ijohnpederson

Clarence Fisher for President.

He (David Weinberger) played on one idea that we have been talking about in education; that teachers who use the internet in powerful ways in their classrooms are no longer the smartest person in the room. He then pushed one step further, asking us “if the smartest person in the room is the room itself; how do we create smarter rooms?”

Source: Reflecting on the Building Learning Communities Conference
Site: Clarence Fisher

We’ve visited 14 Wisconsin communities twice during the past 2 months.  Pitching a vision of broadband stimulus for Wisconsin.

It’s remarkable how many times we arrive to a meeting and folks want to show us maps.

Critical Life Lesson #27:  Maps are places, not people.  Places get you points.  People get you extra credit.

Via Ryan Bretag and his most recent blog post.

Online communities have replaced geographical ones. While many are unable to name one of their neighbors, they connect daily with hundreds or thousands of likeminded people for various reasons. These communities are in place, yet education has not effectively found a way to harness these connections for meaningful learning—even while meaningful learning is taking place within them all along!

via Education for the 21st century: Creating a Hybrid Learning Community | Headgraphics.net.

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.

Darren Draper points me at a quote from Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody.

For any given [community effort], the question “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?” (p. 259)

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.

The amount of collaboration (read: different than coordination or cooperation) I experienced in my [2880 hours, o'rly? ya'rly] of World of Warcraft is my most important take away. While I wouldn’t trade the “Edubloggercon 07 experience” and the subsequent spinoffs for anything, contrast it with gathering 40 people around the world, dedicating 6 hours every Friday and Saturday evening over the span of 8 months, all with the goal of getting to see this guy get knocked over.

My only criticism of Warlick’s point is reading the word “cheat” inside the post. I realize it’s not intentional…it’s a bit weighted to help non-gamers understand. Check out WoW Wiki to see just how involved the collaboration is among WoW’s fans. While reading it, take a moment and understand that this site is all “user generated” and is just one example of online collaborative communities that emerge in gaming. Check out the addon software built to enhance the game at Curse Gaming. There are many other related sites.

I do, however, love the educational “here’s another way to think about wikis” that Warlick spins from his experience.

While I was watching Deborah’s presentation, it occurred to me that study guides for tests are a lot like strategy guides for video games. So, if I might take this to what some might say is an absurd conclusion, might my students gain something useful, if I allowed them to collaboratively create an online study guide for their test, and then allow them to use that web site as they take the test ‚ and open-web test, so to speak.

I still remember defining terms for Mr. Moe in 10th grade American History. We’d write them in notebooks and turn them in as part of our assignments. While we had word processors, we didn’t quite have the means of cheating sharing coordinating cooperating collaborating.

Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleavland, Harison, Cleavland….why is this mantra still consuming cycles in my brain? That old style of learning was so George Herbert Walker Bush.

Related: A link for the kids.

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

It’s time to set it straight. It’s time for educators and the organizations that represent them to divest themselves of the tainted funding, the quid pro quo of modern business. Can any one person take on these organizations (ISTE, TCEA)? Yes and no. Yes, one of us can sound the alarm, but without the passionate support of the membership, we won’t be able to sever the vendor connections that get far more than they receive from our organization’s sponsorship of their activities. We need a Richard Stallman, a Moses, someone to throw down the stone tablets, that calls us back to put our faith in the intangible, the invisible, the power of online communities of educators rather than the expense accounts of vendors.

Please take the time to follow through Miguel’s post. It’s well worth the entire read.

A few thoughts…
1) This is my first NECC. This is also the one issue I’m most apprehensive of.
2) Edubloggercon. Seriously. $0 budget, $1,000,000 idea. A good group of people coming together.
3) They have a “Blogger’s Cafe”. A nice little token, especially considering the strong wireless signal, nearby coffee stand, and power strips.
4) ISTE is listening. It’s difficult for any organization to shift quickly, but after two days I get a real sense that they are trying. I know that they are listening…their media/pr folks “engaged” a small group of us last week.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s sincere. It’s our job to help the organization by participating in the organization.

