edsysad.org

It has been a long summer of silence and I’m excited to get writing again.

After finishing my Masters program his Spring, I needed a break to regain some enthusiasm and perspective. As fate would have it, a wonderful project has fallen into my lap and appears to be a great place to spend my “cognitive surplus” now that school is over.

My school district is using some calendaring software and a wiki to create an electronic curriculum guide. It is an exciting project because we are trying to take a number of great web-based tools to capture our district institutional knowledge. It is a pretty bold initiative, but so far it looks great and has incredible promise. I’ll talk more about it later as the details become more public.

At my individual site, we’ve made some great progress with teacher blog use and are now focusing on student blog use. While the staff isn’t ready to open the doors completely on student blogging, I’m currently developing a WordpressMU server as a structured portfolio for student writing. My eventual goal is to take the work that I’m doing and somehow turn it into a plugin. Initial testing suggests that the appropriate hooks are available to make this happen, but I have yet to determine if my programming skills are up to the the challenge of writing a plugin.

I would love to here from anybody that is interested in using WordpressMU for student portfolios.

There have been two posts in the blogs I read that have been creating a lot of thought.

The first article is from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed. The basic premise of the post is a review of a book, “True Enough”, by Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo suggests that Stephen Colbert’s ideas about “truthiness” have some merit, and that technologies are making it easier than ever for individuals to connect with others whom share views. This has the paradoxical effect of narrowing our world view, because it is easier than ever to narrow our information stream to just others who think like us.

This is scary and has a huge negative potential. It also helps explain why our society has such a fragmented feeling these days. I also can’t help but notice how this book as not been mentioned on any of the other blog sites that I normally read. It would seem that edubloggers are ignoring an important ethical conversation that is lingering in the wings.

The next article appeared in some form in nearly every blog I read, the Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk by Clay Shirky. The catch phrase of “Cognitive Surplus” is the talk of the town. Personally, I think it is a brilliantly simple idea to explain a complex event. And while a agree with everything he said about TV, I can’t help but wonder about the societal ramifications when you think about Manjoo’s paradoxical effect. TV, while a colossal waste of time gives many people something in common. Of course, this is kinda sad but the truth never the less.

I worry that the majority of “cognitive surplus” will be squandered in activities that are no better than television and in some cases worse (i.e. the search for “truthiness”).

As educators, we are doing a lousy job at preparing students to leverage the power of social technologies. In most cases it is feared and downright banned (i.e. MySpace). So, I just wonder what are the new literacies or ethics we need to acknowledge so students are cognizant of developing a balanced information? Are we (educators) developing a balanced informational stream for ourselves? And finally, as Web 2.0 technologies diminish the expert in favor of the folksonomy, how do we judge what if true and what is “truthiness”?

The semester is almost done (a long with my entire program!) and I can finally start thinking about blogging again. It is no that I don’t have anything to say, but I’ve been so busy that blogging seems to be the last thing on my priority list.

What made me want to post is that I heard a great saying on the radio yesterday. It was the director of the new movie “Atonement”, who was talking about how when he was younger he always felt like he had to have something to to say, because everybody around him always had something to say. Then one day he had an epiphany.

He realized you don’t always have to have something to say, as long as you are still listening and learning. I think this may be a good definition for wisdom. Wisdom is listening and learning even if you don’t have something to say.

Let just say, I’ve been doing a lot of listening and learning in the last month.

I’ve been churning over the words of Dr. Tim Tyson, who I recently saw at the NAU Peak Conference. There were several things that he said that really stood out to me:

1. Childhood as we now it today, did not exist until the last 10-20 years. His point was that until fairly recently, children were given responsibility and right to be a contributing member of their family and community. Now children have very little responsibility or rights.I’ve been watching the students at my middle school for the last few days looking for students doing something beyond themselves. Not surprisingly, I was unable to find a student with any exciting going on. The majority of students that I have had the chance to speak with want to do or be something, but don’t have the tools to be active in their community or family.
2. Another point was that students are not asked to help solve world problems. He talks about how an overwhelming majority of teachers believe students could change the world, but an overwhelming majority of students are not doing anything.I think that anybody who has been in education for at least five years feels like something major is missing. I remember my teachers telling me about the hole in the ozone and we did projects about the deforestation of the rain-forests, now all students do is the basics. Instead, teachers are reverting back to worksheets and direct instruction. Why do we keep trying to make our schools into factories?
3. Finally, Dr. Tyson pointed out something that we all know deep down, but may not always been fully aware. State standards are minimum expectations.There seems a perverse paradox that in the process of meeting minimum standards we are destroying amazing educational opportunities for students. We keep lowering the bar and dragging students down, instead of giving them the world that is so easily accessible with cheap, readily available technologies.
   

   California State professor, Art Costa, recently said: “What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value.”

   from Dr. Tyson’s blog

I also got the chance to present for the first time. It was not great, but my audience was wonderful and we had a great conversation about WordpressMU.

This posting begins my path down the road of an ed-blogger. For the past several years I’ve lurked though the comments and postings of many other ed-bloggers, afraid to do more than leave an occasional anonymous comment.

Today that ends! I hope that my thoughts and reflections may prove useful to others as they struggle with the complex task of integrating technology effectively into the classroom.

My goals for this blog are:

• share the configurations and hacks of open-source software that I find particularly useful
• reflect upon why we should care about technology in the classroom
• look at how students respond to using technology for learning
• observe how educators view and use technology in the NCLB era
• connect with other educators who share my vision of the future of education