Arrived at NECC in time for the morning keynote debate about whether or not bricks and mortar schools impede learning. It wasn’t a great question to begin with, because I don’t think anyone really thinks it’s an either or, either online or face to face, but a combination that’s going to emerge from this. I wish the focus had been more on the topic of learning and what we focus our learning efforts with kids on; that’s the real shift we need to explore. Gary Stager was a last minute addition to the panel, and I agreed with much of what he said, especially the idea that we should do what can be done at home at home and that schools should be places where we focus on projects and problems and arts and service. I find myself being more and more drawn to that vision. The debate had its moments, two great student members of the panel, and I’ll link this to the archive when it’s posted.

But here was the real kicker. Brad Jupp who is a high level adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was also on the panel, arguing that we should keep physical space schools. He pretty much articulated a vision that didn’t hold much in terms of any significant change. But if you want a snapshot of what the problem is in terms of moving any of the conversation forward, here you go: An administrator in the audience directed a question at Jupp that basically asked “How am I supposed to use things like blogs and wikis in my classrooms when I have the threat of lawsuits from parents and others hanging over me all the time?” In a phrase, his answer was “Lawsuits? What lawsuits?” He did go into somewhat of a response about a teacher using Facebook and being careful, but it was painfully obvious that he was basically oblivious to the on the ground concerns and fears that these new technologies have created. Not a clue.

I’m not feeling any better about the ability to move any of this to a different space with that apparent lack of understanding from the folks at the top.

A couple of Friday nights ago I may have made a big mistake: I went to bed at 11. It’s not that I stayed up too late. Instead it’s that I might have gone to bed too early. If I’d had my wits about me, perhaps I could have prevented what I’m sure will turn out to be a disastrous oversight on my part, one that may have huge implications to my online reputation (whatever is left of it.)

It seems that sometime early that Saturday morning while I was blissfully asleep, another Will Richardson claimed the new Facebook domain for my name. Will “Cuddle Bug” Richardson, that is, he of (or recently of) Laguna Beach High. Friend of what appears to be 195 other adolescent beach bums with goodness knows how much potential for embarassingness in the years to come.

“Cuddle Bug.”

Oy.

Maybe I should have set my alarm, or had someone call me, or even paid my wife’s high school intern to do the virtual camp out on Facebook and secure the address. Ugh…how could I have been so stupid? I mean, this other Will looks nice enough, arm around what appears to be his mom in the only picture he’s shared publically. (Interesting taste in shirts, however.) But there’s something unsettling about all of this.

“Cuddle Bug.”

Oy. Shoulda stayed awake.

If you’ve been following the news out of Iran the last few days, odds are you’re following it very differently from even a few years ago. Ten years ago, most of what I would have learned would have come from the TV news or the New York Times the day after. Five years ago, it was the New York Times or other traditonal media websites that I probably would have turned to. Today, however, for me at least, it’s Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia and then the New York Times website. It’s a bit of a different process, I’d say.

While we’ll wait to see how social tools affect the outcome in Iran, we can’t wait to begin to teach ourselves and our kids how to make sense of media that we ourselves have to edit. The complexities here are huge, in both an information and technological context. We’re reading and viewing content created by people whose identities and agendas are unkown to us.  While much of it is raw, we can’t know how much of it is made to look raw, how much of it has been edited, how much of it is true. I can read the Tweet above and believe it, or I can wait for confirmation. I can do what all good journalists have done throughout time which is verify and reverify before believing and reporting.

The difference is, obviously, is that I have to do this for myself. I now have access to the raw information, the stuff that I used to pay for someone else to find and sift and synthesize and share. I can choose to continue to take that route, certainly, to only check the reputable media outlets for updates and “news”. But if I do that these days I deny myself a greater understanding of not just how to consume all of this but how to participate in it. I’m not in Iran (thankfully) but I can still share the best of what I find about Iran for others in my network. I don’t take that task lightly, because I want to be a trusted contributor. I want others to share with me so that we can sift and filter and synthesize and contribute the best of our resources and thinking. As Donald Leu writes, these days “we read online as authors, and we write online as readers.” And, I would add, we need to read and write as editors as well.

I know that we should have been teaching these skills and processes all along with every piece of information we read or shared. But the reality is that we as an educational system haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Right now, however, we and our kids simply can’t get away with not having these skills any longer. I know the school year is over for many, but for those that are still in session, welcome to a teachable moment about the world, democracy, technology, media, and most of all, participation.

