So last night we had about 40 people join us for Open Mic Night to talk about leadership, and I have to say, it was a really interesting conversation. The key question that stuck out for me, at least, is whether or not effective leaders have to have a strong vision for the uses of social tools and technology in general in the learning process, or whether it’s more important to be open to facilitate that vision as a community. (At least that’s what I took away.) Both would be great, but it seemed like those types of leaders aren’t very easy to find. Anyway, I’ve posted the chat in below, (full doc format is here) and here is a link to the Elluminate archive if you’d like to listen.

It’s been interesting to moderate these Open Mic nights over the past few weeks. Shelly Blake-Plock, my co-moderator, said after last night’s session that they seem to be getting better and better, and I have to agree. As much as I like putting my own opinion of the world out there, I also like the listening/prodding role that comes with being “just” a moderator. (The idea is that Shelly and I don’t voice our own opinions, though we did drop just a couple into last night’s conversation.) And the whole idea of Open Mic is to give people who want to a chance to just have a conversation about whatever the topic is, not to have someone presenting to the group. Kind of like an unconference session. Anyway, I’m enjoying the result so far; if anyone has any suggestions or ideas for improving it, just let us know.

Probably about five years ago now, I remember David Warlick and others trying to frame the conversation around the shifts we’re seeing in learning under the umbrella of “Telling the New Story” of education. And I also remember being frustrated for a number of years after that at our inability to come up with that new definition of schools, that new story of learning at least in a school sense. I’ve come to realize that we’re not going to be able to write “a” new story for schools, that there will be many new stories in the coming years as the institution tries to adjust to the explosion of learning opportunities outside the school walls. Should be fun to watch (or not.)

But through reading the comment thread on the last post here, it looks as if there might be a desire for some type of site or listing of schools that are telling a “new story.” Schools that are doing things differently in terms of taking advantage of what the Web and other technologies afford around learning. Schools that have a more “progressive” approach to learning through inquiry or immersion using social technology or something other than standards based learning. I know there are many pockets of innovation in individual classrooms, and many of those are well documented. But what about entire schools and, perhaps, systems that are modeling a different path? A few come easily to mind: Science Leadership Academy, High Tech High, CIS 339 in New York City, VanMeter High School in Iowa, and Hunterdon Central High School, my old stomping grounds here in NJ. From what I’ve seen and heard, these schools are beginning to significantly rethink what’s happening in their classrooms, not just infusing technology and tools, but really delivering networked learning to their students at a schoolwide level. And I’m sure there are others.

So I guess I’m wondering if it might be time to create a resource of these types of schools. Maybe a wiki where if people were interested they could create a page of overview for what they are doing that’s different? Anyone have any thinking to share around whether or not that might be a useful idea and how it might be structured?

Lately, I’ve been finding myself wondering if maybe the best strategy for changing education is to join ‘em, not fight ‘em. I mean, if the only material that we think is important is the stuff that our kids are going to get tested on, well, then let’s have MORE tests! (Play along!)

How about a test that every student has to pass on how to live a more carbon free, planet-friendly life? (Wonder how many of them even know what “carbon free” means.)

How about a test on “managing, analyzing and synthesizing multiple streams of simultaneous information?” (I love the NCTE.)

Or here’s a good one. Let’s make a test for a child’s ability to talk to strangers online, not as in whether or not they should, but as in how they go about doing it. (I want my kids to talk to strangers online, btw.)

What if we made a test to see if every kid knew “20 Easy Ways to Use a Wiki?” (Um, actually, let’s not do that. Too many grownups are doing that already.)

Here’s one: Let’s put together a test to see if our students can “Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts?” (There’s that rascally NCTE, again.)

How about one that checks to see if they can solve a real problem in their communities and create a plan to implement the solution? (Eh, why bother? Probably would never get funded.)

And finally, how about one that tries to figure out whether or not they can effectively use all of the people, resources, technologies and whatever else they have at their fingertips to learn just about anything they want to learn without sitting in a school with a teacher in the room? (Isn’t that our ultimate goal here?)

Not finding too much of that in “Common Core” which will, no doubt, soon lead to the “Common Test” which, no doubt, will be written by folks with a “Common Interest” in making money, deciding what’s right and wrong for everyone, and being able to say that they’ve “reformed” education.

