. What do you think is important about your blog entry? I think the importance here is the deconstruction of the process and the inherent reflection that goes with it. Sometimes blogging is work, and it’s when I’m crafting a post (as opposed to writing it) that I know I’m involved in some real learning. As a blogger/learner, it’s crucial that I recognize and understand the decisions I make about what to write (based on feel and audience), how to write it, and when to publish it.

3. What are both sides of your issue? Well, some feel whatever you do in your blog is blogging. As is well known, I disagree. I do think this reflective assessment about the blogging can point to the power of reading, thinking, synthesizing, writing and reading some more.

4. What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do? I would add learn to that list. And I would also move this up to second in the list (if we are looking at this as process.) The audience aspect of blogging is central to the task, and if we’re not aware of what our purpose is, we won’t communicate it well. This is the Donald Murray school of anticipating the readers questions, responses, reactions. We have to become the audience (if there still is one, of course.)

5. What else do you need to say? I’m not sure this question works for me, because I’d hope that if I had more to say I would say it. What about What have you learned from the process? or How will you find out more?

Regardless, some good initial thinking on how we might begin to teach the metacognitive aspects of blogging.

technorati tags:blogging, assessment, education

(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, 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.

Ok, so I’m in a bit of a emotional whirlwind today, and maybe that has something to do with my reaction to yesterday’s New York Times magazine cover piece on the future of books in the sense that I’m looking for all kinds of validation for leaving my desk job and deciding to try to bring these ideas to wider audiences, and that I’m hoping that when the New York Times starts getting all visionary that maybe I’m (we’re) really on to something knowing full well that the Times has been wrong before and that all of this is a crap shoot, but that this paragraph literally gave me chills (though it may not have on any other “normal” day):

“Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remized, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”

And then this:

“In addition to a link, which explicitly connects one word or sentence or book to another, readers will also be able to add tags, a recent innovation on the Web but already a popular one. A tag is a public annotation, like a keyword or category name, that is hung on a file, page, picture or song, enabling anyone to search for that file. For instance, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, hundreds of viewers will “tag” a photo submitted by another user with their own simple classifications of what they think the picture is about: “goat,” “Paris,” “goofy,” “beach party.” Because tags are user-generated, when they move to the realm of books, they will be assigned faster, range wider and serve better than out-of-date schemes like the Dewey Decimal System, particularly in frontier or fringe areas like nanotechnology or body modification.

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click “votes” on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.” [Emphasis mine.]

Mercy.
Now, might that be a bit of hyperbole? (There’s that word again.) Um…I dunno. Certainly, it’s not something that people with no context of what’s happening on the Web can even begin to understand. Either way, it’s amazing, amazing writing, I think. And in the new Socratic spirit of this space, it begs a number of questions.

Should we be thinking about how to prepare our kids for a linked, tagged world?

What strategies do we need to develop to read and write in linked, tagged world?

How do we best harness the potential of a world where knowledge is easily connected and, therefore, increasingly overwhelming and, as my wife pointed out, perhaps paralyzing?

I want to write more about this, not only because of the implications for the education system but because I find this discussion, this move to a more linked and tagged world to be extremely interesting. If you read the article, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: books, reading, writing, learning, education

Tom’s been cranking at the Gray List of sites that he wants to test over at the Blog Banning wiki, and, in fact, he’s ready to give it a shot. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if you can take part, I’d really urge you to participate.

The whole blocking issue really hit home this morning. I was chatting with a superintendent and a principal about some upcoming, summer bloggy training we have scheduled and I asked about the level of blockage at their district. Blogger? Blocked. Edublogs.org? Blocked. PBWiki? Blocked. Wikipedia? Hahahahahaha.

Teacher and student Internet access at home in this district is nearly 100 percent. Does it really make sense to block literally hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of potentially worthwhile, safe, educational sites with the flip of a switch when those same sites are being accessed from home?

There’s more of a post brewing in all of this. For now, let’s see what Tom comes up with.

