:Connecting the Dots

I don’t write a lot about “the industry” here but I can’t resist sharing a quick thought on how things are changing in the world of computers and the internet.  Microsoft, once the behemoth of the technology world, announces a new search engine called “bing” and puts it into production.  Reviews have been mostly positive but with their preview video of “Wave,” Google still somehow managed to not just steal the spotlight but to boot Microsoft right out the front door of the theater and to the curb.  Everyone is talking about this product – which is just a step above vaporware at this point.  Think about that for a moment: a single video of a product that is not even in beta yet displaces announcements about a shipping product from a – once “the” – major technology player. 

And then think about the vision of these two products:  Google is attempting to do nothing less than replace/evolve e-mail, the bedrock application of the internet; Microsoft is, well, making another search engine.  Where is the innovation and who is in the driver’s seat?  It seems to me the answer is clear, and it’s an answer that none of us would have predicted ten years ago.

“Wave” says big, sweeping, tumultuous.  “Bing” says “pebble bouncing off my windshield.”

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Will Richardson is blogging about once per week now.  In April, he wrote a totlal of 6 posts.  In April of 2007, he wrote 27.  Andy Carvin wrote 1 post in February, 2009 and 7 in February of 2007.  David Jakes went from 8 (April, 2007) to 2 (April, 2009).  What happened?  Where have all the bloggers gone?

I suppose the answer is Twitter.  And that upsets me, because in the course of that transition, what has happened to the conversation?  We’ve gone from expansive, probing reflection to 140-character platitudes, from the symposium to the water cooler.  This is definitely the English teacher in me speaking, but I fear that Twitter is robbing us of a great opportunity to think through writing, a shift which will most harm students, who stand to learn a great deal through blogging.  I think there is a synergy between the higher-order thinking skills that educators so value and desire and blogging; I just don’t see that same synergy with tweets.

It’s not that there’s no place for the kind of rapid fire, conversational interchange that Twitter supports; there most definitely is.  But I hate to see it elbowing the kind of rich discourse that blogs engender out of the way.  Seeing this happen only proves what the most fervent critics of educational innovations complain about: we run to the “next big thing” before we’ve had a chance to master the last one and before it has taken hold in a systemic way in classrooms.

I hope that maybe when the excitement over Twitter dies down, some of our best bloggers – and our developing bloggers, too – get back to the longer stuff.  We need it!

Image Source: DigitalParadox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalparadox/16900939/sizes/s/#cc_license

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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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As a former English teacher, I’ve always been a big fan of the visual thinking software Inspiration.  What a forward-looking application, just about the only one from the early nineties (with the possible exception of Geometer’s Sketchpad) that was open-ended, constructivist, multi-disciplinary, fun.  When everyone else was doing “drill and kill,” these guys recognized that computers could be a platform to support and scaffold thinking, writing, and collaboration.  Even now, 15 years later, I still sing Inspiration’s praises to English teachers, although in this age of the web, those songs had begun to sound a little tinny over the last few years.  New web-based apps like Google Docs, PBwiki, and Mindomo had a little more sheen and could support all kinds of collaboration among students and teachers.

Well, yesterday I learned that the online version of Inspiration, mywebspiration.com, is in beta and I’ve been playing with it on and off all day.  So far, I’m impressed by its responsiveness and its almost slavish adherence to the UI from the Windows/Mac version.  And they’ve added a slew of collaboration features, including versioning.  One of the problems with Inspiration has always been that kids can’t continue working on it at home.  No more, if MyWebspiration becomes a reality.

On the downside, it looks like a number of features from the Windows/Mac versions have been left out– at least in this phase in the beta.  Most notably, I couldn’t find any way to export my diagrams as image files or my outlines as RTF documents.  This is a huge omission, as I always argue that the ability to brainstorm in Inspiration and then quickly shoot it all into Word and start writing is one of the software’s main benefits.  Also, I didn’t see any “arrange” buttons to clean up my diagrams and it is way more difficult than it needs to be to paste text into a diagram.  But hopefully they will work these wrinkles out.  I know I’ll certainly be watching as this product develops in the coming months and I hope they’ll offer a reasonable upgrade price for current customers.

