The obsessive focus on standardized testing, textbooks, and core curriculum has done more damage to the learning environment in the United States than just about anything else. It is as simple as the fact that, continually studying for a test just isn’t fun for students, nor does it engage their innate curiosity about life and the world around them . . . and much worse, it creates a permanent perception that school is a boring place, with educators (highly skilled professionals) primarily taking the blame.

In his presentation yesterday morning (5/22) at the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Spring Meeting, Dr. Yong Zhao, Technology in Education & Educational Psychology Director for the Center Of Teaching & Technology College of Education, Michigan State University, commented that standardized testing kills creativity and teaches students that they all need to know exactly the same material in exactly the same way. More importantly he presented a challenging idea, that it might be a positive move to throw out core curriculum. (Listen to his presentation here: Innovation3)

There has been much hand wringing over education for a long time. There have been reform movements and public policy attempts to “turn things around” in school. While the intent has been admirable, the results have not been effective – but why?

After 9/11 the United States scrambled to put policy, organizations, and laws in place that would ensure that the country would be safe from those kinds of attacks ever again. That’s the problem. The terrorist organizations, no doubt, anticipated this so they were already planning ways to disrupt the lives of the citizens of the United States differentlty . . . ways that weren’t being planned for.

There is a direct corollary to educational environments as they exist today: schools are designed to solve yesterdays, and occassionally todays problems – but not tomorrows. The solution is the re-imagining of what learning is, looks like, and how to facilitate it. But to do that, we must be willing to blow up what currently exists. That’s where Rebecca Barry enters the discussion.

Little Becky, as she is known around Dublin, Ireland, is an adorable little girl who was put up to making prank calls by a morning radio show in Dublin. Here she is trying to get her school blown up:

What would happen if your school made a “crash or a whollop,” what would you do? Of course I don’t mean this literally, but figuratively. What if there were no rules, no traditions, no rituals and the idea of school could be re-imagined?

In her book The Future and Its Enemies, Virgina Postrel (blog) asks a series of pertinent questions:

“How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization.: Do we search for stasis – a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embraced dynamism – a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? . . . Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape.”

There seems to be a steady march towards the writing of a new educational manifesto and it is taking place primarily online. EdTech leaders have seen email turn into listservs and then social networks (Ning, Twitter, Pownce), bookmarks in your browser turn into social bookmarking (Digg, Diigo, del.icio.us) and YouTube into Ustream. Technology was misapplied when it was brought into the classroom, being used to maintain stasis, perpetuate tradition and ritual that has existed in education for 100+ years. It hasn’t had the type of influence that was imagined 25 years ago. But, it can . . . and I believe it will in the hands of dedicated EdTech leaders and innovative teachers. It isn’t a panacea, it is the vehicle to implement the process of re-imagining education.

Right now the tools that students are using to construct meaning, identity, and place are considered, by the majority of the educational community, to be disruptive. This can even be the case among the staunchest of EdTech leaders. Considering this: I recall being part of a conversation in Boulder, Colorado while attending the Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference as part of my MA work in Pepperdine University‘s OMAET program. We used TappedIn as our classroom venue during the distance phases of the program and during the conference a number of us were sitting around talking to a few of our professors and mentioned the fact that while we were attending their classes in TappedIn, we also opened an instance of AOL Instant Messenger and carried on a parallel conversation. The immediate reaction from some of the professors was indignation. How dare we sit and whisper in the back of the classroom while class was going on. Remember these were professors in a technology rich program designed to prepare us to be EdTech leaders. We explained how this peripheral conversation revolved around the main discussion and actually deepened and extended the one taking place in the “classroom” – and though it appeared to be “disruptive” it actually was as essential as the main discussion. (A caveat, those professors remain, to this day, as the most positive influences in my professional life, many thanks to Linda Polin, Gary Stager, Paul Sparks, Margret Reil, Mercedes Fisher, and Sue Talley.)