Had a great conversation with my friend and former colleague Rob Mancabelli the other day about the challenges that individual teachers face in understanding and, more importantly, practicing learning in these online spaces. Rob started a blog for a bit a few years ago, one that I thought was exceptional, but he dropped it in short order. He’s mulling over a return, thankfully, because he’s continuing the work we started at my old stomping grounds by rolling out a student 1-1 pilot this fall, one that will hopefully move teachers and students to more self-directed, inquiry-based curricula and classrooms. Personally, I keep begging him to share that process in a blog; I think I may be breaking him down. ;0)

Anyway, we were talking about the pilot group of teachers that had been selected for the work, and at one point the talk turned to the reasons why this is such a hard shift for many. It’s not the technology, we both agreed, as much as it is the shifts in transparency and privacy, and the emphasis on writing and creating that go along with putting yourself out there online. “It’s not about blogs,” he said “so much as it’s about human development.” I totally agree, but since our conversation I’ve been thinking about what the implications of that are, exactly. The Web and the social connections and learning it affords is moving us, I think, to a different type of consciousness, a different way of being in the world. While the way we interact with people in our personal spaces will always be crucial to our personal development and well being, we are in many ways being asked to recreate ourselves in virtual spaces, sometimes multiple spaces. And we’re being asked to do that work in public with others. I happened upon this old Doc Searles quote this morning, and it made even more sense than it did two years ago when I first read it:

“We are all authors of each other. What we call authority is the right we give others to author us, to make us who we are… That right is one we no longer give only to our newspapers, our magazines, our TV and radio stations. We give it to anybody who helps us learn and understand What’s Going On in the world.”

The comfort zone required to live in that “author-ity” space is pretty difficult for many of us, educators and non-educators alike, to find. And while our kids may seem to exist more comfortably in these online, social spaces, I still question whether they completely comprehend the potentials of their work there.

So in case you don’t know it, I’ve got kids. They’ll be 12 and 10 this summer (omg) which makes me perk up when I run across magazine covers like this one from Time last week titled “The Future of Work.”

Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no longer a ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path.

Welcome to my world. Seems I’ve stepped right into the future. What catches me, however, is that while I could never imagine making the shift back to the life I once knew (or some semblance of it), when I think of my kids, that description of their futures makes me shudder. Ironic, isn’t it?

Inside, Time says

We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values–and women will increasingly be at the controls.

Which would seem to me to suggest that we need to create a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative learning experience for my kids, right? If as the article states fully 40% of the US workforce is predicted to be independent contractors by 2019, shouldn’t we be rethinking what it means to prepare them for that?

What I want for my kids regardless of what school they are in is to be able to pursue their passion, to be problem solvers in the face of adversity, to be provided a different picture of their own working futures in light of this huge shift that’s taking place. Yet I wonder how many classrooms discussed that Time issue (or any other different visions) even in passing. And while I know Time’s vision may not come to fruition, I have little doubt that’s the way things are trending. Doesn’t feel like we’re doing much about it.

So it’s been a while since I’ve turned to my blog, obviously. Just felt like I needed a break, some time to get some balance and reconfigure my thinking a bit. It’s been good, and for what it’s worth, I’ve been growing a list of things I want to write here about. More on that later in the week as I come up on my eight-year blogversary. But for now, just a quick post about a piece that has had me thinking for the last month or so.

Not sure how I stumbled across this 2000 article in CITE titled “If We Didn’t Have the Schools We Have Today, Would We Create the Schools We Have Today?” by Tom Carroll, but I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the last few weeks reading, rereading and thinking about it from a number of different perspectives. In many ways, it’s an amazingly articulate view of the learning and networking potentials of Web 2.0 technologies given at a moment when Web 2.0 technologies were in their nascent stages. In other ways, it’s a validation of what many of us have been thinking and saying about the learning in networked communities aspect of this and the challenges that potential presents to schools. But on another level, it’s a bit depressing to think of how far we haven’t come in this conversation in the almost 10 years since it was written. Most people, I think, would find his vision of the new learning world to be a harsh challenge to their current thinking.

