6:55 AM

I finished three days of staff development yesterday with an incredibly weird, but also incredibly talented group of elementary school teachers. We finished the event in a local western-style restaurant and dance floor, viewing the teachers’ video productions. Their assignment was to produce a video, 30 seconds to 2 minutes long, that effectively conveyed some aspect of how media has changed over the past ten years. The number one constraint was that they were not allowed to use any words, spoken or written. The rest of us tried to determine the theme they were communicating.

It was digital charades, but the teachers had at their disposal any props that were available in their school and video editing software to craft their presentations — and they were enormously resourceful, creative, and hilarious.

Now the idea I left this small rural eastern North Carolina town with was, “No school has that many incredible teachers!” No Way!

It brought to mind a line from my first book, that I have not thought about in a very long time. It goes…

There is a thin line between being a mediocre teacher, and being a great teacher.

Among those that we blame for less than great teachers are schools of education, lack of effective staff development, and now it’s the credentials that define highly qualified teachers.

I believe that it is none of those so much as it is a vision of 21st century teaching and learning, access to appropriate professional tools to achieve that vision, and the time to retool classrooms.

Given the resources and time to succeed, I am convinced that all teachers can become great teachers.

4:28 AM

I am in the middle of a part e-mail / part MP3 interview with Bob Sprankle, an elementary school teacher in Maine. He is the producer of Room 208, a weekly podcast, written, organized, and performed by his 3rd and 4th grade students. Bob e-mailed his answers to me yesterday as an MP3 file, and I only just got a chance to listen to them yesterday evening, after a day-long workshop with a weirdly creative group of elementary teachers in Eastern North Carolina.

I’ve already started putting together a podcast for the assembled interview, but a couple of things that this amazing teacher said, were simply to important to wait. As is my nature, as an self-pronounced technology sceptic, I asked Mr. Sprankle, what his students were learning now, as podcasters, that they weren’t learning before. ..and I asked him to go beyond the technology skills that they were learning.

His answer was long, but I will include it in its entirity in the podcasts. But one part in particular deserves printing now. He said,

As students are in class learning, they are starting to think, “is this a podcasting moment?”…or in other words, is this learning relevant? Do I want to share this with the larger community? Is it important? Is it meaningful to me? If it’s not, why not. After all we want to spend our days doing something that is meaningful.

This is a profound statement. When students begin to filter what they are learning, through this desire to produce and publish, then they are thinking about their learning in terms of its context and in terms of their context. Bob goes on to say,

You can’t just fake it for the show. You’ve got to really get in there and understand this information in order to make this show. You’ve got to own it. Students constantly examine it, review it, because they’ve got to teach it.

That phrase, “You’ve got to own it”, is important. This should become a mantra for teaching in the 21st century. We’re educating too much for our own ownership, so that we can show what a great job we are doing as a society. Let’s figure out how to make our students the owners of their learning.

2¢ worth.

5:55 AM

Will Richardson’s on the war path again. I haven’t read the article yet, but I understand his frustration. First, the Blog On article, in Edutopia’s June/July issue, uses the picture to the right to portray blogging. To be honest, I actually can’t think of any one picture that might adequately defining it. Perhaps students at their desks, or in a library, or even under a tree, with their laptops, would have been better. I don’t know and I can’t say.

But his main beef appears to be with the article’s definition of weblogs.

Blogs, short for Weblogs, are online journals filled with personal thoughts and Web links.

To be fair to journalist (and what is unfair about journalism), their challenge is that they may only be able to devote one sentence to the definition.

So how would you, Will, or anyone else, define weblogs in one sentence?

3:49 AM

OK, it’s very early in the morning. I have so much to do, so many projects going on, and I hit the road this morning for a week of travel. This morning, I will be keynoting a week-long staff development institute that is put on by some very dedicated educators and the Wake Education Partnership. They’ve hired me to talk about contemporary literacy, but I will be plugging in some info about blogging and wikis. It’s all about the new information environment.