The world around the classroom is in hyper-flux, changing constantly at an ever increasing pace. But what about education? The best word to describe change in education is, “incrementalism.” It seems as if reform in the educational arena is always designed to proceed at a baby step pace. This doesn’t work! So let’s blow it up and re-imagine. In his book Re-Imagine!, Tom Peters talks a lot about “relevance” in the business world, (Tom Peters photo by Allison Shirreffs):

“To my 30-year old readers: I hereby wager that when you’re my age, Wal*Mart and Dell will be either dead or irrelevant.”

Sure Peters is a “business guru” but the content of this particular book has massive implications for education. Is he right? We will find out one day, but he has been spot on far more than he has been wrong. So, if Dell can one day be irrelevant, can schools be so as they exist today? Are they already irrelevent as they exist today? How about this from Education Next a journal published by the Hoover Institute at Stanford University:

“Computer-based learning is on the cusp of transforming traditional public education, say Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen and his colleague Michael B. Horn in the summer 2008 issue of Education Next. Based on their analysis of data on enrollments, about half of all education courses will be delivered online in just over a decade’s time.”

The article goes on to point out that the online student population was 22 times larger in 2007 than in 2000. Are schools irrelevant? Yes, as they are today. But, is the idea of education irrelevant? NO! So when does the re-imagine revolution start? It begins when we look for answers in the way students learn outside the structures of the classroom. It begins when we admit they might be learning far more, and far more practical material, outside of the classroom. It begins when we pick up the phone and call the demolition company – the people who also carry the vision for designing something new – and start taking risks and leave behind the fear of failure (failure = success), leave behind the traditional proprietary attitudes of the educational arena. It begins when we plant idea seeds outside of the comfort of our networks and use our networks to extend our discussions. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child program, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Labratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology, once said,

“Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”

Be sure and read Dr. Scott McLeod‘s post at Dangerously Irrelevant: So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?

(A final caveat: I am unashamed about the influence that books, people, and ideas have on my thinking and this post was heavily influenced by the book Re-imagine! . . . the word itself I adopt as a hue-and-cry and I think Mr. Peters would approve)

Additional Reading: “The Builder – Designing The Future of Educational Leadership” posted by Rob Jacobs at Education Innovation.

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There are scouts, those who go ahead and explore the landscape and discover the possibilities. They are followed by early settlers who arrive immediately after and discover uses of the landscape and begin to build a new settlement. Following them are those who’ve heard the tales of a new world and made the decision to join the experiment. Those who remained behind had one of two options; ignore the new world developing out of their immediate sight, or become a facilitator for the development while maintaining the necessities and structures of the old settlements that supported the new.

This post started rattling around my head a couple of weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I was reading Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi while I was trying to sweat off the pounds accumulating while I read my RSS feeds. I had begun this book previously, but left it bookmarked on the shelf for quite a awhile, until a tweet by @bokardo (his blog) that eventually led me to his Amazon list of must read books. Linked was listed and I pulled it off the shelf and stared anew. I had begun the book before I was Twitterized, even before I started to seriously blog about EdTech. The book took on a new dimension this time and my brain went into overdrive as I considered it’s message in light of Twitter, Ning‘s such as Classroom 2.0, Slideshare, Diigo, and the list goes on.

The more I read, the more I focused on my experience with my Twitter stream. I find my stream to be the place I discover much insight and wisdom, as well as information and directions to great ideas on the web. There is a large EdTech community within Twitter and the flow of information and exchange of ideas is far beyond anything I experienced as a classroom teacher for 20+ years. Since being Twitterized, I have often thought of a Tom Peters‘ quote I read in Re-imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age,

A New Social Contract. Societies that educate their young to break the rules and invent vivid new futures.

This appears to be the attitude of the network of EdTech practitioners and evangelists I follow on Twitter. There is a strong network that has emerged and nurtured itself there, so as I was reading and running in place I grabbed my phone and tweeted the following three tweets:

I was struck by the cocktail party picture that Barabasi was playing with early in the book, using it as a description of the process of network formation. The path that information can travel seems to be something like a drop of water gathering with others to form a trickle, the trickle ending up in a rivulet, the rivulet to a stream, and on to a tributary, to a river, to the sea. There is power in the social joining of similar minds. With the Internet and social networks it happens at a significantly greater pace than that – but the idea works for me.