At least those with the means can start getting their kids some not-so-common test prep in kindergarten now. Never too early to think about the test.

Sigh.

Alan Levine wrote a post a couple of weeks ago that’s been stuck in my brain ever since, primarily because it asks what I think might be the seminal “next” question for education:

What is going to motivate the large swath of a society to become educated or to learn something in a self-directed fashion? It’s one thing to be facing a need that I need to to know first hand– how to fix a bike dérailleur, how to stop a leaking toilet, how to bake a lemon meringue pie how to add a widget to a web page– these are all places DIY shines, when I know that I don’t know something and want to fill that gap. It is clear when I don’t know something I want to know. Lots of people do this. But what is going to drive people to learn what they don’t think they need to learn? What they don’t know is worth learning? In a DIY world with people tooling up for a better job, are they going to DIY their way into poetry? French literature? Is the limits of education the things we need to know how to perform/get a job? That a bothersome underlying under toe in DIY U- that the purpose of education is to end up in a job. That feels…. lifeless.

The question grew out of his read of DIY U, Anna Kamenetz’s newish book which brought me to some similar wonderings back in April. Back then, looking at it from a parenting perspective, I wrote

Is it any wonder they can’t “take charge of their own education” when that self-directed love of learning on their own was driven out of them by second grade, when no one has ever allowed them to or taught them how do that?

But Alan’s question raises the stakes a bit, I think. Through my very K-12 centric lens, I’ve always looked at this as a challenge for our education system, whereas Alan suggests, it’s really about us all. At a moment where, if we have access, we can know and learn so much about whatever it is that we might be interested in, what will it take for people in general to actually take advantage of this “Cognitive Surplus” as Clay Shirky calls it and move away from the television set and into the DIY Learning world online?

I still think that a lot of this shift will rest in the “passion-based learning” opportunities that John Seely Brown writes so compellingly about. But as Alan suggests, there is a big difference between being passionate about getting the stupid toilet fixed and being passionate to learn, and more importantly create new learning, around all of those great things that you may not even know you could be passionate about. Just because we now have this cognitive surplus doesn’t mean we’re going to take advantage of it.

So after a couple weeks of returning to it, I’m not sure I know what the answer to the question is, (do you?) at least for the adults in the world. For the kids, and for schools however, I think it’s pretty clear. Our most total, laser-like focus has to be on learning, learning that is “lifelong and lifewide,” and making sure we do everything we can to expose our kids to as many different subjects and experiences as we can early on to help them identify what their passions might be. As a parent right now, I would gladly give up a lot of the “knowing” that my kids are doing, a lot of the content that’s being crammed in their heads, in exchange for time spent on what learning can be at a time when they have 2 billion potential teachers at their fingertips. Do that, and they’ll find the content they need when they need it, but they’ll also then have a much better chance of carrying that seed of self-direction with them throughout their lives.

That’s a huge shift in the role of schools, no doubt, and it ain’t going to come easy since “learning” isn’t near as easy to assess as “knowing.” But looking at the world as it is, not as it was, how can we not begin to make that shift?

Starting on Thursday, we’re (PLP) going to be sponsoring some “Open Mic” nights in Elluminate, a chance for people to just drop in and spend an hour talking about various education/tech/shift related topics. We know there are lots of opportunities for “Perpetual PD” out there already, but a number of folks have expressed an interest in just sitting down and chatting with other folks from around the world around topics of shared interest, so we thought we’d provide the structure and see what happens. Think of it as a virtual coffee house (or tavern or whatever works…)

Our first session this Thursday from 7-8 pm EDT will be moderated by yours truly and Shelly Blake Plock, and we’re looking for some discussion topic ideas. You can see some of the responses Shelly got on his blog, or feel free to add some in the comments here.

In terms of format, we were thinking that to maximize the participation time, we’d give those that wanted the mic one minute before passing it on. (If they wanted to say more, they could always get back in the queue.) If you have other ideas, please add them here. And we’ll use the tag #edopenmic unless we get a better suggestion.

Looking forward to extending the conversation with all of you throughout the summer.

