Learning is Change

This is one of my favorite quotes from Harold and Maude, which is one of my favorite movies. It is from the scene where Maude is showing Harold all of the things she has collected. She is explaining to him that for as much stuff as she has laying around, none of it is essential to her life, that if everything went away, she would still have  what is important to her.

The reason why I have been thinking about this quote a lot recently is that this is what I would like to see us adopt as a mantra for every new tool that we encourage someone to take up. For as good as Slideshare or Voicethread are, there is almost no chance that they will be around forever. These things that we have collected and even subscribed to cannot be the basis for what we are trying to do. At least, they cannot be the basis for me.

I would like to say that at the end of the day, anything that I create or collect is not the end all be all of Learning. I would like to be able to say that if you stripped away all of the tools and stuff that I use on a daily basis that I would still have something to stand on. I would still have a purpose in creating change in schools.

So, with that in mind, I am going to be taking a critical look at what I am truly dependent upon for my learning. Do my theories of connected learning still hold up you take away Twitter. Could I still learn if Google Reader was no longer. If WordPress stopped updating and I had to settle for exactly what I have right now, would that be enough to create the types of environments that students and adults need in order to be truly successful learners.

I believe so. I believe that if all of our tools were going to fall flat on their faces tomorrow and the amount of support for them would dry up considerably, we would be able to continue to create change because of what we have learned through the connections we have made.

I think it is because I am coming more and more around to the idea that the truly amazing part of Authentic Learning is not the connection you make with information, the way that you aggregate it or making meaning of it. In fact, the most important part of Learning is the connections that you make with the people: the ones that sustain you and make sure that you have all of the resources you need. It is truly the people that add value in a Personal Learning Network and not the tools.

I know this is nothing revolutionary to say, but it is the first time that I have really felt this to be true. As much as I have denied the tools’ importance, until I figured out that it is the link sent from one person to another or the wonderful compliment paid to a colleague that keeps me going, I never really understood just how my learning worked.

So, if my delicious account were to vanish tomorrow, it is by the power of the people I have connected with that I would be able to piece it back together. That is why I do what I do. That is why I blog and think and connect and try to create change.

In an effort to have some of the conversations that I engage in regularly on Twitter and in the Edublogosphere within my home School District, I have started having a semi-regular conversation with a few folks in Douglas County about 21st century learning in our district. We have decided to make it into a video podcast that is hosted on our server, but is available through itunes.

Here is the iTunes link.

I will also be crossposting the podcasts as a part of the Learning is Change podcasts, so here are the show notes from the second edition of this podcast:

We had a great time today talking about 21st century learning. The following are questions that we considered during this podcast:

• How can we best respond to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century?

• How can we help empower today’s learners and teachers?

• What are the alternatives to schooling as we know it?

• What does 21st century learning practice actually look like (in a “real” classroom)?

• How can I contribute to transforming our educational organizations?

Also, if you are interested in the full show notes, please head on over to our Google Notebook page.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

As much as I can before educon 2.1, I will be expanding upon the ideas of my topic, The On Button: Instant and Always on Collaboration. While, the full post that outlines the session is coming, I feel like holding off on it until then is a little silly. So, with that in mind, I would like to share something that I found today thanks to @Fallapart. I was looking for a way for people to access a shared Google Reader through their e-mails. The reason for this is that as much as I find Google Reader to be one of the best ways to learn things, most people still find RSS to be a complex and confusing thing.

So, what if they could get a digest of blog posts easily from a Reader account. Well, if you use http://www.rssfwd.com/, you can put in any rss feed and it will create a digest for you daily, weekly, or whenever there is a new post. So, after we have the shared Google Reader account set up, all we would have to do is pull the folder feeds into RssFwd and it would create easy to swollow digests of the content.

All I need to find now is an opml file filled with categorized edubloggers… Well, let’s do one better. Let’s let everyone create their own “best reading list” according to their own keywords. Let’s let everyone create their own opml files using this.

So, the workflow goes like this:

1. Create your own personalized reading list with the Live Search OPML Generator.
2. Import into Google Reader.
3. Copy the Folder feed from the “mange my subscriptions section”
4. Paste it into RssFwd

Viola, you have a reading list that keeps on coming of personally relevent information directly to your e-mail account. Talk about always-on.

If only this could be automated somehow…

I was having a little trouble with getting wordpess to update my twitter account when I post from my phone. I think that things should just work, but apparently even wordpress 2.7 (which nay the only blogging platform I will ever need) doesn’t understand the need for instant twitter acknowledgment
 
Let’s see if this works any better..
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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.
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The EdTechTalk delicious site has a wealth of relevent tags. It has so many in fact, that it may be THE resource for tags about Educational Technology and learning in general. I love being able to select different tags and find out what other people are categorizing within this rather large community. However, what if you wanted to use those tags somewhere else? What if you wanted to add those tags to the choices in your own blog or search according to those terms?

