Jay Matthews wrote a piece in the Post this morning titled “The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st Century Skills” to which I replied what follows. Would be interested to hear your thoughts, here or there…

I don’t disagree that the majority of “21st Century Skills” are nothing new, and that we should have been teaching them all along. As computer and online technologies evolve, we have more tools that we can use to teach those skills in perhaps more relevant or compelling ways. But that depends on the teacher’s familiarity and comfort level with those technologies, obviously.

What is different here, though, is something that is not being articulated by the Partnership or many others, and that is the learning that can be done (and is being done already) using online social tools and networks. I’d point you to a recent MacArthur Foundation study which concludes that “New media forms have altered how youth socialize and learn” and that this has very important implications for schools and teaching (http://tinyurl.com/55a878, pdf). While most kids’ uses of these technologies are “friendship based”, the more compelling shift is when their use is “interest based” or when they connect with other kids or adults around the topics or ideas they are passionate to learn about. With access to the Internet, and with an understanding of how to create and navigate these online, social learning spaces, opportunities for learning widely and deeply reside in the connections that we make with other people who can teach or mentor us and/or collaboarate with us in the learning process. That, I think, is where we find 21st Century skills that are different and important. Sure, those connections require a well developed reading and writing literacy, and critical thinking and creativity and many of the others are skills inherent to the process. But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Having blogged now for seven years and having learned in these interest or passion-based online networks and communities for almost as long, it’s hard to begin to describe how different it is from the classroom teaching that I did for 18 years in a public high school. My learning is self-directed, and everyone in these virtual classrooms wants to be there because they too are interested in pursuing their interests. They come from all over the world, all different cultures, all different experiences, a diversity that is hard to fashion in most school classrooms. We share our learning openly, admit anyone into the conversation, and constantly seek to make each other smarter.

But while that can sound like a pretty positive and powerful space, it is fraught with complexity. We have to learn to read not only texts but to edit them as well, not just for accuracy but for bias, agenda and motive. In the online learning world, we have to be full fledged editors, not just readers, because the traditional editors are gone from the process. And, we have to be creators as well. In order for us to be found by potential teachers and collaborators, we need to have a presence, a footprint. I’m fully convinced that my own kids need to publish, need to establish their reputations early by creating and sharing and engaging in ideas in provocative and appropriate ways. These are not easy skills to master.(I’d refer you to Dan Gillmor’s new essay “Principles for a New Media Literacy” http://tinyurl.com/4b3pos for more on that.)

My kids need the help of teachers in their classrooms who understand all of this on some personal, practical level. They need teachers who can help them navigate these complex spaces and relationships online that require, at the very least, a different application of traditional skills and literacies. I think as educators we have a duty to do so. You can call it a “fad” if you like, but the reality is that these skills are sorely lacking in our teachers who are suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces. It’s imperative, I think, that we change that. To quote Kansas State professor Michael Wesch, “We [need to] use social media in the classroom not because our students use it, but because we are afraid that social media might be using them – that they are using social media blindly, without recognition of the new challenges and opportunities they might create” (http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=192). To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.

I know I’ve been on this “do my kids really have to go to college?” bender for a while now, but yesterday’s New York Times column by Charles Murray has added some new fuel to the fire. In “Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?” Murray basically makes the case that a) a bachelor’s degree should not be the prime determiner of employment as an adult and b) for most kids, the bachelor’s is a credential that is “beyond their reach” yet we spend countless hours and dollars in preparation and pursuit anyway.

 Let me just say, once again, I am not anti college or anti-intellectual. What I am is anti the treadmill that we’ve set up for many kids in primarily upper middle class suburban schools that streamlines them into a very narrow track to a four year degree right out of high school. The treadmill my kids are going to be encouraged to climb on in the very near future. The one my wife and kids and I are going to have to decide whether we want them on. The statistics are pretty compelling: only about one in four Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and college dropout rates are over 50%. As Murray says,

For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work…[And] Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don’t want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t think my kids can’t succeed at college. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t fully appreciate the advantages my kids have in growing up in a white, upper middle class home where both parents are educated by the traditional means and (hopefully) intellectually curious enough to motivate their kids to learn. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t know the economic benefits of a college degree. But I can’t help but think that my kids have opportunities to learn what they need to know to be successful in ways that I didn’t, ways that in some measure may have been there all along and that maybe I didn’t take advantage of, but ways that are also brand new and game-changers. This is not a suggestion that we replace a bachelor’s with a blog, btw, but it is an open question as to whether or not my kids have more ways to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful and show what they can do on an unprecedented scale. And if so, it’s a challenge to move them off of a college treadmill and onto a learning treadmill where the system’s job is not necessarily to raise it’s college acceptance rates but to prepare all kids for a variety of choices and scenarios upon which they can create their futures.

