That’s what it’s going to cost you to excerpt in your blog any content published by the Associated Press under it’s new pricing structure. According to a pseudo FAQ on copyright that the AP has published:
Don’t use your browser to cut, copy, and paste content. It is wrong and, in most cases, illegal.
That right there might cost me under the new guidelines.
The potential scenarios for what are and are not billable excerpts are a nightmare, and articulated fairly well at BetaNews. Jeff Jarvis sees this as the beginning of the end for the AP, and bloggers everywhere are yelling and screaming and debating the impact. And how this plays out is important for our own understanding of how to teach this stuff to our kids. I know that Gary’s comment on my previous post about this is an important point in the debate despite his cynicism, and I hope he draws it out more here. But this is another benchmark in the disruption, another test that I find fascinating on many levels, and one that is worth our attention and conversation.
Just a quick pointer to a post by Jeff Jarvis who has some interesting observations about blogging ethics in the context of linking and quoting from other sources. Seems the Associated Press has attempted to get some bloggers to stop using pull quotes (even as short as 35 words) from its stories and, somewhat understandably, the blogosphere is rebelling. Jarvis is leading the charge, and describes the ethic of link and quote as this:
It says to our readers: Don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. And: Here’s what the source said; I won’t rephrase it but I will quote it directly so you can see for yourself.
I’ve always thought that this was one of the powerful qualities of blogging, the ability to send the reader back to the original to see the context for the writing. It’s what made me love teaching journalism with blogs, because it was so easy for me to follow my students’ line of thinking, but because it also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the issues of plagiarism and fair use and copyright with my kids. And, like Jeff, it’s what I want and expect now from traditional journalism, whether newspapers or magazines. It’s an expectation that makes print more and more difficult for me to read. It’s an expectation that I have of just about all non-fiction writing.
What’s interesting is that when I teach blogging workshops, this concept is not an easy one for people to wrap their brains around. The ease with which we can link and connect ideas makes this vastly different from the analog world. And the importance of links in connecting people is one of the foundational points in all of these discussions.
The continual disruptions to traditional journalism continue to fascinate me, another reason that I’m really looking forward to PDF next week.
Just in case anyone is interested, and because I haven’t posted three times to my blog in one day in a while and I’m feeling a little wacky, here is a short list of what’s on my summer reading list (as if I have any more time in summer than any other part of the year these days.) For some strange reason, I’m on a real book reading jones right now.
- Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Thanks to Carolyn Foote (I think) for the Twitter rec.
- The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nick Carr
- The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain (25% through it)
- Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
- Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization by David Singh Grewal
- Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina
- Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace by Tom Atlee
- Wikipedia: The Missing Manual by John Broughton (Thanks to Tom Hoffman)
- Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryann Wolf (Thanks to Sara Kajder)
Suffice to say, there are other books in my pile that I’m hoping to get to (including a few given to me by network associates) and with the election coming up, there are all sorts of other political titles I’d love to get to. Odds are I won’t make it through most of these, but best intentions…
Btw, I’ll just say it again, if you don’t have Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody on your list, I humbly think you should.
Suggestions for additions?
A bit long (1:20), somewhat esoteric, but pretty interesting for a listen (not a watch…wish this was in podcast form.) Former FCC chairs Reed Hundt and Michael Powell take the Obama and McCain case respectively to discuss broadband, Net Neutrality, and communications technology. Highly partisan, but some compelling back and forth about where all of this is headed and, more importantly, where it could be headed under either administration.
Oh, and yeah, education is mentioned here and there. Sigh. (Update: Powell has an interesting answer about parenting and filtering at 1:12.)
There is another post brewing here along the “walk the talk” lines that wants to answer how much do either of these guys really use technology in their own practice, and along those lines, do they understand the potentials and pitfalls for education. If their campaigns are any indication, at least, I don’t think there’s any doubt who has the greater potential to engage in that narrow conversation.
