Multi-faceted Refractions

[This session is being live blogged. Ignore the misspellings and awkward wordings]
[This post is simul-blogged at Multi-faceted Refractions]

The Read/Write Web - Conference Handout (willrichardson.wikispaces.com)

Refer’s to Karl Fisch’s Did You Know presentation.

It is about teaching children to become life-long learners.

Connectivity and transparency will become more acute, not going away.

Other entities reacting to the change - Election 2008 is beginning to change how politics is changing - used Obama Social Networking site. Don’t need physical space, limits connection of passionate individuals like never before.

Went to mySpace - but it was blocked. Every candidate has a page on mySpace - first caucus will be on mySpace in January 2008.

Journalism and media is changing. 70% of traffic is file sharing. Digital Rights management is dead.

Every story on USA Today online is a blog post and can be commented.

Business is going to change. IBM has 20,000 wikis, 400,000 are using a social networking networking.

Refers to Wikinomics and Cluetrain Manifesto. Not about the product, but conversations around the product. Everyone changing, but education is stuck. Not responding quick enough.

15% of attendees have mySpace or Facebook, nearly 75% of students have accounts.

Expectation is that we share. Students don’t look at privacy the way we do. Creates a disconnect. 1:1 schools have more opportunities.

Last few years, students have diverged from the teacher’s paths and they are not coming back.

How do we bridge the gap?

What has transformed Will’s learning is his ability to connect and create networked of passionate learners. Need to create personal learning networks which will sustain and help them make sense of the world, help them forge new ideas.

Huge shift in number of bloggers. What is disconcerning to Will is that teachers simply publish them in a different way and not understand the shift of pedagogy. It is a lack of understanding of how networks work. Used current post about raw food to show example. Currently, there are 30 comments, to help push and shape the message. Look at thread, there is a huge amount of learning.

Will is findable, which is extremely important for his learning. Six on Google search of “Will”. Students are building networks on their own. Shows Fan Fiction site. They are figuring things out, while we are not. Learning is 24/7/365, if you want it to be.

Showed a mySpace page and then Meg Cabot’s mySpace. Can connect, but we block hese sites. The upside is not being recognized by teachers, they are not going away.

Showed Clarence Fisher’s class blogs (had to play imagine that) Did a post on the Nata Village in Africa and she got comments from the villagers.

It is not about what is in the texts, but who is in their networks and how they constuct them.

Nowhere in curriculum are students learning how to access information via cellular technology. How to find using a variety of different tools.

Showed OpenCourseware at MIT and the $100 laptop program. Need to find mentors (teachers) and make them smart consumers. They will learn about subjects not just in our classroom, but now have many different approaches.

Wikipedia is one of the most important web site in Will’s mind, but most don’t visit the history tab and discussion tab, where the conversation is occurring.

Shared the Google doc example - plagiarism is a conversation we are going to have to again and again. Showed wikipedia changes - 500 changes in last 3 minutes. Have to figure out how to teach.

More and more of what we read has not been edited in the same way as before? Who edits the blog? Everyone needs to edit everyone. We need to model editing and be skeptical consumers of information.

Need to teach to read and write in hypertext rich environments. How do you teach this literacy and do it well. The world is linked. If students are not writing with links, connecting with conversations, they will not be prepared for the future.

We have to change our practice of teaching. If you have an Internet connection, job shifts to connecting students to the smartest people, may not be you.

We can connect our students to mentor who can motivate and engage our students in ways which we cannot. This can be powerful. Showed example of the Flat Classroom Project.

Can’t deliver curriculum, teach how to create networks to support life-long learning. Connections are the transformation. It is not what I know, but what I learn. Need to teach the literacy so that they are not duped and misled.

Most examples are digital replication of analog practices. This is very different. Need to talk about these tools with the adults. What is stopping you from bringing this into your practice? Who are your teachers? Are you a life-long learners? How are you connecting? How are you growing your networks? You have to become a participant. How are you modeling your learning?