Joi is in San Francisco this week. He’s bending the ear of gaming executives at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Take a close look at these two quotes…

“…while there are certain companies and individuals who are bridging the gap between the gaming industry and the Internet, the gaming industry is making the same mistakes that the content guys have been making since the beginning of networked computers. They ALWAYS over-estimate the importance of the content and vastly underestimate the desire of users/people to communicate with each other and share.”

“One way to think about this evolution is that as we empower the user through better computers and better networks, we are going from content to context. We used to listen to records and later CD’s to wallow in our loneliness with self-pity laced teenage tunes. Later karaoke and video games came out which allowed us to interact with the content and feel a bit more involved and less lonely. Now we have MySpace, texting, blogging, Wikipedia and an explosion of online community generating content models. It is becoming less and less about content and more and more about context – less about professional content and more and more about us. The professional content is important and will never go away, but it is becoming more of a platform or substrate on which the users build their own communities, interaction and play.”

Having a foot in the blogging world and another in the gaming world, this hits me close. I keep coming back because I see an educational story inside what Joi is saying. Technology has enabled access to vast amounts of content for teaching and learning. A quality education has more to do with providing the context…the “communities, interaction, and play”.

Full article.

I have watched a bit of the recent squabble. I appreciate it. The conflict and discomfort that has been caused means that we, as a community, are learning. It wasn’t long ago that our biggest criticism of ourselves was that we weren’t really being critical.

This community is built on attention. What doesn’t show up on Stephen’s Web is actually more interesting that what does. When Tom agrees with something, I sit up and pay closer attention. Doug is often conflicted about blogging vs. professional writing. Personally, the fact that I went “off the edublogosphere grid” for 8 months, learned more in that time about online communities than ever before, and still haven’t been able explain what it means…it all rolls back to attention. What we do and don’t pay attention to is a core building block…the “currency” of this new medium. Understanding why and how attention flows is critical to all of our understanding.

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1:
With the start of the new school year, many teachers and students are seeking new products and technologies to help them through their upcoming academics. With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. To me, the growing interest for web-based learning is amazing, which brought me to thinking; what if I were to consolodate some of the helpful online products and services that can help students, teachers and administrators alike? Well, I convinced myself. The following is a compilation of Web 2.0 products that I’ve personally researched and tested. These services are grouped into two main categories: “Tools”; and “Office Applications”. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more.
There are going to be three parts to the “Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0″ series: part one covering tools; part two covering office applications; and in part three, real cases of Web 2.0 used in classrooms around the world. I hope that this series becomes a valuable resource for students, teachers, and school administrators alike. On a last note, part two is almost complete and I expect to publish it within a day or two followed by part three shortly after.

Red Arrows indicate personal favorites with education in mind.
Products may appear more than once if related to multiple categories.

