Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything

Keynote by Will Richardson at MTI 2006 sponsored by MACE
Winfield, KS 27 July 2006

blog: weblogged-ed.com
email: weblogged at gmail dot com
presentation resources: webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com

(Will has granted permission for me to post an audio recording of his keynote this morning, which I’ll be posting later tonight as a podcast.)

Preliminary announcements by MTI folks:
– Winfield is community of about 12,000 people
– The Challenger Learning Center is here in Kansas (in Wellington not far from Winfield – MACE participants can do their program tomorrow, limit of 30) – They offer school missions, day camps, classroom programs, scouting programs, programs for corporate groups, and public missions. This looks great! (too bad my presentations are tomorrow and I can’t do this now!)
– MTI will be in Bonner Springs next year (right by Cabella’s and near the Nebraska Furniture Mart!)
– MACE in March07 will be at the

Will was last here 25 years ago as best man in a summer wedding in Topeka in the summer!

I don’t think technology is the main thing happening today
– the imagination that we have when we are using technology is the key

July 12: 2006 “The Red PaperClip” and Kyle MacDonald
– trading a paperclip till he gets a house
– this could not have been done even 2 or 3 years ago
– amazing audience and transparency for ideas

Anime Music Video website, kids doing mashups
– ability to create stuff like this and share it

imagination defined: the ability to…

Everything is more and more moving to the web, away from desktops
– 1 billion people are the web right now
– there will be another billion by 2015
– 10 billion webpages
– 1 trillion links (somewhere you can click, how amazing)

Emerging reality is not just this one way web, it is the read/write web
– you don’t need to know code, ftp, etc
– “web 2.0”
– easier to create, easier to publish
– Tim O’Reilly on 14 May 2006: “We are at a turning point in the technology industry, and perhaps even in the history of the world.”

I INCIDENTALLY AGREE WITH TIM ON THIS!

50 million blogs out there now, 70,000 new blogs per day, 7 million new web pages each day
– feeling overwhelmed?
– yes
– 2.7 billion links
– use technorati.com

Now we are really linking ideas, what people are talking about
– and people
– connecting to each other
– not just linking to content, it is much more intersting

– society of authorship
– age of participation
– era of collaboration
– age of engagement

Tom Friedmen calls this global society the “uploaders”

an active, participatory web, this is NOT just receiving!

Larry Lessig, author of “free culture”
– “We do not realize how significant the Read-Write internet could be.”

Personally this is EXTREMELY significant
– I have been blogging now for 5 years
– I have learned more from blogging on my site than any other collective experiences
– taught me about myself, technology, the world, other people

When I have the time, it is a place where I spend a lot of intellectual capital and get multitudes in return
– there are now 69,000 education related blogs (Joanne Jacobs)
– there were about 7 when I started

25+ million kids creating web content

It is about imagination

Now listen to Matt Bischoff, one of the first podcasters in 2004
– you hear excitement in his voice
– this is not for grandma and grandpa, this is for an audience
– podcasting from his bedroom

Will’s daughter Tess
– top weather recipies
posted these pictures to Flickr
– over 1000 people have come to see Tess’s book

Sandaig Otters school in Glasgow, everything on the school homepage is created by kids

THIS IS A GREAT IDEA NOW, I NEED TO DO THIS WITH ALEXANDER AND SARAH’S BOOKS

Kids have audience and purpose that goes far beyond the traditional classroom
– collaboration example of Will’s class in New Jersey and kids in Georgia
– kids had a real audience and purpose, and they were TEACHING
– best way to learn is to teach
– I connected my kids with others, engaged

they are learning, building networks, going far beyond the classrooms

this is a different place, this is a different world, we need to start thinking different about what we are doing

quote from student in Clarence Fisher’s class “now that we have podcasting and blogging anyone can do it….”

leveraging the read/write web is not about the technology, it is about the imagination
– how can we integrate these into our practice to change the equation

We can’t think about our classrooms as 4 walls anymore

Big changes for Schools:

1- the web changes learning
– primarily: now we have access to a lot of knowledge and content
– in the past we thought the school was where we needed to get together and share knowledge
– when knowledge is scarce, learning looks like kids in rows
– story of teacher unfreezing from glacial

When knowledge is abundant

MITOpenCourseware site
– MIT has 600 classes online now
– you get all the video/audio lectures for some of the courses too, along with all the content
– so now you can get an MIT education, basically for free
– you can learn anything, anywhere, anytime, almost

MY THOUGHT: I NEED TO TAKE ONE OF THESE CLASSES, ESP ONE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (A BASIC COURSE) TO HELP ALEXANDER WITH DESIGN OF HIS SOLAR CAR

Mark Federman: “ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate.”

Philadelphia is putting a wireless cloud over the entire city

In Newton Mass last week, using Google text messaging to get links

Oragami project from Microsoft: pocket tablet pc

learner decides what, when, where and how she learns
– how is this different from our classrooms
– we try to timestamp when and how our students learn

From just in case learning to just in time learning
– “I am a nomadic learner and I graze for information” (nomatic learning)

When we connect around affinity and not geography, learning looks like this (wikipedia)
– wikipedia is a post

Wikipedia is becoming very popular, look at trend lines compared to NYT
– over a million articles

From do your own work, to work with others
– the environment is now very expectant for working with others

John Dewey has risen in this world

George Siemens: learning is a network process, building networks, figuring out

Graphic of network connectivity
– example: 43 things

#1 think people want to learn in this environment is how to now procrastinate

Social networks
– listing of all social networks on wikipedia now
– lists how many people are on these networks, including

Digg.com
– very important now
– del.icio.us too
– these sites connect with tags

NECC example of photos

Question: how do we best support students in this environment, and re-envision our classrooms to leverage the abundance of info

The web changes text
– it is starting to look like wikis (example: South African curriculum)

Organically built physics text
– wikibooks is putting this together, they are writing 1000 books this way
– are textbook companies wondering about this?

lots of content sources
– we are in a “rip, mix and learn” society
– site: harvard H20, you can accomulate/aggregate content from a list and pick them out when you need them
– epitomizes idea of teacher as DJ

web changes teaching
– teacher as connector
– don’t have to be an arbiter of info
– example was Will’s “secret life of bees” project, the author directly teaches and mentored
– I just connected my student to a Washington Post, Pulitzer prize winning

Skype
– call all over the world for free
– you just need an internet connection

Question: when we have access to all this content and billions of people, how do we change school?