Barabasi’s “Third Link” brought the idea of “six degrees of separation” to the discussion in my head and this is where the thoughts began to coalesce.

“Six degrees of separation is intriguing because it suggests that, despite our society’s enormous size, it can easily be navigated by following social links from one person to another – a network or six billion nodes in which any pair of nodes are on average six links from each other.”

Now, the idea of six degrees of separation has been made somewhat trite by public media (old media primarily), but it has proven, over time, to be a reliable theory. No, this isn’t a book review, so here is the next connection that surfaced as I was reading.

I regularly pick up new links to Twitter toys via the Twitter Freaks group on Diigo (started by Lucy Gray of Infinite Thinking Machine and High Techpectations). Just prior to my reading I had been playing with TweetWheel a tool developed by Augusto Becciu and plotted my network:

I noticed some interesting things. First, some of the EdTech practitioners I followed also follow tech industry icons such as Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and Cali Lewis or information outlets such as Ars Techinca, but not many. Now that isn’t a big deal, just interesting. The second thing I noticed was that none of the above were following any EdTech practitioners, evangelists, or bloggers that I an following, now that I found disconcerting. The final observation was how many of the EdTech’s I was following were following each other – the web was amazing.

Here’s the rub. There is such a wonderful network of EdTech’s thinking, sharing, learning, growing within the Twitter universe (and other places, but Twitter was on my mind) . . . BUT . . . isn’t this just preaching to the choir? I remember how wonderful it was, while I was in the classroom, to run into another educator who had visions for how technology was going to re-invent the learning environment in their classroom. There is an amazing energy that is generated by that interaction. Even more exciting was the rare situation when a teacher sitting nearby would interrupt the discussion, eventually joining in, and getting excited about beginning to bring tech tools and applications into their classrooms for the first time.

It is that last experience that ties this all together. Before Twitter, I didn’t have any contact with @ijohnpederson, @mrplough07, @lsshanks or @markwagner, I didn’t know who they were much less that they were involved in the EdTech arena. Through Twitter I gained access to their current thoughts and ideas, their blogs, and most importantly I reduced the six degrees of separation to ZERO. No this isn’t a pro-Twitter rant, it is a chance to point out that not only did I reduce the distance between the people I follow from six to zero, but I also reduced the distance between the people they work with and want to influence (think the ones following the early settlers) from six to one. This network is the strongest tool possible for making massive change in the way education happens. This network is directly connected to other strong EdTech networks giving it added strength with each connection.

How can I help those in my Twitter stream or my friends at Classroom 2.0 make a difference in their educational venues? How can I allow them to enter my classroom or school and help me make a difference there? There are many options, such as responding when someone I follow is presenting Twitter as part of a Web 2.0 enhanced approach to classroom re-invention, staff development, or professional growth. I can share the links I gather using my Twitter stream + Yahoo Pipes + my RSS Feed aggregater in the most advantageous way in my building. I can print hard copies of their blog posts, as well as send links via email to teachers within my building (or that I have worked with over the years), addressing the things I have heard them talk about in the lounge, the halls, or the parking lot. By doing this, I bring these great voices from six degrees away, to one, and then to zero. I can effectively bring you, the EdTech’s from my social networks, into the classroom of many other teachers that you would not otherwise have any contact with. Hopefully, your insight, wisdom, and vision will inspire and encourage and the movement to re-imagine education will grow exponentially – that would be the true releasing of the power of the EdTech network I have discovered in the Web 2.0 world – which would change the answer to my third tweet from May 5:

We increase our listening audience by reducing the degrees of separation between good teachers and good ideas and by increasing each others sphere of influence. Barabasi said in the introduction to Linked ,

“. . . we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else.”

Hope you won’t mind when I link you and your ideas with other great teachers and watch how things can change.