Part 1: Tools

Organizers

• Stu.dicio.us: Student organizer and social notetaking tool where students can create a schedule, track their grades, manage a to do list, store files for classes, and write public notes in an outline-like format. Stu.dicio.us also allows students to connect with friends and soon will include Facebook integration. More on Stu.dicio.us.
• Gradefix: Best described by Gradefix, “Gradefix intelligently organizes and prioritizes all of your homework so you are always on top of it.” Students that use Gradefix create a study schedule used to best spreadout and prioritize homework throughout the week in hopes to decrease stress and improve grades.
• Chalksite (Teachers): Chalksite is a system built for teachers, students, and parents providing teachers with an easy to use central point where they can communicate with students and parents, post assignments and grades, send messages, and manage a website for their courses. More on Chalksite.
• Engrade (Teachers): Similar to Chalksite, Engrade allows teachers to create an account and have direct communication with students and their parents. Teachers can manage student grades, track attendance, schedule upcoming homework, and provide students and parents progress reports.
• mynoteIT: (New release came out the other day) An online note taking tool for students including a WYSIWYG note editor, assignment reminders, grade management, to do lists, and more. Students can also share notes with friends and receive feedback through commenting on notes.
• Haiku LMS (Teachers): Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
• CollegeRuled: Academic organizer, class scheduler, and message board area for students. Students can either create a schedule or connect to their Facebook schedule with CollegeRuled and take notes and manage a to do list for each class. Note: I have not been able to test CollegeRuled as it requires an .edu email address.
• Backpack: Backpack is an all around great organizer including note taking, file storage, to do lists, a calendar, and more. An example use could be that students can create pages in their organizer for each class and manage notes on class discussions as well as upload related files and class documents.
• PocketMod: This isn’t really a “Web 2.0″ product, but I felt it’s worth mentioning. Pocketmod is a small tool for creating disposable paper organizers using print out templates covering just about anything from note paper to reference sheets. It’s perfect for students that prefer keeping organized on paper. Also, it’s just helpful to carry around with you for whenever you may need to jot some things down.
• JotSpot: JotSpot is a free wiki allowing users to create and share documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and more. It is my top pick for a wiki and provides a great set of features. Users can even install other applications from an application gallery to extend their wiki with project managers, to do lists, photo galleries, and other applications. It may be a little on the advanced side for students and teachers, but if your tech savvy, have at it.

Gradebooks

• Teacher! (Teachers): Teacher, formerly known as Teacherly, is an online grading tool for teachers where they can create classes, add students, and track grades for all assignments and test scores. I would imagine it would work out fine for students as well wanting to track their own grades in classes. Unfortunately, Teacher is not accepting new users at this time but you can signup to be notified when they do and check out a demo in the meantime.
• Stu.dicio.us: Built into the Stu.dicio.us organizer comes a very simple grade manager allowing students to assign grade categories (homework, quiz, tests, etc.) and grades to each of their classes.
• mynoteIT: Students with an mynoteIT account can login and access their classes where they can add grade sections and grades. What’s nice too is that unlike Stu.dicio.us, mynoteIT gives the student a clear look with letter grades rather then just percentages and averages.
• Chalksite (Teachers): Designed for teacher, student, and parent communication, Chalksite provides teachers with online gradebooks where they select their class and simply fill in grades for each assignment that they have sent to their students. Students and parents can then login to their account to view their grades.
• Engrade (Teachers): The Engrade online gradebook is built to be flexible to a teachers needs where they can add assignments, create weighted grading categories, customize grading scales (A, B, C, Pass, Fail, etc.), and more. Students and parents can also login and view their grade report.

For Teachers, Clubs, and Management

• Groupvine: A service designed to help bring group members together to keep track of events, tasks, and news. Great for students in clubs, professors teaching specific topics, and campus management. For a screencast, view Screeniac.
• Nuvvo: Teachers wanting to teach online can use Nuvvo providing them with their own online learning portal. Teachers can can add courses that anyone can find and enroll in as well as charge for the online courses. They can manage students, class curriculum, quizzes, and more importantly, learn pages (allowing for headings, text, files, images, and video) that their students will be reading throughout the course.
• Schoopy: Built to strengthen community communication, Schoopy provides a system in which teachers can manage participating teachers, students, and parents and send messages, ask questions, keep up with assignments and even take quizes. Communities/Schools also can create a public website making it easy for students and parents to keep up with recent updates.
• Tuggle: Tuggle, launching Fall 2006, is a web-based organization tool for student leaders to manage groups, online payments, bulk email and texting, and more.
• Chalksite: A web package developed for teachers to help create a class website and a central point of communication with students and parents. Manage class assignments, student grades, and even a public blog.
• Engrade: “Engrade is a free online gradebook that allows teachers to manage their classes online as well as post grades, assignments, attendance, and upcoming homework online for students and parents to see.”
• Haiku LMS: Haiku has yet to launch, but its feature set sounds promising making it worth mentioning. Haiku provides a system for teachers where they can create a public website for their classes, manage content, list assignments and announcements, track grades, and more. Sounds like a similar application to Chalksite.
• Zoho Challenge: Online test tool where you can easily create tests, send tests to candidates (students, in this case), and view results with visual reports and straight forward grading (pass or fail).