More and more, all I want from my kids’ school is to help me identify what they love, what their strengths are, and then help them create their own paths to mastery of their passions. Stop spending so much time focusing on subjects or courses that “they need for college” but don’t interest them in the least. Help them become learners who will be able to find and make good use of the knowledge that they need when they need it, whether that means finding an answer online or taking a college course to deepen their understanding. And finally, prepare them to create their own credentials that will powerfully display their capabilities, passions and potentials. (And I know that my more immediate challenge right now is to figure out whether or not my kids’ public school system can do that and, if not, what to do about it. More on that later.)

Maybe I’m dreaming. Or maybe it’s because the last seven years have turned me into an “alternate route” learner and passion-based professional, and intellectually I’ve just loved this SO much more than when I went to college (though college did have its moments…just not usually in the classroom.) Either way, it just feels like there’s going to be some shift happening here in the next few years as well, and I, at least, have to start thinking about it sooner rather than later.

(Photo “Stairway to learning” by Point-Shoot-Edit.)

So there seems to be a little string of really good blog posts that are laying out some definite re-vision of what schools can look like. This one, by Bill Farren, fits nicely with those Mark Pesce posts that I’ve been drifting in and out of here and here. But with Bill’s post the graphics are almost too good for description. How’s this for a visual on networked learning?

And I just love this description:

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?  Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions.

Again, this is higher ed context more than K-12, but I think there is much to think about here… Has me wondering what, realistically, we can expect from schools not just in terms of opening up their eyes to confront what is in front of them but then re-envisioning themselves accordingly. Funny, but as I read more and more of this, I grow increasingly excited and increasingly skeptical all at once.

So sue me if sometimes I get too smitten with those who write compellingly and with vision about what all of this connective learning stuff means for the long term, but I love to read stuff that makes my head shift and hurt at the same time. Case in point is this post by Mark Pesce titled “Fluid Learning” which I read first last week and have reread a few time since. I know it’s not free of holes, but I have to admit that the picture he paints of higher education in the near future resonates with a lot of my own thinking, and it’s got me ruminating even more deeply on what all of this means for my 9 and 11 year old in terms of what their education is preparing them for.

Start with this:

The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning.

That will at least give you a sense of where he’s going with this, and I’ll give you the briefest of synopsis with the hope you’ll read the whole thing.

He starts with the story of RateMyProfessors.com and the influence it’s having on decision making by students and universities in terms of the courses they take and the people they hire respectively. During a PLP session last night where we were talking about this, Robin Ellis chimed in that her son had relied heavily on the site throughout his college career, and I’m sure others would attest to that as well. (I pinged a few of my former students on Facebook and they all were avid users.) While this wasn’t the original intent of the guys who created the site

…knowledge, once pooled, takes on a life of its own, and finds itself in places where it has uses that its makers never intended.

But what I’m really chewing on is the idea that we can do much of what higher ed offers on our own these days. That, I think, has huge implications for my kids and for the way we prepare students for their learning futures. Pesce asks

Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?…Why not create a new kind of “Open University”, a website that offers nothing but the kinds of scheduling and coordination tools students might need to organize their own courses?

And, to really push that thought:

In this near future world, students are the administrators.

Whether or not my kids decide to go to college, the question for me right now is shouldn’t my school system be preparing them equally as well for a world where traditional college is not the only route to academic success? Shouldn’t my kids get some concept of how to gather their own information, find their own teachers, develop their own collaborative classrooms and write their own curricula? I mean at the very least, shouldn’t we let kids know that is an option these days?

And as the role of students changes, so to does the role of teachers and classrooms. Teachers are mentors and facilitators (not a new idea, I know) and classrooms can be anywhere.

The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom.

