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Lawsuits? What Lawsuits?
6/30/2009 8:45:32 AM
Arrived at NECC in time for the morning keynote debate about whether or not bricks and mortar schools impede learning. It wasn't a great question to begin with, because I don't think anyone really thinks it's an either or, either online or face to face, but a combination that's going to emerge from this. I wish the focus had been more on the topic of learning and what we focus our learning efforts with kids on; that's the real shift we need to explore. Gary Stager was a last minute addition to the panel, and I agreed with much of what he said, especially the idea that we should do what can be done at home at home and that schools should be places where we focus on projects and problems and arts and service. I find myself being more and more drawn to that vision. The debate had its moments, two great student members of the panel, and I'll link this to the archive when it's posted.
But here was the real kicker. Brad Jupp who is a high level adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was also on the panel, arguing that we should keep physical space schools. He pretty much articulated a vision that didn't hold much in terms of any significant change. But if you want a snapshot of what the problem is in terms of moving any of the conversation forward, here you go: An administrator in the audience directed a question at Jupp that basically asked "How am I supposed to use things like blogs and wikis in my classrooms when I have the threat of lawsuits from parents and others hanging over me all the time?" In a phrase, his answer was "Lawsuits? What lawsuits?" He did go into somewhat of a response about a teacher using Facebook and being careful, but it was painfully obvious that he was basically oblivious to the on the ground concerns and fears that these new technologies have created. Not a clue.
I'm not feeling any better about the ability to move any of this to a different space with that apparent lack of understanding from the folks at the top.
"Cuddle Bug” I'm Not
6/25/2009 7:57:12 AM
A couple of Friday nights ago I may have made a big mistake: I went to bed at 11. It's not that I stayed up too late. Instead it's that I might have gone to bed too early. If I'd had my wits about me, perhaps I could have prevented what I'm sure will turn out to be a disastrous oversight on my part, one that may have huge implications to my online reputation (whatever is left of it.)
It seems that sometime early that Saturday morning while I was blissfully asleep, another Will Richardson claimed the new Facebook domain for my name. Will "Cuddle Bug" Richardson, that is, he of (or recently of) Laguna Beach High. Friend of what appears to be 195 other adolescent beach bums with goodness knows how much potential for embarassingness in the years to come.
"Cuddle Bug."
Oy.
Maybe I should have set my alarm, or had someone call me, or even paid my wife's high school intern to do the virtual camp out on Facebook and secure the address. Ugh…how could I have been so stupid? I mean, this other Will looks nice enough, arm around what appears to be his mom in the only picture he's shared publically. (Interesting taste in shirts, however.) But there's something unsettling about all of this.
"Cuddle Bug."
Oy. Shoulda stayed awake.
Cloud Books
6/19/2009 5:07:25 AM
Steve Hargadon hosted a panel discussion the other night on the topic of "The Future of Books and Reading" and I was honored to take part with Maggie Tsai of Diigo, Travis Alber and Aaron Miller of BookGlutton, and author Bob Burg. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Diigo, and during our discussion I started thinking what the ultimate in social reading might be. This is still thin thinking, but this is what I want for Father's Day, kids.
I want to be able to buy a cloud book, that is a license that allows me to access my copy of the book from any device that gets me online. (This assumes, of course, that the book hasn't been released with a CC license, in which case I just need the access.) As I read my copy, I want to be able to annotate it a la Diigo, but I also want to invite others who have a license to that particular title to join me in the reading and annotating. (This is what BookGlutton is doing with public domain and CC licensed books, though the annotations are not on the text itself like in Diigo; more on the margins.) I want to be able to see and interact with all of those notes from any device as well. In addition, I want to be able to see all of the annotations by people who are also reading, and since that might be overwhelming, I want to be able to sort what annotations I view by date, geography of the reader and by tags. This last one is the key. I know I've said this many times before, but if I ever got the ability to tag at the comment level, my ability to organize my reading, writing and learning life would increase exponentially. I seriously get giddy thinking about being able to create digital notebooks filled with pages created by pulling together individual notes from disparate sources around one tag that I've left somewhere, complete with linkbacks and reference information. If we taught kids to do that, imagine the notebooks they could construct over their school years. Imagine getting rid of all that paper.
