There's a question at the end of this post!
I’m at the Midwest Educational Technology Conference (METC) in St. Charles, Missouri, just across the river from St. Louis. There’ll be a bunch of my old friends here, including Steve Dembo, Rem Jackson (Wednesday Keynote), Michael Butler, Gail Lovely, and I ran into David Jakes outside the elevator as I arrived at the hotel yesterday. We talked a bit, as the Superbowl was starting, about social networks and what we were doing at NECC this year, and then I returned to my room to finish preparing for today’s workshop.
Social Networks seem to be on a lot of our minds these days. A session on the subject (moderated by Glenn Moses), at the Educon in Philadelphia last weekend was a big draw. It’s a subject that has no conclusions at this point, and I readily admit to not understanding the concept fully, at least in a way that would be helpful to anyone else. I understand my social network. I shape it, seed it, cultivate it, and glean nourishment from it. But it’s not the same as the one that Jakes has shaped or the ones that Steve Hargadon or Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach are growing.
What I would love to see is that we give up on trying to integrate social networks into our classrooms. I’m not really sure that we can invent a social network and then expect kids to embrace it as a comfortable working platform that Facebook, MySpace, and Beebo have become. I could be wrong, so I’m not suggesting that we do not try. But what I wish is that we could simply let them make it, outside of our classrooms. Let them be responsible. Let them bring into the classroom those elements that help them do our work, and continue to shape, mix, and remix their networks for their own reasons. This too may not be possible, but I think that it would get, more directly, at what we should be focused on right now, and that’s the work of learning.
I’ve said before that I do not visit the Science Leadership Academy to see technology. You won’t. What you see is a different kind of learning at work. The assignments are not, read this chapter, answer the questions at the end, and come in prepared to discuss the questions. The work you see there is not so much about answering questions as it is about finding positions and developing arguments that support that position.
It seems to me that learning today and most certainly in our children’s futures, is not so much about memorizing as it is about exploring, experimenting, conversing, discovering, and constructing knowledge — with some memorizing required.
OK, so lets assume that I’m wrong and we can’t leave the networking platform up to the kids and we can build one. I would hope that it’s a build your own, with components that can be attached anywhere at any time, by both teachers and students, and perhaps even outside observers. Let’s say that we start with a basic profile building element and a way to connect with others through groups or such.
What components do you think should be available for adding?
Technorati Tags: warlick education technology elearning socialnetworks metc08 metc2008
David-
Social bookmarking is something that I do not fully comprehend, especially in light of adults with busy schedules and 15-20 other things to do at any one time other than checking out the bookmark list. I do see the benefit of it, and I also understand that I won’t fully “get it” until I dive in. I was much the same way with Google Docs. But now that I use the shareable Google Docs I can’t imagine not knowing about them.
So, to help out others out there who might not be even as ready to dive in as I am, I wanted to share Social Bookmarking in Plain English. Lee Lefever does a really nice job of explaining, as he says, in plain english, how this system works. I know it isn’t new or groundbreaking for many on this site but I thought that there might be others who could get something out of seeing his work.
Wish me luck, I’ll start slow and share with family before I make it part of my professional work.
I know what you mean about Heppell’s non PowerPoint Presentation. I’ve seen him use his desktop presentation a few times now and have been really impressed. I’m just trying to pluck up the courage to try it myself! Hope your attempt works out OK!
Social Bookmarks have classroom use:
http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/01/social-bookmarking-in-classroom.html
PowerPoint is useful if used well:
http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/01/avoid-using-electronic-chalk.html
Widespread use of the data projector is what will finally “erase the blackboard”. This technology has the potential to engage learners of all types by leveraging the entire World Wide Web… including our presentations be they PPT, MOV, Blog, Wiki or otherwise.
In my years working with technology I have heard your name mentioned on many occassions. Today for the first time I got a chance to hear you talk. A little advice when giving presentations. Don’t interjected your political believes. I for one did not go to your presentation to hear a negative comment about a presidental canditate. Technology definitely needs people like you that spend an inordinate amount of time looking at websites and applications. However when presenting it would be helpful if you gave direct educational applications for the neat things you have learned. Randomly going over all of these different revelations you have is not helpful to the great majority of teachers you talk to. You need to think at the students level. How is this or that beneficial to the student and how can they use it. Check with an educator to see what they think. For fear of getting more of the same I think I will skip your keynote speech.
JohnQ
As clarification, I demonstrated tag clouds by pulled up the Pollster.com tag clouds for the transcripts of the Democratic and Republican debates. The only thing that I said was that Kucinich, because he did not use nearly as many words extensively, seemed to be speaking more from the heart and less from talking points, and that that was my off the cuff interpretation — which is was. I also noted that McCain used the word “states” a lot, which was a Republican theme (States Rights). I also showed some of Matthew Hurst’s BlogPulse analysis of mentionings of candidate names in the blogosphere, but I don’t recall saying anything about any candidates and neither did the graphs indicate anything negative.
At this point, I have almost no opinion, as our primaries are quite a few weeks off yet, so I’m a bit surprised at this acquisition. Not to say that I’ve not inject political opinions before, and I agree that I shouldn’t do this. But I didn’t yesterday, don’t plan to today, and at this point am pretty even keel when it comes to the candidates.
My point was the incredible implications that come from how we can work today’s information landscape, and then talked about the possibilities if students could do this kind of mining of their own textbooks.
David,
Did you see how an organization in Colombia, South America was able to use Facebook to organize a protest around the world against FARC in less than 3 weeks? What would happen if schools use that to tap into their communities?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0204/p04s02-woam.html
http://teacherbytes.edublogs.org/2008/02/05/facebook-used-to-spark-worldwide-protest/