What I am sensing, though, is that more schools and districts seem to “get” that the Web is affording some new opportunities for learning, and that they are willing to seriously consider what the impacts are for their schools. The problem is, and this is just my take on it, that most still see it as a conversation about technology as opposed to a conversation about change.
Source: Opening Day(s)
Way back in the day we all used to go to Will Richardson’s Bloglines account and steal his shared OPML file. This allowed the rest of us to simply import his subscriptions into our RSS reader and we were all smart like that.
Then we all moved to Google Reader.
I’m not sure how long the “subscription bundle” piece has been available for Google Reader. It’s buried a few clicks deep. But it’s powerful. Below is a quick silent film produced by yours truly that shows where and how to click. It’s up to you to make it interesting.
Tip: Expand this video to full screen size as you play it back to eliminate most of the distortion.
Now for examples.
Here is a link to a selection of blogs I watch dealing with issues of broadband.
Here are the people, places, and things I watch dealing with education. It’s true. I rename each feed using the author’s name instead of their silly blog titles.
Have fun.
I’m doing a bit of pixel lifting this weekend. Rethinking the integration of my blog and Twitter account. Subtle changes.
I need is a way for visitors to send any comments they leave out to their Twitter accounts. I’ve found two extensions (Echo and Disqus) that do this in a blunt way…they take over my entire comment function and add the kitchen sink. I’m looking for something more subtle. Similar to “Tweet this…”, but for comments. I want people to be able to point at their own comments on my post, not my post.
Understand?
Check out this use of a pullquote. This is what makes the Interwebs awesome.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
If I were going to wager, I’d say that the free, abundant learning combination is the one that’s going to change the world.
School was the big thing for a long time.
School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists. [From School Was the Big Thing for a Long Time]
It might surprise you to learn that students from New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods arrive at school each day with personal computers. The problem is that they deposit these powerful learning tools at the nearby bodega — where they’re held like a coat check service for a dollar a day — because their personal computers are cell phones, and they are banned by New York City’s school chancellor, Joel Klein. Many students will circumvent the ban by blind-texting from their backpacks or from the bathroom. But it’s not that simple for those who have to pass through metal detectors and scanners to gain entry into the school building each day.
Source: Please Turn on Your Cell Phone: Change Observer: Design Observer
Update: James, a native New Yorker new to WiscNet, caught this story. A) Confirmed. B) “It’s not all that bad. A few years ago it used to be knives they checked at the bodegas.” C) Worse, “…they didn’t use the metal detectors every day. You knew they were checking when long lines developed outside of school. On those days, I just went back home.”
This may allow all of us to leave AT&T without penalty.
In other words, thanks to the new wording of the AT&T contract, if you feel like entering into a class action lawsuit against AT&T, well, you can’t. It’s all there in black and white.
Source: Get angry: AT&T changes contract to prevent class action lawsuits
The deeper issues are more troubling. Cash for Clunkers only makes sense if we believe that our #1 problem is that we don’t drive sufficiently fancy cars.
Well said.
Rather than putting in the effort to innovate through technology, American car companies find it much more effective to make money through political means.
If we spent the Cash for Clunkers money on Let’s Try to Catch up with Korea…a lot of Americans might not have needed to make so many trips in their cars because (1) they could work from home, (2) they could shop from home, (3) they could get information from home, (4) they could find out, from home, that some place they were planning to go was in fact closed.
Well intentioned.
Unfortunately, AT&T is the new GM. Give them $N billion and the only thing they know how to do is what they’ve already done for the past 20 years. Apply 10% to technology. Apply 50% to other. Use the remaining 40% to fund the political efforts to receive their next fix.
We have solved the technology issue. It pains me to watch folks get excited about their new 10Mbps connection when 10Gbps is within their grasp.
The Good: You don’t have to go to Korea. It even exists in Wisconsin.
The Bad: We have 40% of $N billion working against us and only 10% of $N billion is going toward their version of innovation. It’s working out very well for them.
Quotes and Inspiration: Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Cash for Clunkers
Update: An example two stories later in my newsreader.
Context: The telecommunications industry says “Everything is fine with broadband.” The government, upon dedicating $7.2 billion in stimulus money to broadband, asks them to prove it. Show us who has access to what and for how much. The government antes up $.3 billion to make a map.