Instead of “hand in your homework,” what if we said “publish your homework”
– so it is not about me as the teacher and judge of the work, but the value of the ideas and content the kids create

Example of Darren Kurpatwa’s blog
Pre-Cal 20S blog
– scribe post hall of fame
– way to check stats from all over the world

Checked the iTunes K-12 podcast list lately
– Room208, Radio WillowWeb
– lots of content designed to teach

Digital Storytelling
– Marco Torres video
– amazing things with kids and video
– having film festivals, creating music videos
– this is another literacy for the kids, for them to get engaged

Question: what needs to change when kids can publish to audiences far beyond our classrooms– when they are teaching

– think of assignments as things to be shared rather than assessed

literacy is changing
– how many are teaching kids how to read wikipedia?
– favorite story: kid that wrote a poor paper, posted it on WikiPedia, and watched it improve, and then when it was good enough, copied it and turned it in

are we teaching kids how to read in hypertext environments?

this changes how kids write: how many of you have assigned a hypertext assignment to kids
– the power of links in a digital environment

Great book by David Weinberger: documents are not containers of info anymore, they get value from what they point to

Example of MLK.org site (stormfront)

“What happens when everyone gets a printing press”
– this is a huge literacy issue
– we as adults probably aren’t

use easywhois.com and put in the url to get all the info about who owns something, to try and get behind info

The literacy of networks
– kids more and more are working in distributed, collaborative environments (Jill Walker)

Web as platform
– thinkfree.com
– javascript environment, 1 Gig of free space
jumpcut.com to post videos

I NEED TO LOOK FOR THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE SHOWING SITES LIKE JUMPCUT WHERE PEOPLE ARE POSTING

– we’re not going to be loading much software on our computers much longer, it is going to be running over the network

Question: how can we use open source and open content to engage kids more fully

MySpace would be the 12th most populous country in the world if it was a physical place
– add 200 new accounts each minute, 280,000 new accounts today

I am really happy MySpace has blown up, because at least now we are talking about it
– there are
– only a third of myspace are kids, lots of adults are behaving poorly now
– 99% of myspace content is innoculous
– there are a million bands on myspace now
– it is a social site

Dana Boyd and Henry Jenkins from MIT’s essay, looking at why kids are gravitating to social sites

Kid’s don’t email anymore, they do myspace, IM, etc

This is a changing culture, it is much different from what we know and do

I don’t think

Coors Light commercial about twins
– when you compare that to a myspace site, it is really not that different
– this is a society that objectifies women, is constantly sending false messages to girls about what they should look like
– very difficult to help kids have some semblance of self-esteem in this media environment

Heather Candella quotation in NYT: “When you meet someone, the question is not “what’s your number?” it’s “what’s your myspace.” by checking out a guy’s profile, she said, “you can actually get a feeling for who they are.”
– this girl should not have graduated high school!
– who

Cover of Wired last month
– Rupert Murdock owns Myspace: says it is the best marketing opportunity ever
– who is talking to our kids about what this means, about the manpulation that is involved

I don’t think we get it yet, we understand it yet
– their perception of this is skewed

We really need to teach myspace
– it should be in every curriculum, in every school
– we need to teach them about safety
– have them learn they are creating their permanent record with every piece of content
– for kids they don’t have anything else to mitigate what is on their myspace account, problems with later job interviews, etc.

No one is teaching this stuff now
– we need more media literacy!
– this is a huge opportunity to teach

You don’t want your kid being taught to swim by someone who does not know how to swim themselves
– we need to “know” myspace
– we should all get accounts
– we should all

We can’t be afraid of it
– how many of you block/filter myspace

Why don’t we ask better questions?
– why are my kids learning the 50 capitals now?

we take the tools the kids use out of their hands when they come to school
– the result is our schools are looking less and less like the real world
– this is a problem, are schools are on the verge of becoming irrelevant

Al Gore: “Change is inconvenient.”

DOE results on student perceptions of whether schoolwork is meaningful, courses are interesting, school will be important in later life
– we are losing kids to a large extent because we are not using the tools that kids use in real life

30% of 9th graders don’t graduate nationwide, 27% of adults over age 25 have a college degree
– we are not doing good enough

US Dept of Ed have school 2.0 model
– we have to be ok with kids IMing, blogging, using social networks

Your goal

Are our kids continuous learners when they leave our schools? Are they nomadic learners?

George Siemans: we fire our kids every 18 weeks in schools!

WE need to embrace these changes, we really don’t have a choice.

Chris Lemann is doing this now.
– quoted Chris’s comments to Will’s question on what he should tell superintendents in New York

MY COMMENT: THIS IS A GREAT SERIES OF IDEAS FROM CHRIS!

This is VERY different

your goal or task leaving this conference is: how can I be more imaginative, and what is my red paperclip?

this is a difficult task, and it starts with one step!

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