I’ve always been a fan of Seth Godin who is one of those people who pushes my thinking on a regular basis and who can articulate the issues in an unusually clear way. And, I love his passion for what he believes. That in and of itself makes him great reading/listening.

In this video linked by Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Godin neatly sums up in about 4 1/2 minutes a message I think every parent should hear (building on the post here a couple of days ago.) Take a listen:

My kids turn 13 and 11 next month. Homeschooling is not an option for us, for a variety of reasons. (I know, I know…we could make it happen if we REALLY wanted to.) One of my kids is in public school, the other goes to an independent school. While I love their teachers, I don’t love either system. I don’t love the “we’re going to do what you need to do to get yourself to college” path they’re both on (whether it’s articulated that way or not). I don’t love what’s lost in that equation.

What really resonates is when he says that we’re not going to test ourselves out of this problematic moment. “We need to essay ourselves out of it, sketch ourselves out of it, or we need to debate our way out of it” instead. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Thinking about all of this makes me more convinced that unless my kids develop serious passions for doing whatever good work they want to do, sending them off to college as Grade 13 is just a horrible idea, and that I will continue to advocate that their schools become less focused on the one-size fits all education and allow them instead to see their school time as an exploration of what the world can hold for them. To nurture their willingness and ability to seek their own topics, question everything, and participate with others from anywhere in meaningful ways that change the world.

We’ll try to do more of that at home as well, obviously. But I really want my kids to have meaningful choices about their “education” when they get to the point where they can make those decisions. What I wrote here four years ago now still holds…

<rant>

So here’s the question I’m grappling with: why aren’t parents more angry about the education their kids are getting? I know, I know…it’s the same system they went through, most schools are getting over the traditional bar, the whole technology is changing learning thing isn’t dinner time conversation…I get all that. So what?

Humor me. Bring some imaginary sets (or onesies) of parents into a room and ask them these questions. What kind of responses do you think you’d get?

• Do you want your kids to be problem solvers?
• Do you want them to be able to work constructively with others to create useful stuff?
• Do you want the things they create to contribute to the community?
• Do you want your kids to be able to distinguish between relevant, truthful information and the alternative?
• Do you want your kids to be creative, imaginative and curious?
• Do you want your kids to work on their own, to self-direct their own learning?
• Do you want your children to use technology to learn and create?
• Do you want your kids to be passionate about learning?
• Do you want your kids to be engaged in school?
• Do you want your students to learn from/with different cultures?
• Do you want them to be independent?
• (Add your own here.)

I’m thinking few if any parents are going to say, “um, no, I don’t really want that for my child.” Right? Ok, so now ask them, “How’s your kid’s school doing with all of that?” Unless I’m just totally being delusional here, I think they’d struggle when pressed to assess the problem solving, collaboration, information sifting skills et. al. that their children are getting. I know I do. I mean, where is the grade for all of that? How many parents actively try to make qualitative judgments about all that stuff based on the conversations and work that their kids bring home?

Not many.

The other night, I asked those kinds of questions to some parent friends of ours as we went deep into the night talking about education. These were really smart, caring folks who absolutely wanted all of the above for their own children but didn’t really know if it was happening. I got the sense that they had an implicit trust in the system to do right by their kids, and that the grades their kids received pretty much told the story of their education. They struggled with those questions. Not to say they weren’t frustrated with some of the things that happened in the school. Not to say they were always happy. But they seemed powerless, even resistant to change it.

They weren’t pissed. (I am.)

We read everywhere that US school kids are lagging behind, and we all go through the requisite amount of hand wringing and worry. And I know that in the mostly white and privileged communities in which most of us live (have you really looked at the picture/avatars in your Twitter list lately?), it’s easy to say that it’s the other kids that are lagging, not ours. And I also know that for many, many people, just being able to go to school and do well on the traditional tests is an amazing blessing. I’m not suggesting this isn’t complex.

