Important.
Pay particular attention to Shirky’s talk about doing nothing, doing anything, and doing something…that matters.
Now that you have all joined Twitter, you have indeed done the hard part. You moved from doing nothing to doing anything. Without diminishing the impact that your PLN has had, I’m coming out and declaring Twitter as not much more important than lolcats. The next step is moving the masses from doing anything to doing something.
There.
A few of us have been poking around on a project called Shifted Learning. Organize people to do something other than celebrate the face that they’ve created a thing (read: PLN). Move towards creating a community that’s doing something that matters. Of course, this involves first doing something.
I’m ijohnpederson on Words With Friends.
You can beat her too at ijesspederson.
AT&T still sucks, and the best engineering out of Cupertino won’t change that.
Posted that last night.
This morning I caught this piece from danah boyd regarding 4chan, hackers, and the attention economy.
I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture. For us geeks, freaks, and queers who embraced the internet as a savior, mainstreamification has meant a new form of disempowerment.
Read the rest of her article.
Jonathan Becker: ”They don’t make toys like they used to.” “I mean, how is my kid supposed to get calloused and tough?”
Todd Sanders: ”I modified toys with lead fishing weights and old steak knives before letting the kids touch them. Worst American Girl doll EVER.
Jonathan Becker: ”Or best. Depending on your goals.
Todd Sanders: ”Every American Girl doll comes with a story…some are longer than others.”
+++
My own internal dialog in working on lists of instructions goes something like…
- OK, step one. Where are my reading glasses?
- Step two. Going good! Get a beer.
- On to step four. Wait, did I skip step three?
- Up to step five. Damn, this isn’t working. Oh, I did step two wrong. I have to go back.
- Step six already. This is completely unintelligible. English is obviously not this writer’s first – or second language!
- Step seven. To hell with it.
- And step eight – give it to a kid who can do the task without looking at instructions at all.
- Optional step nine – complain about technology in general.
- Step ten – have another beer.
Related…
I am giving Twitter another go. Since I whacked my previous account, I now have a new Twitter name: BlueSkunkBlog
They come back. They always do.
Coming down from the mountain
I have seen the high and mighty
I will go again someday
But for now I’m coming down
Coming down from the mountain
I have seen the lofty glory
I will go again someday
But for now I’m coming down.
Seth Godin’s advice applies to most school mission statements as well.
Write nothing instead. It’s shorter.
via Seth Godin.
This is me talking to @ijesspederson and nothing more.
Finally got all the pieces of the podcasting studio together and working at the same time.
Expect more. Until then, put up with this test audio garbage. Sorry for the swears.
Deadspin features a story about “ferret legging“, a bloody endurance competition in which athletes stuff a ferret in their pants and see how long they can endure the pain.
I know more about ferrets today than I knew yesterday.
Update: There is a YouTube video about this.
Simply visit https://www.google.com and begin your search. ”S” stands for “secure” or “sure is nice visiting the rest of the Internet” while at school.
We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It’s a helpful addition to users’ online privacy and security, and we’ll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings.
via Official Google Blog: Search more securely with encrypted Google web search.
Apple has rolled 2 million + iPads out the door…all without “training” for their users. Think before you schedule that “Fall 2010 Staff Development Day” in your school district.
We’ve done the same thing to our teachers that we’re doing to our kids, namely conditioned them to wait for direction on what to learn, how to learn it, and how to show they’ve learned it.
I’ve figured myself out.
At TEDxNYED, Jeff Jarvis, a well known guy in the world of online journalism, spoke on the parallel worlds of journalists and educators. He advocates the role of teacher be one focused on being a curator rather than a creator of knowledge. High school social studies teachers don’t create new knowledge about the Vietnam War. Furthermore, in the age of Google, they are no longer necessary in order to make information about the Vietnam War available to students. Valuable teachers play the role of curator of what is known and available.
In Twitter parlance, “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
I’ve been involved in this Web 2.0 world longer than most. We all started by reading Will Richardson. I quickly wanted more. I focused on where he was drawing the information from that he was curating on http://weblogg-ed.com. Back in the day, I could look at Will’s Bloglines account and see what he was subscribed to. With a few simple clicks I could import his entire reading list.
While this seems simple, few services have figured out how to capitalize on connecting attention streams like Bloglines. The only other company to do this well was Twitter. Sadly, they killed off these features after a year when the service was growing faster than they could support.
If Web 1.0 was about connecting people to things, Web 2.0 is about connecting people to people. If you are going to do Web 2.0 well, you need to spend a bit of time curating people. If I’m following you, it’s likely that I’m also interested in the people you are following. Even more interesting are the differences in the lists of people we are following. Curating people is a black-belt 21st Century Skill™ that you won’t see listed in any formal lists.
I’ve been obsessed with this very question for the past five years. I’m very librarian-like [#respect] in how I curate my feeds in Google Reader. They all get named FirstName LastName, thus changing them from “things” to “people”. My Twitter client is always set to show full name instead of username. If you are still anonymous or use a pseudonym with that information there’s likely an exceptional situation.
With that context (read: more than you ever wanted to know about @ijohnpederson), here’s something important I’ve realized in the past year.
I’m far more interested, and better, in my role of curating and connecting people than I am about content. In fact, I’ve come to tune most of it completely out of my attention stream. I’m tired of arguing semantics of literacy and 21st century skills. There are enough folks talking school reform that have opinions on education policy. I’m done talking about blogging, handhelds, and how to use Twitter. This past year I tried my hand at advancing online learning by recontextualizing the way I saw things big picture. I also got involved in leading online learning communities with a few people that do it better than anybody. While I gained a bit of traction and valuable experience, I found it personally frustrating.
“Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
I’ve come full circle. The majority of my time is immersed in informal, online, asynchronous learning. It’s working from outside the system inwards. It’s chipping away at the barriers that I spent most of my years behind. The last piece of this puzzle is just setting in. There are plenty of folks out there carrying the water of advancing policy, leadership, reform, projects, storytelling, cyberbullying, filtering, research, etc. I’m letting go of curating the content and instead focusing on curating the people.
On Wisconsin.
Dan Meyer…
Every time you tell a teacher to download a new application or set up an account with a new web application, the teacher loses a fingertip.
Something to think about for the 2010-2011 school year. #savethefingertips
A touch more on the serious side…
My suspicion, also, is that education will improve fastest when teachers recognize the incongruity between their own most exhilarating learning experiences and what goes on in their classrooms.
How do you create the time and space to learn?
Sir Ken Robinson…
It’s about customizing them [conditions in which learning will flourish] to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you are actually teaching. It’s not about scaling a new solution, it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support, based on a personalized curriculum.
Whenever somebody brings “scale” into the conversation it’s meant to obfuscate possibilities into some mathematical realm in which the result is, inevitably, “this won’t scale”. That’s why movements are more interesting.
Understand the important role of “follower” in 3 minutes.
Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore – it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.