So what are the salient questions for us to wrap our brains around in terms of this election?
(Full disclosure: I’m a Obama supporter and have contributed to his campaign.
Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions about what the Web is doing to our reading skills and to our intellects. As with many of these types of pieces, it’s really hard not to read this through the lens of what this means for our teaching and our curriculum, and I think there is little doubt it means a lot. Carr actually makes several similar points to Mark Bauerline in “The Dumbest Generation” (which I’m almost finished with, btw) with the difference that I honestly think he wants us to think deeply about what all of this means. (Bauerline just wants to call names and toss around blame, for the most part.)
Let me say that Carr’s description of how his own reading habits have changed resonate deeply:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Describes me to a tee, though I have to say there are still longer works (Shirky’s book most recently) that I find hard to put down. But the denser stuff, Wealth of Networks, for one example, I find tough any more. And there are some prominent edbloggers who I simply don’t read because of the length of their posts. In many ways, my own angst about this is why I am so thrilled that my own kids are reading books, that they are at least getting a sense of that extended, deep reading that longer works provide, even though I know that once they start really reading more online, that may change.
While there is little research to clearly paint a picture of what is going on in our heads, something is most definitely afoot. Carr cites a study that says
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
(Read the comment thread to my earlier post to get a sense of that debate.)
There’s more that’s equally compelling in terms of making the case that in all likelihood, the Web is changing the way we read. But the obvious question here is, what are the implications for us as educators whose students are reading more and more in online environments? I’m not suggesting that this type of reading is necessarily better or worse than our pre-Web worlds. I don’t think Carr is either; in fact he takes pains to point to moments in history when new technologies were created and roundly denounced only to see great gains in ways few could have predicted. Perhaps this is a step in our evolution as thinkers and learners. Who knows? But what I do know is that very few schools are thinking deeply about what this all means in terms of reading development and practice.
Maybe this article will jump start some conversations.
(Photo “Day 79-Focus” by Margolove.)
The other day, after reading a tweet from Dean Shareski about being upset that Shareski.com (I think it was) was already registered to someone else, I buzzed over the GoDaddy and snagged “tessrichardson.name” and “tuckerrichardson.name” for the next 10 years.
I’m expecting big things, kids.
On some weird level, I feel like this domain reserving thing is now a part of being a father, of providing as much opportunity as I can for my kids’ futures. And I know that sounds really, really silly to some, but I think I actually mean it. (I don’t think, however, as some are doing, I would pick a name for my child based on the domain being free…oy.) I wistfully imagine the day that Tess goes for a job interview and maybe gets some minor bump by the fact that she can pull up her own domain and start clicking through the wonderful work she’s created, the ways in which she’s been changing the world, and her vision of what’s to come.
A dad can dream, right? (Is Father’s Day this Sunday, btw?)
But I’ve been wondering how long it’s going to take until the digital footprint is an expectation rather than just an exception. Right now, for many folks, no footprint is a good footprint. But I wonder how long it’s going to take for employers or potential mates or whatever else to wonder “what, no footprint?” when they start looking around for one. As in “haven’t you been participating and doing good work that you want to share?” I tweeted out that same question today during a workshop and got some great responses that were literally all over the timeline. (Read from the bottom up.)
What a headshift this is for many of us, however. When I say to teachers “You want your kids to have a footprint” or “You want to have your own footprint” and suggest they embrace these ideas rather than avoid them, I can feel the discomfort. It goes against our best judgment, which, in this case, isn’t really best at all.
But I’ll just say it one more time for the heck of it. My kids are going to be Googled over and over, and when they are, I want tessrichardson.name and tuckerrichardson.name to come up at the top of the list. With any luck, whoever is looking will be impressed.
It’s no secret that Lawrence Lessig has been one of my heroes in this conversation for a long, long time, and I just wanted to share his most recent presentation from this weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. Would have loved to have been there.