Mathematics

• Calcoolate: Calcoolate provides users with a simple calculator with advanced expression support, mathematic functions, and history for viewing past calculations.
• Calcr: Similar to Calcoolate, Calcr is a web-based calculator with mathematic expression and function support as well as history logging in a very minimalist design.
• Create a Graph: Create a Graph is a free tool by Students’ Classroom that aims to make it easy for students to create bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, pie charts, and point graphs. Navigate through its easy to understand visual interface to add data and customize graphs.
• e-Tutor Graphing Calculator: Advanced web-based graphing calculator allowing students to enter one or more equations and view them with position/intersection indicators and zooming functionality.

Resume Building

• Emurse: Great service built for job hunters that want to create, send, and share a professional resume. Users can view their resume’s statistics, send out their resume via fax and ground mail, and receive a public or private web address. One of my favorite applications of the year. More on Emurse.
• hResume Creator: Helpful tool for the tech savvy crowd that want to create a Microformat compatible resume for their website. Simply fill out the hResume form covering basic resume information and retrieve an HTML file which you can use to copy-n-paste into your website. You can then style the resume as you wish with basic CSS if your not thrilled with the default appearance.
• Amiko: Amiko does not appear to work or be officially launched yet, but I have been keeping an eye on it for the last month or so and hope to try it out soon. It appears to be a service that allows users to create and manage an online resume although it’s feature set does not look all that promising compared to Emurse. Note: The signup form doesn’t seem to work for me and I’ve tried reporting it as a bug, but the bug form did not work either. I’ll keep my eye on it.

To Do’s and Note Taking
Note: I did not list all of the note taking solutions I am aware of as I’ve already made a roundup of 50 notetaking tools here at Solution Watch, but I will add a few new student specific ones that I have recently come across.

• 25 To Do Lists to Stay Productive: Solution Watch roundup of 25 web-based task managers that can be helpful for students wanting to keep track of homework and upcoming quizzes. Be sure to check visitor comments for more.
• Fifty Ways to Take Notes: Another Solution Watch roundup including over 50 ways to take notes using various web-based tools in seven categories.
• NoteMesh: Best described by NoteMesh, “There are plenty of notes services out there; NoteMesh is a different way of thinking about your notes. Collaborate with your classmates to create a unified set of notes for your class. It’s like Wikipedia for your notes.” Note: School email address required when registering.
• Notecentric: Notecentric is a new notetaking site designed to help university students have their notes wherever they are and easily share them with fellow classmates. You can add multiple classes to your account and save notes to them using a WYSIWYG editor. Note: School email address required when registering.
• NoteTango: Free and collaborative note sharing site, launched just days ago, that allows students to create and share notes online and search notes created by other students.

Learning and Research

• EasyBib: An “automatic bibliography composer” that lets users enter sources and fill out a simple forms to be given MLA style bibliographies. I’ve used this multiple times in the past for research papers.
• Ottobib: Similar to EasyBib, Ottobib is a simple bibliography tool that allows users to enter multiple ISBN numbers for books at a time and retrieve the bibliographies in MLA, APA, AMA, or Chicago/Turabian format.
• Nuvvo: Nuvvo offers a service where students can search for courses to enroll in online on any just about any topic. It’s a fun and easy way for students to learn and they can select from free or paid courses.
• Diigo: Social annotation and bookmarking service where users can bookmark sites and add highlights and notes to them. Great for research. In fact, I used Diigo to help organize bookmarks and notes for this post.
• Wizlite: “Wizlite allows you to highlight text (like on real paper) on any page on the Internet and share it with everybody (or just your friends).”
• Mindpicnic: Similar to Nuvvo, Mindpicnic offers a service where users can create courses and find and study interesting courses full of media, links, flash cards, and more.
• Answers.com: Excellent site for researching anything at all. Make a search and receive results from dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other information sources.
• Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia under a Wiki platform that is written and maintained by volunteers. It has possibly grown to be todays largest reference site and encyclopedia on the Internet.
• Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking site where users can save bookmarks and organize them with tags. Users can also take advantage of their del.icio.us network allowing them to add friends to their account and keep track of bookmarks left by each friend.
• Zotero: Next-generation research tool for Firefox that is currently in private beta. With Zotero, users can capture citation information, store media and websites, take notes, and more all within their browser. Note: Zotero is in private beta and I have not had the chance to try it out and will keep my eye on it.
• Newsvine: I could have picked any ol’ news site for this post, but Newsvine is, in my opinion, the best news source for students. It’s a clean and friendly social news site containing articles from the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as user contributions. Students can browse the site comfortably, rate news articles, participate in article discussion, and even start their own news column where they can write and publish articles. More on Newsvine.

