Question 65 of 365: How do we get there from here?

As much as I try to get excited about of the journey, there is still a really big part of me that just wants to arrive. The point A to B stuff gets tiresome, and I just want to do be done with it. I wan’t to claim victory and not have to see everything through just to prove my point.

In essense, I would like to have a map already laid out and know what the mile markers are going to say. If StreetView can put together a viewpoint of the inside of stores, surely I can see my way to the end of the year or the coming collisions within my life, right?

In Maine they have a saying, “You can’t get there from here.” And I believe that this holds true for a lot of what I am trying to do in starting a new business or in starting a new school. The progression doesn’t seem logical. It seems as though we will have to jump over vast lakes that stand in our way. And if that is the case, what will those jumps be?

I would like to proclaim now that my ideas will be profitable within a year. I would like to proclaim now that education will be better because we have rethought it in this time and space. I would like to proclaim that the networks that I live in will be forever changed because I have taken part. These proclamations are not made out of hubris, but rather, out of passion for making them happen.

And yet, what jumps will let these proclomations come true?

I believe that the first jump will be because of a single person. I believe that a single person that I do not yet know will see what we are trying to do and decide that he or she wants to invest their time and money into breathing them to life. I believe that this person will have a unique perspective that I have never considered. He or she will be able to better see my goals than me and will be better able to articulate them to a wide audience. This person will become my muse for a while. He or she will make me want to work nonstopped to figure things out and prove my worth. This person will not wait for me, but will encourage me to keep up. And I will.

The second jump will be because of a technology that doesn’t yet exist. It will help me listen better to everything going on around me and let me iterate upon my ideas more efficiently becuase of it. This technology will focus my energy on creating something new rather than monitoring what I have already created. It will single-handedly change my discourse to be about making connections and sustaining them. It will change me too.

The third jump I will make to get from here to there will be because of a loss I will undergo that I cannot yet see. I will have to give up a very large part of my ideas or of myself in order to prove that I can go on. I will lose so completely that it will be hard for me to pick up the pieces, and yet I will. I will continue to pursue what I have always pursued: an authentic way to work and learn. And that is what will still be there. The loss will haunt me, but it will solidify my resolve to get things done and I will work even harder to make sure that what I have lost will not have been sacrificed in vain.

While these predictions are somewhat ominous, I think that they are completely true. I beleive that the only way that we can make true strides toward our vision of the way things should be is through loss, disruptive technologies, and supportive mentorship (not an exhaustive list, however). I shall have all three.

BookGlutton: The coolest thing to happen to reading.

I can’t believe that this service took this long to exist, but my goodness is it cool:

BookGlutton is a site that creates on the fly discussion groups around ebooks. It allows you to chat while you are reading with other readers of the same book. And, if that wasn’t enough, it also allows you to embed those books directly into a webpage. This means that you could put it into a school webpage and then have anyone who reads the book become a part of an ad hoc book club.

The kind of function that allows for writing about books without removing it from the text itself, is nothing short of amazing. I want learning to happen in context, and this lets the context of the written word be the place where it occurs.

Anyway, I would love to know how you would use something like this in your classroom. Here are a few books that you might find useful:

1. Jane Eyre
2. King Lear
3. The Scarlet Letter

Twitter and Google Reader for Productivity

Swimming lessons

For one year when I was younger, I took private swimming lessons. This
was in the stage after I had learned all of the basics with a bunch of
other kids my age. We could all do the breaststroke, tread water, and
do relay races for extended periods of time. And it was before any
official swim team existed for our age group. I saw potential in
myself; I wanted to do more advanced things than were going on in a
group, but I wasn’t yet ready to compete.
 
The reason I am relaying this rather personal story is that I feel
like this happens often for educators. They get to a point where they
need some one on one attention in order to continue their learning.
They are ready to fine tune their skills, ready to move beyond the
simple strokes that all teachers posses. So, where do they get this
one on one help? If they have a personal learning network, they can
get it quite easily. They can ask questions and create a relationship
with another teacher who has just had the benefit of “private
lessons”. But, if they see themselves as disconnected from all
teachers who aren’t in their school, then this kind of learning
doesn’t happen.
 
