This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
Today's podcast, recorded yesterday, is a short recording about Myra and her work with our district library clerks as they learn more about he read/write web. Enjoy.
Links
Myra's course
The "23 Things " project - which is formally called Learning 2.0
An article about our school district's Tech Fair (which I don't mention in the podcast, really, but I'm pretty excited about)
The conversation(s), I mean. You know, about how teachers need to be engaged, too, in order for their passion to come through. Gardner Campbell posted this quote by Jerome Bruner that was a good reminder of the fact that, while the tools and the opportunities to connect and talk are new, not so many of the ideas about school and learning and teaching that some folks, myself included, are (re)discovering:
2. Jerome Bruner, from the Preface to the 1977 revised edition of The Process of Education:
Let me turn finally to the last of the things that have kept me brooding about this book–the production of a curriculum. Whoever has undertaken such an enterprise will probably have learned many things. But with luck, he will also have learned one big thing. A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having had an effect on teachers. The doctrine that a well-wrought curriculum is a way of “teacher-proofing” a body of knowledge in order to get it to the student uncontaminated is nonsense.
Amen. A double amen to the conclusion of his post (you should really read the rest):
I yearn for that effective surprise and for the cognitive economy of powerful symbols, for the structures and the illuminating honesty, the theme parks and the sandboxes, to make of courses of study episodes of buildable wonder.
Now, he's a university professor talking about university courses. But I want my daughters' kindergartens to be "episodes of buildable wonder." Don't you?
I don't think for a moment that blogging is going away. In fact, I'm surprised by how quickly some folks seem to embrace that. (I wonder if it's because blogging is hard. I'd like to give up plenty of hard things - but I won't because they're good for me.) Ryan Bretag writes that, unless "blogs evolve" then they'll drift away. I don't agree with him. In fact, in the spirit of constructive debate, and because I've got lots swirling around in my head at the moment, I'm happy to provide the constructive criticism that Ryan was seeking in his post.
In his piece, Ryan argues, on one front, that blogging is dying because we as a blogging community were never able to all agree on goals and objectives:
There are times when I ponder what the goal is for the edublogger community. Obviously, there will be those that immediately move to the power of blogging is that it is about the individual; it is about whatever that person wants it to be about. While this is true, I would hope the end goal for edubloggers is improving education and that the goal of individual blogs or community blogs will focus on how they are helping to achieve this larger community goal.
There are multiple problems here. The same assumptions that inform Ryan's argument above are present in many of the important and interesting conversations taking place within my personal learning network now and in the past. Mostly, the assumption that's troubling me so much is that there's one group (community - whatever) out there that exists for educational conversation via electronic media, and that we should all try to engage and involve everyone in that one (fallacious) group so that we're all friends and reading and commenting each other. And that we'll all agree on where that group should go, when they should meet, and what we'll all do when we get there. Or that we ever agreed in the first place.
Ain't going to happen. Not now, not ever. Never did happen, in fact. We all construct our blogrolls, our Twitter friends, or our other social networking relationships for our benefit and to meet our own unique needs. That leads some folks to add everyone as a friend. Others, no one. And whichever way you want to go is fine for you - but please don't require that I or anyone else goes with your system to meet our own needs.
However folks decide whom to add as a friend, a trusted source, or whatever, dictates to some degree which bits of the "conversation(s)" one receives. (And maybe it's not even a "conversation" in the sense of the word that we're all most familiar with. Bakhtin's a good guy to get cozy with to follow this conversational, or dialogic, view of blogging. If there is such a thing. Yet. I'm still wrapping my head around this stuff - have been for a while.) So context itself gets funky in a network situation, leading to instances where, in my friend group, something would be totally okay, flattering, in fact, and in another, the same act would be a serious social violation. And different readers, responding to different network contexts (because every one of our networks is unique), will react differently to the "same" information. Add in the fact that a piece of my network exists inside of a piece of yours, or vice versa, or used to, or soon will, and things get messy pretty quickly.
Despite the fact that this makes for some seriously complex audience(s) analysis every time one puts fingers to keyboard (or at least, I hope that it does for you - sure does for me), I hope it's pretty clear that there is no such thing as "one" edublogosphere. I used to think that perhaps there was - probably before I started blogging in 2005 - but there're too many of "us" and so it becomes more than impossible to keep track of it all. That's a good thing, once we recognize the reality.
