ijohnpederson

“To understand what’s really happening on the Internet, you have to get down beneath the commercial hype and hoopla, which, though it gets 90 percent of the press, is actually a late arrival. From the beginning, something very different has been brewing online. It has to do with living, with livelihood, with craft, connection, and community. This isn’t some form of smarmy New Age mysticism, either. It’s tough and gritty and it’s just beginning to find its voice, its own direction. But it’s also difficult to describe; as the song says, “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.” And it’s next to impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. You have to live in the Net for a while.”

I’ve used it three times this week alone and thought I’d archive it here for simple searchability.

[Source: Cluetrain Manifesto]

The filtering and shoddy attempts to control the flow of information into and out of the spaces where our children go for the formal part of their education is haphazard at best and dangerous at it’s worst levels.

Thanks Clarence Fisher.

Emphasis on the formal.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will produce its last printed edition on Tuesday and become an Internet-only news source, the Hearst Corporation said on Monday, making it by far the largest American newspaper to take that leap.

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Shifts to Web Only – NYTimes.com

Remember EPIC 2015? I do.

I hear that a 10th anniversary edition of the Cluetrain Manifesto will arrive in July.

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.

In public education, the influence that teachers unions can wield over textbook and instructional software adoption decisions looms so large that many would-be school reformers have abandon hope of significant change. We suspect, however, that when disruptive innovators begin forming user networks through which professionals and amateurs – students, parents, and teachers – circumvent the existing value chain and instead market their products directly to each other as described above, the balance of power in education will shift. Administrators, unions, and school boards will capitulate to the fait accompli of larger and larger numbers of students acquiring and using superior, customized learning tools on their own.

Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Class.

That’s the most important thing etched on http://www.ijohnpederson.com since I remixed the Cluetrain Manifesto’s 95 Thesis into Learning is Conversation.

1+1=3 in this case.

Long time fans of the ijohnpederson Home Game™ know where this comes from.  At each milestone I draw back, reflect, and smack around the pixels a bit further.  The latest version is considerably honed from previous iterations, while keeping amazingly true to the original meaning of the text that brought many of us to this point.

I encourage you to push back and provide feedback on this.

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.

“Again, I’ll say it one more time: Blogging is just the tip of the Cluetrain iceberg. And it wasn’t the tip that sunk the Titanic.”

Courtesy gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: the global microbrand, revisited.

Photo Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons and http://flickr.com/photos/audreyjm529/419036369/

Edit #1:  I posted this late at night and
woke up to 10 comments that have me thinking even harder about this
issue.  I’ll get absolutely nothing done today if I continue to think
about it…so give me a chance to make it home and construct a
thoughtful response.

Edit #2:  "I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think."  – Marshall McLuhan

My rant has had a chance to marinate a bit.  A few "next day" thoughts.

I truly believe that everybody…from the executive editor of Scholastic Administrator magazine through the teachers/administrators in the story and all the commentors on this post…everybody is trying their best. 

We all have different agendas and see things through our own lens.  I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with 150 students a day in a school that banned cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc.  None of you would want me as your principal, trying to keep the lid on the place.  I sure as heck don’t know anything about selling magazines or writing a balanced article.

My job is precisely the same as Scholastic’s.  "I just wan them to think."  Push the edges a bit.  See what we learn as a result.

To Scholastic’s credit…

1)  They do incredible work for teachers and kids.
2)  Read 180 is on my really short list of educational technology things that matter.
3)  The executive editor of Scholastic Administrator magazine was inside my inbox this afternoon, inviting me to construct a response for publication in their October/November magazine.

This is a great lesson for everybody involved in information and media literacy.

Markets are conversations.  I’m going to continue pushing the edge on this "fear sells" thread.

Doug Johnson…I see the smile on your face.  "He’s pure.  Mostly."

Original Rant

There’s a running joke at my mailbox at work. It’s been nearly one year and I’ve received exactly 1 piece of mail that had even somewhat important meaning.  Today was no different. CDW. Symantec. MacWorld. HP. Scholastic Administrator Magazine.

