2 Cents Worth

In going through some books (I’m surprised how old Millennials Rising [2000] and Growing Up Digital [1998] are now), and ran across the Participant Rights and Rules that Don Tapscott used in the kids interactive forum he used in preparing the book. They seem especially appropriate for today’s classroom blogging communities.

• You are entitled to express your opinions.
• You are entitled to an audience.
• You are expected to learn.
• Your are expected to teach.
• You have a right to disagree.
• You have a right to respond.
• It is your privilege to change your mind.
• It is your privilege to remain silent.

There are others that should be added concerning appropriate communication, but I really liked to positive direction of these rules.

The Arizona Technology in Education Alliance holds three ed tech conferences each year. I’ve been asked to keynote each of them this school year. Since many educators attend all of the conferences, and each conference has a specific theme, I have to deliver three different keynotes — and the first one is brand new to me. The themes this year are:

• Who are we Educating?
• What is Important to Learn?
• What is a Technology Supported Learning Environment?

Most ed tech keynoters have presentations on how our kids are different today. I’ve not done one like that, though I have snippets that I can pull from other presentations. Right now, I’m skimming through Millennials Rising by Howe & Strauss, and Growing up Digital, by Tapscott, and was surprised at how dated both of these books are. A lot has happened in the last five years. Or is it that I’ve had high school aged children over the past five years. I’m not sure, but I have a lot more research to do.

One thing that did occur to me yesterday, that I think is important, is the nature of our digital divide. There are lots of digital divides, each with its own seeds for danger. What I was thinking about was the digital divide between tech-savvy students and students with little or no access to networked digital information outside the classroom — and to some extent, the digital divide between tech-savvy students and less-savvy teachers.

The literacy divide of the 20th century distinguished between people who could functionally read and those who could not. Democracy was certainly at stake, but to no small degree, so was commerce. The literate could consume the messages of content producers.

Today, the divide has multiplied, because people with contemporary (digital/21st century) literacy skills not only consume content, but they are the content. Being literate means being part of the network. The difference is not merely the individual who can read and individual who can not. It’s the difference between networked communities of power, and individuals who are cut off. This is a distinction too broad to ignore or postpone.

Consider IM Speak, the abbreviations that students use in their instant message conversations. It is, in no small way, a new grammar, and these students invented it spontaneously in collaboration. The industrial literacy way would have been to assign a standards committee to establish a new grammar, and then spend years teaching it in our classrooms. We should be amazed and in awe of this accomplishment. It happened not because these kids were digitally literate, but because being digitally literate meant being part of a network — a community of power.

Where is our community of power?

AzTEA Conference Attendees

I will be using a feature of Technorati to identify blog postings that concern your conference. If you will be attending the conference, and will be posting blog articles about the event, before, during, after, or in between, then place the following code somewhere in the text of the article.

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/azteaconference” rel=”tag”>AzTEAconference</a>

Technorati should find your blog article and aggregate it together with other related blogs. If you will be taking photos at the conference and posting them on Flickr, then they too can be tagged with AzTEAconference.

It would also be helpful to signup on Technorati, go to account, and claim your blog. This will cause the service to regularly check your blog for new entries.

See you there at the conference!

I’ve had an interesting exchange with Marco Polo (Autono Blogger), through comments on a blog I posted a couple of days ago, Some Quotes from Presentation Slides. The quotes were from various presentation slides I’ve capture over the last many weeks with my digital camera. One set of quotes implies that we should allow our students to take the lead in what and how they learn. Here are the quotes, which are from a Marc Prensky presentation.

Does everything we do have great engagement and gameplay?
Would kids spend their own money for it?

Does everything we do empower our students?
Would kids do it in their leisure time?

Does everything we do change our students’ behavior, beliefs & attitudes for the better?
Would they make their friends do it?

It is common to believe that institutions are part of the problem, that we need to break them, and allow students to rebuild their learning experience. This is a dangerous notion, although there is much about it that is true, in my opinion. Still, Marco, in his latest comment, says:

The difficulty I see and face, is that, probably due to their incarceration in high school, my students have developed bad study habits and self-sabotaging behaviour. I’ve tried letting them take the lead, but that didn’t really work - they just think I’m goofing off, then they goof off too, and nothing productive gets done.