But if we really believe in the value of all that problem solving, collaboration, self-direction, passion stuff, and we take an honest look at what the current system values by what it assesses, it’s hard not to see the gap. I know, we get the assessments we can afford. I know at the end of the day, assessing all of that really important stuff doesn’t fit the “easy” model we have for schools right now. But what I don’t know is why there isn’t more urgency coming from the home. Do parents think that all of that stuff is just folded into the class grade somehow? Really? Or is there a fundamental reality about all of this that I can’t see (or maybe I’m not willing to admit?)

What’s up with that?

</rant>

This year’s ISTE 2010 (the conference formerly known as NECC) was a pretty different experience for me due to one decidedly different fact: I went as a (wait for it…) VENDOR more than as a speaker/learner. That doesn’t mean I didn’t learn some good stuff on the vendor floor in our PLP booth. But it does mean that my lens for this year’s conference comes not so much from my conversations in the Blogger’s Cafe (which, unfortunately, were mostly brief catching ups) or in the session halls (I only saw one) but from the evil dungeon (or in this case, attic) where ISTE shows its dark side.

I’m only half kidding.

I’ve reflected on the vendor floor at past ISTEs (NECCs) before, lamenting the oversized Best Buy bags and the gobs of swag people would carry around in them (99.87% of which is now in a landfill this year) and just trying to figure out how many meals for homeless folks you could buy with the money that’s represented there. In short, it’s not my favorite place during the conference. But Sheryl and I made the decision to have a presence this year, and I’m glad we did. We had more of an opportunity to talk to a wider cross section of educators from literally around the world and get some very different perspectives than I’ve ever had in the Cafe. The short story is that pretty much everyone is hurting right now, and there is a lot of frustration in general, but that people still want to do well by kids. It’s not all bad.

Yet, you can’t help but be taken in a bit by all the shiny new stuff that all the folks in the bright neon orange and green and blue shirts were hawking. (Thank goodness we nixed my idea for a tie-dyed PLP booth shirt pretty much as soon as I brought it up.) There were more SMART, black, IQ, vision, Promethean and insertyourtechynamehere boards than I thought possible. (There was also the lonely guy in a faded white button-down shirt spending most of the conference flipping through a magazine in front of a “cutting edge” dry erase board a couple booths up from us. Remember when?) There were clickers and booger-proof keyboards and video conferencing systems and security systems (oh, the security!) and all sorts of other stuff that probably won’t be on the vendor floor in five years. As one friend who stopped by the booth lamented, it was a sea of “buggy whips.” And it once again just felt like it was mostly all about teaching and very little about learning.

But here’s what struck me most during my 45 minutes of so of wanderings around the exhibit floor: Education. Is. Easy. Did you know this? Almost every toolsy vendor that I saw was pushing the “we can make it easy on you” button, as if students will simply be mesmerized (and, therefore compliant) if only we had the tools. When I was talking to Sylvia Martinez (who, thankfully, was a VENDOR with Generation Yes! as well), she said it felt like one of those Geico commercials…”So easy, even a teacher could do it.” Case in point, this poster flaunted by a software company that will remain nameless. I mean, seriously, look at that list. Online safety is easy. Differentiation is easy. STEM? Easy. And my personal favorite: “Teaching 21st Century Skills-Making it Fit in the School Day.” The irony is, dare I say it, oh, so easy. And the best part? If that easy thing isn’t enough to draw them in, well then, hell…let’s give ‘em some swag.

The good news? I bet at least 50 percent of the conference attendees didn’t even make it to the floor. At least I hope not.

From all accounts from folks who actually got to see some sessions this year, ISTE 2010 was as good if not better than the NECCs of yore. I’ve read a lot of great blog posts coming from sessions, heard of many being inspired by the great work that teachers are doing in their classrooms, and I know that on a very real level, I missed the best of the conference. It actually sounds like things moved a bit more this year as well in the grand scheme of things. Thanks to all of you who have worked so hard to capture it for us all. (And thanks to all of you who didn’t throw me under the bus for my VENDOR status this year.)

But my not so secret love/hate with this annual gathering continues unabated. When people ask me what yearly conference they should attend, there’s only one answer. We love EduCon not just because we get to spend a few days with friends new and old in a pretty special place. We love it, or at least I love it, because everyone who attends knows that the good stuff that happens in classrooms very rarely ends up on an exhibit floor, and because we know the problems and challenges of education and schooling aren’t going to be solved with free t-shirts and iPad raffles. We love it because our voices as educators (and students) in this conversation matter, and we get to use those voices in every session, for every idea.

