:Connecting the Dots

Some quotes from a video I found on YouTube:

“They’re already socializing [online]; why not give them a venue where you can be part of the conversation?”

“The stuff that I know is valuable enough that people want to hear it.”

“We’re talking more… at all levels. I think we have to turn that transparency outward… and allow them to participate in the conversations as well.”

“Imagine a wikipedia not only populated by the masses looking for knowledge but also by a bunch of tech masters… who are also using the space for their own use. Now you’ve got the quality of the crowd and some zen masters.”

“We are moving from a role of being the ones who own the messages and deliver [them] to a role where we are just the facilitators. We’re encouraging, we’re enabling.”

I wish I could say these are quotes from students and teachers in some forward-looking, cutting edge school.  Unfortunately, they’re not.  They are Best Buy employees speaking in a video showcasing the company’s various social media tools and how they are helping to transform the company’s culture.  Clarence Fisher was the first to bring it to my attention in a brief post and the timing couldn’t be better: I’ll be introducing wikis to teachers in my inservice “New Technologies Seminar” course next week.

Now I’m no huge fan of Best Buy.  I was there last week and grew angry as I hovered next to two blue-shirted salespeople who were more interested in talking to each other than in helping me – and even angrier when I discovered that the GPS I wanted was out of stock.  But they certainly drank Circuit City’s milkshake and it seems like they are doing about as well as any retail outfit can in this economy.  Watching this video tells me that at least they’re trying.  Maybe one of those sales guys will be a little more attentive to his customers after reading about good customer service on the company’s wiki.

I’m sure many educators look down on places like Best Buy and the people who work there: pedestrian, commercial, too “Madison Ave.”  But if they can adopt these new technologies to serve their customers better, why can’t we?  No excuses in the video, no whining about time and training: just “I think what I have to say has value and I’m glad I have a place where I can express it, and read what my colleagues have to say, too.”

I hope that the day comes soon when it’s the educators who are providing the money quotes about collaboration, sharing, and empowerment, not floor workers in a retail electronics store.

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Well, another NECC has come and gone.  My family flew into San Anto yesterday and we’ll stick around Texas for the next week or so.  I was so drained from the conference that I fell asleep at 8:30 PM and didn’t wake up until 7:30 the next morning.  That’s close to a record for me.

Anyway, I’m still sorting it all out, but here’s a few of my initial reactions/reflections/thoughts/questions:

“Student-safe” Social Networking Sites are Big

I saw a number of these guys on the show floor, most notably Uniservity and SayWire.  There were others but these are the two I remember because they were such an interesting study in contrasts.  SayWire felt very provincial with a USA-only focus.  It was demoed for me by a teacher from Ohio and the emphasis seemed to be on collaboration within the school or district.  In contrast, Uniservity, a UK company, decked its booth out with flags of the world and brought students in from Hong Kong to demo their software.  Interestingly, they seed collaboration by launching their own content and projects for schools and teachers to sign on to.  SayWire essentially provides the network tool (similar to Ning, I suppose).  I think Uniservity’s global outlook is much more exciting.  Of course, there’s always TakingITGlobal, which I’ll be taking another look at after hearing about it in a number of sessions.

Going Global with VC

Along the same lines, the conference renewed my interest in moving our district beyond virtual field trip videoconferences and towards collaboration with other classrooms and institutions around the world.  Jody Kennedy’s session with Global Nomads Group, Global Education Motivators, and Global LEAP may have been the best I attended, and having dinner with Wayne from GEM hatched all kinds of ideas in my mind.

Synthesis (?)

I heard the term TPCK (”Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge”) in two separate sessions and, as I understand it, the whole idea is to pull back the lens enough to see how technology fits into the broader picture.  Are we finally almost there?  My friends John Ellrodt and Maria Fico discussed in their session how thier non-profit, GlobalWRITES, supports poetry slams and writers workshops using videoconferencing.  I’ve seen them present on it before but what struck me this time is how uninteresting it probably was to most of the pure techies in the room.  Not because what they do isn’t good – it’s amazing.  But because the technology in their project is at once essential and unremarkable.  The focus is on the content and the learning.  I was happy to learn that John and Maria will be presenting at NCTE, where I think they will get a very warm reception.  Maybe the discussion is finally getting past the tools.  Maybe…

Best Product

As our teachers and students have started to generate more multimedia, we’ve struggled to find a place to put it.  In many cases, we want to limit access to the district’s teachers and students only.  And we want to be able to stream the audio and video files we create.  Our CMS limits the size of file uploads and there is very limited support for RSS, so podcasting would be difficult if not impossible.  Enter Discovery MediaShare.  Each school has it’s own space to upload user-created content and, according to policy, one or more approvers can release files created by students and teachers to the rest of the school, the district, or the whole world.  The media files stream and there are very generous upload limits.  And, yes MediaShare does RSS.  It also integrates with the rest of the Discovery Streaming, so when a user searches the database, the scope of the search can include user-contributed content and the usernames and passwords are the same, to boot.  I’m really excited about this product.