I mean, how close are most educators to this concept?:

In the networked learning communities of the future, expert learners (we call them teachers, educators, scientists, and researchers today) are going to be recognized for their ability to learn and help others learn, as they continue to construct new knowledge and develop their own expertise. Their job will not be to teach – but to help others learn, as they model learning through collaboration to solve problems and achieve goals they have in common. (A significant part of the expert learner’s role will be organizing and managing the collaborative learning community.)

Nothing new here, I know. (Actually, there’s very little “new” anywhere in the thinking about schools and teachers and classroom learning right now.) But it reiterates the importance of being able to do this for ourselves before we try to do it with our kids, to at least have some sense of connectedness beyond our physical spaces.

The vision that classrooms must become more inquiry driven, “learning” (not learner) centered spaces where we co-construct the learning opportunities and new knowledge is also nothing particularly new. But it makes me wonder what percentage of the classes our students take have a curriculum that is significantly altered or made different in the process of taking the course and making “new knowledge.” I would doubt that there would be more than a handful in any individual student’s K-12 career even at this point.

While there is a whole bunch more to think about in this essay, it’s striking when you think about how little of this really transformative thinking is taking place when we think about schools. And how difficult it is to retrofit this thinking into existing spaces. That’s why I particularly love the title of this essay. I think most of us in this conversation would say “no”, that we would create something very different. That given a blank slate, we would keep the best parts of the interpersonal relationships between adults and kids but throw out the schedules, the desks in rows, the grades, the workloads, the levels and more and “think fresh” about the learning process in the context of what’s available to us now. Still, I wonder what percentage of educators in general would really think differently about the role of schools and their roles as teachers and learners.

And I also wonder if we can actually make something new out of something old in this case. Without remaking the system, is it reasonable to expect that we can systemically move toward inquiry based, self-directed, networked learning spaces that focus on the learning that Carroll describes in the essay?

In a networked learning community, we will have “schools” that are nodes in a larger learning environment, and in those schools there will be no teachers and no students– just learners.

That is a huge, huge retrofitting process that would be fraught with failure save a clear vision and inspiring leadership to put it into place among many other things.  But the biggest piece, I think, is the re-envisioning of the profession, that we are expert learners first, content experts second (if at all).

The teacher will become an expert learner organizing and leading others in networked learning communities.

To me, supporting that shift is the first step.

(Photo “Bryan Adams High School Hallway” by Dean Terry.)

From Deborah Meier on Bridging Differences in what is unquestionably one of the most powerful paragraphs about education I’ve read in a long time:

As long as we use test scores as our primary evidence for being poorly educated we reinforce the connection—and the bad teaching to which it leads. If by some course of action we could get everyone’s score the same—even by cheating—I’d be for it, so we could get on to discussing the interactions that matter in classrooms and schools: between “I, Thou, and It.” I’ve spent 45 years trying, unsuccessfully, to shift the discussion to schools as sites for learning. Such a “conversation” might not produce economic miracles, but it would over time connect schooling to the kind of learning that can protect both democracy and our economy. Because that’s where schools are (or are not) powerful.

Sites for learning. What a concept.

It’s been a few days since John Pederson posted this Tweet, but I’ve been thinking about that phrasing a lot ever since. It’s pretty obvious that as my professional life has changed, my interest has been moving away from classroom practice more toward individual learning and how we help educators understand the potentials of these spaces for their own learning first and their teaching second. The shift has been deepened by my work with Sheryl in PLP, but it’s also rooted in the continued frustration I have with a) the pace of even a coherent conversation about systemic change and b) teachers resistance to looking inward before moving outward when considering these shifts. (See these two posts and subsequent discussions for context.) While we have debated the “tools first” approach on the periphery, I’m still convinced that while we need an understanding of tools to make the connections, the personal shift around those tools drives the pedagogical shift. It’s difficult to understand the impact that online learning networks and communities can bring (and their potential downsides) without being a part of them.

So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.’” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is. Somehow, by luck or hard work or a combination, those of us who are taking advantage of the affordances of learning in online communities and networks have found a way to invest the time, not in big chunks in a physical space classroom but in as-needed, passion-driven, hour-here-fifteen-minutes-there learning flow that relies on the interactions of many learners, not on the expertise of any one person. And it’s in knowing how to effectively navigate those interactions where the value lives, not in effectively navigating the tools.