We love it, in short, ’cause it isn’t easy at all.

Recently during a presentation a teacher raised his hand and asked what is a fairly common question.

“Look, I agree with most of what you’re saying, but I’ve got kids in my class who don’t have the devices, who don’t have the access,” he said. “What are we supposed to do when every student can’t do this?”

I could hear in the voice of the questioner that this lack of access was offered not as a problem to solve but as a reason for inaction, an excuse to maintain the status quo. Normally, the answer I give to that question includes the words “moral imperative” and “digital divide” or some other fairly typical phraseology that tries to honor the challenge, but this time, for some reason, I just looked at the person and said “Great question. How you going to fix that?”

Silence.

I think that’s going to be my new strategy, actually, for all of the “yeah buts.”

“My students’ parents don’t approve of these technologies.” I hear ya’. How you gonna fix that?

“I don’t have time to do all of this.” That is a problem. What are you going to do about that?

“My superintendent/principal/supervisor doesn’t have a vision for these types of changes.” Yeah, that stinks. So, how you gonna help her with that?

We say we want our kids to be problem solvers, but all too often, when faced with the challenges of a changing educational landscape, we don’t offer solutions. Instead, we offer excuses as to why we shouldn’t solve the problem, why it’s better to just keep on keepin’ on. And solving these problems is getting easier and easier, actually, as more and more schools have already done the heavy lifting to find and implement solutions. It’s not like anyone needs to reinvent the wheel any more. And it’s also not like you need a solution overnight, either. Frame the problem, create a timeline and a process, and have at it. If you had say, two years, is there really NO way to solve that access problem?

I know at some level you have to see all of this as a “problem” to solve. You have to REALLY want those kids to have access. You have to look at the world and the ways in which information and communication are changing, and the ways that online communities and networks are becoming powerful learning opportunities, and the move to digital texts and products and look at your school and classroom and have that “Houston, we have a problem moment.” But once you do that, it becomes your problem to solve, not someone else’s.

So yeah, you’ve got challenges. What are you gonna do about it?

It’s gotten to the point where I shudder every time I hear people with plans to “increase student achievement” or “improve schools” because whenever I dig more deeply into what those phrases mean it always comes down to one thing: improving standardized test scores. And the reasons are clear:  they’re easy to give and to make sense of, they provide our competitive society with some way to rank what’s happening with schools and students, and because we’ve build a billion dollar industry on making sure every kid learns the same thing in the same way on the same day so he or she can pass the test.

Problem is, far too little of what those assessments “measure” is what I care about as a parent.

I read this fascinating article about a the recycling company TerraCycle yesterday. It called the company “The Google of Garbage,” and I couldn’t help but be  taken by the creativity that the founder Tom Szaky brings to his business approach. The company is located just down the road from me in Trenton, NJ, and my environmentalist author/wife Wendy actually did some work with Tom a few years back when the company was just getting started. Here’s the article’s description of the way he got his start:

Szaky’s novel business plan was to ‘make a tremendous amount of money’ out of the leftovers from the Princeton canteen. The scheme involved shovelling the food slops on to a Heath-Robinson-like conveyer belt, where worms would gobble up the leftovers and turn it into worm casts, which were then liquefied to form a rich fertiliser for the gardening industry. Apart from the labour, mostly provided by the worms, and the cost of running the machine, it was a zero-cost operation. Szaky decided to sell this home-brewed plant food, Earth Plant Fuel, in re-purposed soft-drinks bottles with spray-gun tops bought from a remainder company. In the two years it took for orders from shops to start trickling in, he dropped out of college and TerraCycle was born.

Now I know that this isn’t the usual story, but you can’t help but love it when someone has an idea and has the guts to pursue it. It’s passion, and as you read the rest of the article, you can see that almost his entire business is about solving problems, most of them other people’s, like how can we reuse used tea bags and make them into something useful.