The blogs of Twitter-ers I mentioned above:

@ijohnpederson: IJOHNPEDERSON

@mrplough07: The Next Step

@lsshanks: 2020 Nexus

@markwagner: Educational Technology and Life

Suggested Further Reading:

“Who Do We Belong To?” posted by Ben Grey (Blog, Twitter)

“Metathinking Manifesto” posted by Venessa Miemis (Blog, Twitter)

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School is no longer passive, learning and technology have converged allowing students the power to guide their learning. This has created a myriad of new degrees and avenues for creativity that weren’t even imagined when you were directing your student. Please imagine . . . the wild. Visualize . . . the unknown. Remember that vision is the art of seeing the invisible. Create new places of learning that don’t resemble the “tried and true.” But, rather, open the windows to the art of possibility. (With appreciations to both Emerson and Benjamin Zander for having vision.)

It felt fantastic to write that, to bring together the ideas floating around in my head and express them concisely. It was heartening to envision the possibility that educational leaders would exercise the potential of their positions, working together to design new learning environments that are not predicated upon the timeworn structures and ideas that pervade todays educational systems.

I may sound like a broken record, but what we need within the educational arena is a dedication to take only the essentials and leave the “old” behind and create something new – schools that are true learning ecosystems . . . living, fluid places were learning grows and spreads like the underground runners of the tiger lilies that grow wild here in Wisconsin. New ideas blossoming miles away from the original thought . . . but tied back to it via the network of underground roots that continue to venture out to new places.

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Who participates? What defines the participation in school? In the model that currently pervades, the participants are the teachers and administrators. These individuals do the planning, the administering, the teaching, the grading, the assessing . . . and students attend and simply follow and do as they are told. Okay, maybe it isn’t that simple and maybe far too many students don’t even engage to the point of “following and obeying,” but the fact remains that there isn’t much participation on the part of students.

Participation requires some level of control by all the parties involved in an endeavor. In school, administrations decide what will be taught and by whom. In the classroom teachers decide the flow of curriculum and implement the directives from above. Students only control is to buy into the plan and then learn what is “taught”, prepare for and perform well on tests, and do it all in the way prescribed by teachers and school administrators (this includes administrators all the up to the US Secretary of Education).

What I hope to outline in this series of posts is way to more evenly distribute control of the learning experience among the individuals involved. The solution, as I see it, to improving the educational experience and results in the US is not going to be found in more dollars. Sure, more money would mean more “things” to teach with – but if there is no concrete plan on how the “things” are used, no vision for a different way of “doing school” . . . then the money will be spent, but never lead to anything better. One of the first steps to a new vision of education is to redistribute power/control over the experience and let it evolve.

Education isn’t about proprietary thinking and behavior, it’s about thinking. I recently twittered, “TWIT [This Week In Tech, a podcast by Leo Laporte and friends] is talk about tech for tech/business, they
ignore edu because by its actions edu has asked to be ignored, demanded
as much, too bad.” My friend, and fellow edtech evangelist Joe followed that with a blog post extending the lament. The problems with technology never truly gaining traction in education is not because it doesn’t fit – it is because it is eschewed. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I would argue that the one at the heart of the matter is a belief that the methods of education are not broken, so, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Education continues to increase the amount of content required to be covered, demands more standardized testing to gauge improvements, and bellies up to the cash bar with the textbook publishers and curriculum mills. Folks, it is broken, but it doesn’t need fixing.

You don’t fix things that have obviously been replaced by innovation. For instance you won’t fix a old IBM Selectric typewriter unless it is for nostalgic purposes or to re-purpose it (such as using it as a “guest register” at home for visitors to leave a little note when they visit). There are a myriad of other innovative options for writing. Education needs innovative thinking, thinking that goes past the “How do we use this new stuff to keep doing what we have always done” attitude. What is a new picture, vision, concept of education . . . how do we innovate education?

I think students today already know how. The problem is they have little if any control over their education and have to leave their tools behind as they enter the school each day. “There is a forceful interplay between society and its technologies. Society creates technology, but society is also created by technology.” says Lloyd Morrisett in a paper titled “Technologies of Freedom?” So how can students and technology innovate education today? How can teachers, in concert with students, use technology to innovate education? They can’t unless the administrations that oversee the process are not willing to give up some of their control to allow for innovation to occur.

No, not an overthrow of the administration building or a peaceful sit in. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.” Administration needs to see teachers and students as partners in the process of education and allow these “in the trenches” partners to have control over designing how to meet the expectations set by administration.