Our continued emphasis on tools in pd misses that larger point, obviously, because the power of the Read/Write web is not the ability to publish; it’s the ability to connect. Broken record, I know, but tools are easy; connections are hard. And so the question becomes how to best help educators realize these potentials in the learning sense first. Because at the end of the day, community building has to become an integral part of what we do in our classrooms with our students, as well. We have to be able to model those connections for them and understand them in ways that are meaningful to our own learning practice.

The challenge is, of course, that “continual, collaborative, on the job” learning isn’t very convenient for professional developers or for teachers in classrooms. It means re-thinking what learning looks like, and that’s a scary place still for most in education.

My nine-year old Tucker plays AAU basketball for a struggling inner-city team about 30 minutes from where we live. His teammates call him “Shadow” and most times we are the only white family in the gym for games and practice. We (mostly my wife Wendy) haul his (and his sister’s) butt down there three times a week for a couple of reasons, first and foremost because we want him to see that a large chunk of the world looks little like the un-diverse, rural space in which he’s growing up, and, second, because the basketball is just grittier, tougher, faster, played at a different level than in these parts. The gym in which his team plays is 2/3 the size of regulation court with blue-padded stanchions that jut out from the sidelines and become part of the game, and dim fluorescent lighting that depending on the level of sunlight filtering in from the grimy skylights makes the basket a dark target. It’s a no blood-no foul type of game they play, the fundamentals of which are no look passes and under the basket scoop layups which even on a 10-year old level are both beautiful and at the same time difficult to watch. For most of these kids, basketball is a respite from the the difficulties of their lives, lives that are surrounded by poverty, violence and drug use. There are gangs in the middle schools, absent fathers, job layoffs and more, so whenever these kids get the chance, they play, and play, and play some more. And my kids try to keep up.

Tucker has made some fast friends with his teammates. They are sweet, respectful, fun kids to be around. The last couple of weekends, we’ve hosted sleepovers, or more aptly, shootovers as most of the time the sounds of basketballs being pounded by the hoop at the end of the driveway echo through the house. But we’ve also been doing some “field trippy” sort of stuff. A couple of weekends ago, Wendy got their parents to give them a day off of school to go to a statewide GreenFest to have fun but, as is my wife’s way, to get them thinking about the environment. They saw solar cars, learned about organic foods and, at one point, got a lesson on worms. Each of them got a container with some compost, a few poop generating worms, and instructions on how to use them to create great fertilizer for plants. It turned out that for two of the three kids that Wendy spirited off with, it was the first time they had ever held a worm. In the course of the few days they were hanging around with them, we found out all sorts of stuff about their lives and about what they knew about the world, which was, not too surprisingly, not much. At one point when Wendy asked one of them how many people he thought were in the world, he answered “10,000″. The next weekend, we went to “Ringing Rocks” which is this strange little geologic enigma near us, followed by some first-time skipping of stones in the Delaware River near our house. It was an interesting few days of learning for all of us.

There is no doubt that these kids face some pretty difficult futures as a result of circumstances not of their making. It’s pretty obvious they are behind in terms of what they know about the world and their ability to express it well. That’s not an indictment on their schools, per se, as much as it is the inequality that exists in this state and others between the education of the haves and the have nots writ large. But while they say they get “Bs” in school, I can’t help but wonder what that means. No doubt, there learning lives are aimed at what’s on the state assessment, yet they are behind in reading and writing and math. And to be honest, I’m not sure the system can overcome the difficulties present in these kids lives from the start. I don’t think the answer for them is longer school years or teachers getting “merit pay” (or battle pay) as much as it is a fix for the societal problems that surround them. Yet in this moment of steep budget cuts and layoffs, those fixes don’t seem to be on the horizon for them any time soon.

But it’s not just them. Last week I was on a panel with the state assistant commissioner of education where she told the story of seeing the “new” digitally published third-grade “U.S. States” projects, the ones we all did as kids, taking a state of the union and pasting the state bird and state flag and state flower on top of a map with some interesting statistics around it. She asked one young man who did New York State to talk about his slide and he read off all of the stuff. When he got to the population part he said “and New York State has over 19 million people,” and she responded with “Wow! Is that a lot of people?” He looked at her for a moment and said, “you know, I really don’t know.” It was a great example of the context and value that information loses when we fail to teach meaning over memorization.