May just be me, but in 20 years, I want to be reading that story about my kids, about their passions being fulfilled in ways that can earn them a living solving problems and helping to make the world a better place. And I want my kids’ schools to help them do that, not teach them to know the dates of the Second Continental Congress (which is what Tucker was looking up on Wikipedia last night because he knows it’s going to be “on the test.” Sigh.)

So when I was reading Douglas Reeves chapter “A Framework for Assessing 21st Century Skills” in the “21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Student Learn” book that I wrote about a few months back, I was really interested in the focus points he provides for assessment:

• Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
• Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
• Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
• Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
• Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)

These are not sequential, but ongoing, and in all of these, Reeves moves the conversation not only away from the standardized framework to a more fluid one, but advocates doing all of it transparently, and, importantly, focuses on group assessments not just individual ones. This type of learning and assessment should be shared widely and should be built upon by others. It gives a whole different picture of learning as an ongoing process, not an event, not something that can be summed up in the reporting back of a few facts and figures on a short answer test.

A couple of snips from the essay that stood out:

Students are not merely consumers of education laboring for their next reward. Their success is measured not just in terms of tests passed, but by the ways in which they apply their earning to help others. They measure their significance not by how they have distinguished themselves, but by the impact that they had on their communities and the world.

And:

Educational leaders cannot talk about the need for collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking and creativity and at the same time leave teachers and school administrators fenced in by obsolete assessment mechanisms, policies and assumptions.

Two depressing facts about assessment keep weighing me down in all of this. First we teach what we assess, and second, we get the assessments we can afford (both in time and in money.) Neither of those two facts gets us very close to a much needed, systemic upgrade of assessing learning. And as Reeves notes, a third depressing fact is that this will require us to be able to step out of our own school experience, to be willing to define success in ways that are unfamiliar and more nuanced. That may be the biggest barrier of all.

(Photo: “Taking a test at the Real Estate Investing College” by Casey Serin.)

Someone asked me earlier today “if you were a principal of a new school and you were hiring teachers, what would you look for?” Once I got past my “What would Chris Lehmann answer?” moment, I connected back to a post I read yesterday titled “Never Read Another Resume” by Jason Fried, whose book “Rework” is sitting in my Kindle waiting for me. Aside from paying much more attention to cover letters than resumes (as in “can this candidate write?”) I loved this snip about the questions that get asked in interviews.

During interviews, we love when potential hires ask questions. But all questions aren’t equal. A red flag goes up when someone asks how. “How do I do that?” “How can I find out this or that?” You want people who ask why, not how. Why is good — it’s a sign of deep interest in a subject. It signals a healthy dose of curiosity. How is a sign that someone isn’t used to figuring things out for him- or herself. How is a sign that this person is going to be a drain on others. Avoid hows.

I think that’s one of the first things I’d look for, people who are asking why. Why are we using blogs in the classroom? Why is this in the curriculum? Why are we making this decision? So much of the “how” stuff is figure-outable on our own that I wonder why we spend time on it.

Why don’t we take the millions of hours that teachers sit in workshops asking “how” and instead let them learn that stuff on their own and spend those hours asking “why”?

Just asking.

As part of an piece I’ve been asked to write for Ed Leadership’s upcoming “Screenagers” issue, I’m looking for some input. Basically, the thesis of the piece is that we need to help our students use the Web as a way of showing not just what they know but what they can do with what they know. That we need to help them, in essence, create a “g-portfolio” so they are “Googled well” when future employers or potential collaborators et. al. go searching for their footprints online.

I’ve felt for a long time that my own kids will need to be consciously thinking about the online portfolio that they are building, but as they are getting older (11 and 13 next month) I’ve lately been trying to make that process and product more concrete in my own mind. I’m hoping this piece will help clarify a lot of my own thinking about the idea (something writing and blogging always has a tendency to do.)

Anyway, I thought I would reach out to see what others might think about a) the need for  this, b) our role in helping our students in the process, c) the general considerations for creating a “g-portfolio” and d) any good examples of students already being Googled well that I might point to. (I already have a few, but I would love more.)

Some framing questions that I’ve posed for myself that might get some conversation started:

• What types of literacies should be displayed in this Web portfolio?
• What role will this play in “reputation management” or the personal brand of the student?
• What are the challenges and complexities of the process?
• To what extent should educators have their own “g-portfolios”?
• What are the best tools, sites, etc. to create and organize these portfolios?