(via Leigh Blackall) So here’s an interesting idea from Teemu Arena:

I go on and suggest a new school book paradigm. Turn everything around.
Write a school book that has purposefully inserted factual errors. Make it as uncertain as possible, so that the student needs to seek conversations to make any sense out of it.

Make the point of the course to discuss the book and what things are actually true and what are not. Base that on conversations reaching to other information sources and people for answers outside the course as well. Help them to be curious to seek different points of view. Make critical peer review and discussion the central process. Make them realize that to cope with untruths they need humble conversations rather than forcing their own beliefs.

So I know this is a “doh” moment, but it strikes me that one of the points of blogging is to engage in those “humble conversations” in which we try to socially negotiate truth. We’re not purposely writing untruths, but we’re writing “yet-to-be-discovered truths” which necessitate a different type of reading, one that requires the critical thinking and information literacy skills that a book of errors would demand.
Interesting way of framing it, I think…

Some questions from Douglass Johnston via Cass McNutt:

They say that in 1900, we encountered 1000 pieces of significant information per six months. In 1960, it was within one week. Today, it’s within one hour. How much knowledge can we actually retain when our “seven plus or minus two” short-term memories have to constantly filter, direct and trash most of that data?

No doubt, we have an amazing amount of information coming at us (especially those of us who spend way too much of our time staring at a computer screen.) But I think the question is not so much what we can retain (as I would argue we don’t need to retain as much these days,) but rather how much knowledge can we find when we need it. Filter? Yes. Direct and redirect? Absolutely. Weed out? Without question. But I have to tell you, in many ways, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a part of my brain, just as del.icio.us and Bloglines and other tools are becoming. I don’t need to retain all of it, do I? And in fact, I usually retain the most relevant, most important information anyway because I make it more brain sticky by blogging it.

Johnston continues:

It also begs a question: which is better, the instant access to vast quanities [sic] of lower-quality (on average, that is) information, or the more difficult access to rarer quantities of high-quality information?

Beg it might, but the reality is that most of us (read: our students) are going to have to deal with the vast quantities of average information and, subsequently, become really skilled at vetting, synthesizing and recognizing patterns in what we find. And, I would argue that just about every post here is a result of that work, some more work than others. (I’m amazed, in fact, at just how much of my blog I can retain.)

If you read his whole post, you’ll also see that he refers going to the Web for answers as being lazy and that somehow having to find the answers through books or encyclopedias made the knowledge more memorable. I don’t agree. I see it as using the best tools available to get what you need. Sometimes that’s the Web, other times that’s a book. Neither will do you any good if you’re not skilled at using them.

Johnston asks a final question in his post:

Where, then, will that lead the education system, and how can it adjust to the notion of near-instantaneous research replacing memory?

Yeah…that’s the big one, isn’t it?

I love questions, especially ones that make me think real hard about the answer. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun these days, ’cause there are so many difficult questions being posed about education and technology and the mixture of the two.

Via Harold Jarche comes a link to someone else who is posing big questions, Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Like this one from his essay titled “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time“:

“What is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority?”

Ok, just my opinion, but I think this should be must reading for this community. The way in which Federman structures this essay is downright masterful, and the ideas it conveys are profound. As usual, here are a few snips with some hopefully cogent reactions.

Federman traces literacy from the oral tradition through the introduction of the alphabet through Gutenberg’s press through the introduction of Morse Code and he does it in a pretty captivating narrative. Let’s just say I learned a lot (including why the Cluetrain Manifesto has 95 theses…guess I missed that part of history class.) Especially interesting to me was the way in which he discusses the way in which we assign authority to authorship:

When we invoke knowledge that we obtain through the proxy of an author’s book, we assume some of that author’s patina of authority.

