Moving at the Speed of Creativity

My 9 year old is quoted by Carolyn Y. Johnson in this morning’s Boston Globe article, “Space for everyone.” Carolyn explores how digital social networking (DSN) sites are attractive to a growing demographic of adults as well as young people, and how increasing numbers of online DSN destinations for kids are SAFE in contrast to better known sites like MySpace:

Alexander Fryer is interested in more basic forms of play online. The 9-year-old from Edmond, Okla., began using social-networking websites two years ago, before he could even type, frequenting club.Lego.com to build his own virtual projects. “It’s been exciting because you can see how many people have actually seen what I’ve done,” he said.

Today, the third grader uses ClubPenguin.com, where every child has his or her own penguin and igloo, and has tried out Imbee.com. His father, Wesley, said both sites offer a safe social-networking experience in contrast to the MySpace page, which has been criticized for allowing young people to post revealing personal details.

Kudos to Carolyn for writing a balanced article about DSN that includes information about the opportunities as well as dangers/challenges of online spaces. She also includes links to a bunch of DSN sites I hadn’t heard of before or explored yet, including Ning.com (launched by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen) and tubesnow.com, a personal file sharing network tool.

The story behind this story is quite interesting, and probably worth a podcast in itself. Carolyn wanted to interview Alexander and had emailed me some questions Monday night. I didn’t get to ask the questions to Alexander before bed that evening, so I needed to catch him after school. Problem was the school where I presented yesterday afternoon had both Yahoo mail and Google mail blocked, so I couldn’t email her. My cell phone worked, so I asked her to download and register Skype. Not only was I able to send her a file, I was also able to skype out to my son on my wife’s cell phone, who was exploring the Oklahoma City zoo after school, and then drop Carolyn into our conversation in a 3 way skype call: 1 person in rural Oklahoma, 1 at the Oklahoma Zoo in Oklahoma City, and 1 in Boston, Massachusetts. Carolyn didn’t have a microphone connected to her computer during the interview to ask Alexander questions directly, so she used IM to send me additional questions to ask him.

And today his quotation is in the Boston Globe. That was certainly a twenty-first century communication moment!

Technorati Tags: clubpenguin, dsn, internetsafety, myspace, imbee

I’ve felt a bit like E.T. recently landing on planet earth, speaking to a group of humans who had never seen or heard an extraterrestrial before.

According to WikiPedia, “shock and awe” is:

a military doctrine based on the use of “overwhelming decisive force”, “dominant battlefield awareness”, “dominant maneuvers”, and “spectacular displays of power” to “paralyze” an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight.

The allegory of the cave was used by the Greek philosopher Plato to convey the difficulty of explaining concepts like color and three dimensional objects to people solely exposed to black and white, two dimensional representations of reality.

Using Karl Fisch’s presentation on “Did You Know” remixed as a video by Scott Mcleod with teacher audiences here in Oklahoma lately, I’ve felt a bit like Plato in the cave, talking to people by using a video designed to have the effect of “shock and awe” on the audience.

I will likely reflect at greater length on this in an upcoming podcast, but for now I’ll say that overwhelming teachers with the messages from “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by Tom Friedman may not be the best way to encourage teachers to teach digital.

Unlike most of my audiences at edtech conferences, attendees and participants in some of my presentations lately in Oklahoma have been “regular” classroom teachers. Not computer teachers, not particularly tech-saavy teachers, just regular classroom teachers. In some cases, NONE of the teachers in the audience have heard of Tom Friedman or “The World is Flat.” Maybe that is not unusual out in the “real world” outside of edtech conferences. I suspect it is. The ideas of the “Did You Know” presentation are VERY intimidating and even overwhelming for teachers. Some of the responses from teachers about the video, after having discussed it with their peers, have lately included:

- Boy I’m glad I’m retiring soon.
- The United States is really in bad shape.
- I’m overwhelmed.
- I may be in the wrong profession.
- My kids can’t and won’t teach themselves. How will they survive in this new world?

The amazing thing to me in listening to and documenting these teacher responses has been that no one has said, “Maybe we need to teach differently in our schools.” The common responses instead have been: I’m overwhelmed, I’m so behind, there’s no way I can deal with this. I’m ready to retire.

I’m thinking rather than show a video like “Did You Know,” maybe I need to focus on small steps that entry-level technology users can take. I’m reminded of the ACOT research and stages of technology integration. In the case of my most recent presentations, in which I felt like E.T., I wasn’t talking to teachers who were or are ready for “invention level” integration ideas.

My thought for this group goes back to something I mentioned in the WOW2 interview last week. We need each teacher at each grade level to participate with his/her students in at least 1 Internet-based collaborative project per semester. And, this needs to be an administrative expectation that is part of the formal teacher evaluation process.

Google Earth is amazing. 3D interactive environments including the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Canyon ARE amazing. But simply “accessing” engaging, digital content like this is not enough. At some point, if we just present students with these types of resources to consume (even interactively) they are sure to ask, “So what?” No matter how amazed we are as digital immigrants by these resources, at some point “normalcy” will be redefined for our students as well as ourselves, and these things will lose much of their novelty value.

Our students need to remix their learning and create authentic knowledge products. But to do that authentically and effectively, they also need to have relational connections to other people and places. This is why I think websites like epals.com are so essential, to help teachers connect with other teachers for Internet-based projects.

I’m reminded of the story Tim DiScipio shared at TCEA in 2006 of the New Jersey elementary classroom whose writing scores jumped because the students wrote to pen pals in Italy each week of the school year. Simple concept: Get students interested and connected to kids in another country through a pen pal writing project. The implications can be getting students more motivated to write, and therefore writing more regularly and with more effort.

More frequent writing leads to better writing. A simple formula, but one which seems to be often overlooked in schools today.

I don’t have the answers. It was very weird to feel like E.T. this week in several contexts. “Shock and awe” may not be the best formula for conversations and learning. Maybe I need to craft and share a more basic, simple message, and avoid overwhelming people with too many scary statistics and ideas.

Technorati Tags: digitalnatives

Last week when I was driving from St. Louis’s METC conference to the Little Apple for MACE, my wife was teaching the first session of the “digital dialog” parenting class we’re offering at our church in Edmond, Oklahoma.

I actually obtained email permission from the folks at Club Penguin to use one of their graphics as part of the logo / banner image for this class. Very cool!
This evening Shelly and I listened to that recorded presentation (which she made independently with the Samsung YP-U2J audio player/recorder: her first digital recording ever) and shared it as a podcast on a new podcast feed we’ve setup for the class. Resources and links related to this class are available on http://digitaldialog.wikispaces.com. Tomorrow night is session #2, which I’ll be leading. We’ll add the recording from tomorrow night’s session to the same feed channel!

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Technorati Tags: dsn, internetsafety, myspace