If this mapping exercise is going to be worth even 1/10 of the money Congress appropriated, it’s about time for the government to step away from the table with the industry, remind itself of its public interest obligations and quit giving away the store. It doesn’t matter if it was a “good deal” or a “bad deal” to make those changes. There was no reason for any deal. Either scrap the program, extend the deadlines and start over, or hold the industry to some meaningful commitments.
Source: NTIA Losing Game of Data Chicken | Public Knowledge
Imagine three companies are working together to lay the first highway system. Everything is a toll road. Those public entities that need 10 lane interstates have already built them in the normal course of business at 30% the cost of the tolls that others paying on county highways provided by companies.
The government dedicates $7.2 billion with the intention of putting in the 10 lane interstate they have heard about.
40% of $N billion first goes towards twisting the meaning of “10 lane interstate” into “county highway”. Fact: The broadband stimulus bill defines “broadband” as 768k down, 200k up. Seriously. Welcome to 1996.
Next, when $.3 billion is spent map what already exists, the companies convince the government to not disclose a) how big their roads are, b) where they go, and c) how much they are charging.
Show support for victims of Twitter denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
Source: jasonpermenter
You can only get away with charging users $50/month for a 3Mb service for so long before users demand more. If the market were to ever get competitive, how would they provide value?
Imagine if AT&T subscribers could access Google twice as fast as Yahoo (or another start up search engine) because Google cut deals with AT&T for preferential treatment. The Internet as we know it would change substantially and innovation would slow because those who could afford to cut deals with major service providers would attract most viewers.
You know how the NFL Network gets two games sometime in November and 1/3 of people are eligible to receive it because they have DirecTV? It’s like that. But with the Interwebs.
Source: New Network Neutrality Bill
Site: Municipal Networks
AT&T has just opened perhaps the most vindictive, messy can of worms it could have possibly found. Blocking any site seems like a breach of user trust, but the decision to block 4chan in particular just seems stupid. Expect the web equivalent of rioting if this doesn’t change soon.
via Tech Crunch.
Ze Frank on Waves
In 1908, of course, Ocean Beach won the least creative name for a public space ever contest coming in just ahead of Green Park in London.
On that beach, young children were making things that kind of looked like castles by pushing together tiny grains of silicon dioxide. Annoying parents stood by to tell the children what castles did, and did not, look like. The end product was often intricate with buttresses, ornamental shells, and sharp defined corners.
For a moment the children could step back and say “this is a castle,” and very few people would argue with them, but being on the edge of an ocean, beaches also sometimes have waves.
These waves often started somewhere far away, and are the result of many incremental forces. As they approach the shore they have a certain inevitability to them. Waves don’t really give a crap what a castle is supposed to look like, and they don’t really give a crap about the children that made those castles.
In fact, waves aren’t really capable of giving a crap at all. When they’re done, the waves leave behind a clump that’s soft and rounded that doesn’t really look like a castle anymore. It looks like something, but we don’t really have a word for it.
On Ocean Beach some people get tired of building sand castles and choose to interact with the waves directly.
Some people just hang out and bob up and down. Other people float on things that are filled with air, but everyone knows it’s the surfers that really know what’s goin’ on. Besides the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco is also on the edge of something else.
To the south, in silicon valley, hundreds of thousands of people play on the leading edge of technology.
As they struggle to make a name for themselves on that beach they’re also confronted by waves. Waves that started awhile ago and are the result of many incremental forces.
Some people push together a whole bunch of little bits so that they kind of resemble places that we’re familiar with. Annoying people stand over their shoulder and tell them what things like community and friendship do, and don’t, look like.
If they’re lucky, they can step back and for a moment it reminds them of something that they’ve seen before, but the wave has a certain inevitability to it, and the wave doesn’t really give a crap about what you’ve seen before.
When it retreats they’re left with something that doesn’t really look like community, and it doesn’t really look like friendship. It looks like something but we don’t really have a name for it yet.
Other people swim out, and they bob up and down. Sometimes, when people get to the top of a wave, they say “I made this wave, this wave is because of me, and because I’m wearing yellow swimming trunks,” and then lots of other people put on yellow swimming trunks and the swim out, but by the time they get there that guys at the bottom and some guy in red trunks is yelling the same thing.
Other people sit on inflated rafts, so even when they’re at the bottom their little heads peek out over the top of the waves, but, eventually, a lot of those guys tip over or they run out of people that are willing to blow.
It’s the surfers that are the most fun to watch.