Pesce ends with four recommendations. First, “Capture Everything”:

This should now be standard operating procedure for education at all levels, for all subject areas. It simply makes no sense to waste my words – literally, pouring them away – when with very little infrastructure an audio recording can be made, and, with just a bit more infrastructure, a video recording can be made.

Second, “Share Everything”:

The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

Third, “Open Everything” not just using open source, but creating “device interdependence” and in taking down the filters:

Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen. There are many screens today, and while the laptop screen may be the most familiar to educators, the mobile handset has a screen which is, in many ways, more vital…Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.

And fourth, “Only Connect”, connecting students to their teachers and their peers:

Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life. Students should also be able to freely connect with educational administration; a fruitful relationship will keep students actively engaged in the mechanics of their education… Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

I know this last is a huge challenge for teachers and schools, but the reality is that we can connect to our teachers any time we like these days, and there are always teachers available. It’s just another way in which the traditional classroom is looking less and less like the real world.

Read the whole thing and, if you like, come back here and push the conversation in terms of K-12. I’ll write more about this later, but I am approaching the breaking point in terms of what my kids are getting at school. I’ve got to figure out a better way…

So here is the money quote from the just released study from the MacArthur Foundation titled “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” (pdf):

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in  classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and  the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.

I would take a few thousand words to unpack just that paragraph in terms of what the implications are for schools, and if we read that without some sense of both fear and excitement, I just don’t think we’re paying attention.

And please, send your administrators and IT folks this message in 42-point bold type:

Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning. Contrary to adult perceptions, while hanging out online, youth are picking up basic social and technological skills they   need to fully participate in contemporary society. Erecting barriers to participation deprives teens of access to these forms of learning. Participation in the digital age means more than being able to access “serious” online information and culture. Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions. (Emphasis mine.)

Finally, sit down, and mull this concept over:

Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads. Such learning differs fundamentally from traditional instruction and is often framed negatively by adults as a means of “peer pressure.” Yet adults can still have tremendous influence in setting “learning goals,” particularly on the interest-driven side, where adult hobbyists function as role models and more experienced peers.

Let me try to make a few points that come quickly to mind.

• Kids respect other’s knowledge online because their knowledge and expertise is transparent in ways they haven’t been in the past. The study says that kids “geek out” by finding those who share their interests both inside and outside of their face to face groups. What a surprise.
• They are more motivated to learn from their peers because they can connect around their shared passions, most of which the adults in the room don’t share.
• They are self-directed because they can be. They can get what they need when they need it.
• Their learning is “knowmadic”, as is most learning in the real world outside of school. We’re not linear, test assessed learners once we leave the system, are we?
• We have to be more willing to support this type of learning rather than prevent it, but, as always, we have to understand it for ourselves as well.

So stop reading this and go read the report, and let these questions hang:

New role for education? Youths’ participation in this networked world suggests new ways of thinking about the role of education. What would it mean to really exploit the potential of the learning opportunities available through online resources and networks? Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally? Finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

What do you think?

I remember when I first starting teaching journalism way back in the day actually using one of those stinky, buzz-inducing ditto machines to publish my students’ work “widely” up and down the hallways. I remember copy-editing by hand with green Flair pen, the same color my dreaded college journalism professors used, teaching my kids the fine art of marking up each other’s stories and adding suggestions for improvement. And I remember buying about 15 copies of various newspapers every Friday just so we could all spend some time getting our fingers black with ink as we searched for interesting and/or well written stories.

When I think of those days, I feel really old, for sure, but I also feel amazed at how much has changed in terms of media. And now, when it seems that “old” media is finally tipping full force into a “new” digital media model, I have to say I’m somewhat wistful.

Ok. I’m over it.

Yesterday’s New York Times piece by David Carr “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” got me really thinking again, however, about how much more important journalism has become in these days when newsrooms are being cut and reporters laid off. The Christian Science Monitor is closing its print edition. The Los Angeles Times, Newark Star-Ledger and others are making deeper cuts. All of which is going to increase our reliance on not only online media but participatory online media, the form of media that is largely unedited, essay-driven and agenda-ridden. All of which, by the way, should be driving our conversations about how to fundamentally rewrite our curriculum and our delivery system to prepare students to be, um, participants both as readers and as writers.

I loved this graph from the article:

Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper’s Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web.

The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.

We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…

(Photo: News by Kazze.)

