:Connecting the Dots

I presented at NECC Unplugged today in a very noisy but welcoming Blogger’s Cafe.  My topic was, “Grassroots Technology Change, or: Stop Telling People What to Do.”  I spent a long time preparing a long text for a 10-minute “TED-type” talk.  When the time came, I plugged in my mic and opened the floodgates.  It was hard to stay focused on the text and hard to keep people engaged with so many people walking past and so many conversations going on around the room.  But more clapped than booed  (OK, no one booed) and at least one attendee came up afterwards to congratulate me and discuss.  It was over before it began but I’m glad I did it.  Click here to view the complete version of that long text.

The weirdest moment occured as I was waiting to present and took a casual look around the room.  The woman sitting next to me was reading this blog!  So strange to see your writing on someone else’s screen…

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My bags may not be packed yet, but at least I’m thinking about what I’ll be bringing to San Antonio when I attend NECC next week. I’m also thinking about where I’ll go, what I’ll do, and who I want to see when I’m there. Undoubtedly, I will be spending a lot of time talking to vendors as I stroll the show floor; I would estimate that in each of my other visits to NECC I’ve probably spent about 5-8 hours walking through the exhibit hall.

So I appreciate all too well Ryan Bretag’s warnings about getting swept up in the buzzwords and glitz when you walk through those convention hall doors. Bretag has chosen not to attend this year, apparently fed up with not only the salespeople but the pundits and attendees mindlessly spouting “web 2.0″ and the like. Maybe a little extreme, but I think he’s right in encouraging those of us who do attend to be critical. Thinking about his post, I would suggest keeping in mind the following when dealing with those sweet-talking reps:

They want your district’s money and while they might not lie to get it, they will certainly bend the truth. Go up to a software vendor whose literature describes their product as geared towards K-6 and tell them you teach eighth grade. Sit back and enjoy the show…

As you talk to them, ask yourself if this person really knows their product. And then ask yourself if they really understand education. Have they ever worked in a school? Did they use technology in the classroom? How long ago was that?

One of my favorite questions when talking to vendors is, “There are about 20 different brands of whoozy-whatzits on the market. What differentiates yours from the rest?” Another gem: “What do people dislike the most about this product and what is your company doing to address those issues?”

As you discuss that wonderful piece of hardware/software/web site/etc., expand your consideration to include things like the availability of support, training, and user communities. What is the roadmap for the future development of this product?
There are always other attendees standing around the booth while you’re getting a demo. Talk to them about what you’re seeing. Learn from them and be frank in sharing your reactions and let the sales team overhear and react.

The absolute bottom line: how will this help students in my class/school/district to learn? So easy to lose sight of with that shiny gizmo in your hands and Mr. Salesperson whispering sweet nothings in your ear – but so crucial!

I think it’s helpful to think ahead of time about what you want to see. In my case, I’m going to be looking at document cameras, web-based keyboarding software, and possibly anti-spam solutions. Going in with a shopping list prevents you from getting distracted and allows you to minimize time on the floor and maximize time spent with colleagues in and out of sessions talking about learning. After all, that’s what we’re going there for, isn’t it?

Image: Chestnuts for Sale by The Beardster (Creative Commons)

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Vicki Davis is talking about how the AP’s backlash against bloggers might portend a similar clash between blogging teachers and more “established” voices in the Ed Tech world.  I’m not sure it’s going to be so.  Is it a shift away from control of the discourse by powerful institutions or is it an expansion of the discourse to include more, smaller members of the ed tech community?  Personally, I don’t think the powerful corporations, state and local school hierarchies, and “cult of personality” pundits are going anywhere any time soon.  But I do think that blogging will put more of them into direct contact with the people “in the trenches” and give those people more of a say.  It’s not a bigger slice of the pie for the small guys – it’s a bigger pie.

I’m reading The Long Tail right now and one important point that he makes is that the niche items in the long tail don’t displace the “hits” at the head.  Hits – massive ideas/products coming from powerful people/organizations – are not necessarily going anywhere.  It’s easy to miss this point in the book but it’s an important.  Wal-mart will still be the #1 music retailer in America with its puny selection of 4500 CD’s in each store; at the same time, Amazon and iTunes will continue to make money hand over fist selling millions of MP3 files that that only get a handful of downloads per track.  In the same way, I think we will always have textbook companies, state mandates, and “establishment” ed tech pundits running around conferences.  But they will be sharing the stage with a lot of “nobodies.”  The smartest among them will welcome it and profit from building those connections.