“Private swimming lessons” are much harder when everyone around you is
just treading water.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

I’m not sure why this matters…

I just got word that the Chief Information Officer for Douglas County
Schools (my school district) is now on Twitter
(http://twitter.com/rmweldon). Allong with both McCains, I am the
third person he is following at the moment. I guess I’m not sure why
it matters, but there is this small part of me that is happy to know
that.
 
Not that he is following me, but that he is following someone… that
he sees the platform as one that is worth exploring. I don’t expect
many tweets or that it becomes his main platform for asking questions
and getting answers, but I guess it does matter. It matters because I
can now ask him questions. It matters because he is a part of my
learning network now (because I am following him too).
 
So, I guess if you are reading this, please give him a warm welcome.
And Randy, if you ever read this, I look forward to learning from you.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

I believe in burning out.

As much fun as I will have reflecting on CoLearning 2009, I am too burned out to do so tonight. I am too burned out on conversing with anyone but my wife about anything but my two children. And I am glad for this burn out. I am glad that my brain can and does reboot from time to time on matters of educational importance. My wife is glad too.
 
But, tomorrow is another day, and I plan on starting the work for CoLearning 2010 (or even a fall version of the conference, if I am reading the wind right). I encourage you to burn out sometime soon too.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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You say you want a revolution…

I really enjoyed reading Clarence Fisher’s recent post on why no one he knows has been fired over advocating connected learning (http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2009/01/the-death-of-bi.html). He makes some wonderful points about whether or not we are as revolutionary as we claim to be (as Edupunks or otherwise). His most interesting point though is the idea that there are no new ideas that are really sparking debate or lighting fires under people so that they really buck the system.
 
Well, I would say that he is right in many respects. Blogs just aren’t as hot button of an issue that they used to be. And, to a certain extent, educational technology has been coopted by many districts in order to show that they are moving in the right direction. I still wouldn’t go as far as saying that there are not (or have not been in the recent past) any revolutionary ideas in the edublogosphere.
 
The revolution is in the details now. It is in making things actually work for people. It may not be a single big idea, but in the articulation and execution. I can’t believe just how many new pieces I am putting together for the first time and how many barriers to learning I am breaking down for myself and others.
 
For example: Although I have blogged for nearly six years now, I am just now starting to leverage blogs for others in ways that actually make sense to them. Although I have been video conferencing since high school, it is just now possible to get people to meet without having to set up a place to hold us. And although I have tagged over 2500 bookmarks, I didn’t really understand how powerful tags can be for putting information at other’s fingertips.
 
In short, the big idea that is left is in bringing the power of learning networks to everyone. If he or anyone else has figured that one out, I will forever hold my blog.
 
And as for the big idea in the classroom, the one that will get you fired for sure:
 
Open everything. Grade nothing.
 
If anyone is willing to try and have all student projects be open and assign no grades whatsoever (in the hopes of actually providing an authentic learning experience), I wish them luck. I think the only reason why people aren’t getting fired more is that they know theirs schools are better places because of them and their kids are better off with them as their teachers. They won’t go after total openness because, to a certain extent, they can create more change if they create more and revolt less.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Feeds in a workflow.

For as useful as they are for aggregating information, rss feeds are not all that easy to put into one’s workflow. You have to make a point of going to a special page and maintaining your reading list. Google reader (http://reader.google.com) makes it pretty easy to do this, but you still have to make a habit of going there.
 
At one point (not that long ago), I had over 2000 unread posts in my aggregator. It seemed unlikely that I would ever be able to sift through it all and pull off any kind of conclusions. I was under the infamous guilt of falling behind. More than that, I felt like my PLN was leaving me behind.
 
Well, no longer. I have found a way to make my rss feeds more immediate, a way for my feeds to literally alert me to their presence. Enter http://snackr.net/. This Air application (good on any platform) is the only way I have figured out to put feeds onto my screen in the way that Tweetdeck or Twhirl has done for my twitter account. I no longer go to google reader for anything other than maintenance because it syncs directly with Reader. If you have enough room on your screen for one more way to connect, I would recommend Snackr highly. If only for the ability to show others that Rss is not abstract. It is real, and it is a powerful way of exploring connected and authentic learning.
 
