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.

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.

I want to be able to buy a cloud book, that is a license that allows me to access my copy of the book from any device that gets me online. (This assumes, of course, that the book hasn’t been released with a CC license, in which case I just need the access.) As I read my copy, I want to be able to annotate it a la Diigo, but I also want to invite others who have a license to that particular title to join me in the reading and annotating. (This is what BookGlutton is doing with public domain and CC licensed books, though the annotations are not on the text itself like in Diigo; more on the margins.) I want to be able to see and interact with all of those notes from any device as well. In addition, I want to be able to see all of the annotations by people who are also reading, and since that might be overwhelming, I want to be able to sort what annotations I view by date, geography of the reader and by tags. This last one is the key. I know I’ve said this many times before, but if I ever got the ability to tag at the comment level, my ability to organize my reading, writing and learning life would increase exponentially. I seriously get giddy thinking about being able to create digital notebooks filled with pages created by pulling together individual notes from disparate sources around one tag that I’ve left somewhere, complete with linkbacks and reference information. If we taught kids to do that, imagine the notebooks they could construct over their school years. Imagine getting rid of all that paper.

Imagine.

Kevin Kelly wrote this three years ago in the New York Times, and it appears we’re getting there:

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

While much of this will be done by the technology (the Semantic Web awaits) we’ll add the context, tweak the relevance. I know there is the potential for all sorts of havoc here, all sorts of breaking of tradition, all sorts of reading attention issues and much more. But maybe I’m an optimist to think that we could do this well, that it could be a value add, that while it will certainly be different, it could actually be better. I really love being at the beginning of all of this. Will be great fun to watch it all unfold.

(Photo “Sweet Home Under White Clouds” by tipiro.)

Another difference from earlier models of print comprehension is the inclusion of communication within online reading comprehension. Online reading and writing are so closely connected that it is not possible to separate them; we read online as authors and we write online as readers [Emphasis mine.]

And this from Deborah Brandt at the University of Wisconsin Madison in a great article from the Chronicle titled “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers“:

Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline. But that view, she says, is “being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They’re going to be reading, but they’re going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read.” [Emphasis mine]

(See also Kathleen Blake Yancey’s wonderful essay “Writing in the 21st Century” if you haven’t already.)

I know as a long-time high school expository writing teacher (who really misses that classroom), my curriculum would be decidedly different today than five years ago. There would have been a lot more situated practice in reading as a writer and developing the skills necessary to track and participate in the distributed conversation that hopefully occurs. I find it fascinating to consider the ways in which social technologies afford all sorts of potentially global, immediate connections around what we write. And I still think that a basic shift here is that we can no longer look at publishing as the final step in the process but see it instead as somewhere in the middle. Maybe even see it as the start of something.

Interested to hear from teachers who have begun to rethink or rewrite curriculum in light of the potentials of the technologies.

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.

BECOME PART OF THE SOCIAL WEB. Newspaper executives should take it as a personal and professional challenge to participate in social media: Share photos and video online. Follow industry experts on Twitter. Create a Facebook or LinkedIn profile. This is extremely valuable market research. Learn all you can.

Now, I know I’m a dreamer, but there’s an interview with an editor that follows that quote that’s making me think what it would be like if some type of American Education Institute made the same recommendation to principals and superintendents. I’ve changed the words a bit to make me feel really giddy, but imagine an exchange between a reporter and a school leader that included this:

Reporter: What have you learned from actually participating in the social Web that you wouldn’t have been able to pick up from colleagues describing the experience?

Principal: I describe the social Web as a cocktail party filled with interesting people. You can move from group to group, engaging on different topics, listening quietly when you want to, talking at others. The neat thing is that, like real cocktail parties, you can meet new people, hear great stories, learn valuable things and have a few laughs. You can come and go as you please, and the cocktail party is always going on…but it is more than that. You can follow education experts on Twitter, etc., and learn from their links and their conversation. You can converse with people much smarter than you — well, I can, at least — and they’ll respond, helping me. You don’t need to know them, you don’t need a fancy title, you don’t need an introduction. You simply need to ask a question. How cool is that? And, as a result, you establish yourself as a person. A real person. I hope that the people who connect with me on social networks see me as more than a name on a office door. I engage with them. I show some personality, to the extent that I have one. I listen to what others are saying and let them know that I am learning from THEM.

Reporter: How has what you’ve learned helped you improve your school?

Principal: Three ways that I can think of right now. First, social networking is a way to get feedback. Ask a question about policy, about a course, about an idea, people will respond. For instance, I asked a question about the future direction of our arts program on Twitter, sending people to my blog, and got some great responses. And I think it helped that I have established a presence as an active player who engages with others. So, when I ask for help, people offer it. Second, it’s a tip service. The Twitter grapevine is faster than many of the traditional streams of information. Sorry, it just is. Third, the conversations and the links about issues of education, learning and teaching help me think through ideas that I should be thinking through but normally may overlook. It’s more, too, than following the thought leaders. It’s following the thinking of people in the trenches working through the same things they’re working through. Lots of inspiration out there.