Seriously. That cover says "When Tech Attacks". Let that sink in just a bit further.

Ok. You have my attention. Go.

"Schools across the country are waging a war against technology tools gone bad. Read how some districts defend their classrooms against the new school thuggery—from iPod cheats to cell phone punks and sneaky Web surfers."

We are at war?  Let me check my scorecard.  Drugs. Poverty. Afganistan. Terror. Iraq. Cell phones?  I really need to start watching TV again to catch this late breaking news.

"According to Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Adults simply don’t know how to model appropriate digital behavior, he believes, so kids are making up the rules on their own."

Spend more that 5 minutes either reading or talking with Will and one thing is clear.  None of this stuff is simple.  Especially when a journalist leads with "According to…"

"Is it a case of bad technology leading to bad behavior or good technology with not enough role models? These horror stories should act as a primer."

Boys and girls, that’s called the "hook" of the article.  It makes you want to read further.  Let’s explore the horror!

"…(a female teacher’s) suspended student blindsided her with a vicious punch while his buddy recorded the scene (on a cell phone). The teacher ended up with 25 stitches in her head. Murphy High has a cell phone policy, but little good that did when students wanted to cause serious harm."

Nobody likes to hear a story like that. The students in this case faced some pretty stiff penalties and a trip to jail.  No word on whether the phone did time, but that’s not important right now.  Principal Doug Estle is taking steps to calm fears.

“We’ll also do professional development in the fall about spotting potentially violent kids, and we’ll set up tip lines for students who might know something about a potential attack.”

A tip line.  We’ll protect kids from the dangers of technology by having them call a tip line on their dangerous cell phones banana phones.

Another example of technology attacking…

"In October 2004, a substitute teacher in Norwich (CT) Public Schools exposed some of the middle school students in her care to pornographic pop-up ads. Julie Amero was tried and convicted and faced the possibility of 40 years in jail."

Wow.  That must have been some seriously harmful technology to be convicted and  face a possible 40 year jail sentence.  Surely school districts, especially the ones involved in this court case, are learning from this situation.

"Despite the incident, the district hasn’t made any radical changes in what it does to keep kids porn-free, according to Bob Hartz, manager of Information Services. “There are so many porn sites,” he says. “You’ve just got to assume it’s going to happen, pay attention, and take the right steps when it does.”"

I’m neither a lawyer nor an expert on this case.  Would somebody please get this district a PR person to advise keeping these sorts of quotes quiet?  Even if it’s simply for Julie’s sake?  Damn. That stings.

Technology that attacks isn’t limited to knocking out teachers or throwing them in jail.  Take the MP3 player.

"Everybody loves an open-book exam, especially those who forgot to study. Used to be such exams were at the teacher’s discretion, but technology is changing all that. Which is what a teacher at Mountain View High School, in Meridian, Idaho, discovered upon overhearing students discussing how iPods could help them cheat.  The idea is this: Kids record material that will be on an exam and then download it to bring to school on an MP3 player."

How will kids know what will be on the exam prior to the exam?  That’s right…they review.  These kids got clever about it though.  They taught their iPods what would likely be on the exam.  Like the article says though, teachers have discretion whether to allow students to use their notes, books, and resources on an exam.  All is well.  Or is it?

"So why let the MP3 players in the exam room? ‘We wanted to be the cool guys and allow kids to relax a little while taking tests by listening to their iPods,’ Principal Aaron Maybon explains. ‘We’re an SPED and ELL magnet school, and listening to quiet music while taking an exam is a good way for our students to stay focused.’"

What? This isn’t a case of "When Tech Attacks?" These things actually have good uses?

"But even if MP3 players are banned outright, Maybon says, the kids can tell you exactly how to hide the tiny players, cords, and earbuds under bulky clothes and underneath their hair."

Ahh, so it’s not the technology that we are at war with, but rather the bulky clothes and hair.

"Still, Maybon points out that there has never been an incident of iPod cheating at Mountain View. He also has no intention of banning MP3 players and punishing kids for behavior they haven’t exhibited…"

Whew. This story didn’t end up in a trip through the criminal justice system.  It’s just kids practicing study skills.