In the next six “chapters” I want to begin laying out the seeds of a vision for innovating education, hopefully to start a rapidly increasing dialogue and subsequent action toward innovation.

In the mean time, you might want to check out what Abilene Christian University is trying to do with iPhones in education. It is a nice step in the right direction.

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I may have built too big a picture for myself and now after the research and the attempt to organize the ideas I have left myself something that needs to be carved up and can’t seem to pull that off . . .

My character, Andrew, has a backpack that contains the following items as he heads off to classes each day: iPod Touch, cell phone, Kindle or Sony bookreader, laptop. I think I am going to organize the ideas around his backpack, so the next post will deal with the iPod, podcasts, and webcasts.

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“Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy, and the world, we are entering a new age where people participate in the economy like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed , and distributed on a global basis. This change presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and for every person who gets connected.” – Don Tapscott in Chapter 1 of Wikinomics.

In my next few entries I want to present some ideas on how Web 2.O tools can help in the process of transforming our educational system into a place of fluid processes and innovation. Our current system is at its core, the same thing it was 100+ years ago. Then, this system was perfect. The calendar revolved around the crop seasons, the day around the agricultural chores at the beginning and ending of each day. The curriculum was well designed to develop more highly skilled farmers by focusing on basic reading, writing, and mathematic skills – all of which would allow them to take over and run the farm smoothly, effectively, efficiently.

Society then moved into an industrial phase and with a little tweaking, the educational process was better able to meet the needs of an assembly-lined economy. Nice neat rows, a rigid schedule, compartmentalized content, were highlighted to an even greater extent. It made sense. The graduates were going to need to have the ability to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, but they also needed to be trained in the idea of isolated individualism since on the assembly line they would need to be able to perform their particular piece of the larger task with no need for knowledge or understanding of what or how those before and after them performed their particular part if the process. There was no need to see the big picture.

We trained children to “do their own work,” “not to share answers,” and most importantly “not to talk”, but to listen to the teacher. I was in the classroom (virtual and online) for 23 years and the most profound and insightful comments in any class I taught, always came from my students. This wasn’t because I was inept or not sufficiently knowledgeable in my subject areas. The best insights came from my students because I allowed them to discuss the ideas, play with them in their collective heads before we discussed them. Teaching wasn’t, and should never be, focused on the dissemination of “knowledge” or “content.” Sure, I did know more about the subject then most students, but that doesn’t mean I was the one who always had the most interesting take on it.

Education was and is about isolation, about keeping your knowledge to yourself. That is the point of highlighting the quotes above – learning is a social act. I remember the first time I told my students that I thought keeping an answer or idea to yourself was akin to cheating. The astonished looks! I know there were a few who also thought they had just been given free license to check out their classmates tests when they were unsure of an answer – we took care of that immediately following my first statement. There is a positive aspect to doing some, very few though, things in isolation. A test can be an effective way for a student to test themselves – and only themselves – to see what they have learned and use this as a way to evaluate their own learning processes. Test should aid introspection, which requires an educator to rethink how they are then weighed in a “grading” process. However, as pointed out by Lave, Wenger, and Tapscott, learning happens in a social environment (I know that Tapscott doesn’t mention learning specific, but I trust the connection here works).

During my Masters work a professor put the following question to us, “Can you learn anything alone?” The ensuing discussion (all on line in a threaded discussion environment) was some of the most exciting and challenging I had ever been a part of. It changed my views drastically. I had previously been a strong proponent and practitioner of cooperative learning – but this particular class took me way beyond that point to the idea of collaborative learning. No longer did my students cooperate, the collaborated. There was a marked difference.

