These are my notes from Will Richardson‘s presentation, “Learning in a Networked World: For Our Students and For Ourselves” at the Teaching The 21st Century Student conference in Amarillo, Texas, on January 17, 2011. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. THIS WAS A GREAT PRESENTATION.
Addition 1/24/2011: An audio podcast recording of this session is available.
Will’s presentation slides are available on Google Docs.
If you’re coming to professional development and you’re not getting challenged, you’re not getting your money’s worth
3 things to know about me
1- I was a public educator for 21 years in New Jersey
2- I’ve been an educational blogger for 10 years (started in 2001: there were 6 or 7 other educators at that time blogging too)
3- Most important thing about me is I’m a parent and a Dad
I can’t separate my role as a parent from my role as a father
I have a daughter in an independent school and a son in a public school
– neither system is adequately preparing my kids for the world they are going to live in
– it’s the reality of the systems teachers work in, and they ways those systems constrict and limit teachers
I think this is a very challenging time: next 10 and 20 years of education will be very interesting to watch
MY COMMENT: IT’S NOT JUST GOING TO BE INTERESTING TO WATCH, IT’S GOING TO BE INTERESTING TO SHAPE!
Question: How much of that change is going to be driven by US as teachers now
– the national conversation at this point doesn’t give me a lot of hope
– businessmen like Gates and others, and politicians are dirving the boat
It is crucial that we understand this moment
– you cannot wait for people who are not in classrooms with kids to make these decisions today
Who is familiar with Scratch from MIT? Story of 10 year old Andrew teaching over Skype and Yugma over the holiday break
There are LOTS of teachers at our fingertips now
The world is changing in profound ways right now
NYT article: The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
There are 2 billion people who will be connected to the web by 2011
– schools say: that’s 2 billion predators, and we don’t want those people connected to our kids
– I look at this and say: There are about 2 billion potential TEACHERS from around the world
How do we make this world accessible to our kids in ways we can really leverage this world
There is NO substitute for learning in the water, in the dirt, outside, in physical space
– I’m not saying lets take all learning and make it virtual
– it is, however, a time when my son (Tucker) can connect with other people who share his passions
There is nothing my son can’t know about basketball if he knows how to use his digital connections well
– it’s about passion and it’s about networks
Jay Cross from Informal Learning: “What can you do? has been replaced with ‘What can you and your network connections do?’ Knowledge itself is moving from the individual…”
Picture of my networked / online social bookmarks saved on delicious.com
We’re acting in schools as if nothing is really different, nothing has changed
– from Cathy N Davidson and DAvid Theo Goldberg: “Our learning insitutions, for the most part….”
Education vs Everyday (from David Wylie at BYU)
– analog v digital
– tethered v mobile
– isolated v connected
– generic v personal
– consumption v creation
– closed v open
Learning online now is mobile, networked, global, collaborative, solf-directed, inquiry based, on demand, transparent, lifelong, personalized, pull
This is what kids are doing now when they come home from school
Story of Will’s daughter Tess learning how to play Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” using a YouTube video and downloaded sheet music
– her piano teacher at school said, “Oh no! She’s not ready for Journey! She can’t learn Journey.”
Even though no one is asking you to do something decidely different, they are just asking you to do better (parents, community, state)
– but if you look at the world and you “see it” in a networked sense, and all the new ways
the question is: are YOU changing?
If you are going to wait for someone to ask you to change, it is going to be too late
– schools ARE going to change, they have to
I want to go through eight SHIFTS for each of us, and for our kids
shift #1: DO talk to strangers
– we tell our kids not to talk to strangers
– as systems we try to keep strangers out
– reality of safety issues: the web is not that unsafe. Are there bad people out there
NYT article: Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown
We need to teach our kids how to be safe, how to find strangers, vet them, make sense of them
Steven Johnson: “Web Privacy: In Praise of Oversharing” Time Magazine May 20, 2010
bit.ly.aBbBYL
Strangers have a great deal to teach us right now
Showing picture of clustmap from Will’s blog: Jan to Dec 2009
– 98% of these visitors to my blog are strangers
– I want my kids to have maps like this
– the maps of websites at my kids’ schools
How may dots are on your maps? How many people are you learning with and from that don’t live where you do?