It's actually dangerous to believe that we can stay on top of all of the information. Some do better than others, of course, but I don't know that there's any one person that's got all of the necessary information for world domination at their fingertips. (Sorry, Steve. - And that's a reference to an inside joke that you'd only understand if you'd been reading Steve Dembo's Twitter stream for the last several months.) One stance I'd urge folks to consider, if they haven't already, is that we can and should accept that there's plenty we're going to miss, lots of it quite good, but that we're doing no one a service by trying to read everything or make declarations about the "proper social norms" of the "edublogosphere." Since there's not "one" and we're all a little bit different, then lots of the "we musts" only make sense in particular contexts.
And there're plenty of contexts to go around.
Other people, smarter people than myself, have attempted to explain this before. Stephen Downes, for one, continues to be helpful to my understanding of just how wicked complex such a simple act, that of blogging, is.
But I certainly don't get it. At all. I'm still fumbling along, as best as I can - and that's a good thing.
This will sound horribly selfish, and I'm overstating it just a bit for emphasis, so I hope it's taken with the grain of salt that it deserves - but I'm not writing or reading or thinking for the benefit of all mankind, no matter how selflessly I say otherwise. I'm doing it for me, for my personal learning and attempt at understanding. Now, there's a certain benefit for others if I'm able to better teach, to better serve my students, or the grown ups with whom I work. But they are not the primary beneficiaries of my labors.
I am.
Like I said - that sounds selfish, and there's certainly a large piece of me who works in this space because I believe in the value of sharing and collaboration. Heck, I'm a teacher because I believe that education helps to make a difference in peoples' lives. The paradox of "the edublogosphere" is that sometimes, the best thing I can do to build community/group/network capacity is to serve me, myself and I and trust that such self-service will be of use to others. I've seen time and time again that it can be.
(I've also seen that Ryan's probably right about folks' desire to be in agreement with people rather than in conflict about ideas, but that's another blog post.)
My friend and colleague Jason is beginning some new blogging work with his students. You might be interested, particularly if you teach IB Theory of Knowledge. (One great thing about the IB Diploma pPogramme is that all students must take an epistemology course. I wish that everyone took a class about how we know what we know. Here's more info on IB's course.) Here's a bit of info:
I'm having the students each host the blog for a week in an attempt to get them to record for me how people are responding on the blog. All of my expectations, including my "Blog Log", are found here.
Now that my students are thinking, writing, and recording for me... it all begins. Now we'll just see where it takes me.
In other classroom blogging news...
In 2 weeks or so, a new TOK blog will be set up for an international audience. Schools from Colorado, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, the UK, and Equador will be talking to each other. I'm still in the process of formalizing how that will look but I'll post more info. when I know.
As a plus and an aside, here's a teaching resource for one IB TOK teacher's courses, an online community for IB students and graduates, as well as a weblog ring of IB students. Interesting stuff.
I'm writing this morning from the first general session of T+L, listening to the multitude of announcements that usually make up the bulk of first such sessions at conferences everywhere. So far, I've seen some cool student PSAs.
I'm looking forward to a few days of conversation with colleagues from my district and from other schools around the country and world. If you're here, too, drop a comment here. I'd be curious to know where you plan to spend your time at the conference. (Okay, I'm also interested in picking folks' brains - never been to this event before. What's the good stuff that I shouldn't miss?)
I'll probably (and already have been) be posting regular updates via Twitter, my choice bits tool of, ahem, choice, at least as long as my battery hold out.
I tweeted this. Then Dean posted it. And he's right to do so - I'm forgetting to blog in the wake of Twitter. And that's a bad thing - worthy of a podcast in the near future. Will's having the same trouble, it seems, as are others in my network(s). Things are getting ever-more complicated. And that's a good thing.
Anyway - I think this video is of interest to many - both because of the way it was made - which I like very much - as well as the accompanying post on the statistics behind its creation. What a great model for transparency in creation - as well as a good piece for conversation. Enjoy.
This month's English Journal is a themed issue on New Literacies. I'm pleased that a hyperlinked version of our column, entitled "Linkin' (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks" is available for free via the EJ website. Regular readers of the blog will have seen much of the content before, as some of it originally appeared here, but hey, now it's in print, so it's an important text for scholarly perusal, as opposed to just a blog post.
Enjoy.
In this podcast, I manage to define a network as a group (gulp - forgive the error) while attempting to explain some of what's been on my mind as I've been getting used to my new job. Yeah, that theme's getting a little old around here - but I think it's going to be that way for a while. Feel free to let me have it in the comments.
In today's podcast, I reflect a bit on the power of connections, meeting with friends, "starting over" as a blogger, and a teeny bit of what I'm up to in my new position. Enjoy!
Links from the 'cast
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