I’ve always been a student of Lessig as a presenter; when I first started I ripped off his minimalist PowerPoint approach without apology and got away with it because very few of the people I presented to had ever seen him present. I’ve gone down a different path these days in terms of the technology, but I just don’t think there is anyone better in terms of making a clear point by building a contextual narrative that really gives perspective to that point and builds on it and challenges an audience to think about it in serious, meaningful, and new ways. Listen to the way he weaves the story, with just enough humor and cynicism, and how he brings it all together in the end, in this case, by getting back to the “core problem.” Very few intellectual moments in my life come close to the first time that I saw Lessig five years ago at Harvard, when I literally had goosebumps, and I am really looking forward to seeing him again in NYC in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, in case you haven’t heard his newest message, take 30 mins to watch. My bet is he’ll make you think.
A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…
Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:
- The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
- New organizational ways of working
- Challenging previously held values
- Requires gaining new knowledge and skills
And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)
I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:
Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”
That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.
Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.
Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.
So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.
And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.
(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)
According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, UStream.tv is about to report 10 million unique visitors last month. That’s a pretty huge number for a site that’s only about a year old, and it says something about the appeal of both producing and interacting with live television. I know that the story I tell in my presentations of Arthus holding court live to the world on the night of the New Hampshire primary is one of my favorites when it comes to a signpost of just how far these technologies have come. Pretty amazing when you think about it, that kids even younger than Arthus can create their own live television shows for global audiences.
Not that this doesn’t come with a certain feeling of trepidation. I will guarantee that it won’t be long before YouTube’s “worst practices” will be seen as minor compared to what we’ll get through the built in iSight or web cams or even the web streaming phones that are becoming more common (all of which, of course, will later be archived to YouTube no doubt.) But as many of us have already experienced, there are also lots of potentially great uses for live streaming that make it worth thinking about in an educational context.
Ironically, the main problem I have with UStream is that it’s almost too easy to do, and therefore we’re bound to see a lot of pretty bad content coming across our screens. How do we get ourselves and our kids invested in a process that moves us all towards more “quality” in a traditional sense? Or should we even be worrying about that? Will the best content, the best uses bubble up? Should the traditional measures and standards apply, and, if so, to what extent?
Dave Jakes and I (and perhaps some other “special” guests”) are going to be doing a spotlight at NECC next month on this very topic. If you have any thoughts or ideas that you think might fit with the presentation, please let us know.
So with the caveat that I am only halfway through Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, I have some early impressions to throw out there. While I think there is some merit to this side of the debate (much like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur) what really bothers me about this book so far is, as the title suggests, this sense that our kids are at fault. Let me put it plainly: our kids are not “dumb” nor is this generation “dumb” simply because they spend a lot of time in front of television screens and computers or because they haven’t worked out for themselves how to get smarter using the Read/Write Web. And to label them so is demeaning and smacks more of marketing than reality.
Here is a sampling of quotes that I think pretty accurately reflect the tenor of the book:
In an average young person’s online experience, the senses may be stimulated and the ego touched, but vocabulary doesn’t expand, memory doesn’t improve, analytic talents don’t develop, and erudition doesn’t ensue. (109)
For must young users, it is clear, the Web hasn’t made them better writers and readers, sharper interpreters and more discerning critics, more knowledgeable citizens and tasteful consumers. (110)
The major finding: “More than half the students failed to sort the information to clarify related material.” It graded the very communications skills Web 2.0, the Read/Write Web, supposedly instills, and “only a few test takers could accurately adapt material for a new audience.” (115)
And just whose fault is this?
If the argument is that these types of gains are not possible through the Web, that’s one thing. But, speaking for myself, I know that is not true. My interactions using social tools have definitely expanded my vocabulary, improved my memory, improved my analytic abilities, made me a more discerning critic and all the rest. And I would be that many reading this would agree to those shifts in their own experience. Networks push our thinking. Networks can push our kids’ thinking.