Read the entire exchange

It is a fine line that we walk, razor fine.

One of the most compelling ideas that came out of Got Game (by John Beck and Mitchell Wade) and the media around it, was the role of the boss. In many video games, the player must face a large and powerful monster before moving to the next level. The next level is where they want to be, and they will fight that monster again, and again, and again, until they learn how to get past him. That monster is always called, the boss.

To the video game generation, the boss is someone who is a barrier between the player and where the player wants to be. Beck suggests that the supervisor (or teacher) should instead become the strategy guide or cheat sheet, a document players download from the Net or purchase in video game stores. They include shortcuts through the barriers of the game.

Perhaps our challenge, as teachers, is to compellingly define and describe that next level, create a place where the players want to be. If we do it right, then our students will come to us for the short cuts (curriculum) that help them get there. Classroom learning, will always require a leader. But is it better to push a stalled car, or steer one that has someplace to go.

I’m not exactly sure who she is, except that she lives in New Zealand, is interested in science, and is probably a student. But Cherrie, of Cherrieland, posted an important question as a comment to yesterday’s blog about Class Blogmeister. I responded to her comment, but this is such an important question, that I decided to post it as its own blog entry.

Cherrie said…

I don’t understand when people say that teachers (and students) have to “learn how to blog” - what does this mean, how to write interesting, concise blogs that people will want to read, or how to type it up and click the submit button and changing links and profiles and editing… are there secrets to blogging I don’t know about?! (ARGH!)

Cherrie, I like your question because it points to something that irks me as well. Even though a hair just behind my left ear stands straight up when I hear it, I usually do not object when people say, “I need to learn how to blog,” or “My students need to develop blogging skills.” I don’t object (usually) because they are probably going in the right direction in thinking outside the traditional classroom box, and some important learning will probably happen within the context of blogging instruction. But it’s based on the belief that we need to learn and teach technology skills — that it’s about the technology.

It isn’t.

It’s about information.

Certainly, technology has changed. But what has the greatest impact on us is how the nature of information has changed. I believe that teachers and students should be blogging, not so that they can learn to blog, but so that they can learn to communicate. In a couple of years, it will probably be a different tool. But we’ll still be accomplishing our goals through the quality of our communication.

Thanks for this very important observation.

Periodically, Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, posts the State of the Blogosphere articles in his “Sifry’s Alerts” blog. Here are a few interesting points from his October 17 report:

• A new weblog is created about every second.
• Recent spikes are partly due to increase in Chinese blogs.
• 55% of new bloggers are still posting 3 months later.
• 13% of all blogs update weekly (or more).

Technorati is currently tracking 18.9 million weblogs. The blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 5 months. That rate has remained constant for three years.

The image to the right indicates spikes in blogging activity, tied to historic events. Several months ago, Sifry described the blogosphere as the exhaust of the human attention stream. It’s the first time in history that a written history of peoples experiences is being laid down for mass consumption and for the record.

It seems to me that this is an entirely new kind of content that is layering over our more formally published knowledge. It is not perfect, by any stretch, but to call it valueless, would mean denying ourselves of some of the most original ideas to be available to humanity. In a time of rapid change, it’s original ideas that will help us solve brand new problems.

The linchpin to truly leveraging this and other networked digital information is a literacy that addresses dynamic and participatory information environments. We need to learn and teach how to:

• Expose the truth when information is increasingly networked (coming from almost anyone, anywhere).
• Employing information that is digital and constantly changing.
• Expressing ideas when our ideas must compete for attention in an overwhelming information environment.
• Use information ethically, when we have become so dependent on what we know and can learn.

2¢ Worth.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Blogmeister, so I thought I’d just mention some statistics. There are currently almost 1500 teachers using blogmeister, managing more than 11,500 student accounts. There are users in 46 states of the U.S. and 37 countries. So far, more than 22,000 articles have been posted by teachers and students.