What’s next? 

"He (note: not Will Richardson, but referring to Will) says technology is getting smaller and smaller—and easier to carry as well as to hide. Plus, we’re about to enter an age of ubiquitous computing, where kids will be able to snag a Wi-Fi signal from the surrounding community and simply get around whatever blocks or bans school administrators have made. Can you imagine the insanity that will ensue when kids can search the Internet unchecked on a school computer—linked to an unfiltered Wi-Fi connection?"

Insanity?  You should see me after I check into a hotel without free wifi these days.

"The good news is that of all the people in the world, educators are best able to solve these problems."

Like CIPA and DOPA.  I’m sure that stuff came out in your research on this topic.

"To Richardson’s eye, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and stop thinking about policies that limit technology, and instead focus on what we do best."

Hallelujah.

"’It has to be a K–12 curriculum in which we model good behavior,’ Richardson argues. ‘We have to be consistent in our own behavior, and hand out real consequences for abuses to the procedures.’"

Be firm.  Set the expectations.  Model proper behaviors.

It’s time for Scholastic Administrator to finish with something profound.

"In other words, be ready to do battle."

That’s how it ends?  You are advising your 240,000+ audience of school administrators "be ready to do battle?"

Full disclosure.  My personal media critic filter is smart enough to separate Scholastic Administrator Magazine from a peer reviewed journal article or a Wikipedia entry.  I also fully admit playing a bit of "Jon Stewart" with the story. I insist that you go read this article in its entirety. 

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3746915

Before the comments fly, let me list the deeper, more important reasons why I’m stirred.

1.  This article in Scholastic Magazine makes us all look stupid.  It is a complete insult to the entire K12 education profession.  Is there anybody that really believes a cell phone caused a student to punch out a teacher, a porn pop-up is an "attack" on students, and that an MP3 player is a cause for war?

2.  Scholastic Magazine went to Will Richardson for his take and to add a splash of credibility to the article, all the while mangling it.  Will (and others) have quit their "day jobs" to chase their passions of school reform and educational technology.  I’ve known Will for a number of years.  We’ve lived the same highs and lows together. No doubt he’s on some small propeller plane tonight, headed to another hotel room, wondering if it’s possible to hit 4 consecutive "rooms that open to the left" in a single week.  I’m sure he’ll come across his copy of "When Tech Attacks" in the near future and question, yet again, whether the time away from his wife and kids is worth it.

3.  I can’t help but worry when I think about this article.  I’m unsure of how many hours of research go into something like this  I’m sure it was plotted out on a storyboard, edited, re-edited, fact checked, and passed through a few hands before going into a publication that reaches 240,000 educators.  Right?  Somebody had to decide that this article was worth of the cover story.  Even scarier, if I approach the article objectively, the fact that is was deemed "cover story quality" means that Scholastic truly believes that the majority of readers will appreciate this story.

Would somebody please let me know if I’m being punked?

Banana Phone Courtesy Flickr CC @ http://flickr.com/photos/nitz/543734402/

Honestly, I have been thinking really hard.

Back on April 2, 2005 I took the 95 Theses from the Cluetrain Manifesto, substituted “learning” for “markets” and “students/parents” for “customers”.

It impacted my thinking in a deep way.

2+ years later I’m here at NECC, meeting many of the people that helped shape this story in my mind.  The learning and the conversation are more exciting than ever.

I repeat my remix for those “new to me” and as something to think about for those “old timers” who are grappling with what all this means here in Atlanta this week.

Here’s the remix.

