I could not have said this better…
This may be idealistic, but if I could talk about what I’d want for a TED Prize, it’d be to spend a year getting a 1,000 conversations going about what we dream education could be all over the country… and to record them all… and catalogue parents and students and teachers best hopes for school, so that we could have an action plan about where we need to go, because I don’t know that we, as a nation, know what we want or how to get there. But I’d love to find out what it might look like, and I’d love to think that the folks at TEDxNYED would have something to add to the discussion. (From the comments on Dan Meyer's TEDxNYED Metadata)
As part of my regular professional development, I have a group of education technology professionals I follow on Twitter. Through following this group of people, I learn about what they are reading and viewing and how they are applying this to their schools.
One site that came up recently is Facebook for parents by BJ Fogg, Professor at Stanford University. I thought that this site was informative and has a realistic view of social networking for parents.
Social networks are here to stay. Our job is to help our children make good decisions about how the use them. I encourage you to discuss social networking use with them.
Here are a few videos of Professor Fogg from the Stanford Facebook Fan Page that you might find interesting:
BJ Fogg to the very first Stanford Open Office Hours. The conversation starts here (part 1), continues here (part 2), and finishes here (part 3).
For more resources, you can follow my Internet Safety links on Delicious.
Fred Bartel’s Starting a Virtual Independent School thread morphed recently. 
As we discussed the topic, what resonated in me was the importance that our communities understand what it means to learn online. Once a critical mass of our communities know what the the pros and cons of this environment are, we can better assess how they will fit into our schools.
Over the past couple of weeks, arvind, Vinnie and I have been discussing the creation of an Online Teacher Academy for this purpose. Here are links to the two podcasts:
21st Century Learning #97:Designing an open, web 2.0, personal lear…
21st Century Learning #98: Designing an Open Online Teacher Academy…
In the two podcasts above, we begin the discussion about how to lead our teachers through an online experience that provides them with the tools and the inspiration to build their own personal learning network.
After our last podcast, I posted a couple of goals and a short description for this experience:
1. Teach online tools in the context of teaching and learning
2. Creating online community to model and sustain this learning
This online teacher academy starts by walking its participants through some basic online tools while building a community, and creates a structure for the participants to create and document new work thus leaving a legacy for the next generation of learners.
I would like to spend some time working to create this learning experience with a group of interested educators from June 30 – July 2nd here in New York City. We’ll definitely be broadcasting this, so don’t worry if you can’t be in NYC. This also coincides with NECC and I’m sure we’ll be bringing folks who are there into this conversation.
We already have some takers who are interested in participating in this discussion.
What do you think? Who’s interested in participating? Please add comments to the thread at isenet.
Photo from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiscinfonet/405736372/
Check out the criteria for a successful student web 2.0 project that Marie Salinger from Whitefriars College just posted on a PLP NING group page:
What makes a good online project? The following VELS-based criteria may be addressed:
- Interpersonal – students should work in teams and have opportunities to develop speaking, listening, decision making and conflict management skills. They should also have specific roles and responsibilities in relation to those of others and the overall team goal.
- Personal – Students learn to seek and use feedback from their teachers and peers and draw on other members of the community who may provide feedback, knowledge and advice about skills that support their learning.
- Communication – development of literacy skills and opportunities to present information, ideas and opinions in a range of forms eg verbal, written, graphic, multimedia and performance.
- ICT – opportunities to communicate and collaborate and develop new thinking and learning skills in creative ways.
- Thinking – An explicit focus on thinking and the teaching of thinking skills to develop students’ thinking to a qualitatively higher level with opportunities for creative problem solving, decision making and conceptualising.
Projects will also be assessed for effective use of websites and web 2.0 tools, creativity, clarity of instructions and overall presentation.
The project and supporting materials should be presented in such a way that other teachers could follow the instructions and use/adapt the project with their own students.
From: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/Teacher/Webquests.htm
Lots to think about there. Do you have criteria for online projects?
Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/darrendraper/3199912725/in/pool-858082@N25
This morning, I hosted a PLP Network Session on how to use Twitter in the classroom. Here’s my slide deck:
Questions? What’s your take on using Twitter in education?
UPDATE — Here’s a link to the Elluminate Session.
(Cross Posted at edSocialMedia)
“The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.” (Wikipedia)
The Long Tail became relevant to me as I connected with education 
technologists around the world through my blog and Bloglines RSS blog reader. We were the sliver on The Long Tail that was interested in education and technology — a small distributed group with a niche interest. The Internet allowed us to connect to a global network of educators. I soon found myself listening to a number of educational technology podcasts.
My first podcasts were conference presentations by Alan November and John Palmfrey at the NEIT conference in 2005. Then, I found Wes Freyer’s blog where he produces some of the most amazing podcasts from conferences around the country. Next, I found EdTechTalk. Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier hosted a weekly live webcast with a text chat room to participate in the back channel where they interviewed people from the EdTech world. The live broadcasts with a chat room for listeners to participate created real community around their show. All shows were archived as poscasts with chat transcripts as part of the post.
After listening to a number of EdTechTalk podcasts, Jeff and Dave begin speaking about Webcast Academy, a way to learn how to Webcast. I thought, “this has to be full and I’ll never get a spot”. Then, “Is this really free? Who is funding these guys? Who else is participating in Webcast Academy?” Jeff and Dave answered these questions and more in their Back to Basics episode. I signed up for Webcast Academy and arvind grover agreed to be my co-host. We learned to webcast though a series of podcasts and then a series of screencasts.