I suspect that we are approaching the capacity of the hosting service that I’m using, so I will have a decision to make soon. My choices, as I see it, are to move the site to a more robust server solution or limit new teachers to an invitation system. I may set up a procedure where new users will have to receive an invitation from current Blogmeister teachers. I’m still struggling with this decisions.

The fact is that there are other options that were not available when I first built Blogmeister. Alan November’s November Learning is attracting a lot of users. James Farmer is now offering student blogging accounts through Learner Blogs, which he hosts through his Wordpress installation. I suspect that more enterprising tech directors will soon be installing and tweaking tools like Manila and Wordpress to server their teacher and student bloggers. The purpose of Blogmeister was to provide a place for classroom managed blogging experiences for students, when there wasn’t anything else available.

Experimenting…

It’s an A.D.D. thing where you wake up after only four hours of sleep with a brilliant idea…or so it seems at the time. Anyway, I finally got up at 4:00 AM and started programming. Here’s how it works.

If you are a teacher, using Class Blogmeister, you now have a new word cloud icon for each article when viewing them in “edit” mode. When you click the cloud icon, a word cloud window is generated, displaying the article. Words that appear in the blog articles of other teachers appear blue. Larger fonts indicate words that appear in many other teachers’ blogs.

If you click a commonly used word, Blogmeister generates a list of teacher articles that include that word. You can then click an article title back into Class Blogmeister, where you can read it in its entirety and comment.

The idea is to use the content that is continually being generated inside of Blogmeister to promote potentially valuable connections between teachers, and, perhaps, one day, connections between students.

I am going through my iPhoto library, sifting out redundant or otherwise useless pictures. I frequently pull out my camera during keynotes and other presentations that I’m watching, to take pictures of important slides — rather than working too hard to copy them down. Here are some of the quotes I’m running across that you might like or find valuable.

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet”

“When ever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble”

Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook, May 23, 1903

I suspect that this next one came from a presentation that I saw by Marc Prenski

Does everything we do have great engagement and gameplay?
Would kids spend their own money for it?

Does everything we do empower our students?
Would kids do it in their leisure time?

Does everything we do change our students’ behavior, beliefs & attitudes for the better?
Would theymake their friends do it?

This is definitely from one of Prenski’s slides.

“Gamers have amassed thousands of hours of rapidly analyzing new situations, interacting with characters they don’t really know, and solving problems quickly an independently.”
Beck & Wade, Got Game

That’s it for now!

This quote, Putt’s Law, came through my Google page today.

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

To what degree do you think we might substitute technology with education?

Perhaps one of the best small conferences around is Technology & Learning’s TechForums. They evolved out of the old T&L Expos that use to be held in New York and Chicago each year. The TechForum, which offers a balance of administrative/tech issues with curriculum, will grow to Austin, Texas this year (Nov 10), and additional cities next year, as well as NY (Last Week) and Chicago (Apr 28, ‘06).

I attended the NY conference and presented on Blogging and other Web 2.0 topics. One of the most important benefits of these conferences is their size. I feel like I got to meet a majority of the people who were there. The Texas event will feature a keynote address by Hall Davidson (Thinking as Big as the World is Small), now of the Discovery Educator Network. Morning panels will include:

• Leading the Way with Help from Data — Frank Auriemma & James Ashby
• Virtual Schools, Real Learning — Bruce Friend, Cliff Blackerby, & Cathy Galloway
• Video Conferencing & High-Bandwidth Connectivity — Carol Willis, Gerri Maglia, & Dan Updegrove
• Technology-Based Assessment — Miguel Guhlin & Joel Rush

The afternoon will feature more presentations:

• Digital Story Telling, Visual Literacy & 21st Century Skills — Joe Brennan & David Jakes
• Blogs & RSS: Tapping into the Global Conversatioin — David Warlick
• Classrooms, Content, and Kids — Pete Reilly
• Copyright, the Constitution, and Schools: The Colonials Got it Right! — Hall Davidson

There’ll also be lots of opportunities to network through receptions and roundtables.