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 both internetworked learning and among intranetworked students, 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, parents and students are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked learning changes people fundamentally.
8. People in networked learning have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another and the Internet than from textbooks and worksheets.
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 do not speak in the same voice as these new networked conversations. To their intended online audiences, schools sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman.
11. In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of education‚Äîthe sound of mission statements and brochures‚Äîwill seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
12. Already, schools that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
13. Schools that assume the online learning medium is the same as television are kidding themselves.
14. Schools that don’t realize their learning is now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
15. Schools can now communicate with their learners, parents, and students directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
16. Schools need to realize their students and parents are often laughing. At them.
17. Schools attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their parents and students actually care about.
18. Schools need to come down from their Ivory Towers and talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships.
19. By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep learning at bay.
20. Most “school improvement” programs are based on the fear that parents & students might see what‚Äôs really going on inside the school.
21. Smart learners will find schools who speak their own language.
22. To speak with a human voice, schools must share the concerns of their communities.
23. But first, they must belong to a community.
24. Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.
25. The community of discourse is the learning.
26. Schools that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
27. 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.
28. Such conversations are taking place today on school intranets. But only when the conditions are right.
29. Schools typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other district information that workers are doing their best to ignore.
30. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked educational conversation.
31. A healthy intranet organizes teachers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.
32. While this scares district witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.
33. When school intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of learning.
34. Org charts worked in an older economy where plans could be fully understood from atop steep management pyramids and detailed work orders could be handed down from on high.
35. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
36. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
37. Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills schools.
38. There are three conversations going on. One inside the school. One among the parents.  One among the students.
39. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.
40. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers (teachers, parents, students) and generate distrust in internetworked learning.
41. These three conversations want to talk to each other. They are speaking the same language. They recognize each other’s voices.
42. Smart schools will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
43. However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive schools as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
44. This is suicidal. Parents and students want to talk to schools.
45. 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.
46. Parents do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the educational firewall.
47. 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 chock-a-block with eye candy but lacking any substance.
48. 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.
49. 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?
50. As learners, as parents, we wonder why you’re not listening. You seem to be speaking a different language.
51. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around—in the press, at your meetings—what’s that got to do with us?
52. Maybe you’re impressing yourselves. You’re not impressing us.
53. If you don’t impress us, you are going to take a bath. Don’t you understand this? If you did, you wouldn’t let yourself talk that way.
54. Your tired notions of “parents aren‚Äôt involved” make our eyes glaze over. We don‚Äôt recognize ourselves in your projections‚Äîperhaps because we know we‚Äôre already elsewhere.
55. We like this new education system much better. In fact, we are creating it.
56. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!
57. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
58. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
59. We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we’d be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
60. You‚Äôre too busy “doing business” to answer our email? Oh gosh, sorry, gee, we‚Äôll come back later. Maybe.
61. You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.
62. We want you to drop your trip, come out of your neurotic self-involvement, join the party.
63. We’d like it if you got what’s going on here. That’d be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we’re holding our breath.
64. 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?
65. 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.
66. 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.
67. To traditional schools, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
68. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.

Technorati Tags: necc07, necc2007, puppy

Find tutoring services. Advertise tutoring services.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies.

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

Bill Mariott, Chairman & CEO of Mariott International, is now a blogger. He stepped into the game at 12:01:00am on January 16th, 2007. 64 comments in the first two days! I copied & pasted 10 of the longer comments into Word. Not only are Marriottians highly educated, loyal fans of this chain of properties, they are also perfect spellers.

Technorati Tags: cluetrain, marriott

“Markets are conversations.” I doubt you have read The Cluetrain. There probably isn’t the need (yet). You deliver the mail. I’m pretty amazed actually. Mail comes and goes every day. Amazingly efficient.

My problem…this morning you made me angry. My cat ran away this past Sunday. It’s the holidays and such. With kids. And inlaws. And travel. And work. And now this damn cat has been missing going on 4 days. We posted signs. My wife stuffed mailboxes with flyers. A nice college student called yesterday mentioned that she thought she may have spotted the cat, causing a very wet, cold, and dark search last night. Nothing. I know this isn’t a pleasant time for the United States Postal Service either. Busy season. This morning my wife thought to leave our postal carrier a note to keep an eye out for the cat. Who better than the postal carrier, right?

We got a nasty letter this morning about using mailboxes inappropriately.