I wonder if that holds true for what we do with blogs…

And in terms of the pace of all these changes, (something I’ve been lamenting a lot of late) he says:

Roughly speaking, it takes about three hundred years for the foundational knowledge ground of a culture to change, that is for the society to change its conception of what is valued as knowledge, who decides what is valued as knowledge, who controls access to the knowledge itself, and who controls access to those controls. The time span is relatively easy to understand: for the transition to be complete, there cannot be anyone left alive who remembers someone that remembers someone who was socialized and acculturated in the prior system of knowledge.

The most disruptions occur about halfway through that period, and guess what? Right now, Federman says we’re about 160 years into the current 300 year period, ever since electricity and the telegraph “undid” the effect of the written word. And now, with Google and the current tools, we’re undoing even more.

Consider the reversal that has occurred here. In the traditional literate structure of the academy, indexers who controlled the portals to knowledge were very few, very knowledgeable, and possessed a high level of public trust. In the traditional literate system, assertion of both meaning and value of a collection of knowledge by that trusted individual, whose power and authority were vested through an institutional proxy, was paramount for establishing the redibility of that collection. But it seems that we are in the process of changing from the traditional, closed system of knowledge to a more open system of knowledge. A single person or authority asserting meaning and value is automatically suspect, like in the example of Sears.ca; it is the collective wisdom of all the Maries and Steves and Alices that creates trust.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.

Today, establishing the credibility of knowledge sources is a challenge of such complexity, that the literate frame has no mechanism with which to approach the problem. Stated simply, for any avenue of inquiry, both the information and the information sources themselves have both become subjects of research in a way that makes problematic, and fundamentally challenges, the existing academic structure. Research can no longer be a deterministic, linear process, akin to that delineated by the so-called scientific method. Rather, establishing the credibility and reliability of both information and sources comprise an emergent information seeking problem that is subject to multiple, interdependent processes and contexts, all of which, save one, are only incidentally connected to literacy.

Federman makes all of this sync nicely with connectivism, talking about how we need the ability to think nomadically and to recognize patterns in what we are reading and consuming. We need to be able to think “widely and diversely about a topic,” a phrase which doesn’t much resonate with what we ask of our students today. And he says that our “former literate quest for truth [today's classrooms] gives way to a quest for making sense of the world as it is experienced.”

So what does this all mean?

…today’s youth and tomorrow’s adults live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity. Everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else, and all available information, through instantaneous, multi-way communication. This is ubiquitous connectivity. They will therefore have the experience of being immediately proximate to everyone else and to all available information. This is pervasive proximity. Their direct experience of the world is fundamentally different from yours or from mine, as we have had to adopt and adapt to these technologies that create the effects of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.

And what is this new world like?

The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

Now, does that sound anything like what are current educational settings are like? This is such a big shift, and this essay makes the case so clearly the significance of what we’re seeing and feeling. I urge you to read the whole thing…

In a comment here a couple of days ago, Stephen Downes linked to his “Principles for Evaluating Websites” post, and I just wanted to make sure I commented on how absolutely must reading it is for anyone struggling with how to navigate this new Web. I’ve said this before, the bottom line is that even for those who have always been tuned into the need to evaluate information, it’s a much harder task these days. And Stephen really nails it in so many ways in this post. Briefly, here’s what he says, but you need to go read the whole thing.

1. There are no authorities. Authorities sometimes lie and are themselves fooled, so ultimately, you must be the one to determine if something you read is true.

2. What you already know matters.

3. You need to learn who to trust and you do this through repeated contact.

4. Learn to distinguish facts from appearance of fact. Personally, I think this may be the hardest to teach.

5. Be on the lookout for generalizations, especially universal ones.

6. Statistics can be misleading.

7. Go to the source, whenever you can. If, for instance, a study is online, go look at it before accepting someone else’s interpretation. I should do more of this, I know.

8. Motives matter. Remember: EVERYONE has an agenda.

Bottom line, as Stephen says, “determining what to believe – or to not believe – is a matter of trust. You need to determine for yourself who to trust about what.” And that’s what makes this so difficult…it’s work.