Thanks to the efforts of David Warlick, who has encouraged and inspired many of us to take the leap into blogging and who has created one of the better tools, hitchhikr.com, which allows those unable to attend conferences an aggregator so that those who are cannot attend a conference a peek into what is being said and seen. It is a virtual view, like hitchhiking to the conference. I know that last summer, I hitchhiked to NECC, the Laptop Institute, and the Building Learning Communities conferences.

The tags for the conference this year are:

laptopinstitute

laptopinstitute07

For those of you unsure of how to tag a blog post, check for me a the BlogByte Cafe and I will show you how easily this can be done.

Like many, I am intrigued by the promise and potential that integrating Web 2.0 tools provides for learners, both students and teachers. I know that in many instances, that I leading the charge full bore down that path because I believe that it is imperative that we provide experiences for our students to begin to construct their learning environments using these new collaborative tools.

But as we delve further and further down the path, there are three questions that need to be answered before completely committing to these tools.

1. Who owns the data

I will admit that I do not read the terms and agreements of the new tools that I am experimenting with. If I create something, do I retain some kind of ownership of the idea? Are my ideas protected by Creative Commons or am I giving my intellectual property away?

One of the challenges for us in education is to teach all of our learners, faculty and students, how to use the best tool for them to communicate their message, so that it can rise above the rest of the “white noise” of information that surrounds us and is growing daily. But we also want our learners to be able to retain ownership of their ideas, for that alone may be what defines them. No one should be able to co-opt an idea. Enhance it, synthesize it to create a better idea, but the kernel should remain.

2. Who owns the curriculum

One of the questions as teachers begin to modify and create new curricula to meet the needs and demands of the students is who owns it? Is it the school or the individual. In business, the answer used to be crystal clear, it was the business that had ownership of new ideas, especially if an individual left. This may become a bigger issue, especially if the teacher shortage that continues to be forecast in the next seven to ten years occurs and the demands for the excellent teacher who is getting results with the new tools.

3. Who owns the experience?

If the face to face classroom experience is what differentiates the experience, who owns the experience. Prestigious universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Cal-Berekley making the experience, by posting podcasts and videocasts of courses freely available. As schools begin to use the tools and share the classroom experiences, who owns the content, the school, or the creator of the content, the teacher?

4. What will draw students to your physical learning space and environment?

With the whole of knowledge is being made digitally available, what will bring students to your physical space? Or how will your school be defined, by physical location, by time, by content?

I do not profess to have any answers, only questions. I do feel that these questions will help define what we mean by School 2.0 or beyond and am actively trying to synthesize my answers.

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This evening, I live blogged Ian Juke’s keynote presentation at the Laptop Institute in Memphis, Tennessee. To use one of my favorite quotes from that great philosopher and ball player, Yogi Berra, the message was “like deja vu all over again.” Ian recited a message that I have been hearing and am beginning to discuss on this blog, that due to the exponential growth in computing power, the exponential growth in bandwidth, the emergence of the Internet and Web 2.0 tools in the last 18 months, and the fact that we live in an age where information overwhelms its meaning is changing the scope and acceleration of change towards light speed.

Using information from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, and many of the statistics that Karl Fisch put together fall spring in his Did You Know presentation, Ian created a narrative that maybe for many was a dizzying and overwhelming set of questions that we as schools have to wrestle with. Questions such as, what are our goals and how are we going to starting moving the glacial pace of change in schools to move our faculty, parents, students, and government entities so that they keep up with the change.

For many, the approach may have been new. Going by the audience reaction, the number of people who are using the tools were the minority of the users at the conference. By my estimate, about a third of the users had heard or used Skype, which Terry Friedman (England) used to chat with me on Friday and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach contacted me to confirm my participation in a “speed dating” workshop Tuesday. Concerning Second Life, of which I have only dipped a pinky toe into, less than 10% of the attendees admitted to having an avatar. Looking around, I can only find Will Richardson, Jeff Whipple, and Jim Heynderickx whose blogs I that am aware of.

But if one has begun to immerse themselves using the new tools to create personal learning networks, blogs, podcasts, twitter, and nings, these are the questions that we have been asking. For me, these are conversations I have been having for the past three weeks, since EduBloggerCon and NECC. The conversations we began are important and it is through the development of these networks which will help us shape an answer and direction.