For Tucker’s friends, for that kid learning about New York, for a lot of kids in this country, it becomes obvious very quickly that we are failing them. Like I said, I know it’s more complex than just blaming the schools and the teachers, which seems to be de rigeur these days, btw. Which is what is so disheartening about the rhetoric that continues to come out of Washington around education; there’s nothing really new. Nothing bold. Nothing that makes me feel like we’ve turned any corner on any of this. We’re arguing about the same old ideas and writing about the same old shifts when the reality is that the lives of those kids on Tucker’s team haven’t changed a bit from all the bloviating going on.

Not suggesting I have the answer here. My frustration just gets more acute when faces and smiles and hook shots come with the statistics.

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So, Kathleen Blake Yancey has been an influence on my teaching for a good long time, all the way back to the mid 1990s when I was doing research on professional teaching portfolios during a sabbatical from classroom. Her work and ideas have been an important part of the conversation around teaching and writing, and her stature as former president of the National Council of Teachers of English makes her a well respected voice among those trying to understand the changes we’re all experiencing now. So it was a great treat to be able to do a virtual sit-down with her earlier today and talk about how the importance of reading and writing has grown, how these technologies are impacting our thinking of how to best teach literacy, and the very fun and at the same time complex moment in history we’re living through right now.

The one teaser point I’ll throw out here deals with why we need to think of the function of writing very differently. It’s not a new concept if you’ve frequented these parts, but it’s just so validating to hear someone like Kathi articulate it as well. It’s this: an important value of writing today is not simply to communicate but to get others engaged, to build a larger conversation around what we write. As she states in “Writing in the 21st Century” (a must read, btw) writing is now “newly technologized, socialized and networked.” And I wonder to what extent those currently teaching writing (which I think should be everyone in a classroom, btw) really get that on a practical and pedagogical level. As she says in the interview, none of us really know what the answers are right now, but we are at a tipping point of sorts at least in our recognition that something “large” is happening, and that it’s going to have some “large” effects on our teaching and learning lives.

Unfortunately, we had a couple of short drops from uStream in the middle, so the embedded videos below are in three parts. Also, here is the extremely engaging chat transcript that Sheryl was nice enough to capture. It’s all good stuff, and if you do invest the time to listen, would love, as always, to hear your reactions.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

So here is the money question: What two things (and only two) would you tell educational leaders are the most important steps they can take to lead change today? I got that one from a professor at Oakland University last week, and after pausing for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, I answered “build a learning network online, and make your learning as transparent as possible for those around you.” And while I really think the first part of that answer would make sense to most leaders out there, I think the second would have them running for the hills.

It’s pretty obvious to me that my own kids are going to be living much more transparent lives than most of their teachers would be comfortable with. I’ve written and spoken ad nauseum of the need for them to be “Googled well”, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a parent’s responsibility to start that process for them. (That’s a post for another day.) I really do believe that in this moment, however, that schools also have a responsibility to help kids lead transparent lives online in ways that prepare them for the highly complex relationships they will be having in these virtual spaces as adults. But to do that, schools have to get more transparent themselves.

I pulled Dov Seidman’s book “How” off the shelves last week as it speaks so eloquently to this point. I blogged about it almost two years ago when it came out, but in light of how things have moved forward since then, it’s even more relevant today. While most people see it as a business book, I look at it as a parenting book, one that challenges me to think about how to best prepare my kids for the “hypertransparent and hyperconnected world” in which they are going to work and play. His point is that in that environment, “how” you do something is more important even than “what” you do. If you’re not doing it skillfully, ethically, and transparently, you’ll be ceding success to those that do.

A big part of my decision making process in terms of who to believe and who to trust stems from how willing a person is to share her ideas, what level of participation she engages in, how ethical or supportive those interactions are, and how relevant she is to my own learning needs. As I said to the many professors in that presentation last week, there is certainly much I could learn from them if they were sharing. But most of them are not.

In this same vein, I have more and more of an expectation of the teachers and especially the administrators in our schools to lead transparent lives. The fact that they are veritably “un-googleable” in terms of finding anything they have created and shared and perhaps collaborated with others on troubles me on a number of levels. First, I can’t see for myself whether or not they are learners. And, almost more importantly, I get no sense as to whether or not they are leaders of learners. Whether they are in the classroom or in the front office, I want (demand?) the adults in my schools to be effective models for living in a transparent world. I want my kids to see them navigating these spaces effectively, sharing what they know, teaching others outside of their physical space, and contributing to the conversation.