Best part? He includes some examples of trustworthy and untrustworthy sources.
—–

There’s a great article in the new Kairos titled “New Literacies and Old: A Dialogue” which is a back and forth Q & A between Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan of the University of Baltimore. The gist of the discussion centers on the future of writing and the redefinition of literacy, and if you have a spare 20 minutes, the whole thing is definitely worth the read.

I especially find Moulthrop’s definition of the new literacy interesting, and it has a great deal of relevance when thinking about the read/write Web:

What’s the new literacy like? For one thing, it understands any text or writing practice as at least potentially connected to a hypertextual network: we would always teach “writing in the archive,” as the Danish theorist Rune Dalgaard has called it. And while cross-textual relations have certainly been a part of print culture, the new literacy would recognize that, as Pierre Lévy says, the “pragmatics” of communication have fundamentally changed. The Internet is not a system for filing sheets of paper, even if we do still talk about Web “pages.” In electronic writing, the technical foundations of the word itself have changed.

So a new literacy also needs to consider the extension of alphabetism into logical processing. This doesn’t mean letting graduate students count Visual Basic against their foreign language requirements; it means teaching them — and potentially, students from middle school up — how to design documents with markup languages. As we move closer toward Berners-Lee’s “semantic Web,” this will seem all the more necessary.

A new approach to literacy also means inviting our students to deploy writing in forms other than academic essays, book reports, and five-paragraph themes: in Web logs, serious IM dialogues, hypertexts, and my particular favorite, multi-user object-oriented spaces, or MOOs.

I find the whole idea of moving the instruction of writing toward the design of documents with markup languages to be really intriguing. But it’s not a big stretch to think that in 10 years or so, most all writing will include links that annotate the text. And certainly blogs facilitate that linking process. The thing is that when I do a quick mental survey of the English teachers here at my school, there are only a few who I think might even start to understand what’s on the horizon. Not that I fully get it either, of course. But that wouldn’t be any fun anyway.

The Online Journalism Review has an interview up with Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media…” which if you haven’t read yet you should. The book is a great primer for the changes that we’re going to have to prepare our students for, changes that are becoming more profound each day.

Since I think a lot about how we teach our students to find and read good sources of information, I find it particularly interesting when Gillmor talks about blog reputation systems.

You learn what you can trust and what you can’t. I don’t think anyone picking up any publication or going to a site for the first time should automatically trust it. If I’m directed there by Doc Searls I will give it an automatic boost in trust before I start — not complete trust, but Doc has a lot of credibility with me. That’s part of what’s emerging as a sort of free-floating reputation system that will help us find the best sites to go to. It would be wonderful if journalism organizations would point to blogs and say, “Don’t make any crucial life decisions based on what you read here, check things out, but this looks pretty good.”

I think that this is already happening, that the more reputable sites are already being filtered and identified in a variety of ways. And those sites then nurture the reputations of others and so on. It’s definitely a different model from the past where I used to pretty much point to the New York Times, the Washington Post and a few others and say “this is probably as close to the truth as you’re going to get.” Now it’s more like use them as a starting point, but find other sources from other mediums and define truth for yourself.

And it’s back to readers needing to be editors.

But the burden is also on readers/listeners/viewers. They MUST start being more skeptical, and people of whatever political or social persuasion should constantly realize that people are trying to spin them.

It’s pretty amazing to me how little it seems schools are understanding the importance of this. (Maybe it’s just me.) But with the pace of change in education, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
—–

(via edblog) Now you can export your Furled sites by department in MLA or APA format, among others.

The export page just got updated to include two new features. First, you can now export items from a specific topic (in any of the available formats). And second, you can now export items in various bibliographic citation formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE). The citations only contain the data that we collect (i.e. title, view date, URL), but we will increase the amount of meta-data (i.e. author, publication, etc.) in the near future.

I love this. I have just got to grab someone by the lapels, drag them into my office, show them how to Furl, and make them promise to start using it with their students. Better yet…we need a Furl Club!