Bauerline guzzles the “Digital Native” metaphor and leverages it to the extreme, expressing genuine surprise that our kids aren’t able to figure this all out on their own and then, worse, blaming them for the failure when the failure is ours. It’s our own lack of context and practical skills for what is happening right now that is the failure, not just at school but at home. How many millions of parents have no clue what their kids are doing with their online time, have no ability to counsel or model for their own children the ways in which these technologies can facilitate new opportunities for learning? How many tens of thousands of educators?
And that really is the time challenge that we have, not so much the lack of time in the day to get our brains around this but the time it’s going to take for adults to get on some sort of more than equal footing with our kids in their uses of these technologies. We’ve always known more, been able to do more, been “smarter.” In these contexts, however, we’re not smarter any longer at a time when our kids really need us to be.
We’re the dummies, not our kids.
If Clay Shirky is right, and all us baby boomers are carrying around a boatload of “cognitive surplus“, we better start unleashing it sooner rather than later.
(Photo “Bored” by foreversouls.)
From the “Do We Really Want Our Daughters to Learn This on Their Own?” Department comes this excerpt from the cover article of the Sunday Times Magazine this week titled “Blog Post Confidential“:
Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.
One girl’s careening story about enlightenment when it comes to telling to much on her blog (and others doing the same.) A story for our times.
I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read this story, and as I read almost anything having to do with kids or young adults trying to navigate these spaces if they wouldn’t have a better time of it had they had teachers and adults who were modeling and guiding them on how to do it well…
Yesterday, Sheryl and I finished up the culminating session of our year-long work with a Western New York Powerful Learning Practice cohort, and while the teachers were once again pretty impressive in articulating and showcasing the shifts that have occurred in their professional practice and their classrooms, the highlight of the day was a presentation by Laura Stockman, the fifth grade blogger at 25 Days to Make A Difference. Laura is the daughter of Angela Stockman who was a member of our cohort, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, her service project blog in honor of her grandfather has gained national attention. She talked about how she started her quest to get donations for charities by finding sponsors for her daily good works, how surprised she is that over 30,000 people have visited her blog since last December, and how she’s been able to donate over $1,600, 50 pairs of pajamas, and over 400 books to charities in her area. It’s a great story and example, one that I’ve shared with Tess on a number of occasions.
But for some reason, the moment that jumped out at me was when she was talking about how she decided which charities to support. “I asked my readers,” she said. And I just felt like, “How cool is that?” Here is a fifth grader who is first and foremost making a difference in peoples’ lives (which is cool enough) but also who is connected to a community of others who are passionate to make a difference as well. (She dropped some names of some pretty well know philanthropists that had been in touch with her.) She gets it on a practical level that not only models what’s possible but that will no doubt serve as a support for whatever learning experiences she will have in her life.
And one other note. Today in a presentation to some New York City middle school principals, I talked about Laura in the context of how we begin to help our kids create their own digital footprints in positive ways, to be, in a word, “Googleable.” Even fifth graders. Here’s what comes up when you Google “‘Laura Stockman’ Buffalo.”
Pretty good start, I’d say.
UPDATE: Please read what Laura’s mom Angela has to say about the experience.
I’m extremely interested in watching the impact of social media on the current presidential election cycle, and I’m wondering if we really are at the point where, as the author of this post suggests:
Facebook and MySpace are as important as New Hampshire and Iowa.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the Obama campaign has gotten that message sooner than the rest. Their very savvy use of social tools on their Website has been an incredible boon to their fund raising and, in turn, their ability to capture delegates. Some of the deconstructions of the impact have already begun, as in this great piece in Rolling Stone. This quote sums up what’s happening:
“They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.” In the process, the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.