In Gary Hamel’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. The Fortune 500, he writes

Contribution counts for more than credentials. When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute.

I totally agree. My kids need to be surrounded by contributors, people who understand the nuances of these spaces and relationships that we interact with on a daily basis. And not only do they need to see contribution, they need to see it done well, ethically, honestly, meaningfully. In other words, this is more than a twice daily update on Facebook or Twitter.

Bringing all of this together, I just started reading the updated version of Howard Gardner’s “Five Minds for the Future” and there are all sorts of connections to this conversation. Transparency can support all of the ways in which my kids must be able to acquire expertise, act ethically, display creativity, respect diversity, and synthesize and make sense of information. I look at the way my own experience over the last eight years have pushed me in all of those directions, primarily because I built a network around my passion and I shared most everything I did. I hope I’m being a good role model for my kids in that respect at least.

For most principals or superintendents, however, the idea of making their learning lives transparent is not one that sits too comfortably. It’s another one of those huge shifts that is, I think, inevitable but is going to be agonizingly slow in the making. As Seidman asks

The question before us as we consider what we need to thrive in the inter-networked world is: How do we conquer our fear of exposure and turn these new realities into new abilities and behaviors? How can we become proactive about transparency?

Proactive instead of reactive, which is what we’re all about when it comes to transparency in schools right now. What a concept.

(Photo “sunflowers” by marcomagrini.)

Just a quick programming note: my interview with Kathleen Blake Yancey, author of “Writing in the 21st Century” and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, has been rescheduled for this Thursday at noon EST. I have a host of questions to ask, but would love to know what you want to know, i.e. literacy, writing, reading and the importance of Web technologies in the process of all of it.

Please tune into our PLP live channel on uStream if you want to participate in the chat and converation.

It’s been a great 10 days in Australia, one that’s been too packed for much blogging, obviously, and one that was highlighted yesterday by a visit to one of those “I really wish my kids went to school there” type of schools in a Melbourne suburb. It’s hard to capture everything that’s cool about the Wooranna Park Primary School in a blog post, but let me boil it down to this: the kids are driving the learning, from the design of the school and the curriculum to the decision making around school policy and more. It’s one of those inquiry-based learning environments where the moment you step into it you just feel something different. Different spaces. Different colors. Different conversations. Different stuff up on the walls.

I’m hoping to write more about what the principal Ray Trotter is trying to do at Wooranna, but for now, here are some of the highlights:

• When the school got funding to renovate the year 5/6 part of the school, the teachers and students got together and decided that the theme for their studies that year would be “design”. So the students set out to create the timeline, select the furniture, create the space plans, and manage the budgets. It was an involved process, driven by important questions and fueled by the students’ desire (and passion) for creating a learning space they could flourish in. In the process, they interviewed architects, over-ruled the principal in the choice of classroom furniture (after doing detailed research on neck injuries caused by having to sit at round tables,) designed work stations (using Google Sketch-up), and oversaw the entire process. The result? A really stunning mixed open-space, flexible, comfortable learning environment that the students take pride in.
• Everywhere you look in the hallways of Wooranna you see questions. One poster asks “How can we invent colors?” Another says “How have our tomatoes been coping with the 40+ (C) temperatures?” And my favorite, “What is learning?” The walls aren’t filled with products; they are filled with process. And the teachers and leaders model it. Hung prominently on the wall and often discussed with the students is the school’s “Raison D’Etre”. It quotes Plutarch, Vygotsky, Betts and others, and it’s based on questions; “What are the key principles for transformative learning?” “What do I want to change?”
• School government takes the form of the fifth and sixth grade students meeting each Friday in a discussion session that replicates the Australian Parliament. For the first half of the year, half of the kids run the government, and the other half takes over at the midway point. The leaders are elected by the student body, and they go about making real decisions about real projects and policies.
• When they graduate from Wooranna, students perform original music and dance that they have written and choreographed. In fact, they compose a lot of their own music throughout the year. And art. And media.
• Ray Trotter, the principal, talks easily about social constructivism, connectivism, George Seimens, Stephen Heppel and many of the other ideas and people in this space. But at present, due to some restraints with the technology, there is not a great deal of connecting out to the world, though his is looking for schools to video conference with and is beginning to move down that road.