They know they didn’t start the waves, but they do study them. While they’re surfing, they don’t congratulate each other for pushing the water closer to the shore. They understand that the wave has a certain inevitability to it, that it doesn’t give a crap about them… it just moves.
So, they play on it and explore its natural contours and do tricks. And, by doing that, they give the wave meaning, human meaning.
Sure, they get beaten up quite a bit, but when they get it right they can actually experience what waves can mean to people, and when they come back in, those are the people that get to name those little rounded lumps of sand.
This is Zefrank, hoping that you’ve got a surfboard.
Ze Frank on Progressive
So in Tasmania there were these bizarre events. Crop circles kept on appearing in medicinal poppy fields and farmers wanted an explanation. Maybe it was some weird weather pattern, maybe aliens were trying to communicate with us, but it turned out that the crop circles were caused by wallabies, which are like little kangaroos. These wallabies would go into the poppy fields, eat the poppies, and then take off, but by this point they’d be so high that they wind up hopping around in circles.
Last week a bizarre event in politics left plenty of people searching for explanation. Sara Palin resigned as Governor of Alaska in the middle of her term. There were all sorts of speculations. Is she going to run for office? Was she just sick of her job? Are aliens trying to communicate with us? In her resignation speech, Palin said that she was “Taking her fight for what was right for Alaska in a new direction.” But she was a bit vague on what direction that direction was. But, at the end of her speech, she hinted at it with a quote that was mistakenly attributed to General McArthur.
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in a another direction.”
And it’s true. Advancing and retreating can look very similar, especially if your goal is simply to get away from wherever you are right now.
It can be hard to tell. For example take the running of the bulls which was celebrated in Spain last week. Who’s advancing and who’s retreating? From the bulls’ point of view, they could be like “Why are all the people running? There must be something chasing us, we should get out of here.”
And that makes me think of all the fancy stock market mechanisms that lead to the financial crisis. “Why are all these bulls running? I don’t know, but let’s stay ahead of them!” One little stumble and what we thought was progress winds up being a retreat to recession.
But that makes me wonder what progress is. Is it moving away from something you don’t like our towards something you do? Plenty of people call themselves progressives these days, and progressive means advancing forward, but the definition of forward has changed quite a bit over the last 100 years of progressivism and critics say that modern progressives are just retreating back to socialism.
To find out what the definition of progressive actually is, I went to the online journal Campus Progress, which is an outreach for the Center for American Progress. I found an article called “What is Progressive” by a young man named Andrew Garib. Here’s my attempt at a radical oversimplification.
Conservatism sees the world and human nature as static and predictable, so progress is getting out of the way and letting people do their thing.
Liberalism on the other hand thinks that government can help build ideal societies and progress is getting closer to those utopian ideals.
But Garib says that progressives are different. They see the world as ever changing and dynamic. And the notion of progress changes with it. I’m not sure if I totally sure if I understand what that means. But I do know that if progress is a moving target, it can be awfully hard to figure out whether you are advancing or retreating.
And all of that makes me think of former defense secretary Robert McNamara who died last week. McNamara was seen as the prime architect of the Vietnam War, but later in his life regretted not having withdrawn the troops sooner. McNamara experienced first hand the difficulties of knowing when progress means to advance and progress means to retreat.
In the documentary “The Fog of War”, McNamara pointed to an excerpt from T.S. Eliot, perhaps giving one more view of the definition of progress. It reads…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot
And now of the questions at the end of the chapter.
Are we too worried about the color of our swim trunks? Who is trying to name the little round lumps of sand? Who should be naming them?
What are we running from? What are we running towards? What is “it”? How do we get there from here if “it” is changing and dynamic?
Now that Oprah has gone and stirred the pot, it’s time for some rules.
Here are a few things I want to get out on the table regarding my use and preferences regarding Twitter.
1. I’m random about who I follow and why. I frequently delete around half the people I follow and start over. This strategy helps me discover new people, reconsider why I’m following the ones I do, and keeps my ADD in check.
2. I’m getting around 10 new followers a day. 8 of them are crack whores. The only reason Twitter works is because you choose the folks you follow. When 4 of 5 are spammers, it’s hard to take that “new follower” thing seriously.
3. I’m purposefully playing with your attention. I’m watching the people watch the caged monkey that is Twitter. I’ve watched Twitter enough. I’m watching you watch Twitter. Social objects, etc.