You probably weren’t thinking this morning that you represent a brand…that there are choices in this market. Your job is to deliver the mail. There’s some policy the post office has. I dig that. But here’s the deal…you’ve been doing such a great job during my 32 years of using you. I don’t even really think about you. This morning, however, you quickly changed my opinion.

How do I cancel my mail? Isn’t this a Seinfeld episode?

Cluetrain + Library.

This isn’t Vegas folks. And it certainly isn’t the Pentagon. The fact that we are building collections and creating services for our users means we should be letting these folks know what we are doing and how we are spending their money. If you are doing it well, you can tell your users a mighty fine story of what benefits and value the library offers. If you are afraid to tell them, you have a problem. Go back and rethink please. I’ll wait right here.

I love the attitude.

Here’s a secret, Micromanager… I learned this from The Cluetrain and from years of listening to what employees have said and say, both as an employee and as a manager, and now as a teacher. Folks in your organization have identified you as a roadblock. They are working around you. Avoiding you, even though your hold a place on the chart most tightly.

I don’t mean to be rough, but to those reading, look deep inside your professional self and decide: are you hyperlinked? Open? Transparent? Is your institution participatory?

I thinking I need to get back into Cluetrain a bit more. Oh yeah. Go make friends with a librarian again.

Technorati Tags: cluetrain

I’m much closer to teachers and students in my new job. It’s worse than I expected. Each time I go into a school I hear stories from teachers who can’t do this or that because of technology policies…everything from filtering email websites to banning music in the classroom. Students are getting closer to the network. Schools are distancing themselves from it. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

Related: Joi Ito is at the Internet Governance Forum in Greece. Go to conference, attend from your room…because the access is better from the room.

Message: The kids will route around the barriers.

“Those (students) are the perspectives that I find conspicuously missing from this story.”

David Warlick challenges some of the recent media backlash against 1 to 1 laptop initiatives. I love when folks go beyond the “yes or no, for or against” and ask the questions that really matter…the questions that tweak our thinking about the issue a bit.

This recent example shook a little nugget that I pulled from Will Wright and Wired Magazine. He’s talking gaming, but it applies to the research that’s being done about laptops.

I think part of this stems from the fact that watching someone play a game is a different experience than actually holding the controller and playing it yourself. Vastly different. Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theater Рbut that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you’re missing the big picture.

You have to live in the net a while. Until you truly understand what it means to live on the net, you’ll only be watching the people living online. Vastly different than living online.

Technorati Tags: David Warlick, Will Wright

Hugh MacLeod – http://www.gapingvoid.com (Disclaimer: Some of the content here is a bit shocking.)
“How to Be Creative”, “Hughtrain”, About Hugh’s Creative Commons License

Cluetrain – http://www.cluetrain.org

“Learning is Conversation” – Remix of Cluetrain for Education

“Social Constructionist Pedagogy”

‚ÄúTo understand what‚Äôs really happening on the Internet, you have to get down beneath the commercial hype and hoopla, which ‚Äî though it gets 90 percent of the press ‚Äî is actually a late arrival. From the beginning, something very different has been brewing online. It has to do with living, with livelihood, with craft, connection, and community. This isn‚Äôt some form of smarmy New Age mysticism, either. It‚Äôs tough and gritty and it‚Äôs just beginning to find its voice, its own direction. But it‚Äôs also difficult to describe; as the song says, ‚ÄúIt‚Äôs like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.‚Äù And it‚Äôs next to impossible to understand unless you‚Äôve experienced it for yourself. You have to live in the Net for a while.” – Cluetrain Manifesto

I have posed a few indicators of blogging going “mainstream” lately. Not for my sake, and not really for you. We are on our way to understanding the power of this conversation. I’m doing more writing now so that we have something to look back on 10 years out and point to. Some of it personal, some of it professional. We have all seen technologies come and go. The difference with blogging is the conversational nature of these new toys. 10 years out, the tools will undoubtedly be different. Scoble and Israel nail it in two simple sentences.