I have enjoyed my many weeks of very little travel. Probably too many weeks. One must make a living. But during that time I’ve written one book, revised another, and am currently finishing up a chapter for an ICT book that will be published in Europe. I’ve also done a great deal of programming. Writing is work. Programming is play.

When I was 11, I loved to play with Legos. I actually think that they were invented around that time. The joy of Legos is that you have a limited variety of shapes that you can assemble in an unlimited number of ways to create objects of personal value. Programming is the same. You have a limited number of commands and functions. However, you can assemble them in a limitless array of constructions that have value not only to me, but to others. It is the same pleasure as Legos.

I am working on several contract programming projects that I am very excited about, but have also been working on some personal projects, such as The Education Podcast Network (EPN). This is a directory of podcasts programs that may be useful to educators. They range from programs about education and the future of education, to podcasts on specific content areas.

Yesterday morning, I got up early with a new idea. The National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) will be held the end of this week. Although there were a few sessions last year about weblogs, blogging has hit is stride during the past 11 months, and I am sure that people will be blogging about the conference as it approaches, during its proceedings, and afterward.

Yesterday, I put together a web page that accesses Technorati’s index of podcasts and generates an RSS feed of those entries that include the terms NECC and 2005. It then lists the most recent 20 or so postings, the titles hyperlinked to the original weblog. I’m calling it NECC Web Dog, though I’m sure that name’s already been taken. There is also a modest Word Map that highlights the most often used terms in the blogs, and a link to Flickr, and all pictures that mention NECC in the description or as a tag (only three three right now, with some images of New England Crafty Chicks, and New England Conference Center).

It occurred to me that this type of tool could be easily adapted for other topics and events. What do you think?

Oh Yeah! If you blog about NECC, be sure to include NECC and 2005 somewhere in your entry. 😉

7:41 AM

It’s great to be home, here early on Saturday morning. All are still asleep except for me and Rasta the dog, who is waiting somewhat patiently for our 4 mile walk. I’m looking forward to it too, and we’ll get on the way when the latest Ed Tech Musician podcast downloads into iPodder and on to my iPod.

Yesterday was a very good day in rural New York, speaking to about a hundred library media specialists about contemporary literacy, and then in the afternoon, a short session on Blogs, RSS, and Podcasting. It was great fun with a great group of professionals.

For me, the highlight was listening to author, Vivian Vande Velde talk about the joys and some of the pitfalls of being a children’s book writer. Many of her works are fantasy and sci-fi, and, as you might imagine, she is controversial among those well-meaning community members who pay a lot of attention to what children read and have a very narrow tolerance for new ideas and how ideas are expressed.

Vivian, just sent out an e-mail to the the conference planners and to me with some pictures that she took and that were taken by attendees with her camera. So take a peek.

Time to go walk!

12:42

I’m at the “Redefining the World” conference in a small town in Upstate New York. The children’s book author, Vivian Vande Velde, is talking to a large group of school library media specialists. She has already talked that one of the challenges of writing books is the limited amount of influence authors typically have on the post production of their books. She said that she has had a better experience than others, but I can vouch for that problem.

As I’m sure I have reported before in the blog, I am now publishing books using an online service, where I have complete control over the layout, illustrations, and even the price. Vivian is showing pictures from her books and talking through stories related to the book and stories from her life. She is an excellent and amazing story teller, and I look forward to reading some of her books.

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By the way, many of you have realized that my blog has changed. I finally realized how much time I am spending troubling ongoing problems with the RSS files that my homemade blogging tool was generated. So I gave it a try, and sure enough, I had WordPress installed on my server in less than five minutes, and the theme laid out in less than 30 minutes more. I like it, and the RSS files seem to be dependable.

It’s getting close to time for me to do my presentation on weblogs and RSS. Great fun!

3:48 AM

I travel today, and to be honest, I’m kinda looking forward to it. The glamor of airports, tiny coach seats with the back of the seat in front of me too close to my face to even hold a paperback book, and those delicious pretzels. I so savor all seven of them. It still has has the aroma of glamor to this man who was 40 years old the first time he rode in an airplane.