But the impact of blogger/observers is turning out to be pretty huge as well. According to the Technorati article, almost 30,000 blogs are parsing every word the candidates utter, every policy, every interaction (which is a good thing, right?) If 51% of Internet users are not turning to blogs to “gather information and communicate about politics,” and every indication is that the number will continue to grow, it’s pretty obvious that realities of being an engaged, informed voter are becoming more and more complex, and that our students are going to be stepping into that reality without a great deal of navigational skills unless we begin to bring these shifts into our curriculum.
So how are we doing that?
So here is the money quote from “Turn Teen Texting Toward Better Writing” from the Christian Science Monitor last week:
Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption. Failure to harness that potential energy would prove a terrible misstep at this junction in American education.
The author of the essay, Justin Reich, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, makes the case in a pretty interesting way, weaving in research, classroom observations and personal experience in a way that I find pretty compelling. Especially because he seems to really understand the “connective” or network aspect of the writing process.
Or, we can embrace the writing that students do every day, help them learn to use their social networking tools to create learning networks, and ultimately show them how the best elements of their informal communication can lead them to success in their formal writing.
I agree that that is the choice. No one is denying that much of what students (and adults for that matter) are writing wouldn’t be worthy of publishing under traditional standards. But the fact that kids are writing and publishing in a variety of texts, traditional or not, is, I think, a wonderful reality, one that if we know how to leverage it gives us great opportunities to help kids get better at all types of writing.
SCENE I
(Tucker and I at the computer getting ready to get some info on how to throw the boomerang I just brought him back from Australia.)
Me: So where do you want to start?
Tucker: (Already typing “www.yout…”)
Me: Wait a sec. (Trying to sound wise.) Before we go there, why don’t we see if we can get some background? (I’m thinking physics, aerodynamics, etc.)
Tucker: (Keeps typing “…ube.com)
Me: Tuck. Seriously. (Grabbing mouse.) Where could we go to find some other info about boomerangs?
Tucker: (Sighs) Ok. (Starts typing “www.wikiped…”)
Me: I just think we might find some interesting background and stuff.
Tucker: (Clicks in search line and types in “Boome…” and I notice for the first time that Wikipedia now has partial spelling drop downs.)
Me: Hey, look at that!
Tucker: What?
Me: You can just find the word in the list now. Pretty cool.
Tucker: They’ve had that for like a month, Dad.
Me: They have? (I look at him to see if he’s smiling, but he looks serious.) Hmmm…
Tucker: Boomerang. There it is. (He clicks.) So what do you want to know?
Me: Well, how about we see if… (Before I can finish, he clicks on “Throwing Technique.”) Yeah. There ya go. What does it say?
Tucker: “A left-handed boomerang circles towards the right, and a right-handed boomerang circles towards the left. Most sport boomerangs are in the range of about 2.5 to 4 ounces. The range on most of these is between 25 and 40 yards/metres. A right- or left-handed boomerang can be thrown with either hand, but the flight direction will depend upon the boomerang, not the thrower…” Aw, c’mon Dad. This is boring. (Starts typing “www.yout…”)
Me: (Chagrined) Ok, ok. I just thought maybe that would help. (We watch as page changes.)
Tucker: Here! How about this one. (He clicks the top link.)
Me: Now Tuck, you know, you should probably take a second to try to figure out which videos might be the most…
(Video begins to play.)
(Both of us laugh hysterically.)
Tucker: Oh my god! Let’s watch it again. (He clicks the play button and we replay it, stopping as girls let flail into the air. More laughing.)
Me: (Gaining composure.) So, it looks like you just throw it like you would most anything else.
Tucker: (Clicks on next video, which shows three guys throwing boomerangs at the beach.) Yeah, dad. That doesn’t look hard. Let’s go! (Grabs boomerang and heads for door.)
Me: Wait! Tuck! Go over in the field next door. Don’t throw it in our yard where you lost the last one. (Remembering his tears after first toss of the boomerang from last year’s trip to Australia ended up in bamboo patch never to be seen again.)
Tucker: (Half way out the door.) Ok!
