wikis
My life has been a whirlwind of activity since NECC and I have found it hard to keep up with blogging. I don't know why, but I feel guilty blogging when I have other deadlines looming. Do any of you experience that? Is it illogical? Should I blog anyway, much like we still get the day to day things done at work of home when we have extra tasks on our "to do" lists or should I take any free moment and put it toward the deadlines and follow Grandmas' rule of "work before play"?
I'd love to hear your take.
Disclaimer: Blogging is like play for me- sheer enjoyment. Not necessarily the writing, as for me the writing doesn't come easy, but the thrill of the hits and conversation that follows.
Community Driven System 
The purpose of stealing moments away from my already full agenda this morning though is to share the wonderment of the last week. This week I came to realized more than ever that I am a community driven woman. I believe in the power of the community, the wisdom of the crowd, that the network is more powerful than the node and that none of us are as good as all of us. I believe that School 2.0 means moving from a classroom system to a community system. And now more than ever I also believe that about PD and I mean all PD- conferences(e.g. K12Online08), workshops (e.g. most recently CABOCES Summer Instititue), ongoing, job embedded sync and asysn (e.g. PLP) and as a result I am going to start changing my keynotes even more to flow from a community model as well. As I reflected over the last week I realized even my family operates as a community rather than a traditional family model. I am no loan wolf.
CABOCES Summer Institute
One week ago I landed in Buffalo and was greeted by Rick Weinberg who took me to Selemanca where I would be spending the next week working with educators from the surrounding area. When the day drew closer to the conference Rick shared that unexpectedly numbers were down. I gave him the opportunity to cancel rather than bring me out for just a few people, (I am knee deep in buying my first home in Va and could have used the time) but Rick was firm that they wanted to move forward. I am so glad he made that decision because this week was an incredible week of learning for me personally.
Here are my take aways...
1. When you are focused on educational reform from a community perspective- more is not always better.
Monday- I had 10 administrators who were with me for one day. The small number enabled me to spend time personally getting to know each attendee. I invited Karen Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and Jon Becker to attend a panel discussion answering their concerns and questions. You can listen to the panel discussion here. The strength of intimacy because of such a small number of participants in the room made me realize that relationship is a more powerful tool when trying to leverage change than having large numbers of people in a room who are passively listening to you talk.
John Norton's wine glass metaphor rings true here- (He was drinking a glass of wine when it occurred to him- hence the name) that it is better to have small numbers of highly engaged people when influencing school reform than hundreds of folks who show up but walk away unchanged by the experience.
Also, on Friday when we knew our numbers would be minimal and we had such brilliant panel members coming from the community (Darren Kuropatwa, Kevn Honeycutt, Allanah King, and Mark Clemente) we made it a teachable moment. We spontaneously opened the Elluminate session up to the world (and they showed up) and we used Ustream and a chat channel as well to show if you offer quality the community will come to you- no matter how rural or small you are.
2. My belief was reinforced that for most newbies, teaching tools in isolation is too overwhelming and a waste of time.
Tuesday I tried to lay the foundation and set the context. I also wanted to help attendees understand the today's digital learner. Wes Fryer (Oklahoma), Laura Deisley (Atlanta), Meg Ormiston (Illinois), and
Sue Waters (Australia) talked about personal learning networks and the tools that support them (listen in here) on Wednesday. On Thursday my plan was to look more closely at tools and their pedagogy and how they best relate to various instructional activities and then on Friday to plan inquiry based instruction with an interactive model of building a PBL mini-unit. For the most part things went according to plan, but Thursday's tools, tools, and more tools left me feeling overwhelmed and tense. I know if I had been a newbie in that audience not having been given the opportunity to use the tools in a meaningful application would have been frustrating. The idea was to create an awareness, not mastery, so that on Friday when we created lessons using the TPCK model we would have a web 2.0 list of applications from which to choose. The result though was painful, at least for me.
I brainstormed with Rick Weinberg and Tim Clarke afterward and what we felt would have worked better was to have four tables- with one of us at each table presenting a tool. Our presentations would include the tool, an activity using the tool, and a chance to reflect on best uses of the tool. Then after 45 minutes we would break for 15 and then could present another tool. We would do that three times (12 tools) and participants could choose which tools they wanted to learn.
