A rather interesting video that attempts to sum up some of the shifts and changes that schools are undergoing. There are some interesting video bites in here, but some very succinctly summarise the sorts of issues facing this institution we know as “school”.

Not much more I can add to it… just watch it.

Here’s an interesting thought about the nature of communication through conversation…

Michael Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, and the creator of several well-watched YouTube videos about the nature of web 2.0. I’m sure most of the edublogosphere has probably seen “The Web is Us/ing Us“, “Information R/Evolution” and “A Vision of Students Today“. All of these videos have done the rounds of the web in a completely viral way, and if you haven’t yet seen them, you should.

In an interview with John Batelle from Searchblog, Wesch was asked about the videos and some of the ideas he was exploring by making them. It’s an interesting read, but I was particularly struck by one of his responses in the comment section at the end of the interview, as he was counter-responding to a long string of blog comments from multiple readers…

“The Web speeds up the process of rebuttal, reply, and revision and calls forth a different approach. The radically collaborative technologies emerging on the Web create the possibility for doing scholarship in the mode of conversation rather than argument, or to transform the argument as war metaphor into something that suggests collaboration rather than combat”

… and this…

“Even now, as I am answering multiple questions with one long comment at the bottom of a blog post, the structure of the medium is in some way affecting how I am responding. On a forum I would address each question individually in separate threads. These seemingly minor differences are important because all human relationships are mediated by communication. If we change the way we communicate, we change human relationships, and since society is ultimately based on human relationships, those seemingly minor differences can have a profound effect on society, especially if they become dominant or very popular modes of communication.
I can’t see into the future, but what gives me hope is that there are now more people than ever capable of creating and contributing to how these communication structures might be built, and even more people capable of contributing to a serious conversation about the implications.”

This seems to be a common theme, this idea of conversation as a means of evolving shared knowledge. Again, I’ll use the phrase “Learning is a Conversation” as I think it sums up this idea that by engaging in an ongoing conversation we eventually start to spot patterns, see the big picture, and construct our own way of thinking about the world.

This is especially important in our school systems, where conversations between teachers and teachers, students and students, and teachers and students may be the only really effective way to evolve the sorts of ideas and knowledge needed for a 21st century education.

We now live in a world which has fundamentally changed. The idea of learning as a finite body of knowledge which can be transferred from the information-haves to the information-have-nots is no longer tenable. Schools cannot continue to be places where learning is simply about remembering facts and definitions. Information is no longer scarce… Google changed all that. The real task of learning is now to effectively engage with ideas, to discuss and debate, learning about them through ongoing conversation. By engaging in learning as a conversation we can start to get real traction from the neverending stream of ideas around us, expanding our thinking in agreement or argument, encouraging our learners to be critical and creative thinkers.

And as we change our thinking through these conversations, perhaps we become capable of changing our world; which is perhaps what schools ought really be about in the first place.

Tags: conversation, michaelwesch, youtube, information

I didn’t write this, but I enjoyed reading it and wanted to share it.  It comes straight from mouth of Seymour Papert, one of the most influential thinkers of our time.  This quote comes from a speech Papert gave, and is worth reading the whole thing.

“School as we’ve known it is based on an assembly-line model. And the assembly line was a great invention when Henry Ford made it. And the school might have been a great invention when it was made, but it is an assembly-line model. You come into school, you’re in the first grade, in the first period of the day. You do what the first chapter of the textbook says. You go to second period, third period, second grade, third grade. It’s an assembly line; at each point some new pieces of knowledge are put in.
Why we did this was because we had only such primitive knowledge management technology as chalk and blackboard–and even printing is inflexible, impersonal. With our new forms of knowledge technology, there is no reason why we should have the assembly-line model. There is no reason why we should segregate people by age, rather than bring together people who share an interest, who share a style of doing things, who can do things in common.
When we break away from our mental blinkers enough to be able to throw off the idea that math means adding fractions and this other stuff that we learned in elementary school–which nobody ever does–we spend all that expensive money, and time, and frustration, and psychological damage for the people who don’t take to it, in order to program our children to do what a $2 calculator could do better.
We will break away from this one day. We will allow people to learn by following the things they believe in with passion and interest. They’ll learn more deeply. No, they won’t all learn the same things, but we don’t need them to learn all the same things. We want them to be diverse. We want them to be able to do different kinds of activities and bring different points of view.
But in order to do this, we have to break away from this idea that by a token presence of technology–which is all that a pencil in every classroom, or a computer in every classroom, or an Internet connection in every classroom, can be.
We have to break away from that, accept the fact that we have to give every child–not just one maybe, maybe several, but at least one–personal computer to be his or her own thing, to be used not to follow a curriculum, but to follow creative, personalized, diverse learning. That is possible. I think it’s just obscene to suggest that the richest country in the world can’t afford it.”

Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the Next Millennium

Tags: papert, learning, school

It’s sometimes difficult getting kids to understand the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don’t realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it. This video makes a pretty good point of showing the effect of this behaviour…

It’s something that both children and adults need to understand well. This is a post-Google world we live in. It’s no longer unusual that an employer Googles the name of a potential hire to check their reputation and see what they have done (or equally, not done). When you go out with a new person, it’s likely that your date has Googled you, MySpaced you or FaceBooked you to get a little bit of “background” on the sort of person you are. In a digital world you leave a trail behind you, often whether you mean to or not. Forum posts, blog posts, (and the comments you make to them), online projects you’ve taken part in, occasions your name has been mentioned in various online and printed publications, photos… if it ends up online, it’s probably there and it’s probably searchable. And you’d be amazed at how you can take lots of little pieces of data to form a fairly thorough picture of someone’s activities and reputation.

This can work in your favour too of course. As I was applying for jobs recently, I was actually hoping that potential employers would Google me as there is, fortunately for me, lots of positive stuff online - lots of technology projects and events I’ve taken part in which I imagine would have been relevant and supportive to the positions I was applying for. But the point is that had there been lots of negative stuff, there would have been virtually nothing I could have done about it. Try it with your own name and see what you get… wrap your name in quote marks to get Google to search it as a single entity, and of course it helps if your name is a little bit unusual as you will probably get more relevant results.

Get your kids to try this too. I recently encouraged my students to do a vanity search on their own name and while for many it turned up nothing, others were shocked at just how easy it was for their past to be dug up. There is probably not much you can do about ending up in the Google database (or any database for that matter), and in lots of cases it could even be a positive thing, but the lesson is to be aware and be careful of what you put online about yourself.

Do this exercise with your students. It’s a lesson worth learning early because if they learn it later it may be too late.

As a parent, it’s a fine line we walk sometimes in knowing where the boundaries are for your kids. We want to protect them from danger and shield them from hurt. At the same time, we need to allow them to experience the world and learn to interact with it in meaningful ways. This paradox of safety versus experience is a tricky balance to get right, but I’m convinced that we are probably the most overprotective generation of parents in history. A recent post here listed a number of tongue-in-cheek example of how much we seem to overreact to things that would have been much less of a drama a few years ago. How many of you went out playing all day when you were a kid, and the only rule was to be home by dark? No “Call me when you get there to let me know you arrived ok”… just “Bye dear, have fun playing!”

This video from the TED Talks series, called “5 Dangerous Things you should let your Children do” makes a similar observation that maybe we need to just lighten up a bit on our kids. Take a look…

In our schools I find we are developing the same, if not worse, overprotective behaviours. My last school insisted on having staff members walking the children across the road after school (it’s a high school!) - I found this laughable… we have them in class all day teaching them to be mature and independent thinkers and then we won’t let them cross a street without assistance. Our excursion (field trip) program became impossibly hard to work with over the past few years due to all the excessive safety regulations and the need to “guarantee” a safe environment outside the school. You can never get a total guarantee that a situation will be 100% safe - of course you want it to be as safe as possible - but when you start to compromise the creation of situations and environments in which to learn because there may be a small risk involved… I don’t know, that just seems silly to me. Life has sharp edges. Deal with it.

No one wants to see children get hurt, that’s for certain. Regardless of whether your role is that of teacher or parent, I’m sure we all want to see our children stay safe. My own daughter was bitten on the face by a dog a few years ago and the feeling of sheer panic and distress I felt as a parent as I looked down as the blood streaming out of the huge gash torn in her cheek was an indescribable anguish. But would I say to her to now stay away from all dogs? No way. She loves dogs. She’s fallen off a bike and skinned her leg a few times, but that doesn’t mean she should never ride a bike again. In the process of living, sometimes you’ll get a bit knocked around. That, quite literally, is life.

Kids - just like adults - need to occasionally go through some of the painful parts of life if they are to experience the wonder of what it means to live.

Coming soon. This little girl. And millions more like her. Curious. Smart. And not afraid of technology.

Let me rephrase that… Not only is she just “not afraid” of technology, she will expect to grow up in a world where technology comes in the form of easy-to-use devices that just work seamlessly to let her do things. She represents a generation of children for whom access to such technology is as basic as access to air, food and water. Look at her as she plays with this device… she didn’t read an instruction manual, she isn’t waiting for a training session in how to use it. As she grows up she won’t necessarily know or care how these things works, only that they lets her do the things she wants to do. She interacts with technology but probably doesn’t even think of it as interacting with technology.

When this little girl gets to school in just a few short years will she walk into a classroom where technology devices like this are an accepted tool in the learning process, or a classroom where they are banned? Will she be working in an environment where technologies are used as seamless and transparent tools for learning, or an environment where she has to go to the computer lab for her one hour of computers each week? Will her teachers start teaching her about technology by getting her to “do a PowerPoint” or type a letter using Word, or will they give her tasks that can be solved using collaborative communication technologies in innovative and creative ways. Will school for this little girl be an interesting and vibrant place which she is excited to attend, or will she become a student for whom school is a boring and unavoidable interruption to her day?

Perhaps the bigger question is, will you be excited or intimidated to have this little girl in your class? Because she is coming whether we are ready for her or not…

Thanks to Kim Cofino for twittering about this video.