4. Don’t thank me for following you. Seriously. Odds are I was following you in the past.
5. Finally, and most important to this whole post, I need you to check the “Settings” of your Twitter account. Change “Name” to something other than your user name. Extra points if you use your name. Anything I use gives me the option of seeing your real name instead of your user name. Go ahead and use munkyhugz88 as your user name. Give me something I can recognize in the Name: field. Once we get this problem cleared up, I’m coming after those of you that use special characters.
Read their Wikipedia entry.
Microsoft announced in March 2009 that they will cease to sell Microsoft Student and all editions of Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009, citing changes in the way people seek information and in the traditional encyclopedia and reference material market as the key reasons behind the termination.
You want to make the most of the stimulus? Invest it in getting teachers and students connected, and in professional development that goes far, far beyond the one-day Powerpoint workshops many are mired in to something that focuses on how learning changes in a networked world. One that helps teachers see the world differently and helps them re-envision their classroom practice.
I like when Will gets excited.
So, you want to use the education piece of the stimulus to boost the economy? By all means, keep your brain in the box. But if you really want to use that money to improve learning, use it to help the teachers in the schools understand how to help the kids in the classrooms become the readers and writers and mathematicians and scientists that will flourish in a networked world.
Well said.
He’s talking to school administrators now.
If Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen is right, half of all instruction will take place online within the next 10 years–and schools had better get into the online-learning market or risk losing their students to other providers.
Click through to AASA hears what’s about to disrupt schools for the rest of the article. My apologies from eSchool News and their ridiculous requirement to register for the final 2/3 of the article.
Fans of the ijohnpederson Home Game™ recognize this rant as the only thing of significance I’ve contributed to the blogosphere. Today I’m taking it into the real world for a bit of feedback and conversation at Educon 2.1.
As always, props the those that wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto. Mine is not much more than an exercise in find/replace/remix, but it’s helped immensely to frame and inspire my thinking.
Three simple questions for the exercise…
Which thesis grabs your attention?
Which phrase strikes you?
Which word brings this together for you?
Onward…
1. Learning is conversation.
2. Learning consists of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
4. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
5. In networked learning, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
6. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
7. As a result, learners are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in networked learning changes people fundamentally.
8. People in networked learning have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from traditional media.
9. There are no secrets. The networked learners know more than schools do about their own learning. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
10. Schools struggle to speak the same voice as this new networked conversation. To their intended audiences, schools sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
11. Schools can now communicate with their learners directly.
12. Schools attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their learners care about.
13. Schools need to talk to learners with whom they hope to create relationships.
14. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep learning at bay.
15. Smart learners will find schools who speak their own language.
16. To speak with a human voice, schools must share the concerns of their communities.
17. But first, they must belong to a community.
18. Human communities are based on discourse. Human speech about human concerns.
19. The community of discourse is the learning.
20. Schools that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
21. As with networked learning, people are also talking to each other directly inside the school‚ and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
22. Such networked conversations are taking place today. But only when the conditions are right.
23. A healthy network organizes teachers in many meanings of the word.
24. Schools depend heavily on open networks to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.
25. When school networks are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of learning.
26. There are three conversations going on. One inside the school. One among the parents. One among the students.
27. These three conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.
28. Smart schools will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
29. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now perceive schools as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
30. This is suicidal. Parents and students want to talk to schools.
31. Sadly, the part of the school a networked parent wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false‚ and often is.
32. Parents do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations.
33. We want access to your school information, to your plans and strategies, your best thinking, your genuine knowledge. We will not settle for the 4-color brochure, for web sites with eye candy but lacking any substance.
34. We’re also the people who make your schools go. We want to talk to you directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script.
35. As learners, as parents, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and PTA groups to introduce us to each other?
36. As learners, as parents, we wonder why you’re not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
37. Your tired notions of “parents aren’t involved” make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections.
38. We like this new education system much better. In fact, we are creating it.
39. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door.
40. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
41. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something.
42. We have better things to do than worry about whether you’ll change in time to get our business. Education is only a part of our lives. It seems to be all of yours. Think about it: who needs whom?
43. We have real power and we know it. If you don’t quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that’s more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.
44. Our allegiance is to ourselves‚ our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Schools that have no part in this world also have no future.
45. To traditional schools, networked learners may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. However have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
46. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
Here’s the Wordle created from the session descriptions for Educon 2.1. Powerful.