Imagine.
Kevin Kelly wrote this three years ago in the New York Times, and it appears we're getting there:
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
While much of this will be done by the technology (the Semantic Web awaits) we'll add the context, tweak the relevance. I know there is the potential for all sorts of havoc here, all sorts of breaking of tradition, all sorts of reading attention issues and much But maybe I'm an optimist to think that we could do this well, that it could be a value add, that while it will certainly be different, it could actually be better. I really love being at the beginning of all of this. Will be great fun to watch it all unfold.
(Photo "Sweet Home Under White Clouds" by tipiro.)
Writing on the Internet
6/18/2009 7:50:58 AM
Just a couple of quotes that I've run across of late to add to the reading and writing conversation. I love this one by Donal Leu:
Another difference from earlier models of print comprehension is the inclusion of communication within online reading comprehension. Online reading and writing are so closely connected that it is not possible to separate them; we read online as authors and we write online as readers [Emphasis mine.]
And this from Deborah Brandt at the University of Wisconsin Madison in a great article from the Chronicle titled "Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers":
Some of the resistance to a more writing-centered curriculum, she says, is based on the view that writing without reading can be dangerous because students will be untethered to previous thought, and reading levels will decline. But that view, she says, is "being challenged by the literacy of young people, which is being developed primarily by their writing. They're going to be reading, but they're going to be reading to write, and not to be shaped by what they read." [Emphasis mine]
(See also Kathleen Blake Yancey's wonderful essay "Writing in the 21st Century" if you haven't already.)
I know as a long-time high school expository writing teacher (who really misses that classroom), my curriculum would be decidedly different today than five years ago. There would have been a lot more situated practice in reading as a writer and developing the skills necessary to track and participate in the distributed conversation that hopefully occurs. I find it fascinating to consider the ways in which social technologies afford all sorts of potentially global, immediate connections around what we write. And I still think that a basic shift here is that we can no longer look at publishing as the final step in the process but see it instead as somewhere in the middle. Maybe even see it as the start of something.
Interested to hear from teachers who have begun to rethink or rewrite curriculum in light of the potentials of the technologies.
#IranElections: Why We All Need to be Editors Now
6/16/2009 7:55:32 AM
If you've been following the news out of Iran the last few days, odds are you're following it very differently from even a few years ago. Ten years ago, most of what I would have learned would have come from the TV news or the New York Times the day after. Five years ago, it was the New York Times or other traditonal media websites that I probably would have turned to. Today, however, for me at least, it's Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia and then the New York Times website. It's a bit of a different process, I'd say.
While we'll wait to see how social tools affect the outcome in Iran, we can't wait to begin to teach ourselves and our kids how to make sense of media that we ourselves have to edit. The complexities here are huge, in both an information and technological context. We're reading and viewing content created by people whose identities and agendas are unkown to us. While much of it is raw, we can't know how much of it is made to look raw, how much of it has been edited, how much of it is true. I can read the Tweet above and believe it, or I can wait for confirmation. I can do what all good journalists have done throughout time which is verify and reverify before believing and reporting.
The difference is, obviously, is that I have to do this for myself. I now have access to the raw information, the stuff that I used to pay for someone else to find and sift and synthesize and share. I can choose to continue to take that route, certainly, to only check the reputable media outlets for updates and "news". But if I do that these days I deny myself a greater understanding of not just how to consume all of this but how to participate in it. I'm not in Iran (thankfully) but I can still share the best of what I find about Iran for others in my network. I don't take that task lightly, because I want to be a trusted contributor. I want others to share with me so that we can sift and filter and synthesize and contribute the best of our resources and thinking. As Donald Leu writes, these days "we read online as authors, and we write online as readers." And, I would add, we need to read and write as editors as well.
I know that we should have been teaching these skills and processes all along with every piece of information we read or shared. But the reality is that we as an educational system haven't been doing a very good job of it. Right now, however, we and our kids simply can't get away with not having these skills any longer. I know the school year is over for many, but for those that are still in session, welcome to a teachable moment about the world, democracy, technology, media, and most of all, participation.