While catching up on my Tweets tonight I noticed one from @shareski (and swooned over by @speters!) pointing out that Twitter made a cameo appearance on CSI, as shown in the video below…

It’s always interesting to see a less mainstream technology such as Twitter showing up in a very mainstream place like a top rating TV show… it’s sort of like being a teenager and seeing your dad wearing the same brand of clothing as you… You just sort of get the feeling that he’s only doing it to appear cool…

It seems to me that seeing Twitter on CSI signals a recognition of that technology, sort of the two ends of the long tail coming face to face for a moment. It’s like reading a novel where the main character is a webdesigner or a podcaster, rather than a lawyer or an accountant.

I’ve never watched CSI so I don’t know who they two characters are, but I really liked the exchange between them in this scene where they are looking through the victim’s Twitter page for clues. As they browse the page, one guys comments that because the victim was a blogger she may have left a clue amongst her tweets, and with a slightly sarcastic tone he says “Some people just don’t value privacy.”

His partner retorts that “They don’t expect privacy. They VALUE openness.”

His colleague snorts back… “Whatever.”

Listening to this exchange made me think about why some people are maybe less enthusiastic about embracing web 2.0 technologies. Whether they realise it on a conscious level or not, perhaps for many it really is about an idealogical struggle between two world views. Between valuing privacy or valuing openness. Many of our kids today seem to value openness more than they value privacy. Perhaps this gives an insight into why they are so willing to connect and share, so ready to engage in social networking practices, so willing to make connections online… perhaps they are growing up with a completely different mindset about the value of openness versus the importance of privacy.

As society’s values change it can create a shift in our ability to see things from a new perspective. My parents generation generally valued things like thrift, savings, hard work, stability, personal sacrifice, and yes, probably privacy. That’s quite a different picture I get of many kids today, where they seem to value things that are almost antithetical - living for the now, spending and materialism, flexibility, what’s-in-it-for-me, community and openness.

As an educator I have to keep reminding myself that there has been some fundamental changes in what my kids value compared to what my parents taught me to value. While I don’t want to put a blanket statement around this and make silly sweeping statement about “all kids today”, I think there is certainly some truth to the idea that there HAS been an underlying shift in values that cause our kids to see the world through a sightly different lens than we do.

And even more importantly, we need to make sure our response to this difference is not just “Whatever.”

Tags: web2.0, privacy, openness, csi, twitter

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas, and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I’m writing this now because I hadn’t written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn’t feel right.

But the habit is not just about writing, it’s about thinking. It’s about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It’s about simply not being able to let that river of ideas flow past you without having to respond in some way. I can’t imagine being exposed to this rich smorgasbord of ideas without having some reaction to them, and responding via a blog seems like such a natural thing to do. It’s definitely about the thinking and not the writing… (in fact if you only knew what a lousy typist I am, you’d realise that the actual writing is a real pain!)

So I blog. I can’t help myself.

What’s become really interesting though is the environment that the blogging habit exposes you to. Without realising it, I look at my feedreader these days and it amazes me just who I have been inviting into my world, and even more amazingly, who has been inviting me into theirs. Browsing through my Skype contact list is like a who’s who of incredible educators from all around the world. My Twitter feed is a rich tapestry of deep thoughts, trivial chatter and personal relationships, but it’s engaging me with these constant ideas about learning, teaching and the relationships we form with kids in our classrooms.

Having just gone through the process of applying for another job, it really struck me just how much my online world has contributed to who I am as an educator. I don’t have a string of letters after my name, in fact I’m not even teaching in the same discipline as I was originally trained. I’ve occasionally considered going back to university, doing some further study and becoming a bit more learned, but I look at the idea factory surrounding me and can’t seem to justify the time and cost involved… and although I’m not sure how I’d ask the question, I suspect my new school saw enough of this world reflected in my interview that it played a big part in them offering me the position.

I did go back to university a few years ago to do part of a masters course in educational technology. It was a good experience, and forced me to start reading literature about learning that I wouldn’t have done otherwise - Negroponte, Papert, Stoll, Cuban, Spender, etc - all names that I had never even heard before despite having been a teacher for many years. It was this exposure to ideas that flipped switches in my head and caused me to rethink a few things about school and learning. And it made me realise that many teachers never do this sort of thing at all. Try going to work on Monday and when your colleagues ask what you did on the weekend, tell then you went to an education conference (in your own time!) or read a book about learning theory, or chatted with other teachers about how to make learning more relevant, and see the sorts of odd looks you get, or the sarcastic “gee that must have been fun!” comments.

The thing is, I don’t mind learning. In fact I can’t imagine not learning. And exposure to this stream of ideas and thoughts and opinions is quite possibly the best environment for learning I’ve ever come across.

So maybe that makes me dysfunctional or just plain boring, but I really do enjoy the feeling of being stretched by new ideas all the time. I don’t like to be the same today as I was yesterday, I want to be growing all the time. And one of the most rewarding and amazing ways of getting that constant stream of brain food is through the blogging and the writing and the reading and the podcasting and the sharing and the conversing with other people who I think are some of the smartest, brightest, cleverest people I know.

Tags: blogging, pln, pd