For myself, Ian is reinforcing in me the need to heed the personal call to action towards leadership to help move things forward. It is not about the computers, bandwidth and the growth of the Internet. As confirmed by my summer reading list (The Fifth Discipline, The Starfish and the Spider, Wikinomics, Wisdom of Crowds, Gaining Digital Citizenship, Five Minds for the Future, Cult of the Amateur, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) but it is the way we use the tools to collaborate and extend our networks so that we can begin to develop solutions to questions that Ian posed.

To that end, I will be rushing down to the BlogByte cafe between sessions to share how I am using these new tools to creating a learning community where all constituents of my school community, faculty, parents, and students are active participants.

And in the fall, you can join me at the K12 Online Conference during my session on Extending Horizons - Developing Personal Learning Networks sometime between October 22 through October 26.

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[This is being live blogged - please ignore mispellings and awkward wording]

Talk about the issue of change.

Easier to change a cemetary than curriculum - Woodrow Wilson

Easier to change the course of history than a history course - Lou Salza

State today - pile higher and deeper

Any wonder that teachers have problems dealing with change

Business, if take someone who retired 10 years ago - different landscape, a teacher would find no changes in past 10 yests.

Hard to get a handle on what change has happened - is slippery and hard to determine.

Hard to stand back and put finger on what has changed.

Change is subtle and slippery - hard to step back and understand what is going on. Scope and speed is hard to get a handle on.

Change today, tomorrow, forever - overwhelming change.

Overnight - find it is being done differently

Four exponential trends that each and everyone needs to understand.

1. Moore’s Law - in 1963 that processing power was going to double every 24 months while halving the price. Has held for nearly 50 years.

1979 - 8k, 128k storage, 2 Mhz, cost $5000

1984 - 128 k, 400k storage, 10 Mhz, $3900 - changed law to processing power doubling every 18 months

2007 - 512oook, 80000000k storage, 200 Mhz, $800

Dealing with exponential times - what does the future hold? Wired asked Moore what the future brings. No indication that it isn’t going to continue for another 12 - 15 years. IBM and HP have talked about continuing for 50 - 100 years.

Concerned about kindergartener, class of 2019, what technology will be common to them:

208,000 GB, 40, 060 GB, 1224 Mhz, $1.38

Timeframe is shifting to a year or 6 months as it doubles.

This is the anti-long tail. Students are now taking for granted the change.

Showed pen sized cellular phone, with virtual projectable keyboard. Technology has been invented, just can’t buy it yet.

Need to read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil.

What is common sense today is not going to be common sense in 10 years.

What implications does this trend have towards your classrooms and instruction? (Discussion time)

Bandwidth is changing

bandwidth is changing from 1200 baud to 10 Mbs. One strand of fiber optic cable can work at excess 10 trillion per second.

From Telecosm by George Gilder - bandwidth speed is tripling exponentially every 12 months upped to 6 months - four to six times the rate of Moore’s Law. Today are in stone ages of optical communication.

Not just WiFi, but WiMax and another I didn’t catch. Question for educators - where is this going to take us. The Internet is everywhere.

Required Friedman reference about Flatting of the World, students will need different sets of skills. In third revision - 50 % of the book has changed. Friedman now refers to Pink’s Whole New Mind. Need to develop creativity, etc. (Watch for blog posts comparing Pink and new Gardner, Five Minds for the Future). What are we doing to prepare our students for a world that is fundamentally different?

(Discussion time)

Two previous trend led to the third exponential trend - the Internet

1996 -48 million regular users

today - 1.2 billion users from 175 countries - 113 per minute, 4,000,000 new web pages

Last year 36 trillion emails sent.

The growth of MySpace. 5% of traffic is to MySpace. Repeating Know You Know statistics.

Move to YouTube - video replacing email, texting and blogging.

The Wikipedia movement - Scientific American report from before.

The growth of eBay - engaged in auctions. 1 million people make living on eBay.