I really believe that the best examples of tool instruction are within the context of what you are learning. Like our heating and cooling system they should be invisible. The only time we focus on our heating and cooling is when they aren't working properly. Then we have to rethink the tool. Even Bill Fitzgerald (Funny Monkey) after his discussion on Open Source tools left the attendees with the idea of forgetting the tool- focus instead on what you want kids to know and be able to do- then figure out the right task and tool for the job to help them learn or do it.
3. What is most important to 21st Century educational reform is to listen to kids. 
On Tuesday I decided to create a panel of kids from 11th grade to college juniors and talk to them about their reflections on technology. It was the most inspiring part of my week long work. I am still learning from all they taught me during that hour.
Meet Gracie, Maegan, Ryan, Jay, Danny, Christian, Thomas, Caroline and Jesse. You won't be sorry you did.
4. Teachers need time to reflect, explore, and build in the safety net of your workshop.
Teachers, like kids, need you to model and then let them explore authentic use with you there to help. They need to understand how to create lesson plans that use the tools in meaningful ways, but then they need to actually collaborate together to build activities that they can use in school. Activities that leverage the potential of these new mediums for connecting and collaborating.
Typically, in my workshops I only have time to present the shift and the tools- never to actually jump to the most important step of helping teachers contextualize what they are learning. I walked away from this week realizing that this step is what is missing in school reform and why, in my opinion, that change is happening so slowly.
The most exciting time of the conference for me personally was to watch the groups choose a topic- create a concept web, a curriculum web, choose appropriate standards, an essential pedagogy, an appropriate tool and develop several lessons that all integrated not only core disciplines but fell together under a theme, project or problem. The creative juices really began to flow as we constructed together a killer initiating activity that would usher in our year long project and the lessons we would use to teach state mandated content from a passion-based perspective. The tools made sense because they were merely a means to an end- helping students learn about things that interested them from the perspective of a scientist, historian or author.
I am thankful to CABOCES for being willing to invest the time that allowed their educators to not only gain an awareness but to deeply reflect, discuss, and wrestle with the concepts while facilitators and the community stood close to help them make informed choices about change.
Kairos: the Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy announces a new venue for learning and research, the PraxisWiki. The editors are opening PraxisWiki to graduate courses addressing research in computers and writing. PraxisWiki offers an opportunity for graduate students to engage in online scholarly collaboration with colleagues from other programs and the Kairos Praxis editorial staff.
I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year. This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence. We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.
The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online. One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work. My personal web presence should be like that, too. But I’m not sure that it is. I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people. There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year. (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important? Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole? Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?
I think, too, about what “web presence” means. Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing. Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.
These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate. This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment. I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back. My work this weekend will continue to influence that work. Lots to learn. Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with. We should all be so lucky.
Here are the slides associated with two talks I gave yesterday on Blogging and Social Networking for the University of Florida Libraries Technology Expo 2008.
The turn out was greater than I expected (around 25). My goal was to talk on topic for about 10 minutes (15 max) and then open the floor to discussion and conversation. With this size of a group, this format proved to be quite fun and engaging, allowing for local expertise to shared and acknowledged.
Two items that are connected to the Social Networking presentation that I would like to point your attention to:
1) Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison -- a terrific primer for framing a definition of social networks and encapsulating early research associated with social network sites.
2) Why do people participate in social applications? by Josh Bernoff -- a blog post based on associated findings by the people at Forrester Research. Not as academic as the boyd & Ellison piece, but equally compelling in terms of thinking about what motivates people to participate in online social communities.
Other highlights:
At the end of my Social Networks talk, I asked participants what they would like to see in a social networking application. A young undergraduate student promptly raised his hand and said (I am paraphrasing),
I would like to be able to belong to a university network where each course had a socially managed website where students could upload their notes for a particular class, engage in discussions, share resources, collaborate on assignments.
The student was not satisfied that the university's current learning management system was adequate for such student-centered activity. He went on:
This site would be a resource hub, provided to the students by the university, and would be accessible to all students so they can get a sense of what kind of work is associated with a particular course or instructor.
I admit, the smile on my face crossed two county lines! I was amazed at the suggestion and the cooperative and participatory ethos engendered by the student's comment. Responses from other participants in the audience to his suggestion ranged from potential intellectual property issues, issues with the student honor code, as well as student privacy issues. Nevertheless, I imagine there could be a set of norms or ground rules developed outlining what participants in such a system could and could not do.
We're essentially talking about creating and organizing a wiki for each course on campus that could be sorted, viewed, and connected to a larger online social hub for students.
QUESTION:
Is anybody familiar with a similar service? Does this idea ring any bells with you? Your thoughts are dearly encouraged.