What if you wanted to categorize all of your ideas according to what the community has deemed worthy of their time? Well, I did want to do that. I wanted to use the common tags of our community, so I have made all of the tags in EdTechTalk (at least up until today) into a comma separated file for easy import into anything I would like to use them for.

Here is the file: edtechtalk-tags

Pedagogical implication: I think that it really makes sense for us to start using the same words to talk about learning. Coming together on a group of tags that we would like to use for aggregation purposes is something that we have neglected too long. The community is far enough along to put get into a discussion about just where we want our folksonomies to go. We need to take ownership of terms like elearning and make them more specific. We also should be teaching our students to come together on terms to use so that all of their work can not only be found later, but also grouped according to topic, theme, or even skill level.

Think about if we had a way to group student work according to a self-reflected score (of effort, of achievement, etc.). What if we could use exemplars and organize them according to the tags that they have self-selected.

Where else should we go with our community of tags?

I have to say that up until recently I didn’t see what was so great about spreadsheets. I have been using them for years to analyze student achievement data and present findings to others, but the didn’t seem like the “killer-app” that so many others seem to be thinking about.
 
On the other hand, my wife speaks in spreadsheets and she can really make them sing. She can have fields reference across fifteen different sheets and set up a budget in a matter of moments.
 
This is extremely cool if all you want to do is present information or figure out what makes sense in terms of data, but as a collaborative process, I just didn’t see it.
 
That was until Google Spreadsheets started opening up anonymous access to spreadsheet using forms and protected links. I started using google forms in order to record interest in our district’s online school (http://edcsd.org). This proved an effective way of collecting specific information and storing it in a place that could be accessed from everywhere. So, in this sense, it was a mass collaboration that was added to with every entry. No one really is able to see the scale of the collaboration, that is, except for me.
 
Well that was a neat trick, but it is nothing compared to the idea of a spreadsheet wiki. One feature that was just added to google spreadsheets is the ability to share a link with others that will let others edit it without having to sign up for a google account.
 
This means that students could record data on the same spreadsheet without having to sign in. It means that achievement data (not on specific students, though) could be aggregated in one place, all without having to teach an entire staff about a new service. It means that you could keep track of all of your school’s goals with everyone adding their notes, never having to go through the extra hoop of remembering a password.
 
Perhaps best of all, it would allow all of those who do not yet see the value of massively-collaborative projects to participate in one without ever knowing about it and by using a tool they already recognize as important: spreadsheets.
 
Perhaps I am making too much out of this. Perhaps there are other tools that do this already, but as I am on a search for ways to eliminate as many logins as possible, this is one great step in the right direction.
 
Do you see any new ways of using this? Are spreadsheets more valuable now?
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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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I am now coming to understand feeds and rss as the muscles that move the web. They are the tissue that seems to push and pull all of the information that I care about. Unfortunately, many sites still do not open up their content to rss feeds.
 
Well, instead of waiting for them to open it up, I can take matters into my own hands and construct my own rss feeds using http://www.dapper.net. Much like greasemonkey, Dapper allows you to choose which ares of a webpage are important and then select them for inclusion in the rss feed (or exclusion on your browser in the case of greasemonkey). So, what does this have to do with learning?
 
Well, if I can make anything into a feed, then I can make anything on demand for others. I can make any webpage that was created before “web 2.0” into something that can be fed into an email subscription, an aggregator, or a portal. This opens up all content to redistribution in a format of your own choosing. So, put everything at students’ fingertips. Aggregate everything. Seriously.
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Well, I let another year go by without challenging myself to blog more. I let reflections go until tomorrows that never came. I left words and ideas on the tip of my tongue. Well, this year is not going to be like that. This year I will not over filter my learning. This year I will not hold on to theories until they are fully realized, eliminating the conversations that could be had if I talked through each element here. This year I will blog every day. This is not an idle promise. It is not an empty gesture at the beginning of the year. It is a challenge to myself to build a consistent voice. I will not forget about the “big posts”, but I will not wait for them either. This year I will speak to my blog with http://dial2do.com and email my blog with http://posterous.com. I will not forget or regret the days gone by this year. I am also counting on you, the reader, to help me fulfill the challenge. If I neglect my challenge, feel free to tweet me, email me, poke me, or otherwise bug me into submission. Thank you in advance for your help.
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