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I’ve always been a fan of focused, incremental professional development. Find a few areas that are “ripe” and work them hard with whatever group of teachers you happen to be helping. I talk with a building tech committee and ask them what they think we should be focusing on and we’ll throw around a few topics and that largely sets my agenda for part or all of the school year. For example, at our high school, we made a push with wikis during the spring, and a few of our teachers made important steps forward in their classrooms.

But David Warlick’s got me thinking that, especially with the constellation of web 2.0 technologies, maybe each tool can’t be taught in isolation from the rest. In a post on “Tying It Together,” he discusses one teacher who approached him recently and said that she was finally “getting it” after seeing a presentation on web 2.0 and personal learning networks:

She continued that she knew about and had played with blogs, wikis, and RSS, and understood them functionally. But she said that after this conference she saw how they all worked together, that there really is a new connectedness today where information flows in logical and directable ways, connecting us not only to the content we need, but to the people we need, not merely because of proximity — but through the content.

Maybe trying to teach teachers about blogging without introducing them to RSS and wikis is a mistake. Maybe the “focus on one tool at a time” approach is robbing teachers of the context they need to understand how these technologies support and reinforce one another and, taken as a group, represent a whole new communication paradigm.

But who has the time? With so few hours for professional development, how can we effectively introduce teachers to “the whole enchilada” in a way that is meaningful, in a way that connects with classroom practice? And does such an approach result in information overload? Is it better to ask teachers to try to swallow the whole web 2.0 thing at once and then go out and integrate it with their practice or to keep them moving along a slow and steady path that may prevent them from seeing the big picture, a path where one tool is forgotten/discarded by the time the next one comes along? Our teachers are standing on the deck staring down in to the giant pool that is the read/write web; do we structure professional development along the lines of toe-dipping or cannonballs?

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Will Richardson brought my attention to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr poses the question: Is the internet re-wiring our brains? Noting that he and many of his friends can no longer concentrate deeply as they read for extended periods, Carr asks if the way we think is being shaped by this new medium of hyperlinks and infoglut. Obviously skeptical about the internet as a positive force in the evolution of our culture, Carr nevertheless makes some good points and raises some very valid concerns. I have two specific problems with his article, however:

1. I think his characterization of Google as the embodiment of Taylor’s principles of scientific management is way off:

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

This is the company that tells its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on projects of their choosing not directly related to their core job function. They manipulate their corporate logo to commemorate significant dates in the progress of the arts and science.  There’s a lot about Google that scares me; but I think that overall their corporate culture is one that celebrates non-linear thinking and creativity.  In the same way that so many viewed the IBM of the 50’s and 60’s as a monolithic culture of conformity and order (in spite of their “Think” motto), I think Carr mis-characterizes Google’s attempt to make information manageable in the service of free thought as an attempt to mechanize thought. 

2. I have to assume that an editor titled the piece. I say this because in spite of all of his concerns about how the Internet is changing the way we think, Carr is very honest about his abivalence. He opens his conclusion noting, “Maybe I’m just a worrywort.” And while he offers a very convincing argument that the internet is changing how we process information, I don’t think he ever goes so far as to equate that new way of thinking with “stupidity.” Regardless of whether it is Carr or his editor who is to blame, I think we have to stop and consider not only what we have lost, but what we have gained. If we do indeed “think in hyperlinks,” then perhaps we are developing a new capacity to draw connections between disparate ideas, people, and works. Perhaps the structure of the internet reflects the way our culture has evovled into a postmodern one characterized by diversity and interconnectedness and if our brains our evolving in the same direction, they will serve us all the better in this new world. 

Carr shows that clearly the notion of what terms like “literacy” and “intelligence” is changing.  Will we stand by and let others define what’s important or will we play a role in re-interpreting these concepts?

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In The Next Generation of Bloggers, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb brought my attention to youthbloggers.net, a community for teen bloggers.  It looks like it’s just getting off the ground but I’m happy to see kids supporting and encouraging one another as they try to get their message out to the world.  Imagine that: kids helping each other with writing in their free time.  So much for the, “kids can’t write because they spend all day playing video games” theory. 