Reporter: What have you stopped doing that you used to spend time on before you began blogging, tweeting, etc.?

Principal: I’ve always considered this question — or the implied objection to social networking behind this question — as bogus. Educators are supposed to be thinking about learning. We’re supposed to be thinking about the future. We’re supposed to experiment and try new things. We’re also supposed to talk to our parents and engage with the community. So, this is part of the job, period. Any educator who says they don’t have time to do these kinds of things is working on the wrong things. The real answer? My day has probably gotten longer, but this is important stuff.

Reporter: Advice for other educators thinking about making social networks a part of their personal learning?

Principal: Assume nothing, because, most likely, all of your assumptions will be wrong. Social media is easy. If you find it’s not easy, I assure you most of your students can help you. That’s what I do. Make no judgments about any service until you’ve tried it yourself. Find people you know and follow them. Find people you don’t know but who live near you or who do what you do and follow them. Jump in. Give it longer than a weekend before you decide if it’s good or bad. Be yourself and be engaging.

Wake me up when it happens.

(Photo “Apple Martini” by Smaku.)

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.

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.

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.)

That answer stuck with me. I would guess that’s probably the case for most schools, and the reasons are obvious. I know many schools and districts have full-time positions for testing coordinators and college counselors and data-driven decision makers. We put a great deal of emphasis on outcomes with our kids, but I keep wondering how much more we could do in emphasizing the process of learning as well, not just for students but for everyone in the school.

So when I read Jay Cross’s latest piece in CLO magazine, I wondered how many schools could point to someone, anyone, who is in charge of learning. By that I mean someone who manages the culture of the school by focusing not on outcomes as much as how learning is writ large in the system. Someone who also understands the ways in which social Web technologies accentuate the need for the learning skills we’ve desired all along: creativity, critical thinking, independent thought, collaboration, etc. I know I keep going back to this, but I wonder how many of us can look at our colleagues and answer the question “How does that person learn?” And think of the leaders in our schools in that light as well.

And it really is about a culture that supports, celebrates and shares learning. Jay points to a survey about CLOs from TogetherLearn that I think acts as a good barometer of that work. Does your school:

• Welcome innovation and contributions from its teachers?
• Encourage (and provide time for) reflection on successes and flops?
• Tolerate mistakes and reward thinking out of the box?
• Share information openly?
• Foster learning for everyone?
• Experiment with new ways of doing things?
• Work across departments and unit boundaries with ease?

All of that suggests a place that emphasizes process, not outcomes. (The rest of the survey is definitely worth a look in the context of schools as well.) And it also suggests intent, not just serendipity. We need to hire for learning, plan for learning, and share the learning of the entire system, students, teachers, and support staff alike. We need to leverage the potential of the local personal learning communities as well as the global networks of which we can become a part. We need people to lead that work, however, people who understand deeply the passion-based, self-directed potentials for learning in a connected world, and the importance of a vision for true learner-centered classrooms and curricula for everyone in the building.

So I’m wondering, do you have a CLO in your school either by name or reputation? Should we be thinking about hiring CLOs in our schools and districts? Modifying other positions to include these ideas?

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.

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.

But what was different in my reading of the Johnson essay as opposed to the Kelly essay was my ability to interact with it through Diigo. Over the last few months, I’ve become more and more enamored with Diigo as a tool for notetaking and bookmarking, sure, but as a platform for some interesting conversations. And, while I’m not sure Johnson even knows of its existence, it’s already bringing to fruition many of the social reading potentials we’ve been thinking of as futuristic. The idea that I can not just annotate a paragraph or a sentence or one idea on a webpage but that I can engage with others in sharing our thinking about that particular sentence or idea is at once powerful and daunting. I mean, imagine the meta conversations we might be able to have over different passages in the classics once they all get scanned and put online by Google (or someone else.) As Johnson writes:

As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

I’d say that is a pretty profound shift, wouldn’t you? One that is not so well understood and, in many cases, not even desired by many “traditional” book readers out there.

So when you compare the un-annotated Kelly essay to the marked up Johnson piece (this link lets you see all the notes), there is a vastly different feel, for me at least. And it would be even more different if you would add your own annotations to the piece. In my presentations, one of the most powerful examples of how this particular tool is a potential game changer is when I show this article, “Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis” in the un-annotated form and then turn the highlights and conversations on. There is nothing but critical thinking and analysis happening there as supported by, um, technology. The irony is palpable.

Is social reading and social writing in our kids’s futures? I don’t think there is much doubt about that. More and more I’m finding Diigo annotations and notes cropping up on the articles and essays that I read, and by and large I’ve found the commentors to be serious, thoughtful and articulate. In other words, while they do add volume, they also add value. Those of us who are mucking around in these new reading and writing spaces have no formal training in it, obviously, just a passion to connect and a willingness to experiment and engage in conversations around the the topics that interest us. But there are skills here that if developed with some intention (read: taught and modeled) can improve literacy in interacting with texts and people in these digital spaces. As always, however, we have to begin to see this shifts as natural progressions in the evolution of reading and writing and not simply tools that bring a temporary WOW! factor to the process.

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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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: