Just testing you can guess what… Sure wish I had smaller thumbs!

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I’ve liked Twitter since I first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy me about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.

Whether it’s some people getting a little snippy from time to time and then other people making a way-too-huge-a-deal about it, or whether it’s two very smart people like Gary and Sheryl blowing out a Tweet-a-minute micro debate about the state of education in this country, or whether it’s people trying to live Tweet hour-long presentations that turn into like 347 updates, I’m finding anything that hints of substance just too scattered, too disjointed to read, even with the wonders of Tweetdeck. It’s like trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of a bunch of people with really bad cell phone reception, hearing a part of one response ’til it cuts out into the other. Frustrating.

And I can’t help feeling like it’s just making all of us, myself included, lazy. We’ve lamented this before, this “fact” that the whole community is blogging less since Twitter, engaging less deeply, it seems. Reading less. Maybe it’s just me (again) or maybe it’s my long term attachment to this blogging thing and my not so major attachment to texting, but it feels like the “conversation” is evolving (or would that be devlolving) into pieces instead of wholes, that the connections and the threads are unraveling, almost literally. That while, on some level, the Twitterverse feels even more connected, in reality it’s breaking some of the connectedness.

I (we?) blog for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m sincerely interested in what others are experiencing and I hope to learn from their reactions. When I write here, I can’t help but hope that whoever reads it will stop, reflect if they find it relevant, and offer up some wisdom (or whatever else) that will pique my thinking. I hope it becomes a conversation among a group of interested parties that want to test out or build on the ideas. But on Twitter, while I sometimes post silly “I ran five miles” type of check in post for anyone that might be interested, I also find myself writing for just one or two people yet publishing it for everyone to see. And when I read other Tweets directed as a response to another person, it’s like I feel compelled to click and dig and sort and try to nail down the context of the “conversation” and then to read it back again to make sense of it.

Look, I love the Tweet links and the “touch ‘em alls” and the zen, in-the-moment stuff. But, selfishly, I wonder how much less I might be learning today than B.T. as more of what we care about gets processed in short soundbites.

Not sure why all that tipped for me today, but it just got really painful all of a sudden. Anyone else feeling similar things?

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Well, despite some technical issues (Skype video not working behind the NYU firewall (go figure) and just a complete drop of my Internet connection about half way through) here are the 2-part archives of my (or should I say “our”) interview of Clay Shirky along with the at times compelling chat conversation from UStream. (Apologies to those whose questions I didn’t get to; learning…) I’ll compress my thoughts into a later post, but on par, I found the interview itself and the process of doing it pretty interesting. I hope to have some more of these lined up in the coming weeks.

Would love to hear your feedback. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Here is a liveblog of the session from Christy Tucker.

LATER UPDATE: Here are MP4 versions of Part 1 and Part 2. Looks like these links break from time to time; keep trying. And no idea how long UStream will leave them up…

Part 1:

Part 2:

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Here.

That is all…

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Grainne Conole of OpenLearn presents a view of how Web 2.0 technologies can influence pedagogical approaches.  The models and ideas in Conole's presentation are worth considering by learning design professionals whose task is to facilitate the construction of online courses. (The video from the Eduserve Foundation Symposium 2008 was cited by iThinkEd.)____JH

Thanks to a tweet from Andy Carvin comes this latest example of how social tools are pushing the old traditional ways of thinking, this time in Congress:

Given the rules in place, this clash between the old ways of talking to the Congress and the potential new ones may have been inevitable. Noyes says Culberson and Ryan are active users of the Internet. “They have been Twittering all over the place,” he says. “They’ve been Twittering back and forth, engaging one another in debates over politics and policy.” The reporter describes Culberson, in particular, as something of a Web maverick and a poster child for the issue.

I love it.

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Chris shook my brain awake this morning with his reflections on change and Shirky and I’m still trying to sort through some of his finer points. Suffice to say, that it’s among the best posts I’ve read this year because it articulates so clearly where much of this is at and, perhaps, where it needs to go.

The where it’s at stuff is easy to get to, but hard to accept. And, as Chris says, our collective fear of failure, both of our schools and of our kids, is at the crux of the problem. Most are content with “predictably mediocre” schools because the risks associated with change are simply not worth it at this moment. It’s this risk/reward equation that I keep getting drawn to as well, and I keep feeling more and more that schools will not change until the external expectations change, and that the expectations that matter most reside in parents. We need to reframe that lens, and we need to do it fast. And “predictably mediocre” as language may not be a bad starting point. (That’s not what I want for my kids’ school.) But until we can celebrate the successes of “riskier”, change oriented schools like SLA, until we can make a compelling case that not only are the risks a) not that risky and b) imperative for preparing our kids, those risks will continue to be unpalatable.

And then there’s Tom, who is helping me understand “The Role of Chris Lehmann in the Universe.” As Tom points out, there are other progressive schools that might fit that bill, but their efforts are not nearly as transparent as Chris’s in the context of the technologies and tools we use in this community. I love the exclamation point he adds when he suggests that there have been “whole books” written about these places! The idea!

Tom asks if this is a problem in any sense, the fact that these schools and their principals aren’t blogging and Twittering and going to NECC. I wonder in the context of Shirky’s larger point that group action is enhanced by the ability to connect online if it isn’t a problem on some level. I wonder if a transparent network of successful “high-risk” schools connected through social tools wouldn’t at this moment be a boon to the larger discussion of school reform. And this is one of the more interesting effects of all of this, that right now, connecting around books is simply not as easy as connecting around blogs.

Which brings things to the “where all this needs to go” part of Chris’s post which is easier to read but harder to get to. How do we, in Shirky’s parlance, act collectively? Chris offers up some great, concrete, starting points, all of which are daunting to think about on any number of different levels because they inexorably lead to that inherent friction between traditional organization and collaborative group effort. There are new models being built in this process as well. What structure would we build? To what extent can it be owned by the many and not the few? Wikipedia is struggling with this right now. Obama is. It would be an interesting, yet difficult road, one that, as Chris points out, would be easier today than it was 10 years ago. And it could be oh so amazing if we pulled it off.

Much to think about, no doubt.

One more thing: Yesterday, when I picked Tess up from shooting (basketball) camp, she was sporting a new t-shirt, on the back of which read: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Hmmm…

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I saw this presentation live a couple of weeks ago at the Personal Democracy Forum and would suggest that it’s worth 25 minutes of your time to take a listen. I really like a lot of what Pesce is trying to say, even though the verbiage gets in the way at times. And it really pushes my thinking about cell phones in general. Have a look.

Here is the overview from the PDF presentation page, which has some great talks by Rushkoff, Shirky, Lessig, Zittrain and others:

In this keynote talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Pesce situates the current moment of transformation in the context of 60,000 years of human civilization; argues that our innate tendencies to connect with each other, copy behaviors and share ideas are now on hyperdrive; and projects a near-future where “hyperempowered” individuals and networks transform politics. As he concludes: “Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.” The text of his talk is available on his blog here. He has also posted his slides on Slideshare, here.

In light of the Obama campaigns use of social tools, Pesce pushes the thinking quite a bit…

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David Wiley announces the startup of Open Education News. This is another site to add to your list of rss feeds to monitor happenings in the field of open education. ___JH

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"The young field of open education is gaining momentum and energy. As additional projects, foundations, universities, and other participants join the movement, the need increases for a single source to gather, sort, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate news related to open education. As a field, open education is now where the field of open access was a few years ago. Peter Suber's wonderful Open Access News provides an invaluable service to the OA community, and we intend to replicate this service with Open Education News."

"Open Education News is essentially a group blog. A number of individuals from the US, South Africa, and eventually other locations daily monitor the internet for news related to open education. We then aggregate these items and publish them individually with minor commentary. Occasionally we'll publish bigger pieces of our own authorship; analyses and such. If you know of some open education news we should write about, contact David Wiley at david.wiley@gmail.com."

"Open Education News is graciously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation."

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be doing a live streaming interview with Clay Shirky this Thursday at 11 am at my Ustream Channel. I’ll be picking his brain on how what he sees are the educational implications of the changes and shifts set out in his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and I’m hoping you’ll participate as well. Most UStreamers know that there is a chat window that comes with every show, but I’ll also be opening up the cohost feature for those of you with camera and mic that want to come on and ask a question as well. (I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know ahead of time if you plan to do that, just for organization sake.)

If you’d rather just leave a question in this comment thread, I’d be happy to try to work it in.

Hope to see you on Thursday!

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Been trying to get my brain around last week’s NECC experience for a few days now, reading some of the other post mortems, thinking about what the lasting impressions are and will be for my own thinking and learning. For a variety of reasons, mostly personal, San Antonio was not a home run for me, not like last year in Atlanta when the energy and ideas seemed to be flowing more intently, more spontaneously. And before anyone starts throwing things at me, let me just say that was my experience; I’m sure that many, many others found this year’s event to be a celebration, perhaps a transformation in their thinking about teaching and learning and education. In that regard, I’m sincerely happy that more voices have been added to the chorus, and that more practitioners have entered the conversation. We need more voices. We need more good pedagogy and thinking.