NECC Unplugged

I met Steve Hargadon after the Classroom 2.0 BOF session and shared with him my enthusiasm for NECC Unplugged and my ideas about how it could be better situated near the Blogger’s Cafe next year instead of directly in it.  What a nice, thoughtful guy.  I’m optimistic that NECC Unplugged will be a highlight next year and for years to come.  It’s great to have a place where the “little guys” can share their ideas and successes, try out potential large-scale presentations, and learn from one another.  I’m looking forward to doing multiple presentations next time around.

That’s it for now.  Still leafing through pamphlets, URL’s, and notes.  But also just enjoying this very pretty city.

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I don’t know what pushed me over the edge.  Curiosity?  Boredom?  A burning desire to connect?  Feeling left out of the Web 2.0 revolution?  Maybe a little of each.  Today I joined Facebook.

I guess I have three immediate reactions:

1.  Either I need to meet more people or the people I know need to get with the program.  I could only locate two friends!  I’m sure it’s in part due to the fact that we’re friends with so many teachers and teachers are, well, you know… on the outside looking in when it comes to social web technologies.

2.  What an incredibly polished piece of software!  I was impressed at how powerful Facebook is, how nicely it presents, and how tight the integration with other web apps is.
3.  The privacy stuff.  The very first thing I did after signing up was to go and lock down my profile.  I was impressed at how granular the privacy controls are (field-level controls – you decide who can see each discrete piece of information in your profile) and relieved when I looked up our district’s students to see how few actually had public profiles.  They are more savvy than we give them credit for being…

I’m having fun with it so far.  More to come!

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Perhaps districts will un-block MySpace when teachers and their students start to look at a new MySpace/Harper Collins site designed to showcase student writing and to support peer-to-peer collaboration. To prepare for my upcoming PD course on “Technology to Support the Writing Process,” I’ve been researching online spaces designated for publishing student writing, like Writing the City. Now I have another one to add to the list, one with a little brand name recognition among high schoolers. I think this is one worth watching over the next few months…

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The motto of Carmun is “students of the world unite!” This is not the kind of motto that is going to set teachers’ minds at ease as they click their way through the site. Too bad. The idea behind Carmun is a very noble one: offer students with similar academic interests a place to share ideas and sources.

Once you sign up for a free Carmun account, you can start or join groups focused on academic themes like Celtic Studies, Economics, and Feminism. Group members then have access to a threaded discussion forum where they can talk about the topic and where they share and manage a database of sources relating to it. Users can upload bibliographies of their projects, complete with ratings and reviews, for other members of the group to view. There is even a link to locate the work in your local library.

So basically, Carmun is a social networking site for study groups.  It’s MySpace for the late-night library set.  Its founder, Jonathan Edson, created the site when he found that life in graduate school was lonely compared to his experience in the corporate world, where “collaboration is necessary and expected.” Especially in the case of more esoteric topics, Carmun will give students the opportunity to connect with others who share their research interests and in the process, to unearth sources that they weren’t aware of before.

Yet in my mind I already hear the teachers complaining: “They need to do their own research! This is cheating! I want them to learn to do research in the library on their own! This is just like sharing term papers!” And perhaps there’s some validity to those concerns. At what point does collaboration become cheating? Especially in the primary and secondary grades, where the process of research is perhaps more important than the product, will a tool like Carmun become a crutch for the chronic procrastinator who has waited until the last minute and needs to circumvent the usual search routine – or worse, decides to use Carmun to pad a skimpy Works Cited page?

Does research have to be the lonely and isolating experience that it always has been in schools? Is that model still valid given the realities of our new, “flat” world? I don’t know. I like the idea behind Carmun but I’ve yet to mention it to the teachers in my district’s high school. “Students of the world unite!” may be a hard pill for them – and me – to swallow.

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently released the results of a survey in which they examined how teens are using social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook. The findings may actually take some of the air out of the hysteria surrounding these sites: the least common uses were flirting (17% of respondents) and making new friends (49% of respondents) while the most common was staying in touch with “offline” friends (91%). More importantly, 66% of the group who had online profiles said that they control who has access to their information. Perhaps our students are not as naïve and unguarded as we think. Overall, the study paints a picture of older kids using technology tools to plan and communicate with known friends from the real world. The entire report can be found at:

Social Networking Sites and Teens: An Overview

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