Technology Leadership Institute- Will Richardson

I'm at the Mohonk Mountain House with about 30 ed tech leaders. We're talking about a variety of topics, but today's topic is "Powerful Tools for the Classroom", presented by Will Richardson.

I'm already excited, because I've popped over to the links page on the wiki. I want to click through them all, but I'm deliberately restraining myself. I will let Will guide us here.

Powerful Tools for the Classroom

How do you and your teachers learn? Do the students know? If you asked them, could they tell you. Are we still the 'same physical space, teacher as sole authority' learners?

A change in the world is the fact that we learn in affinity spaces- places where we get together with folks of similar interests, in some cases passions. (Will showed us a Clustrmap of his readers at this point.) Do you have a learning network. Today it can be folks from all over the world. We drop into Christoper Sessums blog here, with much on cognitive theory. Will says he'd be working hard to read this. I with Will on this, but it's worthy reading, and part of the learning. How many of us have these types of networks, and are on our way to a self-directed PhD in weblogging and digital information?

Students are already building these networks, through MySpace, using text messaging, and IM. Email is too old school- it's for old folks like us. We're getting lost and left behind- we don't teach networking, at least not the really important kind. They've discovered, and we need to as well, that there is so much information out there, we can't process it all. The network offloads some of the knowledge and processes it for us, making it available in better bites (ed: or bytes?) Maybe what we need to teach is: how do you find good sources? (Check out Dog Island and The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus for bad examples)

However, it's a difficult time to be a teacher. "I don't want to do MySpace. I could be liable if something bad happens." "What if someone drops in on the blog, am I responsible?" We have to get past those feelings.

(Not sure how we got here, but...) Have you seen the wiki for Star Trek? It's quite impressive. All of this info is so dynamic, and a product of the new 'truthiness'. The idea that we no longer always have what is true, but what we think is true. Now that everyone has a printing press, we can get some pretty strange and scary truths, like martinlutherking.org (actually a hate site).

There are some great resources out there, even on YouTube. Check out the Dove Real Beauty Workshop for a responsible use. This is a perfect example of modeling responsible behavior. (haha- the joke makes sense when you see the video)

We touch on Second Life here, and visit with Blogsar Lumpen. We also visit MIT Open Course ware. We close with an intense discussion of the implications of many of these items, and talk about how to become change makers. Ultimately, are we talking to the wrong folks? Superintendents and other leaders need to know and join in the process. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion- are we falling behind charter schools, which ultimately may be more flexible?

BREAK

You've heard about 'fan fiction'? Check out the content there. 270,000 pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction? Feedback from peers, productive critiques, and not in a school setting, but learning where and when they want to learn?

Another question- How are schools able to use these tools and be safe and successful. Not a lot of great alternatives, but Blogger and edublogs appear to be the popular ones. There need to be clear policy, and good education of the students prior to implementing it on their own. We need to teach them to drive, but then give them the keys. If we've taught them well, we hope they will be responsible.

45 minutes left- How do we start building a network using RSS, or open discussion. The crowd elects RSS.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) allows us to subscribe to new content. Most blogs and podcasts have an RSS feed. It allows us to not visit 50 sites, but one aggregator, newsreader, or catcher. (He pops out of Flock, which has built-in aggregation, and over to Firefox 1.5, which doesn't. By the way, the new Firefox has built in subscriptions to feeds.)

Try searching on a provider with the addition of 'RSS' in the search. (new york times rss) and you see the feeds. Right click to "copy this link location" and paste it into your aggregator. Now look at Google News, and put in a news search. You get an RSS button in the left pane, and you could subscribe to a topic. Make sure to use "Advanced News Search" to limit your feed to providers, locations, etc.

We take a look at Bloglines to see a different interface. Using these tools, we don't have to go back to the blog/source again, unless we want to comment. We can then click the link, go visit, and comment.

We poke through Will's Bloglines, and we touch on the K12 Online Conference. There are 40 presentations over the next few weeks. This is the basis for his blogging and work. The blogosphere is connections.

"My writing starts with reading." (Of course it does!) Will calls himself a 'blog snob' in that he posts his 'intellectual sweat' on the blog. It's not a diary, but an online process of working out ideas.

Social networking site like del.icio.us (willrich) allow us to file content more effectively, using 'folk-sonomy' as opposed to 'taxonomy' by using our tags. We can share the tags too! Now we can subscribe to one another's reading. "What has Joe saved? Is he my kind of learner?" We can search del.icio.us for individual tags too! (I need to do this- what I do is not working!)

Furl.net allows us to save (as Will does) to do citations of websites. (WOW! My son totally needs this!)

Flickr allows us to share pictures. We can get a feed here too! Creative Commons (see Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig) is the way many of these images and pieces of content are licensed. Flickr allows you to tag photos, create mouse over tags, and create fiction. RSS can be found through tags (example)

Suprglu allows us to have "small pieces loosely joined" by connecting all of these feeds together. Take whatever RSS feeds and bring them all here, presented in a web page.

We close with "One Red Paper Clip." Alice Cooper- the fatal trade? Nope. It's about imagination. We have not seen the future- we can go anywhere, and there are a lot of steps.

What is your paper clip? What can you trade up to?