Longtime readers of this blog know that I really, really respect and admire Lawrence Lessig who early on pushed my thinking in all sorts of directions with his presentations, books, and blog entries. I’m still a big admirer of his work, and I seriously think he will come to be known as one of the great change agents of our times. That’s why his new book about he cultural shifts that are occurring around copyright, intellectual property and art went to the top of the list when it arrived a couple of days ago. (I’ve got a long list to get to, but I’ve also got some long flights ahead of me…)

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a treatise on how we need to start rethinking traditional copyright law in the context of these easy sharing and copying technologies. And what’s especially relevant to our conversation is that he frames it in the way this all shakes out for our kids. In talking about how the government continues to create laws that “wage war” against the copyright infringement that many youngsters engage in every day, he says:

…I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?

And then he asks the central question:

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural.

To Lessig, this is a war that can not be won.

What should we do if this war against “piracy” as we currently conceive of it cannot be won? What should we do if we know that the future will be one where our kids, and there kids, will use a digital network to access whatever content they want whenever they want it? What should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distibution of “copies” simply will not exist?

Lots of questions that he will no doubt answer in the book, and that I hope to get back to here. But no doubt, these are questions we should be asking ourselves no matter how difficult or disruptive they may be. If you are reading this, you are doing so on your own personal printing press. That is  a different world than the one current copyright laws were written under.

(UPDATE: Please read the correction above reagrding this post to understand the cross outs.)

I’ve been a Mark Federman fan ever since his great essay “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time“ from a few years ago, which, if you haven’t read it, would land on my required reading list for anyone interested in this conversation. Federman is with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and he’s one of those people that just pops up from time to time to get me thinking.

His latest pop (Correction: This is actually by Mark Bauerline. Oh, the irony.) is in The Chronicle Review and it’s titled “Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming.” It’s an interesting recap of some of the online reading studies that have been done by Jakob Nielsen over the years, but it  quickly turns to a discussion of why technology has met with mixed (at best) success in the K-12 classroom over the years. In a word, it has to do with reading:

Digitized classrooms don’t come through for an off-campus reason, a factor largely overlooked by educators. When they add laptops to classes and equip kids with on-campus digital tools, they add something else, too: the reading habits kids have developed after thousands of hours with those same tools in leisure time.

In many of my presentations I ask those assembled what percentage of their reading is done online and whether or not they know of anyone who addresses online reading literacies in the classroom. You can probably guess the results: not much, and zero. (Well, almost zero.) Once again, this is one of those areas where the kids are doing it already and the educators in the room don’t have much to go on in terms of what the differences are or any substantial practical experience. Federman Bauerline makes the point that when new technologies enter the classroom, teachers see change. Students, on the other hand, see the status quo:

Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.

For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives.

Federman Bauerline argues that screen reading cannot provide those skills, and he argues it persuasively.

We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking.

This resonates. In fact, I’ve made myself take time over the last few months to read longer texts, and after plowing through three really, really engaging and challenging novels in the past month or so, I’m feeling like my brain is back in gear somehow. It’s getting closer to balance.

What continues to concern me, though, is the paucity of conversation about any of this in our schools. This is hugely complex, and it requires a strategy and good pedagogy. I feel almost blessed that my kids enjoy reading books, longer novels, Meg Cabot and Mike Lupica type stuff that are even above their age levels a bit. And I love talking to them about what they read. But as I watch Tucker search for and read helps and hints about Spore, I can see the difference. It’s not bad, but it is different. And it’s a difference we need to name.

(Photo Revision by -nathan.)

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.

So, I’m tired. In the last 21 days I’ve traveled about 8,000 miles, near as I can figure, and given 11 presentations, four of them on “opening days” in front of a total of about 3,000 teachers in about a half dozen states and provinces. It’s a fun time when people are rested and ready to get back to school and for the most part engaged in thinking about teaching, learning and schooling. And it’s a good time to get a temperature check as to what’s changing, if anything, in classrooms and in schools. In a few words, my impression continues to be: not much.

That’s not to say that there aren’t more silos or islands or whatever metaphor works of teachers and classrooms with teachers who are letting students do real work for real purposes and real audiences. There are, and in general, it’s feeling like more and more teachers are taking seriously the idea that we need to start some wide-ranging reflection and conversation about just what it is we’re doing with our students. (How far those conversations ever get is another story, however.) I’m sure there will be those that read this blog and others who will disagree, who will trumpet serious efforts and rethinking things either on a personal or system wide level. And that’s all good, but not surprising. They’re reading and participating already. On some level, they get it.