Unfortunately, the sessions on video games will not be following TechForum to Texas. New York’s keynote address, by Bernie Trilling of Oracle, touched on gaming, and there was also a panel with Eric Klopfer of MIT, Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill, and Bill MacKenty, a teacher from Martha’s Vineyard, who uses off the shelf video games with his elementary students.

We tried to use a community Wiki for a collaborative notebook in New York, but my hosting company periodically does something that prevents meta tag redirects from working, and it failed. I’ve since started using a Java based redirect routine, and it seems to work very well. People will be able to go to a web page, type their name and the name of the event, and it will create a wiki page for them that they can use to take notes. All of the notes pages will be linked together so that all attendees will have access to each others notes.

In addition, and at the suggestion of Texans Miguel Guhlin and Wesley Fryer, this forum will be blogged and much of it may be podcasted. Both Miguel and Wesley have suggested strategies where all blogs posted about the event, will be aggregated to the Technology & Learning web site. Podcast recordings will also be available there, as well as iTunes Music store. This is a bit of an experiment, but like all things loosely joined, the winds of uncertainty must do battle with the winds of innovation.

Attendees, blogging the event, should place the following code within the text of their articles.

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/techforumtx” rel=”tag”>techforumtx</a>

It is also helpful to register your blog on Technorati.

You can see all blogs that have already been posted about the even here.

techforumtx

Will Richardson has been sharing his experiences in the Monterey area of California, where he was speaking at the Internet @ Schools West conference. Yesterday, he reported a story that came out of one of his presentations.

But here is the moment that has my stomach roiling (aside from the nasty “snack” the airline gave out): at the end of my presentation, a woman in the audience related the problem with blogs at her school. “The kids are posting questions and answers to tests in between periods so kids later in the day know what’s coming. What do we do about that?” My first response was “sounds pretty inventive to me.” And I know that some people took that as being flip. But I was being serious. What a great use of the technology, not from an ethical sense, certainly, but from a collaboration and information sense. This is the new reality of a Read/Write world where knowledge is accessible, number one, and knowledge is shared instead of being kept closeted, number two. These kids are finding ways to share the information they need to be successful at what they are doing. Isn’t that something we should cheer? (Am I in trouble yet?)

Read the full post here

Here is the comment that I posted to Will blog:

An uncle of mine recently wrote a book about my family. Even though we go back nine generations on this continent, it’s a short book, because there isn’t that much to tell. One thing that fascinated me, though, was that my family valued education. My grandfather earned a degree in the Classics, driving himself to classes at the University of North Carolina in a horse drawn carriage. His brother earned a degree in engineering at North Carolina State University.

However, when they returned to rural Lincoln County North Carolina, there were no newspapers nor magazines, and very few books available to them. Being educated, at that time, meant having knowledge permanently stored in their brains, and the act of educating was to cause knowledge to enter their brains and stay there.

Today, we are surrounded by information and knowledge. Media is available any time and any where. Not only that, but the information is constantly changing — and here is the true crime that we commit when we inflict industrial notions of education on information-driven youngsters. We imply, in the way that we teach and assess, that what they are learning is omni-important and absolute, and that it will serve them the rest of their lives; when we know, as do they, that the answers are constantly changing.

If I were still teaching history, I’d take my students into the library for each test and say, “Answer my questions — with the knowledge you can find here.”

I want to add something here, lest someone thinks that I’m condoning cheating. We must refine our definitions of cheating in the technology-rich, information-driven world. We must also redefine ethics, teaching, learning, curriculum, literacy, and what it means to be educated. The playing field has changed, and so too must the rules.

No child should be rewarded for taking what they did not earn. However, the greater crime occurs, when we prevent our children from resorting to learning avenues that are perfectly relevant to today’s information environment, just because it looks like cheating to us.

Children will be resourceful in achieving the goals that we set for them, and this is what we should teach. How do we steer that resourcefulness into positive avenues — and perhaps the most important thing is, where will we get the time to figure all of this out?

2¢ worth…