SCENE II:
(Finally leaving house five minutes later, looking over to the big field next door where I see him running toward the house.)
Me: Hey Tuck! What’s up?
Tucker: Um…I need the baseball.
Me: The baseball? Why?
Tucker: (Look of angst on his face.) Um…
Me: Are you kidding me?
Tucker: I’m sorry dad! It just went really high and now it’s stuck in a tree. But I can get it. Where’s the ball?
SCENE III:
(Twenty minutes later.)
Me: Tuck. It’s just too high up there. We’re going to have to wait for a stiff breeze.
Tucker: Sorry Dad. (He smiles.) You want to go watch that video again?
Me: Grrrrr….
So considering Mother’s Day was a couple of days ago, it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking a fair amount about my own mom who died suddenly 27 years ago (has it been that long?) leaving me with a slew of unanswered questions about my family history, my young childhood, her views on life, etc.. Seems like just as I was getting old enough to really have a somewhat intellectual relationship with her as well as a mother-son relationship, she was gone. Still makes me sad.
Last night I had this kind of cool waking dream that is no doubt related to her death and to the holiday. It was at some point in the future, after my own death (hopefully way, way into the future) and my kids were struggling with some of the same questions that I had about my own history. What were they like as kids? Why did we move? What were my grandparents like? But in this dream, even though I wasn’t there to answer them, they had another resource.
What I envisioned was them turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies. Certainly not anything that hasn’t been thought of before, but It was, as I said, a pretty cool vision.
I think that dream brought to light another aspect of why I blog. Not just to reflect. Not just to learn. But in some small way to leave a trail for those who come after me. I certainly can’t predict to what extent those people might find any of this relevant or compelling or useful, but I know I would love to have the chance to dig through the work of my own mother, to learn about her more deeply, to understand who she was and what she stood for. If nothing else, my kids will have that opportunity.
And with that thought, it’s 26 hours of travel home…
My last full day here in Australia before the long trip home tomorrow. I get my day back, but who knows how long it will be before I get my body clock back. Last summer it took almost two weeks for me to get straight. Tips anyone? (Be nice.)
Haven’t had time to think much of this through, so excuse the relatively thin thinking. (Feel free to poke holes in it, as always.)
I’ve visited a couple of pretty interesting schools during my visit, one that’s in the process of being built, another that’s been around for 30 years, both different in their design. The new school, a high school, will be one built on open spaces for learning, project based learning concepts, individualized learning plans and very different roles for teachers and classrooms. The spaces have been designed with the great thinkers in mind, DaVinci and Einstein spaces, spaces that on blueprint at least offer up a great deal of potential for creativity and independence and passion based learning. Arts are embedded in the curriculum, and there is a really different concept of assessment. With any luck, I’ll be writing more about this place in the near future.
The other school was out in the country, surrounded by fields filled with cows and chickens and pigs. It was a small, PreK-6 school where the classrooms had all sorts of angles and skylights and patterns. Everywhere you look there is evidence of performance learning. Every classroom has a kitchen where kids do a lot of cooking. Outside, playground spaces are performance spaces as well. And the kids tend to the livestock and the farm as well as the school. I loved the feel.
Technology plays a role in both of these schools, though the roles are different to be sure. The high school will be a 1-1 school. The other is expanding the access of computers to its kids. Both are ripe for the ways in which technology can supplement real learning in the classroom, not just information processing. Obviously, there is much more about the culture and the infrastructure and the climate that goes into all of this.
The early thinking that’s evolved from those visits for me is this: we have been living in a world with pretty much one, ubiquitous model for schools for a long time now. This strikes me every time I take off on a plane to somewhere and am able without any trouble to pick out the school buildings we’re flying over. They’re all at right angles, with baseball and football fields nearby. The sizes and number of buildings vary, but it’s rare that I see yellow school buses parked next to anything that looks like something other than a factory.