McArthur Report: New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development
– interest-based sharing with strangers in addition to local networking with friends
Problem: No one is teaching kids to do this well.
“Children and the Internet” by Sylvia Livingstone: Vast majority of schools are “constraining” in their use of the Internet
Shift #2: The “G-Portfolio”
– you can call it an ePortfolio
– your reputation today is basically based on a Google Search
– most administrators today they absolutely ARE Googling people they are interviewing
Public is the new default (welcome to it)
– we may not feel comfortable with it
– my daughter has only put about 15 photos of herself up on Facebook, her friends have put about 160 photos of her up
– do you think she has a choice about whether she is going to live in public online?
– we may not like that, we may long for another day, but that day is gone
what comes up when you Google yourselves?
My kids have no models for living a transparent life online
From Michael Schrage in Harvard Business Review: “The traditional two-page resume has been turned into a ‘personal productivity portal’ that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their employees work.”
Jeff Kessler at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia Googles really well as a student
– digital footprint is taught there
Reputation Management IS very important
Article: University to Provide Online Reputation Management to Graduates
– Univ of Syracuse actually hired a company to ‘scrub’ bad Google search results with brandyourself.com
http://youropenbook.org is a site you can use to search for phrases others are using on Facebook
Shift #3: We need to tell Digital Stories
I really don’t use much paper anymore, we are moving to a digital world
– we may not like it, it may not feel comfortable, but I can’t imagine that my own kids are going to use
Kids aren’t distracted… they’re just looking for more interesting stories from us
We need to do a better job of telling the stories that we want them to learn, than using the methods
book: “I Live in the Future” by Nick Bilton
– Kids are “consumivores”
Have you ever seen a kid play “world of warcraft?”
– do you think those kids have short attention spans
– they are into those storeis
– research is starting to show they are learning a lot about leadership, collaboration, strategy, more
It’s not as much about attention as it is about passion
The Hunger Games” series is great for tweens
– mockingjay.net is the #1 social networking site around that book series
– was built 2 years ago by a 16 year old and two 17 year olds, who live in different states
– had a real passion for that book andsite
– had a contest for videos, for trailers for the book
I’m not saying there are copyright issues here, there are… but it’s not hard to do this stuff now
Podcasts, videos, screencasts, presentations, livestreams, photos, games
the storytelling piece of this is really huge!
– our kids can tell stories about what we are gd
Shift #4: Information Management
Look for the six bullet points for NCTE on literacy
– read those and you will feel illiterate now
– 90% of the kids who graduated from your high school last year are illiterate by those standards
– www.ncte.org/governance/literacies
90% of the people to who I am connected say Twitter is their #1 source of professional development
Google Reader, Social Bookmarking, RSS feeds, all these tools let us pull this information in to us (we don’t have to wait for it)
all of this is NOT the same as what I learned to do in school, or what my kids are learning to do NOW in school
Evernote is my offline brain and it has changed my life over the past year
If you have a Kindle you can go to kindle.amazon.com, every note that you make on your device shows up on a page
– Tim Wilson wrote a script that lets you export those to Evernote
Shift #5: Be a Crap Detector
story of eating hot dogs
– at that time Walter Cronkite was my “crap detector”
– he was THE most trusted person in America
We have to be Walter now, we have to be the editors and the crap detectors
– if all we are doing in our classrooms is give students pre-edited materials that they should simply accept and believe
Howard Rhingold is writing a book on crap detection
Question today is very important: How do you trust and how do you determine reliability?
TwitterJournalism: How to Verify a Tweet
Will now telling the story of the martinlutherking.org site, and the importance of finding out who owns this site (Stormfront – white supremacist group)
– if you don’t know the process of vetting a process in general, anyone can make a website and tell you anything… and you might just believe them
Google’s page rank algorithm looks for incoming links to pages
– it has lots of incoming links
MY COMMENT: I WAS ACTUALLY CONTACTED AND ASKED TO UNLINK THAT WEBSITE TO MY TECHEDGE ARTICLE, “Digital Literacy Now” from the late 1990s.
Shift #6: Follow Your Passions
We always ask teachers to share their passions
– we met a guy who loves mountain biking on a unicycle
– he used a webcam on his helmet to show this on YouTube
These people are called “municyclists” and you can find out about them online
The National Educational Technology Plan (adopted in November 2010) puts learning as the focus
– it’s a great document, good to get case materials to your district leaders and gatekeepers
– with NCTE standards it is great to use these materials
– discusses how learning now is personalized
– this is going to be one of the biggest challenges we have as schools
– more and more people are figuring out how to personalize learning online, it is trickling down to students
MeganHeartsMakeUp – a 9th grader from Austin, Texas
– has a huge YouTube following, talks about
– gets over 100,000 views per video
– she has already started her own makeup line
Mark A Klassen is a Cinamatographer: www.markaklassen.com
– he’s never taken a video class at his school, he’s learned many other ways – and now he’s networked to other people focused on Cinamatography
– he has 160 connections on Vimeo
– I interviewed him for my new book
– He says these connections have totally changed his life
It’s about passion, and about connecting
Shift #7 – Learning to Learn
My favorite quotation from Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the EArth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
How many of you know about Khan Academy? Buckle Up
– bond trader in the northeast of the US
– gets a request a few years ago from his nieces asking for help about math
– now Uncle Sal has made over 1800 videos on his site
Playing an example video on “Determining Divisibility”
I’ve looked at about 75 of these, I give them a B at best… they are pretty good
– the question is: What changes in a world where our kids have access to Khan Academy?
– do we just keep doing everything the same?
We can debate “high quality” – but there are thousands of kids around the world learning math right now
And: “There’s an App for
Supercool School: Start your live online school
– laugh at that
Don’t laugh at these:
Wikiversity
University of the People
Unclasses.org
Teachstreet
EduFire
School of Everything
OpenLearn
OpenCourseWare Consortium
iTuneU
CosmoLearning
National Connections Academy
Open High School of Utah
Open Learning Initiative
Academic Earth
Connexions
Flat World Knowledge
p2pU
YouTube EDU
I learned the first time I got the Internet in my classroom that I wasn’t the smartest person in the room, and maybe I never was
dweeber: kids can divy up their homework
Grockit: free SAT courses
Ignition Tutoring: Tutor going over slope talking about Halo
– learning slope in the context of how much time he puts into Halo and how many kills he gets
– Is he going to remember slope? Absolutely. Because that is his passion. That is what personalized learning looks like. Those companies ARE going to personalize learning for kids. the question is: Are we?
Shift #8: Solve problems: Creatively, patiently….
Story of Johnson-era movie about nuclear cloud and Goldwater campaign
Problem: My kids in school never get a problem to go DEEP into a project
– they don’t get a chance to really think, wonder, and experiment
very few of the questions they are asked have more than one answer, or don’t have a clear answer
from NCTE: build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
No reason for our creativity crisis in this country (Newsweek Oct 2010)
We need to
showing “we need to build a filter” from Apollo 13
It’s amazing what we solve when we have a passion to solve it
– think about the Chilean miners!
MY COMMENT: I’M THINKING OF BALANCEDFILTERING.ORG
Schools all look very similar when we look at them from the sky, flying
– but learning today is much rounder: much more on demand, self-directed… it looks very different
Our problem now is how do we connect these two visions of learning?
Schools have to change and WILL
– they can’t compete with the alternative
Dan and Chip Heath, “Switch” – “Big problems are rearely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, tehy are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions…”
Carol Dweck, “Mindset” – “You need a ‘growth mindset.’
If you can’t think about changing your school, then start with YOU
– what’s your “yeah but…”
This is an amazing time to be a learner
– it is like no time ever before…. EVER
How are YOU going to take advantage of this? Be a learner in these contexts..
Is technology a part of your personal learning culture?
– how many dots are on your map?
– are you sharing , cooperating, collaborating and collectively acting with others?
“Understanding Media” by Marshall McLuhan in 1964: “We are entering the new age of education, one that is programmed for discovery, rather than instruction.”
– we can do that discovery piece on our own now
Closing quotation from the 2009 Horizon Report: “Increasingly, those who use technology in ways that expand their global connections…..”
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