Media Sharing

• Youtube: YouTube has quickly grown to be one of the most popular websites on the Internet. I personally use it for entertainment, although you can find a great deal of educational videos as well as create an account to upload your own videos for free. Students can research the site (may come across inappropriate content here and there) and even create projects with video and share them on the web.
• Google Video: Similar to YouTube, Google Video allows users to search, upload, and share videos online for free. I’m a fan of YouTube, but Google comes on top when it comes to quality educational videos. Google Video even has an educational category providing hour long videos and caption/subtitled videos (new).
• Flickr: Explore, upload, and share photos online. Includes commenting and neat note functionality where users can add blocks of notes on the photos themselves for others to see.
• Eyespot: Neat site where users can actually create video mixes online and share them with others. You can add up to 100 clips or photos to a movie as well as add transition effects and video effects. Reminds me of videos I had to create back in High School for Graphic Communications class. More on Eyespot.

That about does it for part one of the series. If there are any services that you feel should be on this list, please comment and let us know about them! If you are interested in more services in any of the above categories, feel free to contact me as I have only mentioned ones that I personally felt were best for educational use. Also, I just want to make a last note that red arrows throughout the article indicate personal favorites of mine but do not mean they are the best options for you. I recommend looking at a category that you need improvement on and find what product will best fit your needs, then go from there. Hang tight for part two of the series and enjoy!

Tags: school, education, resources, web2.0

Technorati Tags: education, resources, school, web2.0

Upcoming.org is the new Meetup.com. Free, open, backed by our friends over at Yahoo. (Reminder…these guys run Flickr and Del.icio.us now.) Upcoming.org allows you to tag conferences, meetups, events, etc. that may be of interest to the community. RSS feeds make updates of this information digestible.

It’s an open community. You can add your own conferences, meetings, information, and discussion. It’s what we make of it. Socially constructed online collaboration that facilitates face-to-face (or online) conversations at events in the future.

I’m calling out a few people to help get the ball rolling. Steve Dembo. We’ve had this conversation before. You are in a great position to put some time into helping build online communities. Where in the world is David Warlick? He spends a good amount of time at conferences. I know a few folks from the corporate side that read this and would like their events publicized.

Let’s get busy.

[Related note: Thinking ahead to NECC 2006. I'm beginning a "Will Blog for Sponsorship" campaign. Being the poor professional educational blogger I am, I'm willing to lay pixels for a ride to San Diego.]

I am not a gamer. Last Thursday I checked in on the Chris Pirillo Show, a live audio stream/wiki/irc/call in gig about technology. Last week’s episode was a 3 hour advertisement for the Xbox 360. (I’m trying to stretch a bit outside of the edublogosphere.) Please don’t tell my wife, but I want one.

Why? The more I learned, the more I realized that the Xbox is designed to feed off our obsession to be a part of online communities. This morning, Robert Scoble wonders out loud whether the Xbox 360 is “Web 2.0″.

“Think about it. It uses the Internet. It has a new microtransactional based business model. Has a social model where large numbers of people interact with the Web. Has a new architectural model based around rich content types, content discovery, and personalization, and has a new technical model using low/no cost maintenance, simple programming languages, and new delivery mechanisms, particularly around RSS.”