After 5 webcasts on Webcast Academy, Jeff and Dave asked us to make the jump over the EdTechTalk. Our first interview on EdTechTalk was Chris Lehmann, during his planning year for Science Leadership Academy. Over the past three years, we produced 95 shows and have grown a great deal as webcasters. The EdTechTalk network has grown to over 11 weekly and bi-weekly webcasts. Webcast Academy continues to graduate classes of webcasters to EdTechtalk.
So why tell this story? Why do I think it is amazing? As I said in my last post, social media is all about participating in the conversation. EdTechTalk allowed arvind and me to be part of a global conversation around education and technology. We found The Long Tail of educators interested in technology. A few short years ago, this was not possible. After 95 webcasts, we learn new tools and techniques each week as we continue to build our network of educators who are pushing the boundaries of learning with technology.
Image 1: http://flickr.com/photos/arvindgrover/770886287
Image 2: http://flickr.com/photos/alexragone/3283792900/
(Cross posed at edSocial Media)
As I begin to blog here at edSocialMedia, I’m going to show how I began to start to wrap my head around Social Media.
I’m the Director of Technology at a K-12 Independent School. Part of my job is to keep up with current trends in technology and apply them to education. Pre-2005, most of the time I did this through magazines, books, listservs, and our local NYC Technology Educators (NYCIST).
Then I saw Will Richardson speak at our yearly New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Technology Educators Conference. I had published a static web site since 1998 for professional and personal use, but this was the first time I realized that there were a lot of other people out there who were doing the same through blogs, and I could learn from them.
In 2005, I started reading Will’s blog, and adding blogs to my bloglines account. I found Stephen Downes’ OL Daily through Will and found a link to this presentation: On Being Radical. In Downes’ presentation, he described the web site and then book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. I immediately surfed over to Amazon.com and bought it.
I remember to this day reading the first chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Internet Apocalypso. I got off the subway at 79th street and kept reading as I walked the few blocks to school — I could not put it down. I felt as though the lens from which I viewed the world was shifting. Here are a few paragraphs at the end from that first chapter that I read that day:
In fact, the news gets better from here on out. And the first bit of news is that this isn’t about us and them. It’s about us. Them don’t exist. Not really. Corporations are legal fictions, willing suspensions of disbelief. Pry the roof off any company and what do you find inside? The Cracker Jack prize is ourselves, just ordinary people. We come in all flavors: funny, cantankerous, neurotic, compassionate, avaricious, generous, scheming, lackadaisical, brilliant, and a million other things. It’s true that the higher up the food chain you go, the more likely you are to encounter the arrogant and self-deluded, but even top management types are mostly harmless when you get to know them. Given lots of love, some even make good pets.
Inside companies, outside companies, there are only people. All of us work for organizations of some sort, or we’re peddling something. All of us pay the mortgage or the rent. We all buy shoes and books and food and time online, plus the occasional Beanie Baby for the kid. More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near-fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all our lives.
Inside, outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all five years ago and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it’s about is futile. It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback déjà vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the twenty-first century.
Every time I read that again I sit back and think, wow, I wish I could communicate ideas like that. The role of the Internet as the medium providing human to human communications again. Communication that is two way. The age of mass media control is over.
If you have never read it, I highly recommend taking a look at The Cluetrain Manifesto. It predicted the social media revolution in 1999.
What was the first time you really saw social media changing the world around you?
* Photo from Momentary Glimpse on Flickr
Back in the spring I wrote about my school’s work trying to add a line about responsible use of social networking in our AUP. We had some great conversations with our faculty, students, and administrative team and ended up with the following statement:
I will maintain common, face-to-face social conventions and boundaries to avoid circumstances which are or could be perceived as inappropriate while using social networking, blogs, or any other interactive websites.
In this statement, we didn’t ban Social Network sites but warned against their inappropriate use. In our student and faculty/staff handbooks we define the social norms we expect from community members.
So not perfect, but a good start. Thanks to all that commented on my original post. I am always amazed at how quickly the experts in this field find and comment on posts like this one.
Let’s keep this conversation going. What does your AUP state about social networking?
Alright — Testing out Prologue micro-blogging theme in wordpress. Need to send out some invites. Love it.
I have been having lots of conversations at school (the one where I work) about 
Disrupting Class. People keep saying, "I have to read the book."
Obviously, reading the book is the best way to get this, but if you don’t have time to read the book right now and want a primer, here’s some audio/video/text to get you up to speed:
Start here:
- Scott McLeod’s K-12 Online Presentation: Leading the Change: Current leadership models are inadequate for disruptive innovations
- Our EdTechTalk: 21st Century Learning interview with Scott on DI
- Christensen on YouTube
- Business Week Article
- EdWeek Article – Disruptive Innovation in K12 (subscription required)
And if you’re still interested (this is what’s on my bookshelf at least):
- The Richard Elmore podcast from this post (and any of the other pieces as well)
- Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design: Connecting Content and Kids: Tomlinson and McTighe
- The Innovator’s Dilemma: Christensen
- Influencer: Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, Switzler
- Tribes: Seth Godin
There are tons of other good resources out there. I’ve been watching Google Blog Search for Disrupting Class as well.
arvind, Vinnie and I will also be interviewing Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson on 11/24 at noon EST and 12/4 at 2:15 EST respectively at EdTechTalk.
What recommendations do you have?
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