weblogg-ed

School librarian Thomas Washington’s essay in the Christian Science Monitor argues that in an age of information overload, knowledge is less about acquiring more and more, and more about becoming proficient at tossing things out. We reflect on our own scanning-heavy reading habits, the guilt that comes with them, and the broader educator unease about what reading is becoming in a test-driven, information-saturated culture.

Reflecting on danah boyd’s distinction between social networks and social tools in schools, and why social networking sites themselves may not belong in classrooms even though social tools and network literacy do.

This will probably be our last post of 2007, and while we’ve been doing some looking back, our brains have been taking us more into what next year might be like. Our thinking has been framed by Clay Burrell, Doc Searles, and a conversation with a friend, and it has us dreaming about new learning models grounded in passion, small connected groups, and the Live Web—where learning, not grades or tests, is at the heart of everything.

Tomorrow, Amazon is set to release “Kindle,” the digital book reader that holds over 200 books and does a whole lot more. We may be on the verge of moving one of the last bastions of the analog world online, raising questions about how connected, digital reading will change books, readers, and authorship.

We’re reposting Chris’s announcement of EduCon 2.0, an education and School 2.0 conference focused on innovation and the future of schools, built around inquiry, co-creation, and networked learning, and issuing a call for proposals for interactive conversations due November 1.

We reflected on experimenting with unconference-style sessions at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai, why traditional conference formats feel increasingly out of step, and how we might bring more participatory, networked learning into events like NECC.

We spent a day in a workshop on the future of teaching, exploring how “learning agents” might work in schools that look very different from today’s. The discussion focused on new roles centered on facilitation, connection, and collaboration rather than traditional classroom teaching, and on the pressures that might drive long-term change in education.

We’re big mind map people, and MindMeister has our minds a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that makes it easy to import FreeMind and MindJet MindManager maps, collaborate with others, track history, publish and embed maps, and even get Twitter update alerts—all while smoothing out that “publishing hump” much like Skitch and Jing.