This post may be premature as I have only seen 2/3s of the PLP Independent Schools' team presentations of their impact journey through PLP and team projects- but I must say, Will and I were more than impressed. It was more on the level of WOW.
From extensive summer institutes with a Web 2.0 registration process for other schools to attend (all taught by the team members) to an 8th grade project that will utilize the best that Web 2.0 has to offer in a project based format implemented by all 8th grade teachers next year to a creative Lunch 2.0 project or school-based wikis with all digital curriculum shared and more, we found ourselves renewed in the faith that schools can make principled changes in the way we "do" school as a way to remain relevant in the lives of the students we teach. Independent school culture is such that teachers need to make certain they build on the rich heritage of what works and yet make room to rethink delivery of AP courses and such so that these kids not only get into some of the most prestigious colleges around, but they are fluent in the new literacies when they arrive.
All the project plans will be shared on the Independent School wiki after the remaining 1/3 of the teams present next week.
Cohorts are forming for next year's Powerful Learning Practice opportunity. If you are interested in learning more visit http://plpnetwork.com
Links for managing group wikis, lurking, and feeding others while building your vocabulary [indubitably!]
Creating a Participatory Knowledgebase: 3 Best Practices
From Michael Idinopulos's Blog on Social Software in the Enterprise
This falls under the keep it simple model of thinking about structuring online group projects and resources in a wiki:
1. Structure by topic, not by org chart.
2. Lead with what you want, not what you have.
Don't let your wiki be only a dumping ground for everything you know already. Create space to allow insights to be shared, trends developed, a space where new thinking can take place.
3. Link link link.
Cross-link to broaden your reference sources.
Lurking cont'd
Online Social networking as Participatory Surveillance by Anders Albrechtslund
From First Monday Volume 13, number 3, 3 March 2008
A fun, somewhat academic romp through social networking and the social aspects of surveillance. Albrechtslund notes that the concept of social surveillance is not necessarily negative nor is it free from danger. Rather, he argues that online social networking presents us with an opportunity to rethink acts of participation, observing, and being observed:
"What can we learn about surveillance through social networking? Characteristic of online social networking is the sharing of activities, preferences, beliefs, etc. to socialize. I argue that this practice of self–surveillance cannot be adequately described within the framework of a hierarchical understanding of surveillance. Rather, online social networking seems to introduce a participatory approach to surveillance, which can empower – and not necessarily violate – the user."
Social Action -- FreeRice.com: Tiny App, Big Idea
From Web Social Architecture-The Mad Science of Online Community:
"FreeRice is really elegant. It's not trying to do too much: Users take a vocabulary quiz. Correct answers add to the user's score and to the size of the donation. Each question loads a new ad. The revenue from the ads funds the donation. Perfect!"
FreeRice's mission is two-fold: feed people, improve your vocabulary. Seriously! And the site seems to be working.
Simple. Elegant. Fun. Practical. This site feels like a model for entrepreneurship for all the right reasons.
[Note: Triggering Town is the title of a brilliant book by the poet Richard Hugo which I encourage you to read, even if you don't write poetry, but love writing.]
This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
Back in the olden days of my first online community experience (1996-1997) on Electric Minds there was a topic called "The Mask We Wear." It was one of those discussions that enabled me to see the power of online communication, and to explore with others how we can hide behind masks and use them to express our identity.
I can't recall the details of the conversation. But I remember the visceral feeling of understanding something more deeply than before I entered the conversation.
Tonight I came across a link via the New Media Consortium's Blog (Thanks, Alan) to this video from Robbie Dingo called Mask.
After watching it, I had that same feeling I had in the Electric Minds conversation those many years ago.
How we both see ourselves and represent ourselves, online and off, is an essential part of our connection with others. Even when we "hide" behind our masks, we are being some part of ourselves.
When we had only text based online interaction, with the occasional picture thrown in, we created those masks in our writing. Second Life, World of Warcraft and other games and virtual environments give us new ways to express ourselves, to hide, to flaunt, and to embody our identity.
A good friend of mine, while expressing her delight in her new Second Life experiences, said "I love my avatar." When I saw it, I understood what she meant. She had captured something ineffable about herself in the avatar. At 600 miles away, her spirit and love showed through that avatar. It was remarkable.
In making our mark online - in our blogs, wikis, discussions, emails, avatars, digital stories and writings - we are sending a bit of ourselves out to the world.
It is pretty darn remarkable, these masks we wear.
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