What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts.

(Please make sure to leave your name and a real e-mail address if I can use your responses in my article.)

Nine years ago today I wrote my first blog post. I just want to thank all of you who have joined me on this journey for reading, commenting, pushing my thinking, sharing your thoughts, and keeping me motivated to continue writing here. I may not be blogging as much as I did in my heyday four or five years ago, before Twitter and a half a dozen other new tools started eating into my blogging time, but I still love this space and the things that happen here. I feel very, very humbled by how much you all have taught me in the process.

I have every intention of getting back to the blog more often this summer. Not just for the conversation but for the writing practice. As a lifelong writer, I continue to believe in the long form as a way of digging more deeply into what I’m thinking and seeing. In many ways, ideas and connections reveal themselves in the process, and the “other” powerful value of this site (aside from the interactions) is the exercise my brain gets, the “intellectual sweat” that’s required in synthesizing various ideas into a coherent whole. I know I don’t need this blog to practice that, but for me at least, that shift into the public sphere has been the most transformative piece. It raises the game in a good way, and I can’t imagine my life without continuing to write and without continuing to interact with my readers to think and learn more deeply.

My passion here is still in answering this question: “How do these new social online technologies change the nature of learning and, in turn, education?” Over the last nine years, some answers, at least have become clearer. But so much of this story is still evolving. In some ways, it’s moved a great deal since June 11, 2001. In other ways, it hasn’t moved much at all. Now that my own children, who were just 3 and 1 when I started this blog, who will be 13 and 11 later this summer, now that they are deep into their education experience, I’m more motivated than ever to keep pressing the question. I sincerely hope you’ll continue to keep engaging here in the search for those answers.

Sincere thanks for reading.

A few things have been pushing my thinking even more about reading and writing in digital environments, and I thought I’d throw some kind of random thoughts together here mostly to capture them but also to see where writing about them takes me. So apologies in advance for the thin threads and varied directions this may go in.

First, let me say I love my iPad…as a reading tool. I’ve been telling people that when the new OS comes out here in the next couple of weeks, my “grade” for it will go from a B- to a B+ just for the mere ability to multitask through many open programs, which is the major frustration I find with the device right now. I hate having to close one app down in order to open another up because it’s just so different from the usually six or eight programs and 30+ tabs I have running at any given moment on my MBP. But having said that, I absolutely love reading on the iPad. It’s light, it’s thin, it glows. Yeah…I’m having a moment…

To that end, I seriously don’t know if there’s a more useful app than Instapaper. Now, when I’m working on my laptop and my network floats up some interesting piece to read, I just “read-later” it in my browser and the article, stripped of all the ads and extraneous junk on the page, syncs right into my iPad for later, leisurely, comfortable consumption. And…for somewhat comfortable creation. (Btw, here is the RSS feed for my Instapaper saves if you want it.) With a little work, I can share out those pieces to Twitter, capture chunks on Evernote, save them to my Delicious account, all of which will get oh so much easier when the OS updates. But there is no question that  reading no longer just means consuming. It’s all about pulling out the most salient, relevant pieces and doing something with them that potentially makes other people more knowledgeable as well.

Second, there has been a great series of posts on my new favorite blog at the Neiman Journalism Lab (Harvard) regarding the use of links:

Why does the BBC want to send its readers away? The value of linking
Why link out? Four journalistic purposes of the noble hyperlink
Making connections: How major news organizations talk about links

Now I know most of these have a journalistic bent, but I think they have relevance for any of us who write in this linked world, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or whatever. In fact, I might argue that conversations such as these should be happening in fourth and fifth grade as we begin to help our students understand the value of public writing. I mean it might just be me, but I would love my kids to have an understanding of the value of links in writing in terms of how they can be used in storytelling, in keeping the audience informed, in enabling transparency and their value as a “currency of collaboration.” Isn’t that an inherent part of the online writing interaction that we should be teaching?