I know, Scoble and Pirillo are selling Xbox 360’s. Look beyond that. It’s important that we understand the social, online aspects of what’s happening in the Xbox 360 community. I love Tim Wilson’s quote a few weeks back about MySpace. “This stuff is crack for the teenage social mind.” These are the things that our students (and some of us) are doing online. The more we understand it, the better we can meet our students where they are at.

On a related note, if anybody out there wants to buy me an Xbox 360 for “research purposes”, leave a note in the comments. I promise to share what I have learned. :O)

“Xbox 360 Video Game System (Fully-Loaded)” (Microsoft Software)

A few weeks ago I had a brainstorm. An idea picking away at the back of my brain. The thinking built off my learning over the past year with this blog, which has sparked a number of recent “connectivist” conversations and some deep, intense personal learning and reflection. I’m not ready to share this story yet…it’s deeply personal and very much “in progress” right now…but the crazy little voices in my head tapped me this afternoon and reminded me “learning is conversation”.

Back in April when I had 2 readers, including my wife, I remixed Cluetrain Manifesto’s “95 Theses”. I used the magical powers of “find & replace” to substitute “learning” for “markets”, “schools” for “companies”, and “students” for “customers”. I took the corporate/marketing edge off Cluetrain and put it in an educational context.

Whether you are a company dealing with schools, a library dealing with patrons, a speaker on the lecture circuit, or an educator thinking about the future of technology, these remixed “theses” from the Cluetrain Manifesto should serve as a nice guide to tweak your thinking. They have fundamentally changed mine. Pass it along.



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.

I learned a new phrase today. “Legitimate peripheral participation.”

Amazon.com: Books: Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives): In this important theoretical treatise, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning–that learning is fundamentally a social process and not solely in the learner’s head. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation. Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and oldtimers and about their activities, identities, artifacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalized to other social groups.

I couldn’t be more blown away by how this new technology works.

“Learning is conversation.”

I spent the day with Andrea Pokrzywinski. We were trading notes on all of these new technologies available to education. Andrea is the first “live” person that I’ve been able to talk to about this stuff who “gets it”. I had the chance to pick her brain about NECC.

Andrea introduced me to elgg. elgg is everything I’ve been looking for and even more. It’s a combination of a blogging platform and learning community. Think of the mutliuser version of WordPress that James Farmer has going on with edublogs.org with the added benefits of collecting metadata on users. As you fill out your “profile” with the system, you identify your interests. These “interests” are treated as tags and aggregated at a “learning community” basis. Blog posts also get tagged, adding to this “learning community” database. Example: Let’s say I’m a teacher that’s passionate about 6+1 traits writing. I can tag my own interests at “6+1 traits writing”. If I have a blog post in this learning community that relates, I can tag it “6+1 traits writing” as well. The system uses “tag clouds” to show common interests among members.

Better yet, let Dave explain it.

Dave :: Weblog
Elgg is a web-based learning system that allows users to create their own “personal learning landscapes”. These are places where users can store their personal reflections, development and resource base; they also become online identities which are used to share ideas with other users and instructors, sparking debate and creating online communities of learning. Finally, they provide a mechanism to search for resources relating to a user‚Äôs interests and reflections.

Ok. Here’s the cool part. Open source. You can install this locally and create your own district/regional community of learners/bloggers. I threw and instance of it up on my website (http://pedersondesigns.com/elgg) very easily this evening. (Disclaimer: Very beta on my site. Don’t build your own personal blog over here quite yet!!!) Feel free it give it a ride though.

Amazing stuff folks. Don’t let it take you away from http://www.edublogs.org quite yet though. I’m not yet convinced of it as a full-on “blogging platform”. Right now it’s a step in the right direction towards creating online learning communities through a few of these social networking technologies.