So, what does this have to do with Web 2.0 tools? A lot! The current atmosphere of the web is different than it was just a few short years ago. Previously it had been a place of knowledge explosion – or the availability of knowledge. Today it is quickly transforming into a place of innovation and collaboration – in other words, people are finding ways to use the space of the web and the information there to do something new. I have mentioned a number of times previously that the basic problems of education today revolve around the antiquated structures and nostalgic view of the system. The basic problem of the “Well, it was good enough for me” view of school is that while that may be true, school only helped the learner develop the skills necessary to solve the problems of the day. That has caught up with us and we can’t solve our current problems – yet we continue to educate children with the same tools, methods, and worse – the concept of education that was outdated decades ago. It is time for something new, a new idea of what school is based, focusing on what is happening in society today, how innovation happens, how learning happens, and most fundamentally developing a new way of educating children that is collaborative at its core.

I plan on looking at podcasting, wikis, social media, social networking, digital communities of practice, and other sharing/collaborative tools in terms of how they can help us re-conceptualize what school is all about. My next post will paint a picture of a different type of “day in the life of a college freshman.” My son, a freshman in high school, is headed there in three-and-a-half years (his goal, MIT), so I want to create a picture of how I would like to see it happen for him. From there I plan to take a Web 2.0 tool and feature it based on that picture and maybe with your comments and our collective mind we can paint a new picture of what education is and let the old model rest in peace.

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“Willinsky’s case for open access is multifaceted. It draws on the spirit of copyright law, the mandate of scholarly associations, the promise of global knowledge exchanges, the public’s right to know, the prospect of enhanced reading and indexing, the improved economic efficiencies of publishing, and the history of the academic journal.

Willinsky is careful to explain that ‘open access’ does not mean ‘free access.’ Open access articles cannot be read without a substantial investment in hardware, software, and networking. The open access movement does not operate in denial of economic realities, he says; it is simply acting on a scholarly tradition that has long been concerned with extending the circulation of knowledge.”

How do Web 2.0 tools fit into this discussion?

With an ever increasing number of students entering college as accomplished bloggers or participants in wiki projects what will these students do when it comes to scholarly research?

Maybe a broader idea of open access suggests that as research is ongoing it is published in a very public and digital fashion – even more “free” than Willinsky suggests. Will these future researchers and scholars want to wait to announce their findings, or will they blog about them as they happen?

I can see it now, a group of researchers stumbles across the cure for cancer and across the Twitter universe the announcement is made that cancer is now curable. Not the details of “how and why,” but instead the announcement and a link to the researchers wiki where the final papers are currently in production. The public can read, other researchers can test the ideas before they are even published so that independent replication can be determined before the researchers go to press. This will certainly raise issues of copyright and patent concerns that researchers will have to be aware of as they proceed.

Will the Web 2.0 generation be willing to end their habits of blogging and building collective knowledge and understanding in order to protect the current ideas of academic research and publishing? Will they suddenly become protective of their “property” and hide it until they publish? It would be difficult to see such a drastic shift in behavior. It is more likely that they will carry with them their “open source” mentality and find ways to protect their intellectual property at the same time as they publicly share their learning and discovery.

The social web will become ever more influential in scholarly pursuits as those who are discovering its power now move up the educational ladder. These generations are more adept at figuring out where technology fits into the learning process and even the current educational technology leaders lag behind them. The small pockets of voices in education crying out to take the example of those using Web 2.0 tools are being ignored in favor of the standardized education voices. Innovation is the best place for education to occur – however, that isn’t happening very often, much less at a rate to achieve a new conceptualization of the education process.

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The article doesn’t suggest limits, it seems to be a suggestion of complete abstinence. The memo tells educators that they are not to participate in social networking via the Internet period:

“OEA [Ohio Education Association] advises members not to join [these sites], and for existing users to complete the steps involved in removing their profiles,”

OEA‘s action is interesting considering recent recommendations by the NSBA (National School Boards Association). David Cassel talks about the actions of the NSBA in his blog, Blorge.com as does Will Richardson, ” ‘Learner in Chief’ at Connective Learning and the author of the recently released Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” on his blog. Andy Carvin, from PBS, also addresses the NSBA report at learning.now.

Among comments in the report from the NSBA are the following:

“Social networking may be advantageous to students — and there could already be a double standard at work. 37% of districts say at least 90% of their staff are participating in online communites of their own — related to education — and 59% of districts said that at least half were participating. “These findings indicate that educators find value in social networking,” the study notes, “and suggest that
many already are comfortable and knowledgeable enough to use social networking for educational purposes with their students.”