Skype has grown to 100 million users in past two years.

Second Life - allow to interact and socialize in a virtual space. Buy and invest. How significant. IBM has purchased 31 islands. They see this as new virtual business.

Podcasting - 2004 - 11 hits, today 120 million hits.

Digital Music - Apple has sold 2.5 billion songs sold. Apple sells more music than everyone but WalMart.

What are the implications for education? iTunes University has classes available for free within 5 minutes of presentation. Maine and Alaska are trying to move to 1:1 computing.

The blogosphere. New blog every one half second. Have access to really neat tools.

Leads us to Web 2.0 - moved from passive medium to a constructive model - Richardson calls this weapons of mass communication.

Everyone is beginning to use the Internet. Right now, sometimes like sucking peanut butter through a straw.

Over 1 billion cell phones purchased in the last year. Increasingly, this is a computing device over a wireless infrastructure. Have hi-res screens, web browesers, download books. Phones will replace an ATM cards. What is the price and who is the focus market? Could they be used as a learning tool?

Using continous voice recognition. Using CVR, can speak 70 words per minute and have it translated to text. Next step, automated telephony, automatic translation of language during call. Cost - under $100.

What is going to happen to Internet usage? Go up, down, or through the roof. As bandwidth continues to grow, this will be unrecognizable. Envision a full immersion virtual reality (VR), what will draw students to school?

This is coming at us like a freight train. How can we recognize what the future is going to look like. In past, had to go to different devices, now it is converging to one device and in one place. We expect services come to us, not us going to the service. Think banks and ATMs, on-demand video.

If world is experiencing such a dramatic shift, what steps can you take to reorganize your curriculum to ensure it algins with the world of digital learning?

Trend Four - InfoWhelm

Knowledge built upon facts becomes less durable, since the foundational knowledge is changing as quickly as it has.

Live in an age of disposible information. Information has value, but is perishable as fruit.

Google has collected maps, web sites. Google is working to create an book search and get a summary and read book page by page. This is just the beginning. A transformation of what we can access - implications for libraries, textbooks. Checking a library book will move the way of using a travel agent. Using new video glasses with the iPhone - now have access to all types of information (text, music, and video).

Sony has developed an eBook reader.

Imagine where this going to go. Students will be able to carry a device with the sum total of all knowledge from the beginning of time, downloaded in less than a second.

What are the types of skills to use information change?

Richard Wurman - if take knowledge as a ball of twine, with the three trends, the ball of twine has grown over 20 times. More Did You Know statistics. Information is doubling every two weeks and moving towards every 72 hours.

For engineers half life of information is 5 years. Bio Chemists every year, Doctors every six month.

Need to invest in life long learning and develop personal learning networks (last thought mine).

If we put technology into the hands of teachers and administrators, nothing changes. It comes down to the passionate, engaging teacher who uses this technology. We have to think about what we want to accomplish. What are skills and habits of mind that we need to develop. Align learning with technology.

Question - what steps can you take to ensure the refocusing of legislative priorities from 20th century that we currently see in schools to the skills and standards that reflect the changing reality of the 21st Century?

How many are experiencing stress?

The primary focus in schools is not technology, they have to become informationally and media fluent, have to ask good questions, access both high tech and low tech, synthesis ideas, apply, and be reflexive. Has to be taught in every subject at every grade level. Role of librarian is not to work just with kids, but have to work with teachers (my addition and parents) to use these skills so that they can help guide.

Long term is no longer measure in centuries and decades, but now weekly, daily, and hourly.

Need to comprehend the acceleration of change, need to let go of view of the world,

Eric Hoffler - in the times of radical change, the learners will inherit the earth while the learned are prepared for a world that no longer exists.

Need to stretch the rubber band, break the comfort zone of the mindset. How do get a rubber band to stretched and stay stretched? Break the mold. Cut the band to keep from reverting to old models.

Where do you start? Go to ianjukes.com which has handouts including Living on the Future Edge. Also, access the committed sardine blog. Email ijukes@mindspring.com with a message “I need to be committed” and access it via RSS.

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