There’s more, as usual. But I’ll leave it with this one thought from Ray, one of many, that jumped out at me during our conversations: learning is not a linear exercise, it’s random, it’s self-directed, it looks like spaghetti. And at Wooranna, it’s very, very obvious.

From the “Making the Compelling Case Dept.” comes this article from the new International Journal of Learning and Media titled Learning: Peering Backward and Looking Forward in the Digital Era. Written by Howard Gardner, Carrie James and Margaret Weigel, all from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for me at least it’s one of those must reads that helps put in perspective the many changes that learning is going through right now and helps affirm a vision of learning that may come to pass. As my critical friends frequently point out to me, my own historical context for a lot of these conversations is not what it should be, which is one reason why this piece has a lot of appeal to me. This is a great read, well worth the time, one that I’ll try to summarize the highlights of below.

The thesis here is basically this, that after an extended period of education as we know it, change might finally be upon us whether we like it or not.

In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person’s own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.

The authors weave a very readable narrative of the history of schools and learning to present day, making the case that

the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.

There are some shifts, however. Over the last century, education has become more and more universal, we’re moving away from the humanities and language toward more science, technology, engineering and math disciplines, and there is now more emphasis globally on nationalized curricula and international comparisons for assessment. These have not, the authors suggest, changed much about what happens in schools or the learning that takes place.

“Learning is problematic.”

I was particularly struck by this passage about truth, one which articulates really well the struggle that I see a lot of traditional teachers having right now:

In the absence of recognized authorities and standards for determining what is considered true, learning is problematic. This postmodern perspective is not universally shared. Many continue to operate in a climate in which facts are fixed entities taken for granted, information is created and circulated relatively slowly, and authority figures are invested with the responsibility of determining and sharing what is considered true and good. Even so, it is undeniable that new opportunities for individuals to assert the truth, or their truths, are afforded today; educators will likely grapple with questions about what is true, and what is worth teaching and learning, more and more, both now and in the future.

There is talk about new skills that this new world requires.

In these frameworks, the traditional “three R’s” remain but are supplemented by a broader focus on metacognitive skills and an acknowledgment that individuals live in a complex world defined in part by existing but fluid frames of meaning (Geertz 1993). Most would agree that a well-educated individual should be able to successfully participate in a global economy where money, culture, ideas, and people circulate rapidly; to synthesize and utilize vast rivers of information obtained through a variety of channels (textual, visual, multimediated); to engage with this information across a variety of disciplines; to be comfortable negotiating a range of social connections, including interacting with diverse populations; and to serve as an engaged and responsible member of one’s profession and one’s communities.

I think I would add a need to create their own learning opportunities and spaces in which they interact in passion-based, self-directed activities. Or something like that.

The Promises are Realized

While the authors “recognize that we could be wrong” about this vision, it seems we may be at a “perfect storm” moment because of the affordances that new digital media (NDM) create.

That having been said, we believe that a “perfect storm” of NDM affordances, sociocultural changes associated with globalization, and the growing pace and interconnectedness of human life may potentially add up to a formidable tipping point. We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized. We recognize that we could be wrong. We also recognize—and will elucidate at critical points—how the integration of NDM practices into a school setting can be challenging, such as the difficulties of implementing more social-based Internet practices in the classroom, or of incorporating youth’s extra-curricular, digital pursuits into fruitful classroom instruction, for example.

I love that line: “We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized.” And the key there is the phrase “leveraged properly.” While we may not know exactly what the most effective uses of these technologies are yet, this is where I just believe our work as educators is right now. We need to be deep in the practice of leveraging these connections for ourselves. (Broken record, I know.)

Which leads, inexorably, to this:

While the ubiquity of digital media resources allows for more customized learning within a formal learning context, its primary value lies in the acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of learning that take place beyond formal schooling.

And that, is what we have to be preparing our kids for, that learning that is going to happen, using these technologies in these mediated spaces or “networked publics” throughout their lives. It’s about self-study, self-direction, independent learning. Right now, as the authors suggest, our biggest challenge is we’re not teaching kids to be that type of learner.