Reflective aside: What would anyone think of a collaboratively maintained educational Google Reader account that could be used by Snackr apps in schools? Which feeds should be included and why? Is it just one more thing or would this kind of workflow influence allow for real change?
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Community requires tending.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story mostly about tyranny and the corruption of utopian ideals, but in the very beginning there is a passage that means something very different to me. It deals with the leadership of Mr. Jones before the rebellion, before the animals decide to take the farm into their own hands.

“The fields were full of weeds, the buildings wanted roofing, the hedges were neglected, and the animals were underfed.”

This quotation represents all of the things that happen when Mr. Jones gets too distracted to work, to maintain his environment, and to make life better for all those involved. To me, this is about not tending the community. It is about letting things lie fallow which must be uprooted and overturned to see what is underneath them.

Our communities are just like this I think, both in our classroom and outside of them. The communities within our classroom, especially the collaborative ones that we are all striving for, require an immense amount of tending. The Discovery Utopia wiki that my students are working on (and the reason that we are reading Animal Farm in the first place) is not an exception. If I do not constantly draw attention to the great things that are going on there, the community seems to just pass right on by them. If I do not look for the troubling points, the issues that nearly every student seems to be struggling with, students stop using the community. They find other ways to occupy their time. And that is one of the most interesting parts about our communities. They are communities of choice.

All communities of choice are ones that can be thriving in one minute and vacant in the next. So, how do we tend for consistency? Well, we feed the animals (is it weird that I am referring to my students as animals). We put up new buildings for them to play in. We design the space so that it is inviting and provokes the best kind of authentic creativity: their own.

I think that the lesson is pretty clear. If we do not tend to our communities, they will fail. The inhabitants will rebel and either stop using them, or turn them into something that rejects their purpose. And, if Animal Farm is any indication, the inhabitants of a untended community will become just like us and not tend to their communities. I mean that in both a virtual and real-world sense.

I hope this comes across as something other than a Language Arts teacher’s metaphorical analysis.

Imagery in Blogging (and Cell phones in the Classroom)

As my students work more and more in the non-fiction realm due to their new found niches, they have a tendency to lose sight of just how descriptive and beautiful their writing can be. As a blogger, I have found that some of my greatest pleasure is derived from my ability to string together an image or a particularly well described passage.

A blog is informative, but stylistically so. The ability to craft a unique image within the information is a virtue that we should all be striving for. So, in an attempt to put these words into practice, here is what I am talking about.

Topic: Cell phones and iPods in the classroom

With his two fingers pushed together, carefully spreading them outward across the screen, one of my students was doing something that I had never thought of a couple of years ago. He was blogging from his iPod. Immediately, we gathered around the gadget, pondering its significance. It was distracting and powerful: the ability to blog about anything at any time. Just think if twitter wasn’t blocked at school.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around cell phones being used for things other than voice. I have been saying for quite a while that we need more laptops in the classroom, as many as there are laps. But can’t we get done most of what we need with our plans from verizon and AT&T? Watching the mini-safari browser spin into action leads me to believe that we aren’t far off from this reality.

I want my students to be thinking about how they can utilize their cell phones in my classroom not how they can sneak a look at what time it is on the display when I am not looking. Their cell phones are bejeweled with authenticity. In many cases, their cell phones are so representative of their lives that given the choice of losing a cell phone or a limb would cause them to pause to think.

Where is the research that says cell phones are great for the classroom. Well, mostly it doesn’t exist yet, at least not that I know of. If anyone has seen any great studies or has done some great work with non-laptop ITC, please share. All I have right now is anecdotal evidence from my classroom and the presentation from K12 Online 2007. Surely there is more to it than that.

I have italicized (for my students) the moments where I intentionally added imagery or description in order to make a potentially boring subject interesting (at least to me). My hope is that blogging moves closer to this style and further away from the dense writing of academic papers. Let me know what you think about either idea.

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