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Thanks to Will Richardson for pointing out Michael Wesch’s Library of Congress presentation on YouTube.  I watched the whole thing.  The part that started my wheels turning comes at 22:30 or so:

When we started watching first vlogs and did first vlogs ourselves… it’s like this deep experience of context collapase.  The moment you look into a webcam for the first time and you try to start talking, you have this sense like you just don’t know who you’re talking to and therefore you just come out sounding all awkward.  Do a search for “first vlogs” on YouTube and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I think about all the attacks on YouTube by K-12 educators, the claims that it is worthless because of the boatloads of trite, childish content that it contains.  And make no mistake – it does contain boatloads of trite, childish content.  But Wesch’s comment made me consider the first time someone pointed a video camera at me – not a webcam but a VHS camcorder.  Even knowing that the audience for that video would most likely number fewer than a dozen or so family members and friends, I had absolutely nothing to say and so I made jokes, turned away, talked at the camera operator, not the audience on the other side of the screen, made peace signs, stuck out my tongue… you get the picture.  I was trite and childish.  And I know I’m not alone in having that reaction. 

How much greater then is our sense of dislocation and confusion – what Wesch calls “context collapse” – when we know that the audience on the other side of that screen could number in the millions when that video is on YouTube?  Is it reasonable to expect people to start churning out hard-hitting documentaries about pollution in the local lake and incisive one-act plays when we are still, as a culture, giggling and holding our hands up to the lens and trying to figure out what to say to that blinking red light on the front of the camera?  I guess that what I’m trying to say is that we need to make cave paintings before we can make Mona Lisas.  This is especially true given the fact that most mass media up to this point have pigeon-holed the vast majority of their participants in the limited role of consumers, not producers.  With YouTube, I think it’s fair to expect that with time – and education – we will become better able to express ourselves in powerful and creative ways through the moving image.  Right now, we are still infants learning to speak all over again.

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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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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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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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Getting through Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything was a long haul for me. It’s not that I don’t agree with their ideas, because I do… mostly. I found it very dry and not nearly as engaging as The World Is Flat or Everything Bad is Good for You. Maybe it was just a little too business-oriented and it took a little too much work to apply their ideas to schools. In some cases it was a fool’s errand to even try to make that connection. But I did mark three pages which I thought captured important ideas for the education community:

• “The culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet” – I love this quote and will use it again and again. It comes about in the context of their discussion of open platforms like Amazon’s e-commerce engine and flickr. It’s part of a very honest and frank exploration of people’s motives for taking the time and effort to put things “out there” – one of the few moments where the book seems more real and less Polyanna-ish. They ask some very hard questions about where people’s willingness to contribute really comes from and if it is sustainable in the long run.

• “‘The technologies that come along and change the world are the simple, unplanned ones that emerge from the grassroots rather than the ones that come out of the corner offices of the corporate strategists’.” – Boy, do I believe this sentiment expressed by Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems. Real evolutionary (and sometimes revolutionary) change always comes from the bottom. As I continue to look at technology adoption in schools, I become more and more convinced that top-down dictates just don’t work and it’s the creative use of simple technologies by those in the trenches that eventually spreads and hits critical mass. This will be the focus of my short talk at NECC Unplugged. The chapter in which this quote appeared, “Wiki Workspaces,” was my favorite.

• “Danny Hillis, who founded Thinking Machines and invented parallel computing, says there are two ways to build complex things: engineering and evolution.” – Perhaps just another way of saying bullet #2 above, but I like the contrast between the two. I think that what I’m coming to realize in looking at organizational change in schools is that you can’t engineer it; you can only create conditions conducive to evolution. You create learning communities where people can grow and the organization moves ahead as a result.

Time to read a novel – something enjoyable that will drag me in and keep me reading…

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