What does it say that teens had to create their own support community to learn how to blog?  I guess they’re not getting it in schools, where I suspect the five-paragraph “sandwich” essay (”Your introduction and conclusion are the bread, the three body paragraphs are the ham and cheese!”) still reigns supreme.  I guess that, faced with writing in artificial genres and for a limited audience of one (the teacher), kids have chosen to create their own learning community where they can work together to understand how to communicate in this new medium.  More power to them; I’ll be watching youthbloggers.net as it grows.

One concern: many of the forum posts focus on blogging for money.  I suppose that’s OK – it’s easy to forget how cash-strapped we all were at that age and how hard it is to find a job.  But I hope to see kids blogging out of a sense of passion, intellectual curiosity, and activism.  Hopefully, youthbloggers will help teens with something to say to develop their voice and get their message heard.

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I introduced PBwiki to a number of teachers at our high school recently. One just ran with it and now has her ninth grade social studies classes busily putting together review materials on her “Globalpedia.” For the others, I’ve decided to offer a little carrot: an online summer reading list for use by the faculties at our three schools. I thought this would be a simple way to expose people to wikis: a wiki of just four pages (Introduction, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography) which could be read quickly and subjected to simple, minor edits.  Focus on something that most teachers know about and like to do at a time when they are gearing up to do a lot of it.

I started by trying to convince the few teachers who were already comfortable using wikis to go in and add a few books. Nothing more intimidating than a blank page staring back at you when you’re a wiki newbie. Once I had seeded the wiki a bit, I sent a blast e-mail to all of the teachers inviting them to participate. Many responded asking to be invited into the wiki and thanking me for putting it all together. But since then, only a few have actually gone in and added their own favorite books.

Frustrating. Am I being too impatient here? Is it just the wrong time of year? Or is the problem that these people thought they were getting a freebie, an opportunity to grab a few titles and run off to the bookstore without adding their own two cents? Is it just that they don’t get it – the fact that in this world the quality of the resource depends almost entirely on the community’s willingness to build it? Who knows? Maybe it just needs time…

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Forgive the bad pun. I spent an hour or so last night playing with some of the edugames linked from 26 Learning Games to Change the World (which I found in a recent David Warlick post). The best of the lot that I tried has to be Globalwarminginteractive.com. What a great way for kids to learn about the problem of sustainability. You play three roles – policy, economic, and science adviser – to the leadership of Brazil over a 100-year span between 1960 and 2060. The player manipulates tax rates, budgets, and policy in an effort to keep the economy going without burning out the environment. The player is presented with just enough data to make those decisions as he or she proceeds through 10-year “turns.” It’s enough data to understand the underlying systems without over-simplifying this very complex issue. And the data are not just numbers: it’s presented in a very rich but clean Flash interface which includes graphs, text narratives, and brief movie clips. This will engage kids, give them something to think about, and help them to understand this pressing problem. One minor drawback: I would have enjoyed seeing the actual data on how these numbers changed in the “real” Brazil.

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I was just reading the comments to Will Richardson’s latest post and was amazed and the mix: nobodies (like me) not just rubbing elbows but conversing with some of the biggest names in our field: Will, Gary Stager, Chris Sessums, and others. People who don’t just present but who keynote at conferences. People who write the books and articles that we all read. And I’m thinking to myself, “the internet, web 2.0, this is it! It’s breaking down the walls. It’s all coming true. It’s no longer the ivory tower vs. the trenches.”

But is that true outside of the field of educational technology? We tell teachers they should build out their “personal learning networks” and get in on the conversation, but what is the conversation like in their fields? I suspect it’s not so rich as it is up here in the choir loft. Take a look at the latest issue of Mathematics Teacher and try searching for any of the authors of the articles on Technorati or Google BlogSearch. I hope you do better than I did, because as far as I can tell, the five or six that I looked at had no online presence whatsoever. Ouch. Then try searching for blogs on Technorati using search terms like “geometry teacher” or “high school geometry.” Double-ouch. Not only are the experts not part of the conversation, there is no conversation.

A sobering exercise, but one that I will remember the next time I stand in front of a group of teachers and tell them how wonderful blogs are for professional development. It’s possible that the stuff is out there and I’m just missing it. But maybe we just aren’t there yet. If that’s true, how do we get there? How do we jump start these conversations so teachers can see the wonderful things we’re all seeing when we fire up our RSS readers and go running around the edublogsphere?

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