But, I’ll say it again, what these condensed travels remind me is just how small the scope of all of this talk continues to be. The vast majority of those who I’ve been in rooms with the last three weeks have little idea of what is happening in the world and have given nary a thought to what this means for teaching and learning. How do I know that? By the “omg” comments that I hear as they are filing out. By the “Ugh…we’ve got a lot of work to do” responses. By the teacher/mother of a teenager who asked me what Facebook was. By the consistently less than 10% of people in the room who own a MySpace or a Facebook site. Not that the Read/Write Web conversation is the only one that matters in the context of changing schools, mind you. But it is the one that consumes my time, obviously.

Recently, after one of my presentations, the superintendent of the district and I were standing shoulder to shoulder as his teachers were filing out of the room. He’d given an extremely thought provoking introduction, articulating his desire that they enter into a district wide conversation about change, that they all had a stake and a voice in that conversation if they wanted it. But at the end of my talk, the few questions went pretty much right to the “yeah, buts” and the reasons why these ideas would be difficult to make work. “The problem,” the superintendent said to me, “is that they don’t think they have a voice. They’ve been conditioned to wait for us to lead, to tell them what they can or can’t do. Somehow, we need to change that.”

For most educators, “back to school” means “back to teaching.” And that can be good work, but it remains obvious to me that very few see it as “back to learning.” For themselves, that is, along with their students. I’m not seeing much change since I wrote this two years ago.

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

I still feel that way, for the most part. Things may have moved a tic or two on the scale, but until we do that en masse, not much is going to change.

(Photo “Knives Out” by Charlyn W.)

So this is definitely worth an hour of your time if you haven’t already invested it. (I seem to be about four days late to stuff any more…go figure.) Michael Wesch of Kansas State and the “Machine is Us” fame gave an overview of the cultural significance of You Tube to the LOC, and suffice to say, it’s incredibly interesting stuff.

The really bizarre part for me, at least, is that two of the viral videos that he discusses in the presentation just popped up on my radar thanks to my own kids. Tess, who is turning 11 today, pulled up the “Charlie Bit Me” video on my iPhone the other day and Tucker cranked up the Sponge Bob version of “Crank Dat” just yesterday and started dancing around the house. I felt SO out of it. (“You haven’t seen this, Dad?”) For all that I live and breathe this stuff, I’m such a loser…

Anyway, the best part about this presentation is that it doesn’t try to make any real bold statement other than this is what the YouTube world (and much of the rest of the online world) is like these days: highly networked, highly individualized in terms of content distribution and organization, and incredibly personal. It captures to a large degree the “networked individualism” that Barry Weller talks about and that Wesch refs in the video. (I’ve got some reading to do on that score as well…)

The one concept that really struck me was the idea of “the collapse of context.” I think one of the most difficult things for those who are not familiar with these technologies (and even for some that are) is how different the contexts can be for the content we create. We really don’t know when a video or a blog post or whatever else we create is going to be “read” or how it’s going to be shared or what the response cues might be. And it got me thinking even more about George Siemens’ idea of context and how important it is to be able to identify the immediate circumstances for learning before implementing a tool or a particular pedagogy. My brain is humming…

At any rate, I’d add this to any list of “must views” for this year…

So, yes, this is yet another post on the thinking of Clay Shirky, who what with all of the videos and interviews available out there on the Web has been pushing my own thinking on almost a daily basis. (I’m also happy to report that I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with him on July 10 at 11 am for those that might be interested in how this all translates down to K-12 education. Stay tuned as I’m going to be asking for some audience participation…)

In a presentation to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), a site that is getting a Ted Talks feel to it, btw, Shirky talks about these shifts in terms of how our use of media is changing. Whereas we used to use media to know things, we can now use media to do things. In this world, to speak is to publish, and to publish is to gather. At one point he says that “every URL is a latent community now,” and that community can not only consume the information there but can build platforms to act together. He discusses a number of examples that he used in his book, but he adds a great story about how the businesses in Palermo, Italy are using these new abilities to fight back against the mafia in some creative ways.