Will’s reflection from Building Learning Communities 2005

…listening to Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab talk about how we need to take the concepts of learning from kindergarten and apply them throughout education. About how there is a growing recognition that success in the future is going to depend on acting and thinking creatively, yet schools give little opportunity for students to develop as creative thinkers.

That reminds me of this quote from Hugh McLeod’s How to Be Creative. This quote is what has fueled me, my learning, and this blogspace for the past 6 months.

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, I’d like my crayons back, please.

Earlier this week I was mowing the lawn, listening to This American Life :: Home Movies. The stories were focused on kids that used video cameras to be creative. It was a huge flashback to my youth. We had “The Punk Network” think podcasting, 1985. Later it was “The Saga of the Verbal Spoon”, an indie newspaper of sorts. (Damn, I wish I could hyperlink some of this stuff!!!) This was back in the times when we had crayons. :O)

Last night I asked my 3 year old daughter Claire, “Do you want to be a blogger? Her response, I suppose.” She loves typing letters. Welcome to the blogosphere. Don’t ever lose your crayons Mac.

I get such a kick out of “aggregator moments”.  Sometimes three stories will appear, linked in no particular way, but together send a wicked message.

[Here’s the thinking…] David Warlick’s recent post “The Problem with Integrating Technology” :: “Rather than trying to master technology skills, I believe that teachers should be working to understand this new information environment and the new literacies that it requires. As they seek to understand and harness it, they should teach from that information environment and its literacies. Integrating that literacy will get us further toward making classrooms more relevant to today’s students, than efforts to integrate technology.”

[Here’s the doing…] Followed by Will Richardson’s reflection on his recent presentation at the Building Learning Communities 2005 conference. :: “The best part continues to be that these tools require educators to think differently about what their classrooms could be. To be able to instigate some of that thinking is just way too cool.”

[Here’s the soundbite…] Finally, here’s what tied it together and completely sealed the deal on this being a really cool learning moment.  I came across the blog “What’s the (Next) Message” with this McLuhan quote in the header.

“I don’t want them to believe me, I just want them to think.” – Marshall McLuhan

I’ve done a number of presentations this summer about blogging, rss, Web 2.0, emerging technologies.  Administrators, teachers, library/media, friends and family.  I preface my talks with the following from The Cluetrain Manifesto. “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.”  It’s difficult to get the point across so that “newbies” understand how deep this well actually is.  After my last presentation I was a bit discouraged.  A few really got it.  Some faked it.  A few went away thinking that I was showing a new way to subscribe to listserves. 

After considerable reflection, I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to worry if anyone “believed” me.  I strongly believe we are looking at the first “real” possibility of technology making a difference in education.  It’s just beginning to get good.  I also strongly believe that this is public education’s last chance to “get it”.  Embrace this and make it work.  These same toys that are available to transform learning are also the same ones that will make K12 public education (as it stands) irrelevant.  Look no further than “The World Is Flat” (links to 1 hour audio/video summary of book) to get an idea of how this technology has flattened business.  Business used to be about nations (1.0), then it was about companies (2.0), now it’s about individuals (3.0).  The same tools that made business about individuals are the tools that will make education about individuals…and I’m not talking about inservices where we say “every kid is an individual” and “differentiated instruction is important”.  More like this kind of “individualizing”.

I don’t want you to believe me, I just want you to think.

p.s. My guess is that this is where Tom Hoffman steps is with this recent post on Ed-Tech Insider about our recent conversation about using Wikipedia in schools.  Follow the comments and Tom tells us “I’m annoyed that we don’t have more experienced teachers having serious conversations on blogs about constructing curriculum around this stuff. I’m just getting impatient.”  I think we are all feeling impatient.  We are getting used to this sytle of conversation on an individual level.  The elephant in the room…“How should this stuff scale?”  There are some great things happening…powerfull conversations…amazing community building.  A group of us have been successful “getting flat” in this world.  Now what?  What do we do with this? Or this?  Does it look something like this or that, or more specifically this really cool thingy over here.  I thought that this might help, but it still doesn’t feel right.