So I’m up early this morning, planning to move some of my web Blogmeister and EPN over to the web server on my laptop, so that I can demonstrate them to my audience of librarians tomorrow in upstate New York, without having to depend totally on a working network. “Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups,” I always say.

Still, I’m spending the first moments of my morning blogging, and today its a news story that was waiting in my aggregator, from The New York Times, A Town’s Struggle in the Culture War. At issue is a book, The Buffalo Tree by Adam Rapp, and its removal from the schools. I see this struggle over culture and values in schools as extremely counter productive. While our classrooms languish in the industrial age and much of the rest of the world catches up and passes us by, what brings passion to those who govern education is the brief reading of a passage from the book by a 16-year-old student. Read completely out of context, the delivery still provoked the school board to unanimously vote to ban the book from the High School curriculum less than an hour later. (Two board members were not present.)

Now what’s bad about this? Is it the exercise of political power over the curriculum experts — their teachers? Is it the vast waste of time and effort that the controversy is costing? Is it a right/left thing as the number of challenged books rises 20% after the re-election of George Bush (a connection made by the American Library Association).

What woke me up this morning was the beginning of a new Podcast program, swirling around in my head (that’s how ideas start for the A.D.D.). The concept is education as conversation. We traditionally think of education as being the delivery of skills and knowledge, depositing stuff into the heads of our students. What does education look like, if we start think of it as more of a conversation than a delivery?

How might the controversy above play out? Would controversial ideas be considered differently by the community if they thought of their classrooms as places where students consider, evaluate, adopt or reject, and build on knowledge; as opposed to a place where students are taught.

I’ve not read The Buffalo Tree, so I may be way off target here. But I still think there might be something to thinking about education as conversation. I think you might hear more about this from me, and I’ll expect to hear from you.

5:48 AM

I’m trying to lighten up a bit here at the end of the school year, but my mind keeps getting drawn into these issues. I just looked at my vanity search that I have installed in my aggregator and found that the name of my podcast had been used by Chris Harris, a “Director of a School Library System in Western NY”. He laments that he can’t listen to my “excellent educational podcast” at school, because all media downloads at Archive.org are blocked. He continues to explain that resources at SourceForge are blocked because they are tagged as games, Google is tagged as a “loophole”.

Yesterday, Will Richardson posted another entry about the alleged school newspaper closing in Georgia, referencing Steve Dembo’s podcast where he predicted that…

…in a couple of years just about every school will have at least one student blogging away on his own time and space about what was going on at the school.

I jumped in with a comment from my reading (years ago) of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the point being that people/customers are going to network, and as a result are going to know more about what’s going on in your school than you do. My point was that information will find a way. Does it do us more good to try to control/block the network, or facilitate it?

Two other comments were posted, both missing my point completely, issuing in on blocks and filters on the school networks. Well it wasn’t Bill and Bud who missed the point. It was me. I’m out here, way outside the box. Inside, it comes down to whether you can access that web page in the classroom that you selected at home last night, play that animation or video, access that open source wiki engine.

Bill pointed out that according to a recent survey at his school, less than 20% of students regularly use the technology provided in schools, where more than 80% have access at home, and that in most cases, the performance capabilities at home exceed those of the school computers and networks.

For the sake of protecting our “behinds”, are we shoving learning out the doors of our schools?

I know that this is a serious and complex issue that concerns teachers, but also extends far beyond the classroom. It has to do with staffing resources, community sentimentalities, government regulation, and the presence of truly dangerous content on the net. But we must solve this problem and be willing to invest in solving this problem.

Because when the students see their network as a wall between them and information, then that school is no longer being a school.

