:Connecting the Dots

As Scott McLeod points out, not everyone is happy with the arrival of NECC Unplugged at the Blogger’s Cafe.  Havinig spent time in the BC and presented at NECC Unplugged I, too, think the integration of the two could have been handled a little better - or else they should go their separate ways next year.   To begin with, the positioning of the BC at the conference site was great in terms of drawing lots of people from the nearby foot traffic on the concourse.  This was great for getting people involved but boy, did it make it tough to present.  Also, the layout of the space itself made it difficult.  It seemed like the Unplugged presenter was shoe-horned into the corner but the tables and seats were pushed out into the middle of the area.  There was a large gulf between the speaker and the audience, which meant he/she needed a mic and had to speak all the more loudly to engage everyone.  This in turn probably distracted all those who just came to sit quietly and reflect or to share some conversation with a friend in the Cafe.

The solution?  Maybe next year the Unplugged “stage” is placed in a space adjacent to the Cafe, where people can watch and hear what is going on, if they like, but also have the opportunity to do their BC thing in peace.  It’s important that all of those bloggers still have access to the Unplugged content, but they shouldn’t feel like we’ve invaded.

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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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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 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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For a long time I’ve been looking at models of professional development that go beyond the one-shot after-school workshop. As I’ve studied models of adult learning and become more familiar with the ways that teachers are successful at improving their practice, I’ve realized that good professional development experiences share a few core qualities:

• They are sustained, occurring over weeks, months, or even years.
• They are gradual and incremental, involving a lot of short but connected steps with moments of reflection and integration in between.
• They are collaborative, involving questions, support, and conversation with other teachers in similar situations.
• They directly meet the teacher’s needs, offering solutions to real problems in our every day experience in the classroom.
• Over time, they change the way we see the world and therefore what we do with our students each day in the classroom.

As I become more invested in reading and tracking blogs through RSS, I’m coming to realize that those 15 minute sessions browsing headlines in Pageflakes and posting comments on blogs are starting to add up. Every day I have a little opportunity to see what others are doing and to ask myself why I do what I do and how I could do it better.

When a teacher starts using an RSS aggregator to keep on top of news stories, blog posts, and wiki updates, she is really taking the reins and becoming the editor-in-chief of her own professional development journal. “I want to learn about differentiating instruction in a social studies classroom and using a SmartBoard. I found six or seven experts in each area and they are going to be frequent contributors to my journal. When I don’t understand or disagree, I’m going to let them know and listen carefully to their responses and the comments of other people like me. At the end of the year, I’m going to know a lot more about these topics than I do now.”

The best part of it is that the singular voice of the workshop lecturer or methods text (shudder) gives way to a cacophony of differing agendas, viewpoints, backgrounds, and ideas. We are forced to confront the complexity of our classroom experience and to forge - and frequently thereafter to re-visit and re-evaluate - our own understandings and practices. Simple answers provided by gurus don’t long satisfy intelligent teachers: they need to pick and choose from a buffet of best practices and ideas. Our RSS professional development journal does just that.

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Lately I’ve been looking at blogs and video podcasts from Iraq and other areas in the Middle East.  After reading about the situation in Iraq in the New York Times and listening to pundits discuss it on Meet the Press, I felt I was missing a critical piece of the picture.  We spend a lot of time talking about the war’s meaning to America and Americans: Is it a help in the War on Terror or a hinderance?  How is it affecting America’s position and credibility among the countries in the world?  Will it expand into a regional conflict?  But what does it all mean to the people of Iraq?  I knew long ago that we had failed to “win” their hearts and minds, but what’s in those hearts and minds now?  And, more specifically, how do the hearts and minds of Iraqis differ from one another: mainstream media speak of “the Iraqi people” or the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, but rarely do they take that next step and actually try to represent the diversity of thought and feeling among the Iraqis.

Blogs fill that void nicely.  The one that seems to be getting the most press lately, a video blog, is Alive in Baghdad.  It’s a series of short video interviews with normal Iraq citizens trying to keep their lives going in the midst of a war: a father trying to get medical care for a sick child, a Catholic priest reflecting on co-existence of Muslims and Christians, and so on.   Two others that I’ve enjoyed are Me-vs-Myself and Raed in the Middle.  I found them through Best of the Arab Blogs, which contains links to dozens of English language blogs from the Arab world.

I hope a lot of American students are seeing these blogs, but I fear they are not.  How are kids learning about this war and what role should their schools and teachers play?  There are dozens of great social studies and current events lessons here.  And each blog represents an opportunity for an American student to actually connect with an Iraqi via e-mail, Skype, whatever…  Here’s an opportunity to actually do social history as it happens: I hope we don’t let it slip away.

(Photo by DAVID GREENHALGH)

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