…we doubt that blogging’s conversational capabilities will ever be seen as antiquated. It’s the first technology to enable a simple conversation to go instantly global. It’s the first to decentralize corporate communications, wrestling it from those who historically controlled it, and it eliminates many of the geographic barriers that have restricted relationships between people sharing similar interests.

Just as “markets are conversations” [unbelievable that Cluetrain is now 6 years old], learning is a conversation here in the edublogosphere. My first keynote crack at blogging in education last spring tried to convey that behind all of this technology there was a deep conversation happening. I don’t know how convincing I was. Sometimes I freak out with the thought that it’s just me…and maybe Will Richardson, who’s also addicted to the conversation. Ok, raise your hand if you are addicted.

Then there are messages like the one I got from my television last night. I watched less than 20 minutes of State of the Union coverage before and after. I heard “bloggers” mentioned several times. CNN has a special “internet correspondent” who’s job it is to monitor and gesture to the blogs covering the State of the Union speech. She took some time to define “live blogging”.

This is comforting to an educator willing to bet it all on blogging being special. Interesting how the cultures of big companies, Microsoft and CNN in this case, are beginning to incorporate this conversation into their stories.

“Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers” (Robert Scoble, Shel Israel)

Technorati Tags: israel, naked conversations, cluetrain, scoble

I learned something very important this morning. Very subtle, but important. Blogging won’t change education. It changes us.

Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Stormhoek and Disruption:

There’s a great principle in improv, that of letting yourself be changed. This encourages the actors to invest less energy in formulating a witity riposte, and more on joining their fellow actors and allowing their “feed line” to impact on them.

There’s a parallel at work for bloggers – the value may not be the immediate impact of their words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it’s more about creating real engagement – where you are changed too.

This helps clear a little fuzzy area for me. I knew it wasn’t as simple as “this stuff changes things”. It changes us. Still leaves the question, “We are changed. Now what?”

1) Take what we know and work through our professional organizations. (Doug Johnson)

2) Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. (Cluetrain)

That’s why I took this picture. Different ways, same street. It’s a bit confusing right now, but that’s why we are here.

I’m with Doug Johnson here. Here’s something you may not know. Doug is on the ISTE board. This type of transparency from our leaders is critical. It’s part of the conversation. (Have we all reviewed our 95 Theses in 2006?)

Reflecting this past week on our school district’s past and future, I’m beginning to believe my professional organizations, ALA/AASL, ISTE and MEMO, have approached legislative lobbying the wrong way – focusing on the means to accomplish a goal (mo’ money), when we should have been asking for the goal itself (required 21st century skills for which schools should be held accountable).

I’m a sucker for big picture thinking. Here’s my concern though. Let’s assume that things are covered competently at Doug’s super macro level…these organizations magically become hugely successful at lobbying for the “4th R”. For the sake of argument, lets say that the feds step in and rewrite NCLB to mandate the perfect “4th R”. Now it’s time to retool our teachers with these skills.

Retooling ISTE’s lobbying agenda = X number of years.

Retooling NCLB = Y number of years.

Retooling teachers = Z number of years.

X+Y+Z = ? Ok, some of this will overlap…let’s just call this number N.

This “new information environment” is about 15 years old. Is N <, =, or > the time it took for things to develop? How many more shifts will occur over the next 5-10 years? Do we have the attention, organization, and sense of urgency at this time to figure all of this out? If “we” (those reading this) answer yes, how about the 99% of others involved in education?

At the core, we have a marketing issue. It’s why I’ve tried to understand new marketing over the past year. (Hugh MacLeod).

Suspend all frustration over NCLB for a moment. Isn’t it a brilliant marketing job? Every time you see “accountability” mentioned, you are the victim of a masterful marketing campaign. It’s an agenda. Sort of like the idea of putting people on the moon.

Revisiting ISTE & NCLB priorities are important. Macro. I’m afraid we need some super marco marketing agenda to drive this. Energy self sufficiency or something along those lines.

I’m being a modern jackass right now. I really want to throw this out at this point…because I just got to the point where I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Would somebody step in and straighten me out? For being right or wrong…