5:55 AM

The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman Got Game, by John Beck Oryx and Crate” by Margaret Atwood (well it’s not professional development, but all about ethics in science) La Vida Robot, a WIRED magazine article I’ll add a few more here, and please do comment with other professional readings. The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (keynoted NECC last year) The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, by Mark Pesce As the Future Catches You, by Juan Enrriquez Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig also consider my books: Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century (2004) Raw Materials for the Mind: 4th Edition (2005) Classroom Blogging (2005)

Media guru Doug Johnson started a thread the other day on WWWEDU, about suggested books for summer reading. The discussion there has centered around professional reading and include those listed to the right.

I thought I would start a similar list here, but with books that are more for enjoyment than professional development. Though I read very slowly, I usually have two or more books going at the same time. So here is my list. Please comment to this weblog any books that you think would be worth the while of educators who are taking a much deserved break.

• Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card (this is a must read, one of the best SciFi books ever)
• Night Fall, Nelson Demile (An excellent read and interesting scenario leading up to 9/11)
• Lost Boys, by Orson Scott Card (not an Enders Game, but the ending knocked my feet right out from under me)
• The Narrows, by Michael Connelly (One of my favorite mystery writers)
• City of Masks & Land of Echoes, Daniel Hecht (I enjoyed both of these mixes of mystery and the supernature and am looking forward to more from Hecht)
  
• Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (not an easy read which is typical Gibson, but possibly my favorite)
• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (if you want to fill up the entire summer with one book, this is a very good one — politics aside)
• The Broker — by John Grisham (Grisham’s getting better and better. I liked the Euro flavor here)
• The Company — by Robert Littell (I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this story that traces much of the history of the CIA)
• Runaway Jury — by John Grisham (possibly my favorite book by Grisham, much better than the movie, and I loved the movie)
• Balance of Power — by Richard North Patterson (Excellent about politics and the gun industry)
• The Lake House — James Patterson (one of my favorite Patterson books)

I’m going to leave it there. Please do add to this list by commenting on this blog!

4:12 AM

Nancy Barbee, an eastern North Carolina educator posted a comment to yesterday’s blog asking for instructions on how to produce a podcast. I responded with an answering comment, but thought I would post it here as well.

First of all, I believe that one of the reasons why podcasting has caught on so well is that it is so easy to do. It’s like so much else regarding technology, it’s the content and design that are the hard part. Here is what you need to produce your own podcasts:

• A microphone — most laptops have them built in (I use a Griffin iTalk attached to my iPod),
• Software — most folks use Audacity, a free opensource program that can be downloaded from the net and is available for Macs, Windows, and Linux. (I use Audacity and Garageband),
• A place to upload your podcasts — Archive.org hosts all types of media files for free (I use them), and
• A blog to attach the podcasts to that syndicates in RSS 2.0.

For more details, you can check out a web shelf of links related to podcasting that I keep in my PiNet library. Go to:

http://pinetlibrary.com/links.php?list=118714

10:32 AM

This entry was a response that I wrote to the WWWEDU mailing list. The question regarded what school administrators should be learning about blogging.

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I think that the real value of blogging, from a management standpoint, is in RSS and the aggregator — it’s the directions in which the communication flows. I’ll be participating in an event for a school district in Illinois this summer, exploring exactly how these technologies (blogging, RSS, aggregators, Podcasting, syndicated/subscribed/sent content, etc.) might integrate into the teaching and learning environment. I’m very excited about the possibilities, but in five words, “it hasn’t been invented yet!” We are so new into this stuff, that its place in the instructional environment is fuzzy, and its administrative application has barely been thought about.

I recently ran into an Ohio tech-ed leader with whom I’ve worked, who is working toward integrating RSS and aggregation into the backbone of how they communicate throughout the district. Again, they don’t know exactly what that is going to look like, but they plan to have it up and running by the beginning of the school year.

So, hey, make it up 😉

One interesting thing I learned recently at a Blogger-con was from an employee of a major technology corp, who had given permission to and even encourages all employees to begin blogging (internally) about their work. All blogs are syndicated so that they can be subscribed to by people with an interest. One of the surprises was that rather than workers overwhelmingly subscribing to their boss’s blogs, the trend seemed to go in the other direction, aggregation going from bottom to top.