However, there are serious challenges associated with implementing an NDM-based pedagogy. NDM may be seen as sources of entertainment and escape, not learning; additionally, the determination of the proper level of scaffolding can be difficult. The Internet’s potential for learning may be curtailed if youth lack key skills for navigating it, if they consistently engage with Internet resources in a shallow fashion, and/or if they limit their explorations to a narrow band of things they believe are worth knowing. Left to their own devices and without sufficient scaffolding, student investigations may turn out to be thoughtful and meaningful—or frustrating and fruitless. A successful informal learning practice depends upon an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking.

Schools as Almshouses

There is much, much more here to read, and I don’t want to just list all the really powerful snips that are in there, but the conclusion is compelling.

Part of the answer to change surely lies beyond the walls of schools themselves. Parents, government, the professions, even the marketplace, are all important stakeholders in the state of learning. Alignment among these diverse constituencies may be hard to achieve; here political leadership of the highest order is essential. In the last few decades, the phrases “learning communities,” “lifelong learning,” and “the learning society” have virtually become clichés. Yet like many clichés in education, and elsewhere, the terms themselves are more familiar than actual instances of the phenomena they describe. In our view, no society is likely to thrive in the future unless it actually is dedicated to lifelong learning; and this, in turn, will require both a society that values learning, and communities that continue to learn. As educators, we hope that this learning will continue to take place in educational institutions. But unless the schools are equal to the task of absorbing the new digital media, and making acute use of their potentials while guarding against their abuses, schools are likely to become as anachronistic as almshouses, teachers as anachronistic as barber-surgeons. Any culture that wishes to survive will ensure that learning takes place, but the forms and formats remain wide open.

Amen.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts.

danah boyd delivered a talk for Microsoft recently with the title “Social Media is Here to Stay,” and I’d classify it as must reading for educators wanting to get nudged a little further down the path to rethinking classrooms. I just love the matter of fact way she describes what has happened in terms of kids’ uses of social media and what it all means for us. The whole thing is definitely worth the 10-15 minutes or so that it takes to read it, but let me cut to the chase with this snip:

Specific genres of social media may come and go, but these underlying properties are here to stay. We won’t turn the clock back on these. Social network sites may end up being a fad from the first decade of the 21st century, but new forms of technology will continue to leverage social network as we go forward. If we get away from thinking about the specific technologies and focus on the properties and dynamics, we can see how change is unfolding before our eyes. One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties and dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem. We are all implicated in it - as developers and policy makers, as parents and friends, as individuals and as citizens. Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it.

A couple of things strike me here, not the least of which is the de-emphasis on the tools and a focus instead on the “properties and dynamics” or the “network effects” that they bring about. I think it’s safe to say that we have made huge inroads in getting people to use the tools. Last week at NCTIES about half of a roomful of people raised their hands when I asked how many of them taught at schools where kids are blogging somewhere in the curriculum. (It turned out it wasn’t happening with a lot of regularity, but still…) Where we still have a long way to go, however, is in truly understanding that stuff danah is talking about. And that’s the important part, because that’s what should be driving our decision making and pedagogy around using these technologies in the classroom. But as I’ve said many times before, that’s the hard part, because it really does involve some buy in on the part of teachers in terms of changing their own practice.

But there is another telling passage in this piece that really got my brain thinking. When talking about how kids don’t really use Twitter very much because it’s so much more of a public space, danah writes

Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends and they learned a harsh lesson with social network sites. Even if they are just trying to talk to their friends, those who hold power over them are going to access everything they wrote if it’s in public. While the ethos among teens is “public by default, private when necessary,” many are learning that it’s just not worth it to have a worrying mother obsess over every mood you seek to convey. This dynamic showcases how social factors are key to the adoption of new forms of social media.

It’s funny (not) how when I read that “those who hold power over them” part I immediately thought of schools and the aversion we have to kids creating in public, social spaces. Kids are being driven to become more private in a world where transparency and openness create huge learning opportunities for those that know what to do with them.

Make sure to read the five properties of social media and the three social dynamics that danah says have been “reconfigured” by social media. And then think about the idea that

All of this means that we’re forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. So what does this mean? As we are already starting to see, this creates all new questions about context and privacy, about our relationship to space and to the people around us.

Those are the questions that we have to be examining deeply for ourselves as educators. And right now, those are the questions that few schools really want to have any serious discussions about in terms of the implications on school culture and curriculum. As systems, we’re not even close to getting on the reconfiguration road.

Well, most of us aren’t, at least: