Audience reflections on School 2.0

Well, my 2nd day of NECC 2007 is over and it was terrific. I must admit I was nervous to share my session today on school 2.0. Several reasons contributed to this, but the main ones are the scale of this issue/challenge (and who am I to try and address “educational reform” with my small voice?) and the fact that I guessed some people would be blogging my session. Since I blog other folks’ presentations all the time, it might seem odd that I would be nervous by this– but honestly I think this is the first time I’ve been “live blogged.” I checked the technorati tag search for the tag ISTE setup for my session, and two people posted following the preso.

Carol Koroghlanian posted a nice summary of highlights, and Ken Pruitt posted some summary statements and links. Participation was much greater over on the blogger site I asked people to use to share their perspectives and questions. I’m going to take a few minutes to respond to those in this post. I’m going to address the responses to the main three questions now, and the questions for the presentation in a later post and/or podcast.

Before I do, I want to reflect that using a blog for participant comments like this needs to become a “best practice” for professional development sessions. The reason is that we rarely (if ever) have enough time during a presentation to field all the questions people have. In addition, there are often questions people have which they don’t ask during the session for different reasons. They may not think of the question during the session, they may not want to ask the question in front of the entire group, or some other reason may impede them from asking the question. This is true both for the “regular” classroom of K-12 or university students, as well as professional development sessions with teachers.

The first question I posted to the blog was, “What does school 2.0 look like?” At present, seven people have responded. Here are several of the responses. Kevin Hodgson with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project reflected:

I think School 2.0 should be full of student collaboration beyond the walls of the building, so that the knowledge base extends to the world. The wonder of technology is that is can break students out of the shell of isolation — that their community is the only community — and come to understand themselves as they connect with others.

The School 2.0 possibilities also allow for student-driven inquiry in new ways. Discovery of process is key to a sense of understanding (and we should be teaching kids how to do their own mash-ups, I think — integrating ideas and content in new ways).

He also commented on his concern about advertising to students. (For those interested in safe digital social networking for students WITHOUT advertising, be sure to check out imbee.com.)

Stephanie Sandifer wrote:

It is…
…without walls/without borders
…flat
…transparent
…flexible
…fluid
…just-in-time
…hyper-personalized
…blended — online & f2f (face to face)
…constructive
…focused on learning — not testing
…designed to facilitate life-long learning
…24/7

Christian Long pointed to the Denver School of Science & Technology as an innovative school implementing many of these school 2.0 ideas.

There were more excellent insights. The power of asynchronous conversation is something I don’t think most of the teachers we work with have experienced. I’ve had several people at NECC this year tell me their “live wire” stories about blogging, and generally it was when someone wrote back and commented. Then they were hooked. They “got it.” We need to help more teachers experience the power of the asynchronous, thoughtful conversation powered by read/write web technologies.

The second question I posted was: “How can teachers support school 2.0?” Eight people have chimed in so far. Donna focused on the basics, but that is exactly where we need to focus with many (if not most) of our teachers. She wrote:

Be a learner. Make it personal first.

This idea of using technology tools for personal uses first, and then seeing the connections for professional/instructional contexts was also shared by Roxanne and John Maklary. I heard Michael Porter discuss the importance of using web 2.0 tools for personal use during his great presentation about Flickr at the November 2006 Hawaii Library Association conference. Melinda Miller (who did find the 3 sentence limit challenging on other questions, but did well here!) wrote:

Model the tools. Take the risk with your students. Many of the students will be able to troubleshoot for the teachers anyway!

Read the entire set of comments, there are more ideas I’m not repeating here.

Lastly, on the subject of leadership support for school 2.0 change, one commenter (whose identity I don’t know) said:

Trust students, trust teachers, and let us make mistakes. We need TIME to do it correctly. We need staff development.

Amen to that! We absolutely do need TIME. We need time to think, we need time to play, we need time to reflect, and we need time to evaluate. Time, or the perception of not having enough time (most teachers would probably say that is a REALITY not just a PERCEPTION) is one of the biggest obstacles to high quality teaching and learning in many classrooms today. That is why we need to focus on basic issues for the school 2.0 transformative change, as I discussed in my presentation.

More comments on the leadership question were also shared.

LOTS of good ideas and insights. I need more time to process all this, and this was really just a little feedback from a few folks on the session questions. Think how this conversation is going to continue to grow as we add more voices to our choir!

Thanks to everyone who attended the session in person and has contributed so far to the online discussion on this subject. I’m likely going to have a bit of a podcasting marathon tomorrow night, and share a bunch of recordings from NECC before I head home Thursday morning– to include a recording of this session from today.

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