“In fact, 76% of parents expect social networking will improve their children’s reading and writing skills, or help them express themselves more clearly, according to the study, and parents and communities ‘expect schools to take advantage of potentially powerful educational tools, including new technology.’”

“In light of these findings, they’re recommending that school districts may want to ‘explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes’ “

Ohio seems to have, for lack of a better term, overreacted. When a teacher establishes a classroom, they provide their students with a set of behavioral expectations and the consequence for violating those expectations. Is the OEA modeling how teachers would begin to incorporate Internet and communications technologies into the learning environment? They might want to read Chris Lehmann’s blog about change vs. innovation. The idea of rethinking schools and the process of education will only be that, an idea, unless the “powers that be” see educators as professionals and the act of education as a practice (not unlike doctors and lawyers – and other professionals who continue the learning process and apply new learning all the time.)

Andy Carvin also raises the point that politicians, who always want to have their hand in the educational process, are possibly out of touch with parents, students, and teachers (in other words, their constituents), “Speaking of district policies towards social networking, the findings of this study would appear to run counter to the thinking of many in Congress, given the wide support for pro-filtering legislation last summer in the House.”

We teach and expect responsible behavior from students, why not from teachers as well? Let teachers discover new ways to use the Internet and communication tools to expand the classroom and class time – unless they teach in Ohio.

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Simply put, Diigo is a social annotation tool that allows users to leave comments as notes on web pages. These are then viewable by all Diigo users (public) or the users within a predefined group (private) that a user is a member of.

On first use it seems very easy to use. One of two methods for leaving comments on a web page – highlight text and then leave a note associated with the highlighted portion, or click the “sticky note” button create your note and move to your desired location on a page.

Once you have joined you add a little button to your favorites bar and when clicked a Diigo toolbar appears giving you the tools you need to annotate and when you move on the bar disappears until reactivated. A more complete discussion of setting up Diigo can be found at The Connected Classroom, Kristin Hokanson’s blog where she has a number of links to more about Diigo as well as a link to a screencast created by Liz Davis.

I was never a real fan of the webquest concept because it seemed to be taking the teachable moments permanently available on the Internet and turning them into more paper and pencil chases that, from what I have seen, usually deal in meaningless minutia and very little “real” thinking. With this tool a teacher can create an activity that is entirely web based by leaving comments and directions right on a web page. Guiding students around the web, having them leave thoughts and reactions – that of course would provide insight for future classroom discussions. Teachers would be able to gage understanding, identify preconceived notions, and plan for correcting large misconceptions that may exist within a classroom. It may sound cliche, but you extend the classroom AND class time outside of the traditional setting. There is also a discussion function within the group space that could serve multiple purposes for the teacher and students. Cory Plough provides a similar insight into Diigo’s use as a tool for providing content for his classes in this entry on his blog, The Next Step: Chiming in on Diigo.

When a user leaves annotates a page, the page is bookmarked under their ID and also within the group the user is a member of. A teacher could create a group for their history class, make it a private group and all bookmarks within that group are viewable and available to that group. Possible scenario:

Students are working on a project about the development of the
human view of the “concept of time” and are researching different mechanisms used to calculate time. Each time a student came across a valuable resource
they could leave an annotation and the page is bookmarked for the entire group (knowledge sharing).

My first thought was the elimination of textbooks as something students carry 300 pounds worth of in their backpacks. Instead a teacher could create their own digital textbook, composed primarily of original source material using the web and an annotation tool such as Diigo. No more being tied to a 700+ page tome of what someone else thought was more important than what really is (removes the politicians and textbook publishers from the education process – maybe, the best part of this idea – steps toward academic and learning freedom!).

I remember a number of years ago, back in the mid 90′s I think, a little app that was essentially the same thing as Post-it notes – complete in the wonderful legal pad yellow color of course – that was designed to do something similar. I don’t recall how extensive it was, or how it worked with the web, I just remember being curious about it. However, with the explosion of social networking and collaborative cyberwork this tool may, pardoning the pun, stick.

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