This idea of using media to act has been borne out in some interesting ways in our community in the last few days as well. Doug Belshaw found himself in the midst of some controversy recently when he posted his negative feelings about TALMOS, a Virtual Learning Environment that he had found difficult to use. Seems TALMOS contacted his school and asked that they get Doug to take the “offending” material down, which he did. Doug noted on the post:

***I had criticized TALMOS in this section, but they contacted my school to ask me remove my ‘potentially commercially damaging’ comments. It’s a shame to be effectively silenced through legal threats when all I did was compare their offering unfavourably against another…***

Love it. Of course, when people found out about this, they started writing and Tweeting about it, and it now appears that the company has backed down, saying according to Doug’s comments, that they wanted to “start a dialogue.”

And the other example was the networks reaction to ISTE‘s announcement of its seemingly restrictive policy about videotaping and streaming at next week’s NECC conference. After a number of bloggers wrote about it and attempted to frame a coordinated plan of action, ISTE re-evaluated it’s stance and has now made it much more accommodating to sharing.

But while that is all well and good, there is a part of another Shirky video interview that resonates here. He talks about groups’ abilities to use these tools for action, but he differentiates between using them reactively and using the proactively.

We’re not seeing a lot of real world collective action where people are coming together to build things and not just complain about things.

Now certainly, there are some examples in our network of that kind of work. But to me, that’s the real challenge for us as educators, teaching kids to use the tools for connecting and learning and acting, but also teaching them to do it not just as response but as creation, as inspired construction. That’s the real creative, potentially transformative piece to this. That’s what I want my own kids to be able to do.

Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:

It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.

I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.

What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.

The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.

A bit long (1:20), somewhat esoteric, but pretty interesting for a listen (not a watch…wish this was in podcast form.) Former FCC chairs Reed Hundt and Michael Powell take the Obama and McCain case respectively to discuss broadband, Net Neutrality, and communications technology. Highly partisan, but some compelling back and forth about where all of this is headed and, more importantly, where it could be headed under either administration.

Oh, and yeah, education is mentioned here and there. Sigh. (Update: Powell has an interesting answer about parenting and filtering at 1:12.)

There is another post brewing here along the “walk the talk” lines that wants to answer how much do either of these guys really use technology in their own practice, and along those lines, do they understand the potentials and pitfalls for education. If their campaigns are any indication, at least, I don’t think there’s any doubt who has the greater potential to engage in that narrow conversation.

So what are the salient questions for us to wrap our brains around in terms of this election?

(Full disclosure: I’m a Obama supporter and have contributed to his campaign.

The other day, after reading a tweet from Dean Shareski about being upset that Shareski.com (I think it was) was already registered to someone else, I buzzed over the GoDaddy and snagged “tessrichardson.name” and “tuckerrichardson.name” for the next 10 years.

I’m expecting big things, kids.

On some weird level, I feel like this domain reserving thing is now a part of being a father, of providing as much opportunity as I can for my kids’ futures. And I know that sounds really, really silly to some, but I think I actually mean it. (I don’t think, however, as some are doing, I would pick a name for my child based on the domain being free…oy.) I wistfully imagine the day that Tess goes for a job interview and maybe gets some minor bump by the fact that she can pull up her own domain and start clicking through the wonderful work she’s created, the ways in which she’s been changing the world, and her vision of what’s to come.

A dad can dream, right? (Is Father’s Day this Sunday, btw?)

But I’ve been wondering how long it’s going to take until the digital footprint is an expectation rather than just an exception. Right now, for many folks, no footprint is a good footprint. But I wonder how long it’s going to take for employers or potential mates or whatever else to wonder “what, no footprint?” when they start looking around for one. As in “haven’t you been participating and doing good work that you want to share?” I tweeted out that same question today during a workshop and got some great responses that were literally all over the timeline. (Read from the bottom up.)

What a headshift this is for many of us, however. When I say to teachers “You want your kids to have a footprint” or “You want to have your own footprint” and suggest they embrace these ideas rather than avoid them, I can feel the discomfort. It goes against our best judgment, which, in this case, isn’t really best at all.

But I’ll just say it one more time for the heck of it. My kids are going to be Googled over and over, and when they are, I want tessrichardson.name and tuckerrichardson.name to come up at the top of the list. With any luck, whoever is looking will be impressed.