In my own thinking about what schools might become, I’m realizing that I’ve been thinking that this old model is going to turn into a different model. But what’s really going to happen, I think, is that we’re about to explode into many different models. Obviously, this may not happen with any great momentum until we free up our ideas about assessment and learning culture, neither of which is an easy road. But we do need to find ways to support more unique, passion-based schools, places that like our kids, come in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember when he said it, whether blog or e-mail, but Tom Hoffman reminded me a while ago that we have a lot of different models out there already, many of which are successful in their own right. And as we move away from that one factory model, we need to be open to whatever types of new models might evolve.
(Photo “old classroom” by shuichiro.)
Some random observations of my first few days in Oz:
First, how is it Qantas can serve a free hot meal and free beverages on a 55 minute trip from Melbourne to Sydney when most US airlines I fly on can barely provide a cold, stale sandwich on a cross country flight? It’s also cool, by the way, that the people meeting you off the flight can do so at the gate instead of being relegated to baggage claim. Overall, flying has been much more pleasant here, kiss of death I know for tonight’s flight back to Melbourne.
Surprisingly, what hasn’t been great is the Internet. The connection at my workshops thus far has been spotty or nearly non-existent, and buying it in airports or hotels is insanely expensive. From everything I’ve heard from folks here and others answering questions on Twitter, access is very uneven and, in general, pricey. In fact, many state right out that they are worse off than some third world countries in the connection respect.
As always, the Aussies that I’ve met have been exceedingly generous, helpful, and complimentary. Just like our trip here last year, I’ve felt very welcomed. It’s definitely a place that I would highly recommend making a journey to, despite the fact that our currencies have almost reached parity making things a bit more expensive here than in the past. (Obviously, that’s the case for us Yanks no matter where we go these days.)
While the new government has allocated some significant funds to getting all high school students on a computer in short order, the amazing thing from what I hear is those computers are going to be desktops. Just as in the states, there is not a lot of vision at the top in terms of where to spend technology dollars and what the future might look like.
My “Small World” moment came when my phone suddenly rang and it was Tess calling from back home. Nothing special these days, I know, but a first for me. I just can’t get my brain around how many wireless signals we must be floating in if her phone call found me here in Sydney. Amazing.
And one last: when I was in Brisbane the other day, I was walking down the street when I saw a long line slinking around the corner, dozens of people queued up to get, believe it or not, Krispy Kreme donuts. I kid you not. People were walking out of the store with boxed dozens of the things, and apparently, it is the latest American sensation to hit the continent. Let’s hope it’s not followed by those other sensations that we’re getting more and more famous for: obesity and diabetes.
Finally, one very cool moment: when in my keynote I was discussing the fact that my kids had been taught to use Scratch by Neil Winton’s son Andrew from Scotland during one of our “extended classroom” sessions, it turned out that Neil and Andrew were watching live from Scotland. I only wish I would have known when it happened; what a great model-able moment that would have been.
I’ll try to carve out a few more observations this weekend before my final presentation in Melbourne on Monday. Then back to the states on Tuesday.
In case anyone is interested, my keynote was Ustreamed here, and the other sessions are on this page. Enjoy!
From the “Circling the Wagons Department” it seems the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures. For some reason, letting others know that your are a blogger is highly problematic, and the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blogs. (Hadn’t heard that one before.) As Lisa Nielsen, the manager of professional development for the Department of Instructional Technology writes on her blog, it’s not a direction that serves the DOE.
I find this particularly upsetting because…having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures.
No doubt, employee blogs can be problematic and are not always to be celebrated. And I do recognize the need to monitor what people in your organization are doing. But the reality here is this: educators in New York City who want to connect and share with other educators around the world are going to do that. Some of them will do it well, others, notsomuch. Celebrate the former, educate the latter. Learn from the experience and from the sharing that takes place. In the end, this is once again just lazy policy in action.
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