I came to NECC in a bit of an edublogger funk, and that funk continues in some respects. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that’s not unusual. My interior monologue is fills with peaks and valleys, and right now, I’m once again struggling to define and focus where the best use of my time and thinking is. For the past two months, I have read very little from the education folder in my aggregator; simply, not much has been resonating. To be honest, very little in the last six months or so has felt new, a view that a couple of others at NECC seemed to share. I’ve been drawn to reading outside the usual suspects, thinking hard (once again) about the scope of this community and its reach. Thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems.

The good news is that the level of passion among those that count themselves in this community is, in a word, amazing. It was evident from the conversations I eavesdropped on in the Blogger’s Cafe to the late night debates on the River Walk, to the back channel chats, the sessions on how to put the tools to good work, to the collective efforts to capture as much of NECC as possible for those who couldn’t attend. I don’t think it was possible to sit in on the sessions or walk by the Cafe and not simply admire the level of engagement of both long standing and relatively new participants in this conversation. All of us, whether evangelists or practitioners or even the naysayers, are deeply invested in trying to make sense of these giant shifts that are occurring, and that is all good.

And there was an international flavor to NECC this year that seemed stronger than in years’ past. (BTW, I don’t count the Canadian contingent as international, thought I know I should.) It was great to see folks from Australia and the UK and many, many other far flung spots around the globe. We need more of their perspectives as well, and that seems to be happening.

But for me, at least, at the end of the day, I’m still left wondering, “what’s really changed?” And, where will we be a year from now?

NECC is the echo chamber writ large and in living color; more than any other conference, it’s where we feel “big.” But the reality of it is, as Dean suggests, the powerful learning that most of us experience in these online communities is still little more than a blip on the radar screen. (I wonder what percentage of the 8 million+ educators in this country are aware of these shifts on a basic level.) And this is a tech conference. As I read through some of the back channel conversations, some were asking about presenting to school boards or parents or even town councils. Others were talking about getting out to non-edtech conferences. Some were, again, searching for that elusive tipping point that will get the conversation jump started outside the chamber.

And I think it’s time we get serious about all of that. No doubt, the vendor floor in Washington will be filled with “Web 2.0 in a Box” and “Safe Social Networking” and control, control, control. And I’m going to guess that, like this year, “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts” will be “Hot Topics” as well as a few other new tools. And we’ll be talking once again about new standards and 21st Century Literacies and all of that. But while we as a community have no control over some of that, is that what we aspire to? Is that what we want the emphasis on NECC 09 to be, once again? Or do we want it to be more?

I hope it’s more. More about learning and figuring out what it means to be connected. More about what we can do to begin systemic change. More tangible, non-toolsy, results oriented thinking. More models that work, models that provide realistic options for educators to wrap their brains around.

More like what Chris Lehmann presented in his session, a session that since it had a “specific pedagogical focus” felt like it was “high stakes,” in an of itself a comment that should get us thinking. More like the conversations on leadership that Scott McLeod and Chris and others tried to have at EduBloggerCon on Saturday. More about ideas and connections.

And in general, without speaking for others, I again think I need to do more to try to get these ideas and these questions outside the walls of my learning community. I’m afraid we’re stalling because without some larger force or lever, these ideas have no where (or very limited routes) to go in a comprehensive discussion about what schools need to be and to do in response to the scale of change that is upon us. (That thinking is influenced heavily by Sir Ken Robinson’s latest presentation to the RSA, btw.) For me, at least, I think it’s time to start writing. (I know; I’ve said that before.)

Change on any level is not easy, and I’m not suggesting that there is one way to change or one thing that needs to be changed or that we all need to change in one particular way. It’s all incremental and personal, I know, but it’s also about doing what will create the most change, do the most good. I’ve been thinking about Lessig a lot and his attempt to attack the root cause of the smaller problems. I wonder what the root impediment for school change is? And, reffing Sir Ken again, we are at a moment where we all must change if we’re to sustain this existence. Along those lines, I’ve also, strangely, been thinking about all of the devoted carnivores that I hung around with last week in steak and barbecue land, thinking about how much healthier they would be and how much better off we’d all be if they and everyone else, for that matter, ate lower to the ground. But that is tough change as well.

Anyway, proposals for NECC ‘09 are only a couple of months away…

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Awesome session by Konrad this morning. We had about 50 people in the room from around the world, and it was streamed into Second Life as well. (Here is the chat.) It was just so much fun to be in a packed room of people who were into not just the tool but the pedagogy as well. Enjoy!

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Just before coming to NECC, I found a pointer to this recent post by Dave Winer reflecting on what conferences can and maybe should be. I actually attended the very first BloggerCon at Harvard in 2003. The “Blogging in Education” panel featured Pat Delaney, one of my earliest mentors, and there were a bunch of other smart people all around. But the real kick to the conference was the Day 2 unconference. The idea was to capture the best part of conferences, the conversations, and displace the presentations.

So, when I was designing my own conference in 2003, I decided to do something different — I moved the conference out of the hallway and into the meeting room. Or you can think of it the other way around. I tried to imagine what a conference would be like if you held it in the hallway.

It was, in a word, awesome. People engaged, interacting, debating, riffing on ideas and playing them out, all facilitated by “discussion leaders” that weren’t there to “present” but to guide. It was the hallway brought into the room.

I think that’s what we tried to do, with some pretty good success, last year in Atlanta with the first NECC related EduBloggerCon day. We had about 65 folks, and from what I remember, it was a lot of sitting around tables and on floors having some pretty wide ranging conversations about the state of education. It was like we all just wanted to get our brains stretched by the ideas, and have a chance as a group to get some deep, synchronous, back and forth with a whole bunch of folks who were passionate about figuring out what exactly was happening. It felt different. I wrote:

I’m not sure how far down the road we’re getting on answering any of the big questions. But we’ve started some conversations that I’m sure are going to continue. Steve, who has done such a great job of making this happen, said at the outset that he’ll be interested in seeing what transpires from this six months out. I’m feeling, at this moment at least, that we may have actually pushed further forward by that point.

In essence, as I read over the posts I wrote from NECC last year, we were part of a giant coming out party for these ideas that we’ve been kicking around here, some of us for years. It was like, finally, at last, people are listening. They’re getting it. We’re shifting.

Which is why yesterday’s EduBloggerCon II was, at least for me, a disappointment. I mean absolutely no disrepect to Steve who worked his tail off to organize it all and who I just simply admire as a good human. But right from the start, it was obvious that we hadn’t pushed further. In fact, if anything, it felt like we took a step backwards. Yep, there were more people, and that is a good thing. But the sessions I dropped in on and walked past didn’t have the same feel. They were being led, not facilitated. They were about tools. There were cameras and boom mics that totally interrupted the flow of the conversation, with clipboard laden vendors swooping down on those that talked with release forms needing signatures.

In short, it felt more like Monday than Saturday, in the room, not in the hallway.

It might be me. Others seemed to have gotten a lot out of the day. But it feels frustrating, on some level, that the week is shaping up once again to be more about tools and vendors than about the real work of getting our brains around how learning and networks and the very essence of how teaching and schools are being pushed by the shifts that are occurring. (And before anyone takes me to task, I’m fully aware that I’m doing a session on tools tomorrow, which, on some level I regret proposing.)

So I’m asking, what’s changing, really? How have we moved further down the road since Atlanta? I really want to know.

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This video series from Annenberg Media/Learning.org sets a high standard for online resources. The flash media presentations are exceptionally well produced to include clips from historical records and commentary by historians. Maps, a webography, and transcripts are also included with each module. Registration is required to access the free resources. Viewers who visit A Biography of America will also want to examine other programs available from Annenberg. ____JH

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"Annenberg Media is a unit of The Annenberg Foundation. Our mission is to advance excellent teaching in all disciplines throughout American K-12 schools. Former names of Annenberg Media are: Annenberg/CPB, The Annenberg/CPB Project, and The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project.

We pursue this mission by funding and broadly distributing multimedia resources for teachers to help them improve their own teaching practice and understanding of their subject. Annenberg Media makes use of telecommunications technologies—the Internet, including broadband video streaming, and satellite television broadcast—as well as hard copy media to disseminate these multimedia resources, ensuring that they reach as many teachers as possible."

Zaid Ali Alsagoff has revised his OCW/OER list compilations to produce an extremely useful update. Zaid's compilation should be bookmarked for reference by university instructors, students, and support staff. ______JH

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University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!

• Link to ZaidLearn's Delicious OCW Adventure
• 130+ Free Learning Tools
• 75 Free EduGames

- Zaid Ali Alsagoff (  [ZaidLearn]

Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

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"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.

A roles and responsibilities mindmap collaborative mindmap created with MindMeister

Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."