Third, back to the iPad for a sec. I love the fact that this morning, Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus landed in my Kindle app, ready for me to read. I just finished Switch (highly recommended) and now I have two abridged, annotated, digitally marked up versions of recent books in Evernote that are fully searchable and remixable and sharable (within limits, of course.) I’m becoming more convinced that I’ll never buy another paper book again if it has a Kindle version.

And finally, I bought the Wired Magazine app for the iPad on Monday ($4.99) and it’s, um, pretty darn cool. It’s also another small step in the way we read; embedded videos and audio, amazing graphics, interactive buttons to push. I found it much more engaging to read…that participation thing again. Not that it’s the reinvention of print, but I would have loved to been in some of the brainstorming and idea sessions when they created the interface. It is beautiful and functional. And soon, according to the developers, it’s going to get more social as well, more opportunities to do “connective reading.” Not saying I’m going to subscribe to Wired this way, but when textbooks are made for the iPad in this format…could be very interesting.

I know most people shudder when I say this, but I’m more than ok with letting go of the paper reading world at this point. I’m much more interested in exploring these digital spaces, their opportunities and their drawbacks (as Nicholas Carr has been espousing of late) than watching my paper books grow dust on the bookshelves.

You?

The New York Times is running a piece in the Sunday magazine this week titled “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” and I think it’s a must read for anyone wanting a compelling albeit starry-eyed look at the President’s education “reform” proposals. While the long version is worth the read, here’s the short version: More money and more tests will make better teachers and smarter kids. A small bunch of “reformists” armed with a boatload of money are in the process of buying off the media, unions, and parents to move schools toward greater “accountability” and “achievement” in ways that more resemble fixing the leaks in the hull instead of building a better boat. Chew on this for a second:

“It’s all about the talent,” Secretary Duncan told me. Thus, the highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers’ union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent job security. To win the contest, the states had to present new laws, contracts and data systems making teachers individually responsible for what their students achieve, and demonstrating, for example, that budget-forced teacher layoffs will be based on the quality of the teacher, not simply on seniority…To enable teacher evaluations, another 47 points would be allocated based on the quality of a state’s “data systems” for tracking student performance in all grades — which is a euphemism for the kind of full-bore testing regime that makes many parents and children cringe but that the reformers argue is necessary for any serious attempt to track not only student progress but also teacher effectiveness. [Emphasis mine.]

Now, I know that in many ways my evolving picture of learning in the 21st Century keeps moving toward the edges, away from schools as we know them, far away from the rhetoric being floated in this article. I know that there are times when I see a learning future for our kids that doesn’t necessarily involve “school” or college as we think of it, one that they design and take ownership of, one that connects them to other learners and teachers and ultimately, to success on their own terms. And then there are other times I think that’s just a total fantasy, that as much as I’d like to believe, as a growing number of folks suggest, that the world has changed in ways that frees learning from the shackles of outdated systems and creates all sorts of new paths for our kids, they’d be better off just playing the game as we know it, going to the good college, getting the degree, and finding success as it’s always been defined.

And I think that’s the part that has been bothering me most about the turn in the larger education conversation, that retrenchment of the typical path to “success.” We’re not changing our definition of “the top” at all. It’s just more of the same, as if the world is the same as it was 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. Which is why, I think, Race to the Top needs another  “T” word in there, as in “Race to the Traditional Top.” My problem is, I don’t think I want my kids to win that race anymore.

I think that redefinition of “the top” is what we here in the small lunatic fringe are trying to create. It’s not about knowledge as much as it is about learning, about a passion for learning, and about a self-motivation that “traditional” schooling drives out of kids. In a nutshell, it’s a pretty different picture of what schools and teachers should be doing, and a totally different view on what and how to assess it. The learning world that many of us are now living in, at least, just isn’t the same as it ever was.

Two quotes. First, the last sentence of the Times article:

“That President Obama did this is a total game changer,” says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. “If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same.”

And the last sentences from Diane Ravitch in her latest post, “Schools 4 $Sale: Inquire at U.S. DOE” over at Bridging Differences:

We have a public school system that needs improvement. Nothing coming from Race to the Top will help. It may even do untold harm to the system on which our nation has relied for more than 150 years.

Problem is, as directly opposite as both of these views are, neither one is talking about anything really different. That “build a new, better boat” conversation is yet to begin.