Yours truly is presenting “The Networked Learning Manifesto: Welcoming Parents into the Conversation”. I’m so completely out of my league in comparison to the other presenters, but I trust that the attendees will be gentle.
Our own networked learning is enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge to emerge. While celebrating Web 2.0 tools around these parts will get you ridiculed, it was the developers of these tools that brought us the idea that the aggregate of these tools constituted a “conversation”. Participating in this “conversation” over time changes individuals fundamentally. Can it change systems? Many of the sharpest nodes on our learning network are speaking from the perspective of parents grappling with reforming our schools. In 2005 I took The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of how social media moves markets, and mashed it into a message about how I saw Web 2.0 influencing education. It’s admittedly the only useful thing I’ve contributed outside a few lolcats and snarky Twitter memes. This session will pull this Networked Learning Manifesto out and smack it around among friends. See what roads it leads us down.
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late.
…another quote from Seth Godin’s Tribes.
Download a free copy of Tribes from Audible.
Desconstructing Twitter is one of the few ways you can receive negative ijohnpederson Home Game™ points. Now that we have that out of the way, let me re-introduce you to Twitter.
During the great Twitter meltdown of the summer of 2008, Twitter engineers basically rebuilt the service in a way that allows them to enable/disable Twitter’s features independently for troubleshooting purposes. Among the least used features of Twitter is a little thing called track. Interestingly, track is the only feature not turned on since Twitter stabilized. Who cares? Twitter. They accidentally found their business model amidst the technical storm.
What is track?
We understand that Twitter is about following people. You follow me, I follow you, game on. Track allows you to follow anything. What are you interested in? I’m from Wisconsin. Wouldn’t it be cool to see whenever somebody on Twitter mentions Wisconsin? Track Wisconsin. It’s Wisconsin Badgers football season. Track badger. I’m eating pot roast nachos. Track pot roast nachos. I now receive tweets from people I follow and anytime anybody on Twitter mentions “Wisconsin”, “badger”, or “pot roast nachos”. Think hard about the possibilities this opens.
It gets better.
Follow this scenario. In Twitter, I follow Steve Dembo and he follows me. I see what he tweets, he sees what I tweet. Half the combined people we follow are likely the same. Here’s the problem. Let’s say that Steve asks a question on Twitter. Ten of Steve’s followers answer the question with great feedback. I’ll see the response of the five folks we have in common, but I’ll miss the response of the other five people that I don’t follow. With track, all I need to do is “track teach42″. Now I see all responses to Steve’s question, regardless of whether I’m subscribed to those people.
Not only do I like and respect Steve Dembo, I’m also interested in what’s happening with his people at the Discovery Education Network. Track discovery education. I now see what sort of buzz Discovery Education is generating on Twitter. You now see why track is Twitter’s business model. Steve also really wants to know, in real time, what people are saying on Twitter about Discovery Education. That’s a service he will pay for.
While this seems subtle, it has fundamentally changed how I use Twitter.
Here’s the downside. It’s a bit of a hack to get this operational. Twitter disabled it from their official feature set. A few great thinkers setup a service called TwitterSpy which polls the public stream of Tweets and mimics the track functionality. It also requires you to feed “tracks” through an instant messaging client. Focus. It’s worth the effort. There is a URL below that explains the step-by-step setup using Google Talk. Before you dismiss this as a difficult hack, let me explain how I use this.
I use Adium on the Mac to interface with Google Talk in order to use track. (Bonus, I now have Twitter with the ability to kick up a traditional IM session, all wrapped in a single app.) If I want to enable the fire hose and see all 500 of the people I follow, I simply type “watch_friends on”. I get my entire Twitter feed. If I need to go back to “focus mode” at work, “watch_friends off” turns the hose off. Of course, Dean Shareski and David Jakes have a special place in my heart. “track shareski” and “track djakes” puts them on my track list and I get anything from or at them, even with “watch_friends off”. I’ve setup “track ijohnpederson” to see if anybody is trying to grab my attention while I have “watch_friends off”. I have “track wisconsin”, “track badgers”, and “track wiscnet” setup to keep an eye out for stuff that may be of interest.
You starting to get the point? At first blush it seems like added noise. You will quickly discover this is actually a nice control valve that allows you to adjust the signal to noise ratio on the fly.
Here’s how it’s setup in Google Talk. Have fun, follower.
